The story thus far at The Permanent Problem: Capitalism in the 21st century has triumphed globally and there are no viable alternatives in sight, but its powers as an engine of social progress have been faltering. We have achieved material plenty in the rich democracies, but translating that into widespread flourishing thus far eludes us. Technological progress and economic growth are sputtering; society is riven by a new class divide along educational lines, with the elite thriving on one side while a contagion of social disintegration spreads on the other.
This is the conversation America needs to hear. Much has been written about "performative politics" and celebrity in America, but no one seems to understand the culture it has created. Thanks for the effort.
The idea is that, when your opinions have no impact whatsoever on outcomes, there is a kind of rationality in aligning your opinions with those of your in-group rather than with the truth. As for Medicare for All, I never said it was crazy radicalism -- Canada has government-provided national health insurance and it's not a crazy radical place. But it would be a very big change with a very hefty price tag and it has absolutely no chance of enactment in the foreseeable future, so running on it in the 2020 presidential race was prioritizing fan service for activists over winning. Biden, in my view the only Dem candidate in 2020 who could have beaten Trump, suggested that he would veto Medicare for All; he had his eye on the ball.
And most of the issues you mention (reparations, expanding the Supreme Court, health care for undocumented migrants) have majority support among Democratic voters. It seems odd to label advocating your own voters views as performative. The normal dynamic of politics is that, with issues like this, some groups will be pushing the long run goal, while others will be calculating the short-term politics.
"Defund the police" would be a much better example, but virtually all Democrat politicians have repudiated it.
I'll concede that "massively unpopular" may be a stretch for Medicare for All; unrealistic and gratuitously controversial would be better. As to how it polls, I've come to view all issue polling as worthless garbage. Back in my Cato days, we ginned up all kinds of polls showing how popular Social Security privatization would be; but then when it finally made contact with political reality, the whole thing just instantly disintegrated. I'd put Medicare for All in that category: I'm sure you can phrase questions about it to elicit majority support, but once the idea got fully ventilated--and the price tag was front and center--I think support would evaporate. I'll stick by my larger point, which is that all 2020 candidates other than Biden reacted to progressive frustration with the Obama years by embracing a bunch of positions that pleased progressive activists but would have been general election poison. Setting campaign agendas is always a tradeoff between wanting to win and wanting to have a mandate to do big things; in 2020, the future of American democracy was on the line as it hasn't been since the Civil War, and the dominant instinct of Dem candidates was to prioritize a big mandate over winning--in my view deeply wrongheaded and irresponsible. Of course they didn't see it that way: they had a theory that big policy ambition was the way to motivate what they imagined was a large latent progressive constituency to come out and vote. It's my view that this theory was so transparently wrong that to believe it was to be engaging in self-deception.
"in 2020, the future of American democracy was on the line as it hasn't been since the Civil War"
He was president for four years and nothing important happened. If he had won in 2020 another four years of not much happening would have occurred, then he couldn't run again.
I think you need to get a grip. Losing to Trump might even have done Democrats some good in the long run. If you can't beat Trump, you've got to do some self assessment. I haven't seen any self assessment going on.
What actually happened with a Biden victory is that we got another year of COVID insanity because he wanted to prove that he could "defeat" Omicron since he was the "party of science" rather then just being able to move on with our lives after vaccines were available.
We also got multi-trillion dollar pork barrel spending bills passed on party line votes that were so egregious they caused a huge inflation spike.
I agree with everything you've said, and I was glad Biden got the Dem nomination.
But as you say "Setting campaign agendas is always a tradeoff between wanting to win and wanting to have a mandate to do big things". There will always be people in both sides, and the balance isn't always on the side of centrists . This is normal politics, quite unlike the theatre performances of the "defund the police" left, and the entire Republican party.
The younger right, which is far more interested in culture and aesthetics than its predecessors - see the fascination with architecture and BAP-y hard bodies - has no problem diving head first into this shift to expression and identity.
Most of the practitioners of "expressive rationality" are much better at expression than rationality. Indeed, I wouldn't apply the term at all to the right, which shares fascism's attraction to irrationality. I guess it works fairly well for parts of the academic left: at least those who are capable of generating the slogans parroted by others.
The rationality part of expressive rationality refers to the fact that, when your opinions (in this case, about politics) have no impact on the outcome, there is a kind of rationality in aligning your views with those of your in-group rather than doggedly pursuing the truth.
Your essay refers to American politics and supposed values. I agree with the majority of your comment, however I live in the UK and everything you pen here applies equally to our political and economic realities also, a western problem not confined to US alone I fear.
Thanks. In this blog I try to look at the capitalist system as a global whole, but as an American I regularly fall back on American examples. As far as this essay is concerned, my sense is that the same basic dynamics can be found in most rich democracies; I'm heartened that you see the UK parallels.
One tractable structural problem is the bad incentives baked into large-scale elections. We need large-scale democratic governance, but large-scale elections are not the only way to get that: jury-like citizen assemblies and sortition are another path, and might address both performative politics and disempowerment of ordinary people. I wrote about that, trying to synthesize a bunch of recent thinking about alternatives to elections:
As one of the comments says, I don't have any great ideas about how to get there from here other than "do local pilots to prove the concept," but having an inspiring alternative direction has some value in itself.
Another terrific analysis, Mr Lindsey. You should follow my substack The Neoliberal Standard. It’s all about moving political thought in America in a more pro-growth, responsible, fiscally conservative direction. I’ve referenced your book The Captured Economy in a few blog posts. You might enjoy
While certainly politics has continued to get much worse for all the reasons you mention, given public choice dynamics and political ignorance, the fundamental dynamics are old. Mancur Olson showed the basic democratic dynamics that resulted in politicians catering to special interests. Getting partisan publics to froth at the mouth over symbolic cultural issues while the special interests get their goodies given to them is certainly not a new phenomenon, even if it is more egregious these days.
The constitution was designed to reduce the extent to which these dynamics would be destructive, but in the 20th century those constitutional safeguards against government overreach were gradually eroded. The reason figures such as Hayek and Buchanan shifted to constitutional design were because they realized that in the absence of adequate constitutional safeguards, public choice dynamics inevitably led to "demosclerosis," in Jonathan Rauch's felicitous phrasing.
I became depressed about politics when I learned public choice in the 1980s. Since then, no negative outcome has been the least bit surprising. Spend trillions on foreign interventions killing innocent people while making things worse off? Yep. Spend a trillion on the drug war, killing many thousands of people, imprisoning millions, while destroying civil liberties. Yep. Reward special interests endlessly with subsidies and regulatory favors while claiming to be acting in the public interest (bootleggers and baptists 101)? Yep. And so on. Will politics 5 years from now still be mostly cultural symbolism while special interests continue to enrich themselves? Yes, predictably.
The safest bet is that we will have a fiscal crisis/catastrophe/collapse at some point in the next few years (5-15?), with an unknown degree of suffering and violence associated with it. But neither party shows the least bit of seriousness towards avoiding such an outcome. I have zero expectation that the federal government will solve any problems effectively in the foreseeable future.
After that collapse, our best hope is to dramatically reduce the scope of federal government so that we can rebuild dynamism. Lotus and Bennett's America 3.0 is the best vision here,
If not, we'll slog on as some variation on Argentina or Detroit, Chicago or SF, with anyone who can afford to escape doing so, and the rest suffering through whatever mediocre hell awaits.
In the meantime, the school choice revolution will prepare a larger percentage of young people for social mobility in an uncertain future despite the nightmare that awaits many. Through digital work, creative and entrepreneurial workers will continue to do well as long as they can compete globally. Beyond software dev, American branding, marketing, design, and cultural production has an edge that is likely to last for some time to come. I expect many of our teens are likely to be early adopters of new AI technologies in ways that will continue to leverage their creative and entrepreneurial skills to keep ahead of most of the rest of the world. Those with access to the right kind of cultural capital, either through their families or through innovative schools that provide such access (affordable to all thanks to ESA programs), will do fine.
Jurisdictions globally, new and existing, will provide more places for those who can afford to escape to do so. Expats and digital nomads will live in a world of jurisdictions competing for the capital and talent they bring. Maybe a few states in the US will manage to remain competitive despite the federal level disasters. If Native tribes obtain enough legal autonomy to avoid federal legislation they may become really exciting hubs of dynamism as the rest of the US stagnates. But anyone depending on the federal government to do the right thing is likely to be screwed.
Another great read. Can anything be learnt of the pragmatists of north east Asia in the late 20th century? A different world entirely but there may be a valuable sentiment from that time that is of use today.
This is the conversation America needs to hear. Much has been written about "performative politics" and celebrity in America, but no one seems to understand the culture it has created. Thanks for the effort.
Lots of good points. But "expressive rationality" sounds pretty much like "creation science".
And casting "Medicare for all" as some kind of crazy radicalism is problematic, to put it mildly.
The idea is that, when your opinions have no impact whatsoever on outcomes, there is a kind of rationality in aligning your opinions with those of your in-group rather than with the truth. As for Medicare for All, I never said it was crazy radicalism -- Canada has government-provided national health insurance and it's not a crazy radical place. But it would be a very big change with a very hefty price tag and it has absolutely no chance of enactment in the foreseeable future, so running on it in the 2020 presidential race was prioritizing fan service for activists over winning. Biden, in my view the only Dem candidate in 2020 who could have beaten Trump, suggested that he would veto Medicare for All; he had his eye on the ball.
Medicare for all may be a long way off, but it isn't "massively unpopular". At least in some polls, it has majority support
https://morningconsult.com/2021/03/24/medicare-for-all-public-option-polling/
And most of the issues you mention (reparations, expanding the Supreme Court, health care for undocumented migrants) have majority support among Democratic voters. It seems odd to label advocating your own voters views as performative. The normal dynamic of politics is that, with issues like this, some groups will be pushing the long run goal, while others will be calculating the short-term politics.
"Defund the police" would be a much better example, but virtually all Democrat politicians have repudiated it.
I'll concede that "massively unpopular" may be a stretch for Medicare for All; unrealistic and gratuitously controversial would be better. As to how it polls, I've come to view all issue polling as worthless garbage. Back in my Cato days, we ginned up all kinds of polls showing how popular Social Security privatization would be; but then when it finally made contact with political reality, the whole thing just instantly disintegrated. I'd put Medicare for All in that category: I'm sure you can phrase questions about it to elicit majority support, but once the idea got fully ventilated--and the price tag was front and center--I think support would evaporate. I'll stick by my larger point, which is that all 2020 candidates other than Biden reacted to progressive frustration with the Obama years by embracing a bunch of positions that pleased progressive activists but would have been general election poison. Setting campaign agendas is always a tradeoff between wanting to win and wanting to have a mandate to do big things; in 2020, the future of American democracy was on the line as it hasn't been since the Civil War, and the dominant instinct of Dem candidates was to prioritize a big mandate over winning--in my view deeply wrongheaded and irresponsible. Of course they didn't see it that way: they had a theory that big policy ambition was the way to motivate what they imagined was a large latent progressive constituency to come out and vote. It's my view that this theory was so transparently wrong that to believe it was to be engaging in self-deception.
"in 2020, the future of American democracy was on the line as it hasn't been since the Civil War"
He was president for four years and nothing important happened. If he had won in 2020 another four years of not much happening would have occurred, then he couldn't run again.
I think you need to get a grip. Losing to Trump might even have done Democrats some good in the long run. If you can't beat Trump, you've got to do some self assessment. I haven't seen any self assessment going on.
What actually happened with a Biden victory is that we got another year of COVID insanity because he wanted to prove that he could "defeat" Omicron since he was the "party of science" rather then just being able to move on with our lives after vaccines were available.
We also got multi-trillion dollar pork barrel spending bills passed on party line votes that were so egregious they caused a huge inflation spike.
I agree with everything you've said, and I was glad Biden got the Dem nomination.
But as you say "Setting campaign agendas is always a tradeoff between wanting to win and wanting to have a mandate to do big things". There will always be people in both sides, and the balance isn't always on the side of centrists . This is normal politics, quite unlike the theatre performances of the "defund the police" left, and the entire Republican party.
The younger right, which is far more interested in culture and aesthetics than its predecessors - see the fascination with architecture and BAP-y hard bodies - has no problem diving head first into this shift to expression and identity.
Most of the practitioners of "expressive rationality" are much better at expression than rationality. Indeed, I wouldn't apply the term at all to the right, which shares fascism's attraction to irrationality. I guess it works fairly well for parts of the academic left: at least those who are capable of generating the slogans parroted by others.
The rationality part of expressive rationality refers to the fact that, when your opinions (in this case, about politics) have no impact on the outcome, there is a kind of rationality in aligning your views with those of your in-group rather than doggedly pursuing the truth.
Your essay refers to American politics and supposed values. I agree with the majority of your comment, however I live in the UK and everything you pen here applies equally to our political and economic realities also, a western problem not confined to US alone I fear.
Thanks. In this blog I try to look at the capitalist system as a global whole, but as an American I regularly fall back on American examples. As far as this essay is concerned, my sense is that the same basic dynamics can be found in most rich democracies; I'm heartened that you see the UK parallels.
One tractable structural problem is the bad incentives baked into large-scale elections. We need large-scale democratic governance, but large-scale elections are not the only way to get that: jury-like citizen assemblies and sortition are another path, and might address both performative politics and disempowerment of ordinary people. I wrote about that, trying to synthesize a bunch of recent thinking about alternatives to elections:
https://futuremoreperfect.substack.com/p/lets-elect-not-to-have-elections
As one of the comments says, I don't have any great ideas about how to get there from here other than "do local pilots to prove the concept," but having an inspiring alternative direction has some value in itself.
I'm very interested in sortition-based citizen assemblies and plan to write about the idea down the road.
Great writing & thinking, thank you.
Another terrific analysis, Mr Lindsey. You should follow my substack The Neoliberal Standard. It’s all about moving political thought in America in a more pro-growth, responsible, fiscally conservative direction. I’ve referenced your book The Captured Economy in a few blog posts. You might enjoy
While certainly politics has continued to get much worse for all the reasons you mention, given public choice dynamics and political ignorance, the fundamental dynamics are old. Mancur Olson showed the basic democratic dynamics that resulted in politicians catering to special interests. Getting partisan publics to froth at the mouth over symbolic cultural issues while the special interests get their goodies given to them is certainly not a new phenomenon, even if it is more egregious these days.
The constitution was designed to reduce the extent to which these dynamics would be destructive, but in the 20th century those constitutional safeguards against government overreach were gradually eroded. The reason figures such as Hayek and Buchanan shifted to constitutional design were because they realized that in the absence of adequate constitutional safeguards, public choice dynamics inevitably led to "demosclerosis," in Jonathan Rauch's felicitous phrasing.
I became depressed about politics when I learned public choice in the 1980s. Since then, no negative outcome has been the least bit surprising. Spend trillions on foreign interventions killing innocent people while making things worse off? Yep. Spend a trillion on the drug war, killing many thousands of people, imprisoning millions, while destroying civil liberties. Yep. Reward special interests endlessly with subsidies and regulatory favors while claiming to be acting in the public interest (bootleggers and baptists 101)? Yep. And so on. Will politics 5 years from now still be mostly cultural symbolism while special interests continue to enrich themselves? Yes, predictably.
The safest bet is that we will have a fiscal crisis/catastrophe/collapse at some point in the next few years (5-15?), with an unknown degree of suffering and violence associated with it. But neither party shows the least bit of seriousness towards avoiding such an outcome. I have zero expectation that the federal government will solve any problems effectively in the foreseeable future.
After that collapse, our best hope is to dramatically reduce the scope of federal government so that we can rebuild dynamism. Lotus and Bennett's America 3.0 is the best vision here,
https://www.amazon.com/America-3-0-Rebooting-Prosperity-America%C2%92s/dp/1594036438
If not, we'll slog on as some variation on Argentina or Detroit, Chicago or SF, with anyone who can afford to escape doing so, and the rest suffering through whatever mediocre hell awaits.
In the meantime, the school choice revolution will prepare a larger percentage of young people for social mobility in an uncertain future despite the nightmare that awaits many. Through digital work, creative and entrepreneurial workers will continue to do well as long as they can compete globally. Beyond software dev, American branding, marketing, design, and cultural production has an edge that is likely to last for some time to come. I expect many of our teens are likely to be early adopters of new AI technologies in ways that will continue to leverage their creative and entrepreneurial skills to keep ahead of most of the rest of the world. Those with access to the right kind of cultural capital, either through their families or through innovative schools that provide such access (affordable to all thanks to ESA programs), will do fine.
Jurisdictions globally, new and existing, will provide more places for those who can afford to escape to do so. Expats and digital nomads will live in a world of jurisdictions competing for the capital and talent they bring. Maybe a few states in the US will manage to remain competitive despite the federal level disasters. If Native tribes obtain enough legal autonomy to avoid federal legislation they may become really exciting hubs of dynamism as the rest of the US stagnates. But anyone depending on the federal government to do the right thing is likely to be screwed.
Another great read. Can anything be learnt of the pragmatists of north east Asia in the late 20th century? A different world entirely but there may be a valuable sentiment from that time that is of use today.
Not sure what you have in mind -- can you elaborate?