Third-Party Punishment in Nonhuman Primates? The Tomasello-de Waal Debate

                                               Frans de Waal on "Moral Behavior in Animals"

If the morality of third-party punishment is part of our evolved human nature, as indicated in the previous post, then we might ask whether this is also found in our closest evolutionary relatives--chimpanzees and other primates.  Among primatologists, there is disagreement about this.  Michael Tomasello and his colleagues argue that there is no third-party punishment in chimpanzees (Riedl et al. 2012).  But Frans de Waal and his colleagues argue that in fact chimpanzees and other primates (such as pigtailed macaques) do show third-party punishment (Flack et al. 2005; Flack et al. 2006; von Rohr et al. 2012; Suchak et al. 2016).  This is part of a more general debate in which Tomasello tends to emphasize human uniqueness compared with other primates, while de Waal tends to emphasize the similarities between human beings and other primates.  (I have written about this debate here, here, and here.)

In his first--and most popular--book Chimpanzee Politics, de Waal described the Machiavellian politics that he observed in the chimpanzee colony at Burgers' Zoo in Arnhem, the Netherlands.  In the summer of 1976, he saw the overthrow of Yeroen, who had been the alpha male, by Luit.  A few weeks after becoming the new alpha male, Luit adopted a policy that would make him "the champion of peace and security" and thus win the support of the females and the children to strengthen his position against his male rivals for dominance.  Whenever a fight broke out among the chimps, Luit intervened to restore the peace.  Sometimes he would intervene impartially, not favoring one side over the other, but forcing the two sides apart and hitting anyone who tried to continue the fight.  At other times, he intervened to support the weaker party against the stronger--helping the lower ranking individual against the higher ranking individual who would normally win the fight.  De Waal called this the "control role" of the alpha male (1982, 124-25).  He thought the control role of the alpha male was "not so much a favor as a duty," because his position depended on keeping the peace and protecting the females and the children from attack so that they will help him in repulsing his male rivals.

In his later writings, de Waal has identified the "control role" as "policing"--intervening impartially to control conflict.  This term "policing" was first used by biologists studying social insects as the term for how insects monitor behavior and suppress conflict through impartial enforcement of norms by bystanders.  (I have written about the "bee police" here.)

                                                "The Surprising Science of Alpha Males"

Against de Waal's claims, Tomasello and his colleagues have asserted that de Waal has not presented any direct tests of third party punishment of violations of cooperation among chimpanzees or other primates.  In 2012, they reported their own experimental study in which 13 captive chimpanzees were presented with an opportunity to engage in third-party punishment, but they failed to do so (Riedl et al. 2012).  Three chimpanzees occupied three separate cages designated as "victim," "thief," and "actor."  A tray of food was in front of the victim's cage.  The thief could pull a rope to drag the tray towards his own cage and thus steal the food.  While observing this theft, the actor could pull a rope or press a button to collapse the food tray into a box out of reach of the chimpanzees.  The actor was either dominant over the thief or subordinate to the thief.  But in neither case did the actor punish the thief for stealing the food from the victim.  However, in a test of second-party punishment, where the thief stole food from the actor, and the actor was dominant over the thief, the actor did punish the thief.  This seemed to show that chimpanzee punishment is restricted to retaliation against personal harm, when the punisher is in a position of dominance.

De Waal and his colleagues insist that they have observed third-party policing, or intervening impartially to control conflict, in captive groups of pigtailed macaques and chimpanzees (Flack et al. 2005; von Rohr et al. 2012).  They do concede, however, that this is one of the rarest forms of conflict management among primates, and that most of the policing interventions that do occur are carried out by a few dominant individuals.

De Waal suggests that Tomasello's failure to see third-party punishment in his experiment arose from his limited laboratory setting in which two or three apes were brought into a very contrived situation.  De Waal describes his own experimental setting that mimics natural conditions in which many individuals have an open choice for cooperation, competition, and enforcement mechanisms (Suchak et al. 2016).  A group of 11 captive chimpanzees was put before a pulling apparatus where two or three individuals were required to pull together to obtain a food reward.  The experiment took place in 94 one hour sessions--occurring two to three times per week--that were videotaped.  During these sessions, the chimpanzees could pull jointly at the apparatus to obtain the reward, and this would be counted as a cooperative act.  They were also free to engage in competitive acts--freeloading (stealing the reward without pulling), displacement (taking someone's place at the apparatus), or fighting.

The cooperative pulling experiment was originally designed by Meredith Crawford in 1937 to test for cooperation among chimpanzees.  Since then, many different species of animals have been tested with cooperative pulling experiments.  The Wikipedia article on this is good.

Over the 94 hours of de Waal's experiment, there were a total of more than 600 competitive interactions (freeloading, displacement, or fighting) and 3,565 cooperative interactions--an average of one cooperative act every 2 minutes.  The rate of cooperation versus competition fluctuated over the 94 hours--starting with high cooperation then dropping to more competitive interactions and finally rising to almost complete cooperation at the end.

There were 175 attempts at freeloading, and 91 were successful (63%).  Most of the punishment for freeloading was second-party punishment--that is, the victim of freeloading retaliated against the freeloader.  Third-party outsiders intervened to punish freeloaders only 14 times (8% of the freeloading events).  Four of these third-party interventions were impartial or policing interventions, in which a dominant chimp intervened to stop a fight between a freeloader and a victim of freeloading.  In nine of the 10 partial interventions, the intervening dominant individual favored the victim of freeloading over the freeloader.  So third-party punishment did occur, but it was quite rare.

The primary means for enforcing cooperation was not direct punishment but partner choice.  Victims of freeloading or displacement chose to withdraw from the freeloading and displacing individuals, and then they sought out individuals of similar rank who could be counted on to cooperate.  Partner choice can be seen as indirect punishment or indirect reciprocity, in which individuals cooperate with those who have a reputation for being cooperative.

The rarity of the third-party punishment seen by de Waal and his colleagues might explain why Tomasello and his colleagues have not seen this at all.  This also suggests that nonhuman primates show only the evolutionary precursors or building blocks for the fully developed third-party punishment practiced by human beings.

REFERENCES

de Waal, Frans.  1982. Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes. New York: Harper and Row.

Flack, Jessica, Frans de Waal, and David Krakauer. 2005. "Social Structure, Robustness, and Policing Cost in a Cognitively Sophisticated Species." The American Naturalist 165: E126-E139.

Flack, Jessica, Michelle Girvan, Frans de Waal, and David Krakauer. 2006. "Policing Stabilizes Construction of Social Niches in Primates." Nature 439: 426-429.

Reidl, Katrin, Keith Jensen, Josep Call, and Michael Tomasello. 2012. "No Third-Party Punishment in Chimpanzees." Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 109: 14824-14829.

Suchak, Malini, Timothy Eppley, Matthew Campbell, Rebecca Feldman, Luke Quarles, and Frans de Waal. 2016. "How Chimpanzees Cooperate in a Competitive World." Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 113: 10215-10220.

von Rohr, Claudia Rudolf, Sonja Koski, Judith Burkart, Clare Caws, Orlaith Fraser,  Angela Ziltener, Carel van Schaik. 2012. "Impartial Third-Party Interventions in Captive Chimpanzees: A Reflection of Community Concern." PLoS ONE 7: e32494.

Do "Just Babies" Confirm Adam Smith's Reflective Liberal Sentimentalism?

                               Experiments at the Infant Cognition Center at Yale University

"The one-year-old decided to take justice into his own hands.  He had just watched a puppet show with three characters.  The puppet in the middle rolled a ball to the puppet on the right, who passed it right back to him. It then rolled the ball to the puppet on the left, who ran away with it.  At the end of the show, the 'nice' puppet and the 'naughty' puppet were brought down from the stage and set before the boy.  A treat was placed in front of each of them, and the boy was invited to take one of the treats away.  As predicted, and like most toddlers in this experiment, he took it from the 'naughty' one--the one who had run away with the ball.  But this wasn't enough.  The boy then leaned over and smacked this puppet on the head."

In his book Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil, Paul Bloom reports this as one of the experiments conducted at the Infant Cognition Center at Yale University (p. 7).  He presents these experiments as showing that Charles Darwin was right in claiming that evolved human nature shows a natural moral sense--a sense of right and wrong--that is manifest in babies in the first few years of life, appearing at such an early age that it must be a natural instinct that requires little or no social learning.  (Bloom summarized some of his reasoning in an article in the New York Times Magazine here.)

Bloom also argues that these experiments confirm Adam Smith's moral philosophy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, because they show that Smith was right in observing that we are naturally social animals, with evolved propensities to care about our fellow human beings, a care that is expressed as sympathy or empathy, through which we judge others and judge ourselves as we appear in the eyes of others, judgments that are expressed as moral sentiments of approbation or disapprobation.  When we see people suffering unfair injuries, we sympathize with their suffering and share their resentment against those who have injured them, because we have imaginatively projected ourselves into their situations--perhaps even projecting ourselves into a puppet show.  That resentment against injustice is the natural ground of rights, because we judge rights from wrongs: human beings have the right not to be injured in ways that would elicit our moral resentment.  This is what I have called Smith's reflective liberal sentimentalism (here, here, and here).

I use Michael Frazer's term "reflective sentimentalism" to indicate that Smith's moral psychology combines reason and emotion in explaining moral judgment.  The moral emotions--such as love, indignation, guilt, and shame--provide the motivation for moral experience.  Moral reasoning elicits and directs those moral emotions.  The moral emotivists (like Jesse Prinz and Jonathan Haidt) who deny the role of reason in morality and the moral rationalists (like Immanuel Kant and Peter Singer) who deny the role of emotion are both wrong.  The reflective sentimentalists (like Smith and David Hume) rightly see the complex interaction of reason and emotion in human moral experience.  Darwinian science can explain how this moral psychology is rooted in evolved human nature.

I call this reflective sentimentalism "liberal" for three reasons.  First, it recognizes the natural separateness of individuals and the moral claims that individuals make.  As members of the same species, we share those general propensities or generic natural desires that constitute our human nature.  But we are also unique in our identities as individuals with personal temperaments and social histories.  For the harmony of society, there must be some shared experiences between individuals based on sympathy.  But sympathy can never be perfect in the sense of being a complete unity of spectator and actor, because this would deny the separate identity of the two individuals.  "Though they will never be unisons," Smith observed, "they may be concords, and this is all that is wanted or required" (TMS, I.i.4.8).

The second reason for calling this moral psychology liberal is that it assumes the liberal no-harm principle as the standard for justice.  Smith claimed that justice was a "negative virtue," in that it hindered us from any unprovoked harming of our neighbor.  Harmful actions deserve punishment coming from the resentment of the person harmed and the sympathetic resentment of the spectator.  By comparison, beneficent actions deserve reward coming from the gratitude of the person benefited and the sympathetic gratitude of the spectator; but beneficence cannot be extorted by force.  "Resentment seems to have been given us by nature for defense, and for defense only.  It is the safeguard of justice and the security of innocence.  It prompts us to beat off the mischief which is attempted to be done to us, and to retaliate that which is already done; that the offender may be made to repent of his injustice, and that others, through fear of the like punishment, may be terrified from being guilty of the like offence. It must be reserved therefore for these purposes, nor can the spectator ever go along with it when it is exerted for any other" (TMS, II.ii.1.4).  Here we see the Golden Rule of the Law of Nature: "As every man doth, so shall it be done to him, and retaliation seems to be the great law which is dictated to us by Nature" (TMS, II.ii.1.10).  The Golden Rule is enforced by the "animal resentment" that moves us "to return evil for evil" (II.1.1.4, II.iii.3.4).  This is what John Locke called the "executive power of the law of nature"--the natural propensity to punish those who injure us.

The third reason for calling Smith's reflective sentimentalism liberal is that it explains morality through the liberal idea of unintended order.  Smith sees morality as a self-enforcing order arising unintentionally through the free exchanges of individuals acting to satisfy their own individual desires.  Individuals are naturally moved by the desire for a mutual sympathy of sentiments, so that they exchange personal sentiments and moral judgments with one another, which creates commonly shared standards of morality.  Such an unintended order can be contrasted with an intended order that has been rationally designed by some mind or group of minds for a deliberately planned purpose.  (I have developed this thought here.)

Consider how Bloom's experiments with babies illustrate these points.  The toddler who recognized the naughty puppet and decided that he deserved punishment showed a combination of reason and emotion.  He had the cognitive capacity to understand that the puppet in the middle had been harmed by the puppet on the left who ran away with the ball.  He also had to sympathize with the imagined resentment of the puppet victim, which motivated his punishment of the bad puppet by taking away the treat and slapping him.  Notice that this third-party punishment is a disinterested judgment, in the sense that it concerns actions that don't directly affect the baby himself.

The cognitive understanding of the puppet show by itself would not have motivated the moral judgment without the moral emotion of sympathetic resentment.  Psychopaths illustrate this.  Bloom relates the story of a thirteen-year old mugger who viciously attacked elderly women.  When a reporter asked him about the pain he had caused a woman, the boy was surprised by the question and responded: "What do I care? I'm not her."  He had a rational understanding of what he had done, but his moral judgment was impaired by his lack of moral emotions such as sympathy and guilt.

If these babies show a naturally evolved propensity to third-party punishment, then we need to explain the evolutionary process that produced.  There are at least three theories for this.  We might explain this through group selection, in that groups with third-party punishment tended to outcompete groups without such punishment.  Or we might explain this through individual selection, in that individuals inclined to third-party punishment earned good reputations that enhanced their survival and reproduction.  Or we might explain this though an evolutionary combination of revenge and empathy, in that individuals imagine themselves in the shoes of a victim and then respond as if they themselves had been harmed.

Although I have said that these babies show third-party punishment as a disinterested judgment, this is not totally disinterested or impartial, because the babies favor those close to them--their relatives and others in their group--over strangers.  Infants prefer the voices of their mothers over strange voices, and they prefer those who speak the native language over those speaking foreign languages.  They fear strangers.

Some studies have found that children often favor peers of the same race and think that they are better people.  But this is true mostly for children in racially homogeneous schools.  Children in racially diverse schools don't care about race.  This suggests that there is a natural bias to favor one's own group over others, but social contact with other people can expand one's circle of group identity.  Forming a coalition to compete with outsiders is part of our evolved human nature, but identifying those who do and do not belong to our coalition depends upon our social environment.  The famous Robbers Cave experiment of Muzafer Sherif and the "minimum group" experiments of Henri Tajfel show that any arbitrary assignment of people to different groups can quickly create an Us versus Them psychology.

We can see this at work in Donald Trump's xenophobic rhetoric supporting his anti-immigrant policies, as in his warning about the "invasion" of people from Latin America.  His opponents have to counter this by portraying Hispanic immigrants in a sympathetic manner as victims of unjustified harm.

REFERENCES

Bloom, Paul. 2013. Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil. New York: Crown Publishers.

Bloom, Paul. 2010.  "The Moral Life of Babies." New York Times Magazine, May 9.

Hamlin, J. Kiley, and Karen Wynn. 2011. "Young Infants Prefer Prosocial to Antisocial Others." Cognitive Development 26: 30-39.

Hamlin, J. Kiley, Karen Wynn, and Paul Bloom. 2007. "Social Evaluation by Preverbal Infants." Nature 450: 557-59.

Hamlin, J. KIiley, Karen Wynn, Paul Bloom, and Neha Mahajan. 2011. "How Infants and Toddlers React to Antisocial Others." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108: 19931-19936.

Marshall, Julia. 2019. "The Development of Corporal Third-Party Punishment." Cognition 190: 221-29.

McAuliffe, Katherine, Jillian J. Jordan, and Felix Warneken. 2015. "Costly Third-Party Punishment in Young Children." Cognition 134: 1-10.

Rossano, Frederico. 2011. "Young Children's Understanding of Violations of Property Rights." Cognition 121: 219-27.

The Collapse of Trump's Republican Party in 2020

Michael Anton warned us that even if we charged the cockpit in 2016 to avoid the certain death coming from Hillary Clinton's election, we might still die by electing Donald Trump.

"You--or the leader of your party--may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane."  "A Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto.  With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances."

So, we might ask, now that the Republican Party has been playing Russian Roulette with Trump, how has that been working out for them?

Anton's warning about the possible death of America is actually a fear of the death of the Republican Party.  The Democratic Party represents "half the country and all our elites," Anton admits, and the surging growth in the American electorate favoring the Democratic Party has been so rapid that the Republican Party could become the permanent minority party by 2020.  To save the Republican Party from death, therefore, Trump must increase the size of the electoral coalition supporting the Republican Party.

Has he done that?  The evidence from the past two and a half years--the 2016 election, the 2018 midterm elections, the popular protests against Trump, and voter opinion surveys--all suggest the answer is no.

In 2016, Trump was running against a remarkably flawed opponent who ran a poorly designed campaign, and yet Trump still lost the popular vote by almost three million votes.

On January 20, 2017, Trump's inauguration crowd in Washington was noticeably smaller than President Obama's massive crowd eight years earlier.  So much so, that Trump fumed about the "fake news" photographs of the crowds.  The next day the Women's Marches against Trump brought out over 2 million people across the country--673 marches in all 50 states--which might have been the largest single-day demonstration in U.S. history.

As I have argued in a previous post (here), in the 2018 midterm elections, Trump suffered a massive defeat in what he himself framed as a national referendum on his policies--particularly, immigration.  This was the biggest gain for the Democrats in a midterm election since 1974, in the aftermath of Watergate and Nixon's resignation.  The victory in the House would have been even greater for the Democrats were it not for the Republican gerrymandering in states like Ohio and North Carolina.  Democrats won House seats in some of the most solidly Republican districts in the country.  For example, Orange County, California, now has not a single Republican representative in the House!

Remember that in the weeks before the midterms, Trump sent military troops to the southern border to stop the "invasion" of America by a massive caravan of criminal and terrorist immigrants who were supposedly coming to kill and rape Americans.  The voters repudiated this anti-immigration rhetoric in the midterm elections, which illustrates how the electoral support for illiberal populists like Trump must decline over time, because of the enduring appeal of the libertarian values of the Liberal Enlightenment.

In an article in the New York Times, and in his new book--R.I.P. G.O.P.: How the New America Is Dooming the Republicans--Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg surveys the evidence suggesting that Trump has accelerated the collapse of the Republican Party into becoming a permanent minority party.

For example, there is evidence that Trump's populist anti-immigrant rhetoric has backfired.  Since 1994, surveys have asked voters:  Do you believe that immigrants "strengthen the country with their hard work and talents"?  Or do you believe that they "burden the country by taking jobs, housing, and health care"?  In 1994, 63% answered that immigrants were a burden on the country; and only 31% answered that they strengthened the country.  In 2017, this had completely reversed: 65% said immigrants strengthened the country, while only 26% said they were a burden.  Surveys indicate that one of the prime motivations of voters in the "blue wave" 2018 midterms was rejecting Trump's crude anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Until recently, as analyzed by Greenberg, the Republican Party base has been a coalition of five voting blocks: evangelical conservatives (26%), moderates (23%), secular conservatives (18%), Tea Party conservatives (17%), and Catholic conservatives (16%).  Now, in 2019, the moderates have dropped from 23% to 16%; and the secular conservatives have dropped from 18% to 14%.

The demographic profile of the Republican Party has moved toward older, white, male, native-born, religious, less educated, and rural voters.  So the increase in younger, non-white, female, foreign-born, secular, educated, and urban voters favors the Democratic Party.

While Greenberg rightly sees all of these trends as pushing the Republican Party towards being a minority party, I agree with Eric Levitz (here) that Greenberg does not give enough weight to the structural features of American electoral politics that can allow a minority Republican Party to exert great power.  Even if the Republican Party is unpopular, it can control the Senate because the equal representation of the 50 states inflates the power of Republican voters in sparsely populated rural areas of the states in Middle America.  And as long as they control the Senate, they can control the appointment of federal judges, and the federal judiciary (including the Supreme Court) is a powerful countermajoritarian force.  Senate Republicans can refuse to confirm any judicial appointees of a Democratic President.

As I have suggested in some previous posts, there is a deeper cultural or philosophical dimension to the decline of the Republican Party that deserves more thought.  The triumph of the Liberal Enlightenment over the past two centuries favors the libertarian values of modernity embraced by the typical voting blocs of the Democratic Party.  But as the Republican Party has adopted the counter-Enlightenment values of illiberal populism, it has had to stand against liberal modernity--for example, by resisting the free global movement of ideas, trade, and people and the expansion of personal liberty in civil society (as in gay marriage, for instance).  Thirty years ago, the conservative thought of the Republican Party was based on a "fusionist" conception of liberal conservatism that combined political liberty and social virtue, which was open to liberal modernity.  But now the illiberal populism of Trumpism has rejected this liberal conservatism, and in doing so, it has doomed the Republican Party to appealing to only a minority of the voters who think (mistakenly) that the Liberal Enlightenment is an attack on their traditionalist conservative values.

I written about the fusionism of liberal conservatism here, here, here., and here.

"Charge the Cockpit or You Die": Michael Anton's "Flight 93 Election" and the Question of Trump's Authoritarianism

                                                   Michael Anton at the White House

On September 5, 2016, the Claremont Review of Books published online Michael Anton's essay "The Flight 93 Election," which began this way:

"2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway.  You--or the leader of your party--may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane.  There are no guarantees."

"Except one: if you don't try, death is certain.  To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto.  With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances" (61).

Two days later, on September 7, Rush Limbaugh began reading "The Flight 93 Election" in its entirety on the air.  The website for the Claremont Review of Books crashed from the flood of people trying to access the article.  Anton has said that many people have told him that his article persuaded them to vote for Trump.  At the very least, this signified that the Claremont Institute had decided to support Trump, and so most of the "West Coast Straussians" would be Trumpets.  Anton has served for a time as a national security official in the Trump Administration.

"Charge the cockpit or you die."  Was Anton right about that?  Is it true that the election of Hillary Clinton would have meant that "death is certain"?  Death of whom or what?  Has Donald Trump's presidency saved us or saved America from death?  If so, how so?  And if Trump has saved us from death, does that mean that we will still die if he is defeated in 2020?  If that is so, does that mean that we should hope that he will refuse to step down if he loses the next election, because if a Democrat becomes President, "death is certain"?  Or does Anton's claim that the Democratic Party poses an existential threat to America manifest a dangerously apocalyptic rhetoric that could support Trumpian demagogic authoritarianism?

The publication this year of Anton's After the Flight 93 Election: The Vote that Saved America and What We Still Have to Lose (Encounter Books) helps us to think about those questions.  This book reprints Anton's original article and some new writing defending the article.  His "Pre-Statement on Flight 93" (23-59) provides his Aristotelian philosophic account of how the "American Solution" can be rooted in both the universality of human nature and the particularity of the American nation.  Also helpful is Anton's online essay "Toward a Sensible, Coherent Trumpism," which was originally published by the online Journal of American Greatness, and his essay "Will the Real Authoritarian Please Stand Up?" published in the Claremont Review of Books (summer 2018).

A good profile of Anton was published two years ago in Vanity Fair, with the title "Machiavelli in the White House: Is This the Most Powerful Man in Trump's Administration?"  Anton became the senior communications director for Trump's National Security Council under Michael Flynn and then H. R. McMaster.  He was forced to leave in the spring of 2018 when John Bolton took McMaster's place as national security adviser.  Now Anton is based in Washington, DC, and he has an affiliation with Hillsdale College.

Death of whom or what?  I assume that Anton was not suggesting that Clinton was leading a terrorist gang trying to kill as many Americans as possible.  So what was her death threat?  Anton wrote: "The Left was calling us Nazis long before any pro-Trumpers tweeted Holocaust denial memes.  And how does one deal with a Nazi--that is, with an enemy one is convinced intends your destruction?  You don't compromise with him or leave him alone.  You crush him" (69).

Anton's claim seems to be that the two political parties are in a deadly war, because each side believes that the other side will use electoral victory to "crush" the losers.  Anton spoke of "the Left's all-consuming drive for absolute power, its hostility to all American and Western norms--constitutional, moral, prudential--and its boundless destructive enmity" (11).  Anton warned that "the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally America with every cycle" (70-71).  He observed: "This is the mark of a party, a society, a country, a people, a civilization that wants to die.  Trump, alone among candidates for high office in this or in the last seven (at least) cycles, has stood up to say: I want to live.  I want my party to live.  I want my country to live.  I want my people to live.  I want to end the insanity" (72).

If Hillary wins, Anton explained, "the country will go on, but it will not be a constitutional republic.  It will be a blue state on a national scale.  Only one party will really matter.  A Republican may win now and again--once in a generation, perhaps--but only a neutered one who has 'updated' all his positions so as to be more in tune with the new electorate" (93).

On the one side of this war to the death, Trump fights for the true Americans, the middle-class Americans, who are not Third World immigrants or urban poor minorities or cosmopolitan elites, and these Trump voters support constitutional republicanism.  On the other side, Hillary and the Democrats represent "half the country and all our elites" (21), who wish to overturn the constitutional republic and replace it with one-party rule with absolute power to rule over the country.  Actually, "half the country" is a majority of the voters, because as Anton indicates, the Republicans have lost the popular vote for the presidency in every election since 1988 except for 2004; and in 2004, Bush won with only 50.7 percent (69-70).  And, of course, Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary in 2016; and he lost again in the mid-term congressional elections in 2018.  Moreover, as increasing immigration from the Third World adds to the anti-American electorate for the Democratic Party, the Republican Party will almost never win the popular vote in the future.

Anton employs a populist rhetoric that presents a Manichaean war between good and evil--the virtuous People versus the evil Elites.  This becomes complicated, however, as soon as one notices that some of the People are evil, because they vote for the evil Elites, and some of the Elites are virtuous (like Trump and Anton) because they lead the virtuous People against the evil Elites.  Furthermore, the virtuous People are a minority of the voters, and so they will often lose any contest based on simple majority rule. Anton worries that the electorate for the Democrats is growing so fast that they might have an overwhelming permanent majority by 2020.

If Trump loses the election in 2020, then what?  Since Anton supports constitutional government, one might expect that he would say that the Constitution requires Trump to step down.  But if Anton is right about his claim that a government controlled by the Democrats would destroy constitutional republicanism, establish absolute one-party rule, crush all of their opponents, and set up an anti-American government, wouldn't he have to hope that Trump would declare a state of emergency in response to a "rigged election," and rule by executive decree in punishing the "enemies of the people"?  Doesn't this follow logically from Anton's argument?  If a Democrat winning the presidency means "death is certain" for Republicans and for the true America they love, shouldn't Republicans "charge the cockpit" and allow Trump to pilot the plane for life, regardless of whether he has lost an election?  This would confirm the fear felt by many of Trump's critics that he is a populist authoritarian.

The scholarly critics of Trump have argued that his populist propensity to authoritarianism confirms the fear of demagoguery expressed by Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist.  "History will teach us," Hamilton warned, "that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants" (no. 1).  Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (in How Democracies Die [2018]) quotes this as showing that the American founders saw the need for "gatekeepers" to filter out candidates for the presidency who could become dangerous demagogues.  Originally, the Electoral College was to perform this gatekeeping function: as Hamilton said in Federalist number 68, "the office of president will seldom fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications," because men with "talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity" would be filtered out.

The rise of the two-party system in the early 1800s changed the way the Electoral College worked, because each state legislature began to elect delegates to the Electoral College who were loyal to their party.  Thus, the parties took over the gatekeeping function.  It was then up to party leaders to choose candidates for the presidency who would be popular, while keeping out demagogues.  At first, presidential candidates were chosen by caucuses of congressmen in Washington.  Then, beginning in the 1830s, candidates were nominated in national party conventions with delegates chosen by state and local party committees.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Progressives denounced the convention system as undemocratic, and they introduced presidential primaries in some states as a more democratic way to select presidential candidates without gatekeeping by party leaders.  But many states did not have primaries, and elected delegates were not required to support the candidates who won the primaries.  So party insiders continued to act as gatekeepers who filtered out extremist demagogues.

For example, Henry Ford was one of the richest and most famous men in the world, and he used his wealth and his celebrity to advance his extremist views--such as campaigning against Jewish banking interests--and possibly running for the presidency in 1924 as a Democrat or a Republican.  In the summer of 1923, national polls conducted by Collier's showed Ford to be the most popular candidate.  But party leaders ruled him out.  Senator James Couzens said his candidacy was "most ridiculous"--"how can a man over sixty years old, who . . . has no training, no experience, aspire to such an office?"

Party gatekeeping in selecting presidential nominees continued up to 1968, when Hubert Humphrey won the Democratic Party's nomination without competing in the presidential primaries.  But the violent protests against Humphrey at the Democratic Convention in Chicago provoked a demand for a more democratic procedure for nominating presidential candidates.  Under the influence of the Democratic Party's McGovern-Fraser Commission, both parties adopted a system of binding presidential primaries beginning in 1972, which was intended to fulfill the original plan of the Progressives for primaries as a purely democratic procedure that would circumvent party gatekeepers.  Political scientists Nelson Polsby and Aaron Wildavsky warned that primaries could "lead to the appearance of extremist candidates and demagogues," who "have little to lose by stirring up mass hatreds or making absurd promises."

Some outsiders were able to run in the presidential primaries--such as Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988, Pat Robertson in 1988, Pat Buchanan in 1992, 1996, and 2000, and Steve Forbes in 1996.  But they all lost.  Winning a majority of delegates in primaries all over the country required first winning the support of party elites, which was called by Arthur Hadley in 1976 the "invisible primary," which preserved a form of gatekeeping.

In 2015 and 2016, Trump broke through the invisible primary by using his wealth, his celebrity, and his bombastic rhetoric to win primaries without the support of the party establishment.  The gatekeepers failed to stop him, and a demagogue was nominated and then elected president.

Levitsky and Ziblatt tell this story to show that the American founders were right about the need for gatekeeping to keep demagogues out of the presidency.  Oddly, in his review of their book, Anton says nothing about this ("The Real Authoritarian").  But in his support of Trump, Anton implicitly rejects the founders' position and embraces the Progressives' argument that presidential primaries and elections should allow the most popular candidate to win, because gatekeeping to filter out demagogues is undemocratic.

The problem, however, as Levitsky and Ziblatt argue, is that democratically elected demagogues can easily become authoritarian leaders who overturn democracy itself.  In recent history, Alberto Fujimori in Peru, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Erdogan in Turkey, and Viktor Orban in Hungary have all begun as democratically elected leaders who became authoritarians suppressing democratic norms.

Levitsky and Ziblatt see four key indicators of authoritarian behavior: (1) rejection of democratic rules of the game, (2) denial of the legitimacy of political opponents, (3) toleration or encouragement of violence, and (4) readiness to curtail civil liberties of opponents, including media.  They see Trump as showing all four indicators of authoritarianism.  He has questioned the legitimacy of the electoral process by claiming that millions of votes were cast illegally for Clinton in 2016.  He has denied the legitimacy of his political opponents by saying that they are criminals, unpatriotic, and anti-American.  He has tolerated or encouraged violence against those who lead protests against him.  He has threatened to curtail the civil liberties of his opponents by suggesting that libel or defamation laws should restrict criticism from his political opponents or from the news media.

Levitsky and Ziblatt concede, however, that on all four points, "the president has talked more than he has acted, and his most notorious threats have not be realized," and therefore, "we did not cross the line into authoritarianism" in the first year of Trump's term (187).  But that's just the point, Anton insists: "Trump has said some ill-advised things," but "he hasn't acted on any of it" ("Real Authoritarian," 9).

And yet Anton does not respond to the point made by Levitsky and Ziblatt that some elected demagogues who became authoritarian--like Fujimori, Erdogan, and Orban--did not show their authoritarianism during the first year or two after they were elected.  They moved gradually in that direction.  So the question is whether Trump shows an authoritarian propensity that could be fully expressed over time.

As I have already indicated, we see that authoritarian propensity in Anton's arguments.  If the election of a Democratic President means "death is certain," doesn't that suggest that Trump would be justified in any authoritarian suppression of such an electoral outcome?

On the contrary, Anton contends, the real threat of authoritarianism today comes not from the Right but from the Left--from Leftist leaders like Hugo Chavez and Leftist support for the administrative state.  He accuses Levitsky and Ziblatt of showing their left-wing bias by restricting their criticism of Chavez to only four pages of their book, so that they can devote the rest of the book to attacking right-wing authoritarianism ("Real Authoritarian," 8).  But Anton does not tell his readers that Levitsky and Ziblatt actually offer extensive references to Chavez covering over 23 pages of their 231 page book.

I agree with Anton that the concentration of power in the fourth branch of government--the administrative state--is the greatest authoritarian threat to American democracy, and therefore we could see Trump as an anti-authoritarian leader if he were attacking the administrative state.  But I don't see that Trump is really working for the "deconstruction of the administrative state," as Steve Bannon called it.

Here is a video of Susan Dudley speaking on "Is the Trump Administration Deconstructing the Administrative State?"  She shows that there has been a clear reduction in the number of new major regulations.  But slowing the growth in new regulations is not the same as cutting back regulation by the administrative state.  Trump has claimed that he was going to cut back to the levels of 1960.  There is no evidence that he is trying to do that.  The deregulatory actions that his administration has taken are very small--mostly reducing paperwork but not really decreasing regulation.

Moreover, as Dudley points out, the Trump Administration has largely failed in its court cases involving its regulatory changes--losing 34 cases out of 36.

The fundamental problem here is that the Trump Administration has relied mostly on presidential decrees that can easily be rescinded by a new President.  If the Trump Administration were serious about "deconstructing the administrative state," they would do so by supporting legislation that would radically reduce the power of the administrative state by having the Congress reclaim the lawmaking powers that it has delegated to the administrative agencies.  The most radical "deconstruction of the administrative state" would require overturning the Administrative Procedures Act of 1946.

One example of how this could be done is the "Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny (REINS) Act," which has been proposed in the 115th Congress.  This would require Congressional approval of any administrative rule that would impose compliance costs of more than $100 million a year, so that if Congress failed to approve the rule in 70 days after its promulgation, it would be rendered void.  If the Congress were to pass such legislation, I am not sure that Trump would sign it, because it would restrict his power working through the regulatory state in favor of congressional power.

It is also remarkable that Anton says nothing about Trump's trade war as a massive increase in the regulatory state based on arbitrary presidential decrees without any congressional authorization.  How is this not presidential authoritarianism?

Some of my previous posts on Trump's chimpanzee politics can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Leo Strauss's Silly Idea: "There Are No Gods But the Philosophers"

At the APSA panel on Friday morning, I made the point--but I did not stress it enough--that my fundamental disagreement with Catherine Zuckert was over her acceptance and my rejection of Strauss's claim that the philosophic life is the only naturally good life.  While Catherine thinks this is a great idea, I think it is a silly idea.

In my response to her comments, which is reproduced in my previous post, I restated some of my reasoning from my chapter on Strauss in Political Questions for why Shadia Drury was right about this and why the Zuckerts (in The Truth About Leo Strauss) did not adequately answer Drury's criticism of Strauss.

This dispute turns on how one sees the natural desires of human nature.  My argument is that the good is the desirable, and the natural good is the satisfaction of the natural desires.  The generic human good requires the satisfaction of all or most of those desires to some degree, but the ranking of those desires varies according to the natural temperament, capacities, and circumstances of individuals, and prudence is required for that individualized ranking.

I agree with Strauss that the philosophic life is best for only a few people--the "very few individuals who are by nature fit for philosophy," because they are animated by the "natural desire" to know--people like Socrates.  But I disagree with Strauss's claim that this philosophic life is the only naturally good life, and that moral lives, religious lives, and political lives are the lives of "mutilated human beings."  Most human beings are fit by nature for such lives because they are naturally fitted for ranking some natural desires--such as familial bonding, friendship, social status, and religious understanding--as higher than the natural desire for intellectual understanding.

Strauss's mistake was in his silly assertion that philosophers are god-like in their transcendence of ordinary human life: "If we understand by God the most perfect being that is a person, there are no gods but the philosophers."

Nietzsche was right in Human, All Too Human in saying that the belief that some human beings are "superhuman" (ubermenschlich) is a "religious or half-religious superstition."  In his later writings, Nietzsche affirmed a Dionysian atheistic religiosity with a vision of the superhuman artist-philosopher exercising will to power over all of humanity, and it is this later Nietzsche who has appealed to Strauss and the Straussians.

The Nietzsche of Human, All Too Human supports a Darwinian liberalism, because Nietzsche here sees that evolved human nature shows a range of natural desires, and he sees that the freedom of a liberal democracy allows for the expression of all those natural desires as diversely expressed in different kinds of lives, all of which can be justified as naturally good, including Nietzsche's own philosophic life of the Socratic "free spirit."

When I was speaking at the panel, Catherine shook her head repeatedly to indicate that she disagreed with everything I was saying.  I was surprised, however, that no one on the panel or in the audience offered any reasoning to support Strauss's idea that the philosophic life is the only good life by nature, as if this were a Straussian doctrine that is not to be questioned.