are Americans ‘innocent of ideology’?

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Hardly a day goes by without news about polarization. Americans are said to be divided into hostile camps on the left and right.

That observation contradicts a line of political science research launched in 1964 by Philip E. Converse. In “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” Converse argued that the vast majority of Americans lacked organized systems of beliefs that could explain or predict their views of candidates or their political behavior. He wrote, “The political ‘belief systems’ of ordinary people are generally thin, disorganized, and ideologically incoherent.” Most Americans were not recognizably liberal or conservative–or anything else. Mainly because they did not spend much time thinking about politics, and especially not in abstract ways, most people were not influenced by the ideas that concerned pundits, intellectuals, and politicians.

Even though many observers assume that the US has become more ideologically polarized since that time, it remains entirely possible to defend Converse’s case. That is the task of Neither Liberal nor Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public by Donald R. Kinder and Nathan P. Kalmoe (University of Chicago Press, 2017). This book is dedicated to “Philip E. Converse, Scholar Unsurpassed” and it ably updates his argument. Some of the key points:

  • People’s opinions about various issues correlate with each other at very low rates (an average of .16 in the American National Election Studies from 1972-2012). If most people held organized systems of belief, then many pairs of issues would correlate strongly. For instance, those who wanted lower taxes would also want to cut spending. The low correlations in the ANES indicate a lack of organization. Nor is there an important change in this measure over time.
  • Most people do not identify as liberals or conservatives, and those who identify as moderates have low information and are relatively unlikely to participate. Few Americans are principled and active centrists, but many are just not engaged.
  • Changes in the majority coalition (such as Reagan’s victories in the 1980s) are unrelated to changes in public opinion. Individuals also seem to change their opinions about most surveyed issues in random ways (notwithstanding some interesting exceptions, such as abortion).
  • Partisanship predicts voters’ choices much better than ideology does. Consistent with that finding, there are still considerable numbers of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats, and they vote for their parties.

How could this be true in a world of Fox News and MSNBC? Well, Fox News averages about 1.5 million viewers per month, and there are about 258 million adult Americans, so Fox speaks to–and possibly for–less than one in a hundred people.

In some ways, my colleagues and I have found similar results. For instance, in a 2012 survey, CIRCLE reported that just “22% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 could choose the issue of greatest importance to themselves and answer two (out of two) factual questions about the candidates’ positions on that issue.” Scholars in tradition of Converse would say that this was not evidence of anything especially wrong with civic education, Millennials, or the 2012 campaign. Instead, for Kinder & Kalmoe, it is an international and transhistorical reality that most people lack organized thoughts about politics.

I think we must take this argument seriously, but I would raise two main doubts.

First, Kinder & Kalmoe conclude that groups, not ideologies, drive politics. They explicitly mention race, gender, and religion (p. 137). “Scores of studies show that public opinion on matters of politics is … shaped in powerful ways by the attitudes citizens harbor toward the social groups they see as the principal beneficiaries or victims in play” (p. 138). For some people, these attitudes are well-developed and stable. For instance, an “ardent feminist” is one who consistently sees gender as a basis for injustice (p. 138). But most of us can be influenced by events or political leaders to make different identities salient.

In her review of Kinder & Kalmoe, Samara Klar writes, “Group identities are a fundamental informational source in the course of preference formation. But must ideology be cast aside? Perhaps we can instead consider how ideology is intertwined in our identity politics.” In fact, this point seems fundamental to me. Each of the groups that Kinder & Kalmoe offer as an example reflects a complex mix of ideas and material realities.

For instance, race is not simply an idea. In the USA, people can be designated with a race at birth because it as seen as an inherited trait. And even if space-aliens arrived and erased all awareness of race from everyone’s brains, it would remain the case that White families have 10 times as much net wealth as Black families because of historical injustices.

Yet race is also about ideas. The whole concept was invented at specific times for specific reasons and has been imbued with meanings. To think of people as having racial identities is surely a form of ideology, and then to add notions of white supremacy, or ostensible color-blindness, or opposition to inequality, or pride in a minority racial status–these are powerful ideological additions. Racial identities offer politicians opportunities and challenges but are hardly created by current political leaders. They persist and recur. It would be odd to describe Americans as “innocent” of ideology if Americans see society in racialized terms (albeit with a variety of value judgments).

Religion is different in detail but similar insofar as it involves both ideas and material facts. For instance, the Catholic Church summarizes its core ideas in its creed and catechism, although it also encompasses a rich diversity of thought. Some Catholics are devout believers. For some, their ex-Catholic identity is important. Although Catholicism is not genetic, it runs in families due to socialization; and even renouncing the faith indicates that the religion is important. The American Catholic church owns tangible resources, from parochial schools and soup kitchens to cathedrals, but it also often holds a subordinate position compared to mainline Protestantism. Catholics have the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, but Protestants have the National Cathedral. Catholics founded Boston College, but Protestants had Harvard.

Again, the point is that material circumstances and ideas are tightly connected. (And this is true for gender as well.) Thus ideology is powerfully active and omnipresent. And just as an opinion about race or religion combines ideas with material interests, so does an opinion about a classic policy-wonk question, such as whether the government should provide health insurance. If people lack opinions about health insurance but hold opinions about race, I don’t see why that makes them “innocent of ideology.”

Second, the kinds of questions fielded on surveys like the ANES are designed to assess where people stand on the kinds of issues that are debated by Democratic and Republican politicians. Insofar as people are asked about ideas outside this official mainstream, not too many usually express support. For instance, although about 40 percent express a positive view of socialism, few of those seem to define it in a radical way that would imply substantial changes in current policies. But this is not evidence of a lack of ideology. It is a sign that there is a dominant ideology in the USA, which contradicts many alternative ideologies available in the world or on paper. Not very Americans are theocratic Shiites, Maoists, or anarchists, and that is an important fact about America. The country is ideological, even if ideology does not explain the outcome of electoral contests between Democrats and Republicans.

History tells us that the dominant ideologies of whole societies can shift, sometimes surprisingly quickly. But such ruptures are not predictable with time series like the ANES.

Reading work in the tradition of Philip Converse can be a bit dispiriting. The data undermine what Achen & Bartels call the “folk theory” of democracy, according to which we debate policies and values, form opinions, vote based on our opinions, and influence policy. The data suggests that most people are not part of this process.

At the same time, this tradition is also basically complacent about the political system. If people demonstrate a surprising lack of ideological awareness in 2022, that is because they always have. It is even the case in other countries, according to Kinder & Kalmoe. Concerns about shifts toward polarization or extremism are overblown, because the actual trends move at a “glacial pace” (p. 87). For instance, the proportions of extreme liberals and extreme conservatives doubled from a very low base between 1972 and 2012. If that pace continued, it would take more than a century for those groups to predominate (p. 176).

The ultimate message seems to be that we should abandon romantic notions of an informed, deliberating electorate and yet not worry about the fundamental condition of our polity, which is stable and “innocent” of ideology.

Theodore Lowi concludes his great book The End of Liberalism (1969, revised in 1979) by saying:

Realistic political science is a rationalization of the present. The political scientist is not necessarily a defender of the status quo, but the result is too often the same, because those who are trying to describe reality tend to reaffirm it. Focus on the group, for example, is a commitment to one of the more rigidified aspects of the social process. Stress upon the incremental is apologetic as well. The separation of facts from values is apologetic.

There is no denying that modern pluralistic political science brought science to politics. And that is a good thing. But it did not have to come at the cost of making political science an apologetic discipline. But that is exactly what happened. … In embracing facts alone about the process, modern political science embraced the ever-present. In so doing, political science took rigor over relevance.

Political science that is both relevant and rigorous takes seriously the evidence about human cognitive limitations but is also serious about moral critiques of the current society and aims to help people change it.

See also: what if people’s political opinions are very heterogeneous?; US polarization in context; affective polarization is symmetrical; why political science dismissed Trump and political theory predicted him.

Russia in the larger history of decolonization

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In the first half of the 1900s, empires were headquartered in London, Paris, Vienna/Budapest, Istanbul, St. Petersburg, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Berlin, Rome, Tokyo, and Washington. They were not quite simultaneous. For instance, the apogee of the Japanese empire came in 1942, well after the Ottoman and Hapsburg empires had disintegrated. However, during a single human lifespan, most of the world was dominated by competing empires, most of which fought in the two world wars.

To varying degrees, these capitals and metropoles have had to confront moral issues as their empires have been denounced from outside and within. And they have had to confront deep practical challenges as they have lost the capacity to dominate far-flung countries.

They have handled these moral and pragmatic issues in various ways and to varying degrees, none of them completely well. Perhaps Germany, Japan, and Italy made the cleanest breaks as a result of their defeats in 1945. I know the German case best, and it reflects a strong repudiation of imperialism. However, the moral introspection followed the military disaster–and not immediately.

The two imperial powers that were able to delay the reckoning longest were the US and the USSR, because they emerged from WWII with their military power intact, not defeated or exhausted. Also, both had ideologies that persuaded many of their own people–if few others–that they had never been empires in the first place. The US had the Declaration of Independence and the Monroe Doctrine and called itself the leader of the free world. The USSR was supposedly a union of equal republics united by universalist ideals; Lenin had been a trenchant critic of imperialism.

Today, the USA still has plenty of work to do decolonize. We must equalize power and reckon with past wrongs, above all the conquest and slavery that built the 50 states as well as the remaining territories. And we must recalibrate our relations with the rest of the world. The Afghan and Iraq wars were not only morally untenable but also humiliating defeats for the USA. They echoed the Suez crisis, which taught London and Paris that their imperial days were numbered. There is even a plausible argument that AR-15 are being purchased in huge numbers–and some are being used in mass murders–because of the post-9/11 wars. I suspect that the catastrophes of Iraq and Afghanistan bubble just below the surface of many of our current controversies. Americans feel betrayed by elites. We define our elite enemies in somewhat different ways, but it’s a fact that bipartisan elites supported these wars. Still, we are having a robust conversation about these themes–including an ugly backlash–and our neocolonialists seem to be in retreat in foreign policy.

As for Russia: there may well be a better internal conversation about colonialism there than I would know. Indeed, I am in no position to assess current Russian culture. I am sure that the Russian conversation about colonialism should be robust, fully acknowledging that the Tsarist empire was an example of European colonialism, the Soviet Union was a Russian-dominated empire, the Russian Federation is still 20% non-Russian, the “near-abroad” consists of sovereign states, and recent interventions in countries like Syria and Mali have been morally repugnant (but not unusually so–for instance, Russia’s involvement in Mali directly follows France’s involvement there).

These are moral points. Meanwhile, as a pragmatic matter, Russians must acknowledge that their GDP (even before the current war) was $1.7 trillion: half the size of Germany’s, a tenth of China’s, and less than a thirteenth of the USA’s. The Russian economy is not only relatively small but depends on unsustainable carbon extraction.

The Russian Federation should find its way to being a mid-sized federal republic with a distinctive and diverse cultural heritage, remarkable natural resources, a post-carbon economy, and decentralized power.

Seen in global perspective, it is not actually surprising that Russia hasn’t made this journey yet. It never faced the crises that confronted most of the other empires of 1900-1950. The collapse of the USSR in 1989-91 could be interpreted as a temporary weakness and betrayal, not as a delayed and incomplete conclusion of Russian imperialism.

In The Atlantic recently, Casey Michel wrote, “The West must complete the project that began in 1991. It must seek to fully decolonize Russia.” That statement strikes me as colonialist in itself, replicating the moral superiority and pragmatic hubris that countries like the USA must learn to surpass. Why would “we” succeed in decolonizing a region on the other side of the planet, even if doing so were our business? Citizens of the Russian Federation must decolonize their own country or else continue to decline, both morally and pragmatically. Ukrainians may assist, but their role is to save Ukraine, not to reform their neighbor. And we are right to support Ukraine–for the sake of that country.

I am skeptical that large-scale moral self-criticism is an engine of social change. (See “alerting people to their privilege,” for some evidence.) However, defeat can be an effective teacher.

See also: Putin’s cultural nationalism;  why I stand with Ukraine (from 2015); and Ukraine means borderland (2017)

growing up with computers

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Ethan Zukerman’s review of Kevin Driscoll’s The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media made me think back to my own early years and how I experienced computers and digital culture. I was never an early adopter or a power user, but I grew up in a college town at a pivotal time (high school class of 1985). As I nerd, I was proximate to the emerging tech culture even though I inclined more to the humanities. I can certainly remember what Ethan calls the “mythos of the rebellious, antisocial, political computer hacker that dominated media depictions until it was displaced by the hacker entrepreneur backed by venture capital.”

  • ca. 1977 (age 10): My mom, who’d had a previous career as a statistician, took my friend and me to see and use the punchcard machines at Syracuse University. I recall their whirring and speed. Around the same time, a friend of my aunt owned an independent store in New York City that sold components for computer enthusiasts. I think he was also into CB radio.
  • ca. 1980: Our middle school had a work station that was connected to a mainframe downtown; it ran some kind of simple educational software. The university library was turning its catalogue into a digital database, but I recall that the physical cards still worked better.
  • 1982-85: I and several friends owned Atari or other brands of “home computers.” I remember printed books with the BASIC code for games that you could type in, modify, and play. We wrote some BASIC of our own–other people were better at that than I was. I think you could insert cartridges to play games. The TV was your monitor. I remember someone telling me about computer viruses. One friend wrote code that ran on the school system’s mainframe. A friend and I did a science fair project that involved forecasting elections based on the median-voter theorem.
  • 1983: At a summer program at Cornell, I used a word processor. I also recall a color monitor.
  • 1985: We spent a summer in Edinburgh in a rented house with a desktop that played video games, better than any I had seen. I have since read that there was an extraordinary Scottish video game culture in that era.
  • 1985-9: I went to college with a portable, manual typewriter, and for at least the first year I hand-wrote my papers before typing them. The university began offering banks of shared PCs and Macs where I would edit, type, and print drafts that I had first written by hand. (You couldn’t usually get enough time at a computer to write your draft there, and very few people owned their own machines.) We had laser printers and loved playing with fonts and layouts. During my freshman year, a friend whose dad was a Big Ten professor communicated with him using some kind of synchronous chat from our dorm’s basement; that may have been my first sight of an email. A different dorm neighbor spent lots of time on AOL. My senior year, a visiting professor from Ireland managed to get a large document sent to him electronically, but that required a lot of tech support. My resume was saved on a disk, and I continuously edited that file until it migrated to this website in the late 1990s.
  • 1989-91: I used money from a prize at graduation to purchase a Toshiba laptop, which ran DOS and WordPerfect, on which I wrote my dissertation. The laptop was not connected to anything, and its processing power must have been tiny, but it had the same fundamental design as my current Mac. Oxford had very few phones but a system called “pigeon post”: hand-written notes would be delivered to anyone in the university within hours. Apparently, some Oxford nerds had set up the world’s first webcam to allow them to see live video of the office coffee machine, but I only heard about this much later.
  • 1991-3: My work desktop ran Windows. During a summer job for USAID, we sent some kind of weekly electronic message to US embassies.
  • 1993-5: We had email in my office at the University of Maryland. I still have my first emails because I keep migrating all the saved files. I purchased this website and used it for static content. My home computer was connected to the Internet via a dial-up modem. You could still buy printed books that suggested cool websites to visit. I made my first visit to California and saw friends from college who were involved with the dot-com bubble.
  • 2007: I had a smart phone and a Facebook account.

It’s always hard to assess the pace of change retrospectively. One’s own life trajectory interferes with any objective sense of how fast the outside world was changing. But my impression is that the pace of change was far faster from 1977-1993 (from punchcard readers to the World Wide Web) than it has been since 2008.

a mistaken view of culture

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Until the 1800s, culture was not a “count noun,” a noun that can take a plural form. It was a “mass noun,” which identified a quality that could come in degrees. In English, people did not speak of “cultures” but saw individuals as having more or less culture.

Europeans’ awareness of cultural diversity was generally superficial. For instance, they could not perceive their distance from ancient Greeks, Romans, and Israelites, whom they viewed basically as their contemporaries. They disdained non-Europeans because they wanted to exploit them, but their ethnocentrism also fit with their notion that culture referred to a single scale–and they had more culture than other people. A similar linguistic shift also affected the word “religion,” although it became a count noun somewhat before “culture” did.

Since ca. 1800, a new theory has been available and influential. Here are statements of this theory by quite diverse authors:

“Each nation has the center of happiness within itself, as every sphere has its center of gravity.” – Johann Gottfried Herder, “This, Too, a Philosophy of History,” from Herder On World History: An Anthology, edited by Hans Adler and Ernest A. Menze. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe 1774, p. 40

“The constitution of a people, with its religion, with its art and philosophy, or at least with its ideas and thoughts, its education [Bildung] in general (not to mention other external powers, as well as the climate, the neighbors, the state of the world) forms one substance, one spirit [Geist].” – GWF Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte. Reclam publishing company 1924 (original 1837), p. 25; my trans. I owe the reference to Michael Rosen, The Shadow of God (Harvard 2022).

“Never did one neighbor understand another: his soul always wondered at his neighbor’s madness and evil. A table of values hangs over every people. Behold, it is a table of their overcomings; behold, it is a voice of their will to power.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, “Of the Thousand and One Goals,” from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1885. (my trans.)

“A language, with its expression and its evolution, is not the work of scattered units, but of an historical community: only he who has unconsciously grown up within the bond of this community, takes also any share in its creations. But the Jew has stood outside the pale of any such community, stood solitarily with his Jehovah in a splintered, soilless stock, to which all self-sprung evolution must stay denied, just as even the peculiar (Hebraic) language of that stock has been preserved for him merely as a thing defunct.” – Richard Wagner, Judaism in Music, (1850) trans. William Ashton Ellis

“By ‘tradition’ is not meant the dead weight of outlines, of superficial laws and customs–but an inward spirit, the genius of a people, a harmony with the most constant expressions of our country.” – Eugenio Montale, Stile e Tradizione (1925) p. 153 (my trans.)

“[Class struggle is] always specified by the historically concrete forms and circumstances in which it is exercised. It is specified by the forms of the superstructure (the State, the dominant ideology, religion, politically organised movements, and so on); specified by the internal and external historical situation which determines it on the one hand as a function of the national past (completed or ‘relapsed’ bourgeois revolution, feudal exploitation eliminated wholly, partially or not at all, local ‘customs’ specific national traditions, even the ‘etiquette’ of political struggles and behaviour, etc.), and on the other as functions of the existing world context …” Louis Althusser, “Notes for an Investigation,” Part III of “For Marx” (1962) trans. by Ben Brewster

“Human beings differ, their values differ, their understanding of the world differs; and some kind of historical or anthropological explanation of why such differences arise is possible, though their explanation may to some degree reflect the particular concepts and categories of the particular culture to which these students of the subject belong.” – Isaiah Berlin, letter to Beata Polanowska-Sygulska (Feb. 24, 1986), in The New York Review of Books, Sept. 23, 2004, p. 24

“A modern democratic society is characterized … by a plurality of reasonable but incompatible comprehensive doctrines.” “A reasonable doctrine is an exercise of theoretical reason: it covers the major religious, philosophical, and moral aspects of human life in a more or less consistent and coherent manner. It organizes and characterizes recognized values to that they are compatible with each other and express an intelligible view of the world.” – Rawls, Political Liberalism (Columbia, 1993), pp. xvi, 59

I have chosen quotations by thinkers–from the radical left to the radical right, plus two or three liberals–who share the assumption that there are many cultures in the world, and each culture is reasonably coherent and distinct. An individual belongs to a culture in a similar way as a citizen with a passport belongs to a nation-state.

This model of culture (which is, more broadly, a new account of thinking itself) first arose in response to a growing empirical awareness of ancient and foreign ways of life, plus a desire to protect local traditions against universalistic ideologies. These two reasons explain why the most important source of the new model was Germany in the Age of Revolution. Germans were particularly advanced in historical scholarship (ranging from classical philology to Germanic folklore to an early interest in Sanskrit), and they faced the tangible trauma of a French army with universalistic values.

The new (I would say, “modern”) model has advantages. It makes some sense of the actual diversity among humans and sometimes offers insights about specific ideas or works of art. It can inspire new works when creative people believe that they comprehend the inner spirit of their own people and try to communicate it. And it rationalizes struggles for independence and self-determination, which can be appealing, especially when the protagonists are oppressed.

The modern model also has major disadvantages. It implies that boundaries can be drawn between and among peoples, but any actual boundaries must leave minorities at the mercy of local majorities. It overlooks the heterogeneity of individual opinions, which has illiberal implications. It leads liberals like Berlin and Rawls to advocate a government that is neutral among the incompatible cultures within its boundaries, which is probably impossible and blocks worthy policies. It favors national self-determination not only for oppressed and marginalized groups but also for big and powerful populations. It leads to vexed and often unproductive discussions about who has a right to which cultural forms.

The modern model can generate a profound form of skepticism. If all our beliefs about what is true and good are phenomena of our culture, yet other people have other cultures, how can we be correct about anything? As Berlin suggests in the quotation above, how can we even know which other cultures exist, since our disciplines of history and anthropology must themselves reflect our own culture?

Fortunately, the modern model is false as a description of our human world. Culture is not something to which a person belongs. It is not a thing that has causal power. Culture is a large and usually quite heterogeneous set of ideas, beliefs, memories, skills, and values that a person has and can use.

There is a certain tendency to make the beliefs, values, and skills of a given population increasingly coherent. For instance, Catholic theology, baroque architecture, and monarchical government seem to cohere; as do Buddhist philosophy and Japanese aesthetics. People want their various beliefs to be consistent, and they want other people to agree with them. However, successful efforts to make beliefs and values cohere often require violent political force, because they counteract other tendencies that are also pervasive–tendencies to innovate, to borrow from afar, to distinguish oneself from others, and to complicate received ideas. All populations demonstrate some degree of heterogeneity and incoherence.

To be sure, we are all limited by culture. We have finite time and mental capacity to learn things. Besides, some people won’t allow other people to have access to what they know and can do. (For instance, they may deny access to schooling, restrict the curriculum in various ways, or censor certain ideas.) As a result, each of us only knows some things, and what we know helps to explain what we do. In that sense, culture is causal. Even the aspects of culture that we do use often fail to give us what we want, because nature or other people get in our way.

But we all have somewhat different culture. Indeed, the list of any individual’s ideas, beliefs, etc. is constantly changing. In that sense, culture should not actually be a count noun. There is no number of cultures on our planet. There are more than 7 billion people with constantly changing and circulating bodies of culture. People differ–sometimes profoundly–yet they resist classification. And that means that certain implications of the modern model, from relativist skepticism to hyper-nationalism–are wrong and not only bad.

See also: individuals in cultures: the concept of an idiodictuon; everyone unique, all connected; what is cultural appropriation?; and Putin’s cultural nationalism. (This post repeats many points I’ve made before; any added value lies in the list of quotations, which is new.)

A Festival of Cases, June 24

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There is still time to register for the Frontiers of Democracy conference, which will be held on June 24, 2022, from 9:00-4:30 pm.

The in-person version will take place at Tufts Medical School in Boston’s Chinatown. There is also a parallel Zoom version, which will start at 9:30 and end at 4:00.

This is the registration link: https://tinyurl.com/2p976shr. Note that there are several prices and options. If you wish to attend, please register soon so that we can plan the details and you can receive updates.

This year’s conference has a special format. The main activity will be to deliberate in small groups about the issues raised in selected “civic cases.” People will participate either in face-to-face or Zoom deliberations, not in hybrid discussions, but there will be a few concise plenary presentations.

Civic cases describe difficult choices faced by real groups of activists, social-movement participants, or colleagues in nonprofit organizations. By discussing what we would do in similar situations, we can develop civic skills, explore general issues, and form or strengthen relationships with other activists and thinkers.

Most of the cases for Frontiers 2022 have been developed by the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, Justice in Schools, or the Pluralism Project at Harvard, all co-sponsors of Frontiers this summer. Unlike most cases about business, public policy, or ethics, these stories involve groups of voluntary participants who must make decisions together.

You will be able to indicate your preference for which cases to discuss. This is the working list, still subject to additions and changes: https://sites.tufts.edu/civicstudies/case-studies/.

Before the pandemic, Frontiers of Democracy drew 140 people annually, and some people attended primarily to connect to a professional network. So far, about 45-50 people are registered for the 2022 conference, and about half of those will be remote. People should be aware that the conference will be smaller than usual, although I still anticipate some additional registrants. The “civic cases” format will work well for an intimate conference, but the network will be smaller than usual.