We can start with the most straight-forward piece, Daniel Bonevac on why he voted for Trump<\/a>. (There\u2019s also an earlier piece in the Washington Post, on \u201cwhat it\u2019s like to be a college professor who supports Trump<\/a>\u201c.) As Eric Schliesser has previously noted<\/a>, Bonevac\u2019s Trump is somewhat unrecognizable: Bonevac describes him as a Lockean defender of natural rights and the constitution, an upright supporter of freedom of speech, a fighter for the dispirited and left-behind; claims that Trump peddles racism or crude conspiracy theories, Bonevac suggest, are false or overblown.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n It\u2019s easy to nit-pick Bonevac\u2019s piece in this way. One wonders, for example, about the following passage:<\/p>\n [Obama] has mostly ruled by decree, by executive order and especially by the rule-making of executive branch agencies. Clinton promised to continue the trend. She would have ruled more or less as a monarch with little Congressional limit to her power. The Constitution would have been a dead letter. She would have been able to impose her own moral vision on the entire country. That vision, moreover, rests on a narrative with limited correspondence to reality. And she would have removed the checks and balances of the American system designed to keep narratives and reality in line with each other.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It\u2019s not hard to change \u201cClinton\u201d to \u201cTrump\u201d, and one gets a decent summary of the first days of Trump\u2019s presidency, and his general style of governing. (To his credit, Bonevac\u2019s piece dates from before Trump\u2019s inauguration, so he might well have come in for a nasty surprise.)<\/p>\n More interesting is Bonevac\u2019s invocation of the Asch experiments<\/a>. The experimental subjects in these experiments were presented with a simple visual test in which they had to identify whether one line was longer than others. When subjects were presented with (clearly false) claims by others that a given line was equal in length to others, they surprisingly often yielded to the judgment of others. So, it seems, our judgments can become easily distorted even in simple matters.<\/p>\n For Bonevac, it\u2019s the political elites who have for years had a distorted perception of the realities of American society. It\u2019s with Trump that the masses reassert that the lines are not, in fact, of equal length:<\/p>\n How often have we encountered statements like these over the past eight years? \u201cIslam is a religion of peace.\u201d \u201cIf you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.\u201d \u201cObamacare will bring down the cost of health insurance.\u201d \u201cThe economy is in great shape.\u201d \u201cRaising the minimum wage doesn\u2019t cost jobs; it creates them.\u201d \u201cIran can be trusted not to develop nuclear weapons.\u201d \u201cAmerica is stronger and more respected today than it was eight years ago.\u201d These are not only false, but obviously false.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The metaphor is hardly helpful. It\u2019s a standard political move to accuse your opponents that they don\u2019t see things the right way, that theirs<\/em> is an undertaking of tremendous delusion while yours<\/em> is one of level-headed common sense. Because matters are so perfectly symmetrical, the metaphor doesn\u2019t convince anyone. (The further irony, of course, is that we have a real-world Asch experiment at hand<\/a>, and it turns out that Trump can\u2019t identify the larger inauguration crowd in a simple visual test.)<\/p>\n We should be suspicious, furthermore, of anyone who invokes the metaphor of direct, perception-like access to the political truth. The problem in politics is precisely that truth can\u2019t be had in these simple ways. To put it in standard philosophical terms, politics is characterised by thick<\/em> and reasonable<\/em> disagreement. Our disagreements are reasonable because well-meaning, rational, well-informed people will have different political views. And furthermore the disagreement is thick because there is no agreed-upon method (like sense perception) which could resolve these disagreements.<\/p>\n \u017di\u017eek\u2019s public persona in some ways is similar to Trump\u2019s: he\u2019s an old man with silly hair with a disjointed rhetorical style. Both men are famously against political correctness, and enjoy crudity and vulgarity. Many suspect that despite their successes and media presence, both men are intellectual charlatans. Lastly, \u017di\u017eek as well as Trump have a sure sense for the attention-grabbing.<\/p>\n \u017di\u017eek is not someone who would let a good crisis go to waste. So it\u2019s true to his style that we find clickbait headlines that \u017di\u017eek \u201cendorsed<\/a>\u201d Trump. Once you subtract \u017di\u017eek\u2019s idiosyncratic style, his argument is simple enough<\/a>:<\/p>\n In this situation in which we are now, only some kind of a shakeup can save us [\u2026]. And one good thing about Donald Trump \u2013 and it\u2019s an obscenity to call this a good thing \u2013 is that he put [the system] into great disarray; it almost fell apart.<\/p>\n He is not a dangerous guy who is appearing to be polite. All his violent outbursts \u2013 completely vulgar, tasteless statements \u2013 mask the fact that there is nothing extraordinary about him.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u017di\u017eek has elaborated<\/a> on this view elsewhere. He sees Clinton as continuing the damaging inertia of elite dominance; Trump has shaken up all this complacency. The leftist hope should be that this will ultimately pave the way for a Sanderite \u201cauthentic left\u201d: \u201cthe good thing about [Trump] is that he really scares liberals\u201d. In short, better a genuine right-wing disaster like Trump than the continued dominance of the Clintonite faux-left. (In another interview<\/a>, \u017di\u017eek warns that remaining in the status quo could lead \u201cto a possible new world war, economic catastrophes, etc.\u201d)<\/p>\n So \u017di\u017eek wants things to be different<\/a>; chaos is the ladder<\/a>. But just like Bonevac desperately wants to find a Lockean natural-law conservative in Trump, so \u017di\u017eek desperately wants to see Trump as a stepping stone in the dialectic development towards the revival of the left. This significantly underplays the dangers of Trump and the faults of Clinton, and severely overestimates hopes for a rejuvenated left.<\/p>\n In the case of \u017di\u017eek, one also needs a rather hardened, cynical attitude towards the injustices that Trump will incur for the thin hope of a better society. Still, there is an open (and interesting) question here: should we welcome\u2014or at least accept\u2014chaotic and morally regressive changes if they bear the possibility of carrying us away from a morally subpar status quo? \u017di\u017eek seems to think yes, but he is characteristically vague on the precise conditions on when we should accept this answer.<\/p>\n My suspicion is that \u017di\u017eek is right in some respects, but wrong in the more important ways. Trump\u2019s success might present a fruitful opportunity to shake neoliberal elites out of complacency, and to remind cosmopolitan elites that nationalism is a powerful force to be reckoned with. Trump\u2019s assault on the explicit and implicit conventions that hold a constitutional democracy together might also paradoxically heighten awareness of their importance. But by and large, \u017di\u017eek\u2019s bid seems to me like the proposal that exploding the nuclear bomb in the living room will provide a great opportunity to buy new furniture: there simply won\u2019t be enough house left.<\/p>\n Jerry Gaus has also touched on Trump\u2019s success<\/a>, though a lot more obliquely. Gaus tells a sweeping philosophical story. At its core is a conflict between two visions of liberal society, the figureheads of which Gaus finds in Hayek and Popper. Hayek, Gaus claims, sees the open society as an evolving, spontaneous order:<\/p>\n For [Hayek] the core of the open society is free and willing cooperation of strangers on the basis of rules that allow each space to effectively pursue her aims and values. He repeatedly insisted that in an open society we must take tradition seriously, and must resist the temptation to overestimate our ability to rationally understand, much less guide, such a society.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n On the other hand, there is Popper\u2019s \u201csectarian\u201d vision of liberalism. Popper\u2019s liberalism is one of supreme trust in reason, and our ability to establish the normative desirability of the liberal order through abstract moral argument. On Gaus\u2019s story, this Popperian, rationalist approach to liberalism has dominated political philosophy since Rawls, and it has been implicit in the thinking of political elites ever since. The rationalist, for example, is very confident in the ability of economic experts to predict and plan the economy.<\/p>\n But, so Gaus\u2019s story goes, the Popperian approach is deeply flawed\u2014it suffers from a peculiar kind of \u201cepistemic arrogance\u201d:<\/p>\n I believe that the Popperian, sectarian, vision [\u2026] is deeply flawed, inadvertently encouraging a retreat to the very reactionary tribalism it opposes. When we reflect on the disaster of 2016 we should not just smugly look at the enemies of the open society [\u2026] but its friends, and the arrogant and condescending stance they have too-often taken up.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Gaus sees Trump as a moral and political disaster, though he elaborates little on the specifics. But part of the blame (or at least responsibility) for this disaster, he thinks, should be placed at the hands of the rationalist elites who overestimated their ability to understand and plan society.<\/p>\n This is a sweeping story with a surprising villain, but does it hold up? Let me start with two initial worries. First, there is the suspicion that Gaus finds nails because he has a hammer. It\u2019s not hard to guess that Gaus\u2019s ideological sympathies lie with Hayek. There\u2019s a sense to Gaus\u2019s piece that he nitpicks the pieces of evidence that support his view, and ignores others. (I\u2019ll present some pieces that don\u2019t fit the puzzle in a moment.)<\/p>\n Second, we should be generally sceptical whenever academic intellectual movements are blamed for particular social ills. The motivating forces behind political changes tend to be much more mundane, and the direct (as well as indirect) influence of philosophical ideas limited, for better or worse.<\/p>\n For these two reasons alone I am rather sceptical of Gaus\u2019s account. The moving forces behind political changes tend to be much more mundane. It\u2019s tempting to read phenomena like Trump or Brexit as reflecting more fundamental intellectual or cultural changes, but we must also seriously consider the null hypothesis that they don\u2019t. This doesn\u2019t mean that such developments are arbitrary, but rather that they reflect much more mundane economic or cultural forces.<\/p>\n But let\u2019s turn to Gaus\u2019s story. As I can discern it, its major elements are the following:<\/p>\n We can grant (2): there is some kind of backlash against elites (though the fact that Clinton won the popular election and Trump is deeply unpopular should make us pause). Claim (3) also seems to accord well with some findings about authoritarianism<\/a>.<\/p>\n However, almost all other parts of the narrative I find unconvincing. We can start by pursuing Gaus\u2019s argument into one example he discusses at length, the supposed epistemic arrogance of the economic profession. Gaus offers a series of complaints against the expertise of economists, broadly following the work of Philip Tetlock<\/a>. Gaus takes the well-known view of economics as the \u201cdismal science\u201d, and suggests that economists should show more Hayekian humility regarding the predictive and explanatory capacities of economics. This assessment of the accuracy of economics is by no means uncontroversial, but we can accept for argument\u2019s sake that economists have overstated the scientific prowess of their own discipline.<\/p>\n A first problem is that most stories of failures in economic policy-making are as much stories about the epistemic arrogance of economic experts as they are stories about political elites wilfully ignoring those experts. For example, when French-German policy makers insisted on a common European currency, they were disdainful or even completely ignored expert worries. Similarly, the Republican pursuit of supply-side economics has at best fringe academic support going for it, as do austerity policies as a reply to the financial crisis.<\/p>\n\u017di\u017eek for Trump<\/h1>\n
Gaus on the Open Society<\/h1>\n
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