Thinking of a Very Loose Coalition as an Organism with a Single Heart, Mind, & Will Makes You Stupid
Thinking of a very loose coalition as an organism with a single heart, mind, & will makes you stupid. Or, at least, it makes your audience stupid to the extent that they believe you—& for some malevolent actors, that is what they want. If you think “Congress doesn’t care” about ICE murderings, you’ve already lost the plot. The story that matters is about specific legislators, specific incentives, and a Republican Party that (largely) has a Party Line and punishes Line Wobbles far more effectively than its Democratic rival. This is of broad applicability—I see this most often in the difference between Democratic professional economists who are economists first, and Republican professional economists who are Republicans first. But right now we see it at work all across the entire American spectrum of American governance…
Hoisting this from SubStack Notes <https://substack.com/profile/16879-brad-delong/note/c-199669299> up to the main Grasping Reality feed, because it is important:
The extremely sharp Krenik writes:
Krenik: <https://substack.com/@macrothinking/note/c-199507887>: ‘‘“Democrats” is just a collective term for a group of people who tend to vote the same way and also those people who they elect. There is no organisational structure that can decide what Democrats should or should not do. To ask “what can Democrats do?” is a category error, similar to asking “what can Nebraskans do?”. This gets to the heart of the failure of American politics. Power is distributed to individuals, not parties, and there is no way to get them to agree on things because there is no consequence for defection. Ditto for Republicans…
I 100% agree with his main point: Krenik has this right: There is no Central Committee for the Democratic Party that sets out a Party Line, and enforces it by imposing consequences on those who engage in Line Wobbles. So to say “Democrats”, as if it is a unified anthology intelligence with a single position, a single rationale, and a single will is to commit a grave category error. When it is made by people, they are either (a) engaged in making themselves stupid, or (b) malevolently misinforming their audiences. You can excuse people, on the grounds that we are all hair-trigger primed to attribute human-level consciousness, intellect, and intention to things that do not have it—to individual lions or to the collectivity of a prey species or to the goddess of the hunt or to the thunderstorms. And this extends to collections of us East African Plains Apes, whether Uma’s band, the Imperial Japanese Empire, the Knights Templar, or rthe Democratic Party. But when you do this attribution you need to be very careful, because it is a significant failure mode of human reasoning.
And I would double down on my claim that when people do it, they are either:
engaged in making themselves stupid, or
malevolently misinforming their audiences
For example, something that annoyed me yesterday. The shape Steve Vladeck claiming that their is an organization called “Congress” with a single mind, will, and intention that is fine with ICE’s murderings and does not actually care:
Steve Vladeck: <https://substack.com/@delongonsubstack/note/c-199259864>: ‘It would take a two-word amendment to 42 U.S.C. § 1983 to subject ICE agents and other federal law enforcement officers to the same liability for constitutional violations that local and state officers currently face. If Congress actually cared about what it’s seeing, it could pass that overnight…
My knee-jerk intemperate response: May I say that every time somebody makes the pathetically stupid—when it is not malevolently disinformational—intellectual-cognitive error of writing about “Congress” as if it were a single animal with a single unified mind and set of goals, I really want to puke? Steve Vladeck is smarter than this. Or, at least, I had thought he was <https://substack.com/@delongonsubstack/note/c-199259864>.
Let me expand:
There are Democrats in Congress who do care, but are powerless. There are some Republicans in Congress who care, and who could join with Democrats to get it done, but who fear the consequences for their careers—and, quite possibly, for their and their families personal safety, not being rich enough to be able to afford intensive private security. And there are Republicans in Congress and outside who are absolutely fine with ICE’s murderings. But there is no single entity “Congress” that does not actually care. And Steve Vladeck is making himself and his audience stupider by claiming that there is.
My old teacher Mancur Olson would, at this point, tell me that I am putting it too strongly. He would start talking his book about The Logic of Collective Action, and the importance of selective incentives in turning a heterogeneous collection of East African Plains Apes going every which-way into at least a somewhat unified group pointing in the same direction that can, for some purposes, be usefully modeled as an anthology intelligence with a single consciousness, point of view, and intention. But, as Krenik observes, “ask[ing] ‘what can Democrats do?’ is a category error…. [With] individuals… there is no way to get them to agree on things because there is no consequence for defection…”
And yet, you say, isn’t there a sense in which, if there isn’t an entity “Congress” that does not care about ICE’s murderings, there is an entity “Republicans” that doesn’t care? Can you find me a single Republican who cares, and so who wants to amend 42 U.S.C. § 1983 to subject ICE agents and other federal law enforcement officers to the same liability for constitutional violations that local and state officers currently face?
I cannot find any such who will say this in public. Yet I will still say no, there isn’t any single entity “Republicans” that does not care.
I would say that there is a group, “Republicans”, that is right now undertaking actions that cannot be easily distinguished from what an anthology intelligence that did not care would undertake. But you have to immediately qualify this with the phrase in public—in private, a surprisingly large number of them are horrified, or claim to be horrified when talking in private to Democrats.
So why do these shut up in public? As Mancur Olson would say: because there are selective incentives here. Krenik is substantially wrong when he says “Ditto for Republicans” with respect to the existence of “consequences”, and thus the tendency for them all to fall in line.
I know this best and in most detail in economic policy. So consider my old teacher, the late Marty Feldstein:
Marty Feldstein got into immense trouble in the 1980s with respect to his position as a Republican Grandee of economic policy. Why? For not shutting up over 1982-1984 about the likely damage that the Reagan deficits would do to the economy.
Now Marty was right about the damage. But that he was right cut no ice with respect to his standing as a Republican Grandee of economic policy:
The Reagan deficits diminished investment in America by pushing up interest rates, began the substantial erosion of American’s midwestern manufacturing communities of engineering practice via their high-dollar consequences, produced significant headwinds for economic growth, prolonged the productivity slowdown of the 1970s for an extra decade—until Bill Clinton and all of his spear-carriers, both those of us in the administration and the Democratic congressional caucuses, fixed it in the early 1990s. (And then George W. Bush 43, his spear-carriers (I’m looking at you and many others, Greg Mankiw; and at you, Alan Greenspan, for unlike Marty you did not dare try to get in their way), and the Republican congressional caucuses broke it again in the early 2000s.