Problem Statements
The state of our nation demands a new way of thinking about democracy. I’m less interested in why the Democrats lost this election than to understand how we have come to such a bifurcated society.
A casual morning’s coffee reflection suggests a sobering list of structural problems, related but distinct, and each requiring a diagnosis and resolution.
- We seemingly lack an agreed upon collective identity as a nation, that contains and imposes normative standards on our sub-group conflicts. Dewey’s The Public and It’s Problems (1927), assumed the boundary conditions of the larger “public” body, and focused his analysis on how we bring the rich, local, and contextual mutual regard of the small town to a great nation of 119 million. In 2017, we are roughly three times that size (323 million).
- The “central tendency” of agreed upon truth that largely held in the 20th century is now gone. By “truth” I mean agreement on the laws of the physical and social worlds — the facts — against which, strategies and tactics to change the facts could be debated (here I am using a loose view of Pierce and Dewey’s Pragmatist definition of truth is what inquirers agree is true at any moment in time). Media elites – national and major city newspapers and post-war broadcast media – defined a generally shared narrow spectrum of what they agreed was the “truth”. Importantly, the media elites actively managed this agreed upon definition of truth and the boundaries of who could contest their agreed “truth.” Yeah, I know there are all sorts of problems with the above: (i) Is the Pragmatists’ definition of inquirers’ truth valid (ii) did the 20th century media elites really hold a central tendency of truth; (iii) if so, was that central tendency truth unbiased and representative of the entire society? (I think we all know the answer to this one). While the central tendency of the conversation was distorted, the normative impulse to have a single conversation was important. Today, groups seem to be not just talking past one another but engaging in increasingly separate, intra-group optimized conversations. Persuasion through rhetoric, logic and facts are no longer considered necessary (remember “truthiness” and now look at Trump, Kelly Anne Conway and climate change deniers). There was a lower level of “talking past each other” than appears to be the case today. The question is, was this true? Is a single conversation good? Is it possible to have a single conversation without the distortion of power?
- We don’t know why people vote the way they do. People don’t vote their economic self-interest. So what motivates them? If they are seeking to optimize something (but see below) what are they seeking to optimize? – Religious belief, social morality, collective identity, family and small group cohesion, …?
- Are our citizens rational? Even if they wanted to and claim to, can people calculate what is optimal for themselves? Behavioral Economics suggests that we are not; that we cannot calculate risk; that we cannot think strategically for more than a few minutes at a time.
- Can we put the genie back in the bottle? Now that we are in this state of discourse and democracy highly corroded by market logic, can we ever go back to a stronger balancing assertion of social and political logic and power?
My Reading List
I have a few books on my Q1-2017 Reading List. What’s yours?
Arlie Hochschild Strangers in Their Own Land.
Five-years studying Tea Party friendly working class residents of one of the poorest and highest per capita Federal support recipient states – Louisiana.
George Packer. The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America.
NYTimes review here.
J. D. Vance. Hillbilly Elegy.
See my review here.
NYTimes review here.
Katherine J. Cramer. The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.
Nancy Isenberg. White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America.
NYTimes review here.
Thomas Frank. Listen Liberal: Or Whatever Happened to the Party of the People.
Frank argues that the Democratic party―once “the Party of the People”―now caters to the interests of a “professional managerial class” consisting of lawyers, doctors, professors, scientists, programmers, even investment bankers.
NYTimes review here.
Chris Hayes. Twighlight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy.
David Brooks’ comments on the current state of American elites here. This quote says its all:
Today’s elite is more talented and open but lacks a self-conscious leadership code. The language of meritocracy (how to succeed) has eclipsed the language of morality (how to be virtuous). Wall Street firms, for example, now hire on the basis of youth and brains, not experience and character. Most of their problems can be traced to this. (emphasis added)
We may not like the quaint paternalism associated with past elites, but implicit in Brooks’ contrast with today’s elite attitudes, paternalism has been replaced by a pure market logic of self-interest.
Matthew Desmond. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City.
NYTimes review here.
Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer. $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America.
NYTimes review here.
Daniel Kahnemann. Thinking Fast and Slow. And for those who don’t want to read the must read opus, Michael Lewis’ recent biography and summary of Kahneman’s and his partner, Tversky’s work (The Undoing Project).
NYTimes review of Thinking Fast and Slow here.