Writing about the final (with some luck) fireworks of the Trump presidency, Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins proposes many interesting or challenging insights, up to and including a final contradiction (“Don’t Expect Police to Shoot at Crowds,” January 8, 2021). The penultimate sentence states a deep and science-based idea that you don’t meet often in the press, even the serious press. Writes Jenkins:
Elections should strive to be above reproach in accuracy and lawfulness but they can’t manifest the “will of the people” when there is no unambiguous will to manifest.
I have tried to explain this idea in a few Econlog posts and, along the same lines, I have a forthcoming, more elaborate article in The Independent Review, titled “The Impossibility of Populism.” In short, there is no ambiguous “will of the people” to manifest because “the people” does not exist as a superindividual mind and because there is no way to aggregate individual wills into a social or political will that is not either dictatorial or logically incoherent.
The sentence that follows and closes Jenkins’s column, however, seems to contradict what the author has just said:
This problem will only be solved by Americans reaching a greater consensus among themselves about what kind of society they want to be.
What can be the meaning of Americans deciding “what kind of society they want to be”? As Jenkins otherwise suggests, individuals have different preferences and values and each entertains a different—sometimes widely different—idea of the society he wants (see “The Vacuity of the Political ‘We’,” Econlib, October 6, 2014).
The solution to this contradiction is to implicitly agree to live and let live. Perhaps one can formulate this solution in terms of a social contract à la Buchanan, but a presumed unanimous agreement can only be on very general and abstract rules close to the live-and-let-live principle.
READER COMMENTS
Fazal Majid
Jan 10 2021 at 5:12pm
What do you do when, there isn’t even one people, but two peoples coexisting in the same geography, but at loggerheads? The US may not (yet) be at the same point as Israel-Palestine or Bosnia, but seems well past Flanders-Wallonia or England-Scotland levels of hostility.
robc
Jan 11 2021 at 7:04am
But are they in the same geography here?
It was kind of silly, but I suggested making independent* city-states starting with the largest metro area and working down until the problem seemed fixed.
First we would remove NYC from NY state. Albany would represent up-state without any influence from the city. I think the upstaters would be happy about that. And NYC as well.
Removing LA may not help much in CA, but Illinois would be happy to rid itself of Chicagoland. And so on and so forth.
*what level of independent depends on how silly I felt like being at the moment. The original idea was truly independent, they are their own country. But they could be US states with 2 senators too.
Michael W
Jan 13 2021 at 8:44am
Not so fast. As an upstate NYer, it is very apparent to me that much of upstate NY would be instantly impoverished without the gusher of money that emanates from NYC. This is something I have to constantly repeat to people upstate – many of whom have never been to NYC.
The wealth creation downstate dwarfs anything happening upstate and that’s not to discount the bright spots here and there but they are tiny. Even with the world-class universities within 90 minutes of me (Cornell, Syracuse, Colgate, Hamilton, Ithaca College, Univ of Roch, RIT, Lemoyne, SUNY-ESF, SUNY-Binghamton, SUNY-Geneseo, and multiple others), Central NY has to grovel for new industries.
Anyone with a half-baked business plan can walk into a development office and get multiple-year tax exemptions. Until whatever structural issues that exist get resolved (and with a lot of NYC money to do it), upstate would instantly fall into the bottom of rankings. Would that create the conditions for change? Possibly, but it would be a long-haul effort with little/no short-term advantages.
robc
Jan 14 2021 at 9:26am
Sure NYC provides money, but also the votes for taxes and regulations that drove upstate NY to where they are. Why are Rochester and Buffalo stagnant? It isn’t geography (at least not totally). It would hurt to separate from NYC cash in the short run, but NYC is a boat anchor on upstate in the long run.
Pierre Lemieux
Feb 4 2021 at 10:05pm
It would only hurt if there were no free trade.
Ron Browning
Jan 11 2021 at 8:49am
A “greater consensus “ can be formed by allowing personal values to be allowed a greater role in frowning on conflicting values. Rather than using the government to force your values on others, you privately discriminate. You will receive the satisfaction of only associating with others as you see fit, and paying the costs, privately of course, by detrimental non-association. The result will be the wills of the individual people but would have more ongoing, ever evolving friction than “live and let live”.
Pierre Lemieux
Feb 4 2021 at 10:11pm
Ron: “Live and let live” would allow private discrimination. We hope–and have economic reasons to hope–that there would be little bigotry.
Dylan
Jan 11 2021 at 9:30am
The will of the people may not exist or be logically coherent even, but if there is one thing I’m pretty sure the majority of Americans on both the right and the left agree on, is that they are against the second part of your solution, particularly for all those people they disagree with.
robc
Jan 11 2021 at 9:53am
Both think that next time around they will have a permanent majority.
The House will go GOP in 2 years despite the best efforts of the stupid party.
Fred
Jan 11 2021 at 10:54am
Why not let the process continue in the same manner as we let the market work? Right now, we are united on a great many things and divided on others, but the divisions should not be our focus. Our focus should be on securing an equitable way of moving forward. Yes, many Manhattanites have interests in opposition to the interests of people from Syracuse, but they have many interests in common. These interests will evolve with time, and tying ourselves to the burning issues of 2021 will look quaint in 2051.
Our political parties want us to make commitments, but that only serves them not us. When I buy a Coke instead of a Pepsi, I don’t become a Coke. Let’s stay on the customer side of the store. Make the politics work for us rather than us working for the politics. Yes, this requires acceptance of not always winning. Reject division; division leads to violence.
Lawrence
Jan 11 2021 at 11:40am
A more succinct statement about how to reach such a thing as “consensus” would be to minimize the role of govt to the point that everyone agrees on those tasks and no others. Such a government would be very small indeed — if one could even exist and call itself by that name.
robc
Jan 11 2021 at 2:06pm
I realize unanimity is next to impossible, but I have thought that criminalizing an act should require a super-super-majority, at least 90% of the legislature (maybe 95%) to pass the law. And, of course, only 50%+1 to overturn it.
All the things that should be crimes would be. Some abuses might still pass, but it would be much better than today.
If it takes a unanimous verdict of a jury to convict some one of a crime, shouldn’t it have to be unanimous (or very nearly) to even make the act a crime?
Dylan
Jan 11 2021 at 6:36pm
I’m not sure how well that jives with the (seemingly correct?) observation that anytime you see a large portion of Congress agree on something, they are either doing something meaningless or else its a very bad idea.
robc
Jan 14 2021 at 9:18am
I agree, somewhat, which I why I said there will still be abuses.
But think about crimes: I am pretty sure we could get anonymity (or close enough) on murder, rape, burglary, etc. And those being in agreement wouldn’t be either meaningless or a bad idea. But that would be day 1.
So yes, after they get the obvious stuff out of the way, unanimous votes probably fall under your rule.
Lawrence
Jan 12 2021 at 1:22pm
Well said!
Pierre Lemieux
Feb 4 2021 at 10:17pm
robc: This is the topic of James Buchanan‘s The Limits of Liberty. You are not very far from him and, if you haven’t read the book, I strongly recommend it.
Justin
Jan 12 2021 at 1:17pm
That doesn’t seem like a stable equilibrium if the vast majority want more government.
Lawrence
Jan 12 2021 at 1:23pm
And you would call THIS “stable”? Haaaaa. Haaaaa. Haaaaa.
F. E. Guerra-Pujol
Jan 27 2021 at 10:49am
I wonder if we could get around this logical incoherence (i.e. the notion of a collective “we”) by adopting a method of voting that allows the voters to express the intensity of their preferences, such as QV; see, e.g., https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3659352
In the meantime, would it be possible to see a draft of “The Impossibility of Populism” paper.
Pierre Lemieux
Feb 4 2021 at 10:40pm
F.E. Guerra-Pujol: Thanks for the link for your article. I had a quick glance and it seems very interesting. Any sort of “utilitarian” voting including mild ranking à la Borda violates Arrow’s Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives condition. One may even consider this condition as part of the definition of rationality. It seems that QV and RV fall under the same criticism. Of course, the market suffers from the same problem but it is not a mechanism of collective choice. I rapidly discuss this last problem in my forthcoming TIR article. I sent you a FB friendship request and will send you a manuscript of “The Impossibility of Populism” later this month. Please just make sure to remind me.
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