Living in “Ideological Silos”
PETER WEHNER 2014-06-13A new Pew Research Center survey finds that “Republicans and Democrats are more divided along ideological lines – and partisan antipathy is deeper and more extensive – than at any point in the last two decades.”
Among the other findings:
“Ideological silos” are now common on both the left and right. People with down-the-line ideological positions – especially conservatives – are more likely than others to say that most of their close friends share their political views. Liberals and conservatives disagree over where they want to live, the kind of people they want to live around and even whom they would welcome into their families.
Most of us live in some version of an “ideological silo,” and it makes perfect sense that we do. The deepest friendships, after all, are based not only on common interests but on seeing common truths. Many seek out a community of like-minded individuals who can offer support and encouragement along the way.
At the same time it’s important to resist the temptation to surround ourselves almost exclusively with like-minded people, those who reinforce our preexisting views and biases. For one thing, it can insulate us from the strongest arguments that challenge, or might refine and therefore improve, our stance on certain matters. If someone with standing in your life, whose good faith is unquestioned, takes issue with you on a subject having to do with politics or theology, you’re more likely to hear them out, or at least engage with them in a serious rather than dismissive fashion, than if you’re challenged by a stranger.
According to Professor Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, individual reasoning is not reliable because of “the confirmation bias,” the tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs and hypotheses. The only cure for the confirmation bias is other people. “If you bring people together who disagree,” he argues, “and they have a sense of friendship, family, having something in common, having an institution to preserve, they can challenge each other’s reason.”
In addition, creating “ideological silos” makes it much easier to caricature those with whom we disagree. There’s a strong temptation–stronger than most of us like to admit–to personalize political and theological differences; to assume that those who hold views at odds with mine are suffering from character flaws rather than simply intellectual ones.
One example of how things can be done the right way is the relationship between New Testament scholars Marcus Borg and N.T. Wright. They first met in 1984, after Wright read a book by Borg that impressed him but with which he had some disagreements. A friendship grew, even as Borg became one of America’s most popular liberal voices on theology while Wright became perhaps the most prominent standard-bearer for the traditional stance. Borg was a member of the Jesus Seminar; Wright was an outspoken critic. In The Meaning of Jesus, Borg and Wright presented their very different visions of Jesus. While they didn’t reach agreement on many matters, they did eliminate misunderstandings. Neither misrepresented the other. They operated on the assumption that admirable people can have deep and honest disagreements. And in the process they helped people, in their words, “grapple with points of view they might otherwise have dismissed without serious thought.”
In our unusually ideological age, that’s a fairly impressive achievement.
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Living in “Ideological Silos”
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The Iran-Turkey Switcheroo
The end of an era.
Sohrab Ahmari 2018-06-25
Bernard Lewis issued a startling prediction in 2010: Iran—the land of scowling ayatollahs and flag burnings—would abandon Islamism by the end of the decade, while Turkey—Washington’s stalwart Cold War ally—would turn away from the West and burrow deeper into its Muslim identity. Lewis is no longer with us, and there are still a few years left in his wager, but events in both countries are proving him remarkably prescient.
On Turkey, Lewis has already been vindicated. Witness the ballot-box triumph of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party, or AKP. In the presidential contest over the weekend, Erdogan thumped his opponent, Muharrem Ince of the Republican People’s Party, 53% to 31%. A smattering of pro-Kurdish and secular candidates divided the remaining ballots. Erdogan’s AKP and its allies also locked a majority of seats in Parliament.
The elections were not exactly fair. As the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe observed, the state of emergency imposed following a 2016 coup attempt constricted “freedom of expression and assembly” for the opposition. Erdogan has used the emergency laws to dismiss more than 100,000 soldiers, teachers, police officers, and journalists. And some 50,000 people have been jailed and are awaiting trial, according to rights groups.
With numerous opposition reporters languishing in prison, it came as no surprise that the ruling party dominated the media landscape, which led European Union officials to conclude that “conditions for campaigning were not equal.”
All this is par for the course with Erdogan, who first launched his power-grab in 2008. The opposition is right to complain of Erdogan’s efforts to hollow out Turkey’s independent institutions and remove checks on the AKP. Yet the fact remains that a substantial majority of Turks continue to elect Erdogan and the AKP in one plebiscite after another.
In Erdogan these voters see, not a corrupt would-be dictator, but a visionary who has delivered jobs and growth and reasserted Turkey’s long-suppressed Islamic identity. A majority of Turks prefer a pious Turkey anchored in its Muslim neighborhood rather than in Europe. It is high time to recognize that, for now, Turkey is lost to the West.
That doesn’t mean the West should instantly sever all diplomatic, economic, and military ties to Turkey. But the old arrangements lack the sentimental and ideological glue that once held them together. Everything is fragile and tentative and subject to revision by the majoritarian strongman in Ankara—and the voters who form his durable base.
So far, the Bernard Lewis scenario has been borne out by events in Turkey. But what about Iran?
There, too, events are tending in the direction foreseen by the great historian. As I write in the July/August issue of COMMENTARY, the Islamic Republic faces a profound legitimacy crisis at home, with not a day going by without some explosion of popular discontent. The ideological currents tossing the mullahs this way and that, I argue, are strongly nationalist. The slogans that daily ring out from the streets point to a growing revulsion with the regime’s Shiite-expansionist project, which has starved the national fisc, not to mention the population, and left the country sanctioned and isolated.
The latest slogan: “Death to Palestine!”
You read that right. In a country that has become synonymous with Holocaust-denial cartoon contests and threats to wipe Israel off the map, people are chanting “Death to Palestine.” Iranians don’t have a beef with Palestinians, of course. But they have had it with their regime’s decades-long underwriting of Hezbollah, Hamas, and other Palestinian terror groups. Why is our national wealth going to Gaza, they ask, rather than to Tehran, Isfahan, and Shiraz? The regime has no good answer to such questions. It has to resort to the truncheon, and that may work for a time, perhaps for many more years. But not forever.
Bernard Lewis is surely smiling somewhere.
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PODCAST: Civility Wars
Podcast: Civility in politics and life.
Noah Rothman 2018-06-25John Podhoretz is out today, so the COMMENTARY Podcast hosts are left to navigate the great civility debate in his absence. When is it appropriate to allow politics to determine how you interact with other people? Are activists and service providers justified by allowing political disputes to spill out into the personal realm? And is any of this still about the border?
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The Liberal Contribution to Trump’s Reelection Campaign
Civility is not generosity.
John Podhoretz 2018-06-25
In 2016, GOP presidential candidate Marco Rubio tried to get himself back in the game by ridiculing Trump in Trump-like fashion in the 1,875th Republican debate. This was the notorious “hand size” moment—and Trump responded exactly as Rubio wanted him to, by defending himself on the most ludicrous grounds. But the attack didn’t take and, in short order, Rubio apologized for it. He said his wife was unhappy he’d done it and he wouldn’t stoop to Trump’s level again. And that was that for Marco Rubio.
You cannot shame the shameless, and you cannot make unacceptable someone who has not only resorted to but has embraced conduct everyone else deemed unacceptable—and has not only survived but thrived because of it. That was Rubio’s mistake. By behaving like Trump, Rubio erased whatever advantage he might have had from not being like Trump (and remember, that was not nothing; after all was said and done, Trump only got 45 percent of the primary vote). It was probably worth a shot, but as it didn’t work, it’s probably not worth a second shot.
And yet that is exactly the path Democrats and liberals seem to be stumbling onto in their battle against Trump and the GOP. They have decided that the offenses of Trump and his administration against the good and the true and the beautiful are so horrific that anyone officially associated with him is to be harassed in public. Desperate times call for desperate measures, apparently.
The tactic of making the political personal in the most direct and unpleasant of ways is nothing new, of course. The home of my late sister, married to Reagan’s assistant secretary of state for Inter-American Affairs at the height of the U.S.-Sandinista clashes, was picketed by protestors in 1987. He was away while she and her three children under the age of six sat inside hearing their husband and father denounced as a murderer. In a residential neighborhood in D.C. That was nice, huh? Three little kids.
The comedian Seth Rogen recently bragged about refusing to take a photo with Paul Ryan in the presence of Ryan’s kids. He confessed to feeling bad about it, but also to thinking that it would be good if Ryan’s kids knew people who make movies and TV don’t like their dad. There’s a word for someone who brags about how he went and taught someone else’s kids a lesson in this way: The word is “asshole.”
This is what happens when you dehumanize your opposition. But anyone who professes to admire Trump should tread carefully when expressing outrage over the mistreatment of Press Secretary Sarah Sanders at the Red Hen restaurant this weekend because the dehumanization of the opposition is key to Trump’s communications and base-pumping strategies. And if you thrill at him for his conduct and find the treatment of Sanders unspeakable, there’s a word for you too, and it’s “hypocrite.”
The point Trump’s opposition fails to grasp is this: By imitating Trump, you are doing exactly what you fear the media are doing. You are normalizing him. You are making this kind of conduct the political baseline for both parties and both ideological tendencies. And let’s face it: You’re just not going to do it as well as Trump does. It’s like trying to follow in the footsteps of Al Jolson, a huge star who was also insufferable and immensely annoying. Nobody did Jolson like Jolson—but who would want to?
By affirming the notion that Americans are now divided into enemy camps, and each should treat the other as though it is beneath contempt, Democrats and liberals are making an in-kind contribution to the GOP’s 2018 midterm campaign and the 2020 Trump campaign. This is how you’re going to get Trump again.
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The Delusions of the Politicized Life
Go outside more.
Noah Rothman 2018-06-25
On paper, Republicans are well positioned to withstand the headwinds that accompany their party’s first midterm election—an election to be held while the GOP is in total control of the federal government. Voters increasingly favor the direction in which the country is headed. The unemployment rate is below 4 percent and at or near record lows for minorities. Voters appreciate the president’s engagement with North Korea, the reservations of diplomatic professionals and experts notwithstanding. What Democrats have going for them is that Donald Trump and the party over which he presides have sacrificed the virtues associated with responsible American civics. Trump’s disdain for traditional standards of decency and even the Constitution itself provides Democrats with an opportunity to exploit a contrast. Inexplicably, they want to squander that potential advantage.
In the parochial hothouse that is Twitter, a mass delusion has found a dreadfully large number of adherents. It is the idea that civility is a luxury that we cannot afford; not with the stakes as high as they are. This self-serving hallucination is a bipartisan affliction, but the left seems most affected.
Over the weekend, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders took to Twitter to publicize the fact that she was asked to remove herself from a restaurant because she works for the President of the United States. Few seemed to dwell on how the White House might view that as a politically useful event. For a president who has leaned into every culture war and nursed a persecution complex among his supporters, the assaults on his people suit him just fine. Obeservers willfully herded themselves into predictable camps; Republicans are incensed over the assault on basic comity, while Democrats are either welcoming it as an appropriate response to extraordinary circumstances or encouraging more and worse assaults on Americans who serve their country in the White House.
Representative Maxine Waters’s call for mobs to make life outside the White House gates miserable for presidential appointees is the logical extension of an ethos that has captured the liberal imagination. Liberals have convinced themselves that Trumpism is an ugly set of prejudices and not a philosophy that merits substantive engagement. But that self-flattering construct allows those ideas to flourish without a responsible and thorough rebuttal. Even the courtesy of a rebuttal is, for some, an unearned concession to their illegitimate opponents. Some progressives have assured themselves that the conduct of conventional politics in the Trump era is a half-measure in the face of outright fascism. This is the ultimate logic of “The Resistance,” which pays nominal homage to a militant insurgency—not a loyal political opposition.
And so, a contemptible and short-lived policy of separating illegal immigrant families at the border generates the same response from the left as did the FCC’s decision to terminate a mundane Obama-era regulatory mechanism: the harassment of Republican officeholders, Trump officials, and anonymous public sector employees and their families. This is the product of a particular kind of narcissism. As a political strategy, it is so tactically incompetent, tone-deaf, and self-defeating that it can only have incubated in a bubble.
The right, too, has steeped itself in some deeply unhealthy fantasies about the extraordinary nature of this moment. The symptom most indicative of this delirium is the civil-war fan fiction that populates certain conservative blogs.
The Federalist’s Jesse Kelly is the author of some notable additions to this sordid genre; his latest is a daydream in which he plays the role of Lakota warrior violently resisting his liberal oppressors. TownHall’s Kurt Schlichter, too, pens fictional accounts of a second civil war, an unamicable divorce between red and blue America, and anti-Trump military coups. The common thematic thread in these accounts is that—despite Republicans’ political dominance at the moment—conservatives are helpless, persecuted, and have no control over their own destiny.
The hyper-politicized life is immiserating. It leads observers to absurdly rash conclusions about the nation’s viability as a stable and united country. It convinces otherwise rational people to reckon that the country is not worth saving, or that irrational assaults on America’s foundational civic compacts are a justifiable response to objectionable—not existential—turns of events. And, occasionally, the politicized life leads people to commit violence. There is no objective assessment of the current American political condition that justifies this kind of outlandish fatalism.
The worst impulses of the Trump administration are routinely thwarted by both the checks on the presidency in the Constitution and by public engagement. The nation is nowhere near the levels of political instability to which Americans were privy in 1932, when an insurgent army overran Washington, or 1968, when riotous violence and political assassinations were commonplace. The biggest threat to the nation’s civic culture is not, in fact, intensity but disillusionment, apathy, and disengagement. You’d not know that from surveying the daily hyperventilation on Twitter.
Rarely in the past has the dialogue among professional political observers been so out of step with the daily lived experiences of average Americans. The conversation on politicized social media forums is, in particular, an insular experience without parallel. It punishes civil conduct and rewards hyperbole, posturing, and rhetorical excesses. These tiny, self-selecting communities would be of little note if it were not for the fact that the arbiters of American political taste are addicted to observing them as a feedback mechanism. But they are unhealthy, unrepresentative, and unreliable. They induce paranoia and delirium.
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Charles Krauthammer, 1950-2018
A life well lived.
John Podhoretz 2018-06-21
Charles Krauthammer made people understand their own thoughts. It was Charles who collated the various strands of Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy and codified them as the Reagan Doctrine in a Time Magazine essay in 1985. He did the same with the Bush Doctrine 16 years later—and his codification played a role in how Bush himself came to formulate his approach to the world following 9/11. And in 2009, Charles codified the Obama Doctrine as well, although not by that name, in a speech he turned into one of the great articles of our time, “Decline Is a Choice.” I was there when he delivered that speech and rushed up to him to ask that he allow me to publish it in COMMENTARY, but I was too late; he had already promised it to The Weekly Standard.
I couldn’t really object because, 14 years earlier, I had been part of the trio (with Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes) who had recruited him to come write for the Standard. I don’t think I was the reason he did so and I’m not sure I conducted myself in a way that helped our case. I was not then and am not now easily intimidated, but I always found Charles particularly intimidating. The early going at the Standard did little to ease that sense of intimidation. At early editorial meetings, he seemed particularly eager to challenge my ideas for articles and to make me defend them; he had come to know me primarily as the brother of his wife Robbie’s best friend Rachel and as the brother-in-law of his close friend Elliott and had no independent reason to think I had any particular business running a magazine or serving as his editor, which I would do.
You didn’t edit Charles, though. He edited himself. Over and over again. His work would come in from an assistant and be revised continually until the moment of publication. Expressions of frustration about the late hour nearing the time we had to send pieces off to the printer were greeted on the phone with stony silence. Any complaint to one of his assistants (Rich Lowry was one) generated what seemed to a kind of silent terror that crackled through the cables. He was civil, but not necessarily pleasant, in these moments.
Charles existed so apart from his quadraplegic disability in the minds and experiences of those of us who knew him—because of his willed insistence that it be so, a willed insistence that was all the more powerful because it was unspoken—that any anger I might have felt at the imposition of his writerly arrogance seemed entirely permissible … until the moment that I remembered. I would remember he could not put pen to paper. I would remember he wrote by dictating. I would remember it was a goddamned astonishing fact of facts that he could do any of this, let alone do it with such easy brilliance. Think of it. He read widely and paid attention to everything—a man who had some difficulty turning a page. He wrote weekly, this man who could not write.
How did he? He told me once that when he did rounds as a resident at Mass General, the hospital had a primitive voice-control system in which he and his colleagues would phone in their notes on patients. The system would start when they began speaking, but if they paused or said um or got lost in their thoughts, it would shut down and hang up on them. And so they would have to do it again. Charles, of course, couldn’t take notes. He had to dictate off the top of his head. Because this weirdly technical aspect of his medical training taught him how, he became a fluent dictater of words, and the only person I ever knew who could make one of those early computer voice thingies called Dragon work to his advantage.
Anyway, Charles liked the Standard, and he like the work we did, and when I left editing there, he wrote me the nicest letter I have ever received. It was not a necessary gesture. I didn’t expect it and he was in no way obliged to write it, but write it he did. It was the first act of pure kindness he had ever shown me, and it began a friendship—a very distant friendship, but a friendship nonetheless—that would last two decades. Over time he would share bits and pieces of the way he was compelled to live. He told me that the year Ford came out with the van he was able to drive was the greatest liberation of his life. He did love driving that van—and drove it with frightening flourish.
He had been one of the first people I met when I came to Washington looking for a possible job at the tail end of college. Martin Peretz, the editor of The New Republic and the man who had helped turn Charles from a Mondale speechwriter into a magazine writer, had invited me to lunch with the two of them at the Palm. I had been reading him for a while, and had no idea he was wheelchair-bound. The only note taken of it was that Marty occasionally offered to help Charles with his straw, or to cut a piece of gristle off the steak that had already been sliced thin for him.
A grandee of Washington at the time—I don’t remember who, maybe Lee Hamilton or the head of Brookings or some such—stopped by the table to complain about Israel. That day the Jewish state had annexed the Golan Heights, an act that was taken to be very bad by the conventional wisdom of Washington grandees then and now.
“Please tell me even you have no defense for this,” the grandee told Marty Peretz.
“Well, I’m no fan of Begin, and I’m sure he could have done this better,” Marty said, “but there are good strategic reasons for such a move, of course.”
And Charles said, “Israel does what Israel has to do, just like the United States.”
As I said, he made people understand their own thoughts. Every week. For decades. That day, for the first time, he made me understand mine. After hundreds of other such occasions, reading him in print and listening to him during his tenure as the most unexpected of TV stars, I can say I’m not sure anyone in my lifetime has ever done that better. It is a key role of the intellectual explicator, which is what Charles was nonpareil—to help you understand what you think.
He was the most extraordinary person I have ever known, and I have been blessed to know many. We roasted Charles a few years ago at our annual fundraiser. Of course, no one could think of a bad thing to say about him. He said bad things about us. They were hilarious, because that’s the other thing he was—funny. Very, very, very funny. We’ll release video of it over the coming days.
There is more to say—about Charles as a Jew, about Charles as a brilliant social commentator, and about Charles as a medical miracle. For that he was. He was a quadriplegic who lived to the age of 68—and died not of complications from his condition but from cancer. He told Bill and Fred and me back in 1995 that he did not know how much longer he had to live and he needed to earn as much as he could to ensure Robbie and his son Daniel were provided for if the end came unexpectedly. He lived for 23 years after that. He wrote a book that sold a million copies. People flocked to him at personal appearances as though he were a Beatle.
Has anyone ever done more with the life God handed him, or played a bad hand as astoundingly as Charles did?
He did not believe in God, but if there is a God and there is a heaven, I hope Charles is playing basketball right now and cracking wise with the wisest of men, for he was among the greatest-souled of men. Baruch Dayan Emet. And may Robbie and Danny be comforted among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.
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