Book Review: Age of Fracture, by Daniel T. Rodgers

The Princeton Historian Daniel T. Rodgers has written a fascinating new book about how the U.S. has gone from being one big beacon of light to a thousand little points. The title gives it away. We are in an Age of Fracture. We’ve gone from shared sacrifice and shared identities to individual expression and diffuse identities. We’ve gone from limits to dreams; we’ve shed the confines of the past for the endless possibilities of future reinvention. The only problem is, it’s starting to look like we might now want the past back after all, and limits are starting to look more prudent.

The story begins in the Cold War, an era of asking what you could do for your country. History and tradition weighed heavily; big institutions dominated. “Dedication, courage, responsibility, self-scrutiny and sacrifice,” writes Rodgers, “these were the nouns that bore the burden of the Cold War presidential rhetoric.”

But by the time sunny Ronald Reagan was in the White House, the confining rhetoric of the Cold War was gone and “terms like ‘crisis,’ ‘peril’ and sacrifice slipped one by one out of Reagan’s major speeches like dried winter leaves.” (What can he say? The man likes his collections of representative words.) In Reagan’s speeches, the historian detects the new optimism of self-actualizing philosophy, and the (re?)-birth of an American faith that from three simple words – “We, The People” – anything was possible.

But Reagan may just be the transition’s most visible mouthpiece. The shift away from institutions to individuals was just as much the rage among intellectuals. First, most visibly, in economics: In the 1960s, Keynesian economics was the consensus view, with its focus on institutions and macro-level supply and demand. But then it proved unable to either explain or solve the stagflation of the 1970s, leading Daniel Bell to proclaim that, “nobody has any answers he is confident of.”

Enter the new microeconomics: the atomized market of millions of socially-detached, utility-maximizing individuals, owing nothing to society other than to make themselves happy. “In its very simplifications,” writes Rodgers “it filled a yearning for clarity that the older, more complex pictures of society could not.”

Like Reagan’s soaring rhetoric, the new faith in markets was a way to break free of limits. In contrast to the gray pessimism of planners and government bureaucrats who wanted people to live within their means, the new models bespoke a land of heroic entrepreneurs and innovators, of an America that could re-invent itself constantly from the bottom up.

Other social sciences tracked the trends in economics. In political science, models of rational choice, with their focus on individual utility, replaced the importance of larger institutional structures and forces. Everything now could be explained by examining the incentives of individuals as if they were independent from larger social institutions. Phrases like the “will of the people” became meaningless when complex models showed how impossible it actually was to usefully aggregate independent preferences.

In sociology, the guiding concept of power “grew less tangible, less material, more pervasive, more elusive, until, in some widespread readings of power, it became all but impossible to trace down.” Michel Foucault found power everywhere, and by doing so, effectively rendered it meaningless – for if it was everywhere, than who could pin it down? In anthropology, Clifford Geertz found “nothing but a play of texts.” Everything was performance and masks.

In more popular books, Alvin Toffler’s widely-read Future Shock proclaimed “The death of permanence.” John Naisbitt’s Megatrends promised the triumph of the individual in the new information age.

The politics of race and gender were likewise affected. On the subject of race, conservatives embraced the notion of a color-blind society, and race as a social construct. “In the ‘color-blind’ society project,” writes Rodgers. “Amnesia was a conscious strategy, undertaken in the conviction that the present’s dues to the past had already been fully paid.” Again, the same theme: the triumph of individualism came at the expense of the past. One could not have a world of endless new opportunities if one got bogged down with worries about history and obligations.

On gender, the breakdown was internal to the movement. A representative 1977 woman’s gathering in Houston fell apart when it became apparent there was no single woman’s experience everyone could agree on. The feminist scholar Judith Butler concluded in her landmark book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity: “There were only scripts, nothing outside or beyond them.” Postmodernism strikes again. If everything is socially constructed, nothing has a foundation.

“Choice, provisionality, and impermanence,” writes Rodgers. “A sense of the diffuse and penetrating, yet unstable powers of culture; an impatience with the backward pull of history – these were the emergent intellectual themes of the age.”

And yet by the late 1980s, one could also detect a backlash. In the academy, Allan Bloom railed against the nihilistic deconstruction of everything in The Closing of the American Mind. Conservative think tanks began looking to local communities as sources of civic republicanism. Evangelicals saw the church as the center that could and must hold.

“Conservative intellectuals by the end of the 1980s still yearned for a common culture,” wrote Rodgers. “They could half-remember and half-invent in their mind’s eye a more consensual age, when terms like ‘civil religion’ and the ‘American creed’ had been sociological commonplaces.”

But the great irony was that the new conservative embrace of the American tradition was itself a creative reinvention –a mythic golden age that only selectively drew on actual history.

In conservative legal scholarship, Rodgers writes: “The originalist argument tapped not a desire to go back to any actual past but a desire to escape altogether from time’s slipperiness – to locate a trap door through which one could reach beyond history and find a simpler place outside of it. Originalism’s appeal to the past was, like the economists’ modelings of time, profoundly ahistorical.”

As a document of intellectual history, Rodgers’ book is brilliant. Learned, wide-ranging, delightful to read, full of keen little insights (and epoch-defining bundles of nouns.) But it leaves open the question: is the fracture permanent? “One might reach nostalgically for a fragment of the past,” Rodgers concludes. “But the time that dominated late-twentieth-century social thought was now.”

One way to view politics is about the tension between the individual and the group. All the great political trade-offs – liberty vs. security, equality of opportunity vs. equality of outcome – are at root conflicts between the desires of individuals to do as they please and attempts by the group to keep individuals from doing so much of what they please that the group falls apart. Such a view takes history as civilizations as bouncing back and forth between the two poles: give people too little room for individual self-expression, and they’ll demand to be free. But give them too much room to do whatever they like and be whatever they want, and they’ll demand more order and group identity.

Rodgers leaves us at the moment in which a hunger for a rootedness in history seems to be growing. Have we gone as far as individualism will take us? And if so, what takes us back? Here’s a hypothesis: do the new social networking tools that increasingly dominate our lives restore the possibility of a new and different kind of collective identity? And am I the only one wondering this? Maybe I’d better post this review to Facebook, and see what other people think…

So, surprise, surprise, Barack Obama is officially running for re-election in 2012. As someone who knocked on doors in 2008, I watched the official 2012 announcement video with some eagerness, hoping to be inspired anew. Perhaps he would say something akin to his 2007 speech in Springfield, which launched his then long shot campaign with stirring calls to purpose.

“I want to win that next battle – for justice and opportunity,” he said in 2007. “ I want to win that next battle – for better schools, and better jobs, and health care for all. I want us to take up the unfinished business of perfecting our union, and building a better America.”

But Obama doesn’t even appear in the 2012 video, a two-minute montage of five “volunteers” talking in the most remarkably content-free generalities: “There’s too much that is fundamentally important” says a white man from North Carolina, who later admits, “I don’t agree with Obama on everything” (though he does trust and respect him).

“There are many things on the table that need to be addressed,” says a Latino mom, who wants the best for her children, and for Obama to be the person who addresses, you know, things. An African-American woman reminds us that the President has a job to do, so we’ll have to get inspired ourselves. Fade to blue: “It begins with us,” reads the text.

Yes, I understand what Obama is doing. He’s trying to re-capture what made the 2008 campaign work, which was a propulsive sense of “we” – volunteers caught up in the story of Obama and all he could do. And he could get away with the vagueness of “Hope” and “Change” because all he needed to be then was the anti-Bush. And so I hoped: Here was a real intellectual who will not only take the challenges of governing seriously, but who could also stirringly articulate a national vision of coming together to solve hard problems.

Now, as the 2012 campaign season kicks off, Obama is clearly playing it safe. The fundamentals are on his side. The Republican field is weak; the economy is moving back in the right direction; his poll numbers are decent; demographic shifts are expanding his base of supporters. And Obama’s not one to veer from the cautious path. Especially not at this early stage.

But here’s the thing. In 2008, conservatism was discredited. Heck, even McCain wanted to be the candidate of change. In 2011, conservatism is flourishing again, reinvigorated by the Tea Party. And conservatives are telling a compelling about the American spirit, and the way in which it can be regenerated if only we can get rid of that awful greedy leech responsible for everything that’s gone wrong for the last however many years: Big Government. Moreover, the coalition that Obama put together in 2008 looks decidedly weaker now.

Presidential campaigns can be defining moments. There is no other opportunity for a political figure to speak so often and so loudly to the American people about what we stand for as a nation, to define the moment and define the basis for leadership in it. And yet, most incumbent presidents waste this moment, because they just want to play it safe. They figure, I’ll get re-elected, and then, then I’ll finally be free to offer a true vision, to lead this time for real without actually having to worry about re-election.

Except, second terms rarely offer the opportunity for that defining moment. And they especially don’t offer that opportunity if the campaign hasn’t paved the ground for it, hasn’t prepared the public and made the case. As Irving Kristol once put it: “What rules the world is ideas, because ideas define the way reality is perceived.”

I’m sure the Obama campaign people will come up with some wonderful poll-tested cognitive scientist-approved campaign slogan for 2012 and then repeat it ad infinitum. But in doing so, here’s what I ask: please, please don’t squander this opportunity. Please come up with a message and a story that makes an affirmative case for lasting progressive values of pragmatic experimentation and solving hard problems through collective means. Challenge the Tea Party memes. Reclaim history, reclaim the Founders, reclaim the meaning of American Exceptionalism. These are more than just things on the table. They are the way we understand and make sense of present day events.

The American Prospect‘s Paul Waldman has done us all a great favor by reading and interpreting the latest batch of “campaign books” from prospective 2012 presidential candidates, including Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee and Tim Pawlenty. And after duly noting the relatively low political value of such books, and the low standards governing the genre, he offers some key insights about what they reveal about the Republican zeitgeist of the moment:

Despite their surface differences, the books raise some common questions. How do we answer key policy questions? How important is God to our politics? Is Barack Obama merely wrong about everything, or is he actively attempting to destroy our country? Just how great is America?

Actually, that last question is something the candidates all agree on: America is stupendously great, awesomely great, so great that “great” doesn’t begin to describe its greatness — and Obama just doesn’t get it.

Aside from a peculiar emphasis on “American exceptionalism” that appears to exempt this country not only from healthy self-doubt but from ordinary logic and the lessons of human history, notes Waldman, the books are dominated by an equally unreflexive attitude towards the 44th president, who is always wrong:

In their attempts to understand Obama, the candidates again and again reach the conclusion that when Obama does or says something they like, he’s either shrewdly hiding his real intentions or has been cornered by political reality. When he does or says something they don’t like, he has revealed his true self. So Romney can claim, without any supporting evidence, that “another of President Obama’s presuppositions is that America is in a state of inevitable decline,” just as Palin avers that Obama “seems to see nothing admirable in the American experience.” How do they know this? Well, they just do. None of the candidates provides any quotations in which Obama apologizes for America because he never actually has. And don’t bother bringing up the hundreds of speeches in which Obama has lavished praise on this country, because as Romney says, “President Obama is far too gifted a politician to say in plain words that America is merely one nation among many.” However, if we take some things Obama has said out of context and make a series of absurd leaps in logic to arrive at the worst possible interpretation of them, then we will learn the truth.

America is great, and Obama wants to destroy it. That’s the overriding theme of proto-candidates working in the most expansive format they’ll ever use.

As it happens, I was involved as a “ghost” in a “campaign book” for a candidate running against an incumbent president in 2004, and I can tell you that George W. Bush’s sins and shortcomings were in the background, not the forefront, of the policy-heavy tome. And while the book was full of invocations of America’s greatness, they were deployed not to congratulate Americans for their superior virtue, but to encourage them to meet common challenges, most of which have yet, seven years later, to be seriously addressed.

It’s an open question as to whether GOP presidential candidates can make it all the way through the nomination process–and for the winner, all the way to November of 2012–on a message that essentially tells Americans there is nothing wrong with their society that firing Barack Obama can’t fix. I guess if you get all your information from Fox News, that’s a credible argument. But for everyone else, a positive agenda that goes beyond telling a suffering nation and world that they need to shut up and salute the flag (and oh yes, cut taxes and regulations allegedly afflicting their economic masters, from whom all good things come) might prove necessary.

Crossposted at The Democratic Strategist

Book Review: Going to Extremes, by Cass Sunstein

Back in 2005, a trio of researchers conducted a little experiment on deliberative democracy. They assembled groups of six citizens and asked them to get together to talk about a few politically charged issues (civil unions, affirmative action, global warming). Half the groups were made up exclusively of political conservatives, and half were made up exclusively of political liberals. The result: in almost every group, the individuals took on more extreme positions after talking with the folks who already agreed with them.

Similarly, a study of judicial decision-making found three-judge panels that were all Republican rendered more conservative decisions and three-judge panels that were all Democrat rendered more liberal decisions.

The above experiment and study form the take-off point for Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide, by Cass R. Sunstein, a smart book (now available in paperback!) that sets forth a pithy summary of how group polarization happens. It’s an especially useful guide to the obstacles to open-minded thinking for those of us who are trying to chart a course toward a more moderate politics, and so worth understanding.

The quick takeaway point is that what matters most is information. If you only hear one side of the argument, you are likely to strengthen your convictions that the one side you hear is the correct side. And the more your convictions are strengthened, the more you are likely to seek out only that one side and disregard anyone who comes to you with alternatives. In short, a powerful reinforcing feedback loop.

“A great deal of what we believe, like, and dislike,” writes Sunstein, “is influenced by the exchange of information and by corroboration.”

Sunstein explores a number of entry points into these kinds of reinforcing cascades of corroboration. A surprisingly large number of the entry points have more to do with social instincts than anything else. Individuals defer to other individuals who are of higher status; they defer to family and friends and social groups. Most people want to be liked, and most people have an intuitive sense that a good way to be liked is to agree – or sometimes to even do those whose respect they wish to gain one better. Groups are particular prone to follow confident people – even if those confident people are wrong.

Once people start in on a particular belief path, they tend to be on the lookout for information that confirms what they already think: “Consider the well-established finding that after purchasing a product, people tend to seek out information confirming that their purchase was a sensible one.” And once caught in a cascade of confirmation, it’s hard to get out of it. Sociologists call it “homophily” – a process by which people feel more connected to that which is similar to them.

The problem, Sunstein argues (borrowing a phrase from Russell Hardin) is that most people have a “crippled epistemology” – they know very little to begin with, and if what they know supports their extremism, they have no way to know that their position is extreme.

Worse, “people often ignore powerful contrary evidence,” writes Sunstein. “When people’s false beliefs are corrected, they might become even firmer in their commitment to those beliefs.” (One famous example of this is described in Leon Festinger’s 1956 book When Prophecy Fails, about how members of a UFO cult become more resolute in its beliefs after the group leader’s prophecy that aliens from the planet Clarion would rescue cult members from an earth-destroying flood on December 21, 1954 did not come to fruition)

Sunstein worries that in the modern media environment, self-selection into different camps is easier than ever before. “Many people appear to be hearing more and louder versions of their own views, thus reducing the benefits that come from exposure to competing views and unnoticed problems…The Internet creates more dramatic ‘stratification.’”

The way out of polarization, of course, is the standard bromide of entertaining alternative viewpoints. Sunstein urges “humility and curiosity.” In fact, after reading this article, you should probably immediately go seek out a perspective you disagree with, entertain it, and let it create a slight sense of doubt in all your previous certainties.

But the truth is, you probably won’t go seek that out. Or even if you do, it’s unlikely you will come to doubt your previous ideas. One reason is that what you find will probably be written from a completely different perspective, meaning that it won’t have much to say to somebody who isn’t already a true believe from the opposite perspective.

At the very least, it is helpful to have a certain amount of self-awareness. Sunstein’s analysis of how easily and almost effortlessly one can get caught in a self-reinforcing feedback process of one-sidedness is a little bit scary. What’s remarkable is just how easily the mind closes, and how much constant work is required to fight against it. In other words: those of us who care about moderation have our work cut out for ourselves.

On Tuesday, I put together some data highlighting the fact that there was a strong correlation between how much Democrats’ partisan identification had declined in the last two years and how white a state is. Since then, I’ve received many comments accusing me of saying that Democrats’ problems exist only because white people are racist.

One comment was extremely aggressive: “The race-baiting on display by Mr. Drutman shows the void of his intellect and his morality since he is deliberately unwilling to find the real reasons Democrats are failing everywhere.” Here’s another: “Yet another incident of failure of the intellectual left in the US. Barack Obama was elected by white voters as well as non-white in 2008; rather than look at what changed to disgruntle these voters (INCLUDING ME!) they play the race card.” And a third (sarcasm alert): “But, here we have it. Solid facts! Whites are racist!”; and a fourth: “Keep playing the race card. Please do.”

First of all, this may seem obvious, but I was merely reporting the data. There is an undeniable correlation between the percentage of whites in a state and the decline in Democratic partisan ID advantage. It also doesn’t take a genius to look at the polling data and see that Democrats and Obama are doing poorly among white voters, especially especially southern and rural whites.

But what impresses me about these comments is how quickly they went straight to the “race card” and “race-baiting.” It’s clearly a sore spot.

Of course, as far as I can tell, there are plenty of honest reasons that one would no longer want to identify as a Democrat that have nothing to do with race. There are plenty of reasons to be frustrated with the Democrats, and plenty of honest philosophical disagreements over what policies would serve the country best. As I wrote in the initial post, statistically speaking, whiteness of a state explains only 13 percent of the decline in Democratic partisan identification advantage. What this strongly suggests is that there are many factors.

But as Ron Brownstein has argued, there is also an emerging “New Color Line” that may have more to do with policy preference than with race, even if the two are sometimes hard to disentangle: “From every angle, the exit-poll results reveal a new color line: a consistent chasm between the attitudes of whites and minorities. The gap begins with preferences in the election.” In particular, the white voters seem to be particularly concerned with the size and role of government.

And it then follows that there are must be ways to address the concerns of white voters without making it about race. America may be becoming a more diverse nation, but it’s not a majority-minority country yet, and whites generally vote at greater rates than minorities. So Democrats need to take this seriously. As my colleague Will Marshall recently noted:

Progressives need to engage white voters more directly on questions about the size and role of government. We should be serious about making government more accountable, about enabling citizens and communities to do more for themselves, and about reining in runaway federal deficits and debts. But we should also stand firmly for public activism to rebuild America’s productive capacities, particularly our run-down infrastructure, curb out-of-control medical costs and make the promise of equal opportunity real for all citizens.

In one sense, the comments I received are quite instructive. They suggest there are white voters out there who feel accused of racism if they vote Republican, and they don’t like that. But they are also quite depressing. They suggest that there are too many Republicans out there who can’t respond to a presentation of empirical data without accusing me (a white who remains a Democrat and Obama supporter) of implicitly accusing them of racism.

I’m a number-cruncher. I’m not a race-baiter.