Saturday, May 25, 2019

Ethnic nationalism before and after the Cold War

I wonder if the rise of ethnic nationalism in recent years is simply a reversion to what was historically normal up until the Cold War.

This history is extreme in its horrors. Ethnic nationalist conflict in the first half of the 20th century included World Wars and genocides that killed tens of millions. For centuries before that, colonial empires enslaved and committed genocides against native peoples. The greatest slaughter occurred under governments whose ideologies were those of peoples with one blood -- the Third Reich, the Belgian monarchy, the British Empire, and everyone who sent their young men to die in the trenches of World War I.

With the Cold War came more universal, abstract ideologies. One might fight for communism against capitalism, or for democracy against dictatorship. These ideologies suited the purposes of decision-makers in Moscow and Washington, and made for better advertising to Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans who were rising in power after the end of colonialism. For obvious reasons, developing-country folk were an implausible market for Russian or American nationalism. But you could get them interested in communism or democracy.

When the Cold War ended and its banners were put away, the strongest political units in the world were still national rather than international. So it was easy for the old flags of ethnic nationalism to come out again, for whatever reasons people had flown them before. That's what we're seeing now.

Will new versions of the old horrors come back with them? This may be the great and terrible question of our time. I hope that global economic changes will help to dampen conflict -- for example, the rise in prosperity after the end of colonialism and the necessity of international cooperation in the modern economy. But there are reasons for pessimism too, as technology lets us harm each other much more easily than we could before, whether through war or climate change. And if the past is any guide, we can fall very far.

My role models for such times tend to be the old scientists -- in philosophy, I guess the flavor would be sort of Vienna Circle. They enjoyed the clever weird ideas of their smart friends from different countries, and faced their collapsing world more with public-spirited Enlightenment optimism than cynical postmodern world-weariness. I think their sort of liberal internationalism wins in the end -- well, there's optimism for you. But win or lose, those are the people I identify with in times like these.

Sunday, May 19, 2019

How we got here on abortion

I just looked through the last 15-25 years of of polling on abortion. Depending on which questions you ask -- and Gallup asked a lot of them -- you can get opinions moving slightly in either direction over time. I'd say this means that opinions have stayed more or less the same.

The abortion bans we're seeing in Alabama and other places aren't the result of a change in public opinion. They're effects of Republican electoral success over the past few decades. Republicans pass these laws now because they expect Republican-appointed anti-abortion judges to approve them. The judges were confirmed because Republicans won elections. (Some people say the judges probably won't approve these extreme laws. But the laws they will approve will soon be forthcoming.)

I think Republicans won the key elections largely because of weird stuff involving electoral maps. Their party has become more rural and less urban, giving it increasing structural advantages in Congress and the Electoral College. If not for these advantages, Democrats would have won 6 of the past 7 Presidential elections and they'd have a solid Senate majority. (The Republican state legislators passing these bills are often in gerrymandered districts, so they made their own luck.)

Anyway, as far as I can tell, people didn't change their minds that much one way or the other. Republicans got stronger because we have a badly designed system that was established as a compromise with powerful slaveowners. They manipulated that system for their own purposes. Fixing the system so that it doesn't give Republicans constant partisan advantages is how you stop abortion bans, protect refugees from brutal mistreatment, and save the planet from climate change. So it's something I really focus on.

Tuesday, May 14, 2019

Getting electability right

It's important to win Presidential elections and not lose them. So it makes sense for Democrats to care about which primary candidates are more likely to win than others. Unfortunately, Democratic thinking on electability has followed a bad strategy: choosing the candidate with the most salient Republican cultural signifiers.

Today those are the whiteness and maleness of Joe Biden. But in late 2003, deep in the shadow of 9/11, it was John Kerry's record as a decorated war veteran. Unfortunately, a Republican smear campaign cast doubt on Kerry's reputation (some will recall the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth). Because of that and other things, Bush was re-elected in the depths of the Iraq War.

In 2007, still in 9/11's long shadow, probably nobody theorized that Democrats had to nominate an African-American whose dad was from Kenya, whose middle name was "Hussein", and whose surname rhymed with "Osama". But we nominated him, and he won the election and the next election.

The point here is that having Republican cultural signifiers just doesn't predict that much about how likely you are to win the general election. Maybe it helps a little in winning over persuadable Republican voters, which I guess is the whole idea. But that effect is mediated by big random things and can't be relied on.

Some people say that you should just vote for whoever you prefer, and that'll guide you to the most electable candidate. That's probably better than the Republican cultural signifier method. But we want to go beyond our own idiosyncracies, and I think we can do that.

My main method is to look at polling data. In particular, I like looking at candidates' national favorability ratings in a good selection of national polls, right when it's time to vote. In early 2008, Obama was pretty consistently getting net favorability numbers over +20 and occasionally over +30 (the best was 61 favorable, 27 unfavorable). This doesn't predict everything. The campaign can go badly, as it did for Kerry. But if a candidate is scoring high without exhibiting the Republican cultural signifiers, it's a sign of political talent, which Obama definitely had.

(Democrats also seem to do better when nominating relative neophytes like Obama and Bill Clinton than when nominating old party hands like Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry, and Hillary Clinton. Maybe a shorter record just has less bad stuff. I count inexperience as a slight plus for electability, which is weird but fits the data too well. Maybe the favorability thing encompasses the whole effect? I want more data.)

Anyway, don't worry too much about electability now. There's a big campaign ahead of us. There's plenty of time for Elizabeth Warren to build a national reputation for having awesome ideas about how to give you more money, and put that weird Native American scandal behind her.

But if you want to think about it when the time comes, look at polls. They're a survey of the voters, and the voters decide. The information you want is there.

Friday, May 3, 2019

NUS hires Fatema Amijee and Ethan Jerzak!

NUS Philosophy is proud to announce the hiring of two young philosophers with prolific research achievements: Fatema Amijee and Ethan Jerzak!

Fatema's research has focused on metaphysics and the history of philosophy. Her forthcoming papers include "Explaining Contingent Facts" in Philosophical Studies, "Neo-Rationalist Metaphysics" in an Oxford volume on the Principle of Sufficient Reason that she is co-editing, "Metaphysical Explanation in Spinoza and Leibniz" in the Routledge Handbook of Metaphysical Grounding, and "Russell's Commitment to the Principle of Acquaintance" in the Oxford Handbook of Bertrand Russell. She got her PhD from the University of Texas in 2017, four years after publishing "The Role of Attention in Russell's Theory of Knowledge" in the British Journal for the History of Philosophy.

Ethan's research is primarily on philosophy of language, epistemology, and logic. He will receive his PhD this year from the University of California at Berkeley. Two of his papers have already come out -- "Non-Classical Knowledge" in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and "Two Ways to Want" in the Journal of Philosophy, for which he won a Sanders Graduate Award. He is also author of "Paradoxical Desires", forthcoming in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society.

One of the best things about working at NUS is the constant stream of stellar junior colleagues who keep appearing around me. Adding Fatema and Ethan is a great success for our department, and I look forward to having them around in the coming academic year.