Facts vs Factions
A political ideology, or any position about the best changes for the world, might be conceived as a cloud of interlocking and interrelated moral stances and facts about the world. Change just a few facts, a few stances, and you can end up with a new ideology. People’s personal changes over time can often be mapped as such. Many of the people I grew up with ate meat as children, but now either are vegetarian or seriously limit their consumption. For some this was because of a moral reevaluation about the inherent worth of the lives of animals: they mostly have their same beliefs about the world, but have changed their outlook on what’s right. For others, they changed their behavior because they came to believe that meat production is a significant contributor to climate change: they updated their ideology in response to new information. On both accounts, such changes are a normal and healthy part of moral change. Speaking personally, one of my largest transitions over the last several years was intensifying my moral belief that more should be done to improve the lives of the very poor while my factual beliefs on the best policies to affect that changed.
This framing might suggest that the way people end up following ideologies is they find whichever one corresponds most closely to their facts and values, measured by a weighted percentage of shared agreement. But this would be wrong. People base their beliefs and principles not based on looking at themselves and the world, but based on what those around them think.
In June of 2020, the efficacy of masks for preventing Covid-19 was a disputed fact. The moral worth of embryos and fetuses was and still is a highly disputed value between factions. These two are completely logically unrelated, not least because one is a question of morality and the other a question of peer-reviewed studies. And yet in the United States, one position was a very good predictor of the other. Each new proposition is not evaluated based on its objective standing, but based on its factional acceptance.
In the age of social media, every event, movie, policy, and fact is passed through a factional ideological filter. A position is decided, and people follow it. The social collective becomes embedded even in individual decision making. When confronted with anecdotes about guns, welfare, or the Catholic Church, my first instinct is either to approve or wave away the anecdote, never simply to dismiss anecdotal evidence as a bad basis for complex policy decisions.
This is how politics is done, and likely how it always has been done. People aggregate based on practical factional alliances and over time their opinions on both morality and reality become dictated by the factional whole. While there are good reasons to believe that the present age has greater factional unity than before (polarization), people have always sorted based on group dynamics rather than an individual assessment of everything in the world. Such extreme individualism may even be societally unmanageable - it is much easier to properly aggregate based on preferences when people choose their preferences to go along with others.
There is a collective desire that factions be based on values, a-priori and beyond debate, so that factional divides are morally legitimate. One difference between me and a radical libertarian is that I believe that all people deserve goodness and happiness regardless of whether they deserve it or not and I think it is acceptable to compromise individual liberty in order to accomplish that goal. The radical libertarian insists on the importance of individual freedom and that those who make mistakes are not deserving of help at the cost of others. This is a full moral disagreement and we would be able to disagree about ideal policies even if we held all the facts in common. We might agree that certain welfare policies would give incredible benefits to people who gambled their money away and still disagree on whether we should do it or not. This is much easier from a factional perspective because it is hard to see how we could compromise and the disagreement could instead be put to a moral difference between us. I can simply say the radical libertarian is a selfish bad person and comfortably oppose them in any sort of democratic contest. If our dispute was merely about facts there would be a possibility of resolvable discussion which is boring, difficult, and empirically very rare.
In such contests, the moral path is clear: winning. Persuasion is often morally pointless and ineffective, the way the world actually changes is through factional victory. The Black Haitians opposed their French rulers on the question of slavery and enacted that opposition through revolution and expulsion. The New Deal State was realized not through the facts of the Depression forcing free market Republicans to reevaluate their ideas, but through FDR gaining a massive mandate from the ballot box for the ideas which he had championed the whole time. While such struggles are hard to reduce entirely down to irreconcilable values, it is also hard to see the loser as entirely sympathetic. Progress happens one victory at a time. While all these victories are framed in terms of impartial justice, they are sometimes better understood as competing self-interests, much harder to fairly aggregate. But in systems where the majority wins, justice is usually on the side of collective self-interest.
This sort of fundamental moral conflict is not uncommon throughout history, and the framing of conflicts as moral is nearly omnipresent. Many of the basic victories of progress - for freedom, for independence, for justice - have been moral victories of an oppressed mass over a greedy and lazy few. But there are also conflicts which boil down to facts, not to values.
FDR was absolutely in the right to oppose the Republicans of his time, but he was wrong to attempt to decrease stimulus spending in the middle of the Depression1. While the president can be criticized on a value basis for paying too much heed to principles of budget respectability, had he known that his move would lengthen the economic downturn he would not have done it. In the foreign policy debate following WWII on whether America should be activist (Democrats) or isolationist (Republicans), the side with better moral principles won out, but the facts of their implementation backing many useless cold-war aligned dictators was seriously lacking.
As I have written before, economic policy is probably the most important area of government and also an area that is particularly subject to the fact that we don’t understand it. Factual disputes on economics are very much up in the air, and the best results for people as a whole often seems not to follow the intentions or morals of the victorious factions.
20th century economic development is a grab bag of such examples. Argentina was poised to become a prosperous thriving country speeding past Europe. One wants to blame Perón for being too fascist or too socialist as the cause of the country’s malaise, but it may instead have been the rather technical matter of responding to weaker export prices with government control and rationing of imports. Everything is factionally polarized, but it is difficult to argue that the real difference between the economic policies of post-war France, Belgium, and Argentina is ultimately based on the morality of their leaders. Perón did not know the effects his policy decisions would have, and he was no more wise or foolish than his luckier European counterparts who produced sustained economic growth. The independence of all the African nations featured many freedom fighters triumphing justly over extractive colonial bad guys, but the subsequent success of their countries seems to have depended on coincidences of economic fluctuations and internal political disputes. In the 50’s, one might prefer the egalitarian communism of the Northern Korean to the capitalist authoritarianism of the South, a brutal repressive authoritarianism that would last decades. But one would be wrong. In terms of uplifting the poor, capitalist authoritarianism was right as a matter of fact, even if that was an unintended consequence of leaders who primarily wanted power for themselves and geopolitical control for the United States. All of these conflicts have been endlessly reframed as moral at the bottom and reevaluated to fit a purely ideological factional view of history. But I think the truth is that most of these ultimately came down to questions of knowledge, and if everyone had agreed on the facts in the first place everyone would be better off regardless of who won. The good guys winning was not enough.
Ideologies do change, slowly, based on facts if they are willing to listen. Evidence is growing that despite the American left’s greater sympathy for the homeless, their favored policies are actually making things worse. Gradually and without major external factional conflict this is starting to change, pro-supply housing liberalism is becoming more legible even through it’s favoring of market mechanisms is factionally unaligned. These changes are few but heartening.
Such factual adjustments are the low-hanging fruit of how to make the world better. Small, non-polarized victories on how to do good which side-step the question of what is good. This even applies to supposedly very visible legislative politics, congress works better when it is managing questions of policy and not electoral factions. The US, non-local housing policy, FDA reform, investment in global public health, increasing the number of doctors, permitting policy for energy are all somewhat technical issues that for whatever reason have not been fully taken up as priorities of the major factions even though modest moves could substantially improve peoples lives.
Factions are still necessary to win, and conflict between them may even be healthy for society as a whole. But factual transformation is what we need to help our conflicts go from the lesser of two evils to the better of two goods.
At least according to the current facts as I understand them.