Ideology as Coalition

It is a familiar observation that political parties are coalitions containing a variety of ideologies and interest groups. It is less obvious that ideologies too are coalitions.

Consider the American conservative movement of the fifties and sixties. It was made up of at least three distinct groups: Traditionalist conservatives, classical liberals/libertarians, and southern conservatives, in large part populist. Where some had strong views and the others didn't, on anti-communist foreign policy for instance, they tended to all go along. Where different groups had different strong views, such as government control over sexual behavior, they agreed to disagree. The more common the latter situation was, the greater the tension within the ideology. If it gets large enough, the ideology can fracture, as happened with the split between libertarian and traditionalists in the late 1960’s. A similar split on the left divided traditional liberals from progressives, a division made clearer recently by conflicting attitudes to the Israeli-Hamas war and demonstrations against it.

The current Trumpist right is also a coalition, united mostly by common enemies on the left. It includes religious conservatives with views strikingly inconsistent with Trump’s actions and speech, motivated by the left’s hostility to traditional religion and its support for legalization of abortion. It includes populists who reject the views of a coastal elite they perceive as looking down on them, of viewing much of America as flyover country. It includes opponents of both immigration and free trade, one reason why the libertarian element of the old conservative coalition is largely absent from the new.¹

The modern American left is also a coalition. Someone who thinks of himself as a leftist is probably in favor of increasing environmental regulation, redistribution in favor of the poor, greater government regulation of business, gay rights, feminism, prohibition of private discrimination on any of a considerable variety of grounds, foreign economic aid. He is probably against aggressive foreign policy, anti-nuclear, suspicious of law enforcement and the criminal justice system.

He is probably all of those things but only some are why he is there. The fact that he accepts all the rest, like the fact that the classical liberals in the old conservative coalition mostly supported an aggressive anti-communist foreign policy, reflects tribalism, us vs them thinking, more than intellectual consistency.

In that coalition too there are potential strains. For someone in favor of helping poor people, the economic development of China and India is arguably the best news of the past fifty years. Economic development of poor countries was the explicit goal of foreign economic aid, development planning, a variety of programs in the post-war period that were supposed to lift the third world out of poverty and didn't. The fact that more than two billion people are now in the process of moving from extreme poverty towards the sort of life westerners have long lived represents an enormous improvement in the condition of the world's poor.

It also represents a sharp increase in the consumption of depletable resources and the production of carbon dioxide. The same changes that should be good news to the leftist qua egalitarian are bad news to the leftist qua environmentalist. Not only are people who used to be poor consuming more and polluting more, they are cutting down rain forests in South America, threatening endangered species in Asia. They are, in other words, doing the same sorts of things our ancestors did.

Nuclear power is another obvious problem for the left. It provides a way of replacing a large fraction of fossil fuel power with an alternative that does not produce CO₂, using current technology at costs not wildly above current power costs, as France has demonstrated. Arguably, it provides the only such way. With fairly modest improvements in the technology of synthesizing liquid hydrocarbons it could replace practically all fossil fuel use. But the left is traditionally anti-nuclear for a mix of reasons, including hostility to nuclear weapons and a more general suspicion of technology.

Biofuels present the most recent example of a conflict between environmentalism and concern for the poor. Supporters argue that they reduce dependence on foreign (and depletable) supplies of oil and reduce CO₂ production, although it is unclear that the latter is  true once one takes account of all energy used in producing biofuels. Critics point out that diverting large amounts of farm land and farm output from producing a lot of food to producing a little fuel will cause, indeed has already caused, a steep increase in price of maize, a food consumed mostly by poor people.

When I offered similar points on my blog, one commenter pointed out that:

Similar tensions exist on the right: Conservatives want less regulation of private businesses. Conservatives also want to promote traditional values, such as chastity. Yet when the free market is let loose in many industries - especially the media industry - private companies put out messages that undermine traditional values. That's why conservatives - as a whole - can't decide whether the FCC should have more power or less.

That is one example but there are others. Conservatives are generally in favor of having decisions made at the state rather than the national level. As long as the decision was being made at the national level in favor of legal abortion they were in favor of reversing Roe v. Wade in order to let states restrict abortion. Once Roe was reversed, a lot of conservatives switched to wanting the decision made at the national level in favor of restricting abortion.

All of these conflicts are accidental; it just happens that the same change which helps in one direction hurts in another. There are additional problems that are more fundamental. One reason some on the left don't want a nuclear solution to global warming is that they see the threat of global warming as a useful argument for lifestyle changes — less power consumption, urban instead of suburban life styles, less consumption — that they favor for other reasons. For those in that position, a way of preventing global warming that does not require other people to revise their lives is a threat, not a promise.

In much the same way, the threat of nuclear winter was pushed not so much because its supporters believed in it as because its supporters were, understandably enough, looking for ways to prevent nuclear war.

The problem with such indirect motives is not that they are necessarily unjustified but that they are likely to lead to dishonest arguments. If your objective is not to prevent global warming or nuclear winter but only to use their threat to persuade other people to do things you want them to do or not to do things you don't want them to do, whether the arguments you offer are right becomes less important than whether they are persuasive. The same pattern sometimes appears on the right, even among libertarians.

Blogger and Substack author Noah Smith points at another example, a case where it turned out that a purported problem, increasing maternal mortality, was not true, and a prominent medical figure argued that the fact should not have been published:

Christopher M. Zahn, the interim CEO of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, wrote a lengthy statement in response, arguing that “reducing the U.S. maternal mortality crisis to ‘overestimation’” is “irresponsible and minimizes the many lives lost and the families that have been deeply affected.” Why? Because it “would be an unfortunate setback to see all the hard work of health care professionals, policy makers, patient advocates, and other stakeholders be undermined.” Rather than pointing out any major methodological flaw in the paper, Zahn’s statement expresses the concern that it could undermine the…goal of improving maternal health. (Noah Smith quoting Jerusalem Demsas)

In an earlier post I described similar cases in the context of Covid, alcohol, weight and ice cream.

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1. This is true of libertarians broadly defined, but see my previous post for one part of the libertarian movement that supports Trump at least to the extent of wanting to see him win the current election.