The Forces Fracturing

I wish I could figure out a good way of decompressing Thomas B. Edsall’s latest New York Times column. It’s got quite a few things worth considering but they’re arranged a bit haphazardly. I agree with his conclusion:

The forces fracturing the political system are clearly stronger than the forces pushing for consensus.

He opens by talking about the “erosion of public tolerance”. This is interesting and conforms with what I have observed:

In an email, Chong wrote that “the tolerance of white liberals has declined significantly since 1980, and tolerance levels are lowest among the youngest age cohorts.” If, he continued, “we add education to the mix, we find that the most pronounced declines over time have occurred among white, college educated liberals, with the youngest age cohorts again having the lowest tolerance levels.”

In the mid-1960s the German-American philosopher Herbert Marcuse wrote his most famous work, One-Dimensional Man. In it he asserted that genuine tolerance does not allow for tolerance of “repression”. I and many others think that’s basically throwing Enlightenment values under the bus, especially so when you define repression in purely subjective terms. I would claim that what we’re seeing today is exactly what you would expect from people who’d adopted a Marcusist viewpoint.

He then goes into “moral foundations theory”:

Proponents of what is known as moral foundations theory — formulated in 2004 by Jonathan Haidt and Craig Joseph — argue that across all cultures “several innate and universally available psychological systems are the foundations of ‘intuitive ethics’.” The five foundations are care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion and sanctity/degradation.

What is not acknowledged is that all of these are true in degrees, different people can prioritize these values in different ways, and that’s okay. However, give it a Marcusist spin and those who prioritize care/harm and fairness/cheating (usually progressives) more highly than loyalty/betrayal cannot be tolerant of those who prioritize authority/subversion and sanctity/degradation more highly (usually conservatives). And when you define harm and fairness in completely subjective ways? The standard used to be “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me”. When words are deemed as harmful as sticks and stones, mix in a little Wittgenstein, and what emerges are “toxic environments” and “micro-aggressions”.

He then begins a discourse on feminism, “traditional morality”, and “partisan sorting”. TL;DR:

Huddy and Willman found: “In 2004, a strong feminist woman had a .32 chance of being a strong Democrat. This increased slightly to .35 in 2008 and then increased more substantially to .45 in 2012 and .56 in 2016.” In 2004 and 2008, “there was a .21 chance that a strong feminist male was also a strong Democrat. That increased slightly to .25 in 2012 and more dramatically to .42 in 2016.”

then after a brief digression into race he observes:

Their conclusion is that over the past four decades, “the United States experienced the most rapid growth in affective polarization among the twelve O.E.C.D. countries we consider” — the other 11 are France, Sweden, Germany, Britain, Norway, Denmark, Australia, Japan, Canada, New Zealand and Switzerland.

In other words, whether we evaluate the current conflict-ridden political climate in terms of moral foundations theory, feminism or the political group conflict hypothesis, the trends are not favorable, especially if the outcome of the 2024 presidential election is close.

My own view is that only heightened tolerance will get us out of the hole we are digging for ourselves without bloodshed. The direction now seems to be towards heightened intolerance.