For the Record

Progressives, unlike conservatives, get better informed with time

Talking with some friends last night about this study, showing that people are very effective at filtering out information not conforming to what they already believe, it struck me that while progressives are also subject to this phenomenon, in their case the end result is likely to be more and better acquaintance with the facts.  That's 'cause progressives, unlike conservatives, typically start out in the ballpark of reality and so are more likely to be able to "take in" the true, subsequently refining their basically correct positions towards the increasingly accurate.

Reality check

A couple of months ago I wondered why many policy issues continue to be treated as ideological or political (supposedly reflecting differences of opinon or taste) as opposed to broadly scientific.  We've got tons of evidence, for example, about which approaches to health care provide the most health for your buck, and interestingly, in this case, all the main desiderata---for an economical, humane, effective system---point toward single-payer or at least the general availability of universal, not-for-profit care.  The measly public option that is presently under discussion in the U.S. would appear to be the bare minimum one might do by way of respecting the clear facts... so (to raise just two questions) why aren't (supposedly reality-based) progressive politicians and mainstream media hammering home facts clearly supporting a public option, and why are so many right-wingers frothing at the mouth about it?

I don't think the answer to the first question can ultimately advert to politicians or media being in the pocket of the health insurance industry.  For example, politicians aren't really getting that much in campaign contributions---a few mill, tops (which makes me wonder why someone doesn't do whatever it would take to guarantee that these guys would, if they did the right thing, get compensating grass-roots monies).  Moreover, it's clear that in many cases no amount of lobbying would provide reasonable grounds for a politician to support an empirically discredited cause (e.g., Christian Science).

So I guess I still don't understand why politicians, pundits and the media don't just keep throwing up slides showing, in particular, cost and health- and life-expectancy figures as between the U.S. and all the developed and semideveloped countries with government-based universal coverage.

I was thinking that the presupposition of the first question (namely, that the facts aren't getting out) suggested an answer to the second question.  The reason so many U.S.-ers don't "get it" is that so many U.S.-ers are, for whatever reason, generally unaware of the empirical facts, about health care and other pressing issues of the day.  Relatedly, as a friend pointed out, many are unaware of relevant causal mechanisms between things that they protest against (e.g., "socialist" health care and education) and things they desire (e.g., stable, safe and fulfilled people and communities.)

This is certainly part of the answer, and would explain why people better at accessing information tend to support heath care reform:

A guy at AEI has a piece about how younger voters feel about health care. He begins with a relatively accurate description of how he thinks younger people today function, calling them “generation choice”. Then he posits three reasons why younger voters might be better disposed towards health care reform than older voters: (1) they haven’t analyzed the bill, (2) they care more about the fairness of expanded coverage, and (3) they don’t care much about health care because they’re young and healthy. There’s an obvious fourth reason: they know that our system costs nearly twice as much as anyone else’s and is consistently ranked at the bottom in quality among western countries. Hence, they would choose a different system if possible.

It’s always important to remember that many, if not most, beliefs and customs in our society exist because of the widespread propagation of falsehoods. It’s why some people believe we have a great health care system. It’s also why some American League managers continue to use the sacrifice bunt.

For whatever reason, the internet has curbed the spread of these falsehoods among (the mostly younger) people who are able to navigate the internet without using AOL key words (though it may well have hastened the spread among people who are not). And that may well mark a sea change in American politics.

But it turns out that even when people are presented with the facts, there's no guarantee these will penetrate.  As Sharon Begley explains:

Some people form and cling to false beliefs about health-care reform (or Obama's citizenship) despite overwhelming evidence thanks to a mental phenomenon called motivated reasoning, says sociologist Steven Hoffman, visiting assistant professor at the University at Buffalo. "Rather than search rationally for information that either confirms or disconfirms a particular belief," he says, "people actually seek out information that confirms what they already believe." [...] "For the most part," says Hoffman, "people completely ignore contrary information" and are able to "develop elaborate rationalizations based on faulty information."

Of course, we all experience (dis)confirmation bias to some degree, but what is surprising is the extent to which retrospective rationalization ("inferred justification") can occur:

For their study, the scientists whittled down surveys filled out by 246 voters, of whom 73 percent believed in a Saddam-9/11 link, to 49 believers who were willing to be interviewed at length in October 2004. Even after the 49 were shown newspaper articles reporting that the 9/11 Commission had not found any evidence linking Saddam and 9/11, and quoting President Bush himself denying it, 48 stuck to their guns: yup, Saddam Hussein, directly or indirectly, brought down the Twin Towers.

When the scientists asked the participants why they believed in the link, they offered many justifications. Five argued that Saddam supported terrorism generally, or that evidence of a link to 9/11 might yet emerge. These counterarguments are not entirely illogical. But almost everyone else offered some version of "I don't know; I don't know anything"—that is, outright confusion over the conflict between what they believed and what the facts showed—or switched subjects to the invasion of Iraq. As one put it, when asked about his Saddam-9/11 belief, "There is no doubt in my mind that if we did not deal with Saddam Hussein when we did, it was just a matter of time when we would have to deal with him." In other words, holding fast to the Saddam-9/11 belief helped people make sense of the decision to go to war against Iraq.

"We refer to this as 'inferred justification,'" says Hoffman. Inferred justification is a sort of backward chain of reasoning. You start with something you believe strongly (the invasion of Iraq was the right move) and work backward to find support for it (Saddam was behind 9/11). "For these voters," says Hoffman, "the sheer fact that we were engaged in war led to a post-hoc search for a justification for that war."

Begley suggests, plausibly, that anti-reform nuts are typically people who didn't vote for Obama (or more generally, think progressives are spawn of satan) and are accordingly mainly engaging in inferred justification for their anti-Obama/progressive stance.

UPDATE: On second thought, I'm not sure that the phenomenon of inferred justification ultimately undermines the basic (and more hopeful) thesis that those clinging to discredited beliefs are suffering mainly from ignorance.  Wrt the study case, for example: what the clingers seem to be doing is trying to make some rational sense of why we went to war... they cling to the Saddam connection (perhaps) because they are unaware of alternative explainations, primarily related to oil- and related military-industrial-corporation complex considerations.

Read this book (or at least the review!)

Larry Bartels's 'Unequal Democracy' reviewed here. Looks to be a treasure trove of interesting and/or surprising and/or hopeful info about the attitudes Americans hold about various political issues -- eg the alleged "rightward shift" in the US is pretty much entirely at upper income strata. (Not too surprising, when was the last time any high profile sources paid the slightest bit of attention to the "little guy"?)

Is your kid a whiny, insecure tattletale?

He or she may be in grave danger of growing up to be a conservative:

Remember the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints? Chances are he grew up to be a conservative.

At least, he did if he was one of 95 kids from the Berkeley area that social scientists have been tracking for the last 20 years. The confident, resilient, self-reliant kids mostly grew up to be liberals.

[...]

In the 1960s Jack Block and his wife and fellow professor Jeanne Block (now deceased) began tracking more than 100 nursery school kids as part of a general study of personality. The kids' personalities were rated at the time by teachers and assistants who had known them for months. There's no reason to think political bias skewed the ratings — the investigators were not looking at political orientation back then. Even if they had been, it's unlikely that 3- and 4-year-olds would have had much idea about their political leanings.

A few decades later, Block followed up with more surveys, looking again at personality, and this time at politics, too. The whiny kids tended to grow up conservative, and turned into rigid young adults who hewed closely to traditional gender roles and were uncomfortable with ambiguity.The confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose, turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests. The girls were still outgoing, but the young men tended to turn a little introspective.

Block admits in his paper that liberal Berkeley is not representative of the whole country. But within his sample, he says, the results hold. He reasons that insecure kids look for the reassurance provided by tradition and authority, and find it in conservative politics. The more confident kids are eager to explore alternatives to the way things are, and find liberal politics more congenial.

In a society that values self-confidence and out-goingness, it's a mostly flattering picture for liberals. It also runs contrary to the American stereotype of wimpy liberals and strong conservatives.

Funny -- just the other day I was musing to Benj that a lot would be explained if grown-up right-wingers turned out to have been those creepy kids shunned in high school by all and sundry.  Someday, they fumed in their lonely smelly rooms, I'll take my revenge!  I'll get rich and powerful, and then I'll make all those kids who wouldn't play with me pay!

And having characteristics that, while inappropriate for any kind of decent social interactions, were perfect for doing well in a Corporate State -- basically, being able to wear a suit, boss people around, and stomp down any moral compunction that might attempt to raise its feeble head from the poisoned shallows of their soul -- many of them, it seems, *have* become rich and powerful. And now, by God, we *are* having to pay attention to these crybaby jerks, as they scream and stomp all over our nice world.  Everything we need to know we learned in kindergarten.

UPDATE: I have already received a letter from someone claiming to have been among the shunned in HS, and berating me for my insensitivity to victims of social abuse.  To clarify: my remarks are not intended to imply that anyone who was shunned in HS was either creepy or deservedly shunned; or that those who were not shunned deserved not to be. Supposing you were shunned in virtue of having the unfortunate conservatism-correlated personality characteristics cited in the above study (and also this study), then I don't see that in being shunned you were a victim of social abuse (ignoring, of course, whatever factors led to your having these characteristics); otherwise, my remarks aren't intended to apply to you.

Political angst

Remember existential angst?  Neither do I.  OK, maybe once in a while I experience a vague yearning for meaning, but then I read some Frege and feel better right away.

But seriously, folks, there's a new distinctively political angst in town (and I'm not just talking about that uneasy feeling you get when you hear Bush try to speak) that is associated with scandal overload and which more specifically reflects the past five years' bearing witness to a continuing series of crimes and scandals that we are evidently powerless either to prevent or to prosecute.  None of the usual conduits of resistance, change, justice are working.  As Burbules notes, elected Democrats aren't trying to stop (or even slow down) the criminals in office.  And nothing individuals do---including vote---seems to be making much difference.  Every day a new outrage (or several) with the now-predictably-tiny half-life.  It's getting even Digby down:

I'm feeling down right now. I know I shouldn't. The fact that Tom DeLay has stepped down is such a huge victory for humanity all by itself that I should be dancing a jig for the next six months. But, I'm down in the dumps, mostly because I am watching George W. Bush repeat his patented mantra for the 514,346th time. It's filled with lies, mischaracterizations and simple-minded gibberish, as always, and I'm watching it go out unfiltered, in its entirety, unchallenged by the media, no Democrats in sight, on every cable channel. I think they are personally trying to drive me crazy. [...]

They are going to the 9/11 well again. They say that Democrats are sending talking points to Osama and giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Rove says we don't believe that the government should monitor al Qaeda's telephone calls. The next several months will be spent fending off accusations that if we don't let the president do anything he damned well pleases we are all going to die.

I don't know if it will work again. But I also don't know if I can take this campaign one more time. Five years of hearing the same thing over and over again and watching American sheeple fall for it over and over again is just too depressing. I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to January 20, 2009 (and I'm of an age where rushing the future is no longer wise.) The day I no longer have to listen to one more word from this immoral, dishonest, incompetent, delusional prick will be the best day of my life.

Of course it worked again.

A few of the comments on Digby's post are of the "buck up, have courage" variety, but I was struck by how many echoed Digby's angst:

Digby, this country is becoming fascist. No doubt about it. Look, its time to start planning an escape - a life somewhere else. America is dead.

Well, the death of a democratic society is never pretty. Our country has become incapable of self governance and will, like all countries that lose that capacity, soon lose that privilege, if it has not been lost already. Our press has become a complicit player in the deceptions of a secretive, autocratic government. Our populace has become conditioned to accept as credible anything presented to it with high enough production values. High barriers to entry preclude the high-risk game of speaking truth to power.  We have blogs, that's about all.

I, too, know how you feel. The nausea and shame I feel when I watch George W. Bush speak in public has become almost unbearable.  Lately I have found it harder than ever to fight the notion that he understands my country better than I do: that America has truly become the small-minded, ignorant place he seems to believe it is, a place that no longer values either democracy, republican government, or the truth.

[T]he  United States of America, as it was historically conceived and developed, is deader than a squashed armadillo...

I'm in the same boat. Without a functioning press and opposition party, I don't know what to do...

I'm really sorry to read this post and the comments, because I've been feeling exactly the same lately. I was hoping it was just a case of the wintertime blues for me and not that everyone who actually cares about our country is becoming exhausted.  [...] Our country is sick, and it seems like there is no cure.

...if we haven't made a dent in this tragi-comic farce of the last five years it seems like we never will ... no matter how much truth we have on our side.

Does anyone actually believe, since [the U.S.] has gone this far already, it can possibly right itself? What kind of a country could even have "elected" him in the first place? "America is dead."

Agreed. But in the death throes it will take everyone down with it. There are no countervailing institutions operating in American society to halt the inexorable fascism. Legitimation crisis? My ass. They don't need no stinking badges.

I agree with every single word in this post [...] You've said exactly what I've been feeling. And I am depressed, resigned. These guys have got a lock, and there's nothing -- not corruption, not blatant lying, not Katrina screwups, not kiling and maiming in Iraq -- that makes a difference. Fascism is on the march. I really feel that. AAGh.

One more "me too." All well and good to hear that the country is with us, we're in the mainstream, 36% approval rating... But what difference does it make? We're still sitting ducks for these ass-clowns; our voices are still drowned out by money interests; we still have no opposition party. Get a Democrat in office in 2009? Which war-supporting, non-filibustering, bankruptcy-bill supporting, couldn't find his spine with both hands, a flashlight and a blinking neon sign Democrat is that going to be? And how do you begin to rebuild all that's been destroyed over the past several years?  Sorry -- I hope the optimists here are right; I really do. Me, I'm curling up with a Garbo movie tonight and dreaming of Sweden.

Most succinct of all:

Oh god.  We're fucked.

These people aren't just having a bad day.  They're expressing a deep-seated and perfectly understandable resignation born of the fact that nothing they do seems to matter to the course of terrible events.

Of course, maybe our efforts are not entirely inefficacious, in that without them things would be (god forbid) even worse.  Even so, given how little positive effect we are having, it is irrational to keep on doing (only) what we're doing.  What we're doing isn't good enough.

We need as a community to come up with a better strategy.

To start (as I've previously discussed here) progressives need to stop (only) describing the symptoms of U.S. decay in however brilliant analytic detail and start talking, plainly and simply, about the disease.  The larger part of the disease is, of course, corporate capitalism, and it explains not only the symptoms but the fact that we have been unable to cure them via the usual treatments.    Prominent liberal bloggers could do some good here, by contextualizing their criticism.

Speaking from experience, it goes some distance towards dealing with political angst to realize that our inefficacy has a comprehensible, relatively straightforward institutional explanation.  And while identifying the inherent failures and dangers of corporate capitalism as the basis for social and economic policy need not imply the embracing of any of the standard alternatives, it wouldn't be such a bad idea if "socialism" reentered the lexicon as an alternative with comparatively positive valence.

That's the easy part, I think.

The hard part will be figuring out how to cure the disease.  In lieu of palace revolution, I'm inclined to suggest radical surgery: we need to cut ourselves off from the Democratic party.  If they haven't risen to the occasion by this time and in response to these pressures, they aren't ever going to do so.  We need a real live opposition party -- why not call it the Progressive Party? -- capable of taking our outrage and anger and turning it into action of the sort that can make a difference. 

I can see the leading lights of the party now...  Steve Gilliard as Prez, Jane Hamsher as Vice-prez, Juan Cole as Secretary of State, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga as Secretary of Defense, Glenn Glenwald as Attorney General, Brad Delong as Secretary of the Treasury, Duncan Black as Secretary of Commerce, Nathan Newman as Secretary of Labor, PZ Meyers as Secretary of Health and Human Services, Jerome a Paris as Secretary of Energy, Bob Whitson as Secretary of the Interior, and (of course) Brian Leiter as Secretary of Education.  Me, I'll settle for a diplomatic post.

Ah.  I feel better already.

[Cross-posted at the Leiter Reports.]

Solitary, Poor, Nasty, and Brutish

A familiar story from psychologists tells us that right-wingers are (a) likely to accept inequality and (b) authoritarian. Recently, some sociologists have teased apart these two features: two independent and highly predictive dimensions of political personality are a scale measuring degree of concern about fulfillment/survival (with acceptance of inequality reflecting survival-orientation), and a scale measuring degree of authoritarianism/individualism. On the familiar story, right-wingers are <survivalist, authoritarian>, left-wingers are <fulfillmentist, individualist>.

Strangely (and worryingly) enough, a growing quadrant in the US is oriented toward <survivalism, individualism>:

 

Citation

Where Democracy Corps found voters unable to hear economic appeals through the noise of cultural ones, Environics’ research suggested an even more profound interrelationship between materialist concerns and a community’s broader beliefs. They found economic changes driving changes in social values, and those, in turn, driving political preferences. Using data from Environics’ in-home consumer survey in the United States, Nordhaus and Shellenberger were able to tease apart changes in the thinking of voters since 1992 on 117 different “social values trends.” These values, such as “time stress,” “joy of consumption,” and “acceptance of violence,” are not what people normally think of as “values” -- abortion, gay marriage, or other hot-button social issues. Nordhaus and Shellenberger were looking at something more fine-tuned: the attitudes, biases, and normative beliefs that undergird people’s stances toward politics, life, and policy. They were, in short, trying to elucidate the measurable components of worldviews.

“None of the polling I was looking at really had much ability to explain what was happening in the country socially and politically,” says Nordhaus, the more voluble of the pair, with close-cropped sandy brown hair and slick rectangular glasses framed by hip-for-D.C. charcoal plastic. The data the corporate world was using were “vastly more sophisticated than the methods I was using as a pollster, which were, respectively, quite crude.”

Looking at the data from 1992 to 2004, Shellenberger and Nordhaus found a country whose citizens are increasingly authoritarian while at the same time feeling evermore adrift, isolated, and nihilistic. They found a society at once more libertine and more puritanical than in the past, a society where solidarity among citizens was deteriorating, and, most worrisomely to them, a progressive clock that seemed to be unwinding backward on broad questions of social equity. Between 1992 and 2004, for example, the percentage of people who said they agree that “the father of the family must be the master in his own house” increased ten points, from 42 to 52 percent, in the 2,500-person Environics survey. The percentage agreeing that “men are naturally superior to women” increased from 30 percent to 40 percent. Meanwhile, the fraction that said they discussed local problems with people they knew plummeted from 66 percent to 39 percent. Survey respondents were also increasingly accepting of the value that “violence is a normal part of life” -- and that figure had doubled even before the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks.

Lumping specific survey statements like these together into related groups, Nordhaus and Shellenberger arrived at what they call “social values trends,” such as “sexism,” “patriotism,” or “acceptance of flexible families.” But the real meaning of those trends was revealed only by plugging them into the “values matrix” -- a four-quadrant plot with plenty of curving arrows to show direction, which is then overlaid onto voting data. The quadrants represent different worldviews. On the top lies authority, an orientation that values traditional family, religiosity, emotional control, and obedience. On the bottom, the individuality orientation encompasses risk-taking, “anomie-aimlessness,” and the acceptance of flexible families and personal choice. On the right side of the scale are values that celebrate fulfillment, such as civic engagement, ecological concern, and empathy. On the left, there’s a cluster of values representing the sense that life is a struggle for survival: acceptance of violence, a conviction that people get what they deserve in life, and civic apathy. These quadrants are not random: Shellenberger and Nordaus developed them based on an assessment of how likely it was that holders of certain values also held other values, or “self-clustered.”

Over the past dozen years, the arrows have started to point away from the fulfillment side of the scale, home to such values as gender parity and personal expression, to the survival quadrant, home to illiberal values such as sexism, fatalism, and a focus on “every man for himself.” Despite the increasing political power of the religious right, Environics found social values moving away from the authority end of the scale, with its emphasis on responsibility, duty, and tradition, to a more atomized, rage-filled outlook that values consumption, sexual permissiveness, and xenophobia. The trend was toward values in the individuality quadrant.

Any reader remotely familiar with American popular culture will immediately recognize the truth of this analysis. Ariel Levy recently grappled with one aspect of it in her book Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, writing about a hypersexualized culture that encourages its young women to be Girls Gone Wild and its young men to be piggish voyeurs. She describes a new anti-feminist vision of “liberation” that eschews both traditional constraints and any concern for gender equality. “Despite the rising power of Evangelical Christianity and the political right in the United States, this trend has only grown more extreme and more pervasive,” notes Levy. Indeed, the coarse, brawny, self-centered new philosophy could take as its exemplar television personality Bill O’Reilly, a man who, it was alleged in a sexual harassment lawsuit, is as interpersonally crude as he is politically rough and bullying. Americans, writes Environics founder Michael Adams in his 2005 book American Backlash: The Untold Story of Social Change in the United States, increasingly reject traditionalism and progressivism alike.

“While American politics becomes increasingly committed to a brand of conservatism that favors traditionalism, religiosity, and authority,” Adams writes, “the culture at large [is] becoming ever more attached to hedonism, thrill-seeking, and a ruthless, Darwinist understanding of human competition.” This behavior is particularly prevalent among the vast segment of American society that is not politically or civically engaged, and which usually fails to even vote. This has created what must be understood at the electoral level as a politics of backlash on the part of both Republican and Democratic voters: Voters of both parties, Environics data show, have developed an increasingly moralistic politics as a reaction to the new cultural order.

Americans seem to see themselves as in a Hobbesian state of nature. That's frightening if true, of course, because everyone knows what kind of regime people in that condition go in for.

A familiar story from psychologists tells us that right-wingers are (a) likely to accept inequality and (b) authoritarian. Recently, some sociologists have teased apart these two features: two independent and highly predictive dimensions of political personality are a scale measuring degree of concern about fulfillment/survival (with acceptance of inequality reflecting survival-orientation), and a scale measuring degree of authoritarianism/individualism. On the familiar story, right-wingers are <survivalist, authoritarian>, left-wingers are <fulfillmentist, individualist>.

Strangely (and worryingly) enough, a growing quadrant in the US is oriented toward <survivalism, individualism>:

 

Citation

Where Democracy Corps found voters unable to hear economic appeals through the noise of cultural ones, Environics’ research suggested an even more profound interrelationship between materialist concerns and a community’s broader beliefs. They found economic changes driving changes in social values, and those, in turn, driving political preferences. Using data from Environics’ in-home consumer survey in the United States, Nordhaus and Shellenberger were able to tease apart changes in the thinking of voters since 1992 on 117 different “social values trends.” These values, such as “time stress,” “joy of consumption,” and “acceptance of violence,” are not what people normally think of as “values” -- abortion, gay marriage, or other hot-button social issues. Nordhaus and Shellenberger were looking at something more fine-tuned: the attitudes, biases, and normative beliefs that undergird people’s stances toward politics, life, and policy. They were, in short, trying to elucidate the measurable components of worldviews.

“None of the polling I was looking at really had much ability to explain what was happening in the country socially and politically,” says Nordhaus, the more voluble of the pair, with close-cropped sandy brown hair and slick rectangular glasses framed by hip-for-D.C. charcoal plastic. The data the corporate world was using were “vastly more sophisticated than the methods I was using as a pollster, which were, respectively, quite crude.”

Looking at the data from 1992 to 2004, Shellenberger and Nordhaus found a country whose citizens are increasingly authoritarian while at the same time feeling evermore adrift, isolated, and nihilistic. They found a society at once more libertine and more puritanical than in the past, a society where solidarity among citizens was deteriorating, and, most worrisomely to them, a progressive clock that seemed to be unwinding backward on broad questions of social equity. Between 1992 and 2004, for example, the percentage of people who said they agree that “the father of the family must be the master in his own house” increased ten points, from 42 to 52 percent, in the 2,500-person Environics survey. The percentage agreeing that “men are naturally superior to women” increased from 30 percent to 40 percent. Meanwhile, the fraction that said they discussed local problems with people they knew plummeted from 66 percent to 39 percent. Survey respondents were also increasingly accepting of the value that “violence is a normal part of life” -- and that figure had doubled even before the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks.

Lumping specific survey statements like these together into related groups, Nordhaus and Shellenberger arrived at what they call “social values trends,” such as “sexism,” “patriotism,” or “acceptance of flexible families.” But the real meaning of those trends was revealed only by plugging them into the “values matrix” -- a four-quadrant plot with plenty of curving arrows to show direction, which is then overlaid onto voting data. The quadrants represent different worldviews. On the top lies authority, an orientation that values traditional family, religiosity, emotional control, and obedience. On the bottom, the individuality orientation encompasses risk-taking, “anomie-aimlessness,” and the acceptance of flexible families and personal choice. On the right side of the scale are values that celebrate fulfillment, such as civic engagement, ecological concern, and empathy. On the left, there’s a cluster of values representing the sense that life is a struggle for survival: acceptance of violence, a conviction that people get what they deserve in life, and civic apathy. These quadrants are not random: Shellenberger and Nordaus developed them based on an assessment of how likely it was that holders of certain values also held other values, or “self-clustered.”

Over the past dozen years, the arrows have started to point away from the fulfillment side of the scale, home to such values as gender parity and personal expression, to the survival quadrant, home to illiberal values such as sexism, fatalism, and a focus on “every man for himself.” Despite the increasing political power of the religious right, Environics found social values moving away from the authority end of the scale, with its emphasis on responsibility, duty, and tradition, to a more atomized, rage-filled outlook that values consumption, sexual permissiveness, and xenophobia. The trend was toward values in the individuality quadrant.

Any reader remotely familiar with American popular culture will immediately recognize the truth of this analysis. Ariel Levy recently grappled with one aspect of it in her book Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, writing about a hypersexualized culture that encourages its young women to be Girls Gone Wild and its young men to be piggish voyeurs. She describes a new anti-feminist vision of “liberation” that eschews both traditional constraints and any concern for gender equality. “Despite the rising power of Evangelical Christianity and the political right in the United States, this trend has only grown more extreme and more pervasive,” notes Levy. Indeed, the coarse, brawny, self-centered new philosophy could take as its exemplar television personality Bill O’Reilly, a man who, it was alleged in a sexual harassment lawsuit, is as interpersonally crude as he is politically rough and bullying. Americans, writes Environics founder Michael Adams in his 2005 book American Backlash: The Untold Story of Social Change in the United States, increasingly reject traditionalism and progressivism alike.

“While American politics becomes increasingly committed to a brand of conservatism that favors traditionalism, religiosity, and authority,” Adams writes, “the culture at large [is] becoming ever more attached to hedonism, thrill-seeking, and a ruthless, Darwinist understanding of human competition.” This behavior is particularly prevalent among the vast segment of American society that is not politically or civically engaged, and which usually fails to even vote. This has created what must be understood at the electoral level as a politics of backlash on the part of both Republican and Democratic voters: Voters of both parties, Environics data show, have developed an increasingly moralistic politics as a reaction to the new cultural order.

Americans seem to see themselves as in a Hobbesian state of nature. That's frightening if true, of course, because everyone knows what kind of regime people in that condition go in for.

Political angst

Remember existential angst?  Neither do I.  OK, maybe once in a while I feel a vague yearning for meaning, but then I read some Frege and feel better right away.

But seriously, folks, there's a new distinctively political angst in town (and I'm not just talking about what you feel when faced with the void of Bush's mind), that is associated with scandal overload, and more specifically reflects the fact that the last five years have seen a continuing series of crimes and scandals which we were powerless either to prevent or to prosecute.  None of the usual conduits of resistance, change, and justice are working.  As Burbules notes, elected Democrats aren't even trying to stop (or even slow down) the criminals in office.  And nothing individuals do---including vote---seems to be making much difference.  Every day a new outrage (or several) with the now-predictably-tiny half-life.  It's getting even Digby down:

I'm feeling down right now. I know I shouldn't. The fact that Tom DeLay has stepped down is such a huge victory for humanity all by itself that I should be dancing a jig for the next six months. But, I'm down in the dumps, mostly because I am watching George W. Bush repeat his patented mantra for the 514,346th time. It's filled with lies, mischaracterizations and simple-minded gibberish, as always, and I'm watching it go out unfiltered, in its entirety, unchallenged by the media, no Democrats in sight, on every cable channel. I think they are personally trying to drive me crazy. [...]

They are going to the 9/11 well again. They say that Democrats are sending talking points to Osama and giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Rove says we don't believe that the government should monitor al Qaeda's telephone calls. The next several months will be spent fending off accusations that if we don't let the president do anything he damned well pleases we are all going to die.

I don't know if it will work again. But I also don't know if I can take this campaign one more time. Five years of hearing the same thing over and over again and watching American sheeple fall for it over and over again is just too depressing. I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to January 20, 2009 (and I'm of an age where rushing the future is no longer wise.) The day I no longer have to listen to one more word from this immoral, dishonest, incompetent, delusional prick will be the best day of my life.

Of course it worked again.

A few of the comments on Digby's post are of the "buck up, have courage" variety, but I was struck by how many echoed Digby's angst:

Oh god.  We're fucked.

Digby, this country is becoming fascist. No doubt about it. Look, its time to start planning an escape - a life somewhere else. America is dead.

Well, the death of a democratic society is never pretty. Our country has become incapable of self governance and will, like all countries that lose that capacity, soon lose that privilege, if it has not been lost already. Our press has become a complicit player in the deceptions of a secretive, autocratic government. Our populace has become conditioned to accept as credible anything presented to it with high enough production values. High barriers to entry preclude the high-risk game of speaking truth to power.  We have blogs, that's about all.

I, too, know how you feel. The nausea and shame I feel when I watch George W. Bush speak in public has become almost unbearable.  Lately I have found it harder than ever to fight the notion that he understands my country better than I do: that America has truly become the small-minded, ignorant place he seems to believe it is, a place that no longer values either democracy, republican government, or the truth.

[T]he  United States of America, as it was historically conceived and developed, is deader than a squashed armadillo...

I'm in the same boat. Without a functioning press and opposition party, I don't know what to do...

I'm really sorry to read this post and the comments, because I've been feeling exactly the same lately. I was hoping it was just a case of the wintertime blues for me and not that everyone who actually cares about our country is becoming exhausted.  [...] Our country is sick, and it seems like there is no cure.

...if we haven't made a dent in this tragi-comic farce of the last five years it seems like we never will ... no matter how much truth we have on our side.

Does anyone actually believe, since [the U.S.] has gone this far already, it can possibly right itself? What kind of a country could even have "elected" him in the first place? "America is dead."

Agreed. But in the death throes it will take everyone down with it. There are no countervailing institutions operating in American society to halt the inexorable fascism. Legitimation crisis? My ass. They don't need no stinking badges.

I agree with every single word in this post [...] You've said exactly what I've been feeling. And I am depressed, resigned. These guys have got a lock, and there's nothing -- not corruption, not blatant lying, not Katrina screwups, not kiling and maiming in Iraq -- that makes a difference. Fascism is on the march. I really feel that. AAGh.

One more "me too." All well and good to hear that the country is with us, we're in the mainstream, 36% approval rating... But what difference does it make? We're still sitting ducks for these ass-clowns; our voices are still drowned out by money interests; we still have no opposition party. Get a Democrat in office in 2009? Which war-supporting, non-filibustering, bankruptcy-bill supporting, couldn't find his spine with both hands, a flashlight and a blinking neon sign Democrat is that going to be? And how do you begin to rebuild all that's been destroyed over the past several years?  Sorry -- I hope the optimists here are right; I really do. Me, I'm curling up with a Garbo movie tonight and dreaming of Sweden.

These people aren't just having a bad day.  They're expressing a deep-seated and perfectly understandable resignation born of the fact that nothing they do seems to matter to the course of terrible events.

Of course, maybe our efforts are not entirely inefficacious, in that without them things would be (god forbid) even worse.  Even so, given how little positive effect we are having, it is irrational to keep on doing (only) what we're doing.  What we're doing isn't good enough.

We need as a community to come up with a better strategy.

To start (as I've previously discussed here) progressives (and perhaps most importantly, prominant progressive bloggers) need to stop (only) lovingly describing the symptoms of U.S. decay in however brilliant analytic detail and start talking, plainly and simply, about the disease.  The larger part of the disease is, of course, corporate capitalism, and it explains not only the symptoms but the fact that we have been unable to cure them via the usual treatments.

Speaking from experience, it goes some distance towards dealing with political angst to realize that our inefficacy has a comprehensible, relatively straightforward institutional explanation.  And while identifying the inherent failures and dangers of corporate capitalism as the basis for social and economic policy need not imply the embracing of any of the standard alternatives, it wouldn't be such a bad idea if "socialism" reentered the lexicon as an alternative with comparatively positive valence.

That's the easy part, I think.

The hard part will be figuring out how to cure the disease.  In lieu of revolution, I suggest radical surgery -- we need to cut ourselves off from the Democratic party. 

If they haven't risen to the occasion by this time and in response to these pressures, they aren't ever going to do so.  They don't deserve our loyalty, our money, our time, or our energy.  We need there to be a real live opposition party -- why not call it the Progressive Party? -- capable of taking our outrage and anger and turning it into action of the sort that can make a difference.

[Cross-posted at The Leiter Reports.]

RNC to buy MRI

Why?

Pathological liars may have structural abnormalities in their brains, a new study suggests.

Researchers have found that individuals who habitually lie and cheat have less grey matter and more white matter in their prefrontal cortex than normal people.

Dr Adrian Raine and Yaling Yang of the University of Southern California and colleagues report their findings in the British Journal of Psychiatry.

Past studies have found that the prefrontal cortex shows heightened activity when normal people lie.

It is believed to be involved in both learning moral behaviour and feeling remorse.

The new study suggests that because grey matter consists of brain cells, while white matter forms the "wiring" or connections between these cells, pathological liars may have more capacity to lie and fewer moral restraints.

"They've got the equipment to lie and they don't have the disinhibition that the rest of us have in telling the big whoppers," Dr Raine said.

Powell aide: sexing up the UN report

was "the lowest point in my life".  Yeah, you knew it was a bunch of lies, and he knew it too.  But I'm surprised to hear, Mr. Aide, that your lowest point came then, as opposed to later, when you realized that what you had done was responsible for killing thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of innocent people.

UPDATE: Powell says that the UN speech was a "blot"  on his record, though of course he's careful to blame those who "knew at that time that some of these sources were not good, and shouldn't be relied upon [but] didn't speak up".  Oh, stop crying and go buy some white-out, why don't you.  Isn't that how Republicans usually expiate their sins?

Power and brutality

Last night, Benj and I were walking back to our car from seeing a movie ('The 40-Year-Old Virgin" -- really funny, BTW) when we looked over and saw a cop standing on the driver's side of a stopped car, yelling at the driver in a completely over the top manner.  We couldn't hear the responses of the driver (and have no idea what he did) but what we heard from the cop was: "What the fuck do you think you're doing, driving like that?!! ... Shut the fuck up!!  Give me your fucking license before I bash your head in!!"

Remember, this is Canada, the kinder, gentler nation.  No physical violence actually transpired (as far as we could tell), but why on earth talk to people like that?

Meanwhile, in the States there have been two videos making the rounds which are much more disturbing records of the kind of abusive insanity that takes hold of people when they are wearing a uniform and packing a weapon.  Here's footage from August 20 of a SWAT team storming a rave on private property in the middle of nowhere in Utah, using obviously excessive force on the obviously unresisting crowd (more info here and here).   And here is footage from August 20 of a Pittsburgh cop tasering an unarmed and unresisting protester lying on the ground (more info here and  here).