This is the audio of my friend Andrew Seligsohn, the President of Campus Compact, interviewing me earlier this week about the election, what it tells us about civic life, and what we should do next. I enjoyed it and appreciated the opportunity. Follow Campus Compact for other #CompactNation podcasts.
I am preparing for a weekend conference on modus vivendi–on how people can coexist peacefully even if they do not like each other one bit. The conference was planned a long time ago and has a global scope. Nevertheless, it feels timely to an American after the 2020 election.
Some of the papers are works of abstract political theory, with references to Hobbes and modern liberal or communitarian philosophers. Some are empirical, discussing the possibilities of trust and agreement when people differ. Some of them are about consociational and polycentric governance arrangements–when there isn’t one centralized state or one big market but several heterogeneous entities govern simultaneously. And some of the readings are about concrete situations. For instance, I highly recommend Informal Order and State in Afghanistan, by Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili.
I think one of the unresolved issues is whether to reduce interaction in order to preserve peace and liberty or to encourage interaction by decentralizing power so that people who dislike each other can still negotiate intensively without feeling that one group might use the state to dominate the others.
Murtazashvili depicts local governance in Afghanistan as a complex network of local leaders who have overlapping and limited powers and who collaborate quite often and compete for public support. This implies a lot of negotiation and communication. The overall system is adaptive, not rigidly traditionalist. One of the advantages of polycentrism, Paul Dragos Aligica emphasizes, is its openness to local experiments that others can observe and imitate (pp. 66-69). In short, polycentrism is helpful for learning, and we might expect people in a polycentric order to converge about what they learn over time. They would become more similar.
A different model is a classic consosiational arrangement, such Belgium, which allows different religious and linguistic communities to manage their own affairs independently and without much interaction. Shadi Hamid is convinced that religions are divided by fundamental normative assumptions, and when such divisions arise, it can be wisest to reduce interaction–to send the parties into their respective corners. “Sometimes, reducing contact between opposing sides and allowing for autonomous communities are ways of accepting that some differences cannot be bridged” (p. 36).
In the US context, it seems plausible that reducing the imprint of the national government might lower the temperature of partisan division. The problem with that solution is that some of us have strong commitments to federal intervention, whether on climate change, racial equity, or responses to COVID-19. Telling everyone to disengage at the national level so that the states and localities can do their own thing is biased toward some of the states and localities–the ones that vote for less rather than more social welfare. And it leaves minorities in each state exposed. I don’t think you can predict that progressives will stop demanding national policies, and I am not sure that we should stop.
But we could think about ways to address genuine common problems with a minimal footprint on the values that divide us most deeply. And you can think about that even when the values (e.g., racial or gender equity) are very worthy. I have long favored emphasizing cash transfers over behavioral interventions for this reason. I think that trying to change people’s behavior threatens liberty. It also provokes distrust that undermines the capacity of the national government. This is true even when the goal of an intervention is most worthy, such as educating against racism.
A strategy of lowering partisan polarization by reducing the explicit footprint of the national government may or may not work. And it doesn’t necessarily tell us clearly what we should actually do. For instance, you could argue that if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v Wade and allows states to ban abortion, the partisan temperature will fall as more people become satisfied by the policy in their own state. (This is the decentralized-democracy argument.) But you could also argue that if the government (at any level) is forbidden to ban abortion, the choice becomes personal, which is much more decentralized and prevents battles over state laws. (This is the liberal argument.) So far, we can see that Roe had worsened polarization, but we don’t know whether repealing it would reduce polarization or take it up another notch.
Another example: Tufts is going through an intense conversation about anti-Black racism. Very few people in our campus community evidently supported Donald Trump. Trump voters appear as an out-group, characterized either as complicit with racism or as people to be understood better–but not as part of the community. If people who voted for Trump were better represented at Tufts, the temperature might rise through the roof. I do not believe that the already complex conversations would survive that extra dimension of plurality.
Modus vivendi theory might say: It’s good that we have a heterogeneous, voluntary system of higher education. Let Tufts people go to their corner and have their own hard, important conversations, while Trump voters assemble in other places if they want to. Or modus vivendi theory might say: We need pluralism within institutions devoted to learning. Places like Tufts are relatively homogeneous ideologically. That is bad, and the solution is for the institution to say less in its own name so that a wider variety of views feel fully welcome. (Or maybe there are other ways of addressing this issue that don’t require modus vivendi at all.)
The idea of modus vivendi theory can be opposed to democratic, liberal, social-welfarist, and deliberative theories, but it’s also possible that negotiating a modus vivendi is the best way to advance those values when antipathies run high. In any case, I think there is much to be learned from this body of thought.
Cited sources: Paul Dragos Aligica,
Now that all of life occurs on Zoom, it’s easy to join events like these:
The Tufts 2020 COVID-19 Research Symposium will be two half-days of panels and talks on many aspects of the pandemic: biomedical, public health, economic, political, and more. I have served on the planning committee and will moderate the panel on “Equity in the COVID-19 Pandemic” (Nov 18, 1:00pm – 1:45pm). People who read this blog may also be interested in the panel on “Cultural and Political Impacts of Disinformation in the Pandemic,” Nov. 18, 10:00am – 10:40am. The keynote speakers for the event as a whole are Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, Chief Scientist, World Health Organization and Dr. Eric Rubin, Editor-in-Chief, New England Journal of Medicine. All of the presentations will be open to the public. Register here.
Join Tisch College for a conversation with author, professor, and thought-leader Robert Putnam, and co-author and social entrepreneur Shaylyn Romney Garrett to talk about their latest book, The Upswing: How America Came?Together a Century Ago and How We?Can Do It Again. The Upswing is an analysis of economic, social, and political trends over the 20th century, demonstrating how we have gone from an individualistic society to a more communitarian society—and then back again. How we can learn from that experience to become a stronger, more unified nation?
I will interview Putnam and Garrett and moderate the discussion. Register here.
Peter Levine, an expert on civic engagement, will moderate a conversation and audience Q & A with Suzanne Mettler and Robert Lieberman, authors of the new book Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy. By studying previous periods in history when our democracy has been in peril, they discovered four recurring threats: political polarization, racism and nativism, economic inequality, and excessive executive power. Today, for the first time in American history, all four threats are present at the same time, a convergence that marks a grave moment in our democratic experiment. Yet history also points the way to imagine a path toward repairing our civic fabric and renewing democracy. Register here.
Peter Levine, an expert on civic engagement, will talk with Program Officer Jennifer Hall-Witt about a promising vision for reviving our democracy, focusing on the role that ordinary citizens can play in fostering more deliberative, collaborative, and engaged communities. This conversation will be based on the findings in his book, We are the ones we have been waiting for: the promise of civic renewal in America, which advocates for a new, citizen-centered politics capable of tackling problems that cannot be fixed in any other way.
This event will include small-group discussion in breakout rooms amongst members of the audience. Please come ready to listen and participate. Register here.
“Turnout” is usually defined as the percentage of legally eligible people who actually vote. So defined, turnout was higher back in 1900, when no women and few African Americans were permitted to vote. But if we want to measure how democratic the society is, it’s better to ask how many people voted out of the whole population. By that measure, 2020 will be the best year in US history.
This graph assumes that 149.5 million Americans voted in 2020, although that number may actually be higher. It implies that 45 percent of the people voted. That beats the previous high of 43.9 percent in 2008. Note that the ideal rate would not be 100%, because the population includes people of all ages, even babies. But 45 percent is not high enough.
Population estimates from the decennial Census, with my own linear estimates for the intervening years. Number of votes cast from Dave Leip.
A few days after the 2016 election, I posted a flowchart with options for responses. It was by far my most-shared post in decades of blogging and was used a fair amount in grassroots meetings between 2016 and 2018.
This is a better version of the same graphic:
Two questions: How much was done in each of these boxes in 2016-18? And what is most important now?
The anti-Trump side did win the next two elections, although by a closer margin in ’20 than some might have expected. I think we observed a complex mix of all the ideas in that column, from changing some voting rules to building new coalitions. However, at the national level, the majority coalition is mainly the same as the one that elected Obama, and not larger as a percentage of the population.
Characterizing Black Lives Matter and climate mobilization as “resistance to Trump” is reductive: those movements were already underway before his election and will continue after, frequently targeting Democrats. Still, the combination of protest and litigation has been pretty effective.
Under “repairing the fabric” are two importantly different paths. Many people have worked hard on both. For examples of work in the cross-partisan lane, see Braver Angels, the Bridge Alliance, the Civic Health Project, and many other groups. Meanwhile, institutions and communities are paying attention to vulnerable people.
Both strategies are very hard, and the main trends are against them. Trauma and affective partisanship have intensified, which doesn’t take anything away from the people who are combatting either or both. The situation might well be even worse without these people, but now is a time to reflect on larger-scale strategies.
The last column is about preserving or changing the “regime.” I didn’t mean that word as pejorative; it’s just political-science talk for the government plus the other institutions that connect to it, such as parties and the media. The current regime survived but is surely fragile–see a recent piece of mine for some reasons.
Which of these paths should we emphasize next? My predictable answer is: all of them. I thought that a Biden administration would face a genuine dilemma: either fighting for valuable political reforms that would be seen as partisan or else reducing partisanship. GOP control of the Senate may simply preclude political reform at the national level, which might be an argument for focusing a four-year Biden administration on lowering the partisan temperature. That doesn’t mean that political reform is dead, because it has potential at the state and city level.
I remain interested in policy approaches that could possibly expand the majority while disrupting partisanship by assembling strange bedfellows. For instance, libertarians should be (and often are) appalled by Trump and can find substantive common ground with left-liberals on some policies, e.g., criminal justice reform.
A related strategy is to emphasize certain bread-and-butter policies that involve the government less in people’s lives while still boosting economic equity. A minimum wage referendum passed in Florida even as Trump won the state. The reason could be that there’s a latent majority for left-economic policies that the Democrats missed by nominating a moderate. (That’s the “Bernie would have won” argument.) A different explanation is that people don’t like the government or taxes, partly because they see the government as the representative of hostile cultural values, but they’re happy to pass unfunded mandates on the private sector. This kind of social policy has promise if the outcomes are actually beneficial.
See also white working class alienation from government; promoting democracy and reducing polarization; some remarks on Elinor Ostrom and police reform; political reform in Massachusetts, etc.