Balance or both-sidesism

It’s the ‘argument to moderation’ or ‘golden mean fallacy’. The unstated assumption behind the discussion of the causes of polarisation is that polarisation must be a bad thing. But that’s only true sometimes. Polarisation is not always a bad thing, and it’s wrong to assume it is without having a reason for thinking so.

One small point about this —

From being the unchallenged majority party in the 1980s

–in 1984, a majority of US voters chose Ronald Reagan over Walter Mondale; but also in 1984, a majority of US voters chose Democratic House candidates over Republican House candidates.

I wholeheartedly agree with this. But it’s not clear to me which part of it would be new to Matt.

It’s totally legitimate, though, to point out that https://www.slowboring.com/p/polarization-is-a-choice mentions ‘democracy’ 0 times. It feels like cherry-picking and not very intellectually honest.

I broke down and read the “post”. Engaging with Matt is like engaging with Jell-o. He talks about “elites” and “people” as if we all have the decoder ring, he mentions Democratic “leaders” thinking a pivot to the left was a good idea, and his follow-up cite starts with “young Democrstic wonks” feeling discouraged. Not to mention his cite for Trump’s “centrist” positions based on statements made by Ttump during the campaign. It might have been reasonable to take Trump at his word in 2016, but to cite that now transcends willful blindness. Your point about the polarizing frame being loaded with baggage is fair, but the more I dig the more nothing I find to engage with. He has a conclusion but no argument to engage with, just an army of faceless nameless people, elites, and leaders.

The Yglesias objection to your characterisation, I would guess, is that he’s trying to define an underlying political mechanism – politicians of all parties campaign by appealing to voter middle ground then govern by keeping their base onside, rather than ‘polarization’ being something that just mysteriously happens – rather than evaluating the contents of those policies or actions, whereas you’re emphasising the latter. I don’t think that makes his argument any more convincing, not least because it seems to depend on claims like “Donald Trump, who on Election Day 2016 was seen as a badly flawed candidate with a moderate ideology…”

As someone who criticises the Australian left for their anti-democratic tendencies (the current federal government is at best reluctant to repeal the draconian anti-protest, anti-refugee laws or even the overbroad anti-terrorist ones), I can see an argument that the US centre-right is just a less extreme version of whatever the far right is doing. There isn’t a pro-democracy movement in the USA that has any visibility or power.

But there very much is an anti-democratic movement, and it has been busy planning for the next time they have power so they don’t make the same mistakes again. And they’re planning a disturbing amount right out in public, so even people like me get to see it. Like the plan to make much more of the civil service political appointees, and the even more extreme candidates they have for the already political ones.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=republican+plan+more+of+the+civil+service+political+appointees&ia=web returns quite the list of commentary

It was Milan, the intern, who is leaving Matt’s substack, Yglesias is going no where. He’s making more than a million quid a year. He will never stop posting.

OK, I made it to the end and read many of the (hundreds of) Substack comments and that little world they’ve built for themselves is nasty. What I’m seeing isn’t so much both side-ism as a clear rightward drift –even radicalization — coupled with a self-deceiving insistence that they’ve stayed the same while the Democrats have been sprinting toward the “hard left.” Clinton is alleged to have positioned herself well to the left of Obama and Biden has supposedly been seduced even further by a pack of Warrenites. In Yglesias land, Warren is a radical who should be thrown out the Overton window, while Sanders [spits] is more extreme than Trump (who Yglesias seems to think campaigned as a moderate) and somewhere between villain and scapegoat with his biggest crime being to force Clinton to run as a “leftist.”

Ironically, what all this “gospel of moderation” stuff reminds me of most isn’t the sensible center but rather diagonalism — the so-called “horseshoe theory” of far left and far right wrapping around to meet at the fringes. The sense of being an enlightened elite rejecting mainstream pilitical labels is there and even some of the language — several people mention having to pander to the “normies.” As typically happens, the reactionary side seems to be winning. It’s taken for granted, for instance, that Biden opening public lands to oil drilling is proof of his finally returning to seriousness and moderation. Campaign promises made to appease”the left” are better off broken and the reality of climate change isn’t worth a fig leaf. The cynicism is palpable. There’s an even uglier thread in there where they take turns praising the “moderation” of Biden’s Trump-lite immigration policies and bemoaning that the liberal media just doesn’t understand, but I don’t know if Yglesias himself is that far gone yet.

After reading Yglesias’ article, I think he doesn’t understand why polarization is happening.

He doesn’t see the difference between “culture war” positions and “economics” positions, so he says that Trump in 2016 was a moderate, but in reality in terms of “culture war” he was already quite extremist.
When many dems say the republicans are going fascist, they most mean the “culture war” aspect. The fact that trump was somewhat a moderate on the economic said not only doesn’t contradict it, but is actually the main reason he (and future republican politicians) have to take the fascist/rightwing populist route: because the traditional republican economics are not liked anymore by most voters, so they have to double down on guns, anti-abortion etc.
I remember being on a forum during the Trump campaign, it was about martial arts and not politics, but most posters were right leaning and they were very passionate against gun control; some posters actually said that they wanted Trump in because they wanted a republican mayority on the supreme court (I’m sure many democrats would think the same thinhg on the opposite direction).

In the meanwhile, Yglesias sees increased dem polarisation mostly on the “economics” side, but republicans are mostly pissed off by “wokes”, which is a culture war position not an economic one.

So on the whole he misses the point because he is looking only at the “economic” position, where he would like probably some centre-left stuff, and doesn’t see that the polarisation comes largely from the “culture wars” position (that IMHO also indirectly come from economics, but only indirectly).

If someone thinks that “Republicans” (50% of US?) are inveterately opposed to democracy and that is what is driving their politics then clearly any compromise with them or self-criticism of the Democratic side would be futile, but that seems like an example of the kind of self-fulfilling pessimism Yglesias is objecting to (from a brief perusal of his post).

OP @13,

No, it did not (at least in its totality). It relied on the twilight years of the political power of organized labor. It wasn’t until the 1994 election that the GOP was finally able to break the Dem hold on the House.

You can similarly dismiss the argument that the GOP was the “unchallenged majority party in the 1980s” by looking at the ratio of gubernatorial seats by party; at no point in the 1980s – even when 13 states were up for grabs in the 1984 presidential blow-out election – did the GOP have a majority of state governorships. For several years they had ~ 1/3rd as many as the Dems.

It’s easy to paint US politics with only presidential brushstrokes, but it’s just not that easy.

It’s actually much much worst as:
“Peak both sidesism here. Republicans want to destroy the world by NOT believing in Climate Change – while Democrats stubbornly insist on saving the world by helping to fight the Climate Crisis.. Surely there is some middle ground to be found here”

The good old median voter. Isaac Asimov once wrote a short story where the super comp just picked the median voter who would vote alone in a two party system. The US median voter always was sufficiently misinformed in a non random way – missinformed in the interest of those with lots of money and particular stupid personalities willing to influence what news he got- and sufficiently different from the median person with voting right to make that thing a joke even in the best of times on those grounds alone.

Jed@7: I’ve found that you can usually replace the vague term “culture wars” with either “masculinism” or “white innocence.” Masculinism is an ideology, and I think a fairly well-developed one. In brief, it is what happens when the “two spheres” theory (feminine home and masculine outside world) collides with modern feminism. Masculinism is a retreat from this theory. Masculinism acknowledges the economic equality of women, which allows it to jettison the masculine role of “good provider.” All that is left is “protector,” which means righteous violence: Judge Dredd animated by the Reverend Billy Bob.

I’m confused about what Yglesias is talking about. He says “it’s important to avoid completely retreating into abstractions about polarization.” But what is his notion of polarization? I mean, in the US we have two major parties. Is he saying that polarization is what happens when two parties come up with different policy views/platforms?

And yeah, there’s quite a bit of cherrypicking going on. Take Jimmy Carter, for example. He campaigned on a more progressive economic platform and then he changed his tune when he got into office.

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/kai-bird-jimmy-carter-outlier/

(p.s. He did not get reelected.)

Also, there’s no acknowledgment of the structural factors at the national level (electoral college, Senate, Supreme Court, etc.) that make “moderation” or “bipartisanship” important when it comes to policymaking — but this is really only true for Democrats, at least these days.

In the end, I don’t think the article is even worth responding to. The main point seems to be that sometimes politicians change their minds because they come into contact with somebody who makes a convincing argument. I guess that’s true, as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go very far.

I haven’t read the piece, but the quote is, of course, both-sideism, yes.

Despite being completely ingrained on the right, the idea that the centre-left has become more extreme is ludicrous. To the right it is a justification for their own radicalism (look what you made me do to you), and centrists need to believe it to feel superior and above-it-all and not think too hard about the Overton Window (as the old joke from the Bush era goes, the right wants to put all kittens in a blender, the left wants to kill none of them, so the sensible compromise is to kill half).

To the degree that one could charitably try to argue that the perception of polarisation on the left is based on something, anything, it would be that societal attitudes towards LGBTQetc people have become more tolerant over the decades. But that then means accepting the argument that getting into trouble at work for being abusive towards your colleague or student is an intolerable infringement on liberty and/or a conspiracy to Destroy Western Civilisation. More importantly, on economic policy “the left” is far to the right of where conservatives were a few decades ago.

The irony here is that the nominally centre-left parties will always be painted as the second coming of Stalin no matter how moderate or even neoliberal they are in reality. Obama was demonised as a ‘Marxist’ for adopting a Republican health care plan, and Biden gets the same treatment for investing in infrastructure. Ardern was a ‘dictator’ for doing a Covid lock-down and then… lifting it again, with all civil liberties miraculously intact. Australia currently experiences a moral panic over the idea of giving indigenous people consultation rights while the government approves coal and gas developments left, right and centre and pushes through with massive tax breaks benefiting mostly the wealthy. The contemporary right only has one mental gear: conspiracy theory. Actual policies don’t come into it.

Therefore, those nominally centre-left parties might just as well do something useful like raise top marginal tax rates, increase unemployment benefits, get serious about keeping the planet habitable, make life less miserable for refugees, or (in the case of the UK) admit that Brexit was a bad idea, because their treatment in the billionaire-run media remains the same either way. That they then don’t do any of these things shows to me that they don’t actually want to do them either.

In most countries we thus have the choice between one large party that makes everything worse and thinks that they are the only ones ever entitled to win elections, and one large party that makes most things worse and is okay with losing elections. That is a difference that matters, because I would like to keep democracy, thank you very much. But the drivers of radicalisation of the right, growing economic insecurity of the middle class plus massive concentration of wealth and media power plus low degree of education and media literacy, aren’t solved by the nominal centre-left either on the rare occasions when they get elected, so, how will the right ever de-radicalise? Is the hope in the Labour/Democratic parties of the world that the problem goes away if they cover their eyes and say, “I don’t see anything”?

I wonder whether this is partly driven by “I don’t like it when you argue, please stop”, which is generally addressed to the less argumentative side because they’re more likely to agree.

@You’d have to be pretty astigmatic to see symmetry in this situation.

BUT STILL!!? .
not a word from anybody else here – about the utmost relevant A-symmetry –
that Republicans want to destroy OUR world by NOT believing in Climate Change – while Democrats stubbornly insist on saving the world by helping to fight the Climate Crisis?
And that’s truly confusing – as we know that especially US Conservatives LOVE their Homeland -(and it’s NATIONAL Parks and it’s nature) nearly as much a German GREENS LOVE the environment and nature
NOT only of their Heimatland
BUT the whole world to such a dimension that they even accept rules and regulations an American Conservative would rail against limiting his freedom –
while somehow –
the US Sierra Club -(a Club with a bases of truly ultraconservative Americans) ‘is bringing people together to build the most powerful and effective environmental movement the world has ever seen’.
AND
The Sierra Club is the most enduring and influential grassroots environmental organization in the United States. We amplify the power of our millions of members and supporters to defend everyone’s right to a healthy world.

AND WE filmed in ALL major US Nationalparks and NOBODY discusses there why ‘people on Election Day 2016 saw Trump as a badly flawed candidate with a moderate ideology — more like Clinton, Gerald Ford, or Bush the Elder than Obama, Reagan, or W’.

The right-wingers claim to believe that Biden is a communist (https://www.newsweek.com/marjorie-taylor-greene-says-history-proves-biden-committing-communist-takeover-us-1613746). They even claim to believe that the Pope is a communist (https://www.newsweek.com/two-communists-trump-ally-rep-claudia-tenney-slams-pope-francis-meeting-pelosi-1637850).

Does Yglesias really claim to believe what Republicans claim to believe? That’s beyond crazy.

Mr Mister – I mostly agree with what you say but this is just wrong:
“When many dems say the republicans are going fascist, they most mean the “culture war” aspect.”

No the fascist bit is that they don’t accept the concept of objectivity. There is only for us or against us. Justice (or even science for that matter) is not an exercise in truth discover, but and exercise in power projection only.

The question whether right-wing conspiracy mongers actually believe what they claim to believe – e.g., that Obama is an atheist Muslim Marxist, or that the indigenous voice to parliament will mean that the UN takes over Australia – is a fascinating one. I’d like to read more research on that. What what it is worth, my current hunch is that there is a gradient form the leaders to the followers, with the former more likely to use conspiracy mongering as a cynical ploy, and the latter more likely to truly believe the nonsense.

However, and this was extremely difficult for me to accept and even to understand over the years, there are also many people capable of believing several contradictory things at the same time. For example, that Obama is an atheist and a Muslim; that the left are easily defeated weaklings disconnected from the real world because they care about pronouns and that they are behind a nefarious conspiracy that controls the deep state and all cultural institutions to destroy western civilisation; or that identity politics are bad because it is all about group characteristics instead of individuality and that black people are genetically inferior to white people. This means that a lot of right wingers may, as strange as that sounds, know that they are tactically talking nonsense to get one over on the other lot and at the same time believe that the nonsense is the truth.

I finally got around to reading the Yglesias piece, and I think I know what pissed off both parties. Yglesias is mainly interested in rebalancing the structure-agency framing of modern US politics. He thinks structure has been oversold and that agency has played a very important, perhaps even decisive, part. Polarization in this context is mostly an example.

Quiggin really dislikes the term “polarization” as a descriptor of political development in the US and other wealthy democratic countries. It calls attention to the gap between competing political positions without considering the profound asymmetry between, say, AOC and Marjory Taylor-Green. The Republicans are sliding toward a fascist program, the Democrats tiptoeing nervously toward social democracy. Saying that both are contributing to something called “polarization” is perverse.

Now, Yglesias can say, as I suspect he would, that no value judgments are implied. He just wants us to know that shifts away from more moderate positions in both parties are chosen, not fated, no matter what we think about moderation in either context. In a narrow sense, I agree with him. (Just as I would if all the discourse were about agency, as it sometimes is, and we need to rebalance in the other direction.) But picking “polarization” as his case in point implies that this is an important issue; otherwise he would have picked some other one. (A good candidate might be militarization of foreign policy.) Moreover, and this is what probably got JQ’s hackles up, words like polarization and moderation are powerfully loaded. Polarization is said to be giving us political dysfunctionality, and any action that contributes to it, like Heather Boushey successfully courting Democratic Party grandees, is at least problematic—and the same goes for Trump cutting rather than raising corporate taxes. Moderation, of course, is deemed to be good in the same way polarization is bad. I would go further and say, as others in the comment thread have, that the meaning of “moderate” in the US context is determined by the overwhelming power of business in politics.

There are also lots of specific examples given by Yglesias that reflect a, well, unreflected centrist framing. Obama, for instance, was in reality the most neoliberal president the US has ever had (every issue was framed in Econ 101 terms), despite his evocative rhetoric. The Sister Soulja thing with Clinton was not about some general shift to the middle but a straight-out appeal to white voters put off by black assertiveness. And so on.

Even the name Matt Yglesias makes me tired – which is, I think, his point and purpose in the world. So, putting aside any position MY took, there is a factual curiosity here: Trump promising during his campaign to tax the rich. What? This didn’t happen. I didn’t have to look very hard for what he did promise, which was standard GOP candy. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/us/politics/donald-trump-economy-speech.html

Trump promising tax cuts for the wealthy to benefit blue collars by lifting the burden of the government, thus allowing them to hire and innovate like mice on cocaine is something that Reagan did, George H.W. did, Dole did, McCain did, George W did, Romney did – whereas taxing the wealthy is not and was not a Trump promise. This is why the voting demographic who most strongly voted for Trump was among those making more than 250 thou a year, and especially among the 1 percent. Of course, it is hard to put your finger on the voting patterns of the very richest, since they tend not to be broken out as a group – in keeping with the centrist vision that insists that there are no classes in America. Thus, Pew, for instance, has a categoy for “over 100,000” – which vastly confuses the issue. This paper is good: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/ssqfinal.pdf. There was a poll conducted by Forbes of billionaires that received a statistically feeble response: as many billionaires voted for Biden, apparently, as Trump. But in terms of political affiliation, the poll is telling: the GOP is supported by at least 10 percnet more than the Democrats – with “independents” at 24 percent, which probs means libertarians. Summing up: a man whose whole job consists of covering or opining about American politics – MY – can’t even keep a simple constant in his head. This doesn’t surprise me. It is the ardent belief of the media that class is a Marxist construct, and that all Americans are “divided” between the two parties, which represent the entirety of the political univers.e If the Dems promise to raise taxes on the rich, no doubt the GOP promises it to – competition, no?

T Ray V @ 42: Where does Matt Y. get his facts wrong in this case, for instance?

What reactionary centrists like Yglesias prefer to overlook is that the entire platform of the Republican Party is grounded in ethnic and cultural grievance, not any sort of conventional political issue.
They regard nonwhite people, immigrants, LGBTQ people and women as second class subjects, not full and equal citizens.

This is important because it makes “compromise” impossible. The Republicans object to the very existence of trans people for example. A “middle ground” doesn’t exist, the entire conflict becomes a binary.

Have no idea which of my comments will be deemed safe to be displayed at this point (or why) but I’ll just point again to Tariq Ali’s book, which makes the point very well that it is possible for liberal parties to become more extreme without moving to the “left”. I had a more sophisticated argument than that but can’t be bothered to keep typing things that are just going to get memory-holed (with anti-fascists like these…)
https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/171-the-extreme-centre

Your reference to the middle-of-the-road (in global context) of US “leftist” elected officials raises an important point, that US politics has been dragged rightward for a long time by anti-radicalism, meaning anti-left-radicalism. The first and second Red Scares were important periods for imposing social and political costs for anyone publicly espousing left ideas, but the dynamic they started has only recently begun to shift. The collaboration of other semi-left elements (e.g., the AFL, “centrist” (conservative) Democrats) in “punching left” has institutionalized this pattern so much that Matt Yglesias himself, scion of this tendency, seems terribly unremarkable. Certainly no more remarkable than many of his cable news pundit peers.

More importantly, though, I think it’s important to clarify what the supposed “center” represents–I’m recalling Tariq Ali’s excellent term, “the extreme centre,” for capturing the fact that uni-dimensional accounts of politics (from one extreme to another) are only a semi-clever cover for a political program that is itself not an “in between” space, but very much a set of policies that are constructed and enabled by powerful actors.

@’the extreme center’

and WE can do that –
WE easily can call anything we want to be –
‘extreme’ –
even something or somebody who or which is as absolutely and totally
NOT ‘extreme’ –
as Angela Merkel -(and her policies)
and so when somebody like this Tariq Ali starts calling somebody like Angela Merkel or the politics of Angela Merkel the ‘extreme center’ he just
MUST HAVE BEEN joking or doing some… ‘trump’?
(the Worlds new Word for: ‘Belgium is a Beautiful City’ –
or ‘The Truth’:
https://youtu.be/BnzXMRkBjMY

I’ve never said Ds are same as Rs or that (bourgeois) democracy is a sham (in fact I just spent a whole thread—on Pinochet—explaining why I thought it was valuable) and I take exception to being called “pseudoleft”. But fine I won’t attempt to comment further. I wish you’d bring back Corey Robin though:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/trump-and-the-trapped-country

(I have no response to Yglesias and if I had I’d post it on his substack.)

Ok, maybe I’ve been lumping you in unfairly with Steven T. Johnson. But at least for this post, I’d prefer to stick to Yglesias – JQ

I don’t know about ‘extreme centre’, but what should be more epistemically humbling than it generally is is the realisation that today’s sensible centre would have been considered extremist loonies a hundred years ago and even more so two hundred years ago, and that the sensible centre of those times would be considered embarrassingly ignorant, classist, eugenicist, racist, and sexist today. Similarly, if there is still enough complex society around in, say, two hundred years for people to have formal education in history, they will likely consider those ‘annoying’ activists who get themselves two years of prison for having chained themselves to the gate of an oil terminal to be the only sane people alive today.

But, of course, it is much more comforting to always assume that where the middle sits today is the best and only sensible position, just like the most comforting religion coincidentally tends to be the one that one’s parents had.

Mr. Mister @57
I disagree. Culture war is just the means towards getting voters to support the unsupportable. It is the reason for the drift for fascism. The reason for the drift to fascism is the awareness that their chosen identity is increasingly becoming a minority.

MrMister,

Good point in principle – I am certainly a different kind of atheist with my Christian cultural background than if I had become an atheist in Japan or India. However, I strongly doubt that right wingers who called Obama atheist and Muslim think in terms as complex as that. It seems likely that they divide the world in Us the good conservative Christians and Them the everybody else who must all be in cahoots with each other and have completely interchangeable beliefs and aims, because they are all Evil and Against Us.

It would be fun but also illustrative to try to get these kinds of people to define terms like Muslim, Woke, Liberal*, or Socialist. I’d wager there is a more than even odds chance that “doesn’t believe in / rejects god/Jesus” will be a response for of each of these, with the balance of probability being “wants to destroy our country”.

*) This one is, as always, specific to the USA, as the term is used for conservative or libertarian parties in nearly all other countries, but the other terms would likely result in the same definitions being provided by Trumpians in other English speaking countries.

After having elected Barack Obama, and with Kamala Harris as the Vice President, the Democrats can’t really pull another Sister Souljah stunt. Nearly any feint to the right would be politically disadvantageous.

Abortion is now the heaviest hammer in the toolbox. Unions are suddenly cool. Gays are basically mainstream. Trans panic may be riling up the rubes, but it isn’t getting traction with the general public, which continues to find drag amusing, as audiences have for centuries.

What else do the Republicans have? Covidiocy? I have to admit that, after being vaccinated, boosted, and then bivalently boosted again, I now seem to have 5G reception everywhere, but spoons still don’t stick to my nose.

Climate change denial isn’t yet, unfortunately, a losing argument in the U.S., even after this long hot summer, and the converse is likewise not a decisive advantage. People like their enormous vehicles because they drive everywhere and carry enormous amounts of apparatus everywhere they go, and no one wants to think they’re doing something wrong.

The problem, as ever, is that nearly half of all Americans are thrilled by the prospect of a strong leader who is happy to validate their racism. This isn’t the least bit subtle; it can’t be, given its audience. Nixon, Reagan and Trump were perhaps a trifle more overt in their signalling than either Bush, but the message was always unmistakable.

The Democrats are on the other side. They have no choice.

MisterMr – I don’t think the roots are economic (there is not much evidence of that) I think wars and the resultant refugee are one cause and the other is the climate emergency and the necessary (but continually delayed( response to it (implying a lot of expectations having become unrealistic) that are causing this.

Not to be that guy, but is “polarization” a sufficiently, well-defined term? Is there a technical, term-of-art definition that’s been agreed upon? Are all the interlocutors in this discussion using the same definition of polarization?

M,

The implicit definition behind this conversation is probably like this:

Scenario A, team orange controls one chamber and the presidency with >50% of the votes in general elections, team purple controls the other chamber. Team purple says, I guess we have to accept that about half the people are for us and half against. Let’s work together to keep the nation functioning while achieving as many of our priorities as realistically possible in exchange for not blocking legislation, just like we expect team orange will behave when the shoe is on the other foot.

Scenario B, team orange controls one chamber and the presidency with >50% of the votes in general elections, team purple controls the other chamber. Team purple says, the half of the population who vote orange aren’t real [insert country here]ians, and no government by team orange is ever legitimate. Let’s block everything they suggest even if it damages our nation’s infrastructure, education system, credit rating, or long-term strategic interests.

I think it is fair enough that scenario B contains a degree of polarisation that doesn’t exist in scenario A.

TM,

Plus, fear of becoming a minority is always so revealing, because if somebody believes that their country in which they are currently the majority is a non-racist meritocracy they would have nothing whatsoever to fear from being in the minority. Could it be that they are admitting to something there?