The Volokh Conspiracy

Last week, economist Bryan Caplan wrote an interesting post explaining why people’s virtue or lack thereof is often most evident in their unpopular views:

Consider a world where 80% of people are Conformists, 10% of people are Righteous, and 10% are Reprobates. The Conformists are epistemically and morally neutral, so they believe and support whatever is popular. The Righteous are epistemically and morally virtuous, so they believe and support whatever is true and right. The Reprobates are epistemically and morally vicious, so they believe and support the opposite of what the Righteous believe and support....

What happens? There are clearly two equilibria: one good, one bad. If the true&right is popular, then the Conformists and the Righteous have 90% of the vote, so the true&right prevails. If the true&right is unpopular, then the Conformists and Reprobates have 90% of the vote, so the false&wicked prevails.

Now suppose that in this world, you are trying to assess an individual’s virtue. In the good equilibrium, identifying the virtuous is hard. Only 1 out of 9 supporters of the status quo is genuinely virtuous. The vast majority support the true&right out of sheer convenience. Identifying the vicious, however, is easy. In the good equilibrium, all supporters of the false&wicked are vicious.

The mirror image holds in the bad equilibrium. Identifying the virtuous is easy: Everyone who supports the true&right despite their unpopularity is virtuous. Identifying the vicious, in contrast, becomes hard...

On the plausible assumption that most real-world people are basically conformists, you can’t accurately assess virtue by studying people’s views in isolation. You have to look at their unpopular views. Believing true&right things despite their unpopularity is a sign of genuine virtue. Believing false&wrong things despite their unpopularity is a sign of genuine vice.

There is a lot of truth to Bryan’s argument. For example, modern Americans deserve little credit for being opposed to slavery, because almost everyone holds that view today. By contrast, William Lloyd Garrison deserves great credit for being an antislavery activist back when it was extremely unpopular in the 1830s. I would, however, extend Bryan’s argument to separate out moral and epistemic virtue. Some people might be genuine truth-seekers willing to court unpopularity, but simply do a poor job of evaluating the truth or falsehood of particular views. Others might be very good at evaluation, but choose not to use those skills because they care more about social acceptance than truth. One could argue that the well-intentioned but epistemically incompetent person deserves greater moral credit than the one who combines the opposite set of traits.

For readers who want to evaluate me using Bryan’s test, here are some of the most unpopular views I have ever expressed here at the VC, based on their divergence from those of the average voter:

1. Organ markets should be legalized.

2. Most (though not all) public sex and public nudity should be legalized.

3. Knowledgeable children should be allowed to vote.

4. The entire War on Drugs (not just the ban on marijuana and a few other relatively popular drugs) should be abolished.

5. It is unjust to decide immigration policy without giving the rights and interests of would-be immigrants at least close to the same weight as those of current residents of the United States.

Somewhat less unpopular, but still strongly counter to conventional wisdom:

6. No one has any special moral obligations to other people of the same race or ethnicity, including members of historically persecuted minority groups, (e.g. – Jews have no special moral obligations to other Jews, blacks have no special obligations to other blacks, etc.). It is possible that this position is more popular than I think it is. I haven’t seen any systematic survey data on it, and am mostly judging based on personal experience, combined with the ubiquity of rhetoric claiming that we have obligations to “our people” and the like.

7. Nationalism is a great evil, usually causing more harm than good even in its relatively more moderate forms. The conventional wisdom, I think, is that nationalism is a generally good or at least neutral phenomenon that becomes problematic only if taken to extremes.

There are important commonalities between 1, 2, and 4 on my list, and also between 5, 6, and 7. The former stem in part from my rejection of moral arguments that draw on the “yuck factor,” at least in so far as they are used to justify making anything illegal. The latter are partly a reflection of my unusually strong skepticism about moral claims based on ties of race, ethnicity, culture, or sovereignty.

Several of the above positions are less uncommon in academia than among the general public. But most do not enjoy majority support even among academics. There are, of course, many other issues where I go against the views of the majority of academics (who are, on average, much more left-wing than I am). But most of them are cases where my view has much greater support from general public opinion than the above.

UPDATE: I have made a few stylistic changes to this post.

On Monday April 1, I will be speaking at a George Mason University School of Law panel on the Tea Party movement and voter rationality. Lots of data show that voters are often ignorant about politics and highly biased in their evaluation of the information they do know. The panel will focus on the extent to which Tea Party supporters are better than other voters on these dimensions, worse, or roughly the same.

Also participating in the event are co-blogger Todd Zywicki (who is a prominent academic expert on public choice theory), and Matt Kibbe of Freedomworks, one of the leading organizations associated with the Tea Party Movement). The panel will be held at George Mason Law School from noon to 1 PM in Room 222. It is sponsored by the GMU Federalist Society.

I have written about the Tea Party movement and political ignorance in this article, and here. My general take is that Tea Party supporters probably have higher political knowledge levels than the average voter because they have higher-than-average education and interest in politics (two strong predictors of political knowledge). However, as I discuss in my article linked above, they are far from free of the ignorance and political bias that are common across the political spectrum. For example, I cited surveys showing that “birtherism” is much more widespread among Tea Party supporters than among the public as a whole. This is part of a general pattern in which committed partisans are more likely to fall for myths that conform to their preexisting biases.

Times of Israel:

Americans’ sympathy for Israel is at a 22-year high, according to Gallup figures released on Friday, just five days ahead of Barack Obama’s first visit to Israel as president. In figures gleaned from the polling organization’s early February World Affairs poll, 64 percent of Americans say their sympathies “in the Middle East situation” – Gallup’s term for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and peace talks – lie more with the Israelis than with the Palestinians. Just 12% favor the Palestinians.

People unfriendly to Israel used to say that Israel was only popular in the U.S. because pro-Israel forces had managed to stifle debate by preventing mainstream sources from publishing critical articles. That turns out not to be true now, if it ever was. From the New York Times op-ed page to a best-seller by Walt and Mearsheimer to Joe Klein’s columns to campus “Israel Apartheid Weeks” to dozens and dozens of blogs, it’s actually pretty hard for anyone at all interested in the Arab-Israeli conflict to avoid reading strong criticism of Israel, even if they tried. One would certainly be hard-pressed to argue that debate is being meaningfully “stifled.”

One thing that puzzles me is that if you read just about any online piece about Israel, whether from a mainstream newspaper or a blog, the comments sections are filled with anti-Israel invective. Even many pro-Israel blogs attract many anti-Israel commenters (see, e.g., this blog), and liberal pro-Israel blogs are in fact dominated by them. Given the statistics recounted above, I find this an odd situation. Is there any other issue where public opinion leans so far to one side, but on-line comments slant so heavily the other way? Are there really that many people who feel so strongly about the other side (and not any other burning issues in their world) that they devote a fair amount of their time to mostly-unread blog comments? Or is it a small group that basically scours the internet for Israel-related material, and spend basically all their waking hours writing anti-Israel invective?

Economist David Friedman has an insightful post on the problems inherent in deferring to the views of “authoritative” scientific bodies:

A pattern I have observed in a variety of public controversies is the attempt to establish some sort of official scientific truth, as proclaimed by a suitable authority—a committee of the National Academy of Science, the Center for Disease Control, or the equivalent. It is, in my view, a mistake, one based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how science works. Truth is not established by an authoritative committee but by a decentralized process which (sometimes) results in everyone or almost everyone in the field agreeing.

Part of the problem with that approach is that, the more often it is followed, the less well it will work....

The first time it might work, although even then there is the risk that the committee established to give judgement will end up dominated not by the most expert but by the most partisan. But the more times the process is repeated, the greater the incentive of people who want their views to get authoritative support to get themselves or their friends positions of influence within the organization, to keep those they disapprove of out of such positions, and so to divert it from its original purpose to becoming a rubber stamp for their views. The result is to subvert both the organization and the scientific enterprise, especially if support by official truth becomes an important determinant of research funding.

I. The Dangers of Deference to Biased Experts.

Friedman makes two important points here. Scientific truth cannot be established by the endorsement of an authoritative body such as the NAS or the CDC. And if people start to take the pronouncements of such expert bodies as gospel, there is an obvious potential for abuse.

Both problems are exacerbated in cases where the scientific question at issue is relevant to some hot-button political controversy. When it comes to politics, most people have strong incentives to be “rationally ignorant,” and therefore devote little time and effort to determining whether the pronouncements of “experts” are really backed by evidence or not. Given the very low chance that your vote in an election will be decisive, there is little incentive to make a serious effort to double-check the pronouncements of experts on political issues, if your only motivation for doing so is to figure out which candidate or party has the “right” position on a given issue. For similar reasons, voters tend to be highly biased in evaluating whatever information they do learn about politics, often acting as “fans” for their respective party or ideology rather than as objective truth-seekers. This often leads them to place excessive credence in real or imagined experts who support their preexisting views, while discounting those on the other side.

II. Why Deference is Often Unavoidable.

That said, I don’t believe we can simply dispense with deference to scientific experts. There are so many complex issues in the world that none of us have the time or expertise to really delve into the evidence on more than a small fraction of them. As I explained in reference to the “Climategate” controversy in 2009:

[O]ur knowledge of complex issues we don’t have personal expertise on is largely based on social validation. For example, I think that Einsteinian physics is generally more correct than Newtonian physics, even though I know very little about either. Why? Because that’s the overwhelming consensus of professional physicists, and I have no reason to believe that their conclusions should be discounted as biased or otherwise driven by considerations other than truth-seeking. My views of climate science were (and are) based on similar considerations. I thought that global warming was probably a genuine and serious problem because that is what the overwhelming majority of relevant scientists seem to believe, and I generally didn’t doubt their objectivity.

Even if you consider yourself a great skeptic, I suspect that you too defer to expertise on many issues. You probably follow your doctor’s advice on what medicine to take when you are sick, usually without first reading up on the scientific literature on that medicine’s effectiveness, and almost certainly without performing your own laboratory experiments to assess its potency first-hand.

III. Increasing Our Expertise on When to Defer to Experts.

Given the near-inevitability of deference to experts, can we avoid the pitfalls Friedman rightly emphasizes? There’s no perfect solution. But some rules of thumb can help. First, deference to expertise is more warranted in cases where there is an expert consensus that crosses ideological lines. Like the rest of us, experts are prone to ideological bias. Thus, if experts of differing ideologies converge on the same conclusion, that’s a sign that the resulting opinion is really driven by expertise rather than bias. It doesn’t prove that the experts are right, of course, but it does justify a stronger presumption in their favor. When, on the other hand, experts do split along ideological lines, that suggests the issue is more disputable, and that bias may be influencing their judgment. It doesn’t mean that the experts are wrong or that their expertise is useless. Their views are still probably worth listening to more than those of laypeople. But it does mean that we should be more cautious about concluding that an expert pronouncement must be correct simply because the person or the institution making it has impressive credentials.

A weaker but still significant indicator of expert reliability is to ask whether expertise makes you more likely to support a given conclusion, after controlling for ideology and other factors that might bias judgment. For example, if experts in a given field are 50% more likely to believe X about a key controversy in their area of expertise than are otherwise comparable non-experts, that is some indication that X derives some support from the evidence and relevant expert analysis thereof. Bryan Caplan’s research on the differences between economists and laypeople on economic policy issues is a good example of this kind of analysis. He shows many issues where expertise in economics has a major effect on policy views even after controlling for ideology, self-interest, and various relevant demographic variables. That doesn’t mean that economists are necessarily right about those economic issues where they differ from laypeople. But it does suggest that the difference really is a product of their expertise and is therefore entitled to greater deference than a supposedly expert judgment that is mostly driven by ideology or narrow self-interest.

Finally, as in the Climategate controversy, it may be worth considering whether experts in a given field have good incentives to pursue the truth, or whether theose incentives are skewed by funding sources or by the ability of one faction to “freeze out” those who dispute the received orthodoxy. However, crude analysis of funding incentives can be even more misleading than simply ignoring them entirely. Unfortunately, properly assessing the impact of incentives on the range of views expressed by experts in a given field itself often requires detailed knowledge that most of us do not have.

Such rules of thumb don’t matter much in cases where you know enough about the field in question to assess the evidence for yourself. But in the many situations where we must defer to experts, they might help reduce the dangers inherent in doing so.

In a recent post, co-blogger Orin Kerr cites a poll showing that 61% of Californians now support gay marriage, and considers the implications of this result for the Supreme Court’s upcoming decision on the constitutionality of California’s ban on gay marriage. He predicts that:

If last year’s debate over the popularity of the Affordable Care Act provides any clues, each side will have its preferred lesson. For those who want the Supreme Court to strike down Prop 8, the poll shows that the Supreme Court can invalidate Prop 8 without causing a major backlash because the law has become very unpopular. For fans of judicial restraint, however, the poll shows that the Supreme Court doesn’t need to invalidate Prop 8 because California voters will almost certainly repeal it themselves.

These are not mutually exclusive claims, and both are probably true. Growing public support for gay marriage makes it likely that the Court could weather any backlash created by a decision striking down Proposition 8. On the other hand, it is also likely that a ballot initiative reversing Proposition 8 will pass in California sometime in the next few years if the Court chooses not to strike Prop 8 down.

I would add a few caveats to Orin’s analysis, however. First, any decision on the constitutionality of Proposition 8 is likely to have an impact that goes well beyond California. Thus, national public opinion is relevant, not just California opinion. A n December Gallup poll of national opinion shows 53% supporting gay marriage with 46% opposed. Recent Pew Research Center surveys show an average 48% in favor, with 43% opposed. This is a major change from earlier years, and support for gay marriage is rapidly increasing. At the same time, however, it is not nearly as high as the lopsided majorities that wanted the Supreme Court to strike down the individual health insurance mandate last year. A decision striking down Proposition 8 is likely to face broader opposition than a decision striking down the individual mandate would have. Moreover, many of the social conservatives who oppose gay marriage feel very strongly about the issue, perhaps even more so than hard-core liberal Democrats felt about the mandate.

That said, the Court would likely weather the storm without too much trouble. Its decision would start out with majority public support. In addition, the ranks of gay marriage supporters are rapidly expanding, while opposition is diminishing. Thus, the Court could expect support for a decision striking down Proposition 8 to increase over time.

At the same time, I also don’t think the Court would face a debilitating backlash if it upholds Proposition 8. Right now, only a narrow majority supports gay marriage, and for many of them the issue is not a high political priority. Moreover, if gay marriage continues to gain ground politically, that success may diminish advocates’ anger at the Court for upholding Proposition 8. In the long run, such a decision may be condemned by history if we ultimately come to a near-consensus that gay marriage is right and just. It could be viewed in the same light as the Court’s nineteenth century decision upholding state laws banning interracial marriage or its 1986 ruling upholding anti-sodomy laws.

Be that as it may, the Court could go either way in this case without incurring major political risks, especially if a decision striking down Proposition 8 does not immediately invalidate the laws of all 41 states that currently forbid same-sex marriage. The case will ultimately come down to what the justices genuinely believe about the constitutional issue at stake. That’s as it should be. Except in very rare cases, Supreme Court justices should not base their decisions on their potential popularity or lack therefor. They also should not hesitate to strike down an unconstitutional law merely because they expect the political process to repeal it in the future. As Orin puts it in the comments to his post, “I don’t think judges should pay attention to public opinion polls either way, except insofar as it might be formally relevant to existing doctrine.”

UPDATE: I should note that the survey data on gay marriage is not an exact parallel for last year’s polls on the individual mandate case, because the former don’t directly ask about whether the Court should strike down state laws banning gay marriage, but merely ask about respondents’ policy preferences on the issue. The two are likely to be highly correlated, but not perfectly so.

When Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorship began to collapse two years ago, I expressed the fear that the ultimate outcome might be a new Egyptian government more oppressive than the old. The main reasons for my concern were that illiberal radical Islamists were far better positioned to seize power than liberal democrats, and that Egyptian public opinion was itself highly illiberal, which raised the possibility that radical Islamists could prevail even in a genuinely free election.

Since then, the first Egyptian presidential elections have been won by radical Islamist Mohammed Morsi, who proceeded to persecute journalists who “insulted” him, kill numerous protestors, and assume near-dictatorial “emergency” powers.

Fearing a descent into Islamist dictatorship, more liberal Egyptians have taken to the streets in protest. Harvard Law School Professor Noah Feldman, a leading academic expert on Middle Eastern law and politics, sympathizes with them, but argues that they should not undermine Morsi’s democratically elected government lest they bring on a reversion to military rule:

I hate to agree with an Egyptian general about anything, but Abdelfatah Al-Seesi, who’s also Egypt’s defense minister, had a point when he warned his countrymen on Facebook that continued violent protest in the streets might lead to collapse.

Ordinary Egyptians have plenty of reasons to be frustrated with the government of President Mohamed Mursi, which has by turns overclaimed its authority and underdelivered in establishing order. Still, it’s one thing to engage in mass protest when your target is a dictatorship — then you are a democratic revolutionary. It’s quite another to use mass protests to try and bring down a democratically elected government that you don’t like. Then you’re running the risk of becoming an unwitting agent of counterrevolution....

If Egypt’s democrats want to avoid becoming another Pakistan, in which democracy is never more than a few shots from military dictatorship, they have just one path available to them: take a deep breath, go home, and let the democratically elected government try to do its job. Mursi and his government may do well or badly. But as long as they are up for re-election in a few years, they will have laid the groundwork for democratic transition.

Patriots of Tahrir, ask yourselves: You may not like Mursi. But would you really rather have the army?

Feldman certainly knows more about Egyptian politics than I do, and he may be right in his bottom-line conclusion. But the issue is more complicated than his description suggests. If Morsi continues to persecute his political opponents and establishes an Islamist dictatorship, his government might not be “up for re-election in a few years,” at least not a free election in which opposition parties are allowed to compete on equal terms. If Morsi is not overthrown now or at least forced to accept tight constraints on his authority, Egypt’s “democratic transition” could easily turn into a case of “one man, one vote, one time.”

Even if Morsi retains a relatively free democratic process, the illiberal nature of majority Egyptian opinion could still lead to severe oppression of women, liberals, religious minorities, and others. Democracy is an important value. But it is not the only value that matters and not necessarily the most important. A modestly repressive authoritarian regime might be a lesser evil compared to a democracy governed by a sufficiently oppressive illiberal majority.

Egypt is not the first nation that has transitioned to democracy under the shadow of powerful illiberal political forces that threaten to seize power. Some new democracies have dealt with the problem by banning illiberal political parties or otherwise making it harder for them to seize power through the democratic process. For example, post-World War II West Germany banned the Nazi and Communist parties (the latter was legalized only in the 1970s, while the former remains illegal to this day). After the fall of communism, several Eastern European nations adopted “lustration” laws banning many former communist officials from holding public office. Such laws create genuine injustices and also carry slippery slope risks (if we ban the communists, why not moderate socialists or liberals?). But if the threat of an illiberal takeover is severe enough, they might be the lesser of the available evils. In some extreme cases, the only way to save democracy or other important liberal values is to impose severe limits on the democratic process itself.

Egypt’s liberal democrats face a genuinely difficult dilemma. Confronting Morsi’s government in the streets may indeed risk the return of military rule. But failing to do so might pave the way for an even more oppressive Islamist government, possibly one that blocks future democratic elections once it has consolidated its power. If it were my choice, I would probably rather live under a junta of corrupt generals who are in it for money and power than under radical Islamists who want to force all of society to obey their version of Sharia law. The former might only impose enough repression to hold onto power and enrich themselves and their cronies. The Islamists, by contrast, might seek to impose brutal control over all aspects of society. Better to be ruled by crooks than quasi-totalitarian ideologues. But liberal Egyptians have to consider the relative likelihood of the two dangers as well as the relative severity. A high probability of moderately oppressive military government might be worse than a much lower probability of severely oppressive Islamist rule. Regardless, the right answer to the problem – assuming one even exists – can’t be determined simply by the fact that Morsi was democratically elected.

UPDATE: In this recent Washington Post article, Fareed Zakaria argues that Egypt is in danger of sliding into Islamist rule because it “chose democratization before liberalization.” He notes that Egypt’s new Islamist-influenced constitution is highly illiberal and points out that “[m]ore journalists have been persecuted for insulting Morsi in his six-month presidency than during the nearly 30-year reign of Mubarak.”

If the Pentagon’s recent decision to open up combat positions to women leads conservative Dave Carter to worry that women will be drafted, liberal Democratic Rep. Charles Rangel embraces the idea and calls for the establishment of a draft that applies to both men and women:

Since January 2003, at the height of the debate on the possible unilateral strike against Iraq, I have advocated for a reinstatement of the military draft to ensure a more equitable representation of people making sacrifices in wars in which the United States is engaged....

Currently the burden of defending our nation is carried by less than 1% of the American population. The 2.2 million members of the armed forces in active duty, the National Guard and the Reserve have become a virtual military class that makes the ultimate sacrifice of laying down life and limb for our country....

Since we replaced the compulsory military draft with an all-volunteer force in 1973, our nation has been making decisions about wars without worry over who fights them. I sincerely believe that reinstating the draft would compel the American public to have a stake in the wars we fight as a nation. That is why I wrote the Universal National Service Act, known as the “draft” bill, which requires all men and women between ages 18 and 25 to give two years of service in any capacity that promotes our national defense.

Rangel’s equality argument for the draft is dubious. If we reinstate the draft, it would still be true that only a small percentage of Americans would ever actually serve in combat during wartime and take the risk of “making the ultimate sacrifice.” Even during World War II, only about 16 million Americans served in the armed forces out of a population of 132 million in 1940. And only a minority of the 16 million served in combat positions. Under Rangel’s proposal, the burden of combat duty would still fall on a very small fraction of the population: those unlucky enough to be between the ages of 18 and 25 whenever a war happens to occur. The big difference is that the small group that bears the burden will be selected by force rather than choice. Coerced inequality is no improvement over inequality created by voluntary choice. At least in the latter case, the government has a strong incentive to adequately compensate servicemembers for the risks they take, if only because they would face manpower shortages otherwise. Unequal risk of death is partially offset by extra pay and benefits and by the attractions of military life to those who find it appealing. Draftees get far less in the way of compensation for the inequality imposed on them.

Rangel’s view that the public would be more reluctant go to war with a draftee military is also questionable. During the Vietnam War, young men eligible for the draft actually supported the war at higher rates than other demographic groups. Today, veterans support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at higher rates than the general public, and post-9/11 veterans who actually served in combat are more supportive than those who didn’t. The evidence is not completely one-sided. Some recent experimental data suggests that a draft might reduce public support for war after all. Overall, however, we don’t yet have enough evidence to show that the impact of the draft on public support for war is an exception to the general rule that there is little causal connection between public opinion on political issues and narrow self-interest.

Even if the establishment of a draft would make the public less willing to go to war, it is not clear that this would be an improvement. One can certainly point to cases where public opinion was too willing to fight. But there are also plenty of examples of the opposite problem, such as the period leading up to World War II, or the period right before 9/11, when both the public and political elites were too slow to act against the threat posed by radical Islamist terrorism.

Finally, Rangel simply ignores all the major downsides of the draft, such as its tendency to reduce the quality of the military, its economic inefficiency, and the incentive it creates for governments to squander lives. Most of all, Rangel doesn’t take seriously the moral costs of the draft. Subjecting millions of people to two years of forced labor is a severe infringement of liberty that can only be justified, if at all, by some truly enormous good that cannot be achieved by less draconian means.

As I have explained elsewhere, I am not opposed to the draft under all conceivable conditions. If, for example, having a draft were the only way to avoid getting conquered by an enemy that would impose a totalitarian state on us, I would support it. The draft is a great evil. Still, there can potentially be situations where it is the only way to stave off an even greater one. But the arguments advanced by Rangel and other modern draft supporters don’t even come close to meeting the burden of proof needed to justify such massive coercion.

UPDATE: A point I made in an earlier post on conscription is relevant here as well:

Many people resist the comparison between conscription and other forms of forced labor because they see military service as providing a great good that is essential to our society. But military service is far from unique in that regard. Historically, slaves and forced laborers often performed work that was vital to the social order. The entire economy of the antebellum South depended on crops produced by slaves. So too with ancient Rome, Russia in the era of serfdom, and so on. The key point to realize is that this work, however noble and necessary, can be performed by free laborers. Thus, the use of forced labor to carry it out is still unjust. The same goes for military service. Both the United States and other liberal democracies can field more than adequate military forces without conscription. Indeed, they can create better armies without it than with it.

In her interesting new study of young libertarians, which I discussed in my last post, Liana Gamber Thompson notes “a significant deficit” in the libertarian movement – the lack of an organization for high school students interested in libertarian ideas:

Of the five participants [in her study] under age 18, four reported participating in the Liberty Movement in a majority online capacity, as did one of the 18-year-old participants with whom I spoke. While access was an issue for these young people, they still considered their political interests and aspirations to be a very important aspect of their lives. Even though they did not participate in local libertarian organizations, they described feeling very much a part of a tangible movement.

This finding also highlights what can be viewed as a significant deficit within the movement: a general lack of high school groups and clubs in which young libertarians can participate....

It is unclear why there is a lack of “in person” spaces for high school libertarians. Young Democrats of America (YDA) clubs are common in high schools, with over 1,500 chapters nationwide. The Young Republican National Federation (better known as Young Republicans), with limited control over its state federations, does not publish statistics on the number of local chapters; but it is the oldest political youth organization in the United States, and thus has a well-organized leadership structure and resources to hold national meetings and events for members. Libertarians have no analogous organization.

This is a significant problem. Many people who are strongly interested in politics first develop that interest in high school, or earlier. And it is easier to influence the political views of younger people than older ones. As people get older, they become more set in their views and less open to new ideas – especially ones that diverge from the political mainstream. I first became interested in libertarianism when I was in high school. The same is true of many other libertarian scholars and activists. People active in other political movements often first became interested in them in high school as well.

Only a small minority of high school students are going to be actively involved in political groups. But those few are disproportionately likely to grow up to be influential political activists, conmmentators, or scholars. Libertarians should strive to reach a higher percentage of them while they are still young.

As Thompson points out, the Democratic and Republican parties both have numerous organizations for high school students. The same is true of many other liberal and conservative organizations. For example, my high school had a fairly active chapter of Amnesty International. Libertarians should learn from these examples. A libertarian organization for high school students could play a valuable role similar to that of Students for Liberty in the college setting. Maybe we could even call it High School Students for Liberty.

One obstacle to forming libertarian high school groups is that the number of libertarian-inclined students at any one school will often be very small. But the internet makes it much easier for students at different schools to connect. Even if there is only a handful of people potentially interested in libertarianism at High School X, that handful can use the internet to locate like-minded people at nearby schools Y and Z. Some of this can be done by individual students acting entirely on their own. But a nation-wide organizational structure can make it easier for like-minded people to find each other and develop closer ties.

UPDATE: Some commenters claim that is there were a need for a libertarian high school student organization, the market would have already provided for it; or perhaps they mean that libertarian defenders of the free market must be committed to the idea that it would. Either way, it’s a weak claim.

By the same logic, you can argue that every new idea or product is unneeded. Before the first car was built, the market failed to provide automobiles too. Ditto for the first light bulb. Markets are dynamic institutions that regularly provide new products and organizations that didn’t exist before, in some cases because no one had seriously considered the idea behind them. I think this is a new idea that few if any libertarians have seriously considered previously. Before SFL was created just a few years ago, there was no significant libertarian organization for college students. SFL’s tremendous success since then shows there clearly was an unmet need. The same may well be true in the high school context.

Libertarians don’t claim that “the market” automatically and instantaneously fulfills all needs. Rather, they argue that it meets more and more needs over time thanks to ongoing processes of innovation and competition.

Liana Gamber Thompson of the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism has an interesting new paper on the politics of young libertarians, focusing especially on members of Students for Liberty, the rapidly growing student libertarian organization. Here is the summary:

In the past decade, young libertarians in the U.S., or members of the Liberty Movement as it is called, have utilized new media and technology along with more traditional modes of organizing to grow their movement, capitalizing on the participatory nature of the internet in particularly savvy and creative ways. Still, the Liberty Movement is quite unlike more progressive, grassroots movements, with its organizations and participants sometimes relying on established institutions for various forms of support.

As this report highlights, the Liberty Movement represents a hybrid model, one that embraces participatory practices and interfaces with formal political organizations and other elite institutions....

In a letter to Richard Rush dated October 20, 1820, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave.”1 This report suggests that participants in the Liberty Movement would concur with respect to the challenges they encounter; largely ignored by mainstream media and pushed to the margins of the electoral process, libertarians have it tougher than many groups when it comes to the task of gaining voice and visibility in the mainstream political debate. This report examines how young libertarians confront such obstacles and presents readers with a detailed account of young libertarians and their relationship to the contemporary political landscape.

Not surprisingly, the study concludes that young libertarians make extensive use of the internet, that they are very skeptical about the political process, and that most have doubts about the effectiveness of voting as a strategy for promoting political change.

Thompson notes increasing racial and gender diversity among younger libertarians, but also suggests that this is still a disproportionately white male movement. She quotes one female libertarian student as saying that ““There’s pretty big gender discrepancy, and it’s largely male. I would say 60% [men] to 40% [women] on a good day. Sometimes, it’s like 70-30…”

At the Bleeding Heart Libertarian blog, Matt Zwolinski comments:

I had to chuckle at this. Not to sound like an old fogie or anything, but back in my day we would have killed to have 30% women in the libertarian movement! If we wanted to find a woman libertarian, we had to walk eight miles, in the snow, uphill, both ways!

There is some truth in both the frustrated student’s point and Zwolinski’s response. As I pointed out in this post about SFL, today’s student libertarians have a much higher percentage of women than in the past, a reality that reflects the broadening of the libertarian movement, and its greater acceptance within the mainstream. Given that women are, on average, less likely to be interested in politics, and less willing to embrace non-mainstream ideas and ideologies than men, the 30 to 40 percent figure quoted by the student is actually pretty good. It’s not much less than we would expect from the “average” relatively non-mainstream student political movement.

It’s worth noting that the 30 to 40% percentage of women was similar to what I saw when I gave two talks at the 2011 SFL national conference. Perhaps more importantly, the student libertarians I met at this and other events were, on average, more socially normal than were young libertarians of my own generation. On average, they have better social skills than we did, and come across as friendlier and more charismatic. That’s a good sign that the movement is broadening its appeal. That said, libertarians still have a lot of work to do in appealing to women, racial minorities, and other groups not traditionally well-represented in the movement.

Among the 30 young libertarians studied by Thompson, only 7 of the 24 willing to identify their gender in a survey were women. Interestingly, 9 of the 27 willing to give a racial identification were not white. The latter is actually a slightly higher figure than the percentage of nonwhites in the general population (about 22%). However, we shouldn’t make too much of either figure, given the small sample size.

The small sample is the biggest weakness of Thompson’s study as a whole. Since she relies primarily on what she learned from these thirty people, it’s difficult to say how representative her findings are of young libertarians overall. That said, many of her findings strike me as plausible, and similar to what I have seen in my own fairly extensive dealings with younger libertarians.

A recent Huffington Post poll shows that some 22% would “strongly support” (12%) or “tend to support” (10%) their state’s secession from the union (complete results here). This result, combined with recent petitions for secession sent to the White House by citizens of Texas and other states, has led to considerable alarmist discussion of the subject. In reality, however, public support for secession has not increased significantly since mid-2008, when a Middlebury Institute/Zogby poll showed that 18% of the public said they would “support a secessionist effort in my state.” Since the 2008 poll didn’t give respondents the option of merely “tending” to support a secession movement, it’s likely that support for secessionism in that survey would have been even higher had the question been worded the same as in the 2012 Huffington Post poll. I blogged about the 2008 poll here.

There is, of course, a big difference in the distribution of support for secession between the two polls. In 2008, liberals and African-Americans were the ones most likely to express support for secession. For example, some 33% of African-Americans said they would support a secession movement in their state, and 40% expressed support for states’ right to secede. In the 2012 poll, support for secession is highest among Republicans, with 42% saying they would support secession by their own state, and 46% expressing support for a general right of states to secede if a majority of their people want to.

Obviously, the contrast between the 2008 and 2012 results is largely due to who was in the White House. In 2008, liberals and African-Americans were reacting to their anger at George W. Bush. In 2012, Republican secessionist sentiment is driven by anger at Barack Obama. In neither case has the outrage resulted in a serious secessionist movement. And that’s a significant fact. There is a major difference between expressing abstract support for secession in a survey and actually supporting a serious effort at secession in the real world. In the modern United States, few people feel enough loyalty to their states to have a strong commitment to establishing the state as an independent nation. Some 42% of Americans have lived in more than one state, and many others are recent immigrants who identify more with the US as a whole than with the state they happen to live in.

Even setting aside the possibility of the federal government using force to suppress a secession movement, any serious effort at secession would run into significant problems. A state that chooses to secede would have to negotiate with the US as to the percentage of the national debt it would take on. It would have to deal with the problem of federal facilities on its territory, such as the numerous military bases in Texas. The US and the seceding state would have to negotiate some kind of free trade agreement, or risk serious economic harm. And what about the residents of that state who are collecting entitlement payments from Washington for Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security? These problems may not be insoluble, addressing them would be difficult and in some cases costly. I doubt that very many of the 22% who say they support secession are really willing to pay the substantial transition costs of forming an independent nation.

That said, the survey results are not completely meaningless. The fact that around 20% of the public express support for secession in both 2008 and today is yet another indication of political polarization and dissatisfaction with the status quo. Distrust of the federal government when the presidency is controlled by a hostile party is strong enough that a large fraction of the population considers secession to be a reasonable option (even if they are not prepared to support a serious secession movement). The polls also show that, for much of the general public, secession is not an unthinkable taboo, in the way it is for most intellectuals and political elites. The latter still tend to associate secession primarily with the Civil War, slavery and racism. Many in the general public don’t see it that way, as is especially clear from the extensive support for a right of secession among African-Americans in the 2008 poll.

This is one of those instances where the public may be closer to the truth about a complex political issue than the more highly educated elite. Although the southern secession movement of 1861 was indeed a despicable effort to protect the evil institution of slavery, it does not follow that all other secession movements are tainted by association. Each such effort must be judged on its own merits. Some, such as the Baltic States’ 1991 secession from the USSR, have great merit; others, such as the Confederacy, not so much.

In my view, state secession from the US today is likely to cause more harm than good. Both the seceding state and the rump US could easily end up worse off than before. But that could potentially change if the federal government becomes sufficiently dysfunctional and the seceding state has a good chance of setting up a better regime. For the moment, most public support for secession in the US is an expression of frustration with the federal government and its current leaders rather than a serious effort to form a new nation. I hope and expect that the economic and political situation will not deteriorate enough for that to change.

In this recent article, James Rainey of the LA Times argues that public opinion has moved in a “center-libertarian” direction:

Many debates have broken out about the meaning of last week’s election, including over whether conservatives should still push their claim that America is a “center-right nation....”

A survey of last Tuesday’s electoral landscape suggests the truth may be somewhere in the middle. The results cut heavily against the notion of a center-right dominance, at least when it comes to social issues.

After 32 straight losses for same-sex wedding laws, four states approved marriage-equality proposals last week. Two other states legalized marijuana for recreational purposes. Wisconsin elected the first openly homosexual U.S. senator in history, Tammy Baldwin. An Iowa Supreme Court justice targeted for removal because he voted in 2007 to approve gay marriage, David Wiggins, defeated an effort to oust him. And, crucially, Obama won with 60% of voters telling exit pollsters they supported the president’s call for higher taxes on the rich.

But Americans appear to remain more receptive to conservative viewpoints on spending, debt and the size of government. A bare majority, 51%, of voters last Tuesday told exit pollsters that government should do less, with 43% saying it should do more....

A more precise verdict would be that the majority of the country remains slightly right of center when it comes to supporting lower spending, decreased debt and smaller government. But America appears to have shifted left of center in allowing more liberal policies on drugs and the institution of marriage. So, left on social issues and right on economics. If you eliminated the desire to tax the rich, it would sound like we had a center-libertarian nation.

Rainey’s conclusion is reinforced by the fact that a plurality of Americans remain opposed to Obamacare, the most important expansion of government in recent years, even after the GOP’s attack on the law was hobbled during the election by virtue of the fact that the party nominated a candidate who could not criticize the law’s most unpopular component, the individual health insurance mandate.

As I have pointed out previously, there is a big difference between the kind of “center-libertarianism” that much of the public subscribes to, and actual full-blown libertarianism of the sort committed libertarians would embrace. But these survey and referendum results do suggest that public opinion could be mobilized to oppose further expansions of government and possibly to support significant reductions in regulation and spending from today’s extremely high levels. It is too early to say whether “center-libertarianism” is the political wave of the future. But it at least seems to be a potentially viable political strategy. At the very least, the evidence suggests that the public is not sold on either the liberal or conservative versions of activist government.

Commentators such as liberal E.J. Dionne and even libertarian David Harsanyi are claiming that the election results prove that Obama won a great referendum on the role of government in American society, achieving a mandate for expanded government intervention.

The CNN exit polls tell a very different story. 51 percent of voters said that government is doing “too much” that should be left to businesses and individuals, compared to 43% who believe that government should do “more” to solve problems. By far the biggest and most controversial new government program of the last four years was the Obama health care plan. The CNN poll shows that 49% would like to see it repealed in whole or in part, while 44% want to keep it as is or expand it. The latter number is particularly interesting in light of the fact that we just went through an election where the GOP nominee could not attack the individual health insurance mandate – the single most unpopular part of the law – because he enacted an individual mandate himself back when he was governor of Massachusetts.

Somewhat inconsistently, there is a 63-33 majority against the idea that taxes should be raised to help cut the deficit, but a 60-35 majority in favor of raising taxes on people earning over $250,000 per year. Either there is a huge number of people who want to raise taxes but not spend any of the money on paying down the deficit, or (more likely) the wording of the two questions has different framing effects.

I don’t fool myself into believing that the majority of the public are as libertarian as I am. Not even close. The vast bulk of the 51% who believe government is doing too much and and the 49% who would like to repeal all or part of Obamacare still favor a much bigger government than I do. But they don’t seem to endorse the liberal view of government’s role either.

It’s too early to say whether a more libertarian position is the best political strategy for the GOP (or any party) going forward. I certainly hope it’s true. The above survey data combined with the continuing popularity of property rights, and the growing social liberalism evident in increased support for drug legalization and gay marriage is some evidence for the theory. On the other hand, the fastest-growing ethnic segment of the electorate is Hispanics, and they tend to be economically statist. Whether the GOP can persuade more Hispanics to support free markets if they reach out to the group by changing the party’s position on immigration is difficult to say. Also, it’s very hard to persuade a majority of the public to support deep cuts in entitlement spending – the single largest component of the federal budget, in part because of widespread ignorance about how enormous that spending actually is. At this point, therefore, it is hard to say whether a much more libertarian stance than that which the GOP took in 2012 will yield political dividends. It’s always tempting to conclude that whatever you support is also good political strategy. But the temptation should be resisted unless and until you have some strong evidence to prove it.

What we can say, however, is that the available evidence does not show that the election was a clear mandate for bigger and more interventionist government. The majority of the public remains suspicious of government and more people want it to leave more issues to the private sector than want it to do more.

UPDATE: It’s worth noting that the 49-44 breakdown on Obamacare is consistent with other recent surveys on the law, which show an average of 47 percent opposing it, and 39% in favor. A smaller sample of polls aggregated by RCP shows an average of 50-44 in favor of repealing the law. That reduces the likelihood that the CNN result was a function of flaws in the wording of their question (such as ambiguity over what it means to repeal “part” of the law, or “expand” it). This not a high enough level of opposition to force the Democrats to actually repeal it. But that’s not my point. I merely suggest that there is no majority consensus in favor of it.

In a recent Slate column, John Dickerson points out that presidential elections typically focus too much on issues the president has little control over and too little on those that he has more effect on:

Nothing tests a president’s temperament like foreign affairs. Though this presidential campaign has only recently touched on the topic, the lack of focus points to another flaw in our election system. If we arranged our campaigns around what a president actually can control, we wouldn’t spend the majority of our time talking about the economy, where a president is a bit player.

Not so in foreign affairs. A president is the last word on decisions regarding military strikes, covert operations, or how to treat political prisoners. George W. Bush signed off on every prisoner that faced enhanced interrogation techniques. Barack Obama personally approves every drone strike of a high-value terrorist target. When the president serves as the country’s chief diplomat, he acts almost entirely alone.

Dickerson exaggerates a little when he suggests the president “acts almost entirely alone” on key foreign policy issues. But he certainly has much more control over them than over short-term economic trends. Yet the latter are the biggest factor in most elections. Voters also tend to ignore or underemphasize other issues that the president has a great deal of control over: issues such as judicial nominations and appointments to federal regulatory agencies.

Why are voters myopic in this way? Because, thanks to widespread political ignorance, most voters have difficulty telling the difference between issues that the president can affect and those he can’t. That’s why studies show that voters routinely reward and punish politicians for events they have little or no control over, including trends in the world economy, shark attacks and droughts, and even victories by the local sports team.

Voters would not do this if they were well-informed about politics and public policy. But for the vast majority, it’s actually rational to be ignorant, and to do a poor job of evaluating the political information they do know.

UPDATE: For those who want to argue that an Obama victory this year would prove that voters have given up overemphasizing short-term economic trends, I would point out that his performance in the polls is roughly on par with the predictions of economic models of presidential contests based on data from past elections.

This recent Wall Street Journal article summarizes an important study of libertarians by famed political psychologist Jonathan Haidt and several other scholars:

An individual’s personality shapes his or her political ideology at least as much as circumstances, background and influences. That is the gist of a recent strand of psychological research identified especially with the work of Jonathan Haidt....

Studies show that conservatives are more conscientious and sensitive to disgust but less tolerant of change; liberals are more empathic and open to new experiences.

But ideology does not have to be bipolar. It need not fall on a line from conservative to liberal. In a recently published paper, Ravi Iyer from the University of Southern California, together with Dr. Haidt and other researchers at the data-collection platform YourMorals.org, dissect the personalities of those who describe themselves as libertarian.

These are people who often call themselves economically conservative but socially liberal. They like free societies as well as free markets, and they want the government to get out of the bedroom as well as the boardroom....

The study collated the results of 16 personality surveys and experiments completed by nearly 12,000 self-identified libertarians who visited YourMorals.org. The researchers compared the libertarians to tens of thousands of self-identified liberals and conservatives. It was hardly surprising that the team found that libertarians strongly value liberty, especially the “negative liberty” of freedom from interference by others....

Perhaps more intriguingly, when libertarians reacted to moral dilemmas and in other tests, they displayed less emotion, less empathy and less disgust than either conservatives or liberals. They appeared to use “cold” calculation to reach utilitarian conclusions about whether (for instance) to save lives by sacrificing fewer lives. They reached correct, rather than intuitive, answers to math and logic problems, and they enjoyed “effortful and thoughtful cognitive tasks” more than others do.

The researchers found that libertarians had the most “masculine” psychological profile, while liberals had the most feminine, and these results held up even when they examined each gender separately, which “may explain why libertarianism appeals to men more than women.”

The study discussed in the article is available here. Its overall conclusions strike me as probably correct. Although there are many individual exceptions, on average libertarians probably are more rational, less emotional, less empathetic, and less influenced by feelings of disgust than liberals or conservatives.

However, I do have a few caveats. First, the libertarians in the study are those who self-identified as such on the YourMorals.org website. The term “libertarian” is more widely known today than in the past; but it still has much less currency than “liberal” or “conservative.” As a result, self-identified libertarians are likely to be more hard-core and committed adherents of their ideology than self-identified liberals and conservatives. And the most committed adherents of a minority ideology are likely to have personalities that deviate from the average more than those of less dedicated fellow-travelers. The libertarians in the study are probably not fully representative of the 10 to 15 percent of the population who hold generally libertarian views (which includes many people who are not aware of the word libertarian, but simply think of themselves as “fiscally conservative” and “socially liberal,” or the like).

Second, I would bet that the personality of the average libertarian will differ less from that of the average person as the ideology continues to become more mainstream. Because of my work with organizations like the Institute for Humane Studies and Students for Liberty, I spend a lot of time with younger libertarians, and they strike me as significantly more socially normal than most libertarians my own age and older, and have a significantly higher proportion of women. This is a result of the broadening of the libertarian movement over the last fifteen to twenty years. An ideology that has only a few adherents is likely to attract mostly people with unusual personalities. If it becomes more mainstream, its supporters are likely to be less distinctive. For example, the personality of the average racially tolerant liberal today is less distinctive than it would have been 100 years ago, when the overwhelming majority of American whites were racist. Conversely, the average racist today is probably more deviant from the norm than the average racist of a century ago.

Finally, it would be a mistake to conclude from Haidt’s research that personality is the sole or even the main determinant of people’s political views. Many people, regardless of personality type, tend to adopt political ideologies in much the same way as they adopt religions. They conform to the views held by their friends, relatives, and acquiantances. Obviously, some personality types are more likely to rebel against conventional wisdom than others. But even they are unlikely to completely avoid the influence of the dominant ideology around them.

Political, economic, and technological developments, also play a major role. The reason why there are many more libertarians in the US today than fifty years ago is not that the distribution of personality types in the population has changed. Rather, the growth of libertarianism is the result of various events that have increased distrust in government, and the rise of the internet and other technological platforms that have spread libertarian ideas to people who otherwise might never have heard of them. Conversely, political, social, and technological developments help explain why there were very few socialists in 1850, vastly more in 1930 and 1950, and far fewer today.

UPDATE: I have not banned comments on this post. But there may be some technical glitch blocking them. The VC will try to address this as soon as possible.

UPDATE #2: The comment system seems to be working again. So comment away, if you are so inclined.

Ever since the Arab Spring began, I have been concerned that it could ultimately result in the establishment of Islamist regimes as bad or worse than the more secular dictatorships they replaced. One of the reasons for that fear is that public opinion in many Arab nations is highly illiberal and intolerant. As a result, free elections could result in victories for authoritarian and repressive radical Islamists, as has indeed happened in Egypt. The new Islamist Egyptian President has already imposed media censorship and harrassment that activists consider to be worse than Mubarak’s was.

Unfortunately, the recent outbreak of violent riots in many Middle Eastern nations in response to an insignificant anti-Muslim Youtube video is a further indication of the problem. With the important exception of Libya, most Arab and Muslim governments have issued vitriolic condemnations of the video while either ignoring or only mildly criticizing the violent response to it.

In the absence of systematic polling data, it is too early to say what percentage of the population in these countries agrees that violent rioting is a justified response to “blasphemous” speech. But the tepid reaction of Arab governments to the violence suggests that such support is at least relatively common, even if not the view of a majority. And in Egypt, site of some of the worst violence, previous survey data shows that violent religious intolerance does enjoy majority support. For example, a 2010 Pew survey found that 84% of Egyptians believe that Muslims who convert to another religion should be executed.

It would be a mistake to say that such intolerance and illiberalism are an inevitable attribute of Islam. Like Christianity and Judaism, Islam is a centuries-old religion with many different variants, some of them more liberal and tolerant than others. I don’t believe that the radical Islamism is the “true” version of Islam, while liberal variants are somehow “fake.” There is no single true Islam, any more than there is one true version of Christianity. But it is clear that the versions of Islam that enjoy widespread support in much of the Muslim world are authoritarian and oppressive. And, in many countries, the purveyors of such intolerance have been empowered by the Arab Spring to a much greater extent than liberals.

None of this bodes well for the future of the Arab Spring nations. Obviously, public opinion is not the only factor that will determine the outcome. Political elites matter too, as do a variety of other factors. Unfortunately, however, in much of the Arab world, radical Islamists are far better organized than their more liberal opponents, which might enable them to seize and hold power even when majority opinion is not on their side.