“I urge you to beware the temptation of pride–the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.” – Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire” Speech
During the Cold War, folks like Ronald Reagan accused their domestic opponents of believing in the “moral equivalence” of the United States and the Soviet Union. Having lived through the era, I am confident that believers in moral equivalence existed. Knowing the relevant history, I agree that this was an absurd belief. However bad the United States was, the Soviet Union was vastly worse.
If you want to nitpick, admittedly, we never find literal moral equivalents in real world. Why? Because in a continuous world, one side in any conflict is bound to be at least a little worse. Still, careful examination of real-world conflict does occasionally uncover not moral equivalents, but moral approximates. Though the two sides’ moral status is not precisely equal, they are morally more-or-less the same.
It’s easiest to identify examples that are far away in time and place. During the Wars of Religion, who was worse – the Catholics or the Protestants? During World War I, who was worse – the Germans or the Russians? During the War of the Roses, who was worse – the Yorks or the Lancasters? You could plead ignorance. Yet even if you studied the history for a year, you would plausibly conclude that the two sides were moral approximates – both sinned so egregiously that it really is hard to know who was worse.
For recent and ongoing conflicts, assertions of moral approximation naturally inspire far more pushback. If we were rational, however, the opposite would be true. The very fact that people have strong emotions about recent and ongoing conflicts is a strong reason to discount their judgment. Furthermore, when a conflict is recent or ongoing, we usually lack a great deal of not-yet-released relevant information. No one is likely to scare up shocking new revelations about the Lancasters, but in fifty years we’ll have a much better understanding of what the Trump administration actually did.
Those limitations in mind, here are the top three moral approximations I am willing to defend.
1. Communism and Nazism are moral approximates. Why? Both movements were fanatical attempts to build dystopian societies – and both self-righteously murdered tens of millions of innocent people. Contrary to much propaganda, Communists did not have noticeably better motives. Both groups imagined that a totalitarian society would be a big improvement over the status quo – and recklessly embraced the necessity of mass murder to get there.
2. Socialism and fascism are moral approximates. Why? Socialism is a toned-down version of Communism; fascism is a toned-down version of Nazism. As toned-down versions, they aim for much less, and murder far fewer people in the process. Yet the vision of both movements – society as a big family with a common purpose – remains dystopian. And while their methods are far less brutal than Communism or Nazism, socialism and fascism both casually advocate pervasive coercion for flimsy reasons.
(My main doubt here is that while I’ve repeatedly publicly debated socialists, I would not so engage a fascist. Doesn’t that show that I think fascism is markedly worse? Not exactly. The main reason I don’t debate fascists is that avowed fascism is now so low-status that its adherents are low-quality and scary. In a world where fascists were as mainstream as socialists, I would debate them).
3. The Democratic and Republican parties are moral approximates. Why? Both are dogmatic, emotional, and demagogic. Neither party internalizes the maxim that with great power comes great responsibility – or dwells on the possibility that they might be mistreating people who don’t agree with them. Both parties say they want various radical changes, many of which seem very bad. The policies Democrats and Republicans actually impose when they have power are similarly mediocre, though that doesn’t stop them from rhetorically making mountains out of molehills. On immigration, for example, the Democratic-Republican debate basically comes down to whether the border should be 98% closed or 99% closed. Though I prefer 98% to 99%, it’s approximately the same.
I am well-aware that both Democrats and Republicans will protest angrily being lumped together; in their eyes, the differences between their parties are “huge.” My question for them: In 200 years, how big will these “huge differences” look to historians? Yes, during the Wars of Religion, Catholics and Protestants mutually called each other servants of the Antichrist. Today, however, we can plainly see that both sides were unhinged.
Similarly, if you carefully studied the politics of, say, France in 1970, would you really conclude that the arguments that enraged contemporary French partisans were, in fact, a big deal?
Back in 2016, many Democrats told me that Trump’s election exposed the sheer evil of the Republican Party. In a way, this understates. I say that the mere fact that a man like Trump did well in the primaries shows that the Republican Party is rotten. However, I’d say the same about Bernie Sanders’ success in 2016. The mere fact that a man like Sanders did well in the primaries shows that the Democratic Party is rotten, too.
You could respond, “Suppose Democrats and Republicans really are moral approximates. Shouldn’t an economist, of all people, still be eager to discover the slightly lesser evil?” My answer: If I were America’s kingmaker, then yes. But when I’m just one voice among tens of millions, no. While I’m always happy to share my views with curious Democrats or Republicans, I’m too much of a puritan to ever join either party.
P.S. Lest anyone misinterpret me, I think the Democratic and Republican parties are markedly better than socialism and fascism, which are in turn markedly better than Communism and Nazism. Mathematically: D≈R>>S≈F>>C≈N.
READER COMMENTS
Phil H
Feb 19 2020 at 9:40am
I suspect this is approximately right, but I have a reservation about the Republican party that I’m genuinely curious to hear others’ views on. It feels a bit as though the Republicans’ mechanism for selecting good presidential candidates is messed up. Since I’ve been politically aware, it’s been Clinton, Bush II, Obama, Trump, and it seems like there’s a fairly obvious difference in quality of thought and integrity there, which are the qualities I care about.
Candidates like McCain suggest it could have been otherwise. But it’s interesting that Britain seems to have been struck with the same problem at the same time: Cameron and Johnson are just low-quality people (I have to admit that Corbyn seems pretty useless, too, and May seemed fine, so the record isn’t all one way or another).
So is there something wrong with the Republican party and the way it picks its leaders; and why haven’t the Democrats been hit with the same plague of celebrity candidates – or have they?
robc
Feb 19 2020 at 10:44am
I disagree with you, only on the Ds, I think you have the Rs dead on (except for McCain, ugh, he is worse than the 2 Rs who won).
In 1992, I watched the first Dem primary debate, when they were being referred to as the 7 dwarves. I knew very little about most of them and none about some of them.
My response after it, and this is very close to an accurate quote, “I don’t know who is going to win the nomination, but it won’t be that Arkansas governor. He is way too scummy.”
Obvious, my predictive power is not very good, but I think my character judgement was dead on.
MikeDC
Feb 19 2020 at 2:25pm
…seems like there’s a fairly obvious difference in quality of thought and integrity there, which are the qualities I care about.
I know lots of people who think this way, but I think it mostly falls into the prejudice that so many folks have for an academic sort of intelligence and sensibility.
I suggested to some folks recently, to their general agreement, that the average highly educated person (which is not the same as the average highly intelligent person) that most members of this class would rather have a child that’s gay than a child who didn’t attend college.
This illustrates the depth of our preferences as the elite/educated class. And it speaks to a problem in politics. The truth of the matter is we live in a nation where only 2-3% of the population identifies as being gay, but 66% do not have a college degree.
Our sensibilities (and I speak as someone with a lot of education and ‘professional’ background) are the sensibilities that need to be challenged.
We overestimate “intelligence” and we over-associate it with the external markers of the genteel elite. Thus, it’s not even questioned to sniff and question the “quality of thought and integrity” in ways that I can’t tell actually relate to anything.
Just to put some specifics to it, Trump made and lost and remade several fortunes. Bush flew fighter jets. No matter what one things of them, it’s a mistake to think of them as objectively stupid men. Even if they don’t or refuse to speak the language of “all the right sort of people”.
On the other hand, I have no doubt that Clinton is also an objectively intelligent man, but he’s also been somewhat credibly accused of rape.
When I start to try and figure out how that fits into the thought process, I end up concluding it’s not a very meaningful one. It’s just serving my own prejudices that people “speak my language”.
Phil H
Feb 19 2020 at 8:44pm
Hi, Mike. This is a weird one, because I basically want to agree with you, but I really don’t agree with any of your arguments!
“would rather have a child that’s gay than a child who didn’t attend college…This illustrates…a problem” – Nope, because there’s nothing wrong with being gay, but there is a very small thing wrong with not going to college (something like lack of aspiration). The percentages aren’t relevant.
“We overestimate “intelligence” and we over-associate it with the external markers of the genteel elite.” Nope – I’m not really interested in intelligence, but I love the genteel elite. The existence of the middle class is a big part of what makes life good, and I’m happy to champion their bourgeois preferences.
“Trump…fortunes. Bush…jets…mistake to think of them as…stupid” I’m not that interested in how intelligent or stupid they are, but I don’t think those are good evidence. If a stupid man were born a billionaire, it seems entirely possible that a Trump-like story would ensue.
MikeDC
Feb 19 2020 at 9:58pm
But the percentages are quite relevant, because if you’re to the point of saying there’s something “wrong” with the vast majority of folks, that seems like a pretty big failure of perspective. Education is largely, though not completely, a game of rent and status seeking.
Not wanting to play the status game isn’t a failure of aspiration. It’s a different aspiration. And we’d probably be better off as individuals and as a society if we stopped requiring a college degree to get any job and to not be looked down upon.
Then you are quite at odds with yourself, because the “genteel elite” and the middle class are very different groups. And, I’d point out that blithely considering there to be something “wrong” and basically lazy with two-thirds of the country for not attending college is a sign of abandonment of traditional bourgeois preference for those of the genteel elite.
I think you are not alone in this regard. You think of yourselves as “middle class” but you adopt the sensibilities of the elite. Which are really quite different.
Unlikely. There’s plenty of research that indicates there’s significant downward economic mobility. Staying rich is obviously easier than getting rich, but a non-trivial number of people fail to stay rich.
Phil H
Feb 20 2020 at 4:30am
Thank you for that thoughtful response.
“if you’re to the point of saying there’s something “wrong” with the vast majority of folks, that seems like a pretty big failure of perspective”
I don’t think so. I’d prefer to be rich. I’d prefer you to be rich. Most people aren’t rich. But my preference is not a comment on them! I don’t see any problem with saying “it’s better to go to college (all else being equal)” and it’s not a claim that people who don’t go to college are wrong. I’m a parent, and I want my kids to get a university education. If they don’t, I will regard it as a failure on my own part (not theirs). If they turn out to be gay, I will not think that anyone has failed or anything gone wrong.
Now if my preference spills over into disdain for those without a degree, that’s no good – and I see that it all too often does do that. But aspiration itself isn’t a bad thing. (If you think that there isn’t anything aspirational about college and it’s all ingrouping and politics, then I can see that this argument doesn’t work as well for you. I don’t think that.)
“abandonment of traditional bourgeois preference for those of the genteel elite” Interesting. I’m not sure what you mean by these two different groups. I don’t see anything to make me think that college has changed its role or stopped being the mechanism through which the middle class reproduces itself.
Of course, I don’t know what is making you see college that way. But after talking to other people with similar views, my takeaway is that they seem to be irritated by the mixed role of college. Because, it’s not just about the academics. It’s also about having fun, and about reinforcing class. But I don’t see any of those as bad things!
MikeDC
Feb 20 2020 at 2:54pm
“Elite” is generally synonymous with an “upper class”. The bourgeois and middle class are synonymous with the much larger lump of people in the middle of the income distribution. To make it concrete, consider it maybe the quartile of the income distribution vs. the middle two.
One could quibble about the exact line, but it’s a basic numeric truth that since 66% of the relevant population does not have a college degree it is obviously not accurate to say that the “middle class reproduces itself through college”
Historically speaking, it is much more accurate to say that the elite reproduced itself through college. Only the top 10-20% frequently and regularly got degrees historically. Often less. That tracks much more with the suggestion I’m making… it’s the elite, the upper class, that reproduced through college.
The middle class obviously didn’t. And this is evident from the numbers (both currently and historically), which suggest that a middle class long existed with a college education. Hence, you’re conflating the classes pretty badly.
Now, let’s consider the second part of what you are saying in context of this:
The complaint about the “mixed role” of college is that it has come to serve a very different set of ends when it is being used by 75% of the population instead of 25%. Those ends seem to be indoctrination, which is bad, rent-seeking, which is unproductive, and state-mandated credentialism, which is immoral. The last one is the least talked about, but probably the worst because of the massive costs is imposes on most everyone.
Let me give you a real-world example. My company works for the federal government on various contracts. At one point, we had several folks doing condition assessments on facilities who didn’t have a college degree. The agency that hired us, when it re-issued the request for the work, specified that everyone working on the project must have a degree. So, we had to lay those guys off and replace them with folks who did have a degree.
This is by no means an uncommon situation. Prof. Caplan here and others have documented a wide variety of situations in which work that was formerly done by folks without a degree now requires one.
And, it’s obviously a rent-seeking operation. The middle-class formerly never required a college degree. You could get a decent job without a massive expenditure on a credential that bore only a tenuous relation to your career path. Now the opposite is the case.
And that is bad for pretty much everyone except the higher-education industry. It now gets a sizeable chunk of your money and a claim on several years of your life in order to give you a fighting chance to do exactly the same work that, a generation or two ago, didn’t require any such expense.
If there’s actually a grain of truth out there to the extreme left-wing view that we are living in servitude, then higher education is certainly the fief, the credentials are the patents of nobility, and the tremendous debt of education that folks feel compelled to take on is the indenture.
Phil H
Feb 21 2020 at 1:01am
OK, so I don’t really agree with what you’re imagining to be the middle class.
“bourgeois and middle class are synonymous with the much larger lump of people in the middle of the income distribution.” – I don’t think there is such a lump, and there never was. The middle class was never actually the middle of the population. They were/are “middle” in the sense that they fall in between those who work for a living wage (almost everyone, originally) and the landowners (basically the 1%). The middle class still work for their money, so they are not like the leisured landowner class; but they make enough money that they’re not just living – they have culture and an interest in politics. I would suggest that originally the middle class were basically the 90th-99th percentile. That’s now been extended a bit, and may include approximately the top half of the income distribution. But the working class is still the largest in absolute numbers. And always has to be, I suppose.
“And, it’s obviously a rent-seeking operation. The middle-class formerly never required a college degree.” Yeah… I agree something has changed. But I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. The middle class used to differentiate itself by having bigger houses, going to classical concerts, and wearing suits to work. Now they differentiate themselves by going to college. To me it seems better, because now the differentiator has to do with learning new ideas, writing, and training in skills. Those seem to me to be innately valuable.
MikeDC
Feb 21 2020 at 11:21am
I disagree with the rest, and I think a review of the historical and common use of the terms shows I’m right, but I don’t think we’re going to agree. But I do think this is worth a comment
What you are acknowledging is that folks within the cohort used to be able to spend their disposable income on an array of choices. Better housing, clothes, music, etc. Now, they are compelled to spend it on “education” just to have any disposable income. The simplest way to describe this change is a massive loss of individual freedom. Economically, it’s a significant decline in welfare.
Phil H
Feb 22 2020 at 4:38am
“massive loss of individual freedom…significant decline in welfare.” This is a pretty good point. To the extent that college is required for entry into the middle class, it does seem like a steep price to pay.
I fear there may be no way around paying that price, because you have to learn stuff somewhere, but I agree that it’s an issue.
Mark Z
Feb 20 2020 at 4:03am
I think a reasonably objective liberal would admit that, say, Bob Dole, George H.W. Bush, John McCain, or Mitt Romney were not qualitatively on a different level from Clinton or Obama. I think it’s really just Bush II and Trump that stand out as being unusually ‘bad quality’ (e.g. in terms of not being very articulate); and I think Sanders is in the same class, not among the more ‘normal’ candidates. So it seems to me it’s more of a temporal trend than a partisan one. Perhaps in 2016, the Democrats could say the ‘grownups in the room’ managed to stay in control (albeit not decisively), whereas the Republicans could not. But a mere 4 years later they can no longer say that (I guess we’ll see for sure over the coming months).
zeke5123
Feb 20 2020 at 11:39am
This is a common refrain — Obama was smart / possessing integrity, but Trump is dumb / lacks integrity. I won’t disagree with you on Trump’s lack of integrity, and I don’t think we will agree on Obama’s integrity (I think the image of Obama differed from the actions of Obama in meaningful ways). But I want to focus on the “smarts.”
Obama seems smarter than Trump. Hell, I’d say Obama is smarter than Trump. But…it sure seems like in the areas most strongly in the President’s control (specifically foreign policy) Trump has been “smarter” than Obama. Trump has nothing — yet — akin to the massive Libya debacle. Stated differently, Trump’s policies — and especially the policies Trump has direct control over — seem to have been better than Obama.
So, what does that tell us about smarts? Is it that they are overrated or that maybe we haven’t calibrated our insights into what constitutes “smarts?”
Phil H
Feb 21 2020 at 1:05am
“Trump has nothing — yet — akin to the massive Libya debacle. Stated differently, Trump’s policies — and especially the policies Trump has direct control over — seem to have been better than Obama.”
I’m not seeing it. Trump has been beaten back by the courts on a number of policies, so obviously he was making serious bureaucratic blunders. His travel ban seems misguided. His trade policy is nonsense. His military policy… I mean, do you remember the day when he said he was pulling out of Syria, then reversed the next day, then later did it anyway? These are not the actions of a person with a clear grasp of the situation.
Mark
Feb 19 2020 at 9:59am
I disagree that Nazism and communism were moral approximates. The Nazis started World War II, so they bear some responsibility for all the deaths that happened from that, whereas communist powers (the USSR and China) were far less aggressive in their foreign policy. Most deaths attributable to Nazism were directly and intentionally caused by the state, while most deaths attributable to communism were due to things like poverty and famine that communist policies contributed to but usually did not intentionally cause. There was also a huge difference in POW survival rates in World War II between Russians in German captivity (where over half died) and Germans in Russian captivity (where the death rate was around 10%, most of whom were among the already-dying people captured at Stalingrad).
A larger point though is that it is hard to assign a moral valence to factions or particularly entire countries. Only individuals have moral agency. When two countries are in conflict, you could deem the leaders of one morally worse than the leaders of another, but most of the people affected by conflict are individuals who are no morally better or worse than the individuals on the other side. Thus, in any conflict between nations or other large involuntary groups where most of the people affected had no say in the conflict to begin with, one should judge the desirability of outcomes based on utilitarian considerations (typically this means the larger, poorer country should win) rather than moral judgments of the country’s leaders.
Salem
Feb 19 2020 at 10:34am
Are you serious? The Nazis started WW2 by invading Poland in concert with the Soviets. In 1939-1940 alone, Russia started wars of conquest against Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Finland. This is to say nothing of the earlier wars of conquest that formed the USSR. WW2 ended with Russian military occupation of most of Eastern Europe, which they periodically reinforced with new invasions (Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968). Even in its senility, the USSR still found cause to invade Afghanistan, just for old time’s sake.
The USSR was an evil empire every bit comparable to Nazi Germany.
Mark
Feb 19 2020 at 10:47am
The USSR just took back territory that had belonged to the Russian Empire. They didn’t invade all of their neighbors and start World War II. The vast majority of the deaths in World War II were the result of the German invasion of the USSR, not from partioning Poland (which Prussia/Austria and Russia had done many times in their history). What the USSR did is at most morally equivalent to if the Nazis had stopped at Austria and Czechoslovakia.
Plato’s Revenge
Feb 19 2020 at 4:15pm
You seriously seem to think conquering former parts of a former empire is somehow more justified than outright robbery. Especially if those parts made a conscious effort to flee that empire.
You also ignore the fact that the Soviet troops met the Germans as friends — which they were (at the time) in word and deed
After denying it for decades, the Russians recently produced the secret protocol to their treaty with Germany
Miguel Madeira
Feb 20 2020 at 9:22am
“Former” by a question of a couple of years (or perhaps even months); and it was also the Communist government that initially abandoned these lands (Brest-Litovsk).
Brad S
Feb 21 2020 at 3:42pm
“The USSR just took back territory that had belonged to the Russian Empire. They didn’t invade all of their neighbors and start World War II.”
Holy smokes. “…just took back…”. Nice apology.
FYI, by your standards Germany didn’t invade all of its neighbors and start WWII. It just invaded Poland (as noted above, in concert with the USSR). And then France and Britain elected to declare war on Germany. Etc.
Mark Z
Feb 20 2020 at 4:20am
I’m sorry, but no. The Holodomor, the most severe of the famines, was absolutely an intentional act of genocide. The goal was to break the Ukraine. To characterize other famine deaths of communist regimes in general as mere accidents is also rather bizarre. Communist regimes could’ve stopped their policies once they saw they were killing enormous numbers of people, but they pressed forward anyway, knowing the harm they were doing. You’re also understating the extent to which communist regimes outright murdered large numbers of people, not just through famine. Mao had nearly a million people executed after taking power in his efforts to ‘suppress counterrevolutionaries.’ About a million or so were killed during the cultural revolution. Pol Pot is also certainly on the same moral plane as Hitler; that he killed fewer people is only because he has a smaller country to terrorize. Overall, I don’t find your argument much more compelling than if one were to suggest that the large fraction of Nazi camp victims who died of starvation or malnutrition somehow subtracted from the moral gravity of it, as though being made to starve were significantly less bad than being shot.
David Shera
Feb 19 2020 at 10:02am
correction point 1: … were fanatical attempts to build utopian societies …
They were attempting to build utopian societies, they ended up with dystopian
Alex
Feb 19 2020 at 11:22am
Good post. Regarding the last point, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Scott Alexander’s post “I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup” Still a good read nearly six years later.
MarkW
Feb 19 2020 at 12:45pm
…but in fifty years we’ll have a much better understanding of what the Trump administration actually did.
I rather doubt it — it’s been 40 years since the elections of Thatcher and Reagan. Are we approaching a much better commonly shared understanding of what their administrations actually did? Or do we still have incompatible, highly polarized, partisan versions of what happened during that time period? It seems to me that only when an historical period becomes so remote that it has no salience for current politics does it settle into something we might call a general ‘better understanding’ of what happened. This has not even happened to all major events in the last 400-500 years (hence the 1619 project and the ongoing disputes about whether Columbus should be honored or condemned). Even going back much longer, modern political differences create disputes about ancient history (Was the really such a thing as the ‘fall’ of Rome or the ‘Dark Ages’?).
BW
Feb 20 2020 at 4:59pm
I think you are confusing a “better understanding” with a “more-widely accepted understanding.” You are correct that time alone is not sufficient to produce the latter, but it is often necessary to produce the former. Many of the details of a scandal are only uncovered years after the fact; after journalists have had time to investigate and once its primary perpetrators are no-longer actively sustaining the cover-up.
Thaomas
Feb 19 2020 at 12:48pm
True that both are pretty far from the neo-liberal ideal of market friendly, pro growth, pro redistribution. Republicans tend to have better rhetoric but worse policies when they have unchecked power.
Mike Sandifer
Feb 19 2020 at 12:49pm
Bryan,
You’re way off on Republicans and Democrats. The Republican Party is openly, thoroughly fascist, while most Democrats aren’t socialist in any meaningful sense of the word.
Jon Murphy
Feb 19 2020 at 1:00pm
The front-runner for the party’s nomination is literally, in his own words, a socialist.
Fred_in_PA
Feb 20 2020 at 12:45am
Bryan;
I would argue that both the Democrats and the Republicans are fascist in their economic policies. That socialists believe that the State should own the major means of production. Whereas Fascists believe that ownership of these companies should be (nominally) in the hands of private owners, while in practice the behaviors of the firm should be bent to the will of the State through regulation, taxation, and public suasion (jawboning). Even Bernie Sanders doesn’t call for State ownership (in spite of calling himself a socialist). But he (and his Party) do seem much more aggressive about the “bending” of firm behavior.
Fred_in_PA
Feb 20 2020 at 10:49am
Sorry. This should have been addressed to Mike, not Bryan. (The perils of typing past midnight!)
Mark Z
Feb 20 2020 at 4:23am
I’m not sure what to say other than that this is just obviously false. Republicans controlled all three branches of government not too long ago. If they were thoroughly fascist, we wouldn’t be having this discussion right now.
Hazel Meade
Feb 19 2020 at 1:33pm
I take a different approach: Just because A is morally better than B, doesn’t mean A is good, or that you are obliged to support A. It’s possible to acknowledge that A is better than B, and nonetheless reject A. Because the universe is not a landscape of binary choices. I refuse to side with the Democrats merely because Trump is clearly worse than Hillary. There are other choices than supporting one of the two parties, neither of which currently reaches the necessary threshold of non-evilness to get my vote.
Refusing to accept the logic that one must choose the lesser of evils allows me the freedom to acknowledge that naziism was worse than communism, and that facism is worse than socialism, and that (at the moment) the Republicans might be worse than the Democrats (in terms of net evil). Neither of them is getting my vote until they stop being evil.
FasihZ
Feb 19 2020 at 8:44pm
With this notion, you’re never going to vote for anything–support anything or anyone. For human nature is such that evil exists; nothing is perfect.
I believe a better approach is to support the lesser evil, leaving the future 1% better for the next generation–in the hope that they’ll do the same. Marginal improvements.
Kevin Jackson
Feb 19 2020 at 10:08pm
What’s the logical conclusion of this argument for supporting the lesser of two evils? If you truly believe this, then marking a (largely irrelevant) ballot every four years just doesn’t cut it. You should be devoting your entire life to supporting those lesser evil candidates! I doubt you do this, though, since lesser evils hardly inside lifelong dedicated support.
No, a better choice is to reject the false choice, and ask instead what you can do that will make a change for real good. The answer I’ve come up with is to act local, specifically with my own family. I make careful, well reasoned arguments to them, and listen carefully to their replies. I try to understand what issues drive them, so I can address this rather than argue for my own hobbyhorses. If I can change their minds in a few key issues, then perhaps they can influence others in turn, and so on.
This has two benefits over your method. One, I can influence the people I love and respect, and when I’m wrong I’m influenced by then in turn. And two, I have zero guilt from supporting an evil policy that I underestimated.
Mark Z
Feb 20 2020 at 4:29am
Not necessarily. If more people refused to vote for candidates, even lesser evils, that failed to meet a basic standard, then it would incentivize the party to which they’re more sympathetic to have better quality candidates. However, if everyone votes for their preferred lesser evil, it invites a race to the bottom, since the worse the other party is, the worse your party can afford to be.
Refusing to vote for anyone that’s not perfect is obviously pointless (other than, of course, because voting itself is irrational, but that aside…). But then automatically voting for the lesser evil also creates a suboptimal incentive structure. The strategically optimal strategy is somewhere in between. Sometimes, if you care about future generations, you should be willing to subject your party to a loss when it’s behaving sufficiently badly, even if it’s the lesser evil; otherwise, it has no incentive to do better in the long run.
Fred_in_PA
Feb 20 2020 at 11:56am
Mark Z;
You say, “If more people refused to vote for candidates, even lesser evils, that failed to meet a basic standard, then it would incentivize the party to which they’re more sympathetic to have better quality candidates.”
Seems to me this doesn’t work. Because the party isn’t informed from your non-voting that you sympathize with them. All they see is that the other guy — the worse candidate — won! Their incentive will be, if anything, to outdo (in an undesirable way) the bad candidate who beat them. Or, perhaps, stick by their principles and resign the field — to give themselves up to the wilderness. I don’t think this is the result you want.
RPLong
Feb 19 2020 at 9:59pm
In practice, though, this doesn’t put you in any different a place than Caplan. You say you think fascism is worse than communism, but you reject both in more or less the same way Caplan does. So, this is a distinction without a difference. Other than the signaling value, what does your position get you?
Hazel Meade
Feb 21 2020 at 2:03pm
I like being honest and accurate and willing to acknowledge things that are true even if they aren’t good for my “side”. So I guess it buys me intellectual credibility.
If you see someone refusing to make moral distinctions when those moral distinctions would be bad for people he is politically aligned with, it tends to cast doubt upon their objectivity. Being willing to say, yeah, in this instance, the other side is correct, means people on the other will take you more seriously when you tell them when they are wrong.
Hazel Meade
Feb 21 2020 at 2:39pm
Also, here’s why I think Naziism is worse than Communism:
The Communist ideals weren’t inherently evil, in the way that Nazi ideals were. The communists had a utopian vision of a society where everyone was equal and provided for equally. The Nazis by contrast shared *some* of that utopian idea, but they also wanted to kill off various social undesirables, including minority ethnic groups. In other words, if communism “worked” , it would have been an okay society to live in. If Naziism “worked”, lots more people would have been executed. The Holocaust was Naziism working *as designed*. More Communists would not say that Stalins purges were exactly what they set out to acheive. But the Holocaust WAS exactly what the Nazis desired.
Brad S
Feb 21 2020 at 3:53pm
“The communists had a utopian vision of a society where everyone was equal and provided for equally.”
That sounds like a description of ideal communists, not a description of actual communists. People hijack ideals for their own ends. My conclusion is different: that communists had dystopian visions of societies with themselves in charge and their enemies imprisoned or dead; their intentions were every bit as vile as those of the Nazis.
zeke5123
Feb 21 2020 at 3:56pm
First, it isn’t clear that intent matters.
Second, I am not sure the communist utopia is that utopian. Besides absolute equality sounding…terrible I do think communists had class based bigotry (somewhat analogous to the racial based bigotry of the Nazis).
Scott Sumner
Feb 19 2020 at 2:16pm
Stalin, Hitler, and Bernie Sanders all called themselves “socialist”. (Or at least the Soviet Union was officially called socialist under Stalin’s leadership.) It would probably be useful to specify various versions of “socialism”. There’s also some variation in the other 5 terms discussed in the post, but perhaps not so wide a variation as with socialism.
Jens
Feb 20 2020 at 5:03am
But the usefulness of a term depends on its purpose. When it comes to creating the most widely usable, negatively connoted label, differentiation is not useful.
The intended use will of course become a little clearer if definitions such as “society as a big family” are floating around. As often as I currently hear terms like “pluralism”, “conflict” and “democracy” from self-proclaimed socialists, “family” is really the very last association I have.
And socialists are not so stupid that they have never heard of the fact that properties of systems change with size. They know that the blood circulation of a blue whale presents different problems than that of a mouse. I.e. a society coordinates differently than a family, even a big one.
In recent years there have been governments in Europe that have been put in place by parties that describe themselves as socialist. They were not all unsuccessful on any preference scale, that does not include anti-socialism as a end in itself. Portugal is a very recent example. The successor organization of the socialist party in East Germany prevails either and has a good chance of being involved in the federal government in the near future.
Btw: there is a statistic in Germany that differentiates between left-wing and right-wing motivated political murders. The current status is around 1:200 (left:right) since reunification. (The one left-wing political murder, on a manager involved in a institution that handled reunification issues, was by the RAF in 1991 – a left wing guerilla group, that disbanded shortly after in the early 90ties). But sure .. its a misguided statistic, that’s typical german and left vs. right has *absolutely* no connection to S≈F.
Most modern “democratic socialists” (no, i don’t know if that term makes any sense, it’s a name, names point to, they don’t define) would probably define their attitude in such a way that they want to update their views at any time so that the term S (and only this) is always the “left-most” in the final inequality Caplan defines. And that’s not too bad (by definition). Especially if libertarians never update. Hitler, Stalin, Sanders. As above, so below.
KevinDC
Feb 19 2020 at 2:24pm
Hey Phil –
I’m not sure I share your opinion of the gap in thought and integrity among those choices, at least not fully. You list the following: Clinton, Bush II, Obama, and Trump. I think Trump in unequivocally worst among them on on both dimensions – my spider sense it telling me you’d probably agree. I think Bush was much smarter than he was generally given credit for (when I read this I found it fairly easy to believe). I would rate Obama highest on both fronts – despite many disagreements with him I think he was highly intelligent and had good character. Bill Clinton I would rate very low on character. I think he was and is a truly bad person. His intellect is harder for me to gauge – he gave horrible and embarrassingly flimsy arguments for his views, of course, but so does every politician. In my entire life I don’t think I’ve ever heard any politician give a good or well reasoned argument for anything. Politics doesn’t reward sound reasoning, it rewards sound bites. So when a politician makes a patently stupid argument, I’m more likely to ascribe that to them playing the political game than being genuinely stupid.
Regarding the Democrats having a crazy celebrity candidate of their own – while they haven’t had anyone yet on the level of Trump, I don’t think that’s because there is anything about their side that makes them more robust against such an eventuality. I was reminded of this article from Slate a few years back arguing that in all likelihood the Democratic party is just as vulnerable to such a thing happening, and it strikes me as pretty plausible even now.
Phil H
Feb 19 2020 at 8:16pm
Yeah, that’s probably fair. I think ultimately I’ve got to downgrade Bush a lot because I regard Iraq as a war of aggression (Tony Blair t00). But your points all seem fair, and I suspect that the apparent difference between the parties is spurious.
Mark Z
Feb 20 2020 at 4:36am
Bush was trying to appeal to the ‘rural/rustic’ voter demographic (or at least voters who identify with that aesthetic), so he likely sort of ‘downgraded’ himself to some extent. This isn’t new of course; America has a long history going back to the early 19th century of blue-blooded, educated presidential candidates playing the “I was born in a log cabin” schtick. It’s made for some interesting campaign slogans over the years.
zeke5123
Feb 20 2020 at 2:50pm
But you don’t “downgrade” Obama for Libya? In many ways, Libya was a worse war than Iraq.
First, Libya happened after Iraq but without learning any lessons from Iraq.
Second, the precedent set by Libya is significantly worse than the precedent set by Iraq.
Third, there was no colorable strategic interest in Libya.
Fourth, Libya was likely illegal (both under international law and US domestic law); Iraq was not.
Obama sounds intelligent, but his policies — especially the policies he had most control over — were terrible. Ultimately, the measure of smarts has to be in outcomes. And based on the outcomes, Obama wasn’t so smart.
Dylan
Feb 21 2020 at 7:54am
I suspect I differ from many here on this, but I think the most basic and important role of the president is to be able to speak convincingly and passionately in defense of “American values.” Obviously, I’d like to have policies that I agree with as well, but that only comes after the rhetoric. On that level, in comparison to all other president’s in my lifetime, Obama excelled. And, I’ll note that he would do this even when it went against the progressive tide (see his multiple defenses of free speech on university campuses).
zeke5123
Feb 21 2020 at 3:58pm
Curious if your life time includes Reagan? I maintain he was easily the best US orator of the last 70 years.
JdL
Feb 20 2020 at 11:05am
I agree with the categorizations but also think a lot of the distinction is mostly a semantic game. Socialists want the government to own production; fascists say no, you can keep it in private hands but we’ll tell you how to run it. Difference? Not much.
In all cases the level of evil comes down to how much the government tries to run people’s lives. In my opinion, Democrats and Republicans deserve only a single ‘>’ compared to so Socialists and Fascists. The level of micromanagement, not to mention robbery and intolerable waste, are truly horrible today.
nobody.really
Feb 21 2020 at 11:39am
No; only the Democrats say the difference between the parties is huge. The Republicans say that it’s yoge.
aretae
Feb 24 2020 at 12:52pm
I have one mild dispute here:
I don’t think fascism is a real position. It’s an insult used by some folks to claim badness of the other guy with ZERO content.
Effective no one advocates the position, and when someone does, it is very hard to distinguish any actual practices that differ from Socialism.
Combined with real disputes over the position like Jonah Goldberg. And I have a hard time figuring out what the differences between FDR and Mussolini in terms of policy preferences were.
I agree with everything you’ve said here, except that I don’t think fascism exists as a thing to compare.
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