Ezra Klein: prediction

Transcript context

…How well does Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory explain polarization? I like a lot of Jon’s work. He’s mentioned in the book a couple of times. He’s actually a blurber on the book, which I’m grateful to him for. I think the disagreement I have with Moral Foundations Theory is that . . . I learned a lot from Jon about motivated reasoning and about the ways in which human beings end up using their reasoning more, as he puts it, as a press secretary than a disinterested searcher for truth. My concern with Moral Foundations Theory — which I know has also been under some academic challenge, although I don’t actually feel super qualified to adjudicate that debate — my concern with Moral Foundations Theory is that it is pretty easy to imagine how people, if they’re motivated by elite cues or motivated by partisan interests or something else, could argue their way into justifying a lot of different kinds of policy perspectives under different moral foundations. So, to the extent you do have — and I do buy this part of it — to the extent you do have different moral foundations for people who are on different sides of the debate, I talk a lot about, there’s a very clear in the data increase in polarization by political psychology, resounding down to open versus closed versions of psychology, where you’re an openist to experience versus conscientiousness. That is polarizing, but because we are so good at arguing ourselves into the position we need to take, and because a lot of people’s policy perspectives are actually reasonably weak, I’m just not sure how much, in an abstract way, that actually tells you about where people are going to end up. Maybe a very simple way of putting it is, given the stated views of both the Democrats and Republicans on questions like harm and sacredness and so on — where Jon would put them in moral foundations, or other people would put them just in terms of caring about government interference — it seems very plausible that you could’ve had the two parties reverse their position ultimately on abortion, that you could have had a Republican Party that was much more pro-choice because it was worried about government interference in people’s lives, a Democratic Party that had taken the other position for other reasons. The fact that we didn’t always makes me wonder how much of positions are actually being explained by people’s underlying psychologies versus that their underlying psychologies end up helping them explain how they’re going to argue for the positions they’ve taken for other demographic and historical reasons. Let’s say we put aside the GDP metric and move to an influence-in-the-world metric, and let’s just say, I suppose, 85 percent of the import of what the US government does is foreign policy, or some pretty high percentage, right? This is America. We have a lot of impact on the world. If I look at foreign policy, things, to me, seem less polarized. Now, I get on any moment, “Oh, we talked about Russia, Putin, Ukraine.” People go crazy being polarized. But they almost don’t even know what the places are they’re talking about, and it can fade in an instant. And when you ask, what does each party actually want to do when it’s in charge, I’m not sure I could even describe the differences. And the parties seem, in a way, incoherent on foreign policy — both of them — to me. Do you think that’s a fair characterization, that in foreign policy, putting aside moment-by-moment, that polarization has gone down?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.