people become even more entrenched in their political views when they stop attending services. Though churches have a reputation in some circles as promoting hyper-politicization, they can be depolarizing institutions. Being part of a religious community often forces people to get along with others—including others with different political views—and it may channel people’s efforts into charitable work or forms of community outreach that have little to do with politics. Leaving the community removes those moderating forces, opening the door to extremism.
Williams cites his own research that suggests that Christians who stop attending church “become hyper-individualistic, devoted to law and order, cynical about systems, and distrustful of others.” Notably, Williams published that analysis in Christianity Today and serves as a senior fellow at Ashland University–so he may be able to reach audiences that I could not. However, he also cites Samuel Stroope, Paul Froese, Heather M. Rackin, and Jack Delehanty, who reached similar conclusions and published their paper, “Unchurched Christian Nationalism and the 2016 US Presidential election,” in Sociological Forum in 2021.
This argument makes good sense to me, and I have tried to test the same thesis myself in different ways. At one point I found: “For white Christians, being actively involved in a church builds the values that we need for a pluralistic democracy. At the same time, simply identifying as Christian and hearing Christian messages is associated with intolerant values.”
I still believe the Tocquevillian theory that people learn to collaborate, deliberate, and accept other human beings by participating in self-governing communities, of which churches are key examples. Of course, Christianity also makes a compelling moral case for love, acceptance, and fairness when it’s interpreted in ways that both challenge and uplift the believers, which is supposed to happen in a church. However, for White Americans, the sheer sense of being Christians (Christian identity) is associated–in my research and others’–with intolerance. This means that when White Americans who identify as Christians go to church, there is at least the potential to channel their beliefs and behavior in positive ways. If they leave the church and also stop identifying as Christians, things can go well or badly. But when they stop attending church and yet continue to think of themselves as Christians, bad results often ensue.
On Labor Day, I very much enjoyed reading the memoir of my friend Henry Milner, entitled Participant/Observer.
Born in a refugee camp in Germany in 1946 to Polish-Jewish survivors, Henry grew up as a Baby Boomer in Montreal. As he navigated the turbulent waters of his time and place as both a political scientist and an activist, he became an Anglophone Quebecois nationalist, an expert proponent of Scandinavian social democracy, a liberal on social issues, and sometimes a critic of the Quebecois public sector unions to which he belonged. He has played significant roles that have put him in the “rooms where it happened,” notably as one of the most senior Anglophones in the leadership of the Parti Quebecois (PQ) during its heyday and as one of the key diplomats for that party in international social democratic circles.
I know and admire people–possibly readers of this blog post–who have deep commitments on all sides of these issues. Some would be more prone to take the unions’ side or less enthusiastic about the Swedish welfare state or more critical of Quebecois nationalism or less favorable to Anglophone involvement in that movement. I’m not qualified to defend Henry’s positions, but I think that any reader should appreciate his memoir as the story of a thoughtful and public-spirited person who has tried to exercise good judgment on difficult questions and has contributed effort as well as opinions. For instance, he sometimes made the English translations of politically sensitive PQ documents.
Milner raises general questions that are worth consideration. For example:
1/ Must organized labor clash with social democratic parties when labor represents a small minority of the workforce and is strongest in the public sector? (This is the situation in the USA now, as well as in Canada.) Milner argues that Scandinavian unions can advocate growth and modernization–shifting workers to new and different jobs–because they represent most of the population. In contrast, unions that represent small segments of the public become protective of the status quo and compete with disadvantaged people.
2/ Do participants in politics know things that political scientists cannot know? Is the reverse also true? In general, how should we think about the relationship between science and experience?
(I count five professions that claim expertise about politics: reporters, civil servants, lobbyists, political scientists, and politicians themselves. Do they all have valid insights? Can the methods of political science capture all the others’ perspectives if scholars study participants’ beliefs well?)
3/ How can democracies provide robust voluntary adult education for democracy without allowing it to degenerate into propaganda? I encountered Milner years ago as an expert on Scandinavian adult civic education and have only grown more supportive of that cause over time. We can’t rely on civic education for children and college students alone, since most citizens have long ago outgrown those phases. At times, Americans have adopted Scandinavian exports like Folks Schools and Study Circles. Americans contributed (with others, including Germans) to building a robust system of adult education in post-War West Germany (Levine 2023). Nevertheless, today we lack an impressive policy for adult civic education in the USA, and it’s hard to see how we could create one in the face of intense partisan polarization.
Overall, Milner’s trajectory has been from a socialist who was always deeply democratic to a democrat who seeks social equity, and from there to a proponent of civic education and electoral reform as bulwarks of democracy.
Ukrainian friends have been telling me for a decade about the value of decentralization in their country. Some have even argued that it helped prepare Ukraine for an effective and motivated military defense.
A new paper by Arends, Brik, Herrmann and Roesel (2023) offers relevant quantitative evidence. The authors explain that, in “2014, the Parliament of Ukraine amended the budget code to entitle villages and cities which amalgamated voluntarily into larger local governments, so-called ‘territorial hromadas’ …. Hromadas therewith become independent from local branches of the national administration. The newly created local governments also qualified for a 60 percent share of the personal income tax collected within their jurisdiction.”
In 2015, the hromadas gained power over schools, libraries, hospitals and health centers, local roads, and fire and emergency services. In 2018, they were also given “ownership of formerly state-owned land within their jurisdiction.”
The process was popular and widespread. By 2020, “more than 10,000 Ukrainian villages, settlements and cities were amalgamated into 1470 new hromadas now enjoying considerable autonomy over local affairs.”
Arends et al show that areas with and without hromadas started with similar levels of trust in local and national government, but the ones that created hromadas saw substantial increases in trust for local (but not national) government. This empirical evidence is strongly suggestive that the reform caused trust to rise.
Here are a few reflections based on theory and studies from other countries.
First, I don’t read the paper as a general argument for decentralization, per se. Independent Ukraine had inherited a highly centralized system from the Soviet Union, and it was wise to moderate that by strengthening the local layer. The study does not imply that more power should necessarily be devolved to localities if they are already strong.
More important, I suspect, was the way the reform was designed. Contiguous communities were permitted to assemble themselves voluntarily into hromadas. This was a bottom-up process, requiring substantial agreement at the local level. One advantage was avoiding corruption: politicians and bureaucrats could not extract benefits by deciding which new local units to create or by conferring autonomy on favored local leaders. Another advantage was civic experience. Quite a few local stakeholders had to come together to negotiate and present each plan for a new hromada. They would later be able to use their network-ties, deliberative experience, and confidence for other purposes.
Second, trust in government is not intrinsically desirable. People should distrust bad governments. Some have argued that “trust” is not quite the right word for an attitude toward the state, which should rather inspire “confidence” if it functions well.
But we have survey data on trust, and the authors make good use of it to support a valuable empirical case. Still, the really interesting question is whether governance improved as a result of the reform. For example, did corruption fall? Trustful opinions may indicate improvement, because citizens are well placed to assess government, but I think the accuracy of their opinions deserves further attention.
At the same time, trust in government is often found to be a component of the construct labeled “social capital.” And social capital is a resource that communities can use to address problems–including corruption. But although trust in government is empirically a component of social capital (meaning that it correlates with the other components), it doesn’t suffice. It would be interesting to know whether Ukrainians in hromadas also developed other aspects of social capital, such as habits of participating in discussions and meetings and helping each other voluntarily.
A pivotal period in the development of our current world was the first decade after WWII. Much happened then, including the first great wave of decolonization and the solidification of democratic welfare states in Europe, but I’m especially interested in the intellectual and technological developments that bore the (now obsolete) label of “cybernetics.”
I’ve been influenced by reading Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (first ed. 1991, revised ed., 2017), but I’d tell the story in a somewhat different way.
The War itself saw the rapid development of entities that seemed analogous to human brains. Those included the first computers, radar, and mechanisms for directing artillery. They also included extremely complex organizations for manufacturing and deploying arms and materiel. Accompanying these pragmatic breakthroughs were successful new techniques for modeling complex processes mathematically, plus intellectual innovations such as artificial neurons (McCullouch & Pitts 1943), feedback (Rosenblueth, Wiener, and Bigelow 1943), game theory (von Neumann & Morgenstern, 1944), stored-program computers (Turing 1946), information theory (Shannon 1948), systems engineering (Bell Labs, 1940s), and related work in economic theory (e.g., Schumpeter 1942) and anthropology (Mead 1942).
Perhaps these developments were overshadowed by nuclear physics and the Bomb, but even the Manhattan Project was a massive application of systems engineering. Concepts, people, money, minerals, and energy were organized for a common task.
After the War, some of the contributors recognized that these developments were related. The Macy Conferences, held regularly from 1942-1960, drew a Who’s Who of scientists, clinicians, philosophers, and social scientists. The topics of the first post-War Macy Conference (March 1946) included “Self-regulating and teleological mechanisms,” “Simulated neural networks emulating the calculus of propositional logic,” “Anthropology and how computers might learn how to learn,” “Object perception’s feedback mechanisms,” and “Deriving ethics from science.” Participants demonstrated notably diverse intellectual interests and orientations. For example, both Margaret Mead (a qualitative and socially critical anthropologist) and Norbert Wiener (a mathematician) were influential.
Wiener (who had graduated from Tufts in 1909 at age 14) argued that the central issue could be labeled “cybernetics” (Wiener & Rosenblueth 1947). He and his colleagues derived this term from the ancient Greek word for the person who steers a boat. For Wiener, the basic question was how any person, another animal, a machine, or a society attempts to direct itself while receiving feedback.
According to Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, the ferment and diversity of the first wave of cybernetics was lost when a single model became temporarily dominant. This was the idea of the von Neumann machine:
Such a machine stores data that may symbolize something about the world. Human beings write elaborate and intentional instructions (software) for how those data will be changed (computation) in response to new input. There is an input device, such as a punchcard reader or keyboard, and an output mechanism, such as a screen or printer. You type something, the processor computes, and out comes a result.
One can imagine human beings, other animals, and large organizations working like von Neumann machines. For instance, we get input from vision, we store memories, we reason about what we experience, and we say and do things as a result. But there is no evident connection between this architecture and the design of the actual human brain. (Where in our head is all that complicated software stored?) Besides, computers designed in this way made disappointing progress on artificial intelligence between 1945 and 1970. The 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey envisioned a computer with a human personality by the turn of our century, but real technology has lagged far behind that.
The term “cybernetics” had named a truly interdisciplinary field. After about 1956, the word faded as the intellectual community split into separate disciplines, including computer science.
This was also the period when behaviorism was dominant in psychology (presuming that all we do is to act in ways that independent observers can see–there is nothing meaningful “inside” us). It was perhaps the peak of what James C. Scott calls “high modernism” (the idea that a state can accurately see and reorganize the whole society). And it was the heyday of “pluralism” in political science (which assumes that each group that is part of a polity automatically pursues its own interests). All of these movements have a certain kinship with the von Neumann architecture.
An alternative was already considered in the era of cybernetics: emergence from networks. Instead of designing a complex system to follow instructions, one can connect numerous simple components into a network and give them simple rules for changing their connections in respond to feedback. The dramatic changes in our digital world since ca. 1980 have used this approach rather than any central design, and now the analogy of machine intelligence to neural networks is dominant. Emergent order can operate at several levels at once; for example, we can envision individuals whose brains are neural networks connecting via electronic networks (such as the Internet) to form social networks and culture.
I have sketched this history–briefly and unreliably, because it’s not my expertise–without intending value-judgments. I am not sure to what extent these developments have been beneficial or destructive. But it seems important to understand where we’ve come from to know where we should go from here.
Principled classical liberals are sharply critical of basically illiberal people who claim the libertarian label. The Unpopulist is an important source for this critique. I think their cause is an important component of the broad front against authoritarianism. I am not a classical liberal, but if I were, I would be even more alarmed about illiberal currents within libertarianism as threats to what I would hold most dear.
Imagine that you are a principled libertarian. You want all human beings to be free. In a very abstract way, you share that commitment with socialists, anarchists, and New Deal liberals. But you add two ingredients. First, you are primarily concerned about negative liberty: freedom from coercion. Second, you see the state as the worst threat to liberty, because it has guns, prisons, and executioners, a huge budget, extensive files, and a hierarchical structure.
I happen to believe that corporate bureaucracies and markets also threaten liberty. I support the republican form of liberty that involves making collective decisions by debating and voting. I also believe in the Four Freedoms of the New Deal and the potential of governments to promote them. However, classical liberals make important points in these debates.
As a principled libertarian, you would scan the world for cases of states violating individual liberty and you’d try to help, perhaps even at your own expense. Maybe you are concerned about Uyghurs in Chinese concentration camps. Or maybe it concerns you that the government of the United States minutely controls the lives of almost 2 million prisoners, using its power to throw some of them into solitary confinement. When an agent of the state, a police officer, fatally suffocates a citizen who is trying to sell cigarettes to willing buyers, you see a gross violation of liberty, whether or not you are inclined to attribute it (as I would) to systemic racism.
Alternatively, imagine that your view is compatible with Ayn Rand or some interpretations–poor ones, I believe–of Nietzsche or Emerson. To be polite, I will call you an “egoist” (Rand’s term for her own view). You basically believe that it is right and virtuous to be concerned about yourself and either weak or patronizing to act for others.
You, too, will scan the world, but you will not be looking for coercive injustices against other people that you should help resist. Your eyes are open for threats to your own interests.
Insofar as these threats are state actions, you can walk the same road with classical liberals. For instance, you may want tax rates to fall so that you don’t have to pay as much money, whereas a classical liberal seeks to hamper the coercive power of the state and liberate other people’s entrepreneurial energies. If the issue is the rate of taxation, you and the classical liberal may vote alike. The same is true for school choice or marijuana policy.
But what if you are concerned that many women don’t seem to want to date you because they are (more or less) feminist and they dislike your values? Or what if your private employer wants you to experience a diversity workshop that makes you feel bad? Then your opponent is no longer the state. In fact, your values might be fairly popular, and therefore you may be tempted to use the state’s power to restrict and restrain the ideas and behaviors that hamper you, or that simply offend you.
As an exhibit of the latter view, consider Tucker Carlson:
Democrats in Washington have told you, you have a patriotic duty to hate Vladimir Putin. It’s not a suggestion. It’s a mandate. … Before that happens, it might be worth asking yourself, since it is getting pretty serious. What is this really about? Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity? Does he eat dogs? These are fair questions, and the answer to all of them is no. Vladimir Putin didn’t do any of that.
Putin has indisputably violated the individual rights of many people, including Russians. But Carlson is not scanning the horizon for governments that abuse freedom. He is looking for things he doesn’t like, such as being called a racist, being laid off by a private employer, or hearing critiques of Christianity or expressions of other faiths. He doesn’t feel that Putin has hurt him; on the contrary, the Kremlin is imposing certain policies on its own people that Carlson rather likes.
Perhaps Carlson is not, in any sense, a libertarian. However, he is influential within the Republican Party, which–although never consistently libertarian, and always overly enamored with police power–was once a vehicle for promoting certain classical liberal ideas. Generally, it was the party that was more skeptical of government. But now a major voice in the party is defending an authoritarian.
The same debate is playing out within the Libertarian party itself. Reason Magazine’s Brian Doherty quotes a Libertarian activist who advocates the permanent incarceration of Anthony Fauci in Guantanamo Bay and decries “woke globalism”–even though classical liberals are universalists, skeptical of nation-states, and should be appalled by the very idea of an overseas federal detention center.
Again, this isn’t really my fight, because I am not a libertarian myself. Nor do I want to explore the nuances of debates within libertarianism, because I have more pressing interests. But I do appreciate the efforts of true liberals to safeguard their own movement. They are part of the broader struggle against right-wing extremism.
