The crank realignment is bad for everyone

A stupid party + a bunch of biased institutions degrades epistemics across the board

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s transition from semi-prominent Democrat to third party spoiler to Donald Trump endorser is emblematic of a broader, decade-long “crank realignment” in American politics.

Trump himself, of course, used to be a Democrat. He switched parties in a blaze of birther conspiracy theories, and only then came to embrace conservative views on topics like gun control and abortion. And RFK Jr. was into election fraud conspiracy theories long before January 6, but his version was about George W. Bush stealing the 2004 election in Ohio. That wasn’t a mainstream Democratic Party view (there’s a reason there was no Kerry-led insurrection), but it was mainstream enough to be published in Rolling Stone and for Kennedy to continue to be a player in progressive politics.

Twenty years later, that’s no longer the case. Democrats are much more buttoned-up, and the GOP is much more accepting of cranks and know-nothings like Kennedy.

The partisan shifts of both Trump and RFK Jr. are part of a long term cycle in which educated professionals have gravitated toward the Democratic Party coalition and a generic suspicion of institutions and the people who run them has come to be associated with conservative politics. Conservative cranks are not even close to new (the John Birch Society, for example), but they’ve become increasingly prominent, which continues to push educated professionals into Democratic ranks. This generates more partisan alignment on questions like immigration (which in the 1980 and 1990s had basically no relationship partisanship), where views are closely related to psychological attributes that correlate with intelligence and educational attainment.

To some extent, this crank realignment is nice.

When I was working at The American Prospect and we were trying to nudge the Democratic Party in a more progressive direction, it was a thorn in our side that there were so many people on the left who wanted to talk about how 9/11 was an inside job, GMOs were poisoning our children, and the FDA was ignoring damning evidence about vaccines and autism. We wanted marriage equality and a more generous welfare state, not a fuzzy agglomeration of anti-establishment viewpoints. And over time, we got what we wanted: Democrats have become more left-wing in their policy views and also less friendly to nut jobs. The problem is that this hasn’t actually changed the fact that lots of people are dumb cranks; it’s simply created a Dumb Crank Party. And on balance, I think that has eroded the epistemic quality of both coalitions.

The stupid party

The most obvious problem is that as Republicans increasingly become the party of retirees and folks who didn’t go to college, they still need smart, educated professionals to actually do stuff, and they’re fishing in an increasingly thin pool.

You can see this quantified most clearly with federal judges, who are supposed to be smart people who went to good law schools, but who are also, in practice, selected on partisan criteria. The vast majority of graduates of top law schools are Democrats, but roughly half the judges are appointed by Republicans, so conditional on getting a high LSAT score, your odds of becoming a federal judge are dramatically higher as a Republican. This also means that in some sense, the average “quality” of Republican judging is much lower. The good news for the Federalist Society is that appellate jurisprudence is basically fake, and having judges agree with you about stuff is dramatically more important than having “highly skilled” judges (whatever that means).

But the same human capital issue replicates across domains.

Republicans keep getting asked to stop playing various songs at Trump rallies because very few top musicians like the GOP. By contrast, during the Democrats’ convention roll call, each state had a signature song, with all songs cleared with the recording artist. Looking at campaign signs and images, it’s also clear that Democrats have access to much higher levels of average skill in areas like typography and graphic design. That sounds trivial, but the problem extends to essentially all skilled professions. Most doctors are Democrats. Among scientists who contribute to political campaigns, only 10 percent to give to Republicans. A lot of academics think of economics as a relatively conservative discipline, which is it, but only in the sense that top colleges’ economics departments have a 5-to-1 ratio of Democrats to Republicans rather than 20 or 100 to one.

This was all broadly true during Obama’s presidency, but since Trump took office, Republicans have done better with formerly Democratic-aligned groups like genuinely poor white people and working class Hispanics and worse than ever with college graduates. This optimizes their coalition for the electoral college, but it makes it harder for conservatives to actually marshal knowledge and govern the country. It’s striking that the GOP has never put together a halfway serious plan to fight inflation or reduce crime. A lot of Romney-Clinton voters could, conceivably, have been tempted back into the GOP ranks with a serious effort to persuade them that Republicans have genuine solutions to Biden-era problems. But the Trump-era Republican Party lacks the capacity to put forth such an effort.

That’s not to say there are no capable people in the GOP. But they are few in number and increasingly marginalized in a conservative ecosystem that doesn’t care about experts or knowledge. For the last week, the entire right side of the political spectrum has been soaked with nonsensical conspiracy theories about the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ annual revision of employment statistics. William Beach, who ran this agency under Trump, tried to explain what actually happened, but there are no institutions on the right that amplify credible experts and marginalize conspiracists.

To the extent that Kamala Harris is a quasi-incumbent and it’s in Republicans’ interests to lie about her, these epistemic weaknesses can serve as a kind of strength. But if the Republicans ever want to govern the country, it’s not helpful to repel everyone who is honest and rigorous.

Bias on the left

The flip side is that turning fields like journalism, social science, and public health into partisan monocultures makes it harder for them to perform their epistemic functions.

I don’t think this is widely known outside of the field, but at any general interest publication, the reporters who cover politics are the least left-wing group at the publication. People who care a lot about politics tend to develop at least somewhat nuanced views of at least some issues. And in the course of doing their jobs, those reporters sometimes find themselves talking to Republicans and understanding, to an extent, their points of view. But the copy editors and social media managers and television critics and food writers all tend to be both left-wing and a bit casual and unreflective about it. Which is fine as far as it goes. But I have heard from many policy writers that as their articles go through the editorial process, conservative or centrist points tend to receive heightened scrutiny and pushback relative to progressive ones. Not because any individual in the system is trying to create an imbalanced process — that’s just the natural result of a process in which everyone involved has left-wing priors.

Similarly, I think policy-relevant research done in economics departments is a lot more useful and credible than other forms of social science, not because economists are so great but because an economics paper is much more likely to clear the “has at least one conservative read this?” test.

For reasons that sociologists, anthropologists, and social psychologists are probably better-situation to explain, if you work in an environment where all your colleagues and peer reviewers and people you talk things over with in a seminar are left-wing, you are going to get biased results. Again, not necessarily because anyone is trying to bias the results, but because each individual person has their own biases and when almost all of those biases are mutually reenforcing, you get a bad outcome.

A related issue is that once an expert community obtains a sharp political skew, it’s easy to confuse the interests of the expert community with an ideological vision of the public interest. It’s important to make energy policy in a way that aligns with scientific facts about climate change and public health. But that’s not the same as saying that “the science” dictates specific policy measures. We saw this really clearly during Covid when “defer to public health academics” became constitutive of progressive politics, but public health academics also seemed to feel considerable pressure to align their recommendations with the progressive policy priorities of the moment. Ideally, we’d live in a world where empirical information “pulls sideways” in a way that’s orthogonal to values-based ideological conflict. But we’re not even close.

Facts and knowledge matter

This is all a real shame. I used to be much friendlier to the idea of strategic dishonesty as a means of achieving useful political outcomes, but as I’ve become middle aged I’ve also become more earnest about honesty. The problem is that values really do sharply underdetermine specific policy measures. There’s a sense in which “the government should take action to combat food deserts as a way to fight obesity” is a progressive view, and research casting doubt on food desert theory is bad news for the left. But there’s a deeper and, I think, more true sense in which progressives want to use the state in ways that address public health problems, and that means taking action to combat food deserts is a good idea if and only if it’s actually true that this works. If it doesn’t work, it’s a huge waste of time! If what people really need is broader access to GLP-1 medications, then we need to (a) know that and (b) formulate policy ideas that achieve that goal.

The basic problem is that just saying government programs should help address problems that aren’t addressed by the market alone, while true, offers basically no guidance about what to actually do. It is very, very important to come up with correct empirical analysis or else you’re not going to accomplish anything.

Conversely, conservatives put more faith in culture than in policy to address what they see as the problems of society. That in some ways lightens the load in terms of how much high-quality policy analysis you need. But in other ways it raises the stakes for doing the work in society at large. Are conservatives succeeding in building compelling institutions that can address their concerns about trends in American life? I think they pretty clearly are not, even according to conservatives. And on a policy level, they are completely up the creek without a paddle.

The pandemic revealed that many longstanding conservative criticisms of the drug approval process have some merit.

But there is no post-pandemic FDA reform push from the GOP, and certainly no agenda to take lessons learned from Operation Warp Speed and apply them to other issues. Republicans have become the party of conspiracy theorists who believe Bill Gates is using vaccines as a covert mind control program, so even when they hit on something that works, they don’t dare talk about it or build compelling narratives around it.

I would, at the end of this piece, ideally present solutions to these problems. Maybe all the cranks and idiots will vanish from the earth and all future political discussions will take place among smart, well-informed people in a way that allows for ideologically balanced policy debates. That would be nice! But it seems unlikely. In the real world, where the cranks will always be with us, I think it would be better to have them more evenly distributed across the parties rather than having one crazy party and one party of credulous conformists. Maybe if Trump loses, whatever comes after him on the right will have some kind of re-realigning effect. For now, though, the trend only seems to be accelerating.