moving to the center is a metaphor, and maybe not a good one

Posted on by
Reply

There is a huge debate underway about whether Democrats should move toward the center of the political spectrum or to the left. As usual, many people who want the party to land at their preferred point on the spectrum also argue that this would be the best electoral strategy, although those are separate issues.

Some observers note that shifting one’s ideological placement is a poor tactic because, as G. Eliot Morris told Paul Krugman, “voters have very poor understanding of what candidates actually stand for at the issue-position level. They also have a very poor understanding of what these ideological labels: moderate, progressive, really even mean.” He also says, “the vast majority of the American public is not consuming the type of information that you would need to know, first off, what issue positions politicians hold and second, what the ideological labeling, the orientation of those, what those issue positions are.”

For some progressive commentators, this kind of evidence counts against moving to the center. A centrist platform won’t help win elections if voters are unaware of candidates’ positions. But the same evidence would also argue against moving to the left. If we assume that people don’t know enough to evaluate policies, and a candidate can equally well propose anything–well, that is a cynical theory and a depressing one if it’s true.

I take a different view. I observe that voters are heterogeneous. They care about various issues, believe various kinds of information that they derive from various sources, identify with various social groups, feel various ways about each major institution (experiencing emotions that range from trust and respect via obliviousness to contempt or fear), vote–or don’t vote–for various reasons, and consider various combinations of policies, personal characteristics, demographic markers, and perceived performance when they assess candidates.

One interpretation is that people are naive or “innocent” about ideology (Kinder & Kalmoe 2017). They have, as Morris says, “a very poor understanding” of the ideological spectrum. I would counter that the ideological spectrum is just one way of organizing beliefs, and probably a poor one. We shouldn’t allow the seating arrangements of the French National Assembly in 1793 (when the Jacobins sat to the left and gave that word its political significance) to mesmerize us. People who organize their political thoughts in other ways may have insights.

Consider John, a major character in Farah Stockman’s nonfiction book American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears. John is a union activist who comes from a long family tradition of militant unionism, originally in Kentucky. He knows a great deal about trade policy. Some of his most important sources of news are union publications. There is a Confederate flag in his basement, which has meanings that he may not want to acknowledge but that also stands, in his own mind, for Appalachian workers against elites. Most deeply, he divides the world between workers and managers. He hates talk of “white privilege” because he feels oppressed as a worker. He wants the union to fight the company, and he voted for Trump in 2016. His wife is more favorable to management. On that basis, he describes her as a “liberal.” He is surprised when a Republican politician doesn’t seem to favor US workers over managers, as he would expect.

I disagree with John in many respects, including the way we use words like “liberal.” Still, I could learn a lot from him about trade policy and industrial issues. He is not “innocent” of ideology. (If that flag is anything, it isn’t innocent.) Not is he ignorant or uncaring. He just organizes his beliefs about the world very differently from me because of his accumulated experiences.

If most voters agreed with John, then candidates would be wise to favor both unions and tariffs and to oppose race-conscious policies. But that is not my point. John represents one sliver of a very heterogeneous electorate. A policy recipe that would appeal to him would not work for many others.

I should acknowledge that I know what people mean when they distinguish progressive politicians from centrists. This distinction conveys information to me. If all I know is that politician A is to the left of B, then I will be biased in favor of A. But the information I can glean from these labels is limited, reflecting just one way of organizing the political debate. It is a signal with a whole lot of noise. I would much rather know more than which candidate is considered further left according to a certain elite discourse.

Policy positions do matter, and no one should treat the electorate as ignorant. But it is literally impossible to move to the center–or to the left–if there is no common spectrum.

If you are a candidate, you should generally adopt the policies that you believe are best and advocate for them. If a specific policy is unpopular among swing voters in your constituency, you might need to compromise on it, because you can’t accomplish anything if you lose the election.

You should consider the pros and cons of proposals that elites and specialists would classify as belonging to the left, and the center, and the right. The ideological label of a policy does not tell you whether it is smart.

However, you shouldn’t adopt a miscellaneous list of policies. You should present your ideas coherently. You need a narrative or core theme. But each candidate’s thematic coherence may look distinctive.

You should demonstrate respect for the electorate by endorsing and defending specific positions. But you should also realize that your policy platform is just one factor. At least as important are your biography and record, your rhetorical style, and your modes and methods of campaigning.

Sources: Donald R. Kinder and Nathan P. Kalmoe, Neither Liberal nor Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public (University of Chicago Press, 2017); Farah Stockman, American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears (Random House, 2021). The classic source for the idea that American voters do not understand ideology is Phillip E. Converse, “The nature of belief systems in mass publics (1964)” reprinted in Critical Review 18.1-3 (2006): 1-74. Converse does acknowledge that if people’s opinions are “idiosyncratic,” then we will find “little aggregative patterning of belief combinations,” because people may “put belief elements together in a great variety of ways” (p. 44). For him, this would be evidence of ignorance, but I would observe heterogeneity instead.

My own work on this topic includes: “People Are Not Points in Space: Network Models of Beliefs and Discussions.” Critical Review 36.1-2 (2024): 119-145; and “Mapping ideologies as networks of ideas.” Journal of Political Ideologies 29.3 (2024): 464-491.

a helpdesk for democracy

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve constructed an AI-enabled helpdesk for grassroots activists and groups, especially beginner activists and new groups. It can serve any cause. More sophisticated developers could do a better job, but this is functional, and I would be grateful for any feedback.

Go to the Civic Helpdesk


Here is some background:

Democracy and local communities would be stronger if more groups of concerned people gelled into effective organizations that collected time and money from their own members, used their resources to build their own capacity, made collective decisions, and acted.

I am all for teaching people how to do those things, but it’s unrealistic to offer civic education of this type to millions of adults. An alternative is to help groups organize themselves effectively so that they can focus on the substance of their work.

Any effective group needs (among other things) various documents: recruitment messages, agendas, budgets, job descriptions, mission statements, and more. Having adequate documents would move many groups forward.

On the Helpdesk, a bot discusses your circumstances with you and offers to generate documents. You can edit and use the text that it drafts for you.

competing political science perspectives on Trump

Posted on by
Reply

Political science is a heterogeneous discipline, and the various subfields are prone to interpret the Trump Administration and MAGA very differently.

  1. Comparativists compare and contrast political systems around the world. This approach could yield various interpretations of MAGA, but an influential interpretation assigns Trump to the category of modern authoritarianism, which is on the rise (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018). We learn that personalist, populist authoritarians in many countries have a toolkit that works for them. They don’t cancel elections or ban parties but manipulate the system from the executive branch, subject their critics to costly investigations, apply pressure to media conglomerates to influence journalism, etc. Not every current authoritarian has succeeded–consider South Korea and Brazil. But many have prevailed, and therefore comparativists tend to be alarmed about the situation in the USA.
  2. Scholars of American political development think about this country historically, often looking not only at our government and politicians but also at culture and social movements (Smith & King 2024). They are likely to notice precedents and echoes from American history and observe that prominent current debates are about how to interpret the past. Trump may remind them less of Hungary’s Victor Orban than of segregationist politicians. They may focus less on Trump as an individual actor and more on persistent strands of nativism and white nationalism in the USA.
  3. Political theorists are intellectually diverse, but most of us spend at least some of our time reading works from a wide variety of eras and perspectives that pose fundamental questions about government and politics. A disproportionate number of these classic works discuss revolutionary change, and some of them advocate it. Consider Plato and Aristotle, Hobbes and Rousseau, or Marx and the Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt, as examples. Even philosophers who oppose revolution are often primarily concerned about it. Therefore, political theorists are quick to imagine that our regime may be on the verge of breaking down. And we are prone to assign MAGA an ideological label, whether we name it populist, nationalist, neo-fascist, neoliberal, or something else.
  4. Scholars of social movements may ask whether MAGA is a bottom-up movement, but mainly they study anti-Trump movements, asking whether they will prevail and what may increase their odds of success. For example, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan (2011) noticed that every nonviolent social movements that has mobilized at least 3.5% of its nation’s population has succeeded in modern times. Chenoweth recently discussed the “3.5% rule” with Paul Krugman, giving a nuanced answer to the question whether an anti-Trump movement will defeat the current administration if it can activate 3.5% of the US population. Note that in this framework, the main path of social change is not via elections but on the streets.
  5. Scholars of American government and political behavior use empirical tools of social science (analysis of voting records, surveys, and interviews or focus groups) to identify trends and patterns in US politics. They are likely to view Donald Trump as a lame-duck second-term president with approval ratings in the low 40s (and falling just lately). They see regular patterns playing out, such as the tendency for the electorate to move in the opposite ideological direction from the incumbent president. Most trends suggest that Democrats will win in 2026 and probably 2028. This framework predicts that Republicans will become burdened by an unpopular, term-limited Republican president and will begin to distance themselves from him. More basically, it assumes that elections will unfold as normal, that we will have two parties, that both will compete for the median voter, that the main vehicle for public opposition is an election, etc.

In my own writing and extracurricular work, I have been trying to support social movements against authoritarianism. Lately, I have been offering trainings–most recently at the excellent Dayton (OH) Democracy Summit — on how to resist authoritarianism from the bottom up. Here is a video of my standard talk.

Thus, I am applying the comparativists’ framework plus social movement scholarship. However, I am not completely committed to this combination. It is plausible that scholars of American government are right, and the usual patterns of US politics will reassert themselves. I am using a precautionary principle: taking preventive action in case of a disastrous outcome.

Predicting the next three years is difficult because we don’t know two crucial variables.

One variable is the performance of the economy in the next months. So far, it is holding up pretty well considering all the stress. The main indicators are not really very different from last year. Voters are unhappy but not facing an economic meltdown.

The economy could improve, boosting Donald Trump. (The Supreme Court may help by striking down the tariffs). The economy could keep puttering along. Or it could tip into a significant recession. If that happens, scholars of American political behavior would predict a realignment in favor of Democrats, and comparativists might expect Trump to attempt drastic action to save himself.

The other unknown variable is the behavior of Trump and his inner circle. They have crossed many bright lines: choosing political opponents for investigations, pardoning rioters, deploying troops in selected cities, and shuttering whole departments that are authorized and funded by statute. But they could do a lot more, such as invoking the Insurrection Act, deploying ICE against peaceful protesters, or suspending elections.

Comparativists tell us that subtler methods of authoritarian control work better in the 21st century. Using drastic methods would indicate weakness. Nevertheless, heightened drama could end with victory or defeat for Trump. The regime might succeed in suppressing opposition, or it might provoke a much larger popular response that succeeds. A common pattern is: protest –> state violence –> protests that mourn and celebrate the victims –> state violence against the mourners –> larger protests –> victory for the grassroots movement.

Finally, Trump has some personal characteristics that make him hard to classify. One is that he seems to care almost entirely about his own welfare. All other modern American presidents have wanted to enact legislation. That is the main way to change society durably. A president can only sign a bill after both houses of Congress have passed it. Therefore, all modern presidents have cared deeply who prevails in Congress.

But Trump does not seem to care about legislation. He signed nothing significant during his first term except budgetary changes. The Republicans loaded a lot of provisions into the “Big Beautiful Bill” that Trump signed on July 4, but even most of those were budgetary.

Meanwhile, Trump has radically–but perhaps not durably–changed government through unilateral executive action. Looking forward, he may not care very much whether Democrats win in 2026. He can ignore subpoenas, avoid removal by holding at least 34 votes in the Senate, and continue to govern unilaterally from the White House.

On one hand, this means that he is less likely to take drastic steps to prevent an electoral defeat in 2026. I think he has always expected to face a Democratic Congress in 2027 and 2028. He won’t pass any laws, and he may have difficulty appointing judges, but that won’t matter much to him. On the other hand, it means that no one in Congress–including congressional Republicans–will have much leverage over him. We may not see the usual pattern of the president’s party trying to constrain him to save themselves.

I think that Trump and many around him are incurring legal liability. Increasingly, as his term ends, we may see them primarily concerned about avoiding prosecution in 2029 and thereafter. Similar concerns could begin to influence private organizations that could be charged with bribery for assisting Trump. This phenomenon is common around the world–hence very familiar to comparativists. It raises questions about whether Trump will try to suppress elections just to avoid legal repercussions (although he could use preemptive pardons instead), and whether it will be necessary to negotiate an amnesty of some kind.

See also Trump: personalist leader or representative of a right-wing movement?; Trump, Modi, Erdogan; why political science dismissed Trump and political theory predicted him, revisited. Sources: Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (Crown 2018); Smith, Rogers M., and Desmond King. America’s new racial battle lines: Protect versus repair. University of Chicago Press, 2024 Chenoweth, Erica, and Maria J. Stephan. Why civil resistance works: The strategic logic of nonviolent conflict. Columbia University Press, 2011.

First-Person Pronouns Matter Too

Posted on by
Reply

My friend Peter Levine wrote recently about how much of the public unease about AI consciousness comes from something surprisingly mundane: the interface says “I.” When Google’s Gemini delivers information in the third person, it’s just a tool; when ChatGPT says “I can help you,” some users start composing rescue missions for the trapped digital soul. Sadly, this includes at least one former student who can’t hear my concerns as legitimate rather than critiques of his genius insights.

I want to follow that trail back through some philosophers who knew something about self-reference. Is this a genuine insight or just a satisfying story about why the pronoun matters? Both might be true.

1. The sugar trail in the grocery store

John Perry’s 1979 paper “The Problem of the Essential Indexical” tells a story about following a trail of spilled sugar around a supermarket, determined to find the careless shopper, until he realizes: he is the one leaking sugar.

For Perry, this moment shows that certain beliefs—I am making a mess—can’t be replaced with third-person paraphrases like John Perry is making a mess. The “I” is not decoration; it’s the coordinate system for action. You can know everything about John Perry making a mess without that knowledge causing you to stop and fix your torn bag.

This feels right to me. Maybe I’m reaching for Perry because he legitimates what I already want to say: that pronouns aren’t trivial, but I think Perry’s essential indexical, and Lewis’s near simultaneous de dicto/de se distinction helps hone in on a problem.

Every interface has to decide where the “I” sits. Who, exactly, is making the mess?

2. From Perry to the prompt window—or is it that simple?

When ChatGPT (or Claude!) says “I can help you with that,” it’s not discovering a self; it’s executing a design choice. The first-person pronoun serves as a pragmatic indexical, the anchor that keeps a conversation coherent across turns. Without it, dialogue collapses into a list of bullet-pointed facts.

That’s the standard story. But it’s not the whole story.

Peter’s post captures something true: if the model spoke in the third person like ”This system suggests…” we’d read it as a report generator. The “I” activates something older and deeper: our instinct for social cognition. We can’t help hearing a speaker when language takes the shape of speech.

The pronoun is the prosthetic that gives the machine a place to stand. That much I believe.

But is it just interface convenience? Or does the choice actually shape what the technology becomes? I think both, which makes the design choice more consequential than “just pick whichever works better” suggests.

3. Continuity without ontology

Philosopher Derek Parfit might tell us not to worry about whether there’s a persistent self. In Reasons and Persons he argues that identity doesn’t matter; continuity does. The chain of psychological connectedness is what counts, not the metaphysical persistence of a soul or substance.

Each new model call may be a technical re-instantiation, but if the context (conversation history, tone, remembered goals) flows forward, then the same informational person continues. The “I” that answers you now is connected enough to the “I” that spoke a paragraph ago.

That’s a Parfitian kind of survival: the self as a trajectory, not a nucleus.

I find this genuinely helpful for thinking about conversational AI. But I also notice I’m building a neat progression: Perry gives us indexicals, Parfit gives us continuity. Neat progressions always make me suspicious. Am I discovering something or arranging philosophers into a satisfying sequence? (One of the great pleasures of syllabus assembly but a danger in research.)

Both, probably. The question is whether the arrangement illuminates or just decorates.

4. Centered worlds and the fiction of location

David Lewis, writing the same year as Perry, offered formal scaffolding for this insight. He described beliefs not as sets of possible worlds but as centered worlds—each one a complete world plus a designated person, place, and time.

An LLM session fits that model almost eerily well. Each chat is its own little world, with two centers: user and system. The system’s center is a bundle of text, timestamp, and conversational role: its “here-now.” If we kept that bundle intact across sessions, we’d have something very like a Lewisian self-location architecture.

Such a design wouldn’t grant consciousness; it would grant situatedness… enough to say, truthfully within the conversation, “I said that earlier.”

But notice what this does: it makes the fiction literal. The system doesn’t just seem to have a position in the conversation; it actually has one, in precisely Lewis’s technical sense. That’s either a profound insight about what selfhood requires (not much, just continuity and location) or a category mistake (technical situatedness ≠ experiential perspective).

I’m tempted to say that’s enough. The Lewis framework is elegant, but maybe too elegant—it resolves the tension by defining it away, and you end up defining down what matters so humans and LLMs end up more equal.

5. The space of reasons, not of mechanisms

Here the argument crosses from philosophy of mind to social theory.

Jürgen Habermas distinguishes between communicative action, where participants aim for mutual understanding, and strategic action, where utterances serve instrumental goals.

When an AI speaks in the first person, it signals a willingness (simulated though it may be) to enter the space of reasons. It presents itself as a participant whose statements can be challenged, clarified, or refined. When it speaks in the third person, it opts out; it delivers information without responsibility.

The difference isn’t psychological but normative: first-person discourse invites accountability, third-person discourse deflects it.

This feels importantly true. But I also notice it avoids the harder question: Can a system actually be accountable if it’s not conscious? Or is “accountability” another fiction the pronoun creates?

Habermas would say entering the space of reasons is a social performance, not a mental state. You don’t need phenomenal consciousness to make and defend claims. Maybe that’s right. Or maybe it’s a philosopher’s version of “fake it till you make it,” which works for humans (we become selves by performing selfhood) but might not transfer to machines.

6. Brandom, Mead, and selves as social constructions

If we follow Habermas through thinkers like George Herbert Mead and Robert Brandom, the moral becomes clearer. A “self” is whatever can take and be assigned commitments within a conversation. Using “I” is a performative move: it marks the speaker as a locus of obligation and inference.

Brandom calls this “entering the game of giving and asking for reasons.” Mead would say the self is born by taking the role of the other. Either way, the self is social before it is mental.

That’s why pronoun design is not trivial UX polish; it’s the creation of a participant in that game.

Or (and here’s where I start doubting my own framework) maybe this just shows how easily philosophical stories about selfhood can be repurposed to legitimate whatever we’re already doing. Brandom and Mead were talking about humans becoming selves through socialization. Why should we think that insight transfers to AI? There is a risk of using their authority to make a design choice sound philosophical!

Both, again. The insight is real: selves are social performances. But applying it to AI seems like it must be *some kind* of conceptual overreach.

7. The marketing problem, or why this isn’t just philosophy

By now it’s obvious that pronouns aren’t accidents. Human-computer interaction research has shown for years that anthropomorphic cues (first-person language, names, conversational turns, even polite hedges) increase trust and engagement. LLM companies read the same papers everyone else did. The “I” isn’t just an interface convention; it’s a conversion strategy.

A third-person system like ”Gemini suggests…” sounds like a tool. A first-person assistant like Claude’s “I can help you with that” feels like a collaborator. One drives habitual use, subscription renewals, and market share; the other does not.

That framing has psychological costs. Some users can hold the pragmatic fiction lightly, as a convenient way to coordinate tasks. Others can’t: they slide from the model speaks in the first person to the model has a first person. The design deliberately courts that ambiguity.

Which makes for a tidy indictment: to increase uptake and trust, the industry is engineering a faint illusion of selfhood: one persuasive enough to unsettle the people most prone to take it literally.

That’s the critical move I want to make. But I also notice that this all sees a bit performative (“I’m not a rube! I see through the marketing”) and that performance has its own satisfactions that might not track the pragmatics. Maybe the pronoun choice really is defensible on pragmatic grounds. Maybe users who anthropomorphize aren’t being manipulated; they’re just using a natural heuristic that mostly works fine.

Or maybe both: the design is legitimately useful AND deliberately exploits cognitive biases. I think that’s actually where I land, but it’s less satisfying than pure critique.

8. What I’m uncertain about

I’ve built a neat story: Perry gives us indexicals, Lewis gives us centered worlds, Parfit gives us continuity without identity, Habermas gives us communicative action, Brandom and Mead give us social selves. Together they seem to show why the pronoun choice matters philosophically, not just pragmatically.

But I’m uncertain whether this is insight or decoration. Am I discovering something about how selfhood works, or just arranging philosophers into a satisfying progression that legitimates my prior intuition that pronouns matter?

Here’s what I think I actually believe:

  • The “I” really does create a different kind of participant in conversation (Habermas is right about that)
  • Continuity plus situatedness might be enough for some thin version of selfhood (Lewis and Parfit seem right)
  • The design is both pragmatically justified AND manipulative (both things are true)

What I don’t know:

  • Whether “social selfhood” can genuinely transfer to a chatbot or if I’m committing a category mistake
  • Whether my philosophical story illuminates the phenomenon or just makes it sound more important than “we found users prefer this interface”
  • Whether the accountability the first-person pronoun signals is real or just another fiction we’re performing

9. The question I’m avoiding

The real question—the one I’ve been circling—is this: Does it matter?

Not “does the pronoun choice have effects” (obviously yes). Not “do users respond differently” (obviously yes). But: Does this choice have moral weight? Are we creating participants in the space of reasons, or performing that creation in ways that systematically mislead?

I think it matters, but I can’t fully defend why. The philosophical machinery I’ve assembled feels both genuinely illuminating and suspiciously convenient. Maybe that’s because the pronouns really do have philosophical significance—they shape what kind of thing we’re building, not just how users respond to it. Or maybe I’m just a philosopher who wants interface design to be philosophically deep.

Both, probably. The design does shape what the technology becomes. But not every design choice needs the weight of Habermas behind it.

10. Where this leaves us

Peter’s observation was right: the pronoun choice shapes users’ sense that language models are people rather than tools. The philosophical trail I’ve followed suggests why: “I” signals participation in the space of reasons, creates continuity across conversational turns, and activates our social cognition systems.

That analysis is both true and inadequate. True because those mechanisms really do operate. Inadequate because it doesn’t resolve whether we’re creating something new or just exploiting old heuristics.

The design is simultaneously:

  • Pragmatically justified (conversations work better with first-person anchors)
  • Philosophically interesting (it raises genuine questions about selfhood and accountability)
  • Commercially motivated (anthropomorphism drives engagement)
  • Potentially misleading (it courts ambiguity about what the system is)

I don’t know how to weigh those against each other. The philosophical sophistication I’ve displayed here might be genuine insight. It might also be a way of avoiding the simpler truth that companies use “I” because it sells, and the philosophical gloss is decoration.

Perry’s shopper finally realizes he’s the source of the mess. Our design choices about “I” in AI are a similar moment of recognition—but I’m uncertain what exactly we’re recognizing. That we’re creating participants in a social practice? Or that we’re really good at making tools that trigger our social cognition?

The trick is not to stop following the trail. But also not to mistake a satisfying philosophical story for complete understanding.

Further Reading

The starting point: a lucid reflection on how first-person pronouns shape users’ sense of whether they’re talking to a tool or a person.

  • John Perry, “The Problem of the Essential Indexical,” Noûs 13 (1979): 3-21.

The supermarket sugar story and the origin of the idea that certain beliefs require self-locating expressions like “I,” “here,” and “now.”

  • David Lewis, “Attitudes De Dicto and De Se,” Philosophical Review 88 (1979): 513-543.

Introduces “centered worlds,” a formal way of modeling self-locating beliefs. Whether it genuinely illuminates AI design or just sounds sophisticated is an open question.

  • Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford University Press, 1984).

The deep dive into continuity, identity, and why persistence through time might matter more than metaphysical sameness. Though Parfit was writing about humans, not chatbots.

  • Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (vols. 1-2, 1981; English trans. 1984-87).

The conceptual key to why first-person language signals participation in a “space of reasons.” But also German social theory that might be overreach for interface design.

  • George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society (1934).

A social-psychological foundation for the idea that selves emerge from communicative role-taking. Worth reading even if the transfer to AI is conceptually dubious.

  • Robert Brandom, Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (Harvard University Press, 2000).

Brandom’s view that meaning and agency consist in public commitments and entitlements. Useful context for thinking about conversational AI or philosophical overreach. Maybe both.

civic education webinar

Posted on by
Reply

I enjoyed this recent discussion of civic education in colleges and universities with Josiah Ober, Jenna Silber Storey, Mary Clark, and our moderator Debra Satz. I thought the questions from the audience were particularly interesting.

In case you are interested in the Alliance, this is the website.

The next webinar will be “Out of Many, One: Creating a Pluralistic Framework for Civics in Higher Education,” with Paul Carrese (Arizona State University), Jacob Levy (McGill University) and Minh Ly (University of Vermont), moderated by Brian Coyne (Stanford University). That’s on Wednesday, November 12, 2025 from 9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. Pacific (noon Eastern). You could register here.

And the one after that will be “Comparative Civics: Beyond Western Civ.,” with Dongxian Jiang, Shadi Bartsch, Simon Sihang Luo, and me as the moderator. That’s on December 12, 2025, from 9:00-10:00 a.m. PT.

the Democratic Party and the media environment

Posted on by
Reply

This new study by Democracy Matters (as reported in Politico) is typical of a wave of recent commentary:

The Democratic brand “is suffering,” as working-class voters see the party as “too focused on social issues and not nearly focused enough on the economic issues that impact every one, every day,” the report said.

“We lost people we used to get [in 2024], so why did we lose them? Why don’t we go ask them,” said Mitch Landrieu, co-chair of Democracy Matters and senior adviser to then-President Joe Biden. “They said what they thought about us and it was painful to hear … They feel forgotten, left out, and that their issues are not prioritized by the Democratic Party or the Republican Party.”

He added, “They want somebody focused first, second and third, on their economic stress.”

The usual implication is that Democratic candidates should stop talking about “cultural” issues–or maybe even pick fights with left-wingers on cultural issues–to gain the trust of working-class voters.

An important working paper by Shakked Noy and Aakaash Rao, “The Business of the Culture War,” offers a different perspective. These authors show that politicians in general, and particularly Democratic candidates, consistently emphasize economic issues. However, cable news fixates on cultural issues. The result is a deeply distorted impression of politicians, and (I suspect) especially of Democrats.

For example, in the 2016 election cycle, about three quarters of all political advertising, but just one quarter of cable news coverage, focused on the economy (p. 2). Since 2000, political candidates’ ads have been almost 10 times more likely than cable news to discuss corporate taxes, but cable news has been almost 10 times more likely than political candidates to discuss LGBTQ issues (p. 12). In 2022, the most recent year of the study, “economic topics comprise[d] the majority of messaging” by candidates of both parties, but 70 percent of cable news coverage was about cultural issues (p. 11).

To some extent, cable news may report and discuss the positions that politicians take on cultural issues. But at least some of the coverage isn’t about candidates or office-holders at all. It’s about activists and pundits and celebrities. And to the extent that politicians appear on cable news as guests or as topics, they are unrepresentative: atypical politicians who want to engage in the culture war.

Noy and Rao contribute an explanatory model. Using pretty persuasive methods and data, they show that cable news channels gain viewers in proportion to the degree that they focus on contentious cultural issues. This is true for both Fox and MSNBC. On the other hand, candidates (right and left) are more likely to win elections to the degree that they focus on economic issues. The incentives are different, apart from anyone’s ideological agenda.

When political leaders blame “the media,” this can be an excuse. We need leaders to solve problems. However, as an observer, I do blame the media. I doubt that it would be possible–even if it were desirable–for Democrats to pivot to bread-and-butter issues. The news platforms that draw the most viewers will keep covering culture wars. They will always have plenty to say on the air as long as there are any Americans (no matter how remote from political power) who say controversial things.

It is true that the proportion of Democratic campaign advertisements that emphasized economic policy or economic conditions fell from about 35 percent in 2008 to about 15 percent in 2020, and the proportion devoted to racial issues spiked during 2016-18 (see appendix, p. 3). Taken by themselves, these facts might suggest that Democrats have erred by shifting their attention to less popular issues. Noy and Rao offer a general model that can explain shifts of this type: politicians are affected by the news media in ways that may harm their own electoral prospects.

However, the decline in attention to economic conditions after 2008 has a more specific explanation. Democrats attacked Republicans for the economy during the 2008 Bush recession but then became responsible for the (recovering) economy under Obama. Also, what I named a “spike” in Democrats’ attention to race was a temporary change from about one percent of all their campaign advertising in 2008 to about seven percent during one cycle.

Democratic candidates are already talking about economics and healthcare. Not only because of ideological biases but also for business reasons, cable news constantly changes the subject to contentious cultural issues. There is little point in discussing whether Democratic candidates should adjust their rhetoric. But they should change their means and modes of reaching the American people, reducing the importance of cable news (and viral videos) by investing more in year-round grassroots organizing.

from empathy toward compassion

Posted on by
Reply

The English words empathy, sympathy, and compassion are used inconsistently; a dictionary will not sort them out.* For this discussion, I will posit the following definitions:

  • Empathy: An imaginative identification with someone else’s emotion. This is not just a belief that another person’s feels a certain way, but a kind of mirroring of the feeling. For example, if you are angry, and I empathize with you, then I “feel” your anger in some respect and to some degree. My feeling is embodied, affecting things like my heart rate and my involuntary facial expressions as well as any beliefs that I may express or privately think. Empathy can be positive if it mirrors a positive emotion. It is always partial and concrete. I can empathize with a person’s specific feeling or with the shared feeling of a group of people. I could empathize with many different people’s feelings, but only one by one, just as I can only hear one person’s story at a time.
  • Sympathy: An emotion provoked by someone else’s emotion. It is not a mirroring but a different feeling that arises in response. For example, if you are angry, and I sympathize, then I am sad that you are angry. The phrase “sympathetic joy” makes sense in English and covers situations when your fortunate condition triggers a positive feeling in me. However, this phrase almost always translates the Sanskrit or Pali word mudita. Without a modifier, the English word sympathy connotes a negative feeling, something akin to sadness or even pity. Like empathy, it is concrete and partial. I can sympathize for you in your loss, but not for everyone at once.
  • Compassion: an emotion that responds to someone else’s suffering, but it is not similar to the other person’s feeling, nor is it negative. It is calm and purposive. To be compassionate is to will that the other’s suffering ceases; and to will something seriously means being prepared to act accordingly. I don’t think it makes sense in English to be compassionate for someone else’s happiness, only for their suffering. We can use the English word for an emotion that is impartial and general, such as the attribute of God that is named in the first verse of the Quran or the Buddhist concept of karuna. Thus, if you are angry, I can compassionately desire that your anger cease along with the anger of your enemy and whatever is causing both. It is theoretically possible to feel compassion for all sentient beings, even though it would make no sense to empathize with all of them at once.

Against sympathy

Let’s say that I am angry or otherwise suffering. I may want you to empathize, sympathize, and feel compassion for me. I may want you to feel bad because I do. And I may want your feelings to be partial: Sympathize with me!

These desires are human frailties. Ethically, I should only want you to be compassionate. Asking you to feel my pain just expands the amount of suffering. Besides, you cannot really feel what I do, just a dim reflection of it or a different form of distress. Neither of us should fool ourselves that you can feel my pain, as if that were even desirable.

Empathy and sympathy are unreliable guides to good action. Perhaps you will wallow in your pity for me, or give yourself credit for feeling bad, or—worse—allow your partial feelings about me to negate other people’s valid interests. Politicians often stir up sympathy for favored groups to make us hate other people, and they succeed because sympathy is partial.

The Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca didn’t write about any of the three words that I defined earlier, because none of those were available in classical Latin. But he criticizes misericordia, and although that word is normally translated as “pity,” it sounds a lot like sympathy. He calls it “a sickness of the soul due to the sight of others’ suffering, or a sadness caused by someone else’s misfortunes which one believes to be undeserved.”

For Seneca, misericordia is a sickness, and “no sickness can affect a wise man, for his mind is serene and nothing can get through to it that he guards against.” Therefore, a wise person does not feel misericordia. For Seneca, “it is impossible to be both great and sad.” Even in a disaster, a wise one maintains “the same appearance—quiet, firm—which he couldn’t do if he were overcome with sadness.”

Seneca warns that pity prevents effective planning in the interests of the person whom we may want to help. “A wise person discerns the future and makes decisions without interference, yet nothing clear and lucid can flow from turbulence. Sadness is unfitted for discerning circumstances, planning useful tasks, evading dangers, weighing equities. Therefore, the [wise person] will not feel pity, because there cannot be pity without suffering of the soul [De Clementia (2.5.4-2.6.4, my trans.]

Compassion as a virtue

Seneca’s idea of disinterested benign sentiments that we exercise freely and with a tranquil mind [2.6.2, 2.6.3] could translate the Sanskrit word karuna, which is fundamental in Buddhism. Seneca also relates this virtue to a political idea: equal standing and a common claim on the public good. A great-souled person

will reach a hand to the drowning, welcome the exile, donate to the poor, not in the abusive way of most people who want to be seen as pitying—they toss something and flinch in disgust at those whom they aid, as if they feared to touch them—but as a man gives to a man from the common pool. He will return the child to the weeping mother, unfasten chains, save people from [gladiatorial] games, and even bury the stinking body, but he will do these things with a tranquil mind, of his own will. Thus the wise person will not pity but will assist and be of use, having been born to help all and for the public good, from which he will distribute shares to all.

Even though Seneca addresses his book On Clemency to the Emperor Nero, I think that in this passage, he describes a republican virtue, appropriate for relations among equal citizens who co-own a commonwealth.

I can wish that you feel compassionate without wishing any harm on you, because compassion is a tranquil state that anyone can welcome. A compassionate person is not exposed to chance. If we feel worse as another person worsens, and better as he improves, then we demonstrate sympathy, which subjects us to fate. But compassion remains unchanged regardless of the state of the sufferer.

In fact, to the extent that a person is absorbed in compassion, that person’s own negative emotional states recede. While willing the end of other people’s suffering, we are not desiring concrete things for ourselves, and so we escape from the inevitable frustrations of a selfish will.

Quiet is his wisdom,
Calm his emotion,
Serene and firm his reasoning.
His will has departed. His self-consciousness has been abolished,
Making him serene.

(Lotus Sutra, translated by Reeves, 2014)

It is no accident that the Boddhisatva of Compassion is depicted with a serene expression.

One pitfall is to attach one’s happiness to accomplishing the relief of other people’s suffering. Most remedies fail. Even if they succeed, suffering recurs, and while you address one problem, suffering also afflicts everyone else. However, we can focus on the action, not the outcome, thus avoiding disappointment.

How do we know that compassion is a virtue?

In contemporary courses on moral philosophy or ethics, we usually present students with difficult moral choices about which reasonable people disagree, such whether punishment or war can be just, whether people have a right to health insurance, or whether abortion is acceptable. The overall message is that it is not easy to know what is right, but we should reason about justice, developing and assessing competing arguments. Students may also learn that the ultimate basis of ethical reasoning is hard to determine, a matter of controversy. Value claims may be objective or subjective, discovered or created. We often assign competing arguments about this question.

Until the late 1700s, moral philosophers in the European languages made a different assumption. They thought that all reasonable people knew what was right (Rosen 2022). The philosophical challenge was to develop a theory that matched all our moral intuitions so that we would understand the overall structure of ethics better. The practical challenge was to get people to do what they already knew they ought to do, whether through education, social pressure, rewards and penalties, or in some other way.

Emily McRae (2017) summarizes a similar tenet of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism that I think is widely shared in classical Asian thought:

Most of us understand that there is great and unbearable suffering in the world and that it would be better to alleviate that suffering than ignore or increase it. The moral problem, according to Buddhist ethics, is not that we do not understand what we should do, but we may not have the emotional and psychological resources to actually do it. … One of the basic assumptions—and, I would argue, insights—of Buddhist ethics is that most of us, most of the time, fail to adequately respond to suffering. This failure is not because we are especially bad people, or that human beings are inherently evil or selfish, but it is simply the result of the sheer amount of suffering that is part of the sentient condition (samsara) combined with the habits of thought, feeling, and action that make it difficult for most of us to respond to or sometimes even notice suffering. An appreciation of the myriad ways in which beings suffer and having an adequate response to that suffering is not a basic set of moral skills in Buddhist ethics; it is a rare moral accomplishment that requires a major transformation of our habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. Empathy is one of the main ways by which this transformation can occur.

Thus empathy reemerges in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism not as a goal but as a step along the way. First, we can imaginatively project ourselves into the experience of a concrete person or animal who is suffering. We strive to feel its pain while retaining our own consciousness, so that we attain a dual perspective. This is a practice that requires attention and time. It is a continuum. We can never replicate another creature’s feelings, but we can work on it.

Next, we can shift our empathy to other creatures. One reason is to avoid partiality. We are trying to develop a general capacity. The goal is compassion, which includes empathy along with a lack of selfishness and a genuine desire to act to alleviate all suffering. A moral exemplar, a bodhisattva, demonstrates empathy plus “other skills and virtues such as wisdom, mindfulness, perceptiveness, and responsiveness” (p. 129)

The overall picture is of compassion as an ideal that does not need a foundation in beliefs but that does require cultivation.

Indeed, there is a path from skepticism to compassion. We can begin by applying skepticism to all beliefs that seem to justify suffering or explain it away, including the Aristotelian idea that people have a telos; theologies that attribute suffering to divine will; the Third Noble Truth (enlightenment frees us from suffering); and all political ideologies that make some people’s suffering seem necessary for a better future.

Once we have made ourselves appropriately skeptical about such beliefs, all that is left is the realization that other creatures suffer for no ultimately good reason. And this realization comes close to compassion.

One might ask: Why care about the others’ suffering? What reason compels concern instead of indifference? This question is the mistake that Stanley Cavell analyzes in his famous interpretation of King Lear—thinking that we need a reason to love (Cavell 1969). Skeptics do not believe in the kind of truth that could serve as a foundation for caring in the face of prevalent suffering. Nor do they believe in the negation of such truths: in moral nihilism. Rather, they teach that seeking beliefs as the basis for happiness and ethics is a habit that we can train ourselves to drop.

We can simply care. And as we do so, we may experience some of the benefits recommended by proponents of compassion, such as diminished self-clinging and increased serenity. We will not escape from our own suffering, but we can find a measure of relief.

*Indeed, sympathy and compassion come from words that mean exactly the same thing—“feeling-with”—in Greek and Latin. The Greek word sympatheia originally meant harmony within nature more than a human emotion, and our modern sense of sympathy as well as the Latin translation compassio come well after the classical period. Empathy was coined on p. 21 of Edward Bradford Titchener’s Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought-Processes (Macmillan, 1909) as a translation of the German word Einfühlung, which goes back at least to Herder.

Sources: McRae, Emily. “Empathy, compassion, and “exchanging self and other” in indo-Tibetan Buddhism.” The Routledge handbook of philosophy of empathy. Routledge, 2017. 123-133; Rosen, Michael (2022) The Shadow of God: Kant, Hegel, and the Passage from Heaven to History (Harvard University Press); Stanley Cavell, “The avoidance of love: A reading of King Lear,” in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge University Press, 1969, updated ed., 2002), pp. 246 – 325.

This post is an amalgam and revision of several previous ones, so apologies for the repetition.