Advice for Democrats and Republicans
I did a short video interview with The Economist, which is turning out to be the most tweeted thing I’ve done in a while. People seem to be interested primarily in the answers I gave when the interviewer, Roger McShane, asked me for specific advice for Obama and Romney. Normally I’m careful not to offer specific campaign advice. Political strategy is a game I know nothing about. All I can do is comment on when and why candidates connect, or fail to connect, with the moral concerns of various groups. So here’s what I said:
Q: How should the Democrats change their message to appeal to a broader base? How should Barack Obama change his message?
A: …The Democrats tend to focus too much on messaging and framing, as though if they can construct the perfect message vehicle, put it up into message space and send it out, it’s going to go into people’s ears, turn a key, like lock-and-key, and get the message across. That’s not the way persuasion works. You have to trust the messenger. Persuasion is not done very well directly. But if you use more indirect means… The bottom line is that if they trust you, they’re more likely to listen to you. And the Right, and especially businessmen… if the business community doesn’t trust Obama, doesn’t trust the Democrats, then when he makes an argument — and there’s some merit to the argument he’s making [in the “you didn’t build that” speech] — they don’t follow the argument carefully and try to understand its logic; they go right for what’s wrong with it.
…So if i had to give advice to the Democrats, it would be: stop focusing so much on how do you message each particular issue, policy, or rule, and think much more about the long term. What does the party stand for, what does it mean to be a liberal in the 21st century?
Q: Is there anything that Republicans should be doing differently?
A: I think the Republicans got their message straight in the 1980s, but… I think the Republicans have become too rigid, and too hard-hearted [in contrast to Ronald Reagan, who was often flexible.] George W. Bush tried to promote compassionate conservatism, I don’t think that really flew. But Mitt Romney really comes across as cold and uncaring. If you’re going to talk about capitalism, well, its weak spot is that it creates losers and victims. And if a governing party doesn’t care about those people at all, well, that’s going to alienate a lot of people. And frankly I think it’s the wrong position to take.
Just to be clear: I love capitalism, and I think that anyone who cares about the poor should love it too. It’s capitalism that generated such vast wealth in the West over the last 250 years that almost everybody was lifted out of poverty, and now capitalism is working its magic by cutting poverty at lightening speed in East Asia and South Asia. But come on, Republicans, read Charles Dickens. We can do better than that. Tell us how you’re going to protect workers from abuse, and protect the public from harmful externalities. Celebrate capitalism, but show us that you’re at least aware that it can cause massive suffering and environmental damage on its path to massive public benefit.
McShane then asked me what is unique about America that generates such high levels of political polarization. I mentioned some of the usual suspects, plus one that I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere, but have been thinking about recently. I talked about how the Founding Fathers set up our governing institutions to pit factions against factions, and to seek out balance between competing interests and institutions. They expected that there would be many cross-cutting divisions, such as the states vs. the federal government, and the three branches of government against each other. But in recent decades, the Left-Right divide has risen to such prominence that it suppresses all other divisions, and that is bad news for a tribal species such as ours:
Our moral psychology makes us very adept at having shifting teams and coalitions, and that can be healthy,* when you’ve got lots of cross-cutting divisions. And the founders of this country knew that. Unfortunately, all those cross-cutting divisions have been wiped away, and there’s just one giant chasm, one giant fault line, and all the institutions of government are lining up along that line. And so everything gets paralyzed, and within each [institution] you get more demonization, more hatred across the line.
Here’s the 7 minute video:
*note: I got the idea that it can be healthy to have multiple competing divisions and identities from an excellent book on our tribal psychology: Us and Them, by David Berreby.
” … come on, Republicans, read Charles Dickens. We can do better than that. Tell us how you’re going to protect workers from abuse, and protect the public from harmful externalities. Celebrate capitalism, but show us that you’re at least aware that it can cause massive suffering and environmental damage on its path to massive public benefit.”
Probably no one, or very few, defend spillover effects which are destructive of the very possibility of the lives which the primary activities are imagined to be enhancing. Tort laws used to handle some of these issues, before government saw big capital as an indispensable social resource – and when taken as a whole and while classing the good with the irresponsible, as a kind of noxious golden goose to be alternately indulged and robbed. We are trying to regulate the subset of sociopaths because prosecuting is too wearying. This is not a matter of basics though, it’s a matter of dealing with the system as found.
But one additional thing that Haidt – and others like him – might ask themselves, if they can even make sense of the following “basics” question, is this: Do people, or you, have a right to be an employee?
It’s not a trick question. But, in answering, as well as coming to grips with what the word “right” might mean [natural, civil, “social” etc.] in the various contexts we might visualize it in, it is also useful to refer back to the definition of an “employee”, and what it implies as far as the supposedly deserving subject goes, and what it entails in the way of implied obligation for the reciprocal party.
Is an employee simply someone who hires out his labor for an agreed upon term, and no more? No. And if you don’t believe it, ask the IRS.
Looking up the old legal definition of an “employee” might be clarifying. It certainly tracks well with the barely coherent and complaining UAW members we see on television.
So, suppose you have a “right” to be an employee. Does this then imply a duty on the part of someone else to supply you with an opportunity to earn money while avoiding the trauma and risks of self-direction?
Now of course, viewed in Darwinian terms, in terms of programmed but jostling human mechanisms, it makes no “real” sense to even ask such a question. But in terms of those illusions we call moral values, or the system as found, it does.
So, from the inside, from within the veil [or one of the veils] of illusion so to speak, where exactly does one’s right to be a dependent of another come from? – one’s entitlement to a “place” constructed by others, the right to be set to time occupying but emotionally satisfying tasks within that place, tasks which also generate an acceptable remuneration?
So, how do you get from A to B, exactly?
Jon, it seems to me that the nature of the persuasion that each party would want to undertake with the “other” side is to speak better to that part of the other side’s moral matrix that they usually miscommunicate with.
So I think it makes perfect sense, as you suggest, to tell Republicans to try to better connect with the higher value placed on caring on the left. They need to tell stories that really connect all the dots between some number of struggling Americans and their vision of authentic success. Their current message seems far too glib about the potential collateral damage that could come from budget cutting and so on.
For the left. I think they need to do a MUCH better job of connecting with the right on basis of the various binding moral foundations that they traditionally undervalue. To me, that means de-emphasizing uber-compassion for groups in that conservatives are prone to seeing free-riding within, and placing much more emphasis on the people hurting now who are hurting despite having done all the so-called right things.
Jon, you have demonstrated that liberals such as yourself do not correctly describe the positions of conservatives, but that conservatives much more accurately describe the positions of liberals. You prove this here: “And if a governing party doesn’t care about those people at all, well, that’s going to alienate a lot of people. And frankly I think it’s the wrong position to take.” Your “rider” knows that to claim the Republican party “doesn’t care about those people at all” is a false statement. But still it serves the “elephant,” who knows that this statement, false as it is, is “the wrong position to take.”
I think that Dr. Haidt makes an error in accepting the premise that liberals “care” more than conservatives do. Actions speak louder than words, and several studies have shown that conservatives give more time and money to charity than liberals do. Liberals are more “liberal” with other people’s money. See “Who Really Cares”by Arthur C. Brooks.
This is clear when you read 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century history. The whole idea of libertarianism, or liberal in the classic European sense, was a revolt against privilege, and it’s still that. This idea of somebody saying, look, I’m going to give North Americans what they want to see in my country, which is all your principles, but I’m not going to go against my elites, and I’m not going to back them and I’m not going to confront them, because I know you also want stability, is not possible. That’s very important for Western countries to realize, that when they call for creation of market economies in developing countries such as mine, they’re calling for revolution, so they’d better get ready for a change in the status quo. You can’t have the old status quo and at the same time have change. If you create change you’re going to go against the traditional friends of the West in these countries, and realize that there’s a lot more that can also be your friends, but we have to shake the system up. There’s no shortcut to revolution. The bringing in of markets, the bringing of capitalism, the bringing in of democracy into the West was a major revolution against the old vested interests. There’s no way that’s going to be any different in developing and former communist nations. And that means you’ve got to be prepared to see the old leaders and the old elites lose their privileges.
Now, what’s really bad about this is that prior to Obamacare, some of the state insurance regulators were pushing insurance coverers to a higher level, where they would provide more coverage rather than less. Obamacare has now put it into law that 60/40 is okay and 70/30 is what the government will pay for. And so the 80/20 and 90/10′s become less common. So you’re going to see more and more people with under-insurance and not going to see lack of insurance completely go away.
Your blog was launched on 12 September, yet in more than three months it has only attracted 17 comments, and three of them were written by you. That’s hardly the “momentum†which is going to change our country. This forum was only started on 7 October but has already attracted 71 members, and our ambitions are nowhere near as grand.
They lie. But this is at least interesting… http://www.gallup.com/poll/113980/Ga…-Approval.aspx Do I think Obama is unpopular? Not really. I think he’s immensly popular. What I think is that governance-by-freak-out doesn’t work. For one, it’s hard to maintain that level of intensity. Really, really hard, as a matter of fact. For another, there has to be at least a small indication that what you’re saying might be true, or could possibly be true. After folks found out federal spending was still going to rise over last year (just not by as much) it was a little difficult for the freak-out to keep people’s attention. Now, I don’t blame the President for this course of action. It’s what community organizers do best and that’s what he is, that’s his talent. The problem is, community organization only works for a community. You can get a lot of people to freak out and change something, but it has to be something that is immediate to them. Something ‘close to home’. Getting people to freak out over an apartment building being closed down or bulldozing a meadow to put in a Wal-Mart? Yeah, you can get people who live there to freak out pretty good. Someone eleven states away that ‘might’ lose their job because of a cut in spending? That’s harder to get worked up about. Not everyone’s job depends on federal spending. As a matter of fact, despite the best efforts of this administration, a surprising number of them don’t. And it gets worse. The markets didn’t crash. And they’re not showing much indication of doing so. This was supposed to be an economy ender, an immedate fission bomb in the tailpipe of the national bus that is America. It didn’t go off. The President spent a ton of political capital on a very disappointing result. My sympathies to the man. This is why senators make lousy presidents.
User growth going negative isn’t on most analyst radars even if the press is starting to ponder the idea.
Your problem is that they can take taxes on offshore assets from your domestic assets, which is why you have to comply with domestic law when you set up an offshore trust.
You might ask should we give to those in need anyway, even when we lack? Of course we should, but taking into consideration the propensity of man to be self-serving and self-interested (this is his nature) it makes it a lot easier for him to part with his abundance rather than his lack (especially in times of desperation). America when she practiced this kind of capitalism best (however imperfectly) has proved this kind of compassion, often by being the leader in feeding the third world.
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But I am going to extract just a piece of Kovel’s argument, which directly considers the structural elements of capitalism that (in Kovels’s view) ensure that capitalism will destroy the world, and why incremental reforms cannot adequately mitigate this dire outcome. Obviously if this argument is true, then Michael Albert’s notions of social justice hardly need be considered: we either jettison Capitalism, or we die — or at least most of us and our descendants die.
Yes, sure. Yes. And again, of all the things out there, the thing that we should be able to manage most is cost and so we’ve been pretty specific about that. Although we’ve said $12.5 billion of noninterest expense, $1.5 billion of that more or less in marketing which in and of itself will actually be just a series of individual calls based on opportunities. We’ve said about $11 billion GAAP expenses, including about $600 million of intangible amortization, a couple of $100 million of integration expense. The revenue side, again, somewhat within our control but ultimately, we’re going to have to see what the market gives us. Our assumption there is that margins will stay reasonably stable and or perhaps see a little improvement versus where we were. In the fourth quarter of last year, you already saw that in the first quarter but margins we kind of have some cross wins. We’ve got obviously continued low rates and a flat yield curve but in the first quarter, we called our trust preferred securities. Those about $3.5 billion with an average coupon of around 8%, thereabout. So we’ve got some benefit on the funding side. We’ll try and manage that as best as we can. See how the mix of the assets goes. In effect, if you take a look at what you saw in the first quarter, what we’re saying is we’re going to see something that looks pretty similar to that over the course of the year assuming no major change in the macroeconomic environment. So it’s probably best to kind of see what just happened to us in the first quarter and assumed that more or less that’s going to be something we should look for over the course of the year. Obviously, some puts and takes here and there but orders of magnitude. I think what you’ve seen is what you’re going to get for a while.