Confusing the normal and the exceptional
In an excellent interview with Arthur Brooks, Tyler Cowen suggests that our current politics is the norm, rather than the exception:
I consider myself a classical liberal. I think thereās been negative emotional contagion from a number of very bad events, some of which were partly random. Say that 9/11 actually happened, that COVID came along when it did, and if a bunch of bad things happened, the Great Financial Crisis, thatās less random. People turn to worse ideas, and weāre suffering under that, and then it spreads, and then negative ideas lead to further negative ideas, and people become less happy, and that leads to worse policy, and weāre stuck in this rut.
Now I never expected classical liberalism or classical liberal Republicanism to be that dominant anyway. Iām not that surprised. I see it as a return to some features of, say, late 19th-century America that I feel never went away. Iāve never liked them, but I think itās maybe what we really are. There was this odd bubble. You can debate when the years run, but something like 1980 through 2016, that seemed quite normal, but that was an illusion. Now weāre back to the real state of things.
Iām not sure if Tyler is correct about thisāI suspect that he isābut I do think the sort of mistake he is pointing out, in which people observe a change from X to Y and assume that Y is temporary while X is normal, when in fact X was temporary and Y is normal, is very common in politics and culture. Four examples immediately spring to mind:
1. Partisan polarization. A great many people observe our current partisan polarization and long for a return to the ānormalcyā of the mid-20th century. But the low levels of partisan polarization from the 1930s-1970s were utterly abnormal, as any of the many longitudinal graphs will reveal. If you liked the structure of that politicsāboth major parties with lots of liberals and conservatives in them, lots of split-ticket voting, strong individualism among lawmakers, and shifting coalitions across issuesāyou liked the outlier. Normal in American history is high levels of partisanship.
2. A liberal Supreme Court. Related to the first example, one of the biggest mistakes many liberals make is assuming the liberal Warren court of the 1960s represents some sort of normal period for the Court. Almost exactly the opposite is true. For the vast majority of American history, the court has been a conservative institution, putting the brakes on liberal legislative and executive initiatives. That the current Court exhibits a similar function makes it entirely unremarkable.
3. Bowling Alone. A fascinating book, but an argument that may have mistaken an exception for a baseline. The argument is about social capital and its decline in America, but the core emprical insight is that Americans joined tons of civic organizations in the 1940ās and 1950ās, and thereās been a steady decrease in such behavior ever since. But the impressive time series often begin with the WW2 generation, and doesnāt investigate the habits of earlier Americans. Itās not hard to come up with an alternative hypothesis: the war utterly shaped the lives of that generation, tied them together in shared experience, and made them the outliers. Even the famous bowling trend itself exhibits this. For someone my age, it was totally unremarkable to have grandparents who talked endlessly about the war, and spent their live at the Elks club, VFW events, and bridge parties. That the boomers and Gen X did not might show a deviation, but thereās strong circumstantial evidence it was just reversion to mean, and the Greatest Generation was actually the outlier.
4. The geopolitics of the 1990s. This one is very personal for me. I was 11 when the Berlin Wall came down, and 23 on September 11, 2001. That is, the most formative years of my life occurred between the end of the Cold War and 9/11. The period of time when, to a first approximation, the world seemed to be spiraling in an unambiguously goodāand unambiguously Americanādirection. We won. Optimism was high. The economy was on a roll. Military spending could be cut. The internet was going to usher in an age of democracy and abundance. And we had the luxury to argue over how to spend budget surpluses and presidential affairs. And now all of that is gone, it turns out the world is still a dangerous place that often gets worse, and I still have trouble accepting that the 90s were the exception, rather than normal. Iām convinced this will afflict me forever.