Social science & mainstream politics

Central themes here at Dissident Politics include the intractable irrationality and incoherence of politics and the lack of impact by modern social and cognitive science on the situation. In the wake of Donald Trump's shocking election, that just might be starting to change. This is something worth following to see if it's temporary, like a cat coughing up a hairball, or if something new in political thinking is beginning to coalesce into some meaningful mind set change.

Southern Steenbok

Writing in the Wall Street Journal on December 22, 2016, Hoover Institution senior fellow John H. Cochrane sounded like he was beginning to wake up to the reality of how democracy really works in the real world. The Hoover Institution is an influential, hard core conservative think tank at Stanford University. Cochrane, an economist, was refreshingly candid about his learning moments:

“I have learned some deep lessons from this election and especially its aftermath. Like most policy-wonk types I supposed that people care about policies, and about results, and vote accordingly. And are amenable to sensible discussion about policy, and sensible negotiation. . . . What has become very clear to me since the election is a fact probably blindingly obvious to real students of politics—that’s not at all how it works. Most people vote by cultural affinity, brand, values, and a sense of personal identity. To the extent policy matters at all, it’s part of the buzzwords, propaganda and tag lines thrown back and forth. These things are related to where you live and who you interact with on a regular basis, which is why geographic polarization is such a problem—and why measures like the electoral college, which push our democracy to have more even representation of tribal and partisan alignments and identities are so important.”

That’s an indication that what social and cognitive science, including political science, have been saying about politics and how it works is beginning to sink in with at least some members the punditocracy. Those folks are serious and principled about reality-based democracy and rationality.

Of course, pundits who are in it to win at all costs have been aware of the science for decades. They successfully used the knowledge to deceive and manipulate to get what they want. In 2016, that crass class of players finally got what they have been angling for. They have created the new world of post truth politics that’s now threatening American democracy and other Western liberal democracies. For that crowd, truth is irrelevant. Winning is everything. Deceit and lies are key ingredients.

What’s new is that some principled pundits and members of the mainstream media are beginning to wake up to the threat. A period of trial and error to figure out how to deal with the lies and deceit has started. Depending on which side of the truth you’re on, that’s either good or bad.

All of that raises some questions. Are we really in a new era of post truth politics, or has it always been post truth? Does the situation seem different only because of the rise of fake news sites and sources? Or, is it meaningfully different because social media and online propaganda sources have risen in influence? Or, is post truth politics nothing to be concerned with since lies and deceit in politics are constitutionally protected free speech?

Tyrants, the new cold war and opportunities lost

December 20, 2016

In a Wall Street Journal opinion (December 17-18, pg. A13), former chess champion Garry Kasparov describes his experiences as a citizen of the former Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan during the period of Soviet Union disintegration in the early 1990’s. The fall occurred a series of events that included the resignation of Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev on December 25, 1991. Kasparov saw Gorbachev’s resignation as the result of “a final attempt to keep the Communist state alive.” Kasparov was optimistic that “the Soviet Union would be forced to liberalize socially and economically to survive.” Kasparov was filled with optimism that change would bring a better future for people of Russia and the former Republics.

 

Writing 25 years later, Kasparov laments the lost opportunity with the rise of the new dictator, Vladimir Putin and his intentional erosion of democracy and freedoms in Russia and the former republics. He see an attitude change where “citizens of the free world don’t much care about dictatorships anymore, or about the 2.7 billion people who still live in them.” That attitude change contrasts with John F. Kennedy observation in Berlin in 1963: “Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free.” He argues that Ronald Reagan’s warning that “freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction” might be an understatement in view of recent changes in Western democracies.

Kasparov argues that “Bill Clinton was making jokes with Russia’s President Boris Yeltsin and it was time to party, not press the advantage. . . . . Yet instead of using it to shape a new global framework to protect and project the values of democracy and human rights—as Truman had done immediately to put Stalin in check—the free world acted as though the fight had been won once and for all. Even worse, we made the same mistake in Russia and in many other newly independent states. We were so eager to embrace the bright future that we failed to address our dark past. There were no truth commissions, no lustration—the shining of light on past crimes and their perpetrators—no accountability for decades of repression. Elections did nothing to uproot the siloviki, the powerful network of security and military officials. The offices and titles of the ruling nomenklatura changed, but the Soviet bureaucratic caste remained as power brokers with no accountability or transparency.”

As Kasparov sees it, “the reforms in Russia enacted by a dream team of national and foreign economists were piecemeal and easily exploited by those with access to the levers of power. Instead of turning into a free market, the Russian economy became a rigged auction that created an elite of appointed billionaires and a population of resentful and confused citizens who wondered why nothing had improved for them.”

That somewhat sounds similar to the opinion that many Americans have about their own democracy (as discussed before).

In 2000, Putin took power with few “obstacles capable of resisting his instinct to remake Russia in his own KGB image. He also found a Russian public that felt betrayed by the promises of democracy and afraid of the violence and corruption we saw all around us. Mr. Putin’s vulgar rhetoric of security and national pride would have worn thin quickly had the price of oil not begun to skyrocket in the new millennium. A rising cash flow enabled him to negotiate a Faustian bargain with the Russian people: your freedoms in return for stability. . . . . Outside Russia, at every turn, Europe and the U.S. failed to provide the leadership the historic moment required.”

Compared to right-wing dictatorships transitioning to democracy, Kasparov criticizes socialism and communism. “Left-wing regimes have had a far harder time, as if socialism were an autoimmune virus that destroys a society’s ability to defend itself from tyrants and demagogues.” 

 

Given the state of politics in America and Western liberal democracies, the autoimmune virus seems to have established an infection there as well. How it plays out in liberal democracy hosts remains to be seen. Support for tyrants and demagogues is on the rise. Regardless of how it plays out, the opportunity the West had after the U.S.S.R.’s fall was squandered and is irretrievably lost. Any new opportunity for peace and freedom in Russia and other countries ruled by kleptocratic tyrants and demagogues looks to be at least two generations in the future, assuming another opportunity ever comes along.

The West blew it’s chance. We are beginning to see the ramifications of the failure of short sighted, distracted Western political institutions and thinking.

Questions: Is Kasparov right to argue the West should have played a bigger role and therefore failed in what they did do after the Soviet Union collapsed?

The scope of presidential power

December 19, 2016

Since the election, what’s been going on with conservatives and Trump populists is not clear. Conservatives are talking about constitutional conventions and amendments. Given the lack of coherence, it’s hard to know what populists, or at least Donald Trump, are talking about. 

 

The tyrant usurper: A major complaint from conservatives has been that president Obama has abused and unconstitutionally applied or expanded executive powers by unilateral action. One reason for that is, as one observer puts it, Obama was trying to “circumvent congressional inaction or opposition.” That raises the narrow question of whether a president facing a hostile congress has a duty to try to govern via executive action when congress is broken. It also raises the broad question of what the constitutional scope of executive power actually is. Maybe Obama wasn’t a usurper at all and had a duty to act in the face of an AWOL congress.

Given the constitution’s lack of detail on many matters, including the scope of executive power, the question cannot be conclusively resolved. Opinions on the various sides will be dictated mostly by social identity, personal ideology and a personal rational that supports personal belief. There’s no surprise since that’s the basis for most political beliefs and the historical record is almost always open to various interpretations. Put another way, most political beliefs, including ones about the scope of executive power, are mostly personal and subjective.

The case for the unconstitutional executive: Writing in the Wall Street Journal (December 17-18, pages C1-C2), Jeffrey Rosen, President and CEO of the non-partisan National Constitution Center and professor of law at George Washington University (Yale law school graduate), argues that executive powers “have ballooned far beyondtheir constitutional bounds.” Coming from a bona fide non-partisan constitutional scholar, that’s a striking claim.

Rosen’s essay, The Over-Inflated Presidency, argues that the debate centers on whether constitutional executive powers are limited to what the constitution explicitly authorizes. One interpretation, the ‘conservative’ view, is that executive power is limited to those explicitly enumerated. The powers include power to command the armed forces, at least in times of war, if not always, veto of congressional legislation, pardon for certain offenses, power to convene congress to declare war and power to make executive appointments and treaties with senate advice and consent.

Another interpretation, the ‘populist’ view as Rosen sees it, is that the president has the authority do whatever the constitution doesn’t explicitly forbid. Rosen fears that president Trump will have this mind set. 

A third view, one that Rosen doesn’t mention, is a pragmatic, public service-focused view holding that although executive power is flexible or ill-defined, it falls short of imposing tyranny as described by some reasonably acceptable conception of presidential power, e.g., no unreasonable or unnecessary infringement on (i) constitutional personal freedoms, (ii) state powers and (iii) congressional powers. For the pragmatic view, the devil is in the details, e.g., what’s the definition of unreasonable and unnecessary? Those concepts have meanings that vary with the observer’s mind set.

Of course, the conservative and populist views also have their own devils. The constitution does not say that the president is limited to only enumerated powers, or that the executive can do whatever the constitution doesn’t expressly forbid.

Rosen, a believer in the conservative narrow scope vision of presidential power makes the following observations. They illustrate the practical difficulty in attempts to definitively define constitutional limits on executive power.

Rosen points out that since the constitution doesn’t specify if the president has powers beyond what was enumerated, “it fell to George Washington to fill in some of the gaps—establishing, for example, the president’s power to recognize foreign governments . . . .” That’s an explicit statement that executive powers include at least some matters the constitution is silent about.

There’s nothing surprising about the existence of “gaps” in the constitution because the constitution would have to specify every possible act a president would need to undertake, which is an impossible task. President Washington ran into the limits of express powers regarding the constitutionality of chartering a national bank. That led to the birth of the concept of constitutional flexibility and that some powers are implied to exist because they are necessary and proper for the normal functioning of government. The courts continue to recognize implied powers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied_powers) that are not explicitly named in the constitution.

Rosen argues that Franklin D. Roosevelt “exercised extraordinary powers across many domains: detaining Japanese Americans in California prison camps, trying and executing accused Nazi saboteurs, disregarding U.S. neutrality by implementing the Lend-Lease program and ultimately constructing the New Deal administrative state. He did all of this, it should be noted, with the tacit or explicit approval of Congress and the Supreme Court.”

That raises the question of why neither congress nor the courts acted at the time of FDR and any time thereafter to restrain executive actions that are far beyond constitutional bounds. If some of what FDR did was blatantly unconstitutional, why do most or all of his illegal actions still stand today? The situation makes no sense, unless one assumes that what FDR did was arguably within the scope of executive power.

Alternatively, one could argue that once an illegal executive action has been taken and not timely challenged, it becomes legal by default of the legislative and judicial branches. There’s no constitutional or logical basis to believe the latter option applies, so the former best explains the situation. Even today in 2016, congress or the federal courts could repeal or strike down FDR’s illegal acts if they were in fact illegal.

 

When congress is AWOL: We are in a time when congress doesn’t function properly. Partisan disputes have displaced regular debate, compromise and legislating. Maybe that will change when the new congress convenes in 2017. Maybe it won’t. Regardless, president Obama had to work with a hostile congress that has not functioned normally at least since republicans took control of the House after the 2010 elections. Under the circumstances, should the scope of presidential power be as the conservative view sees it even if congress is dysfunctional?

Two fundamental problems: The constitution could have included language specifying that the president either had powers not otherwise reserved to the other branches of government, the states or the people. It could have stated the president had no powers beyond those enumerated. Instead, the constitution is simply silent.

Given the long history and continued judicial and congressional acceptance of some flexibility over the scope of presidential powers, it’s reasonable to believe that the president has some powers that are not enumerated and those powers can include ones far beyond the constitutional bounds that some experts like Rosen see. If nothing else, that’s how American politics have in fact operated under the constitution. That alone should count for something.

A second problem is that arguments for a scope of presidential power limited to the enumerated powers plus some “gaps” are rarely or never accompanied by any vision of what needs to be changed, how that would be done and what effects on the American people that would likely impose.  Rosen’s criticism is no different. He gives no vision for how government would work differently and why or how that would be better.

He also says nothing about what effects on society a narrow powers scope president would have or how America and society would have been different and better if all presidents going back to Washington had strictly adhered to only enumerated powers and no more. If nothing else, Americans deserve to know how government action would have been different and how that might have changed America.

The User Illusion

December 18, 2016

Book review: In The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down To Size (Penguin Books, 1991, English translation 1998), Danish science writer Tor Norretranders dissects the powerful illusion that humans believe that what they see and think is accurate or real. The User Illusion (TUI) relentlessly describes human consciousness and the biological basis for the false realities that we believe are real. TUI is about the constraints on knowledge. The 2nd law of thermodynamics and the curse of always increasing disorder (entropy), information theory and mathematics all make it clear that all sentient beings in the universe operate under severe information constraints. That includes the limits on the human mind. To believe otherwise is a mistake, or more accurately, an illusion.

TUI’s chapter 6, The Bandwidth of Consciousness, gets right to the heart of matters. Going there is an enlightening but humbling experience. When awake, the information flow from human sensory nerves to the brain is about 11.2 million bits per second, with the eyes bringing in about 10 million bits per second, the skin about 1 million bits per second, with the ears and nose each bringing in about 100,000 thousand bits per second. That’s a lot, right? No, it isn’t. The real world operates at unknowable trillions of gigabits/second, so what we see or perceive isn’t much. 

Fortunately, humans needed only enough capacity to survive, not to know the future 10 or 100 years in advance or to see a color we can’t see through human eyes with just three different color sensing cell types (red, green, blue). For human survival, three colors was good enough. Evidence of evolutionary success is a planet population of about 7.4 billion humans that’s rapidly heading toward 8 billion.

Given that context, that 11.2 million bits/second may sound feeble but things are much weirder than just that. The 11.2 million bits/second are flowing into our unconscious minds. We are not conscious of all of that. So, what is the bandwidth of consciousness? How much of the 11.2 million bits/second we sense do we become aware of?

The answer is about 1-50 bits/second. That’s the estimated rate at which human consciousness processes the information it is aware of. Silently reading this discussion consumes about 45 bits/second, reading aloud consumes about 30 bits/second, multiplying and adding two numbers consumes about 12 bits/second, counting objects consumes about 3 bits/second and distinguishing between different degrees of taste sweetness consumes about 1 bit/second.

What’s going on?: It’s fair to ask what's really going on and why does our brain operate this way. The answer to the last question is that (i) it’s all that was needed to survive, and (ii) the laws of nature and the nature of humans, which are severely limited in data processing capacity. The human brain is large relative to body size but nonetheless only it processes information at a maximum rate of about 11.2 million bits/second, most of which we never become consciously aware of. That's human bandwidth because that’s what evolution resulted in.

What’s going on is our unconscious mind taking in information at about 11.2 million bits/second, discarding or withholding from consciousness what’s not important or needed, which is about 50 bits/second or less, and then presenting the little trickle of important information to consciousness. That’s how much conscious bandwidth (consciousness) that humans needed to survive, e.g., to finagle sex, spot and run away from a hungry saber tooth cat before being eaten, find or hunt food, or do whatever was needed to survive. In modern times, our mental bandwidth is sufficient to do modern jobs, build civilization and advance human knowledge.

If one accepts the veracity of the science and Norretrander’s narrative, it is fair to say that the world that humans think they see is more illusion than real. Other chapters of TUI and the science behind the observations reinforce this reality of human cognition and its limits. For example, chapter 9, The Half-Second Delay, describes how our unconscious minds make decisions about 0.5 second before we become aware of what it is we have unconsciously decided. Although there's room for some disagreement about it, we consciously believe that we made a decision about 0.5 second before we became aware of it. Current data suggests that decisions can be made unconsciously about 7 to 10 seconds before we're aware of the decision.

In other words, we operate under an illusion that our conscious mind makes decisions when that's the exception. The rule is that our unconscious minds are calling the shots most of the time. When it comes to perceiving reality, the low-bandwidth signal the brain uses to create a picture is a simulation that we routinely mistake for reality. As Norretranders sees it, consciousness is a fraud. That’s the user illusion.

Questions: Is some all, some or none of this credible? Why? Can conscious reason or thinking contradict an unconscious decision once it becomes conscious, i.e., if free will is defined as conscious control of decisions, is there such a thing as human free will?