Every five years or so, the United States has a major societal-wide crusade. Sometimes there’s a shocking event. Other times, there’s an ongoing evil. Either way, all Americans are supposed to join forces and take decisive action to win the crusade. And even if you can’t personally do anything, you’re supposed to get very angry.
You’re supposed to be very angry about the problem.
You’re supposed to be very angry about anyone who stands between us and victory.
You’re supposed to angrily support our crusaders.
And you’re supposed to be very angry about people who aren’t very angry.
Here is a list of all the full-blown crusades I personally recall, in chronological order. Yes, there’s a line-drawing problem, so if you think I’ve I missed one, please share in the comments.
1. Islamist Iran. When Iranian students took American embassy workers hostage, even kids under ten were angry. Something had to to be done! When the hostage rescue mission failed, my parents broke their “no TV at dinner rule” because they needed to know what had happened. A popular t-shirt actually read, “Vote Yes for Lake Iran.”
2. The War on Drugs. Beginning in the 70s and throughout the 80s, my schools were covered in anti-drug propaganda. So were billboards all over LA. Everyone was supposed to be vigilantly searching for drug dealers offering free samples of hard drugs in suburban elementary schools. My high school hired Dave Toma to preside over an apocalyptic anti-drug revival meeting for the whole school.
3. Free Kuwait. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, American society flipped out again. Back then, I doubt most Americans even knew the difference between Iraq and Iran, but they were still enraged. If you opposed action, the knee-jerk question was, “Well, what do you propose to do?!” Even most anti-war activists would glumly respond, “Give sanctions time to work.” When I stopped by my old high school, my history teacher had a “Free Kuwait” bumper sticker on his podium.
4. The War on Terror. The aftermath of the dissolution of Yugoslavia never attained crusade status, though the Kosovo War came close. (How many times did I hear contemporary media use the phrase “ethnic Albanian Kosovars”?) 9/11, however, launched the biggest crusade of my lifetime. Flags and stickers and bloodthirsty opinions were everywhere. My dad was visiting me when the U.S. started bombing Afghanistan. My mom phoned him to let him know the U.S. attack had begun – and he gushed, “It’s about time!”
5. The Iraq War. Almost everyone vocally supported the destruction of the Taliban. The crusade to unseat Saddam Hussein, in contrast, sparked mild domestic resistance – and massive domestic counter-resistance. The Congressional war authorization vote won by more than 2:1. The Dixie Chicks got “cancelled” before being cancelled was a thing.
6. The 2008 Financial Crisis. TARP was controversial, but primarily because so many people wanted to bail out “Main Street as well as Wall Street.” Other than Scott Sumner, almost no one wanted to hear about simple technocratic fixes like nominal GDP targeting.
7. COVID. I don’t count opposition to Trump or Brexit as a crusade, because public opinion was always sharply divided. The COVID crusade, in contrast, went from a minor issue in late February 2020 to the end of the world by April. And while it may seem like there’s been “debate,” it is the hysterical consensus that stands out. All 50 states declared a “state of emergency.” And even today, “I’m vaccinated, so I should be exempt from these rules.” remains a heretical position. (Not to be confused with the mainstream position that, “The CDC now says vaccinated people are allowed to do X”).
8. Black Lives Matter. Until George Floyd, this was just one popular issue out of many. Now, almost a year latter, I continue to encounter heavy-handed “anti-racist” propaganda and bizarre expiation attempts. The police publicly murder an innocent man, so all of the black characters on The Simpsons have to be voiced by black voice actors? “In Derek‘s fall, we sinned all.”
When I classify X as a “crusade,” this obviously doesn’t mean that the events that sparked the crusade didn’t happen. Nor does it mean that the events weren’t bad. What it means, rather, is that the public reaction was highly emotional, and hence deeply unreliable. Once a crusade is underway, you can no longer comfortably ask pertinent questions like, “How bad is this event on a 0-10 scale, where 10 is the extinction of humanity?” or “What are the odds that our efforts will make things worse?” or “Are we mistreating bystanders?” And a fundamental principle of Effective Altruism is that you should always ask such questions.
Now I wish I could say that I’ve opposed every single one of these crusades, but that’s not true. Alas, I was an earnest drug warrior as a child. Indeed, I favored summary execution for even the smallest drug offense, which freaked out even some of the adults in my life. (Though I never freaked out an adult enough to make them admit, “Well, drugs are bad, but they’re not summary execution bad.”)
Still, I saw the error of my ways before turning 18. I realized I was dead wrong about the War on Drugs. And I’ve had the sense to spurn each and every subsequent crusade. Verily, you will not stampede me.
How popular are these crusades really? On reflection, most Americans probably support all the crusades unleashed during their adult lives. After the fervor dies down, they may feel occasional regret, but selective amnesia is far more prevalent. And it’s hard not to look down on such sheeple. Yet shouldn’t we be equally critical of folks like me who oppose every crusade that comes along? You might even quote Inherit the Wind, which ends by hinting that cynics are even worse than fanatics:
DRUMMOND [evenly]: I’m getting damned tired of you, Hornbeck.
HORNBECK: Why?
DRUMMOND: You never pushed a noun against a verb except to blow up something.
HORNBECK: That’s a typical lawyer’s trick: accusing the accuser.
DRUMMOND: What am I accused of?
HORNBECK: I charge you with contempt of conscience! Self-perjury. Kindness aforethought. Sentimentality in the first degree.
DRUMMOND: Why? Because I refuse to erase a man’s lifetime? I tell you Brady had the same right as Cates: the right to be wrong!
My answer: In a world where opinion leaders take Effective Altruism to heart, we should indeed look down on those who stubbornly refuse to support well-vetted, self-aware causes. But since the real world is ruled by hysteria and herding, there is a strong built-in presumption that any crusade popular enough to get off the ground is unworthy of your support. And since most of us (thankfully) only live through a dozen or so crusades per lifetime, you shouldn’t be surprised if exactly zero of them surmount that presumption.
READER COMMENTS
David Manheim
May 19 2021 at 10:03am
You focus on ambiguous cases, rather than those that were obviously correct in retrospect.
For example, I’d add the crusade for gay rights to this list.
Michael Stack
May 19 2021 at 10:32am
That’s an excellent point. I’d love to see a complete list, then we could identify the subset of crusades that were misguided.
Alcibiades
May 19 2021 at 12:11pm
I’d list the obviously good and correct ones that I can think of, in chronological order:
1. Abolitionism
2. American Participation in WWII
3. Civil rights/desegregation
4. Gay rights
Tyler Wells
May 19 2021 at 11:18am
Was that a crusade? I think of a crusade as something that is shorter in nature and more top-down. Changes in feelings for gays, like racial minorities, I think of as more gradual and grass roots.
Evan Sherman
May 19 2021 at 10:19am
The point about the mechanics of the behavorial science problem is well articulated, and well-taken. If we are sincere in our analysis of the social phenomenom as an end unto itself (and thus determinedly agnostic to the merirts of the case, as you say) we can add a huge number of ‘crusades’ to the list.
The Me Too movement.
The Brett Kavanaugh hearings in particular.
Of course, if we go further back, it is even easier to see both the power and danger of an American Social Gospel spirit that has, for centuries, combined reformed WASP-y sensibilities and social-political reform. Again, the mechanics of the crusade are agnostic to the value of the underlying cause. The same core social gospel movement produced:
Abolitionism
Anti-Catholic nativism in its various manifestations
Prohibition (arguably the biggest single manifestation of anti-Catholic nativist political backlash)
Women’s Suffrage
Thomas Leske
May 19 2021 at 11:31am
People have a “Hive Switch” (see the chapter by this name in The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, 2012, p. 256).
There is also a crusade against child sexual abuse. See the controversy about the meta study by Rind et. al. 1998. They have shown that CSA is not as harmful as generally thought. A better explanation for maladjustment is a broken family. This result was not welcome, similar to results on the remarkably good health of crack babies during the war on drugs.
CSA is the topic on which Wikipedia has officialy thrown its neutrality policy out of the window:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Child_protection
„Editors who attempt to use Wikipedia to pursue or facilitate inappropriate adult–child relationships, who advocate inappropriate adult–child relationships on- or off-wiki (e.g. by expressing the view that inappropriate relationships are not harmful to children), or who identify themselves as pedophiles, will be blocked and banned indefinitely.“
Philo
May 19 2021 at 3:22pm
Wikipedia does not really have a “neutrality policy,” because it is not neutral between truth and falsehood. Therefore it cannot allow any of its entries to say that George Washington was a woman, or that the earth is flat, or that sexual relationships between an adult and a child are generally not harmful to the child.
[Comment edited by request of commenter–Econlib Ed.]
Philo
May 19 2021 at 3:26pm
. . . “an adult”; can these comments be edited?
Julian
May 19 2021 at 4:40pm
There’s fact, and there’s opinion (especially political/ideological opinion). Neutrality towards the latter should be a prerequisite for any encyclopedia, which is most often achieved via “both-sideism”.
Joe Denver
May 19 2021 at 12:07pm
Two other cases I remember: the AIDS epidemic of the 80s and 90s.
And, though it was relatively shortlived, the “Bird Flu” epidemic of the oughts.
Brian
May 19 2021 at 12:07pm
Now explain high school and college sports in America. Aren’t those episodic “crusades”. People don’t get angry but they do get inexplicably enthusiastic and there are the same expectations that you describe about society-wide crusades. Perhaps the school team sports culture is the cause of the subsequent crusading behaviour.
MarkW
May 19 2021 at 12:11pm
Don’t forget the satanic child sex abuse crusade (partly enabled by the ‘Recovered Memories Therapy’ hoax).
Julian
May 19 2021 at 4:45pm
Or the current sex trafficking hysteria that ends up just being a means of cracking down on regular prostitution, especially every Super Bowl season.
A lot of those big-shot prosecutors like Kamala Harris and Josh Hawley made a name for themselves by loudly pursuing dead-end sex trafficking cases that ended up being a nothing-burger that only wasted millions of taxpayer dollars and ruined the lives of regular prostitutes. By the time the whole thing unraveled, the public just remembered their warrior image against the non-existent traffickers.
Andrew
May 19 2021 at 12:18pm
One other one I recall from school is Japan in the mid-late 80’s. There was a big concern that Japan was outperforming the US, and I remember multiple school wide assemblies where we had people talking to us about addressing this crisis.
In the 90’s I also recall a class size crusade that seemed to have broad agreement, though this was likely more noticeable to someone in school.
The war on crime had pretty broad agreement in the early 90’s, increasing policing, 3 strikes laws, mandatory minimums, sentencing guidelines, etc.
“Stranger Danger” has to be somewhere on this list, as we as a society seem to have transitioned rather sharply on this issue, there was definitely panic and a strong response (sex offender registries, multiple laws named after children, shifting norms about unsupervised children, shifting norms about unaccompanied men near playgrounds, etc.) and there is still generally strong agreement to this day, though things are starting to shift a bit. Not completely distinct from the war on crime.
Floccina
May 19 2021 at 3:39pm
To my regret I supported 1 and 3. They felt so right, especially 1 but experience has taught me resist feelings in such matters.
Floccina
May 19 2021 at 4:17pm
There was a daycare child abuse crusade that turned out to be based on bad police work.
Steve X
May 19 2021 at 9:03pm
What about Climate Change?
In the 2000s the two big crusades seemed to be The War on Terror and Climate Change.
Most people were into one or the other. Some, notably a few NYT writers, were very big into both.
Jerry Brown
May 20 2021 at 9:56am
“How bad is this event on a 0-10 scale, where 10 is the extinction of humanity?”
That is a tough scale to use. What would WW2 rank as- a 6?
Steve Bacharach
May 20 2021 at 1:29pm
Big omission: Me Too. That was pretty huge until race bumped it off the radar.
Side note: Bryan, I know that you and me are about the same age since we attended Cal the same years, but I find it pretty hilarious that you had to sit through a high school assembly with Toma too. Boy, do I remember that and it was awful.
BC
May 21 2021 at 4:20am
I am surprised that Bryan Caplan of all people has left out the biggest crusade of all, the crusade against the scourge of immigrants illegally cleaning our homes and working our farms without proper documentation. We are all supposed to be very angry when someone works without first obtaining the proper paperwork and very angry at those who don’t get very angry over such missing paperwork.
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