Republican conservatism (complete rewrite)

Unless you’re going to argue for extreme inbreeding, you’ve also got to account for why people whose ancestors only a few generations ago are largely European are so much more right-wing/authoritarian than those currently in most European countries. I’m also immediately wary of any author who is slipping between “Republican” and “conservative” without giving any details of how such groups are defined by him.

I don’t challenge the idea that political ideology is related to idiosyncrasies of individual personalities. I’m not sure anyone sensible would argue to the contrary. But I have two problems with grandiose conclusions about heritability:

1. I have difficulty with the notion that individual personality idiosyncrasies are strongly hereditary independently of enabling environments.
2. I have difficulty with the notion that individual personality idiosyncrasies map strongly to well-defined political categories independently of historically situated contexts.

The first is a dispute over what science actually shows given the enormous difficulty of constructing the kinds of experiments that would lead to robust conclusions. The second comes from noticing how, for example, Ron Paul supporters argue America is not a free market, and therefore the failures of American markets cannot be used as arguments against anarcho-capitalism; while for many years the far left argued that since the USSR was not socialist, its failures could not be construed as failures of Marxism. Regardless of the merits of either argument, I am convinced that the kinds of beliefs both groups hold, and the manner in which they argue for them, are completely compatible, and that young American libertarians would simply have become young American radical socialists if they had been born in another generation without having significantly different personalities.

I don’t know if Mooney considers that prospect, but I just can’t see how “Republicans are the way they are because they were born that way” is really going to fly.

The statement “political views are genetically determined, if only partially and indirectly” looks to me like the start of the TSOTT. If interpreted in a weak sense it’s trivially true, while in a strong sense it’s quite outrageous.

Conservatism and homosexuality could have a genetic basis, but athletic ability, criminality, gender roles, and intelligence can’t? Without nailing down precise genes how does this work?

Or just to spell out the thought a little more:

* Blood type is genetically determined, in the sense that there is a developmental path leading from a given allele to a given blood type, with no environmental influence. If you know the distribution of alleles across a population, you know the distribution of blood types.

* Height is genetically determined, in the sense that there is a link between various genes (though not one specific allele) and height, in combination with various environmental influences. In a given societies, height will be moresensitive to genetic variation than to chance or minor environmental differences, but comparing average height between socieities or over time, environmental variation is much more important than genetic variation.

– Religion is a personality trait that is not determined genetically in any meaningful way, even though it is strongly heritable. Even complete knowledge of the distribution of all alleles across a population would tell you nothing about the distribution of specific religious affiliations across that population, if you had no other information about the society it was part of.

(I.e. we can say there is a gene for being Rh positive, there are genes associated with being relatively tall in a given environmental context, and there are no genes for being Catholic in any sense.)

So what I’m wondering is, are you claiming that conservative politics is like blood type, or like height? And how do you know it’s not like religion?

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/2011/09/07/your-brain-on-politics-the-cognitive-neuroscience-of-liberals-and-conservatives/

Here is a useful write-up on it that I ran across recently. Fascinating stuff. It gives scientific justification for calling Conservatives “thick.” But some of their apostates, such as Paul Craig Roberts and Bruce Bartlett, talk an awful lot of sense to some of us Old Lefties.

Conservatism and Conservatives have changed a lot in the last generation. There is far more money at stake now, with taxes so much lower and fortunes growing so much faster, among those fortunate enough to have to have something to conserve.

But there is also recognition among one group in the power elite (the carbon energy sector) that its role in the economy is changing and its power will inevitably diminish with that shift. Hence its intransigence regarding certain sciences. No doubt it promotes Intelligent Designand other such hoaxes as a way to keep its allies on board.

Indeed on issues of immigration and race the European Right is far, far, far more extreme than the US right.

Cite, please.

The first sentence refers to the fact that the US is just about the only country in the world where you get citizenship on the basis of birth regardless of your parent’s status.

Count me among those who think that searching for a spurious genetic basis to complex social/behavioural phenomena is weak, whether it’s “our side” doing it or Charles Murray.

I wasn’t interested in hearing this rubbish from the Nobel Prize winner who co-discovered the structure of DNA. And at least Jim Watson has spent a lot of time in the company of people who may have some claim to know what they’re talking about, i.e. evolutionary biologists and neuroscientists. I’m particularly not interested in hearing this from a Templeton fellow who apparently has no qualifications in science.

I’m not generally a fan of sloppy arguments about how much behavior is determined by genetics, but can’t we all agree that if this meme baits and irritates conservatives that’s a good thing?

I’m fine with working backwards from the premise that the present incarnation of conservatives is insane (they are) but the genetic part is a stretch. The fact that poster boys for the insanity include names like Paul Ryan, Kevin McCarthy, and Bill O’Reilly tells its own story about ethnic shifts in the composition of the movement over the last 2 generations.

I think the insanity has been 40 years in the making, but it had its own hockey stick moment with Bush v Gore in 2000. They saw power slipping from their grasp, they freaked out and called in every mole that had been planted over the previous decades, and they won. There was no going back after that.

14, 15: you are slipping, possibly accidentally, between “US citizenship policy is more liberal than European” and “the European Right is more extreme than the US Right on matters of immigration and race”. These are not the same thing at all.

I don’t think you could find a serious contender for the leadership of a European country saying that the cure for illegal immigration would be a heavily militarised border zone with the authority to shoot to kill; I don’t think you could find a serious Republican candidate who would say anything else.

I may be just a simple country hyper-chicken, but it seems to me that the current alignment of economic and social conservatism, religiosity, authoritarianism, and anti-intellectualism with a single partisan political identity is a peculiar historical contingency of the early 21st-century U.S., and can’t really be generalized in the way that Mooney wants to.

I’ll bet a nickel that Mooney doesn’t argue that “republicanism” is genetically influenced, so much as he argues that more general concepts like “authoritarianism” or “a desire for a structured social hierarchy” are genetically influenced.

Ajay:

I have been told by graduate students here that shooting to kill to prevent illegal immigration into Europe from Black Africa actually exists as a defacto policy in Morocco. The Europeans tacitly endorsing this policy as a way of preventing illegal African migration. I have not independently verified this. But, I have no reason to distrust my sources.

I have been told by graduate students here that shooting to kill to prevent illegal immigration into Europe from Black Africa actually exists as a defacto policy in Morocco.

I’ve been told by graduate students that Britain is secretly run by a Freemason conspiracy. Your point?

The apparent suddeness of the onset of full-out derangement is easily accounted for by (1) ajay’s remark @ 13

I tend to have that effect on people.

I’ll bet a nickel that Mooney doesn’t argue that “republicanism” is genetically influenced

And I will bet a shiny new dime that Mooney’s book is about “the Republican brain.” Because that’s its title.

The irony of a mostly-left-of-center blog discussing whether in fact a group of people they dislike is genetically inferior… well, to quote the hackneyed phrase, “it burns.”

@ Mason @ 35:
Mooney called it ‘The Republican Brain’ because he knows marketing. The argument itself is not about Republicans per se. I’ve read chunks of it online … can’t remember where or I’d link. I thought it was amazon’s “read inside the book” feature but as I look now that only seems to provide a very few pages …

I think it would be more accurate to say: mainstream immigration policies in Europe are to the right of the American right.

That is: American right is advocating polices that are already implemented in Europe.

manta 1976

J Otto’s claim appeared to be that the European right is more extreme than the US right on immigration, so I don’t know what benefit looking at immigration policy at the federal level in the US or Europe would have, as the policy would not exactly be representative of the right.
You could claim US immigration policy is more ‘progressive’ than European (I don’t know if that’s true) but when you’re making judgements about who’s right wing is more extreme I would think it becomes so subjective to be almost redundant. (And there are a lot of factors influencing immigration policy that have no relevance to xenophobia)
Personally I think you need to look at it country specific in Europe, I don’t know about region specific in the US. Once again anecdotally, going primarily on family that live throughout Europe and countries I have lived in, Britain’s political culture seems far less openly hostile to immigration than say Switzerland’s or Frances. Then again I only speak English so I can’t really judge.
I’m not disagreeing with J Otto, just thought the point was to general.

rf, to judge a political movement I look at what it does when in power.

When American right is in power the policies it actually implements are on the left of those already existing in Europe (e.g., it did not abrogate the Jus soli).

Bob McManus @17: you you must be seriously misguided &/or confused to conflate macro-economics with science.

Bloix @24: Your commentary on the role of authority is largely on target, except for one thing. I don’t imagine most people who deny religion and accept science are willing to depend on religion for anything important in their lives, but most people who accept religion and deny science are unwilling to give up science based technology or, especially, medicine. Why? In the one case, outsiders cannot see the practical usefulness of the results from that which they deny(including, often enough, profits!)[1], while in the other, they can. This informs my acceptance of science and the relevant authorities.

[1] I emphasize practical here, since religion has clearly inspired important parts of artistic tradition. I’d be very reluctant to give up the works of Bach or Vivaldi, for instance, even if it meant that all humans had more reasonable views of either science or religion.

Bloix @24 is very good. And in general, the unanimity of this thread is heartening.

I suspect that when John Q. responds to the comments here, he will say that this was a quickly written, off the cuff post (the typos suggest it) and that on reflection, he doesn’t think Mooney’s argument is helpful. It’s even possible he’ll reveal the whole thing is a parody or hoax. The phrase “brave in following the scientific evidence wherever it leads”, which sounds exactly like Andrew Sullivan on The Bell Curve, certainly raises some suspicions.

Yea Gods, since when is Crooked Timber channeling Steve Sailer (brain science is true, accurate and your destiny!) and Bryan Caplan (many, if not most, people aren’t fit to vote) and maybe even Lenin (the enemy of the people cannot be reformed – only eliminated).

Okay, yes, overstatement, but this is awful on so many levels.

How about a simple rule that any book, article or post that assumes that *any* significant segment of the population is less than fully human be dismissed out of hand – full stop. No closer examination, no “let’s look at the science”, just dropped.

Just on the basis of the fact that citizenship in the US is determined solely by birth US policy is far, far, far more liberal than any European country.

This is patently untrue. I see no reason to take any of the rest of your argument any more seriously than this.

I thought this might be an April Fool’s Day joke accidentally posted early, but the book is on Amazon and most of the content is in Mooney’s Mother Jones article posted… about 5 hours ago.

“I’m expecting him to prevail.”

Prevail against whom? And to what end? I

rf, I would not worry about derailing the thread: JQ was (successfully) trolling the internet…

I’m looking forward to the book on Republican penis size.

@63 The fact that Mooney presents data refuting his argument, doesn’t mean they don’t refute his argument.

Anyway, what do you think, Salient? Do you think conservatives are hostile to science because they are genetically predisposed to reject evidence-based arguments?

I don’t believe there’s a “genetic” disposition towards authoritarianism (what is that btw – I always perceived it as one of those convenient terms liberals invent as a means to indicate their superiority over both those to their right and those to their left, like “totalitarianism”) any more than there is a genetic predisposition towards distrusting science.

I admit that among my friends I enjoy calling the Koch Brothers and the Arizona Legislature crazy, and denouncing Mitt Romney a low-life panderer rather than a master of the Art of the Possible. I’m also permissive when it comes to ad hominem arguments against people whose political positions seem to me to be grounded solely in some sort of mental derangement.

But such judgments are meant to be taken as comedy, and low comedy at that. This post, it seems to me, is likely to lead to something which isn’t funny at all. I really wish I could blink a couple of times and make it go away.

You think: uh oh, here comes the ‘nature’ part. What will Mooney say about nature?

You know what he’ll say? He’ll say that you political views are shaped by your “political genes.” No, seriously:

Scientists are already showing that average “liberal” and “conservative” brains differ in suggestive ways. These differences may be related to a large and still unidentified number of “political” genes—although to be sure, genes are only one influence out of many upon our political views. But they appear to be an underrated one.

I remain hopeful that John Q. doesn’t really believe the argument of this post. But Mooney clearly does.

jwmason@10: “In a given societies, height will be moresensitive to genetic variation than to chance or minor environmental differences.”

Sorry, no. That would be true if all societies were like the later 20th/early 21st century US: which is not in fact the case.

After the astonishing achievements of liberal capitalism in providing large amounts of food even for the poor in the US/Australia/NZ and, rather later, in most of W Europe (and arguably elsewhere), height in those regions has for some time been determined mostly by genetic factors. Before that, the poor, especially the urban poor, ate badly and were shorter than average, genes or no genes.

Height is determined by nutrition and infectious disease. Egalitarian societies (where everybody has access to health care and clean water) are taller than other equally rich, less egalitarian societies.

So the idea is that there could be a genetically-determined trait — i.e., one written into our DNA — whose measurable effects can only be seen since… the mid-70s???

I’m with Rob in CT.

Manta (73.): Sorry, I apparently wasn’t clear. Of course you are right that comparing which policies work and which don’t can be useful. What I meant to say is that taking policies on one issue, comparing them, and then using that comparison to argue whose “right” is “more racist” or “less racist” is a fool’s errand.

The _American Political Science Review_ just published an article on genes and politics (PDF).

Abstract:

bq. Political scientists are making increasing use of the methodologies of behavior genetics in an attempt to uncover whether or not political behavior is heritable, as well as the specific genotypes that might act as predisposing factors for—or predictors of—political “phenotypes.” Noteworthy among the latter are a series of candidate gene association studies in which researchers claim to have discovered one or two common genetic variants that predict such behaviors as voting and political orientation. We critically examine the candidate gene association study methodology by considering, as a representative example, the recent study by Fowler and Dawes according to which “two genes predict voter turnout.” In addition to demonstrating, on the basis of the data set employed by Fowler and Dawes, that two genes do not predict voter turnout, we consider a number of difficulties, both methodological and genetic, that beset the use of gene association studies, both candidate and genome-wide, in the social and behavioral
sciences.

What matters is not why people hold one or another belief but why one or another belief becomes influential. If belief in geocentrism, or phlogiston, or the ether, or the fixity of species, promised to help, however indirectly, prevent any movement toward popular, democratic control of social and economic life, then anyone holding that belief, or convincingly pretending to, would be lavishly subsidized, promoted, and publicized by those who want to keep control of the economy and society just where it is at present. And a fortiori for particular aspects of policy: if democratic action to control anthropogenic global warming would diminish the profits of the energy industry, then those who (sincerely or not) deny anthropogenic global warming skillfully enough to retard popular comprehension of the need for that action will never lack for sponsorship.

What’s the matter with Kansas/conservatives? Sorry to be tedious, but Marx answered that question long ago: “In every epoch, the ideas of the rulers are the ruling ideas.”

Very good to see scientific skepticism being applied to this kooky and frankly offensive argument. I agree with a great deal of the criticism in this thread, including HP at 28 and SN at 29.

Regarding Pohl’s claim that Just on the basis of the fact that citizenship in the US is determined solely by birth US policy is far, far, far more liberal than any European country:

This is, as Uncle Kvetch and others have noted, nonsense on several levels:
1. There is a sizable, vocal, and politically viable anti-birthright citizenship movement in the US.*

2. Harsh state-level anti-immigrant laws passed in the US in the last two years include those that deny some immigrants the right to a public water supply, medical care, and schooling. That these laws are being litigated up to the Supreme Court has not stopped many of them from being enforced in the meantime.

3. Having recently spent some hours with German and French visitors to the US talking about just exactly these issues, I can say with confidence that the US is both more liberal, flexible, and effective at immigrant integration than Europe, and has anti-immigrant sentiment that is more hatefully mainstreamed, in the form of political leaders who run on anti-immigrant platforms and policies, as well as individuals who take it upon themselves to deny immigrant children and adults health, safety and education.

*To see how many Republican state legislators have introduced bills to abolish birthright citizenship in the last few years, you can consult the handy compendium of immigration-related laws generated by the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Do you think conservatives are hostile to science because they are genetically predisposed to reject evidence-based arguments?

No. I misread Mooney as saying “nature” was metaphorical for people moving from one party to another without changing their views, and “nurture” was metaphorical for people changing their views.

There are definitely “genetically predisposed” medical conditions, so to speak. So, I could be persuaded that someone with a medical condition is likely to have had genetics influence that outcome. I’ll note that there’s a horrible definition-ambiguity here: ‘authoritarianism’ is treated like a medical condition for the purpose of linking it to genetic predisposition, and then it’s treated as a behavioral trait for the purpose of linking it to preferred political objectives. I think linking the authoritarians’ authoritarianism to genetic predisposition is a too-clever-by-half way of accidentally letting them off the hook.

It’s like when researchers linked alcoholics’ alcoholism to genetic predisposition: I’m not saying they got the wrong answer; I’m saying they were asking a question that is irrelevant for social/political purposes. The medical condition of alcoholism is emphatically not the behavioral trait of alcoholism. No matter whether the predisposition exists or not, we need to get the alcoholic some help, and their behavior is just as damaging to those around them. Finding that some people are more genetically predisposed to alcoholism, that alcoholics are more disposed to fits of rage, and that alcoholics start trending to vote Democratic in 2020 {let’s say because Dems decide to support freer alcohol sales policies}, would say nothing about whether Democratic voters tend to be alcoholic, much less that “votes Democrat” is any kind of biological condition with meaningful genetic predisposition.

I would say authoritarians have substantial input into the policies generated by (local as well as national) Republican politicians. I would say that their authoritarianism is not a medical condition. It’s social-political authoritarianism. There’s a difference, so to speak, between suffering from a personality disorder, and being evil.

When American right is in power the policies it actually implements are on the left of those already existing in Europe (e.g., it did not abrogate the Jus soli)

They would do it, but for the fact that it would require amending the Constitution, which is very difficult and can’t be done with a simple majority of Congress.

Well, I just wish we could get to the bottom of why conservatives are by and large so awful. Then again, the world will always have assholes. There probably IS nothing to be done about it.

Does this discussion of genetic inferiority sound at all familiar to anyone conversant, say, with the progressive or populist eras?

Scott Nygren, Time Frames but doesn’t matter, any ole critical theorist:

Fanon’s colonial subject, positioned by imperialist domination as an object, occupies a site of intensely conflicted representations. The conflation of subject and object either triggers a recognition of identity as Symbolic masquerade and site of reinvention, or the misrecognition of identity as truth collapses into contradiction and madness.

Since I believe liberalism and neo-liberalism are the prevailing ideologies, (Cochrane and Prescott aren’t running the economy; DeLong and Krugman just aren’t running it quite as much as they want) even if they haven’t achieved totalitarian control, and that neo-liberalism is an imperialist ideology far more than old conservatism…

…it makes some sense to me to try to apply some post-colonial critical theory to Republicans…as the colonized, colonial subjects, the abject. “Oh their primitive superstitions and social practices…etc”

Anybody out there done any work yet?

94: There is a story today about Santorum letting slip a partial n-word.

So Obama can be pretty much who he is in public, but Santorum and his friends have to wear a mask, hide their selves in public. Isn’t that the way of the colonial subject?

Total blockquote fail there. The second sentence is a quote from chris (@1).

JW Mason@83: we agree in some ways but not altogether.

There are some societies (African pygmies, Inuit) where the genetic selection for shortness, an advantage in thick forest/great cold, is such that no matter how well fed and egalitarian they are, they’ll still be short.

But in societies where the genetic background is such that, given a good environment, people could be tall, than the more adequate the environment – not necessarily egalitarian, the US is not by any reasonable standards egalitarian but the poor are very well fed – the greater the average height.

And width. Only in the US have I seen fat beggars.

I think the argument for genetic selection (weak or strong), was that humans, -and indeed most primates) seem to have a sense of moraility which is at least partly prewired in the brain. The thesis is that some of these moral senses, such as fairness predispose one towards the “liberal” end of things, and others such as purity loyalty and authority, predispose one towards conservatism. Now in the context of living in an environment where a deadly infection can be acquired, purity -and its enforcing emotion -disgust, can be seen as having survival value. In any case the claim is made that subjects administered psychological tests designed to tease out the relative strengths of these moral senses strongly predict voting behavior. Assuming this research holds up, you then have the usual questions of cause versus effect (does associating with a group that emphasizes some moral sense more than others amplify some traits and dampen others). Also to what extent are such traits inhertited, versus influenced by the environment…..

Its hard for me to see how this has much impact on science versus anti-science. I suspect that, given a highly partisan society, it comes down to people placing more importance on winning their peer groups cultural/political battles, versus seeking the truth. And then choosing to be anti-science, if science is deemed unhelpful to their choosen cause.

I suspect that, given a highly partisan society, it comes down to people placing more importance on winning their peer groups cultural/political battles, versus seeking the truth.

I think there’s ample evidence in this thread that liberal-leaning people actually are rather fond of seeking truth. Had this been an entry on a wingnut blog, they’d be falling all over themselves to agree with its conclusions (assuming it said mean things about liberals). There’d be no hesitation, no call for citations, no skepticism. Just “Yeah! Their side sucks!”

Now, of course, their side does suck…but I’m not sure there’s any easy or pat reason we can point to and say definitively why. It may just be that some people are assholes, as I said upthread. So, then I guess we could ask why assholes exist. Hell, only the FSM knows.

This point from David Carlton at 51 is worth repeating:

Thus the decision for most of us isn’t, “Who’s right?” but “Who do we trust to tell us?” What has changed for conservatives thus isn’t their view of science so much as their view of scientists. Conservatives trust scientists less because they increasingly see them as political adversaries, and they see them as political adversaries because scientific issues have become increasingly politicized

Right. Although that does open the question of why and how scientific issues have become politicized. I suspect that sociologists and anthropologists (or historians of science, maybe) have some explanations, or at least theories about this.

The why and the how also have to do with the *direction* in which an issue becomes politicized. One thing that the Komen controversy sort-of unearthed was the degree to which Komen has managed to make breast cancer charity field about “early detection” and “the cure” rather than, say, analysis and regulation of the most significant carcinogens.

I apologize for not reading through all the comments…. Any argument which concludes that Group X is anti-science, and that Group X’s anti-science views have a specific genetic basis, is so divorced from the actual science of genetics that the whole argument is incoherent.

Also, as is not uncommon in these discussions, “conservative” is being used as interchangeable with “Republican” and both to designate some fixed type.

Note the slipperiness of “is being used”. Several different people saying several different things on a thread in which Mooney’s name is on the top is not equivalent to Mooney saying all those things at once, or believing them.

I think the argument for genetic selection (weak or strong), was that humans, -and indeed most primates) seem to have a sense of moraility which is at least partly prewired in the brain. The thesis is that some of these moral senses, such as fairness predispose one towards the “liberal” end of things, and others such as purity loyalty and authority, predispose one towards conservatism.

And I suspect that this relatively abstract thesis is what Mooney is actually talking about, sensationalist titles notwithstanding.

Have we already had a thread on J. Haidt’s TED talk on moral roots of conservatives and liberals?

Is it very different from Lakoff’s?

Haidt: “Whether you’re a liberal or a conservative is as heritable as anything else.” But, there’s not specific genes for anything. So it’s a pattern thing that we don’t understand.

“I think it’s a lot simpler than conservatives being somehow innately reality denying. Politics is fundamentally a legalistic game where the legal representatives of different interest groups use rhetoric to advance their interests.”

There is a lot to this. Note that the anti-science beliefs are greater among educated conservatives because they are better able to figure out what will help their team.

But given the update (in the OP), this just sounds like Corey Robin with some sensationalist It’s the genes! (but only kinda sorta actually) thrown in. No? I mean, what if anything is the appeal to genes or biology or whatever adding?

Agreed on the point about the asymmetry though. Fairly obvious, I’d have thought.

Moony’s argument is BS. The reason American Conservatives are anti-science these days is that science, as it’s practiced on the national level in the US, no longer supports Conservative goals. Back in the 50s and 60s the majority of scientific research was geared towards building atom bombs and wiping out commies. Now it’s all about figuring out how evolutionary biology got us to this point, and what we can do to alleviate anthropogenic climate change. Or, as the conservatives put it, forcing godless, homosexual Darwinism down our throats and undermining Holy Capitalism by perpetuating the myth of Global Warming. Of course Conservatives don’t like science in the 2st century. It’s no longer reinforcing their bigotries.

1. Chris @110, the OP uses the term “conservatives/Repubs.” I think comments on a post can legitimately address the wording of that post.

2. John, the trouble with your supplement is that when you start generalizing about your impressions of “people on the left,” as much as “people on the right,” the argument turns into complete mush. E.g. Huffington Post, which would certainly be identified as part of the left blogosphere, has long featured pseudoscience. It’s not hard to make lists of crankeries, some with no obvious political bias, others with … but I see no coherent way to weigh them up, and call one political perspective crankier than another.

Bruce Wilder @101: Personally, I would hazard an alternative hypothesis, that centrist weak-mindedness and moral bankruptcy has been more devastating to American politics than conservative craziness. It is the increasing inability of the centrists to recognize conservative crazy, which causes damage—not the constant of conservative crazy.

This.

bruce mcmanus @95: 94: There is a story today about Santorum letting slip a partial n-word.

So Obama can be pretty much who he is in public, but Santorum and his friends have to wear a mask, hide their selves in public. Isn’t that the way of the colonial subject?

I’ll follow up on Bruce’s hypothesis: because the prevailing social and moral order is (neo)liberal, conservative crazy is seen as outside that order, it can describe itself in terms of weapons of the weak, like humor (Limbaugh and Coulter are ‘entertainment’), and liberal social critique isn’t able to recognize it as a real threat (‘invade their countries, take their oil, and convert them to Christianity’ is ‘just hyperbole’) and moderates continue to tolerate it on the pretext that ‘they’d never actually do any of those things’ (like what people said about the Nazis when they first came to power).

The thing is, Santorum really can’t be who he really is in public, but Bill Maher can. Doesn’t make him powerless. The whole familiar formula of the powerless struggling against the powerful is still too rooted in liberal assumptions about what constitutes power, and fails to recognize that subversion, assisted by some real sources of power (lots of money, or lots of popular or institutional support), can really be effective. And we get absurd moments like Obama spokesperson Valerie Jarrett promising that the newly-elected administration would “speak truth to power”.

The above post was tangential to the topic. But I see no point in adding to the chorus about the (non) genetics of party preference.

I find Quiggin’s update unhelpful in one way. It’s all about his beliefs, but doesn’t clarify what Mooney’s thesis is.

I’ve read a few of the papers that Mooney builds on and don’t recall the specific ones I read as being about genetics at all. Some I found amusing. I didn’t like a recent one about how conservative ideology mediates a tendency for low IQ people to be bigoted. This contradicts my doubt that intelligence can be measured along a single dimension.

By the way, studies show that studying mainstream economics makes you more likely to follow the economists’ predictions in the prisoner’s dilemma. Is there a gene for becoming an economist? Once again, that’s not the kind of speculation I found in the literature.

There’s a gene for everything except, unfortunately, for replacing missing screws in Ikea furniture.

@51:

“What has changed for conservatives thus isn’t their view of science so much as their view of scientists. Conservatives trust scientists less because they increasingly see them as political adversaries, and they see them as political adversaries because scientific issues have become increasingly politicized. Global warming, I think, is the key issue here. The implications of what scientists say have unpleasant implications for the way conservatives live, reinforced by their unpleasnat implications for some very powerful interests.”

Not that I am a conservative in the US sense but does this actually surprise anyone?

On this very global warming point, we’ve vast swathes of the green/environmental left insisting that the IPCC scientific results mean that we must pull back from globalisation, must re-localise the economy. Yet the IPCC results are built on the economic models of the SRES which already assumes, in coming to the conclusion that global warming is a real problem that we should do something about, that further globalisation is part of the cure. The two globalised families of scenarios, A1 and B1, produce better results than the re-localised ones, A2 and B2. Fewer, richer, people with lower emissions.

If science is so abused to tell us what just ain’t so then shouldn’t people lose trust in those doing that telling?

Or JQ’s above argument about nuclear. Fukushima showed that when absolutely the worst thing possible happened to a reactor (a non-Chernobyl one) then the health effects of this were so minimal that we’ll never actually be able to identify anyone at all who dies from the radiation exposure. We’ll not even be able to note it statistically the effect is going to be so small.

Yet this is taken as scientific proof that reactors are too dangerous to use?

Agreed, they might be too expensive, but too unsafe? Even George Monbiot was persuaded the other way around.

If science is being abused shouldn’t people lose faith in that science?

I should know better than to bother with Otto, but I really don’t like being called a liar.

Instead it is very difficult to get citizenship in a European country if your parents are born outside of Europe.

In the case of France, at least, this is not the case.

A child born in France to foreign parents may acquire French citizenship:[3]
at birth, if stateless.
at 18, if resident in France with at least 5 years’ residence since age 11.
at 16 upon request by the child and if resident in France.
at 13 upon request by the child’s parents and if resident in France.
if born in France of parents born before independence in a colony/territory in the past under French sovereignty.

There is nothing “extremely difficult” about it, only a bureaucratic formality.

But, of course for American Leftists the EU has become the new USSR and can do no wrong.

Otto, the chip on your shoulder is visible all the way from Ghana. Get a grip.

Jexpat (133.): But what on earth does that have to do with any genetic predisposition towards anything at all? All it suggests is that many many people are being cleverly lied to in a way that takes advantage of the cultural formations that American society produces – the myth of rugged individualism, the myth of just rewards for hard work, the idea of man taming nature (an idea that would be rather ridiculous in Europe where nature has been tamed for along time), the idea of American exceptionalism and so forth.

Waiting at least 13 years in most cases is a lot more difficult then obtaining citizenship instantly. At any there simply is no equivalent in the US of Le Pen so my point about the European right which has its roots in Fascism being much more extreme than the US right stands.

John @ 117:

Do you really think that the relative value of scientific and religious knowledge depends only on your upbringing and social circumstances?

No, I don’t think that. I thought that Bloix’s earlier statement resonated with some work by STS scholars like Shapin that argues that there is a social component to truth, in particular, trust. The idea (and admittedly, I’m oversimplifying here) is that because we can’t confirm independently everything that we know, we put trust in those who, for various reasons, are in a better position to make claims about the truth of something. This trust is socially conditioned; we come to it by virtue of factors like education, social class, upbringing, etc. But I wouldn’t argue (and Shapin doesn’t either) that the relative value of scientific and religious knowledge relies only on these things.

Now maybe that’s a trivial point or one that doesn’t address the discussion at hand very well. I brought it up because I thought it a useful caveat when we get into discussions about the role of heredity with respect to social constructs like politics.

Kaveh@122

You make a lot of sense. There are enormous differences, however, between the alternate universes where the people who dominate are: neoliberal[1], “American liberal,” and “liberal meant Rockefeller Republican when I was a lad and I’m darn well not going to change for anybody.” Bill Maher’s show is called “Political Correctness” for a reason. I suspect neoliberals tend to be counted among moderates—“moderate” is a term of high praise for David Brooks, and I don’t think he’s just catering for the “liberals” and trying to get them to pull the lever for “R”—and the chart linked above shows moderates have the same level of respect for science as conservatives. These factors are important when considering who justifiably feels they’re excluded.

The above, on the other hand, does not actually address any group’s beliefs about science or about scientists or about the connections between science and politics–unless I’m missing something quite obvious.

[1] not to mention neoliberal and socially libertarian

“the European right which has its roots in Fascism being much more extreme than the US right stands.”

While I agree with you that probably every European country have less liberal immigration policies than the US, the relative levels of racism on the respective right wings will depend on the cut-off point in time. In 1968, i.e. just missing your four decades in comment #17, George Wallace got 13,5% of the votes in the presidential election. This would have been a quite good result for a European far right candidate – 34 years later Le Pen got 16,9% in the first round and 17,8% in the second round of the French presidential election. There are parts of the American right that has its roots in Jim Crow Apartheid, which in many ways were as racist as some parts of European fascism were. On the other hand, if you move the cut-off point back before 1945 the European far right would become the most racist one again.

My impression is that the levels of concern/opposition to immigration in the USA is roughly similar to that in many European countries. Of course, it varies quite a bit between different European countries, though perhaps not to the extent that election results for such parties/candidates do. And many right-wing populist parties in Europe doesn’t really have its roots in fascism. For instance, the Progress Party in Norway are remarkably similar to the US Republicans in both many of their policies and in their voter demographics.

bianca: I was really thinking of two different things, one is that those are the political attitudes that are within the Overton window, the other is that I think more than just being aggregates of political positions, each of those attitudes has its own hermeneutic assumptions that almost always go with it. Liberals, moderates, and neoliberals tend to underappreciate the connotative function of language.

re the OP, this whole discussion reminds me of something Barthes argued about myth in Mythologies, that myth is essentially a tool of conservatives and fascists, and antithetical to the goals of the left. His definition of myth is semiotic, but it sounds like ‘fast thinking’ referred to above is close to Barthes’ ‘myth’.

I don’t agree with Barthes about myth being conservative, I don’t think there’s anything about social democratic, leftist, or liberal positions that myth is antithetical to, or vice versa. If there is a ‘myth gap’ it’s a historical accident, the aggregate result of choices that have been made.

Well that’s an unedifying update. I don’t see how

there’s no such thing as a genetic predisposition to be a conservative/Republican.

isn’t a direct contradiction of

political views are genetically determined

If you want to withdraw the post, that’s great, but you should say so and not pretend you’re just clarifying. Otherwise you risk looking like you suffer from a genetic predisposition to respond to challenges to your beliefs by doubling down. :-)

More to the point, if you believe the first sentence, then you believe Chris Mooney is wrong. You don’t write a post praising his book, you write a post debunking it — or sarcastically mock-praising it, as I had hoped, wrongly it seemed, was what was being done here.

(And yes, I know there was the caveat afterward. But you don’t write “X is true, if only partially and indirectly,” unless you think there is some significant sense in which X really is true.)

More broadly, the idea that the only reason ordinary people could hold conservative views is that their personalities are defective in some way, whether based on their genes or otherwise, is as nice an example as you could ask for of proposing to dissolve the people and elect another one.

As Tom West said upthread,

How about a simple rule that any book, article or post that assumes that any significant segment of the population is less than fully human be dismissed out of hand – full stop.

Personally, for my own peace of mind I’m just going to assume that when John Q. wrote the original post he was drunk. We’ve all been there.

#117 – “Do you really think that the relative value of scientific and religious knowledge depends only on your upbringing and social circumstances?”

Of course I don’t think that, and I thought I was clear in stating that I believe in science as source of knowledge and I deny that religion is a source of knowledge.

But I also said that I am fully aware of my own state of gross ignorance and I do not claim to have the ability to make independent judgments on the great majority of issues relating to scientific knowledge. I accept scientific knowledge as true because I accept scientists and scientific institutions as sources of authority. That’s not a statement about the value of scientific knowledge. It’s a statement about how I – and, I believe, most educated people – “know” things.

One of things an educated person learns early in education is to associate what he or she has been taught with what is true. We learn to accept that information gained from approved sources of authority is knowledge on a par with information gained from personal experience. From our earliest childhood, we are praised when we master information given to us by our parents and teachers and show that we can repeat and manipulate it in approved ways. And we come to believe that knowledge from certain approved authorities is no different – and may be even more reliable – than knowledge from other sources, such as experience. But not everyone has that sort of upbringing, and not everyone’s parents and teachers have the same approved authorities.

An example:

I know from personal experience that some dogs I have known – a heart-breakingly beautiful samoyed mix, for example – haven’t cared for chasing sticks and balls, while others would do it hour after hour.

I “know” from reading Dogs: A New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior and Evolution, by Raymond and Lorna Coppinger, why that is.

But although I accept the two forms of information as both being knowledge, they are not all the same.

I have no competence to judge whether the Coppingers are right, and even if I had the ability to do so, I am never going to devote the time and energy into mastering the debates over canine evolution. The best I can do is to find authorities that seem persuasive to me, and accept them.

I am old enough to have believed things espoused by scientists that were later shown to have been false – not merely false, but terribly damaging. “Refrigerator mothers,” for example, as the cause of schizophrenia. It’s true that they were shown to be false by other scientists. But my acceptance first of their truth, and later of their falsity, had very little to do with my personal powers of reason, and was almost entirely the result of my acceptance of the authority of the mainstream of scientific opinion.

And it seems to me that educated non-scientists are often unaware that their opinions are a result of their acceptance of authority. People who have much less understanding of science than I do seem to think that they have formed independent scientific judgments on questions like evolution, global warming, the biological sources of sexuality, and on and on.

They can’t possibly have done so, any more than they could have an independent judgment on the truth of the theory of relativity, and yet they think they do. And they don’t seem to aware of what it means to know something on the basis of scientific evidence, and what it means to accept that something is true on the basis of acceptance of science as authoritative.

let’s not lose sight of the fact the methods of science do in fact produce truth (to put it rather unhappily), and the methods of revelation, e.g., do not.

All due respect to John and Chris, but this whole thing is bass ackwards. A good place to start is the first comment here “Since there are so few black Republicans”.

There are so few black Republicans because the party, starting in 1964 threw them out. Before the New Deal, blacks were majority Republican. The benefits of the New Deal attracted many of them to the Democrats, but there still was a large core of blacks who remembered the Civil War, the racism of the southern democrats and more.

They were tossed aside when the Republican Party leadership saw the advantage of doing so and attracting the racist core of white Democrats in the south of the US.

The point is not that Republicans are anti-science because they are Republicans, but that the Republican party has reshaped itself to attract anti-science people and repel those who are not (aka RINOs).

Choice, not chance

Agree with Chris Bertram on ‘the Transatlantic pissing contest’ about who is meaner to immigrants. It doesn’t work, because the situations aren’t really comparable. And it’s not clear what a good comparison would look like, or what good metrics would be. If the case is ‘where is immigration a more salient issue?’, then the answer is clearly Europe (I mean politically salient, rather than empirically salient). Ditto for the location of the most high-profile, clearly anti-immigrant politicians.

However, this isn’t evidence by itself that European political culture is more hostile to immigrants. European politics is more fragmented, with national legislatures of even small countries having as many as half a dozen parties, compared to America’s duopoly. So racists in Europe can be visible without (necessarily) being influential, whereas maybe in America they simply get sucked into the outer part of the Republican ‘big tent’. It does happen that politicians make hostility to immigration a big part of their campaigns; Tancredo’s aborted Republican primary run in ’08, for example. However, the size of the ‘big tent’, and the fact that illegal immigration is actually useful for the much larger part of the tent, big business, means the nativists don’t get anywhere.

Or, maybe, perhaps they drop out of politics altogether in America. This could be a concern if, for example, they took up domestic terrorism instead. Le Pen, Wilders, Griffin – all horrible people, of course, but they all accept the results of democratic elections, and none has, to the best of my knowledge, actually hurt anybody. Maybe, just maybe, in Europe, somebody like Timothy McVeigh might have been a frustrated wannabe MP instead of a domestic terrorist outside the system. In other words, maybe it’s better to keep your enemy right out in the open where you can see him.

Sorry for long-winded thoughts. It’s an interesting question, but in the end I think the two situations, and wildly different political cultures, are too far apart for making any useful final decisions.

there has been no equivalent to the popularity of organizations such as the BNP, Vlaams Blok, or National Front in US politics either during the more than four decades I have been alive.

Matt McIrvin somewhat beat me to this, but anyway…

The glib answer is “well, there’s no need, given the existence of the Republican Party.”

The less glib, but functionally similar answer is that American politics structurally enforces a broad two-party system; there has equally been no equivalent to the rise of Die Grünen in the US, but that doesn’t mean environmental politics has had no impact. Positions and statements comparable to those from the BNP/FN/VB can be found without much effort within the elected Republican Party, e.g. gobshite Congress types like Tancredo and Steve King of Iowa, countless state legislators. Challenges from the left and right come in primaries, not general elections; why form a third party when one can benefit from the structural advantages of the two big ones — or even better, dictate the policy of a state party far far away from the tax-sheltered confines of a nonprofit in DC?

As for the main topic, I’m with Bloix, and think that existing models of accounting for how arseholes (figuratively) beget arseholes are more than sufficient.

It is kind of crazy to try to compare US immigration and European (whatever that means) immigration. The major countries in Europe don’t come anywhere near the US in long term acceptance of immigrants and even in relatively short terms (1980-1990 or 1990-2000 for example) the US accepts levels of immigration that would, and in fact have caused enormous political problems in Europe. The major counterexample to that broad description would be Sweden, but even there the largest subset of immigrants would be Finnish, providing much less of a cultural contrast between the US and its largest subset–immigrants of Mexican origin. The Swedish political grumblings about Islamic peoples have been triggered at almost a full order of magnitude less than the challenges of cultural integration of Mexican immigrants in the US. And that is taking it as percentages of the whole, if you compare high-immigration Sweden to a regional subset like California, the question isn’t even close.

About 27% of Californians are foreign born. See here

Yes 27%. The Latin American immigrant population *alone* in California, more than half the total, flirts with being as big as all the immigrants in major European countries. California is often compared to France in terms of size of population and economy. French immigrants + those born in France with at least one immigrant parent are estimated to be at about 20% of the population. See here. A similar definition for California would put the number at 49%.

Yes that would be half.

And while the political salience of immigration is certainly above zero in California (with recent attempts to cut off certain social services for *illegal* immigrants though not the majority of immigrants) it doesn’t compare to that of France which has half the amount of immigration.

Trying to suggest that the US is even roughly comparable to Europe in terms of progressive immigration policies over the years is ludicrous. The US is and has been MUCH more welcoming than nearly any European country and it has been MUCH more successful in integrating such an enormous number of people than any of the larger European countries (see especially France and Germany).

And btw, in case it isn’t clear, I think that is a GREAT thing about the US. I wouldn’t change it at all (except maybe to let more people in).

Here’s a great example of a Democrat, Sen. Tom Harkin, who rejects science in favor of his pre-conceived notions of how the world should work (from PZ Myers):

“Sen. Tom Harkin, the proud father of the National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine, told a Senate hearing on Thursday that NCCAM had disappointed him by disproving too many alternative therapies.

“‘One of the purposes of this center was to investigate and validate alternative approaches. Quite frankly, I must say publicly that it has fallen short,'” Harkin said.

“The senator went on to lament that, since its inception in 1998, the focus of NCCAM has been “disproving things rather than seeking out and approving things.”

“Skeptics have complained all along that Harkin and his allies founded this office to promote alternative therapies at public expense, not to test them scientifically. Harkin’s statement at the hearing explicitly confirms that hypothesis.”

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/03/an_honest_admission_from_senat.php

Mooney’s thesis makes some sense if it’s restricted to America and placed in historical context.

I think it makes more sense if you don’t. Authoritarianism/the paranoid style/etc. has shown up in many places and times throughout history. The fact that we call it conservatism here and now shouldn’t obscure its fundamental similarity to, e.g., the Taliban, or dictatorships (in general, and including ones that claim to be of the left), or the Inquisition. I can only come up with negative examples, perhaps because I’m not very sympathetic to that point of view, but maybe there’s some society where it’s been a force for good in some sense, too.

A genetic influence on tendency to become an authoritarian broadly defined is plausible in exactly the sort of way that a gene for wanting to deregulate airlines isn’t. (Immigration is somewhat of a middle ground; because of the tribalism and xenophobia that are part and parcel of authoritarianism, a gene for authoritarianism would very likely also be a gene for a more negative view of immigrants and minorities compared to the gene’s alleles.)

Chris, perhaps you’re misunderstanding.

“Are Hispanic people in the SW of the US to be considered “immigrants”? Really? ” Umm no, so your sarcastic ‘really’ is unnecessary. I used the immigrant + born in country with one immigrant parent statistic *because that is how immigration is talked about and how statistics are kept in places like France*. I then compared it to California (normally considered quite a good one to one comparison if you don’t want to try to compare every bit of the US simultaneously against every bit of the EU) and illustrated that if you use the French statistical definitions you find that 49% would fall under immigrant or child of immigrant (compared to a mere 20% of France).

Now of course in California, we don’t think of children of immigrants as ‘immigrants’ because we think of them as ‘citizens’. Which was Otto’s point. But if we are going to compare immigration impact, it is worth noting that immigrants + children of immigrants in France = political problem of a greater magnitude than JUST immigrants in California. When you compare like to like (20% to 49%) it is clear that France is having a lot more political trouble over a ‘problem’ with much less magnitude. And that is true pretty much everywhere in Europe. Immigration becomes defined as a ‘problem’ at much lower levels than in the US.

Now that may or may not be because of the soil based citizenship rules, I don’t know. But a fact based community can’t just ignore the fact that immigration freakouts happen at a much lower tolerance level in Europe–even today.

“You switch time-frame too: but comparing the historical record of a colonial enterprise like the US (which needed settlers) to the historical record of Europe isn’t all that meaningful either. ”

Huh? I’m relatively certain that it is safe for a reader to infer that immigrants now living (my first set of statistics) and immigrants now living plus their children now living (my second set) didn’t show up in the US during colonial times. But if they did, I would suggest what we really ought to be investigating is how they are living more than 250 years, not how they are integrating so successfully into the US.

Matt McIrvin@153

‘Tom Tancredo is totally the American Le Pen.’

Yes, that would indeed have been a laughable thing to say, if that was what I actually said. Unfortunately, it wasn’t, not even close. I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear enough in what I wrote (for the record, stated plainly: I don’t believe there are any useful comparisons to be made of the kind ‘who is the American French Politican X’, because as I said, the two political cultures are too different), but my point was simply that it’s not unknown for prominent American politicians to run on anti-immigration tickets.

This may be a folk etymology in its own right – folk-pedantry? – but I’ve always understood that the ‘prove’ in that phrase originally meant to test or try; the exception puts the rule to the proof, as you might say. Which is luminously sensible and doesn’t come with that annoying penumbra of unresolved paradox – the exception doesn’t *confirm* the rule, it *challenges* the rule and makes you stop and ask if you’ve got it right.

I always understood the phrase to mean, a seeming exception that on closer examination, isn’t one.

Anyway, I agree wit Bloix that there is no sense in which faith in science implies receptiveness to factual evidence or resistance to arguments from authority. For everyone except scientists within their own specialty, scientific claims are just as based on arguments from authority just as much as religious claims are. Lewontin:

It is certainly true that within each narrowly defined scientific field there is a constant challenge to new technical claims and to old wisdom. … But when scientists transgress the bounds of their own specialty they have no choice but to accept the claims of authority, even though they do not know how solid the grounds of those claims may be. Who am I to believe about quantum physics if not Steven Weinberg, or about the solar system if not Carl Sagan? What worries me is that they may believe what Dawkins and Wilson tell them about evolution.

Indeed, in good Jamesian fashion, it could be argued that a believing in a religion that you find from first hand experience helps you cope with life is more evidence-based and empirical — more scientific — than believing whatever your physics teacher tells you.

‘believing in a religion that you find from first-hand experience helps you cope with life is more evidence-based and empirical – more scientific – than believing whatever your physics teacher tells you’

It’s a long time since I was at school but I seem to remember physics lessons containing such things as experiments and proofs.

I’m also pretty sure that ‘scientific’ doesn’t mean ‘helps you cope with life, in your experience’.

Chris, and none within even passing distance of California, right? And California has a relevantly large enough internal politics that we can make fair comparisons to Germany or France, right? Furthermore, lots of people who count as immigrants in France or Germany DONT count as immigrants in California, because everyone born in California is a citizen. Which I’m pretty sure you’re aware of since that is exactly what Otto brought up.

Rf, I’m not sure what you are asking me. You quote me as saying “it is worth noting that immigrants + children of immigrants in France = political problem of a greater magnitude than JUST immigrants in California….When you compare like to like (20% to 49%) it is clear that France is having a lot more political trouble over a ‘problem’ with much less magnitude. ”

You ask how I would back that up. It stands for itself, unless you are suggesting that France isn’t having more political trouble over immigration than California. Is that what you are saying? Assuming that you grant that France does have more political trouble over immigration (or even if you grant that it has the same amount), it is clear that California has VASTLY more immigration than France with less (or if we are incredibly generous for the sake of argument, the same amount of) political trouble. I’m not making any particularly strong claims about WHY that is so. Now maybe it is the case that the US can handle immigrants better because we can pack them into places like California and leave places like Montana relatively immigrant free. I doubt it, considering the amazing capability of California to absorb immigrants, but who knows.

“You also havent responded to the question of what you define as immigration; movements of people within the EU, from the newer Eastern European states, from more ‘cultually similar’ countries outside the EU, or are we taking about Muslims? (Because thats largely who Le Pen and Wilders are talking about)”

We can talk about it under any dimension you want and you’re going to have trouble showing any sort of long term trend that competes with the US, even if we restrict it to just the last 100 or 50 years. But if we’re going to talk about Muslims in Europe, the proper analogy is almost certainly Mexicans in the US (recognizably distinct in culture, somewhat resistant to assimilation, rumors of scary youths). And again Mexicans in the US are a dramatically larger presence than Muslims in Europe. And without border citizenship rights (i.e. a German-like definition of citizen) their ‘immigration’ levels would be even higher.

Steve Williams @166: I think you read in sarcasm that wasn’t there. I do regard Tancredo as the American Le Pen.

“it is possible to check with reasonable accuracy whether scientists are in fact basing their claims on research done using scientific methods and when they are making authority claims that go beyond that.”

Unfortunately, it really isn’t. I would say why, except that Lewontin (link at 170) already has – I appear to have been unconsciously channeling him all along.

Just to add as an example that there is no way for an ordinary person who grew up in a church and who knows no geology, chemistry, biology, or statistics to reach a considered opinion that people advocating Intelligent Design are not making scientific claims.

“I’d accept Wilson as an authority on ants, Gould as an authority on snails, and neither as an authority on humans.”

But if Wilson is an authority only on ants, then who cares what he thinks – except for the Orkin man, perhaps? And Lewonin (#170) is arguing precisely that people should accept Gould (and not Dawkins) as a general expert on evolution as applied to humans. If you reject Gould, who are you going to recommend to anyone as an alternative to the Intelligent Design people?

Now of course in California, we don’t think of children of immigrants as ‘immigrants’ because we think of them as ‘citizens’.

Who is this “we”, Sebastian? I don’t think it is “the set of the residents of California”.

Mm, trying again for this comment, without the spam-filter attracting link (sorry if it causes a double post).

Matt McIrvin@178

‘I think you read in sarcasm that wasn’t there. I do regard Tancredo as the American Le Pen.’

Ah, sorry, that’s my bad. I shouldn’t be so defensive. And actually, you’re right, Jan Brewer is a much better example of the gains to be had for politicians embracing nativist populism. After passing Bill 1070, Brewer’s personal approval rating in Arizona shot up by a whopping 20%.

I’ve been convinced by the literature that looks at scientists naturalistically that there is no such thing as the Scientific Method. This has nothing to do with whether or not some arguments are better or not, by the norms of some community in some place or time.

Funny that this level of factual denial would show up in a thread about Republican anti-science.

I frankly find it hard to believe that there are educated people who could actually consider the process of science as an authority comparable to revealed scripture. Even if it is outside their area of specialization, they ought to know something about how it works, and in particular they ought to be expected to understand that, in science, an appeal to authority is considered illegitimate.

There have been numerous scientific revolutions within my lifetime. Dark holes and continental drift were once speculative notions but are now key to the understanding of galaxies and earth’s crust. Biology has advanced at a dizzying pace. Keeping track of these changes demands no more than reading skills and a modicum of attention; more to the point, observing the practice puts the lie to the notion that science is just another unquestionable authority of unexamined provenance.

Lewontin was describing a lamentable legal situation, and one in which expert testimony has probably sent innocent people to their deaths, not a model for general intellectual discourse.

bad Jim has it right on science. Science is not random – it tries for a coherent understanding of the world. So Newton showed that apples and planets and thrown balls obey the same laws – and once he did this is obvious to anyone who takes the trouble to look at any of them (it lets you see why, for instance, a ball moves in a parabola or a two metre fall is much harder than a one metre one). Ditto evolution – you can look at the chicken carcass after dinner with a new eye. Scientific claims can be evaluated by asking how well they cohere. The physicist David Deutsch (The Fabric of Reality) takes the unmathematical (like me) through all the basics on a single volume.

“The exception proves the rule”. I always thought it indicated that one outlier that the rule didn’t cover. Kind of gives the rule a boundary — so far and no further.

Of course it’s just an expression. “Begs the question” is another such expression. Much as I’m attached to these expressions (like “disinterested” versus “uninterested”) there probably comes a time when they have to be retired. Does that make me a witling, a jackanapes, or a poltroon?

Re McManus on Jennifer Pitts, ‘A Turn to Empire’

From the summary of the book on Amazon:

Pitts shows that [19th century] liberal thinkers usually celebrated for respecting not only human equality and liberty but also pluralism supported an inegalitarian and decidedly nonhumanitarian international politics. Yet such moments represent not a necessary feature of liberal thought but a striking departure from views shared by precisely those late-eighteenth-century thinkers whom Mill and Tocqueville saw as their forebears.

Emphasis added.

196: 1) I am interested, possibly off-topically, whether (some kind of) cosmopolitanism is an aspect or consequent of Imperialism, extra-territorially

2) But also, I was trying to relate Pitt’s analysis of liberal Imperialism directly to the thread, and JQ’s update does help a little.

“I suggest that a strong conviction of the rationality of all
people and the fundamental reasonableness of all societies was essential
for robust resistance to imperial expansion and rule.” …J Pitts

And Quiggin in his update does essentially say that Republicans, that indigenous tribe irrational unreasonable mostly ineducable, with their alien religion and strange social practices and hostility to modernism…must be ruled by we progressives. It feels familiar.

The usual crowd here will likely not be open to analogizing Republicans/conservatives to the subjects of the British East India Co, or using Edward Said’s tools for understanding those politics, but hey, I study Japan, and somebody can possibly be hegemon and subaltern simultaneously. But I didn’t plan on doing it here until I feel more comfortable with my arguments.

“The exception that proves the rule” comes from Cicero; the Platonic form is something like “Shop closed on Tuesdays” indicating that the shop is open every other day of the week. Hence the exception (“not on Tuesday”) proves the rule (“open every day”).

Lucius Cornelius Balbus, later to become Caesar’s secretary and the first non-Italian consul, had been granted Roman citizenship (he was from Gades, i.e. present day Cadiz). Increasingly powerful and widely unpopular, his citizenship was challenged in the courts. Among many arguments, it appears that the prosecutor contended that, since treaties concluded with various peoples included clauses prohibiting the granting of Roman citizenship to their people, Balbus’s citizenship was should also be judged illegal by a generalization of that approach, even though no such clause was present in the treaty with Gades.

In response, Cicero successfully contended, that, since these prohibitions were clearly exceptions to the general policy, it could be inferred that there was no general prohibition on conferring citizenship on foreigners, but that on the contrary it was quite permissible: “if an excepting clause makes it impermissible, where there is no excepting clause, then it is necessary that it is permissible.”

Judge Jones (in Kitzmiller) sat through weeks of trial testimony and then wrote a 139 page opinion. He was paid to devote the necessary and time and attention to reach a reasoned conclusion. He’s far from an ordinary person.

_I defy you to find any easily identifiable sub part of the EU which has 27% foreign born …_

London has 33% foreign born.

It is also a pretty big sub-part of the UK (12.5% of the UK population and therefore proportionately similar to California), which, like the US is a state in international law (as the EU is not).

I appreciate your need to nurture your Rumsfeldian fantasies about “old Europe” versus the US Sebastian, but it really is quite pathetic.

I for one am finding the exchange between Sebastian and Chris Bertram highly enlightening, and that CB’s oppositional stance is exemplary in demonstrating how to further draw a conversational partner. (I hope this was the intention.)

Much of the conflict between conservatives and science revolves around the Liberal idea that findings in a Social Science should hold the same weight as Physics and therefore the results should be acted upon. US centric examples could be gun control, white male patriarchy, spanking, etc, where a fake truth is touted as scientific and therefore a reason to stop all discussion an implement some new law. Since the conservative party already is tarred with anti-science for these cultural reasons, it became much easier politically to ignore the uncomfortable results from the hard sciences.

So no answer on the Poles in London I take it?

Sebastian it might well be that if Poles in London were to become 12 per cent of the population then there would be a reaction. But you want to make a general point about US attitudes to migration and how they compare to Europe. Since the foreign-born population of Louisiana (which last time I looked was, like California, a US state) is 3.7 per cent and they’re managing to have a full-on nativist panic attack, your general case for US “superiority” can’t be sustained.

I’m glad others brought up Haidt, because I immediately thought of his new book when reading the rewrite and wondered how the two arguments intersect. For the record, I’m skeptical about Haidt’s argument too, for some of the same reasons — what he means by “conservative” doesn’t seem to map onto the US political system well and “conservative” is a category that changes over time — but I’ve also only just started his book, so will reserve judgment.

I continue to think that the issue with science and Republicans and the supposed authoritarian personality common among some conservatives are being conflated incorrectly. I haven’t seen a convincing argument that people reject science because they are authoritarian.

Now, you note that the Republicans effectively use “white tribal/ethnic loyalty.” That seems obviously true, and it’s also true that some people may respond more strongly to these kinds of appeals — that’s consistent with the Haidt argument — and that the Republicans have found a way to appeal to that, rhetorically.

With respect to economic policies, the opposition to so-called “socialism” is hard to square clearly with authoritarianism, as it’s often phrased in terms that sound anti-authoritarian. It’s just that the fear of authority by certain people (the government, the intelligentsia) are used as a basis to give unlimited opportunity to seize authority by others (corporations, the rich). (The government is imagined to favor some groups over one’s own, and to an extent one sees this as less-deserving groups over the deserving, there may be a link with the idea of authoritarianism, but again it seems more complicated.)

I do think some traditional Republicans are more comfortable with the idea that the same old people are in charge, since they see the same old people – rich white men – their kinds of people in some ways. But there’s also a rightwing populist wing that may be ideologically incoherent or substanceless, but also seems to be operating based on different mindsets, including dislike of being told what to do by certain kinds of authorities.

I suspect that I would test high on certain kinds of tests of conservative mindset or personality. I get nervous about change and unintended consequences, I tend to respect authority and structure (which is why I tend to give a decent amount of credibility to scientists, doctors, experts, the legal establishment – the same people I think the right is attacking), I think that people on average are better off when embedded in a society vs. having as much autonomy as possible, even though I value much of the autonomy and opportunity to create my own life that the liberalism of our society has allowed me. But the result of these “conservative” tendencies, under the current political circumstances, is to be threatened by the right and to dislike most of the policy positions taken by the Republicans.

Anyway, given all this, I’m still not sure enough who the authoritarian conservatives are to have a position on whether it is worth engaging with them or not.

Sebastian: as I’ve reiterated several times, the issue here is your determination to use California as representative of the US as a whole, that’s obviously misleading. Louisiana?

California is 1/7 of the population of the entire US. It is more autonomous than cities like London, and easily has its own completely separate ethnic/sociological/cultural dynamics. That isn’t cherry picking, that is taking a well recognized social/political unit and using it as an illustration. The politics of Louisiana have virtually nothing to do with California, while the politics of the UK rather well track onto the politics of the UK.

You chose the illustration of the Poles as a parallel with Mexicans with respect to California. I understand that you don’t like talking about California–though I’m beginning to suspect that it is largely because you don’t like where the facts about it lead, but characterizing it as cherry picking is being dismissive not intellectually curious. California is a political unit, as large as France. It is as economically powerful as France. It has slightly less power in its larger group than France does in the EU. It shares a common currency with its larger political unit. It has its own culture, quite distinct from Louisiana–at least as distinct between those two as between economic/cultural units that you would easily grant me (say Sweden/Germany/Finland/Denmark) and arguably as different as France is from Germany. Essentially you seem to want to complain that it doesn’t have its own army and navy. Ok I grant you that. Brilliant distinction!

In that distinct state, 1/7 of the whole United States, you can find an ASTONISHING amount of immigration. 27% foreign born and 49% foreign born + children of foreign born. And for the most part it functions at least well as your average European state and we have to deal with totally insane Republicans. For the most part, California focuses on integrating its ENORMOUS foreign born population. Now is it an actual paradise on earth for immigrants? No. It exists in the real world with real people and real prejudices. And don’t even start on immigrants from other states in the US–we don’t even count those, even when we think they are weird or undesirable. That is a 37 million person cherry to pick. And you offer individual cities or a bank state like Luxembourg in response? Really? Come on.

“The Polish population of the UK has, if we ignore a few thousand WW2 veterans, gone from zero to its present level in ten years. Mexican immigrants in California have been coming and going (and joining their extended families etc) for decades.”

Now you’re just falling into stereotyping. The Mexican immigrant population California increased dramatically between 1960 and 1970 (immigration reforms) then almost doubled again between 1980 and 1990, nearly doubled again between 1990 and 2000, and more than 75% of Mexican immigrants arrived within the last 20 years.

So that actually isn’t much of distinction between Poles in the UK and Mexicans in California.

By the by, the SCOTUS ruling on strip seaches by the conservative majority could mean arrest for civil disobedience could include cavity search. Good thing the Wisconsin protests are over with. (see below) .

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/us/justices-approve-strip-searches-for-any-offense.html?hp

Feel free to delete this comment or put somewhere else. (no pun intended)

Chris Bertram@216

‘Sebastian: as I’ve reiterated several times, the issue here is your determination to use California as representative of the US as a whole, that’s obviously misleading.’

Yes. This. California is not representative, at all. It has more immigrants, and is more tolerant of those it has. Yet, when it comes time to consider immigration reform at a federal level*, California will still have 2 senators voting on the topic, just the same as Arizona or Louisiana or Alabama. And outside of California, laws clamping down on immigrants are extremely popular. As I noted above, Jan Brewer received an immediate 20% boost in her approval rating for signing Arizona’s recent immigration bill. Before, she was polling in the mid-30s, and after in the mid-50s.

In truth, it may well be the case that America isn’t more hostile than it is to immigrants simply because neither party campaigns – at a national level, at least as a priority issue – on being hostile to immigrants. Often, it’s liberals who complain about party consensus in Washington**, but maybe on this occasion liberals should be thankful for it.

*which could be a long time, since addressing the issue isn’t really in either parties interests.

**for one example – polls regularly show up to 80% of Americans favor treating Israel and Palestine exactly equally in the peace process. It’s a myth that hawkishness on Israel is the only politically viable position. (sorry, not trying to start a conversation on Middle East – just the 1st example that came to my head).

I’ve taken a look at the preview of Mooney’s book, and it’s certainly the case that it would be quite difficult to combine his discussion of temperaments with the argument in Corey Robin’s book (which I’ve almost finished). But Robin does emphasize elements related to personality. The difference may have something to do with Robin’s book being more about ideology than about party politics, and more about powerful individuals than about voters. “Conservative temperament” seems more applicable to voters, something a party will appeal to.

Why not check what surveys of public opinion shows? This and this [pdf] seems to indicate that attitudes to immigration and immigrants are more positive in France than in the US. On the other hand, the UK is more of an outlier in the other direction on many of the questions.

As for jus soli or jus sanguinis, the distinction often isn’t that important. The common way for immigrants to acquire citizenship in Europe is by naturalization, and while the rules are different in different countries it is usually straightforward and relatively easy. But naturalization is hardly uncommon in the USA either.

Regarding Polish immigrants, in many countries that’s not really that large an issue, except among trade unionist and others on the left who fear social dumping. Instead, most opposition to immigration is directed against asylum seekers and other immigrant groups that are considered to more “culturally distant” than what Poles are. Note that many European countries both receive and accept a lot more asylum seekers per capita, and in some cases even in absolute numbers, than the US does.

And I note that if Rick Santorum is nominated, he will surely do much better than Le Pen did in a two-way race. He has embraced the Eurabia-conspiracies of the European far right, and while I’m not sure about his views regarding immigration to the US, he has been complaining that there are too many immigrants in Europe: “Look at Europe. Europe is on the way to losing. The most popular male name in Belgium – Mohammad. It’s the fifth most popular name in France among boys.” If Tancredo or Buchanan is the American Le Pen, Santorum is the American Kjærsgaard.

Ah, the HTML and the link got messed up. Trying again:

“The political implication, which has drawn some flak in the comments, but which I think is correct is that there is no point in political engagement with authoritarian conservatives.”

Another conclusion could be, like Bruce Wilder has argued in several other threads, that one of the major problems facing the modern left is its lack of appeal to people with authoritarian inclinations. If a fairly large portion of the population has such characteristics, it’s probably impossible just to ignore them. And appealing to these groups doesn’t have to take the form of Stalinism, social democracy is often considered a relatively authoritarian movement as well. So the particular problems the US left has been experiencing during the last decades could be caused by too much liberalism, and not enough social democracy.

This whole discussion seems dismayingly ahistorical for a Crooked Timber thread. In my own experience everybody changes. Young liberals become crockety old conservatives; children of fundamentalist households transform into lifelong raving progressive atheists. On some axes our children maintain continuity with us; on other axes they become our diametric opposites; and on others they become orthogonal. And then you watch them change as they age too.

So, how permanent is the “authoritarian” personality? Do these traits tend to stay in place a whole lifetime? I see a lot of change in people, but that could just be the confirmation bias of an aging transhuman cosmopolitan metrasexual.

To toss the question back to commenters who have taken exception to this aspect of the post – do you disagree with this characterization of the Republican base?

Well, it’s hard to know what to say to this. If you talk about “temperaments” that “can’t be changed”, I’m thinking about time-horizons on the order of centuries. But of course, major political realignments can happen in 2-3 generations. So, yes, on the one hand, I agree that right now there are large, very large, parts of the Republican base that you couldn’t straightforwardly engage them in rational discourse and thereby expect to persuade them. On the other hand, I do think that what’s more important than simply beating them electorally is building a viable left alternative that can have genuine (mass-ish) appeal, not because it’s demagogic, say, but because—well, sure I’ll say this—it builds class consciousness for example. (Though, while that alternative is being built, please just yes lets fucking beat them (electorally).)

More generally, I guess, the sort of view you’re proposing seems to me to close off the possibility of a genuinely non-demagogic left-democratic politics. And I guess I find this to be unwarranted.

This remains a bizarre exercise in confirmation bias, which appears to be driven by an underlying sense that the worst of right-wing talk-radio/bloggers/pundits are exemplary of Republican thinking. The actual data contained in the linked study provide almost no support for an “authoritarian personality” thesis. This is about on par with Robert Nozick’s theory that liberals are so much in favor of strong and paternalistic welfare states because liberals felt more at home, and protected by, the institutional confines and authority of the school – as opposed to libertarians and conservatives, who were more comfortable, and flourished, in the free and fluid environment of the schoolyard and the street.

Just-so stories can be fun for everyone.