When politics isn’t local
Why Western politicians fail to culturally represent their citizens.
Economist Laurenz Guenther has performed the very useful exercise of quantifying how unrepresentative the views of European politicians are of their voters on cultural issues, such as crime and immigration. This is not true of economic issues, where the views of politicians tend to be quite representative of their voters.
In the case of economic issues, in some countries the politicians are more pro-market (“right”) then their voters, in others they are more dirigiste (“left”) than their voters, in others still they are very similar to their voters. There is simply no consistent pattern, and the average gap between voters and politicians across European countries on economic issues is fairly small.
With cultural issues, such as crime and immigration, we get a very different pattern. There, politicians are consistently more socially liberal (“left”) than their voters and by a considerable margin. While education levels explain some of this difference, they do not explain very much, as politicians are significantly more socially liberal than even university-educated voters.
Moreover, politicians are unrepresentative even of their own Party members/base on cultural issues and, again, in being much more liberal than their core supporters. There is some factor or factors specific to being a contemporary politician that systematically separates them out from voters on cultural issues yet does not operate with economic issues.
Veteran politician Tip O’Neill famously said that all politics is local. This is particularly true of cultural issues such as crime and immigration, where the effects vary wildly by location. This is much less true of economic issues, which are much more economy-wide in their operation.
There are various features we can identify here. First, executive function(s)—including such features as patience (aka time horizon)—varies between people and is highly heritable. Localities that have lots of people with poor executive function operate very differently from those where it is very much normal for people to have strong executive function.
As the combination of physical robustness and weak executive function predicts criminal behaviour, this has a great deal to do with why crime varies so dramatically by locality. This is especially as crime is very much a power law phenomenon, where a small minority of (overwhelmingly) men commit the vast majority of violent crimes.
It also means that people who have spent their lives in social milieus full of people with high executive function can have little or no sense of what happens when one has to deal with weak executive function folk. This is the people unlike me problem that so bedevils contemporary politics and commentary.
As weak executive function also predicts poverty, one ends up with high-crime, high-poverty, low-government-revenue localities weakly socially connected to policy-makers. This lack of connection is especially so as meritocracy bleeds off talented folk from working-class communities and working-class politicians disappear from legislatures.
These fiscal-sink—i.e. net revenue/expenditure deficit—localities then tend to be under-policed because they need higher police presences than they are funded for. Latin America suffers from an extreme version of this pattern, as you get localities that are barely policed at all, which has a lot to do with why it is—along with the Caribbean and Southern Africa—the region with the world’s highest homicide rates.
Welfare states can suffer the additional problem of a welfare-state apparatus that benefits from increased social dysfunction that drives up welfare expenditures and so the welfare apparat’s scale and career prospects. This applies to both government sector and to non-profits, as in the homelessness-industrial complex.
When you see a police force that is focusing on “thought crimes”—as in the UK—it is the unaccountable classes (those paid to turn up) supporting their access to resources, and their social authority, by using the state to enforce their control of public discourse, their control of public legitimacy.
A similar (indeed overlapping) point about effects varying wildly by location applies to immigration. About half the population are Somewheres: those whose connections (whose social capital) are strongly locality-based. Their locality-based connections are disrupted by large-scale migration into their community. Hence hostility to migration tends to increase the more migrants flood into neighbouring communities.
If regulation restricts the provision of housing—and a large influx of migrants increases tax revenue from restricting the supply of housing1—the rents Somewheres pay are driven up by migration. Somewheres suffer the strongest congestion costs from migration. They are most likely to have their wages suppressed by competition with low-skill migrants. Any increase in crime from migration will be concentrated in their localities.
Impoverished policy language
Universities separate people from locality and congregate high executive function people together. This has an effect on graduates but, even more, on the academics. They live in a world of transnational networks of high executive function people where they do not have to make anything actually work but reputation within particular academic networks is crucial. These systematic biases within academe then affect what they produce, and so the language and framings that policy-makers and media use.
The dominant academic language for policy has been mainstream Economics and the rational-actor model of politics more generally. This is not well-grounded in our evolutionary history.
By focusing on efficiency, and largely ignoring problems of resilience, while also not grappling with the realities of cultural variety—that, due to different framings, people from different cultures will respond to the same sets of incentives differently—mainstream Economics is, with some honourable exceptions, very bad at dealing with cultural issues or with issues of social resilience, even though risk-management, for instance, is more a resilience than an efficiency issue.
There is simply no good, widely used, analytical language to deal with questions of social resilience, social order and cultural variety. Instead, there is mainstream Economics/rational actor theory which treats countries as places where transactions happen and people as interchangeable widgets.
But it is worse than that. Laurenz Guenther notes that there is evidence that folk in the media are even more liberal (“left”) in their cultural views than are politicians. Politicians respond to framings that journalists provide. If their concern is getting “good” media, this will pull politicians even further away from voters on cultural issues.
In a recent podcast, tech investors Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz provide informed insights into the evolution of media over the last few decades. This includes how traditional media training works—training political candidates to operate in brief sound-bites while managing journalists who are constantly asking “gotcha!” questions. This produces a managed blandness in so many politicians that largely operates within the frames pushed by mainstream media. So, it matters how journalists frame things.
Marc Andreessen notes—indeed himself experienced—the shift from journalists being free speech/US First Amendment people to journalists supporting censorship. What you see in contemporary mainstream media, academe, bureaucracy, non-profits, arts and entertainment, and so on—very strongly in what social psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls the epistemic institutions/industries—is how status-networks operate to enforce opinion conformity.
Network goods promote monopoly provision, as the bigger the network, the more benefit there is in joining it and the cheaper it is to add another person. Having moralised opinions deemed to grant moral status generates a shared—indeed, networked—status game, where affirming X makes you a good person, so believing not-X makes you a bad one. The growth of social media has made it much easier to enforce such shared moralised status-games via the shaming and shunning of online mobs.
Hence journalists shifting to support censorship and the dramatic rise in use of moral abuse terms in media articles and academic abstracts.
Mainstream media has increasingly adopted the Pravda model, pushing shared narratives as markers of righteousness.
These moralised status-games have become extreme in academe—which operates via reputation, so is very much prey to shaming and shunning enforcement of opinion, especially in a social media age. Large parts of academe now act as indoctrination factories, with students only exposed to a narrow range of opinions, as a recent study of university course reading lists reveals.
Hence the standing of academe is falling in the wider citizenry—though the fight of Harvard and other Ivy League universities with the Trump Administration is having some normal partisan effects. More and more professionals and others in the UK and elsewhere discount what economists have to say, or speak of them with open contempt, because of how disastrously—even catastrophically—bad economists’s way too often, way too narrow efficiency-but-not-resilience analysis of immigration and its effects have been.
The question then becomes: which opinions underpin the narratives of glib righteousness that have become such a feature of mainstream media? The answer comes in three parts—(1) the moral kudos of the civil rights movement; (2) the rise of Critical Theory and the spread of it and its derivatives across academe; and (3) the metastasising of the Open Society consensus.
The various civil rights movement, the final culmination in the postwar period, of the Emancipation Sequence—abolition of the slave trade; of slavery; Catholic Emancipation; Jewish Emancipation; adult male suffrage; female suffrage; civil rights for African-Americans; full legal equality for women; for gays and lesbians—became the great moral triumph (and so great moral example) of our time.
This created a civil rights/anti-discrimination/equality legal structure that viewed the wider citizenry as forever hovering on the edge of wrong-think (racism, etc) and wrong-act (discrimination). It created an advocacy NGO/non-profit economy that needed ever more causes to sustain its donor money flow. It created an expectation that the end of legal and social discrimination would result in the equalising of outcomes between social groups.
The last had two advantages. First, it was a very easy moral benchmark that could be highly performative—it did not require adherents to give anything up. On the contrary, it was primed to generate the aforementioned moralised status-networks.
Second, equality of outcomes between all groups is incapable of being achieved, as human groups simply vary too much. It therefore creates endless justification for ever more money flows, regulatory and other action, as well as moral and career leverage for designated representatives of the “afflicted” groups.
This has some deeply corrosive effects, as such worship of equality undermines the ability to make distinctions—for example, between the effects of different life-strategies from different cultures. Groups that do well do not provide examples of what works, but of presumptive oppressor status. Groups that do badly do not provide warnings of what does not work, but of presumptive oppressed status.
The patent economic failure of the command economies had massively undermined the example of economic socialism. (Also, telling business elites that our plan is to shoot you and take your property is not a good selling point.) If, however, one shifts to cultural issues, and culturally defined groups, whole new vistas open up—including, of course, the ability to not only abandon concern for the local working class, but to engage in sneering abuse of them for their moral and linguistic “vulgarity”.
This is where Critical Theory and its derivatives were greatly advantaged. Being derivatives of Marxism, they had the Oppressor/Oppressed template and the elevation of “true” equality working for them, while the shift to cultural matters enabled them to shed the stain of the economic failures and megacides of Communism.
Building on the work of interwar Western Marxists such as György Lukács, Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, various Critical Theorists developed cultural critiques based on the elevation of equality—equality of outcome by group (aka equity), rather than across all individuals. This proved way more saleable, as one could support such equality while retaining all one’s existing economic and other advantages. Moreover, such Critical Theorists were often able to incorporate molehills of truth to build their intellectual constructions.
The triad of equity (equality of outcome by group, so control of resources), inclusion (control of discourse) and diversity (control of hiring and association) gave tick-box moral projects to managers which extended their reach while undermining or frustrating accountability—as any critique or concern for such could be taken as showing one was not committed to the oh-so-wonderful-good intentions, thereby indicating a lack of moral character.
All this was made for the aforementioned moralised status-networks. Especially in a highly, and increasingly, bureaucratised society with an increasingly bloated higher education sector.
The final feature was the postwar Open Society consensus. The worship of openness undermines the ability to enforce boundaries—including national borders. Over time—particularly with the spread of Critical Theory—such elevation of openness also undermined the capacity to defend, or even transmit, a coherent national heritage.
So, you get a focus on cultural issues that demands equality of outcome between groups and undermines any notion of making awkward distinctions or defending boundaries. This feeds into the framings that mainstream media generates for its narratives of glib righteousness and into the increasingly conformist, moralised status-game networks.
Meanwhile there is a lack of a coherent policy language that focuses on issues of social coherence and resilience. Media-access focused politicians are thereby pulled away from the cultural concerns of their voters (or even Party members) in a consistently socially-liberal (“left”) direction.
The pulpit gap
Part of what happened with the triumph of the civil rights movements is that the structures and ideas that had opposed them were thoroughly discredited. People talk of a “God-shaped” hole in Western civilisation, riffing off Nietzsche’s idea of the murder of God. There is a religion-shaped hole: it is perfectly possible to have a morally coherent civilisation without monotheism.
Part of what is going on is that the top-end of Western elites have never been particularly socially conservative. The really “posh” were always fairly socially liberal, particularly in sexual matters. (To use a British term, social conservatism was not—and very much still is not—“clubbable”.) It took constant pressure from the pulpits to stop the elite example spreading.
With the collapse in attendance at Church services, and various added scandals—most obviously with the paedophile priest problem in the Catholic Church—leading to the evaporation of congregations, that pressure from pulpits largely vanished. At the heart of the Sexual Revolution was women acquiring unilateral control over their fertility—via the Pill and legalised abortion. This meant that the signalling role of Church attendance—“getting me pregnant means marriage”—largely collapsed.
With the evaporation of congregations, their role in fostering social connections based on a coherent moral order also vanished. This led to a moral order vacuum into which notions deeply hostile to social conservatism—and to the social-order questions conservatism raises—have moved. We can see—in “progressive” Democrat-run cities in the US and in London—that this outlook in government produces social disorder and decay.
Yet many folk remain committed to it. Partly this is because of the continuing power of the moralised status-game networks—and that many folk are still insulated from any adverse consequences—but there are also deeper reasons.
The imagined future of progressive politics becomes the realm of authority, the moral and political benchmark, which cannot be directly challenged—there being no information from the future—while various “marginalised” groups becomes sacred. That is, they become groups that claims on their behalf cannot be challenged, cannot be traded-off against.
What has become known as “wokery” seems like a religion because it is quite straightforwardly a secular religion with the imagined future as a realm of divine authority and sacred claims that generates zealots, devoted actors. One that focuses—as religions tend to—on cultural rather than economic issues. The area where there has developed the largest moral order vacuum in Western societies.
Losing coherence
So, that is how we end up with European politicians being systematically un-representative of their voters on cultural issues. Which is a systematic problem for democracy.
It is also a systematic problem for public policy, as the voters are right and the politicians and media are wrong, especially on migration.
Western democracies need a much better policy language concerning social cohesion and resilience. This is not something we can expect our thoroughly decayed academe to provide.
You know who does have such a policy language? The CCP. It has been the life’s work of Wang Huning. The Social Credit system and the Great Firewall of China are about a lot more than just political control.
References
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The pattern of migration fostering housing supply restriction you see again and again in high-migration cities across the Anglosphere—it is the classic restrict supply/increase demand pattern in public policy economist Arnold Kling draws attention to. Exceptions to migration driving up house prices and rents are places such as Texas where pre-existing institutional arrangements strongly inhibit use of official discretions and other regulation to restrict housing supply. The construction industry, governments getting increased land-tax and other revenue, and home-owners seeing the value of their homes shoot up, generate a powerful congruence of interests for higher immigration plus restrictive land/housing supply regulation. This is especially so if one enables foreign owners to launder money through purchase of appreciating assets that generate increasing rents. The notion that one can simply change the land/housing supply regulations is a political fantasy currently lacking any example of success. Driving up rents and house prices is much of the functional point of high immigration.
There is a reason media has evolved as it has - it went from a craft/trade that one apprenticed in to a college major. This of course meant it was subject to all of the problems associated with academia in general, but even more specifically, how the hell was a PhD in Journalism qualified to teach actual journalism? What horsecrap would you uncover if you examined a random collection of Journalism dissertations over the last 50 years?
I have a very strong suspicion that the shadow of Walter Lippmann looms large, even if filtered through the doctoral process and the man being essentially invisible to the undergrads of the last 30 years.
A great and much needed foundation on how luxury beliefs originate and spread. They don’t get it because they don’t interact in the sphere that would provide the understanding.