Disconfirmation. The system does all sorts of things, but it is tuned for what Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in their 2018 book, The Coddling of the American Mind, call “institutionalized disconfirmation.” Individuals, of course, work hard to confirm their own viewpoints, and try hard to persuade others. But they understand that their claims will and must be challenged; they anticipate those challenges and respond; they subject their scholarship to peer review and replication, their journalism to editing and fact-checking, their legal briefs to adversarial lawyers, their intelligence to red-team review.
Madison was aware of the general problem, which he knew had sunk democracies of the past. He called it the problem of factions—what today we often call special interests. “By a faction,” he wrote in Federalist No. 10, “I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”
What, then, is the best course for the real experts? To help the public understand how their field works, in particular how science works. Most Americans think of science by its endpoints—a discovery or breakthrough or invention. They look at dazzling pictures of galaxies and read of miracle drugs. But science is really all about the process of learning and discovering, with many failures and disappointments.
But fundamentally Just America ["progressives;" "social justice warriors;" "anti-racists"] is about race. Everything else is adjunct.
Spread across priorities ranging from childcare to the energy transition, that was far too little to effect a transformation of American society or to put the United States on course to climate stabilization. Especially with regard to the energy transition, they appeared to rest on optimistic assumptions about the private investment that would be triggered by modest public stimulus combined with regulatory change. When it came to long-term policy, Bidenomics was a continuation of the public-private, blended finance, Frankenstein policies that had been so typical of the crisis-fighting in 2020.
