"Do People Believe Things: The Musical" (Act I)

I’ve moved into my new home and am getting ready to start the semester here at the philosophy farm, so now I can finally get around to writing about some of my thoughts after the “Liberalism in the 21st Century,” conference I was at in July. One of the great things about that conference was the sense of camaraderie with people with a wide range of differences and disagreements - on real questions of policy, strategy, and tactics - that were nevertheless united at the most fundamental level of commitment to liberal values. Politics and political theory junkies like me love rooms like that. Most other (one might say ‘normal’) people, I think, would treat spending two days at a conference like that as similar to activities like ‘going to the dentist’ or ‘waiting in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles for six hours.’

As much as I loved my time there, I do think that one of the perennial failings of politics junkies like me is our tendency to wildly overestimate how much politics turns on questions of values, theories, principles, or even marginally coherent and consistent pictures of the world. There’s a strong temptation to defend liberalism at the theoretical level. I think part of this is because it’s a natural and comfortable playing field for those of us who enjoy engaging with theoretical questions. The other part is that getting at those underlying questions of values seems to be the best way of dealing with the ‘root problems’ of the crisis of liberalism. It seems to be the approach that best captures the moral gravity of the situation. 

In some sense that’s true, because there really are people who are committed to different value systems, whether you want to call them illiberal, postliberal, authoritarian, totalitarian, populist, or whatever. It has always been the case that some people have had an over-large portion of the libido dominandi – the lust for power and domination. It might be in the service of race, or class, or religion, or ideology, or just their own personal power and position, but they are never satisfied with liberal ends or liberal means. They reject liberalism precisely at the level of values and principles. They claim that liberalism has failed, that liberalism is deficient, and that liberalism degrades and destroys the things they do value. Those claims are serious, and efforts to rebut them can be valuable

But it’s worth noting that these committed illiberals aren’t a majority, and neither are the committed liberals. I doubt that we’d form a majority combined. A great many people approach politics with a weak or nonexistent attachment to consistent theory, or to these kinds of values. Their focus is on kitchen table issues, even if it’s often based more on ‘vibes’ than any kind of accurate picture of the world. 

Take immigration, which I wrote about in a previous piece. Some people are going to be against immigration because they have prior commitments to racist beliefs: they want to live in a society with mostly or only white people. Those are their values, such as they are. Other people, like me, have prior commitments to non-racist beliefs: we know that a proper understanding of human nature makes the idea of inherent racial differences ridiculous, and therefore a morally wrong basis for treating other people. These are our values. But a great many people aren’t fully committed to either side. They’re open to actions or beliefs that are racist, but they’re also open to actions or beliefs that aren’t. You can convince them that immigration makes them less safe and less prosperous, and from there it’s a short enough step to convincing them that this is because of something inherent in the immigrants themselves, like their race or religion. But you can also convince them of the truth, which is that immigration makes them more prosperous and no less safe, and keep them onside with liberal, pluralist values.

When you have people with fundamentally different values (like the idea that all people are persons of equal moral worth and the idea that some people are better than others because of the color of their skin), one trying to persuade the other is always a long and difficult process. It’s probably impossible to do at scale. Construct a massive timeline of all of recorded human history, throw a dart at any random point on that timeline, and odds are good that the date and place you threw that dart was either experiencing a racist pogrom, about to experience a racist pogrom, or just recovering from a racist pogrom. It’s a bleak view of people, but I am massively skeptical that we’ll ever get to a point where some relatively stable minority part of any population isn’t pretty damn prejudiced against somebody. 

What we can do, though, is to keep that minority part of the population stable and politically contained. The way to do that is to keep them from winning over the third category of person we talked about above: the uncommitted. Anti-immigration racists, like anti-liberals in general, need to persuade those uncommitted people in order to get political power. And if they’re clever, they won’t try to persuade them by being upfront about their racist values, because those things come off as, well, weird (See! Relevant News hook!) to normal, uncommitted voters. Instead, they’ll try to convince them that going along with the racists, and letting them do some racist stuff, is a good way to make their lives better. 

It’s this sense in which I say that the crisis of liberalism isn’t really a crisis of values. Sure, there are people who have illiberal values. There probably always will be, and I doubt we can come up with a way to persuade them at scale. But the crisis of liberalism is that the committed illiberals have gotten pretty good at convincing lots of uncommitted people to support illiberalism anyway. In my next piece, I’m going to talk about how to think about messaging for that political battle, and why sometimes things that are fully true and justified are also terrible rhetorical strategies. But for now, the answer to ‘do people believe things’ is shaping up to be “quite often, for many people, not really.”