Vast Open Spaces and Tense Little Monopolies

Monk by the Sea, Caspar David Friedrich ca. 1809 via Wikimedia.

Seems Yuval Levin has written a David Brooks column for the Times this week ("How Did Americans Lose Faith in Everything?")

When we think about our problems, we tend to imagine our society as a vast open space filled with individuals who are having trouble linking hands. And so we talk about breaking down walls, building bridges, leveling playing fields or casting unifying narratives.

But what we are missing is not simply greater connectedness but a structure of social life: a way to give shape, purpose, concrete meaning and identity to the things we do together. If American life is a big open space, it is not a space filled with individuals. It is a space filled with these structures of social life — with institutions. And if we are too often failing to foster belonging, legitimacy and trust, what we are confronting is a failure of institutions.

Well, don't you tend to imagine our society as a vast open space filled with individuals attempting and failing to hold hands with each other? I mean, when you're thinking about our problems? I guess when I think about our problems I tend to think about our problems, like rising inequality, failure to provide huge numbers with what they need to live satisfying lives, and headlong rush to the destruction of possible human habitats. When I think about what's a creative-sounding analogy for society, I don't regard myself as thinking about our problems at all. I guess that must mean I'm a liberal. Though I have nothing against analogies in principle. Rest assured.

But if American life is a big open space (suddenly it's not American society any more), then it's not a big open space, but a space that is not open at all. This is a point where you might be better advised to move to a different analogy, or give up on reading the thing altogether, which was my choice.

Meanwhile, as if in revenge, Brooks has written a kind of Yuval Levin piece ("The Bernie Sanders Fallacy"), to adduce the economic proofs that there is no such thing as class struggle in the United States, along with possibly attempting to prove on the basis of irrefragable logic that there is no "culture war" either, though he forgets all about that after the initial bothsiderizing in paragraph 4:

The Golden Chain

Barbara Stanwyck in Alfred E. Green's Baby Face (1933), via An Honest Ghost.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Fragmented Society", New York Times, May 20 2016:

I'm so clued in that Yuval Levin name-checks me in his new book, and yet there are things in that sucker even I didn't know, on virtually every page, although all the examples I can think of seem to be things I say myself all the time, like political polarization in Congress seems to be on the rise since its period of decline in 1910-40 and income inequality, diminishing from 1925 to 1970, has also begun to rise, and immigration, slowing from 1910 to 1975, has been going up. These factors, as opposed to the Internet, which arrived later, have caused us to become a fragmented society. Levin argues that our politics are based upon nostalgia for a less fragmented time. Conservatives lament the new lack of social cohesion and liberals complain about the inequality. Both are wrong, in Levin's view, because that's just the way things are nowadays and we can't do anything about it. These phenomena are the downsides of choices we have made for perfectly good reasons, like the desire to enjoy more flexibility, creativity, and individual choice, as when we buy cheap products around the world, and so there's nothing to be done. Therefore what we do will have to be the opposite of what we have done in the past. Unlike the policies of the Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush administrations when all this unfortunate fragmentation took place, we will have to adopt subsidiarity, devolving more power and choice from the federal government to local authorities. This is all quite true, but I'd like to say that I disagree with it in part. I think it is important, as we are taking away power from the federal government, that we should also give more power to the federal government, for example by instituting radical new ideas like national service and OMG look at the time and I've run out of space.

Levin's book is The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism (Basic Books, 2016), and I don't know if it's as much of a mess as the way Brooks portrays it, although it's inevitable that it should suffer from that cognitive dissonance between the fatalistic declinism of the conservative narrative (nostalgia aside, you can never have it as nice as it used to be) and the need to claim that your prescriptions are going to do the patient some good (you'll be as good as old!)

Brooks's basic argument, that he has thought of a way to disagree with Levin's argument even though Levin mentions him by name, is contained in paragraphs 14-16 of his column:

Confirmation Bias Watch

Image via.

In the "liberals are the real fascists" department, one of my favorite cases was "public intellectual" Yuval Levin (that's really one of his professions according to the Wikipedia biography, suggesting it's actually on his C.V.) calling out the economist Paul Krugman for being one of those tradition-minded, hidebound, inflexible liberals who, in spite of their also being demonically relativistic postmodernists, consistently insist they are in possession of absolute, indiscutable truth, as in the brief debate I covered in April; in Shorter form,

Confirmation Bias Watch

Some more Piketty fallout: Paul Krugman again bows to empirical evidence and acknowledges changing his mind:

we're rapidly moving towards a state where inherited wealth dominates. I didn't know that. I really was-- I should've known it. I should've thought about it, but I didn't. And so then here comes this book with-- I mean, it's beautiful-- absolutely analytically beautiful, if that makes any sense at all....  You suddenly say, "Oh, this is not-- the world is not the way I saw it."

(h/t Marie2 at Booman Tribune)

Meanwhile Yuval Levin is on record as having (in 2011) blamed current inequality in the United States largely on Great Society social spending in the 1960s and '70s:

Flush with revenue and stirred by the promise of technocratic mastery, our government took on immense entitlement commitments and major social reforms in that era, and these have certainly had some of their intended consequences. But they have also struck at the roots (economic and especially moral) of our ability to sustain our strength. The collapse of the family among the poor — powerfully propelled by the ethic of social democracy and by a horrendously designed welfare system that was not improved until the mid-1990s — has vastly worsened social and economic inequality in America, and the capacity of generations to rise out of poverty.

I'd say that's yet another chance for Levin to show that conservatives can be just as open-minded and ready to bend their opinions to fit the facts as liberals are. How about it, Dr. L? Anything about the Piketty-Saez data make you want to rethink your premises there?

Confirmation Bias Watch

Image by John S. Dykes for Wall Street Journal, July 2012.

A little over a month has passed since famous conservative genius Yuval Levin accused Paul Krugman of refusing to entertain evidence that challenges his beliefs even as he criticizes everybody else for doing the same thing. Here at the Rectification of Names we were able to adduce empirical evidence that Krugman has, actually, repeatedly changed his mind in the face of facts and publicly admitted it, as scientists are supposed to be capable of doing, but not as it happens that Yuval Levin has ever done so.

I just want to note here that Krugman has done it again, on the very important question of whether humanity can afford to stop destroying our Earth with greenhouse gases, in yesterday's Times column:

One front many people didn’t take too seriously, however, was renewable energy. Sure, cap-and-trade might make more room for wind and the sun, but how important could such sources really end up being? And I have to admit that I shared that skepticism. If truth be told, I thought of the idea that wind and sun could be major players as hippie-dippy wishful thinking. But I was wrong.

Still no data on Levin. In 2008, incidentally, he wrote on the subject of climate change denialism,

the genuine abuses of science have been (and frankly continue to be — just listen to “rolling back the waters” Obama lately) more serious on the left in this debate than on the right. 

Maybe now we have some hard evidence on the relative abusiveness of left and right in this connection, this could be a good opportunity for him to demonstrate his ability to revise his views in the light of reality. I can't find that he's said anything on the subject at all lately.

Confirmation bias has a conservative bias

Via.

Yuval Levin on the hot topic of confirmation bias at the National Review:

Without (it seems) a hint of irony, Paul Krugman argued on Monday that everyone is subject to confirmation bias except for people who agree with him. He was responding to this essay Ezra Klein wrote for his newly launched site, Vox.com, which took up the question of confirmation bias and the challenges it poses to democratic politics. Krugman acknowledged the research that Klein cites but then insisted that his own experience suggests it is actually mostly people he disagrees with who tend to ignore evidence and research that contradicts what they want to believe, while people who share his own views are more open-minded, skeptical, and evidence driven. I don’t know when I’ve seen a neater real-world example of an argument that disproves itself.

With the implication that I'm rubber, you're glue, and neener neener neener. Or as Jennifer Rubin calls it,