Political Beliefs

Front matter

Political Beliefs

A Philosophical Introduction

Oliver Traldi

PART II Theories XV viii Contents

9 Theories of positionality, standpoint, and experience 65 10 Theories of tunneling and ideational determinism 69 11 Minimalist and eliminativist theories 72 PART IlI Sources 77 12 Debunking and rationalizing political epistemology 79 13 Skepticism from widespread disagreement 93 14 Democracy 101 15 Decentralization 111 16 Expertise 122 17 The ethics of belief 139 18 The epistemology of liberalism 155 PART IV

Dynamics 161 19 Polarization as sorting 163 20 Polarization as extremism 177 21 Conspiracy theories 188 22 Propaganda, dehumanization, and gullibility 197

Contents ix

Conclusion 225 Bibliography 227 Notes 242

Preface

Two friends — maybe it’s easier to imagine them as lovers — run laughing through the hills and valleys of a great green land. They play a game: when they reach a pair of hills, each stands on one and explains why the other should come to their side. Eventually one is convinced, or playacts as though they are, and they join hands and run again together under a clear sky.

They make their way to a certain pair of hills and take their places as usual. But as they each start to speak to the other, a wind picks up, carrying their words off with it. They try to shout, but the wind only grows louder. Suddenly on each hilltop materializes a huge collection of other people, one surrounding one friend, another surrounding the other. A rope appears, standing taut in midair between the two hills, each group of people pulling as hard as they can from their side.

The friends are left with a dilemma. They can continue their game in a new form, participating in the tug of war instead of the mock debate they’d chosen. Or they can abandon their positions on the hills and go off to do something else. What’s not open to them is to go on as they had been.

Different features of this story will for different readers be attractive illustrations of the difference between political disputes and other kinds of disputes. For some, political disputes fall short of our desired standards of rationality. They are ultimately just matters of tugging, not of offering one’s own reasoning and listening to other people’s. For others, political disputes are what happen when a disagreement is no longer a game. Becoming political is just what happens when participants actually start to care about how the dispute is resolved — when there are “stakes” to it. Yet others might emphasize that political disputes can happen “anywhere” in our belief space — a hill of science, a field of morality, a river of

Preface xi physical force. It’s almost arbitrary whether or not a dispute is “politicized.” I don’t think any of these views is quite right. But I think the story does capture something important.

You’ve probably heard many people express their political beliefs. Maybe you’ve expressed some of your own. In particular, you’ve probably heard many people have political disagreements — disputes with each other, in words, over their political beliefs. Such disputes occur in debates, in dorm rooms, over the dinner table. They occur between competing candidates, between classmates, between comrades. Maybe you’re the instigator of such disagreements. Or maybe you join unwillingly, pulled in by the emotional force of the conversation or the certainty that someone else has said something incorrect or even evil. Or maybe you’re the one quietly asking: “Why did you have to make it all political?” Whichever role you play, this book is for you.

As you’ve probably gathered from the title, this book is a philosophical introduction to political beliefs. It’s a book in the branch of philosophy we call epistemology. In epistemology, we study belief and associated concepts like knowledge, certainty, and rationality. The way I think about it, epistemology is the study of how to evaluate our beliefs. So this book is an introduction to debates about how to evaluate our political beliefs. If you like, you can think of it as an introduction to disputes about how to resolve our political disputes.

Because I think the notion of a political belief is a kind of moving target, as I'll explain soon, there are a lot of different questions we could have about our political beliefs. But I’m going to limit my scope a bit to make this project manageable both for myself and for you. To form political beliefs in a rational or reliable way probably requires that we do basic things like perceive a real, actually existing world, learn from our experiences, and understand basic arithmetic. Philosophers often worry about skeptical challenges to foundational forms of knowledge like the perceptual, inductive, and mathematical. I won’t worry about that in this book, though. ’ll be concerned with problems that are relatively characteristic of the political realm. At the same time, I won’t get too concrete. This book won’t tell you how to form political beliefs about any particular issue, like abortion or climate change.

This middle level of abstraction puts us in an area of philosophy which has a very long pedigree but has also seen a very recent rise in interest: social epistemology. Social epistemology asks how we should form our beliefs, and how we should evaluate the ones we have, given that we live in a world with other people. Should we trust other people? What should we do when they disagree with us? Political epistemology, the topic of this book, is much like social epistemology applied to politics, but it also includes a few extra dimensions. First, we don’t just live in a world with other individuals; those individuals form groups, and we ourselves are likely members of certain kinds of groups as well. Just what it means for individuals to form a group is difficult to pin down, but many xii Preface political theorists take the idea of a group to be part of the essence of politics. Second, political beliefs are often beliefs about what we ought to do, and those sorts of beliefs, what I’ll call moral beliefs or values, introduce their own epistemological puzzles. Third, to the extent that politics is a distinct field of inquiry, it may present challenges of its own, like complexity.

The sort of philosophy I do is focused around theories and arguments. Those are two kinds of structures that put together a bunch of different ideas or claims. Sometimes Pll call an idea or claim a proposition. A theory is just a bunch of propositions put together. An argument is a bunch of propositions put together with one picked out as a conclusion.

Classical philosophical puzzles of “global skepticism” target all of the knowledge we might think we have. How can we be certain that we’re not dreaming? How can we be certain that we’re not being tricked by some evil demon? How can we be certain that we’re not brains in vats hooked up to some illusiongenerating machine? If any of those skeptical scenarios obtain, it could mean that none of our beliefs are true, and that possibility might suggest that we don’t truly know anything at all. But such arguments rely on these odd scenarios being saliently possible, and philosophers have resisted global skepticism by resisting either the claim of possibility or the claim of salience in that regard.

When it comes to politics, however, we might worry that we are actually in the odd scenario, which would justify a local skepticism about political beliefs. There are a lot of potential arguments for political skepticism. Some argue that political cognition is subject to too many biases for us to rationally trust our own judgment when it comes to politics or that political cognition is necessarily subject to distorting ideologies. Others argue that there is so much disinformation in the current media environment that it is irrational to trust anyone else. Still others say that politics in the modern world is necessarily too complex to license rational political beliefs. Finally, some say that the mere prevalence of disagreement about politics should be enough to make us unsure about our own political beliefs. These arguments will be seen throughout the book, but it’s good to start thinking about them now.

The skeptical perspective is not the only approach people take to political epistemology. Some start with a set of political beliefs they take to be obviously false and then try to characterize what goes wrong when people believe those things. Still others avoid both political skepticism and political dogmatism. They think that there are reliable ways of getting at the truth in social epistemology — those we’ll consider include listening to the experts and deferring to the majority or social consensus — and that there’s no reason these shouldn’t remain reliable when it comes to politics. More generally, some might wonder whether politics deserves its own epistemology at all; what makes it so special?

The plan for the book is as follows. In the first part of the book, I’ll go through some preliminaries: the surprisingly rare question of what counts as political, the

Preface xiii surprisingly contentious question of what counts as a belief, and then the first effort, to my knowledge, of characterizing what counts as political belief: Then Pll talk a bit about the nature of political conflict, of which various theories have been propounded, and about ways to interpret political disagreement, including the principle of charity, which unfortunately does not, in light of the various possible causes of conflict, always give us clear guidance.

In the second part, I'll go through some major theories of political beliefs, with some input from philosophers but just as much from social scientists, especially psychologists. What I mean by a theory of political belief here is a scientific, causal account of what gives different people their different beliefs. Some varieties of theories we’ll consider: theories based on personality type, theories based on ideology, theories based on group membership, theories based on social location, theories based on cognitive heuristics, and minimalist, expressivist, and eliminativist theories, which suggest that people might not have political beliefs at all.

In the third part, Pll go through some sources of evidence or justification for our political beliefs. First will be two types of skeptical arguments for the conclusion that we should doubt or even abandon our political beliefs. A debunking argument takes one of the etiologies of political belief and suggests that, if we think our political beliefs were caused in that way, we should abandon them. The argument from widespread disagreement suggests that political beliefs are in such controversy that we should abandon many of them. A natural next step is to ask: What about when there is a clear majority on one side or another of a political belief? That’s the question of the epistemology of democracy. If we don’t trust majority votes, we might trust other decentralized mechanisms for aggregating the viewpoints of many different people. A central alternative to the epistemology of democracy is the idea that we should trust the experts, the subject of the following chapter. We’ll consider the possibility that we should determine our political beliefs based on which beliefs would be morally right or wrong to hold. Finally, we’ll take a close look at specific epistemological issues related to the political theory of liberalism.

The fourth part will be similar to the third, except that P'Il focus more on real-world political phenomena that have been matters of public debate. I’II talk about polarization; “polarization” really is used to name (at least) two different kinds of phenomena, sorting and extremism. I’ll talk about conspiracy theories and the difficulty of explaining what’s irrational about them without condemning a lot of our normal thinking and theorizing. Pll talk about propaganda and dehumanization, tools attributed to powerful people and groups by the ideology theories considered earlier, and about fake news and political rumors, which cast doubt on how much of other people’s testimony we can believe. I’ll talk about political narratives and how they affect people’s snap judgments about news items. Then PII close with a relatively underexplored topic, the relationship between xiv Preface our political beliefs and the philosophy of history, especially our narratives about historical progress or historical decline.

Don’t get the wrong idea: even in the parts where I’m not providing my own original ideas, my perspective has influenced the way I’ve written this book, from choices about what to include to the organization of the material to little sidebars and snippets about which arguments I think are good and which arguments I think are bad. So I want to urge you: don’t take my word for it. Do your own thinking about everything that comes up in this text; treat it like it’s under dispute, just as you would a text about politics itself. To my mind, that’s one of the core insights of epistemology, including political epistemology. At some level, at some point, you’re on your own. You have to figure it out for yourself.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many people have helped me with this project, both with the book itself and with the underlying ideas. It would be impossible to list everyone with whom I’ve discussed the topic of political beliefs, including academics in philosophy, political science, psychology, and economics; policy wonks and political operatives; and “civilians” with no professional link to politics. I wrote much of this book while traveling; so I'll start by thanking the people who have put me up: Mom and Dad, Matthew and Lesley, Rebecca and Johan, Jeff and Tina, Sara and Jan, Larisa, Joey and Annie, Alice, and any number of Airbnb hosts. They have all talked through my ideas with me as well — well, not the Airbnb hosts, but the others. The three philosophers who have read the most of my work, and especially the most of my work on political beliefs, are my advisor Blake Roeber, Dan Greco, and Liam Bright, who calls himself an expert on “Oliver Traldi thought.” Everyone at Notre Dame has been really helpful to me while I’ve been there, and I want to thank the undergraduates in my fall 2021 class, which was basically a dry run for this book, in particular, as well as David Eil and Béatrice Leydier, who listened to a different version of it on Zoom. I’ve had great and encouraging conversations and online “exchanges” with spectacular philosophers of political belief like Rima Basu, Spencer Case, Gabriele Contessa, Kevin Dorst, Michael Hannon, Hrishikesh Joshi, Enzo Rossi, Jason Stanley, Kevin Vallier, Brandon Warmke, and Alex Worsnip, as well as non-philosophers who work on similar topics like Musa al-Gharbi, Paul Bloom, Jonathan Haidt, Dmitri Halikias, Robin Hanson, Philip Tetlock, and Adrian Vermeule. Thanks to Adam Gibbons in particular for many talks over the years and for giving an early draft a thorough read. He made many helpful suggestions which were integrated into the text, as xvi Acknowledgments did two anonymous referees at Routledge. Becca Rothfeld and Jane Cooper also read some short early excerpts and gave me helpful feedback.

Andy Beck, my editor at Routledge, has been great through this whole process, and I’d also like to thank several anonymous reviewers for really helpful comments. I made all sorts of additions based on those comments, added helpful sources and qualified questionable claims I’d made, and fleshed out plenty of sections which were sketchier when I’d submitted them. In particular, I spent September of 2023 integrating nearly every suggestion made by an incredibly helpful review of the entire book manuscript. I talked about these issues constantly at the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Society conferences in New Orleans, and virtually everyone gave me good ideas and feedback. Some of the ideas in the book’s final chapter were initially written as a paper for now-Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s course on modern constitutional theory in the spring of 2019, which I audited; many thanks to her and to my classmates. The philosopher groups I’m in on Slack and Discord have also helped me relax and formulate my thoughts, and I’ve gotten pretty much constant feedback from many people on Twitter (now X), much of which is very helpful. I’ve published versions of some of these ideas in magazines and newspapers, so thanks to all of my editors as well. In particular, this text cites an article of mine in the Bulwark, where my editor was Adam Keiper, and a book review of mine from the Hedgehog Review, where my editor was B. D. McClay.

Special thanks are due to the Institute for Humane Studies for a very generous grant which helped me focus on this project while other things threatened to distract me from it. This publication was also supported by the Princeton University Library Open Access Fund.

Finally, thanks are very much due to Jeffrey Friedman, whose political epistemology workshop I attended in Berkeley in the summer of 2018. We argued a lot about what good writing is, what good arguments are, whether there’s any use to analytic philosophy, whether historicism is mere pedantry, and so on. He passed away in December 2022 and will be missed for his kindness, his scholarship, and his incisive thinking. Though I don’t know if he would be any more fond of my approach now than he was then, his ideas are all over this book.

PART | Preliminaries

WHAT IS POLITICAL?

Just which beliefs are political? In these first few chapters, we’ll start by thinking about what it means for something to be political and go on to thinking about what it means for something to be a belief. Hopefully from those two inquiries we should be able to say at least a little bit about what it might mean for something to be a political belief, a topic about which very little has to date been written. Ill offer my own theory by the end of the third chapter, but like most theories in philosophy, it’s probably wrong. I hope that, rather than internalizing or memorizing it, the reader will apply the same scrutiny to my theories as I do to other people’s throughout this text.

The notion we want to define in these first few chapters is “political belief.” In the first chapter, we’ll ask which things are political, and in the second chapter, we’ll ask which things are beliefs. In the third chapter, PI give my own view of which beliefs are political. I suspect you’ll be able to find ways in which it is overinclusive and underinclusive. The quest for real definitions rarely finds treasure.

Power, conflict, and order

In an unpublished paper, political scientist T. J. Donahue surveys fifteen different analyses of the concept “politics,” finding them all ultimately wanting — that is to say, either overinclusive or underinclusive — and then offering his own. Donahue writes! that it is “[a]n oddity of political philosophy . . . that it spends so little time answering this question” — that is, the question “what is politics?” This is no doubt correct, and it is true of fields other than political philosophy. For instance, the Routledge textbook Introduction to Political Psychology, in an introductory

DOI: 10.4324/9781003355274-2 This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY 4.0 license.

section called “What is Political Psychology?”,* does not undertake any sort of outlining of what counts as politics, or “political behavior,” the object of study of political psychology, the textbook’s topic. This is especially odd because politics itself includes a great deal of debate about what politics consists of.

Rather than covering all the definitions Donahue considers, I think it’s better to note that they fall roughly into three groups. To some theorists,’ the dividing line between the political and the nonpolitical has something to do with power. To other theorists," this dividing line has something to do with conflict. And to yet more, the line has to do with setting things in order.’ Donahue offers quick counterexamples to all the theories he surveys, and quick counterexamples to his own theory are also available. But we should try to say something more general about each of these approaches.

Let’s start with a note about all of the approaches together. A characteristic situation that can be unobjectionably called “political” might involve two or more different “sides” jockeying against each other in one way or another to try to make sure that things are done in a certain way in society. Note that this situation has elements of all three theses: the power, the conflict, and the eventual setting down of some sort of social order, whether by legislation or by some other means. One method for figuring out which definition seems best to you might be to start trying to take away pieces of this situation and see if it still seems “political” to you. For instance, you might think that if no conflict existed, it would be hard to understand what the jockeying for power even involved.

Is “political” really just one thing? Maybe we use the word in multiple senses. Or maybe it doesn’t mean anything: maybe it’s just something we throw around to try to affect how others see things. Or “political” could be what Ludwig Wittgenstein? called a family resemblance concept or cluster concept. Whether or not a cluster concept is properly applied in some case depends on a variety of factors, and it is possible that none of them will be either sufficient or necessary. The full range of instances of such concepts thus exhibits only a “family resemblance” among its members. An interesting feature of such concepts is that they can come in degrees based on how many factors in the cluster obtain in some specific case. If some activity or belief can be more easily said to be more political or less political than some other activity or belief rather than being said to be political or not political full stop, then that might be good reason to think that “political” is a cluster concept.

i Donahue cites Raymond Geuss, Adam Swift, Peter Nicholson, and Max Weber.

ii Donahue cites David Miller, John Dunn, Bernard Crick, Carl Schmitt, Mark Warren, and J. D. B. Miller.

iii Donahue cites Michael Oakeshott, Chantal Mouffe, and Bertrand de Jouvenel. His own theory also fits here. (Note that some of the theories he considers could arguably fall into more than one of my categories.)

On to power. The basic problem with theories that define politics in terms of power is that “power” itself is a poorly defined term. If we take power to be any sort of influence, then anyone convincing anyone else to do anything at all would count as political; Donahue gives the example of one person convincing another to give them a ride when the first person’s car has run out of gas.* But if we narrow the sort of power we’re talking about, we end up excluding from the scope of “political” activities that should definitely count as politics. For instance, a definition of politics in terms of state power ignores all the sorts of political activity that might occur in the absence of formally organized states;* a definition of politics in terms of force ignores all the sorts of political activity that might involve attempts at rational persuasion.‘

Now consider a possible way of protecting theses about power. A power theorist might say: “You’re right that the term ‘power’ is too general. What we really mean is political power.” This response would neglect the task at hand. The task at hand is precisely to say what it means for something to be political. To qualify a term in a proposed analysis of politics by restricting it to political phenomena is to propose no analysis at all, for the same reason that we are taught in school not to include a word in its own definition: it relies on what it provides prior to the provision.

There is a more concrete problem with the idea of “power,” too. We can distinguish between the power over others and the power to perform certain kinds of actions.’ An analysis of politics that includes all instances of both types of power is clearly overinclusive. We gain the power to do new things when, for instance, we learn to play an instrument or to speak a language, but those are generally not political activities. However, to entirely exclude power-to from the analysis of politics would seem underinclusive. The fact that society is, at least according to some, set up in a way that determines that members of certain (privileged) groups have a wider scope of action than members of other (disprivileged) groups is arguably a central case of a political fact. Even including all instances of power-over in the analysis of politics might be a mistake. People can gain power over other people by being beautiful, charming, or talented. But it seems clearly overinclusive to think that all performances of beauty, charm, and talent are political activities.

Arguments against defining politics in terms of conflict* are similar in form to the arguments against defining politics in terms of power. There are plenty of conflicts that aren’t political (say, a physical fight between two people who both want the last piece of a delicious cake). Are there political situations that don’t involve conflict? Say an emergency situation arises in some country. Everyone agrees on what the government should do about it, and effecting this outcome requires that the legislature pass a certain bill, which indeed does pass unanimously. Was the event of that bill’s passage not a political event? The possibility of bipartisan political action might mean that defining politics in terms of conflict is underinclusive. However, we might still save the definition if bipartisan political action is political only when undertaken in institutions which are ordinarily conflictual.

I have a little argument which favors seeing politics as a matter of conflict. When people append the word “politics” to the name of some other activity, as in the phrases “academic politics” and “office politics,” they are referring to an aspect of that activity that involves some sort of conflict. So it is natural to think that the “political” side of an activity will be the conflictual one. Though I think it’s cute, this argument should not move the needle very much. This use of phrases like “office politics” would be comprehensible even if conflict were merely a frequent feature of politics rather than an essential one. And “politics” could indicate something more general than conflict, like unpleasantness.

Donahue argues against most theories of politics as a matter of setting things in order because they exclude cases of purely negative political expression — political actions which seek only to break a group’s current arrangements, radicals setting themselves on fire to protest the passage of a statute, and so forth.’ This includes theories of politics that essentially involve concepts like governing and ruling. To my mind, these theories, including Donahue’s, also suffer from a problem we saw that plagued theories of politics as power: just as there are intuitively political and nonpolitical instances of power, there are intuitively political and nonpolitical instances of order. Take a case in which four friends have decided to play a board game together every few weeks and must pick a time and a place for those regular meetings. These friends will set their affairs in order as a group and make general arrangements which are relevant to their goals. (They might even overcome some conflict.) However, it doesn’t seem natural to me to say that the friends are doing politics. There are aspects of the activity that kind of seem political, but something seems to be missing, too. Readers, of course, might disagree.

A natural thought is that we might be able to find a definition of “politics” or “political” that includes power, conflict, and order. But I think there are still obviously conflicts over power which involve setting affairs in order which aren’t political. For instance, imagine that two friends each want to be the one to choose where the group goes to dinner tonight, and one of the two friends very nastily unplugs the other friend’s phone, so that they can’t call a restaurant to make a reservation, leaving the first friend with the power to do so. This involves power (the power to make the reservation), conflict (the conflict over where to eat), and setting things in order (deciding where the group will eat), but I think it’s intuitively not a political event or a political struggle. Just as before, we want to say: this isn’t a matter of political power; this isn’t a matter of political conflict; this isn’t setting things in order in a political sense. That this response is natural indicates that there’s some other sense of “political” lurking behind all these definitions.

Is everything political?

In an introduction to the volume What is Politics? Adrian Leftwich writes of politics that “debates about its proper definition and the scope of its subject matter are themselves political.”!° But it’s very hard to make sense of this sentence if “political” is left undefined. Indeed, that it may be a “political” matter what counts as “political” leads some into odd inferences. After all, though we may all agree that it is a political matter, we may not know what that entails until we resolve that political matter: until we figure out what “political” means. Some extremists about the nature of politics may take the view that there is no truth in political matters — that they are inevitably resolved by force, for instance, and that there is no ultimate “fact of the matter” where they’re concerned. But then there is no genuine inference to be made from the fact that it is a political matter what counts as political, since there is no ultimate “fact of the matter” about what inferences can be made from something counting as political. Even worse, some people argue from the premise that it’s a political matter what counts as political to the conclusion that everything is political. This recently popular catchphrase is rationally unsupportable, and indeed if it were true it would be hard to make sense of sentences including words like “politics” and “political” or to understand phrases like “political debate” or “political science.”