I really look forward to listening to your podcast contributions, Dan. I might go back to walking to work instead of cycling, to have the opportunity to listen to them (cycling with a podcast on is suicidal in Boston).
One comment: you wrote "many Republicans either view Trump as the victim of persecution or view him as the lesser of two evils. Given this, they might (and most often do) share core values about the evils of corruption and the importance of democracy. They simply diverge on where the most egregious violations of these values actually reside."
I have thought about this a lot, not least because I have frequent in-depth discussions with well-educated Republicans. And I'm not sure I agree with your assessment here, although I admire the value system that motivated you to make it. I think it is too generous, relativist, and both-side-ist.
I believe that your interpretation is exactly what Trump-supporting Republicans *want* people to believe, because they want their cake (supporting Trumpism) and eat it too (still being invited to parties). Anyone can SAY that Trump is the victim of persecution and/or the lesser of two evils, but in the light of abundant evidence to the contrary, it makes so little sense that I can't believe that (esp. educated) Republicans actually believe it. Also, I have asked educated Republicans repeatedly to come up with examples of how/why the Left is more evil than what is happening under Trump II, and they just can't do it. And the persecution idea is just based on the logic: "If the Democrats are in power, and Trump is indicted for crimes, this must be politically motivated", conveniently overlooking the long list of crimes that Trump has actually committed in plain sight, and the (now somewhat naive-sounding) constitutional-democratic notion that nobody is above the law.
So my guess is that most Republicans do not, as you suggest, share the values regarding the evils of corruption and the importance of democracy. At least not when they and their Leader are in power, and when these values would either constrain them or make them look bad. And if they only have these values when they are convenient for them, they are not real values in the universalistic sense.
Thanks JP. That's an interesting perspective. I guess I have a strong prior that there aren't strong moral differences between large-scale political tribes, and that people view reality through different belief systems, which influences how I think about these sorts of cases, but I agree that what you raise is a possibility and is applicable in at least some cases.
If you had more exposure to Republicans talking among themselves, you would see that many do, in fact believe that "Trump is the victim of persecution and/or the lesser of two evils". I recommend reading posts at places like themotte.org (I'm sure there are many others, but that's an open forum that tilts heavily rightward, perhaps 70-30).
> Put this way, you could argue: okay, January 6 was bad. But it was like a ten-year-old child's idea of authoritarianism. You seize power by getting a bunch of people to zerg rush the opposing politicians and beat them up until they declare you in charge. Too bad you were foiled by a locked door, you'll get them next time. I won't claim this strategy has never successfully taken over a government, because history is long and weird. But I can't think of any examples.
> When I look at actual democratic backsliding, it looks nothing like this. It looks like a group of clever well-placed people gradually tightening the knot while maintaining plausible deniability. A court-packing here, but only because the old court was hidebound and reactionary. A carefully-worded constitutional amendment there, but only because nothing ever got done under the old system. A corruption crackdown, but only because corruption is genuinely bad. Then ten years later you wake up and one set of guys control everything and if you speak out against them they can destroy your life.
> So (continues the strongest argument I can think of for supporting Trump) the Republicans egged on a guy with face paint and a horned helmet to smash furniture in the Capitol. Meanwhile, the Democrats got every social media company in the country to censor opposing opinions while swearing up and down that they were doing nothing of the sort, all on some sort of plausible but never-put-into-so-many-words threat that things would go worse for them if they didn’t. They did it so elegantly and naturally that even now nobody really wants to call them on it - partly because it’s hard to tell where free corporate choice ended and government coercion started, and partly because they’ve successfully established a culture where it’s declasse to even talk about it. So, which side are you more scared of?
(He goes on to refute it, convincingly in my opinion.)
I'm unclear as to what level you're claiming "extremely and inexplicably controversial". It's not "inexplicabl[e]" when in the context of the long, long history of biology-is-destiny justifications for oppression, which I presume you know.
(I'm not endorsing every word of the below, but it's an example)
Are you heading into the clickbaiting where you say stuff which is in practice very, very highly associated with right-wing racism and sexism, though not a right-wing racist and sexist yourself, yet are performatively befuddled as to why you get (inaccurate of course) accusations of that? I see this a lot, and I've become at a loss as to what follows. It loops:
"They got angry at you because you said things which sounded to them like you were justifying repression of them."
"They shouldn't do that! It's Unjustified."
"Well, it's really clear why it happened, they deal with a huge amount of such stuff all the time"
"No! They should carefully examine my exact words and nothing else. Doing otherwise Shuts Off Debate, It's A Close-Minded BUBBLE!"
"That's not a fair expectation of everyone, in a world full of professional propagandists and bad-faith actors"
"It's unfair to me. I'm not responsible for anyone else. I am An Open-Minded Person Only Interested In Debate, and they should recognize that."
On and on. I have sympathy for both sides here. I have no idea what to do nowadays.
"Are you heading into the clickbaiting where you say stuff which is in practice very, very highly associated with right-wing racism and sexism, though not a right-wing racist and sexist yourself, yet are performatively befuddled as to why you get (inaccurate of course) accusations of that? I see this a lot, and I've become at a loss as to what follows."
No. I'm an academic who has long drawn on evolutionary psychology in my published research. It's a topic I feel passionate about. To the extent it's associated with right-wing racism and sexism, that's due to profound ignorance and misinformation on many people, who know nothing about evolutionary psychology and wrongly connect it to completely unrelated pseudo-applications of Darwinian theory throughout history. I don't see why I should misrepresent what I think to cater for other people's ignorance and wrong beliefs.
… continued. Similarly, an individual may become fashionable and as a consequence his or her ideology becomes fashionable. This might explain the rise of Trump to some extent.
Another consequence of idea+individual=politics is that you end up supporting individuals you can’t tolerate and ideas you can’t stomach because they all come in a boxed set. You can be a strong liberal but have to pretend to like Joe Biden. You can be a deep conservative and have to tolerate or even demonstrate affection for Donald Trump.
Those of us who like ideas for their own sake and might select from a smorgasbord of concepts which don’t belong to a particular politician or political party find the political landscape to be frustrating and deficient.
Yet the political concept of tying an individual to a set of ideas seems ingrained. Over the ages we seem to love leaders and follow them to the grave, committing all manner of moral crimes along the way. Extreme movements like fascism and communism and even religious cults are consistent with this theorem.
Does anybody agree with my basic concept or are there better ways to explain the bizarre nature of politics?
Dan, like you and many others, I am baffled by the bizarre and polarised nature of our politics.
Our species of ape has classically been referred to as Homo Sapiens (rather aggrandising) and often as Homo Economicus (rather idealistic), but I prefer Homo Politicus. In this sense, the word Politics refers to the bootstrapping of an idea to an individual (or at a stretch, to a collective of individuals). The successful manifestation of this union is capital P Power. In politics people and ideas go hand in hand and their success rises and falls together. Traditional politicians travel in ideological parties, typically represented as the left and the right. Thus if we like the left, we like Joe Biden but if we like the right we like Donald Trump. They are a package, and you can predict the type of policies they will support. If you are a strong loyalist to the ideology, you will put up with the individual. Similarly if you are a strong loyalist to the individual, you will put up with the ideology.
There are many implications of this conception of politics as the union of personal to idea. Both ideas and individuals are subject to fashion. Over the last five or ten years the manifesto of woke (critical theory) reached peak fashion and is probably on the decline. This may be because such an ideology was once a luxury we could afford but now it seems too expensive. Sadly for those politicians who bound themselves to the academic left, their stars are in decline too and there’s nothing they can do about it. I doubt, for example, that Kamala Harris will get a second chance.
We are not evolved apes; Neanderthal and Denisovans were evolved apes and they are extinct, apart from the genes we carry. We are autonoetic consciousness, a special, perhaps unique evolution that does not involve Darwinian survival of the fittest but rather survival of the friendliest. And no, Artificial Intelligence will never become autonoetic.
Evolutionary psychology is an ideology, backed by ever-changing just-so stories. It has all the validity of astrology, creates harmful perceptions and is effectively refuted by the failure of behavioral genetics to find anything of substance. It is really only the arrogance of a scientific superiority complex that keeps it going. I’m so tired of it.
SOME evolutionary psychology is indeed like that. Nonetheless, that we are evolved apes simply does set parameters for what is possible for us. Sadly, entire swathes of the humanities proceed as if this isn't true. It's not a good state of affairs.
Tell me about some of the specific psychology genes that have evolved to create modern human psychology. Or, make something up within your ideological “parameters.”
I really look forward to listening to your podcast contributions, Dan. I might go back to walking to work instead of cycling, to have the opportunity to listen to them (cycling with a podcast on is suicidal in Boston).
One comment: you wrote "many Republicans either view Trump as the victim of persecution or view him as the lesser of two evils. Given this, they might (and most often do) share core values about the evils of corruption and the importance of democracy. They simply diverge on where the most egregious violations of these values actually reside."
I have thought about this a lot, not least because I have frequent in-depth discussions with well-educated Republicans. And I'm not sure I agree with your assessment here, although I admire the value system that motivated you to make it. I think it is too generous, relativist, and both-side-ist.
I believe that your interpretation is exactly what Trump-supporting Republicans *want* people to believe, because they want their cake (supporting Trumpism) and eat it too (still being invited to parties). Anyone can SAY that Trump is the victim of persecution and/or the lesser of two evils, but in the light of abundant evidence to the contrary, it makes so little sense that I can't believe that (esp. educated) Republicans actually believe it. Also, I have asked educated Republicans repeatedly to come up with examples of how/why the Left is more evil than what is happening under Trump II, and they just can't do it. And the persecution idea is just based on the logic: "If the Democrats are in power, and Trump is indicted for crimes, this must be politically motivated", conveniently overlooking the long list of crimes that Trump has actually committed in plain sight, and the (now somewhat naive-sounding) constitutional-democratic notion that nobody is above the law.
So my guess is that most Republicans do not, as you suggest, share the values regarding the evils of corruption and the importance of democracy. At least not when they and their Leader are in power, and when these values would either constrain them or make them look bad. And if they only have these values when they are convenient for them, they are not real values in the universalistic sense.
Thanks JP. That's an interesting perspective. I guess I have a strong prior that there aren't strong moral differences between large-scale political tribes, and that people view reality through different belief systems, which influences how I think about these sorts of cases, but I agree that what you raise is a possibility and is applicable in at least some cases.
If you had more exposure to Republicans talking among themselves, you would see that many do, in fact believe that "Trump is the victim of persecution and/or the lesser of two evils". I recommend reading posts at places like themotte.org (I'm sure there are many others, but that's an open forum that tilts heavily rightward, perhaps 70-30).
If you don't like it straight, you could read Scott Alexander's steelman from his pre-election article "ACX Endorses Harris, Oliver, Or Stein" [https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-endorses-harris-oliver-or-stein]. Here's an excerpt:
> Put this way, you could argue: okay, January 6 was bad. But it was like a ten-year-old child's idea of authoritarianism. You seize power by getting a bunch of people to zerg rush the opposing politicians and beat them up until they declare you in charge. Too bad you were foiled by a locked door, you'll get them next time. I won't claim this strategy has never successfully taken over a government, because history is long and weird. But I can't think of any examples.
> When I look at actual democratic backsliding, it looks nothing like this. It looks like a group of clever well-placed people gradually tightening the knot while maintaining plausible deniability. A court-packing here, but only because the old court was hidebound and reactionary. A carefully-worded constitutional amendment there, but only because nothing ever got done under the old system. A corruption crackdown, but only because corruption is genuinely bad. Then ten years later you wake up and one set of guys control everything and if you speak out against them they can destroy your life.
> So (continues the strongest argument I can think of for supporting Trump) the Republicans egged on a guy with face paint and a horned helmet to smash furniture in the Capitol. Meanwhile, the Democrats got every social media company in the country to censor opposing opinions while swearing up and down that they were doing nothing of the sort, all on some sort of plausible but never-put-into-so-many-words threat that things would go worse for them if they didn’t. They did it so elegantly and naturally that even now nobody really wants to call them on it - partly because it’s hard to tell where free corporate choice ended and government coercion started, and partly because they’ve successfully established a culture where it’s declasse to even talk about it. So, which side are you more scared of?
(He goes on to refute it, convincingly in my opinion.)
Thanks for sharing these interesting resources.
I have clicked on that Pic with Ann gat 5 times by now, finally I get the actual video
I'm unclear as to what level you're claiming "extremely and inexplicably controversial". It's not "inexplicabl[e]" when in the context of the long, long history of biology-is-destiny justifications for oppression, which I presume you know.
(I'm not endorsing every word of the below, but it's an example)
https://jacobin.com/2025/01/stephen-jay-gould-sociobiology-gender
Are you heading into the clickbaiting where you say stuff which is in practice very, very highly associated with right-wing racism and sexism, though not a right-wing racist and sexist yourself, yet are performatively befuddled as to why you get (inaccurate of course) accusations of that? I see this a lot, and I've become at a loss as to what follows. It loops:
"They got angry at you because you said things which sounded to them like you were justifying repression of them."
"They shouldn't do that! It's Unjustified."
"Well, it's really clear why it happened, they deal with a huge amount of such stuff all the time"
"No! They should carefully examine my exact words and nothing else. Doing otherwise Shuts Off Debate, It's A Close-Minded BUBBLE!"
"That's not a fair expectation of everyone, in a world full of professional propagandists and bad-faith actors"
"It's unfair to me. I'm not responsible for anyone else. I am An Open-Minded Person Only Interested In Debate, and they should recognize that."
On and on. I have sympathy for both sides here. I have no idea what to do nowadays.
"Are you heading into the clickbaiting where you say stuff which is in practice very, very highly associated with right-wing racism and sexism, though not a right-wing racist and sexist yourself, yet are performatively befuddled as to why you get (inaccurate of course) accusations of that? I see this a lot, and I've become at a loss as to what follows."
No. I'm an academic who has long drawn on evolutionary psychology in my published research. It's a topic I feel passionate about. To the extent it's associated with right-wing racism and sexism, that's due to profound ignorance and misinformation on many people, who know nothing about evolutionary psychology and wrongly connect it to completely unrelated pseudo-applications of Darwinian theory throughout history. I don't see why I should misrepresent what I think to cater for other people's ignorance and wrong beliefs.
… continued. Similarly, an individual may become fashionable and as a consequence his or her ideology becomes fashionable. This might explain the rise of Trump to some extent.
Another consequence of idea+individual=politics is that you end up supporting individuals you can’t tolerate and ideas you can’t stomach because they all come in a boxed set. You can be a strong liberal but have to pretend to like Joe Biden. You can be a deep conservative and have to tolerate or even demonstrate affection for Donald Trump.
Those of us who like ideas for their own sake and might select from a smorgasbord of concepts which don’t belong to a particular politician or political party find the political landscape to be frustrating and deficient.
Yet the political concept of tying an individual to a set of ideas seems ingrained. Over the ages we seem to love leaders and follow them to the grave, committing all manner of moral crimes along the way. Extreme movements like fascism and communism and even religious cults are consistent with this theorem.
Does anybody agree with my basic concept or are there better ways to explain the bizarre nature of politics?
Dan, like you and many others, I am baffled by the bizarre and polarised nature of our politics.
Our species of ape has classically been referred to as Homo Sapiens (rather aggrandising) and often as Homo Economicus (rather idealistic), but I prefer Homo Politicus. In this sense, the word Politics refers to the bootstrapping of an idea to an individual (or at a stretch, to a collective of individuals). The successful manifestation of this union is capital P Power. In politics people and ideas go hand in hand and their success rises and falls together. Traditional politicians travel in ideological parties, typically represented as the left and the right. Thus if we like the left, we like Joe Biden but if we like the right we like Donald Trump. They are a package, and you can predict the type of policies they will support. If you are a strong loyalist to the ideology, you will put up with the individual. Similarly if you are a strong loyalist to the individual, you will put up with the ideology.
There are many implications of this conception of politics as the union of personal to idea. Both ideas and individuals are subject to fashion. Over the last five or ten years the manifesto of woke (critical theory) reached peak fashion and is probably on the decline. This may be because such an ideology was once a luxury we could afford but now it seems too expensive. Sadly for those politicians who bound themselves to the academic left, their stars are in decline too and there’s nothing they can do about it. I doubt, for example, that Kamala Harris will get a second chance.
Such nonsense! This is like someone in the 19th century saying, ‘I believe in phrenology’!
We are not evolved apes; Neanderthal and Denisovans were evolved apes and they are extinct, apart from the genes we carry. We are autonoetic consciousness, a special, perhaps unique evolution that does not involve Darwinian survival of the fittest but rather survival of the friendliest. And no, Artificial Intelligence will never become autonoetic.
Evolutionary psychology is an ideology, backed by ever-changing just-so stories. It has all the validity of astrology, creates harmful perceptions and is effectively refuted by the failure of behavioral genetics to find anything of substance. It is really only the arrogance of a scientific superiority complex that keeps it going. I’m so tired of it.
SOME evolutionary psychology is indeed like that. Nonetheless, that we are evolved apes simply does set parameters for what is possible for us. Sadly, entire swathes of the humanities proceed as if this isn't true. It's not a good state of affairs.
Tell me about some of the specific psychology genes that have evolved to create modern human psychology. Or, make something up within your ideological “parameters.”