I don't think you are being uncharitable toward Fukuyama, but I do think you are engaging in a type of analysis you are prone to criticize in others. I don't remember what you call it, but it has to do with claiming to understand the other side's motives better than they, or something to that effect. I strongly suspect Fukuyama would object to your characterization of him--that he loathes a particular social class or that he is motivated by class sympathies.
This is not to say I think you are wrong about Fukuyama. Rather, I think (with utmost respect) that you are a bit too heavy-handed with this particular criticism in general. When a car salesman behaves as though I am his long-lost best friend the moment I walk onto the lot, I don't think I am out of bounds when I doubt his sincerity and ascribe ulterior motives to this absurdly friendly behavior. I'm probably better served by being a bit presumptive regarding his agenda.
I think you are dead on re Fukuyama's prejudices. Just as I think VDH, for instance, is often dead on when he assumes obvious progressive prejudices or pathologies in his analyses. To take a face value anyone's explicit reasoning for anything is often more naive than helpful. Indeed, and for what it's worth, I don't mind a little psychoanalysis sprinkled onto my commentary every now and then.
Current polarization-solvers are in the same category as privacy worry-warts. I fail to see what would be achieved by their rambling solutions. The woke have taken over the institutions and need to be crushed if we are to survive at all. They may end with a whimper or it may take more DeSantis Bangs. Until their impact on our institutions is neutralized, depolarization is an abstract distraction that is tedious and uninspired.
I suspect Fukuyama, and a lot of center-left pundits like him, just don't interact that much with young people, since they themselves are middle aged and upwards, and doesn't appreciate that his wing of the party has already lost the war and are just coasting at this point. They think the modal Democrat is a Bill Clinton style moderate, and that the 'bad wing' of the Democratic party is a fairly small minority. But demographic trajectory is clearly against them - I don't know why or how they don't know this, as every poll that tracks politics by age group shows each younger age group more radical than the preceding one.
I'm not sure what timeframe Fukuyama is thinking about, but long term, the GOP is the only party that will face pressure to become more moderate, and eventually it will (younger Republicans are consistently to the left of older ones, so even the stylistic rightward lurch of the GOP is bound to be temporary). Standard Christian conservatism won't be a viable ideology for a major party in 20 years. Unless there's some major 'paradigm shift' in the near future, time is definitely on the left's side, so there's no incentive for the more extreme elements to rally around a moderate.
Demographic inevitability is the bane of moderation.
Sure, it might come a little slower then you thought. You might get ahead of it. There might be a temporary backlash. But, as they say, history is on your side. Nobody said that history would be pleasant.
When I think about what kind of policies could help the right win huge majorities, I imagine things that really matter. Universal school vouchers. Bigger child tax credits. Ending affirmative action. Amongst others.
But I'm not sure what the big center left vision is. If recent events are a guide, aren't we talking Obamacare subsidies, green energy pork, and highly questionable CBO scores.
The one area I have no optimism in in foreign policy. I don't think either party is interested in anything other then bigger budgets and more warmongering.
I agree with your take. I think the Republican Party probably has tremendous momentum down their current path, if they could find a way to remove the baggage of Trump. This is why DeSantis seems so formidable. I suspect a Trump-lite GOP would be able to form a pretty effective coalition of working class whites and upwardly mobile but conservative minorities, much like the Democrats had in a prior generation.
I think the Democrats are in a very weak position and have banked future success on a progressive agenda premised on the idea that they could pick up upper and upper middle-class voters while retaining all of the working class / minority voters who are leaving for the GOP.
We’ll see.
Sadly, the one thing I’m confident of is that a politician who stands for what I believe in – competent management, low regulation, free trade, avoidance of government getting involved in moral issues, etc. (basically libertarian / classical liberal ideas) – stands basically 0% chance of winning any election anywhere.
The actual results from the 2020 election, Trump losing but the GOP gaining 16 seats in the House, would seem to indicate that it will be much easier for the Republicans to become a center-right majority than for the Democrats to move back to a DLC-style platform.
Fukuyama and most moderate Dems. like J. Haidt, refuse to open their eyes to the discrimination that is most driving polarization today.
Colleges don't hire Republicans, pro-life folk, active Christians.
This allows the college ed elite to demonize the Reps, which they've been doing, increasingly, since FBI #2 Mark Felt, passed-over for #1 director, helped get rid of Nixon.
The Dem deep state, and polarization, has been getting worse since then. The raid on Trump's home over documents is just "another outrage".
Democrats not outraged by Stasi-style police-state behavior are not moderates - and those not voting for Republicans support continued demonization, in practice.
Thanks Arnold Kling. I think you misdiagnose anti-establishment support for Trump as a "personality cult." As highlighted by Fukuyama, current American politics are very divided and antagonistic. Thus, what you see as cultish support for Trump may really be cultish opposition to the news media, leftism in academia, etc. It's about getting even (or "standing up").... Just as many of these Trump supporters elected Trump because they disliked Clinton, his current "cultish" support seems really to be a somewhat unified opposition to what is seen as the establishment. Such anti-establishment motivation seems like the defining characteristic of populism.
It will be far easier for the Republicans to return to fiscal sanity, more open borders, free trade, and individual responsibility than for Democrats to reject the nanny state and the concept that government bureaucrats and regulators are intelligent enough to manage everyones affairs. As Trump is in the age bracket where his mortality probability becomes increasingly higher each year, we could easily luck out and he drops dead or becomes senile. Without the "dear leader" as figurehead, his whole movement will almost certainly fail.
Virtually all our non-stem elites from universities to our government, legal system, and political system believe "they know what is best for all". Their desire to direct others is a more primitive drive for undefined "power" making it less likely the Democrats will change. The death of any Democratic leader won't make any significant difference. They will always resist accountability and truth for all their failures.
As the complexity of our society and technological economy continue to increase, the ability of central management becomes more impossible, but the delusion of centralized control continues as some bureaucrat forgot to order the bottling of the monkey pox vaccine the tax payers had already bought.
I continue to think the solution is to divide the government based on competencies. In all the talk about the Networked State and the importance of Geography, it's implicit that the technology of government in the past required, at best, the election of generalists. We had to have a single governing authority to deal with all matters. I don't see why this still applies. That is, we probably still want a generalized Congress or State Legislature for some issues, but why not devolve different portfolios to new and different elected bodies?
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"Many political reform proposals face a chicken-and-egg problem, however: you can’t enact legislation to reduce polarization until you’ve reduced the level of polarization. The path to a long-term solution is blocked in the short run. The only way to resolve this conundrum is through the democratic process itself: that is, through a decisive electoral victory by one party that seeks to promote serious change, and is able to enact it."
This simultaneously gets close to the mark and misses entirely. I submit it's not a "chicken-and-egg" problem, but two sides of the same coin. A political party that enacted broadly popular and successful policies would reduce polarization and therefore win elections.
Currently, neither party seeks to do this, and the prospect for either party seeking to are almost nil.
I live in Indiana, and the Indiana Republican Party just lost my vote by passing a draconian anti-abortion bill that's not just unpopular, but unpopular with most republicans. They had a chance to take a broadly popular, depolarizing stance, and I would have rewarded them for it. Now I have to punish them.
Democrats nationally didn't have my vote and won't get it because (continuing a string of bad decisions) they passed another ridiculous spending and graft bill.
-----------
Perhaps the solution is to break up the decision-making into tolerable chunks. Let's have separate policy making legislative bodies for social and economic policies. It reduces polarization by allowing us separate votes on separate issues.
"Perhaps Mr. Trump will not run in 2024. Perhaps he will lose, in either the primaries or the general election, and then no longer be a factor."
All of this is entirely possible, and maybe even likely. However, it doesn't matter who the Republicans choose in the primaries- that candidate will immediately become the "new Hitler that is worse than even Trump". And if that candidate somehow manages to win in 2024, the mainstream media will be writing hagiographies to Trump if he so much as says a contrary word against that new candidate. Think I'm wrong? See Dick Cheney and George W. Bush.
I agree that there's a better chance the GOP will move beyond Trump than the Dems will move beyond Progressive Woe-ism. Biden had a chance, but he went left.
White democrats have been increasingly radicalizing towards wokeness since 2010. I strongly doubt that they will change course anytime soon.
I think you're right. Fukuyama is naive about democrats because even radicalized they are his social ingroup while the republicans are now politically closer to him but they are still his outgroup.
The influences that led us to our current polarization remain in place, namely the unfettered and unfiltered noise on the internet (of which this comment is an example, but I hope a well-reasoned one). I am uncharacteristically (for me) pessimistic about either party occupying the middle ground where most or at least the mode of voters reside. Polarization and balkanization of news and information sources and the primary election process, I fear, will prevent both parties from moderating.
I don't think you are being uncharitable toward Fukuyama, but I do think you are engaging in a type of analysis you are prone to criticize in others. I don't remember what you call it, but it has to do with claiming to understand the other side's motives better than they, or something to that effect. I strongly suspect Fukuyama would object to your characterization of him--that he loathes a particular social class or that he is motivated by class sympathies.
This is not to say I think you are wrong about Fukuyama. Rather, I think (with utmost respect) that you are a bit too heavy-handed with this particular criticism in general. When a car salesman behaves as though I am his long-lost best friend the moment I walk onto the lot, I don't think I am out of bounds when I doubt his sincerity and ascribe ulterior motives to this absurdly friendly behavior. I'm probably better served by being a bit presumptive regarding his agenda.
I think you are dead on re Fukuyama's prejudices. Just as I think VDH, for instance, is often dead on when he assumes obvious progressive prejudices or pathologies in his analyses. To take a face value anyone's explicit reasoning for anything is often more naive than helpful. Indeed, and for what it's worth, I don't mind a little psychoanalysis sprinkled onto my commentary every now and then.
Current polarization-solvers are in the same category as privacy worry-warts. I fail to see what would be achieved by their rambling solutions. The woke have taken over the institutions and need to be crushed if we are to survive at all. They may end with a whimper or it may take more DeSantis Bangs. Until their impact on our institutions is neutralized, depolarization is an abstract distraction that is tedious and uninspired.
I suspect Fukuyama, and a lot of center-left pundits like him, just don't interact that much with young people, since they themselves are middle aged and upwards, and doesn't appreciate that his wing of the party has already lost the war and are just coasting at this point. They think the modal Democrat is a Bill Clinton style moderate, and that the 'bad wing' of the Democratic party is a fairly small minority. But demographic trajectory is clearly against them - I don't know why or how they don't know this, as every poll that tracks politics by age group shows each younger age group more radical than the preceding one.
I'm not sure what timeframe Fukuyama is thinking about, but long term, the GOP is the only party that will face pressure to become more moderate, and eventually it will (younger Republicans are consistently to the left of older ones, so even the stylistic rightward lurch of the GOP is bound to be temporary). Standard Christian conservatism won't be a viable ideology for a major party in 20 years. Unless there's some major 'paradigm shift' in the near future, time is definitely on the left's side, so there's no incentive for the more extreme elements to rally around a moderate.
Demographic inevitability is the bane of moderation.
Sure, it might come a little slower then you thought. You might get ahead of it. There might be a temporary backlash. But, as they say, history is on your side. Nobody said that history would be pleasant.
When I think about what kind of policies could help the right win huge majorities, I imagine things that really matter. Universal school vouchers. Bigger child tax credits. Ending affirmative action. Amongst others.
But I'm not sure what the big center left vision is. If recent events are a guide, aren't we talking Obamacare subsidies, green energy pork, and highly questionable CBO scores.
The one area I have no optimism in in foreign policy. I don't think either party is interested in anything other then bigger budgets and more warmongering.
I agree with your take. I think the Republican Party probably has tremendous momentum down their current path, if they could find a way to remove the baggage of Trump. This is why DeSantis seems so formidable. I suspect a Trump-lite GOP would be able to form a pretty effective coalition of working class whites and upwardly mobile but conservative minorities, much like the Democrats had in a prior generation.
I think the Democrats are in a very weak position and have banked future success on a progressive agenda premised on the idea that they could pick up upper and upper middle-class voters while retaining all of the working class / minority voters who are leaving for the GOP.
We’ll see.
Sadly, the one thing I’m confident of is that a politician who stands for what I believe in – competent management, low regulation, free trade, avoidance of government getting involved in moral issues, etc. (basically libertarian / classical liberal ideas) – stands basically 0% chance of winning any election anywhere.
The actual results from the 2020 election, Trump losing but the GOP gaining 16 seats in the House, would seem to indicate that it will be much easier for the Republicans to become a center-right majority than for the Democrats to move back to a DLC-style platform.
Fukuyama and most moderate Dems. like J. Haidt, refuse to open their eyes to the discrimination that is most driving polarization today.
Colleges don't hire Republicans, pro-life folk, active Christians.
This allows the college ed elite to demonize the Reps, which they've been doing, increasingly, since FBI #2 Mark Felt, passed-over for #1 director, helped get rid of Nixon.
The Dem deep state, and polarization, has been getting worse since then. The raid on Trump's home over documents is just "another outrage".
Democrats not outraged by Stasi-style police-state behavior are not moderates - and those not voting for Republicans support continued demonization, in practice.
Thanks Arnold Kling. I think you misdiagnose anti-establishment support for Trump as a "personality cult." As highlighted by Fukuyama, current American politics are very divided and antagonistic. Thus, what you see as cultish support for Trump may really be cultish opposition to the news media, leftism in academia, etc. It's about getting even (or "standing up").... Just as many of these Trump supporters elected Trump because they disliked Clinton, his current "cultish" support seems really to be a somewhat unified opposition to what is seen as the establishment. Such anti-establishment motivation seems like the defining characteristic of populism.
It will be far easier for the Republicans to return to fiscal sanity, more open borders, free trade, and individual responsibility than for Democrats to reject the nanny state and the concept that government bureaucrats and regulators are intelligent enough to manage everyones affairs. As Trump is in the age bracket where his mortality probability becomes increasingly higher each year, we could easily luck out and he drops dead or becomes senile. Without the "dear leader" as figurehead, his whole movement will almost certainly fail.
Virtually all our non-stem elites from universities to our government, legal system, and political system believe "they know what is best for all". Their desire to direct others is a more primitive drive for undefined "power" making it less likely the Democrats will change. The death of any Democratic leader won't make any significant difference. They will always resist accountability and truth for all their failures.
As the complexity of our society and technological economy continue to increase, the ability of central management becomes more impossible, but the delusion of centralized control continues as some bureaucrat forgot to order the bottling of the monkey pox vaccine the tax payers had already bought.
I continue to think the solution is to divide the government based on competencies. In all the talk about the Networked State and the importance of Geography, it's implicit that the technology of government in the past required, at best, the election of generalists. We had to have a single governing authority to deal with all matters. I don't see why this still applies. That is, we probably still want a generalized Congress or State Legislature for some issues, but why not devolve different portfolios to new and different elected bodies?
----------
"Many political reform proposals face a chicken-and-egg problem, however: you can’t enact legislation to reduce polarization until you’ve reduced the level of polarization. The path to a long-term solution is blocked in the short run. The only way to resolve this conundrum is through the democratic process itself: that is, through a decisive electoral victory by one party that seeks to promote serious change, and is able to enact it."
This simultaneously gets close to the mark and misses entirely. I submit it's not a "chicken-and-egg" problem, but two sides of the same coin. A political party that enacted broadly popular and successful policies would reduce polarization and therefore win elections.
Currently, neither party seeks to do this, and the prospect for either party seeking to are almost nil.
I live in Indiana, and the Indiana Republican Party just lost my vote by passing a draconian anti-abortion bill that's not just unpopular, but unpopular with most republicans. They had a chance to take a broadly popular, depolarizing stance, and I would have rewarded them for it. Now I have to punish them.
Democrats nationally didn't have my vote and won't get it because (continuing a string of bad decisions) they passed another ridiculous spending and graft bill.
-----------
Perhaps the solution is to break up the decision-making into tolerable chunks. Let's have separate policy making legislative bodies for social and economic policies. It reduces polarization by allowing us separate votes on separate issues.
"Perhaps Mr. Trump will not run in 2024. Perhaps he will lose, in either the primaries or the general election, and then no longer be a factor."
All of this is entirely possible, and maybe even likely. However, it doesn't matter who the Republicans choose in the primaries- that candidate will immediately become the "new Hitler that is worse than even Trump". And if that candidate somehow manages to win in 2024, the mainstream media will be writing hagiographies to Trump if he so much as says a contrary word against that new candidate. Think I'm wrong? See Dick Cheney and George W. Bush.
I agree that there's a better chance the GOP will move beyond Trump than the Dems will move beyond Progressive Woe-ism. Biden had a chance, but he went left.
"Whether he and the current leadership of the Democratic Party are capable of pulling off anything remotely like this is unknown"
Oh, I think it's known, all right. This is in the "when pigs fly" realm.
A perceptive summary, Mr Kling.
White democrats have been increasingly radicalizing towards wokeness since 2010. I strongly doubt that they will change course anytime soon.
I think you're right. Fukuyama is naive about democrats because even radicalized they are his social ingroup while the republicans are now politically closer to him but they are still his outgroup.
The influences that led us to our current polarization remain in place, namely the unfettered and unfiltered noise on the internet (of which this comment is an example, but I hope a well-reasoned one). I am uncharacteristically (for me) pessimistic about either party occupying the middle ground where most or at least the mode of voters reside. Polarization and balkanization of news and information sources and the primary election process, I fear, will prevent both parties from moderating.