Value Competition

Will the Parties Reach a Deal to Reduce their Allies' Power?

Assume both liberal and conservative parties have an incentive to reduce the power of their union or church allies as part of a corresponding reduction in the power of the other side's allies.  Will a deal between the parties be reached?  A key obstacle is that it is much harder to think of plausible public policies to curb the power of churches than it is to think of plausible public policies to curb the power of unions.  Reducing or eliminating collective bargaining and anti-discrimination protections given to private sector unions federally in the 1930s and to public sector unions at the state level are plausible if highly controversial public policy changes.  By contrast, a law that eliminated the charitable tax deduction for religions that maintain their members are divinely favored and/or maintain non-scientific beliefs is not a plausible legal change.  Given that asymmetry, it is hard to see that an implicit deal between the parties could be reached.  Absent such a deal, it is hard to see the reason for liberal politicians to support legal changes that would hobble their key allies in mobilizing lower-SES voters while keeping the key mobilizing allies of conservatives intact.

Parties, Unions, and Churches

Assume the following: 1) Liberal and conservative parties have a need to attract support from lower SES people as well as upper SES people; 2) Liberal and conservative parties have a need to ally with institutions that can effectively summon support from lower SES people who are less attracted to liberal or conservative ideology and/or are less able to act effectively on their beliefs; 3) Two plausible such allies are unions for liberal parties and fundamentalist churches or other religious groups for conservative parties; 4) Both types of institutions engage in certain socially detrimental conduct (in the case of unions, rent-seeking on behalf of senior and less skilled members, in the case of fundamentalist churches socially divisive and factually dubious assertions as to the divinely preferred status of their adherents); and 5) the socially detrimental conduct by the institutions is electorally detrimental, resulting in an interest by the parties in minimizing such conduct that is in conflict with their ally's interest.

Two stories related to those assumptions follow, the first related to the attributes of leaders and followers in churches, unions, and parties and the second related to the likely outcome of the struggle between the party trying to reduce its ally's mischief and the ally trying to maintain it.

    Fused Egoism and Altruism in Union, Religious, and Party Leaders as a Means of Bundling Vegetables and Sweets for Followers

    Assume individuals recognize that they have a self-command problem with preferring "sweets" over "vegetables."   A union, church or party operates as a way of bundling features that are in the member's immediate interest--"sweets"--with features that are in the member's long-term but not short-term interest or in the interest of others if not the member--"vegetables." 

    The dominance of liberal unions and conservative churches can be understood in terms of members' opting for a package that includes the vegetables of political ideology as well as the sweets of group ideology or self-interest.  Consistent with the story's logic, one could tell a pessimistic historical story about the rise of industrial or political unionism compared to craft unionism (a free market in unionism has led to the decline of "lots of vegetables" craft unionism in which guild privileges required guild skills in favor of the cheap to each member altruism of modern liberal unions), and a like pessimistic story about the rise of conservative evangelical religion compared to old-time fundamentalism (a free market in religion has led to "lots of vegetables" old-time religion declining in favor of the inexpensive altruism of modern evangelical religion).  But also consistent with the logic is an optimistic historical story about how unionism has become accompanied by a sophisticated modern liberal ideology that mixes altruism with egoism by blending cultural liberalism with economic egalitarianism rather than an unsophisticated, group-based, messianic socialism or communism or an apolitical, parochial view; a similar optimistic story can be told about the transition from old-time fundamentalism to a conservative evangelical religion that mixes altruism toward high-earners with egoism on culture.

    Similarly, the dominance of parties that blend altruism and egoism for both high SES and lower SES people can be derived from a preference of people for a bundling of sweets and vegetables; parties like unions and churches serve as bundling devices to solve the commitment problem.

    In parties, unions, and churches, followers want leaders who can blend both a particularistic, egoistic agenda and a broad, partially altruistic agenda.  If the ability to do so is scarce, a subpart of the story for each institution becomes about leadership as a rare attribute.  As noted before, another subpart of the story concerns whether leaders' competition to attract followers leads to a desirable race to the top or a detrimental race to the bottom.  For parties, the pessimistic story of decline over time would presumably emphasize an increase in reliance on unions by liberals and religion by conservatives, with an associated increase in detrimental conduct by these institutions.  An optimistic story would emphasize the rise of liberal and conservative parties with their distinctive mixture of altruism and egoism for high and low status people compared to older kinds of parties with a clear-cut class basis, such as workers' parties and middle-class parties. 

    The Edge of the Union or Church over the Party in the Chicken Game

    If the party has plenty of other potential allies to recruit low SES supporters, the general proposition, as argued in Becker (1983), that competition will drive down political rents, just the way it drives down economic rents, is applicable.  But assume that the liberal party is in a bilateral monopoly with the union, and the conservative party in a bilateral monopoly with the church.  This can be modeled either with a 2 x 2 matrix or continuously as a chicken game, in which the sides have a choice between a hard-line and a soft-line strategy.   If both go hard-line, there's a "crash"--in this situation, that could be viewed as a strong electoral victory for the opposing party combined with a serious loss of perquisites for the ally--say 0, 0.  If both go soft-line, with the party not pushing rent reduction and the ally reducing rents some on its own, the outcome in win-win--say 3,3.  On the other hand, the best outcome is to have other side cave while you stand firm--we'll call that 5, x (explaining in a moment the ambiguous x). 

    Both sides have an incentive to commit to a hard-line strategy.  The game has no single solution, but there are two good reasons to expect an outcome in favor of the ally rather than the party.  One reason is that the ally can be understood as more egoistically motivated than the party and hence as more likely to win the negotiation.  The second is based on the value of x, which may well be lower for the ally than it is for the party; the ally is also likely to have better information about the party's x than the party is to have about the ally's x (i.e., unions and churches understand political calculations better than parties understand how unions and churches work).  If that value is 0 for the ally when it caves to a hard-line party, being hard-line is a (weakly) dominant strategy for the ally, which makes a commitment to play that strategy credible.  The party may well believe that if the ally worked at doing so, it could find a way to make x greater than 0.  The party has some hope that will happen--for example a union leader or minister who wants to run for President has an incentive to figure out whether unionism and religion can be done at a lower social cost in order for him or her to have a chance to win.  On the other hand, his or her union and ministerial peers have an incentive to stop the renegade within their ranks from succeeding in developing a form of unionism or religion that reduces members' perquisites.   That suggests a second prediction, to accompany the first one that the ally is likely to win the chicken game with the party: Both liberal and conservative parties are highly unlikely to be led by leaders rising from the union or clerical ranks, in that these leaders are either associated with socially detrimental conduct or with betrayal of their group.

Post-Left-Right Politics

Assume that the left and the right in their moralistic "I'm right and you're wrong" forms are useful in certain settings (notably legislative politics and litigation) in which exit costs are high, surfaced conflict is acceptable, and substantial self-segregation of the opposing camps is practical, but are not useful in certain other settings (such as workplaces and social groups) in which self-segregation is undesirable, close collegial relations are important, and exit costs are low.   Further assume that these flexible economic and cultural organizations constitute the major frontier domains for politics in the future.  Is it possible for such organizations to gain some of the benefits of value competition--harder work, innovation, etc.--without the contextually unacceptable moralism of the left and the right?

One way post-left-right politics might work: Consider a six-way division on two dimensions, ideology and culture-economics, involving left cultural and economic organizations (in which the right is unacceptable), right cultural and economic organizations (in which the left is unacceptable), and centrist cultural and economic organizations (in which the left and the right are both unacceptable).  The key idea here is that the relevant dichotomies will have to be different for the different types of organizations; the competing/cooperating sides that will work to create a more mutually respectful, less moralistic politics for a left cultural organization are not the same as those that will work for a right cultural organization, and a centrist cultural organization demands yet another dichotomy.

My nominations for sides in the six types of organizations that could empathize with the other and feel the merits of the other, and in doing so work to foster mutually respectful internal competition in a way that the left and the right can't: 1) for left economic organizations (e.g., government or non-profit offices, schools, unions): Parents and Children (or Teachers and Children); 2) for right economic organizations (e.g., for-profit corporations): Managers and Investors (this division, unlike the other five, is already the basis of an effective cooperative-competitive politics for this type of organization); 3) for centrist economic organizations (e.g., reformist government, non-profit, or for-profit firms, schools, etc.): Yin and Yang; 4) for right cultural organizations (e.g., conservative churches, synagogues, mosques, etc.): Men and Women (or Boys and Girls); 5) for left cultural organizations (e.g., communes): Butches and Femmes; and 6) for centrist cultural organizations (e.g., social clubs, civic clubs): Yin and Yang.

Many ambiguities and debatable points lurk: For example, one might might doubt the viability of a "Women" or "Girls" side in a conservative religious group, and for some such groups the criticism might be correct.  Another question/criticism about the viability of the hypothetical sides: The "true-false" philosophical rationalism of Athens and the "good-evil" religious dualism of Jerusalem have through whatever processes gone along with democracy and rule of law-based civil liberties in the West.  By contrast, the "both sides true and false, both sides good and bad" philosophical dualism of Taoism and more broadly of China, appealing as it may be, has through whatever processes not gone along with democracy and rule of law-based civil liberties.   Given that, why should one feel that leaving the West's left and right behind in favor of the East's yin and yang can foster more democracy in certain kinds of organizations?   A response: The wheel of history brings different ideas to the top; my judgment/guess is that Taoist notions that perhaps did indeed promote quietism and emperor control in their original setting have a much better prospect than left and right of promoting cooperative competition and enhanced democracy within organizations in the contemporary United States.

A Downside of Left-Right Value Competition

Although I'm optimistic about left-right competition in the United States and other wealthy democracies, it does have its difficulties.  One difficulty is that a deeply embedded left-right culture fosters a mode of writing in which the author and some of the author's audience finds satisfaction in a demonstration that ideological opponents have engaged in a course of action driven by adherence to ideology.  Such writing is frustrating to readers who are unconcerned with such a demonstration of ideological motives and concerned instead with whether the course of action taken makes sense and what alternative actions might be preferable.

That's my core reaction to Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West.   At the length of a magazine article--a format in which I've enjoyed Caldwell's work--the unmasking exercise he engages in strikes me as worthwhile; he is right, I think, that European elites impelled by a "never again" horror over Fascism and ethnocentric nationalism as well as by a desire for cheap labor were ideologically predisposed to support a multicultural Europe and did not think over carefully what that involved or submit expanded immigration to democratic debate.  But with 442 pages to work with, Caldwell has more than enough room to make a reasoned case not merely about ideological motivation but about the rights and wrongs of immigration policy.  That he does not do, unfortunately.  instead, we have snark directed toward European elites.

it's possible, of course, that my belief that Caldwell does not engage the pros and cons of policy effectively is tinged by my own ideological tilt toward the position that for all the very real problems of mass Muslim immigration to Western Europe, the long-run outlook for European nations, for immigrants, and for predominantly Muslim nations is better than absent the immigration wave; I like the prospects for France in the 21st century considerably better than I like the prospects for Japan.  But I also believe that Caldwell's book is affected for the worse by a deep-rooted ideological culture that makes unmasking of the ideological foe enough for some of us, inadequate as it is for others of us.  Books that criticize liberal (or conservative) ideology but that also argue that a different understanding is correct--such as the Thernstroms' data-laden argument that the U.S. was doing better on race before the rise of affirmative action, or Herrnstein and Murray's similarly data-laden argument about the connection between heritable IQ and life success--are stimulated by an embedded left-right ideological culture just as Caldwell's is, but are, I think, better ways for a reader to spend his or her valuable time than reading a book that unmasks without advancing its own argument.

How about Burke, whose book on the French Revolution is Caldwell's titular inspiration?  Burke's argument is not data-laden in the mode of much modern ideologically-driven debate, but it is clear, thoughtful, and passionate.  If Burke's reflections were like Caldwell's, instead of Burke's actual full-throated denunciation of the planned society in which all vistas lead to the gallows and his powerful and emotional defense of an English order of tradition and gradual change, we would have a small book that stopped with unmasking the motives of the revolutionaries and their English sympathizers. 

Your Parents and How Bad the World Appears to Be

In a recent email on my book proposal I got good pushback on my contention that it's good for politicians to be electorally oriented.  It depends, my interlocutor correctly noted, on how bad a place you think the world is currently--if it's bad enough, the risk of politicians just imposing what they think is right is presumably less than if the world's doing sort of all right.   In my response, I acknowledged that the world didn't seem nearly as bad as it had to me in the 1980s when I was working at a law firm job I disliked.  Afterword, I thought of a response that I think also gets to the psychological reality of the situation: My sense of a world awry in the 1980s had a lot to do with going from a home setting in which my parents had been highly solicitous of me (and from school settings that rewarded certain skills of mine) to work settings that weren't so aligned with my desires and skills.  The point, I suppose, apart from the VC issue of whether "the world is doing pretty well"/"the world is doing terribly" dichotomy is a useful value dichotomy (yes) is that a dark view of the world can be associated not only with having had mean parents but also with having had benevolent ones.

An alternative to left-right ideology in everyday life

Competing political ideologies that are antagonistic to one another can work well, or well enough, in settings in which there is no effective exit option.  Legislatures and courts epitomize such settings.  On the other hand, a competition between such antagonistic ideologies will not work well in firms, families, comunity groups, and other settings in which entry and exit tend to be flexible and close day-to-day cooperation between colleagues, family members, and group members is crucial. 

Is there a substitute for conventional political ideologies that would have some of the benefits that these ideologies bring--such as keeping people on their toes and motivating them to care about the preferences of "swing voters" or more generally uncommitted people--without the deep flaws that such ideologies have in non-government, non-compulsory settings?  One idea: Men and women, and a whole complex of traits, principles, and characteristics culturally associated with maleness and femaleness, are interdependent and simultaneously cooperative and competitive.  "Maleness" and "femaleness" in the form of constructed sides in everyday life settings that are not limited to people of any one gender or position present a possible way to benefit from the energizing effect of competing values that also cooperate better than, say, liberalism and conservatism.  Value competition is useful--but it's also necessary to avoid having people in intimate settings be torn apart from one another by the divisive features of conventional ideological competition.

Skepticism

The rise of economics as a science over the last two centuries has gone along with a rise in political belief among the educated over the same time period.  That makes sense, given that economics provides a logical and empirically sophisticated structure for making liberal and conservative arguments.  If value competition comes through at some point as a science to the degree that economics has, I expect that it will harm rather than help political belief among the educated.  Understanding how more desirable political belief systems are also less consistent ones will, I think, tend to debilitate political faith among those proud of their attachment to rational inquiry and argument.

The Positional PD in Economics and Culture

Robert Frank and others have made the argument that income is a positional good that leads people into a PD rat-race: If everyone pursued it less, we could all be better off, but everyone has an individual incentive to push ahead of one's peers.  The policy implication is an egalitarian, redistributionist one.

The positional PD model can also be applied to education.   Assuming that liberals who favor the positional PD as a basis for a strongly progressive income tax do not favor it as a basis for high taxation of education, or other measures to discourage an educational rat-race, why not?   is there an inconsistency that supports a skeptical perspective that sees liberalism as adhering to different principles on economics and culture (or a different skeptical perspective that sees liberalism as the reflection of the interests of a highly educated elite)?   Liberal willingness to redistribute on the basis income but not education can be defended on utilitarian grounds, but the basic two-part, Rawlsian statement of liberal principles proposed in the last post does not justify the different treatment of the two cases on non-utilitarian grounds.  That leaves open the question of whether there is a more nuanced statement of liberal principles that does work to distinguish the cases.

Defending Liberal and Conservative Consistency

Two attempts at stating liberal and conservative principles that apply to both economic and cultural issues--

Liberal principles: First, government and society should support individual freedom in economics and culture over compulsion or moral pressure, both because doing so is correct in itself and because freedom brings about a better economy and a better culture; second, government and society should support compulsion or moral pressure to reduce inequalities in economics and culture that are unfair and/or reduce utility under the principle of diminishing marginal utility.

Conservative principles: First, government and society should support right action--overriding impulse in favor of judgment--in economics and culture, which may involve compulsion or moral pressure, both because doing so is right in itself and because right action leads to a better economy and a better culture; second, government and society should avoid compulsion or moral pressure to reduce inequalities in economics and culture as long as such inequalities are an outcome of a fair process.

Assuming these principles are an acceptable shorthand for what liberals and conservatives believe, do they explain the flipped stances of the sides on compulsion in the economic and cultural spheres?  I believe so, in that liberals can say they support inequality-reducing but not inequality-increasing uses of compulsion while conservatives can say they support virtue-enhancing but not virtue-reducing uses of compulsion.  To undermine the defense of liberal consistency, one would want to show that liberals will support inequality-reducing compulsion in the economic sphere but not in a comparable case in the cultural sphere.    Similarly, to undermine the defense of conservative consistency, one would want to show that conservatives will support a virtue-enhancing intervention in the cultural sphere but not in a comparable case in the economic sphere.

A Flipped Prisoner's Dilemma: The Need for Hierarchy

A and B are engaged in a venture--which could be a non-profit one as opposed to a business--in which there is free exit and benefits to be gained from mutual cooperation.  Although the relationship is long-term, so uncooperative behavior can be punished, such lack of cooperation is imperfectly observable.   Given this background, there is a PD-based case for managerial hierarchy rather than equality between A and B, with one party having the right to monitor the other's behavior for lack of cooperation and to remove the other from the venture, with these rights being backed up by the coercive power of the state. 

This culturally-oriented case for internal hierarchy parallels the case for external hierarchy in the standard exchange-oriented PD.   The political valences are reversed, though.  In the standard PD, it is liberals who are more receptive to the case for government intervention to respond to the PD and conservatives who are more skeptical about the broad application of the model.  In the flipped cultural PD just given, it's reasonable to posit that conservatives would be more receptive to the model's case for hierarchy and that iberals would be more skeptical of the model.  Assuming that's the case, we have some support for the proposition that liberals and conservatives shift their positions on compulsion to support cooperation, with liberals being more receptive to it in economics and conservatives being more receptive to it in culture.   That leaves open the question of whether a principled position for liberalism and/or conservatism can be identified under which the different stances on the two PDs make sense given those principles.