Fallacious political thinking of our time

By Simon Kuper

https://www.ft.com/content/59b5d70e-00b1-44ee-9580-0871c7727ff4

Since 2016, a bizarre sequence of events has challenged our belief in political rationality. First, populism (chiefly, the votes for Brexit and Donald Trump), then the pandemic and now Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine have uncovered previously concealed strains of fallacious thinking. People keep acting apparently against their own self-interest, from Brexit voters making themselves poorer to antivaxxers risking death, to the Russian state destroying the wellbeing of its citizens.

 Indeed, perhaps the emblematic politician of our time, Trump, displays an unmatched understanding of human irrationality, as if he’d absorbed the entire corpus of behavioural economics. Meanwhile, opponents of these movements, like me, keep failing to foresee their next illogical choices. Here I’ve tried to identify the biggest irrationalities on both sides. 

 The first is the self-interest fallacy: the notion that people will always choose their own economic advantage. From Karl Marx until 2016, it was widely believed that “it’s the economy, stupid” — an analytical error that I kept making. Almost the only argument of the Remain campaign ahead of Britain’s referendum was that Brexit would make the country poorer.

 But post-referendum research by academics Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin showed that most Leavers cared more “about perceived threats to their identity and national group”. I’ve finally grasped that when people have to choose between their status, their income or life itself, many choose status, suggesting Russia’s elite might prefer European war to status-destroying retreat. 

 Next up is the set of fallacies around expertise. It’s become apparent that many people don’t understand how it works, and demand a certainty and precision that expertise generally cannot offer. Experts aren’t always right. They are merely wrong less often than non-experts. Yet people still dismiss expertise by pointing to one expert’s error.

 Something else that’s poorly understood: expertise advances over time. Our understanding of Covid-19 changes as experts learn more. Lastly: experts are better at explaining what happened than at making predictions. So we know more about the mechanics of climate change than its future path. 

 When asked for predictions, experts prefer to lay out a set of possible scenarios. But this is too wishy-washy for some people. You see the demand for certainty in arguments about vaccine safety or nuclear energy. The way to think about these issues is by assessing relative risk: taking a Covid vaccine poses a tiny risk, massively outweighed by the benefits. Similarly, future risks from nuclear energy are probably outweighed by the present dangers of climate change. But relative risks seem hard to grasp.

 Of course, many people oppose experts for status reasons: experts may know things, but they are arrogant. A popular alternative to expertise is “simplism”: the belief that complex problems have simple answers. Simplists cannot accept that some explanations may be true and yet too complex for laypeople to understand. They prefer to blame, say, bad elites rather than intractable societal causes. Simplists stick to their views come what may, as per the Brexiter refusal to admit that Brexit has failed.

 Simplists like conspiracy theories. Any event can be explained in a satisfyingly simple manner by blaming it on a person or group who might conceivably benefit from it, from a witch 400 years ago to George Soros today. There’s a touching faith in the power of elite evildoers to co-ordinate impossibly involved conspiracies.

 Then there’s partisanship. As Steven Pinker argues in his recent book Rationality, most people don’t want to be rational: they just want their side to win the argument. When they try to understand the world, their first question is: who do I support? In choosing their side, some people reward norm-breaking — from unbrushed hair to bald-faced criminality — which they equate with authenticity.

 And people back the politicians who tell entertaining stories. This valuing of words over good government also pervades the American left, which sometimes obsesses more about insensitive speech than about discriminatory social structures.

 When people assess characters outside their own society — Putin, say — they often use the principle of “my enemy’s enemy”. Many western rightwingers liked Putin because he opposed their enemies: feminists, gay people and Hillary Clinton. Sometimes, though, your enemy’s enemy is just a war criminal.

 When political leaders get attacked, partisans respond with whataboutism. So any criticism of Trump prompts a takedown of Joe Biden. But whataboutism rests on the “two wrongs make a right” fallacy. It’s also usually incommensurate in degree: Trump and Biden are both flawed, as is everything else, but one of them could destroy US democracy whereas the other is merely a mediocrity. 

 There: now that I’ve explained irrationality, people will surely ditch it.

There: now that I’ve explained irrationality, people will surely ditch it.

Unless democracy defend itself, autocracy will destroy it

Anne Applebaum

Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic, fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, and author of Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, writes this in The Atlantic:

In February 1994, in the grand ballroom of the town hall in Hamburg, Germany, the president of Estonia gave a remarkable speech. Standing before an audience in evening dress, Lennart Meri praised the values of the democratic world that Estonia then aspired to join. “The freedom of every individual, the freedom of the economy and trade, as well as the freedom of the mind, of culture and science, are inseparably interconnected,” he told the burghers of Hamburg. “They form the prerequisite of a viable democracy.” His country, having regained its independence from the Soviet Union three years earlier, believed in these values: “The Estonian people never abandoned their faith in this freedom during the decades of totalitarian oppression.”

But Meri had also come to deliver a warning: Freedom in Estonia, and in Europe, could soon be under threat. Russian President Boris Yeltsin and the circles around him were returning to the language of imperialism, speaking of Russia as primus inter pares—the first among equals—in the former Soviet empire. In 1994, Moscow was already seething with the language of resentment, aggression, and imperial nostalgia; the Russian state was developing an illiberal vision of the world, and even then was preparing to enforce it. Meri called on the democratic world to push back: The West should “make it emphatically clear to the Russian leadership that another imperialist expansion will not stand a chance.”

At that, the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, Vladimir Putin, got up and walked out of the hall.

Meri’s fears were at that time shared in all of the formerly captive nations of Central and Eastern Europe, and they were strong enough to persuade governments in Estonia, Poland, and elsewhere to campaign for admission to NATO. They succeeded because nobody in Washington, London, or Berlin believed that the new members mattered. The Soviet Union was gone, the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg was not an important person, and Estonia would never need to be defended. That was why neither Bill Clinton nor George W. Bush made much attempt to arm or reinforce the new NATO members. Only in 2014 did the Obama administration finally place a small number of American troops in the region, largely in an effort to reassure allies after the first Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Nobody else anywhere in the Western world felt any threat at all. For 30 years, Western oil and gas companies piled into Russia, partnering with Russian oligarchs who had openly stolen the assets they controlled. Western financial institutions did lucrative business in Russia too, setting up systems to allow those same Russian kleptocrats to export their stolen money and keep it parked, anonymously, in Western property and banks. We convinced ourselves that there was no harm in enriching dictators and their cronies. Trade, we imagined, would transform our trading partners. Wealth would bring liberalism. Capitalism would bring democracy—and democracy would bring peace.

This is just a reminder of how threats can sneak up on a society and an ideal and then wreak havoc once the threat becomes strong enough to act. Society and the ideal feels safe, but they aren't. A few keep raising the alarm, but they get buried and swept away in the ocean of comforting everyday noise. Everything from profit motive to mistaken reasoning and lack of time to think helps hide the threat and keep minds dulled. 

Germaine’s definition of American fascism

The label “fascism” or “Nazi” I allegedly use to characterize the Republican Party and certain groups of people keeps getting criticized. Instead of trying to explain myself over and over, I give an explanation here. If need be, I’ll revise this 

First, I do not use the label fascist or Nazi, out of respect for those who suffered and/or died in the 20th century from those authoritarian political ideologies. I know the situation in the US is not yet as bad as it was in 1920s, 1930s and 1940s Germany or Italy. Instead, I use qualified labels in a desperate attempt to try to get all people, especially Americans, to get a feel for how grave and urgent right wing attacks on American democracy, truth, etc. really are right now. 

I usually only use qualified labels like American fascism, American fascist(s), neo-fascism and neo-fascist(s) to characterize the people and groups in the modern radical right American political movement. That movement is anti-democratic, anti-inconvenient facts, truths and reasoning, anti-secularist, anti-civil liberties, including anti-free and fair elections, pro-authoritarian, pro-Christian theocratic, and/or pro-laissez faire capitalist. The focus and power of this anti-democratic movement is located mainly in the Republican Party. Due their hate of government, at least some libertarians are also neo-fascist in their policy preferences, not necessarily in their own minds.

I use those qualified labels to avoid descending into demagoguery or disrespect for those who suffered and died in the last century. Whether the qualified labels succeed in avoiding demagoguery or disrespect will be in the beholder’s eye. That won’t change. But at least my good faith intent should be clear.

Germaine’s American fascism & neo-fascism

Messy 21st century American fascism

These traits are present to varying degrees at various times among various groups and individuals, particularly the Republican Party leadership, most of its rank and file, nearly all of its major donors, and all or nearly all of its propaganda Leviathan, e.g., Fox News. My conception of American fascism and neo-fascism is people, groups or special interests who, to some non-trivial extent, adhere to or share at least five of the following eleven beliefs or traits:  

• Due to decades of intensely deceptive propaganda, most rank and file supporters probably do not know that they support a version of fascism; most (~96% ?) mistakenly believe they are fighting for democracy, truth and civil liberties from grave threats; “Many would be unhappy to learn all of the details about what their leaders are proposing. Much of this group votes identity, not policy.”; personal ignorance and false beliefs do not change the fact of support for anti-democratic authoritarian politicians and policies 

• Hostility toward and distrust of the professional, not partisan, American free press; “The press is doing everything within their power to fight the magnificence of the phrase, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! They are truly the ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!”

• Anti-democratic hostility toward and distrust of free and fair elections; More than 40% in US do not believe Biden legitimately won election

• Heavy reliance by elites and donors on relentless torrents of well-funded, well-researched propaganda to deceive, divide and foment irrational distrust, fear, rage, hate and intolerance; inconvenient facts, truths and sound reasoning are ignored, denied, distorted or downplayed and replaced by lies, deceit and objectively flawed partisan motivated reasoning; blatant lies, hypocrisy and double standards are normalized and mostly uncritically accepted by the rank and file

• Hate and/or irrational distrust of government, including government regulations on businesses; advocacy of laissez-faire capitalist policies that are claimed to be pro-liberty, but that actually transfer power from governments to private sector special interests, thereby tending to damage individual liberties while special interest power over individuals expands 


• Distrust and blind rejection of experts, science and empirical data, particularly when the content is inconvenient, e.g., assertions of inconvenient truth such as human caused climate change is not a hoax, American was not founded as a Christian nation, or COVID vaccines are reasonably safe and effective and their use has saved many lives 

• Support, knowing or not, for anti-democratic policies, including laws that make voting harder or more intimidating, or that give power to state politicians to overturn an election outcome they dislike

• Refusal to reasonably compromise; When Compromise Was Not Regarded As Treason -- You have to be older than 40 to remember when government worked properly

• Attacks on or unwarranted distrust of disfavored out-groups including the LGBQT community and racial and ethnic minorities

• Nationalist fervor to the point of causing damage to national interests, such as attacks on allies and international cooperation, and support for dictators and anti-democratic demagogues 

• Continuing support for Trump and/or justification of the 1/6 coup attempt

20th century fascism & a theory of fascism

Italy’s 20th century fascism

Fascism was usually hostile to a free press and generally relies heavily on deceit and division propaganda. It tended to glorify things that are claimed, true or false, to characterize the national race and ethnicity, while vilifying different races and ethnicities. Fascism had a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control of government and society.

Wikipedia: 

Fascism is a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and the economy that rose to prominence in early 20th-century Europe. The first fascist movements emerged in Italy during World War I, before spreading to other European countries. Opposed to anarchism, democracy, liberalism, and Marxism, fascism is placed on the far-right wing within the traditional left–right spectrum.

CBS News: 

Fascism is generally defined as a political movement that embraces far-right nationalism and the forceful suppression of any opposition, all overseen by an authoritarian government. Fascists strongly oppose Marxism, liberalism and democracy, and believe the state takes precedence over individual interests. They favor centralized rule, often a single party or leader, and embrace the idea of a national rebirth, a new greatness for their country. Economic self-sufficiency is prized, often through state-controlled companies. Youth, masculinity and strength are highly fetishized.

The end of World War II saw the downfall of several fascist regimes, but not all. In Spain, Francisco Franco, who incorporated fascist elements in his military dictatorship, hung around for several decades, while other governments, such as that of Juan Perón in Argentina, enacted a kind of fascism-lite, modeling its economy somewhat after fascist Italy.

Jason Stanley -- a theory of fascism: 

....the concept of fascism has wide interpretive applicability across societies that otherwise differ quite drastically from one another.

To rescue the concept of fascism for philosophy requires arguing that fascism has the kind of universal significance and centrality characteristic of philosophical concepts. It must have a recognizable structure that abstracts from local historical contexts, and be capable of being interpretively useful in locations that differ significantly from one another. .... If fascism is a historically located concept, however, then we do not need to be worried about confronting it. Fascism cannot reoccur, and political philosophers in recent decades have been right to ignore it.

If I am right, the view that fascism is a historically located concept is not just false, it is dangerously false. If fascism describes a dangerous ideology with universal appeal, representing it as an artifact of particular past historical circumstances masks a real danger. By not studying fascism philosophically, philosophy lends credence to the view that fascism is not a risk.

Tactics and traits of 20th century fascism

(Jason Stanley)

Capitalism's moral core: The lead paint story

CONTEXT

A second generalization from experience is that the appeal to “social responsibility” has little effect, unless there is an iron fist in the velvet glove of appeals to voluntary restraint. The program either breaks down and is discarded, or it is replaced by a compulsory program—as voluntary price control in the United States in 1941 was replaced by legally imposed maximum price legislation in early 1942. The failure of truly voluntary programs is inevitable and has nothing to do with a lack of “patriotism” or social consciousness. Indeed, the doctrine of “social responsibility,” if taken seriously, is a truly subversive doctrine in a free society. This can be seen in the kind of challenge it offers to a free society. 

Almost without exception, appeals to “social responsibility” arise from an unwillingness to let the price system work. But no one has yet invented or discovered a substitute for the price system in coordinating the activities of millions of people without central control. Because the price system works impersonally, automatically, continuously, and quietly, because it has no press agents, there is a tendency when all goes well to take it for granted and to forget that a function is being performed by it. Almost without exception, however, attempts to replace the price system, or to prevent it from working, have ended in chaos. -- Milton Friedman, Social Responsibility: A Subversive Doctrine, National Review, 24 August 1965, pp. 721–723

In the article cited above, Friedman argues for government to get the hell out of the way of companies, i.e., no regulations, no social conscience. They can be trusted to do the right thing and besides, government itself is incompetent and corrupted by lust for political power. Friedman probably drinks his own Kool-Aid. He actually believes his own nonsense. 

He is wrong to argue that trying to regulate the profit motive nearly always results in chaos. That propaganda leads directly to the false implication that when markets are left alone, chaos does not happen. US history in the days of hard core, unregulated laissez-faire capitalist markets is full of economic chaos and misery for the masses. What causes chaos is not always mostly due to regulations. Unregulated markets can lead to just  as much or more chaos, misery and death.

He is also wrong to argue that a capitalist price system works impersonally. What a staggering load of crap. What the hell did he think that special interests, lobbyists, campaign contributions and wealthy capitalists do with politics -- advocate for the best interest of everyone, with little regard for profit? It is very personal to people with money asking government for favors that are usually pro-wealth accumulating to them personally and often or usually detrimental to the public interest and competition. 

Yes, the price system works as quietly as the people who control it can be. Capitalists want the real workings of the price system out of public view as much as possible, whenever possible. Obviously, capitalists do not want the public to understand or know how they purchase and use government to their benefit and our detriment. Capitalists do not want transparency. Neither does our complicit, corrupt two-party pay-to-play system. Transparency tends to kill rot and most capitalists and most people with political power like lots of rot. For them, opacity is far better than transparency.

The lead paint story

The little guy, JJ, he got lead in him from paint --

a 19-day treatment got some out of him

I frequently refer to moral rot in our two-party political system. Other than lust for profit, assuming that is a moral value, moral rot seems to characterize most big businesses along with the always-present profit lust. The New York Time writes in an article, How 2 Industries Stymied Justice for Young Lead Paint Victims:

The U.S. insurance and real estate industries have waged a decades-long campaign to avoid liability in lead cases, helping to prolong an epidemic. The cost for millions of children has been incalculable.

When Selena Wiley signed the lease for an older rental home in South Bend, Ind., she asked the property manager about lead paint and was assured the house was safe.

But in November 2018 — almost two years after moving in with her partner and three children — Ms. Wiley noticed that their 2-year-old’s appetite had vanished and his constant chattering had stopped.

A doctor soon discovered that the boy, Joevonne, known as J.J., had lead poisoning. The level was so high that he immediately began a 19-day treatment to help rid his body of the toxin, which can cause irreversible damage to a child’s brain and nervous system. A health inspector soon found lead paint and dust throughout the family’s rental home.

Although lead poisoning has decreased substantially since the late 1970s as a result of regulatory actions and public health initiatives, about 500,000 children under 6 have elevated blood lead levels in the United States and are at risk of harm. The issue has only intensified in the era of Covid-19: Rental inspections lagged, exposure increased as people spent more time at home and testing of children fell by 50 percent at times in 2020.

But with little public attention and the approval of state officials, insurance companies across the country excluded lead from their policies, declining to pay out when children were poisoned on properties they covered, according to interviews with health and housing officials, regulators and lawyers who represented children and their families. The move also eased pressure on landlords to fix up their rentals.

Without insurance, there is little chance of recovering money for a child when a landlord has few resources. Property owners who do have substantial holdings have found ways to legally distance themselves from problem rentals, increasingly using L.L.C.s to hide assets and identities. In 2019, for example, a Virginia family that had been awarded a $2 million judgment agreed to accept just $140,000 after the landlord, a major developer, dodged collection efforts.  

As a result, plaintiffs’ lawyers — who often work on contingency, fronting costs and collecting payment only if there is a favorable judgment or settlement — are increasingly declining to file lawsuits.

If not for the obstacles, “I would still be getting up in front of juries,” said Richard Serpe, a lawyer who represented the Virginia family and stopped taking lead cases last year after working on them for three decades. “We have shifted the burden to the people least able to handle it, which is these kids.” (emphasis added)

Once again our rotten two-party political system works quietly with big companies to shield the companies from accountability and social responsibility. Shift the burden of proof to the victims. That is a brilliant profit-boosting strategy.

America has long suffered under a corrupt pay-to-play two-party system. That system now includes a press mostly neutered and corrupted by capitalism (need for profit) and corporate owners. Those owners do not want inconvenient truth about capitalism to be publicly known or understood. 

Protection from taxes, regulations and competitors can all be routinely bought from politicians for special interest cash. For America's brand of laissez-faire capitalism, profit talks and social responsibility walks. That includes human health and life walking whenever big profit is talking.