You say “the blue tribe’s problems are much less severe than those confronting the red tribe” because “If you reject [America’s knowledge-generating institutions] wholesale, the result is not liberation from bias and delusion; it is the complete capitulation to them.” That is approximately true in the short term. But that is a static analysis. What does it mean going forward? The implication seems to be that we should seek to reform the knowledge-generating institutions. Is that practical? This is an exit, voice or loyalty problem. The left is happy to be loyal to the current left-biased institutions, but loyalty to broken institutions will not fix them. There are a few on the left who are trying to persuade the institutions to improve, but my impression is they are very much losing the argument, and internal reform strikes me as very unlikely. The only alternative is to exit and rebuild. That is no doubt very damaging in the short term, and is certainly not guaranteed to succeed. But as Nate Silver always says, when you are in dire straits, you need to play a hihg-variance strategy.
What if the point of the red team’s ideological thrust is propaganda, pure and simple? Does propaganda have or need an epistemology? Here’s JD Vance’s statement about pet-eating Haitian migrants in Ohio in 2024: ‘if I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do’. Vance knows the story is untrue. It is a means to an end. Dare one say, an irrational means to a rational end, winning an election? Epistemology is irrelevant, as is Obama’s diagnosis of the problem being an ‘epistemological crisis’. Misdiagnosing the problem leads into the contortions Friedman entangles himself with.
There is nothing irrational about lying but it is very questionable ethics. Also, unless Vance, et al. are pure opportunists (some are), it is still ideas that (mostly) motivate the right. The problem is not epistemology per se (i.e., how we know what we know is true); it’s bias/ignorance reinforced by a terrible information ecosystem.
Everyone knows that Trump doesn’t engage in serious, informed debate. He’s pushing buttons (on the right and left) and driving broad themes. He’s a buffoon. He’s neither well-informed nor concerned about logical consistency. He’s also a perfect foil for the gaslighting and madness of the Progressive left. Isn't it clear that he's not playing by the old rules?
Your analysis focuses on two extremes. The most potent opposition to the Progressive left actually comes from Democrats and ex-Democrats who care about the media, our universities, and principled discourse. Trump would not be in office if not for the astounding cowardice of the good people in the media and academia. Trump didn’t degrade our sense-making institutions; they did it to themselves. They need to return to sanity, and that includes acknowledging what happened. People who have been personally or professionally brutalized by Progressive zealots are not going to forgive and forget without some recognition of what happened. The NYT is course correcting to save its tattered credibility. They’ve published a sort of mea culpa on immigration and have turned their editorial board from matters of identity and Trump to a deep analysis of national defense strategies. NPR has drastically reduced its fixation on the nebulous world of gender, but it remains in the swamp of Progressive ideologies. Universities have been brought to heel to some extent, but are still dominated by left-wing extremists. Time will tell if the good people can get their heads on straight.
I think racism is the mother of almost all biases and motivated thinking. In the United States, reaction to de-segregation forms the basis for the so-called "Moral Majority" and other alignments of conservative Christians with the Republican party. It explains the reason why the U.S., alone among industrialized nations, does not have universal medicare, it explains the reason for the charter school movement and Trump's attempt at destroying the public school system, and his war on DEI and wokeness in Universities. It is also the underlying motivation for Christian Nationalism, and project 2025. Granted it doesn't explain denial of human caused climate change - that seems to be due to an alliance between the fossil fuel industry, libertarians and conservative Christians who find the idea that humans have a responsibility not to wreck the Earth's ecosystems as unpalatable.
Racism is everything. This is a core doctrine of the Progressives who have destroyed the Democratic Party. There is nothing to really engage with here, as the claims you are making are just self-serving dogma. Trump and Co. thank you for your service.
It is difficult to convince someone of a reality that contradicts their own interests. That probably applies to you. The history I am describing is there for anyone to see. The southern democrats would not agree to universal medicare when Truman proposed it because it would mean blacks would be equally entitled. The religious right were initially motivated by the Federal government's move to eliminate segregation in education. The Heritage Foundation is convinced that slavery wasn't so bad for the blacks after all, and they support suppressing truthful accounts of slavery. Chief Justice Roberts believes that the Southern states no longer discriminate against blacks or do anything significant to impede coloured people's voting rights, against strong evidence to the contrary. Trump got his start in politics by pushing the "Birther conspiracy" about Obama's supposed non-American origins. I've only skimmed the surface of this cesspool.
"It is difficult to convince someone of a reality that contradicts their own interests. That probably applies to you."
I'll rephrase this for you: "People can't be wrong if they disagree with me."
Your second comment is just like your first. No persuasive argument, just a very serious and sweeping assertion supported by a few half-truths and outright fibs that have little bearing on your claims. Of course, you will assume many things about my political affiliation and character from a conversation where no actual substance was exchanged, other than I find your POV painfully shallow and offensive. I'm out.
In America it started with justifications for slavery, that blacks were an inferior race, that the Bible supported slavery, that Blacks had inferior intelligence. It is basically the "Ur" or original basis for motivated reasoning. It's the impetus for Libertarianism and the ideal of a limited state that doesn't involve a social safety net. It is no coincidence that libertarians like Barry Goldwater and Ayn Rand were against Federal civil rights legislation. The push for "small government" is a cover for keeping blacks from getting benefits. The "tea party" was a massive social reaction to the election of the first Afro-American president, the Republican over-the-top reaction to Obama was a sustained attempt to delegitimize Obama's presidency. When white supremacists marching in Charlottesville shouted "Jews will not replace us!" Trump said "There are good people on both sides." David Duke the leader of the KKK endorsed Trump in 2016. Ice raids predominantly target black and brown people. Trump and his allies want to get rid of the 14th amendment right of citizenship for anyone born in America, an amendment that was put in place during Reconstruction to ensure former slaves received civil rights. The main thing that unites Maga is not economic hardship, it is racism. Trump says out loud what these people believe in their hearts but were afraid to say publicly. I used to believe that America had made great progress in civil rights, especially after Obama's election. But after Trump's first election I realized that racism was a deep festering wound in American society that has never healed. Race is not a progressive preoccupation, it is overwhelmingly an obsession on the right. It is undeniable that the entire anti-immigrant strategy of the Trump administration is based on the racist "Great Replacement Theory", an attempt to stop non-whites from overwhelming American society.
American realities are created by PR people. Everything American is a result of being sold an idea on a mass scale. We manufacture problems in order to sell the solutions. Shampoo makes your hair greasy and mouthwash makes your breath stink, but people buy and use them over and over to fix the grease and the stink for a few hours and buy more crap they don't need.
The majority of people punish the truth. They want their decisions made for them. They want to feel a part of something bigger than the self. So they go along with whatever the group says. Always has been, always will be, unless we fix human nature with tech at some point.
As you know, I found this piece to be a great analysis of the situation, but the conclusion to me seems to point to a kind of metamodernism or an acceptance of the blue team institutions as flawed. I think we could all benefit from a closer look at what institutional plurality would look like. Good choice for republishing. :)
Good abstract discussion, with a binary focus. Generally, I don't like binary perspectives.
I do think that the two party political situation in the US creates much of the turmoil that comes from any binary perspective about an issue.
Specifically, the Republicans have been taken over by the MAGA team, which likely represents 80-90% of Republicans. The other 10-20% just go along out of habit.
The Democrats have been captured by progressives, who have somewhere between 60-80% of the Democratic views, by and large.
Unaffiliated voters (independents and many young people) make up 20-30% of the voters and are not in the primary mix in many states. So they are significantly outside the primary selection opportunity and are forced to pick the lesser of two evils in November.
Primaries have LOW turnout so the dominate group in each party selects the primary nominee in a "first past the post" election.
So what, you ask! The primary situation leads to both major political parties selecting "extreme" candidates in primaries since unaffiliated voters are often left out and many voters don't show up for primaries. So the two choices in November are binary and often extreme.
In the US (and the UK) there is no strong and effective constituency for moderation and practicality. In a "winner takes all" election, moderation and the interests of the minorities are forgotten and left in the shadows.
Why is this allowed" Both dominate minorities in both parties like the power and control that comes from this arrangement. Neither political party cares about anything but winning in this archaic, clumsy, and undemocratic approach.
What to do! Press for state and federal legislative seats to be filled by (semi) open primaries with Ranked Choice Voting. Like Alaska, and Australia. (I don't think we will be able to move forward to multi-member or proportionate structures quickly.) Germany has an interesting election hybrid election system that US politicians would hate but would be more "democratic."
The jungle primary that moves the top two vote recipients to the November general election is better than the current system, but we really need to move to a top four or five with RCV to stir the juices on undecideds and unaffiliated voters and to neuter two party machine politics.
Conclusion: The current system creates the problem outlined in the article. The solution needs to be a fix of the process. Unfortunately, even Democratic leaders oppose giving up power to voters. NYC and DC are recent examples of the continued exclusion of unaffiliated voters from the Democratic primary. Alaska is in danger of losing its RCV leadership because Democratic leaders in Alaska don't like it. I don't expect anything from Republicans. Clearly!!
the democratic party does not have first-past-the-post primaries. every democratic primary uses proportional representation. the republican party primary rules vary by state, but only some of them use FPTP
Simply not true. Where have you been? Democrats generally run primaries where the plurality winner in low turn out primaries is the Democratic candidate in November. You should do some research, try googling about how Democratic state and federal primaries are conducted. Proportional representation in the US doesn't exist!
Outstanding synthesis of Friedman's idealist framwework. The distinction between first-person and third person naive realism is really useful for understanding why each side views the other as willfully delusional. I've noticed in conflict zones that when groups adopt mutually incompatible epistemological frameworks, dialogue becomes nearly imposible. The weakest point here is probably underestimating how much the rejectoin of expertise on the right is strategic rather than principled.
Great post, Dan, as always. I think Friedman's narrative that the radical Left got coopted by the liberal establishment requires serious qualification. The radical Left of the 1990s-2000 focused mainly on economic issues (inequality, globalization, big corporations). This agenda was completely absent from the woke left. So the cooptation was selective, and one has the impression that the liberal elites manufactured an establishement radicalism which was in fact very comfortable for them, since it eliminated an important part of the criticism directed at their economic policies.
“…liberals, as third-person naive realists, assumed conservatives must be aware of the self-evident truth of climate science.”
That’s puzzling. In order for climate science to be “self-evident”, it must first be understood. Do liberals think ordinary conservatives are reading (at least popular) scientific explanations and then rejecting the evidence? Or are they talking about someone like Alex Epstein (author of Fossil Future)?
Terrific analysis of Friedman's framework. The distinction between flawed institutions versus abandoningthem entirely is key. I've watched friends fall down the everything-is-propaganda rabbit hole and what seems like healthy skepticism quickly becomes epistemic nihilism. Once common knowlege-generating norms dissolve, there's no shared baseline to even argue from. Even bad institutions beat no institutions, turns out.
The starting ground here is already ideological. There is no view from nowhere. Everyone has a set of ideas; the question is which are closest to truth.
Imagining we can afford endless debates about whether reality exists is a luxury belief.
If your frame needs science to be perfect, or imagines that power and money don't matter, then the frame is broken.
In 1865 slavery was a contestable truth.
To focus on a Left/Right narrative crisis is to conduct the band on the Titanic. Intent doesn't absolve. It just means your back is to the iceberg.
IMF report ongoing global state subsidies to fossil fuels = $7 trillion per year.
Black, S., Liu, A., Parry, I. W. H., & Vernon-Lin, N. (2023). IMF Fossil Fuel Subsidies Data: 2023 Update (IMF Working Paper WP/23/169). International Monetary Fund.
“You cannot understand the prevalent belief systems in American society and the two tribes’ attitudes towards expertise without engaging with these forces.”
But if these forces are not deterministic, then ideas are still the primary force, no? Granted, it is professional suicide to, say, acknowledge group differences in IQ, so we could also include cowardice or social conformity as forces too. (I’m assuming private doubts here.) But these kinds of forces also reinforce naive realism, so, absent widespread lying about one’s real beliefs, it seems ideas are the primary force backstopping all of it.
You say “the blue tribe’s problems are much less severe than those confronting the red tribe” because “If you reject [America’s knowledge-generating institutions] wholesale, the result is not liberation from bias and delusion; it is the complete capitulation to them.” That is approximately true in the short term. But that is a static analysis. What does it mean going forward? The implication seems to be that we should seek to reform the knowledge-generating institutions. Is that practical? This is an exit, voice or loyalty problem. The left is happy to be loyal to the current left-biased institutions, but loyalty to broken institutions will not fix them. There are a few on the left who are trying to persuade the institutions to improve, but my impression is they are very much losing the argument, and internal reform strikes me as very unlikely. The only alternative is to exit and rebuild. That is no doubt very damaging in the short term, and is certainly not guaranteed to succeed. But as Nate Silver always says, when you are in dire straits, you need to play a hihg-variance strategy.
is there anyone on the right making a serious effort to rebuild knowledge-generating institutions?
What if the point of the red team’s ideological thrust is propaganda, pure and simple? Does propaganda have or need an epistemology? Here’s JD Vance’s statement about pet-eating Haitian migrants in Ohio in 2024: ‘if I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do’. Vance knows the story is untrue. It is a means to an end. Dare one say, an irrational means to a rational end, winning an election? Epistemology is irrelevant, as is Obama’s diagnosis of the problem being an ‘epistemological crisis’. Misdiagnosing the problem leads into the contortions Friedman entangles himself with.
There is nothing irrational about lying but it is very questionable ethics. Also, unless Vance, et al. are pure opportunists (some are), it is still ideas that (mostly) motivate the right. The problem is not epistemology per se (i.e., how we know what we know is true); it’s bias/ignorance reinforced by a terrible information ecosystem.
Everyone knows that Trump doesn’t engage in serious, informed debate. He’s pushing buttons (on the right and left) and driving broad themes. He’s a buffoon. He’s neither well-informed nor concerned about logical consistency. He’s also a perfect foil for the gaslighting and madness of the Progressive left. Isn't it clear that he's not playing by the old rules?
Your analysis focuses on two extremes. The most potent opposition to the Progressive left actually comes from Democrats and ex-Democrats who care about the media, our universities, and principled discourse. Trump would not be in office if not for the astounding cowardice of the good people in the media and academia. Trump didn’t degrade our sense-making institutions; they did it to themselves. They need to return to sanity, and that includes acknowledging what happened. People who have been personally or professionally brutalized by Progressive zealots are not going to forgive and forget without some recognition of what happened. The NYT is course correcting to save its tattered credibility. They’ve published a sort of mea culpa on immigration and have turned their editorial board from matters of identity and Trump to a deep analysis of national defense strategies. NPR has drastically reduced its fixation on the nebulous world of gender, but it remains in the swamp of Progressive ideologies. Universities have been brought to heel to some extent, but are still dominated by left-wing extremists. Time will tell if the good people can get their heads on straight.
I think racism is the mother of almost all biases and motivated thinking. In the United States, reaction to de-segregation forms the basis for the so-called "Moral Majority" and other alignments of conservative Christians with the Republican party. It explains the reason why the U.S., alone among industrialized nations, does not have universal medicare, it explains the reason for the charter school movement and Trump's attempt at destroying the public school system, and his war on DEI and wokeness in Universities. It is also the underlying motivation for Christian Nationalism, and project 2025. Granted it doesn't explain denial of human caused climate change - that seems to be due to an alliance between the fossil fuel industry, libertarians and conservative Christians who find the idea that humans have a responsibility not to wreck the Earth's ecosystems as unpalatable.
Racism is everything. This is a core doctrine of the Progressives who have destroyed the Democratic Party. There is nothing to really engage with here, as the claims you are making are just self-serving dogma. Trump and Co. thank you for your service.
It is difficult to convince someone of a reality that contradicts their own interests. That probably applies to you. The history I am describing is there for anyone to see. The southern democrats would not agree to universal medicare when Truman proposed it because it would mean blacks would be equally entitled. The religious right were initially motivated by the Federal government's move to eliminate segregation in education. The Heritage Foundation is convinced that slavery wasn't so bad for the blacks after all, and they support suppressing truthful accounts of slavery. Chief Justice Roberts believes that the Southern states no longer discriminate against blacks or do anything significant to impede coloured people's voting rights, against strong evidence to the contrary. Trump got his start in politics by pushing the "Birther conspiracy" about Obama's supposed non-American origins. I've only skimmed the surface of this cesspool.
"It is difficult to convince someone of a reality that contradicts their own interests. That probably applies to you."
I'll rephrase this for you: "People can't be wrong if they disagree with me."
Your second comment is just like your first. No persuasive argument, just a very serious and sweeping assertion supported by a few half-truths and outright fibs that have little bearing on your claims. Of course, you will assume many things about my political affiliation and character from a conversation where no actual substance was exchanged, other than I find your POV painfully shallow and offensive. I'm out.
In America it started with justifications for slavery, that blacks were an inferior race, that the Bible supported slavery, that Blacks had inferior intelligence. It is basically the "Ur" or original basis for motivated reasoning. It's the impetus for Libertarianism and the ideal of a limited state that doesn't involve a social safety net. It is no coincidence that libertarians like Barry Goldwater and Ayn Rand were against Federal civil rights legislation. The push for "small government" is a cover for keeping blacks from getting benefits. The "tea party" was a massive social reaction to the election of the first Afro-American president, the Republican over-the-top reaction to Obama was a sustained attempt to delegitimize Obama's presidency. When white supremacists marching in Charlottesville shouted "Jews will not replace us!" Trump said "There are good people on both sides." David Duke the leader of the KKK endorsed Trump in 2016. Ice raids predominantly target black and brown people. Trump and his allies want to get rid of the 14th amendment right of citizenship for anyone born in America, an amendment that was put in place during Reconstruction to ensure former slaves received civil rights. The main thing that unites Maga is not economic hardship, it is racism. Trump says out loud what these people believe in their hearts but were afraid to say publicly. I used to believe that America had made great progress in civil rights, especially after Obama's election. But after Trump's first election I realized that racism was a deep festering wound in American society that has never healed. Race is not a progressive preoccupation, it is overwhelmingly an obsession on the right. It is undeniable that the entire anti-immigrant strategy of the Trump administration is based on the racist "Great Replacement Theory", an attempt to stop non-whites from overwhelming American society.
American realities are created by PR people. Everything American is a result of being sold an idea on a mass scale. We manufacture problems in order to sell the solutions. Shampoo makes your hair greasy and mouthwash makes your breath stink, but people buy and use them over and over to fix the grease and the stink for a few hours and buy more crap they don't need.
The majority of people punish the truth. They want their decisions made for them. They want to feel a part of something bigger than the self. So they go along with whatever the group says. Always has been, always will be, unless we fix human nature with tech at some point.
As you know, I found this piece to be a great analysis of the situation, but the conclusion to me seems to point to a kind of metamodernism or an acceptance of the blue team institutions as flawed. I think we could all benefit from a closer look at what institutional plurality would look like. Good choice for republishing. :)
Good abstract discussion, with a binary focus. Generally, I don't like binary perspectives.
I do think that the two party political situation in the US creates much of the turmoil that comes from any binary perspective about an issue.
Specifically, the Republicans have been taken over by the MAGA team, which likely represents 80-90% of Republicans. The other 10-20% just go along out of habit.
The Democrats have been captured by progressives, who have somewhere between 60-80% of the Democratic views, by and large.
Unaffiliated voters (independents and many young people) make up 20-30% of the voters and are not in the primary mix in many states. So they are significantly outside the primary selection opportunity and are forced to pick the lesser of two evils in November.
Primaries have LOW turnout so the dominate group in each party selects the primary nominee in a "first past the post" election.
So what, you ask! The primary situation leads to both major political parties selecting "extreme" candidates in primaries since unaffiliated voters are often left out and many voters don't show up for primaries. So the two choices in November are binary and often extreme.
In the US (and the UK) there is no strong and effective constituency for moderation and practicality. In a "winner takes all" election, moderation and the interests of the minorities are forgotten and left in the shadows.
Why is this allowed" Both dominate minorities in both parties like the power and control that comes from this arrangement. Neither political party cares about anything but winning in this archaic, clumsy, and undemocratic approach.
What to do! Press for state and federal legislative seats to be filled by (semi) open primaries with Ranked Choice Voting. Like Alaska, and Australia. (I don't think we will be able to move forward to multi-member or proportionate structures quickly.) Germany has an interesting election hybrid election system that US politicians would hate but would be more "democratic."
The jungle primary that moves the top two vote recipients to the November general election is better than the current system, but we really need to move to a top four or five with RCV to stir the juices on undecideds and unaffiliated voters and to neuter two party machine politics.
Conclusion: The current system creates the problem outlined in the article. The solution needs to be a fix of the process. Unfortunately, even Democratic leaders oppose giving up power to voters. NYC and DC are recent examples of the continued exclusion of unaffiliated voters from the Democratic primary. Alaska is in danger of losing its RCV leadership because Democratic leaders in Alaska don't like it. I don't expect anything from Republicans. Clearly!!
the democratic party does not have first-past-the-post primaries. every democratic primary uses proportional representation. the republican party primary rules vary by state, but only some of them use FPTP
Simply not true. Where have you been? Democrats generally run primaries where the plurality winner in low turn out primaries is the Democratic candidate in November. You should do some research, try googling about how Democratic state and federal primaries are conducted. Proportional representation in the US doesn't exist!
oh, you're talking about congressional primaries. i was thinking of presidential primaries, which are proportional
Outstanding synthesis of Friedman's idealist framwework. The distinction between first-person and third person naive realism is really useful for understanding why each side views the other as willfully delusional. I've noticed in conflict zones that when groups adopt mutually incompatible epistemological frameworks, dialogue becomes nearly imposible. The weakest point here is probably underestimating how much the rejectoin of expertise on the right is strategic rather than principled.
Great post, Dan, as always. I think Friedman's narrative that the radical Left got coopted by the liberal establishment requires serious qualification. The radical Left of the 1990s-2000 focused mainly on economic issues (inequality, globalization, big corporations). This agenda was completely absent from the woke left. So the cooptation was selective, and one has the impression that the liberal elites manufactured an establishement radicalism which was in fact very comfortable for them, since it eliminated an important part of the criticism directed at their economic policies.
“…liberals, as third-person naive realists, assumed conservatives must be aware of the self-evident truth of climate science.”
That’s puzzling. In order for climate science to be “self-evident”, it must first be understood. Do liberals think ordinary conservatives are reading (at least popular) scientific explanations and then rejecting the evidence? Or are they talking about someone like Alex Epstein (author of Fossil Future)?
Terrific analysis of Friedman's framework. The distinction between flawed institutions versus abandoningthem entirely is key. I've watched friends fall down the everything-is-propaganda rabbit hole and what seems like healthy skepticism quickly becomes epistemic nihilism. Once common knowlege-generating norms dissolve, there's no shared baseline to even argue from. Even bad institutions beat no institutions, turns out.
The starting ground here is already ideological. There is no view from nowhere. Everyone has a set of ideas; the question is which are closest to truth.
Imagining we can afford endless debates about whether reality exists is a luxury belief.
If your frame needs science to be perfect, or imagines that power and money don't matter, then the frame is broken.
In 1865 slavery was a contestable truth.
To focus on a Left/Right narrative crisis is to conduct the band on the Titanic. Intent doesn't absolve. It just means your back is to the iceberg.
IMF report ongoing global state subsidies to fossil fuels = $7 trillion per year.
Black, S., Liu, A., Parry, I. W. H., & Vernon-Lin, N. (2023). IMF Fossil Fuel Subsidies Data: 2023 Update (IMF Working Paper WP/23/169). International Monetary Fund.
“fallibilism”
Notwithstanding the wackiness of the right-wing information ecosystem, radical skepticism is still the correct *epistemological* view:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.284.5420.1625
“You cannot understand the prevalent belief systems in American society and the two tribes’ attitudes towards expertise without engaging with these forces.”
But if these forces are not deterministic, then ideas are still the primary force, no? Granted, it is professional suicide to, say, acknowledge group differences in IQ, so we could also include cowardice or social conformity as forces too. (I’m assuming private doubts here.) But these kinds of forces also reinforce naive realism, so, absent widespread lying about one’s real beliefs, it seems ideas are the primary force backstopping all of it.