In a previous post, I wonder whether democratic realism shows that public reason is trying to solve an illusory problem. Kevin Vallier has a lengthy response to Achen and Bartels in his new book, but I think he's largely missing the point. The point isn't that the people lack justification for their beliefs; it's that most of them don't have the beliefs the public reason liberal thinks they do. They are ideologues without issues. People vote for who they are, not what they want. Most Americans are basically innocent of ideology, and even among those who claim to believe this or that, most are simply parroting their party's current platform without real commitment.
For the latter, consider an analogy. Suppose Jeff simply parrots whatever Steve says on TV. On Monday, Steve says he believes Christ is God. Jeff repeats that Christ is God when surveyed. On Tuesday, Steve says Jesus was not God, but just a nice man. Jeff, when surveyed, says the same thing. On Wednesday, Steve once again says that Christ is God. When surveyed, Jeff says the same. Suppose, on top of this, we find very strong evidence that Jeff receives various social benefits from saying whatever Steve says. Here, I'm inclined to say Jeff was not really a Christian on Monday or Wednesday, and I suspect Kevin would agree. The question of whether Jeff was justified is secondary.
With that, here are some excerpts from a draft of the forthcoming paper.
A core assumption of public reason liberalism, the political theory associated with the idea of public justification, is that people’s reasons for action and belief can differ substantially. Consequently, a reason must in some sense be relative to an agent’s beliefs, values and other commitments.
While public reason liberals dispute the exact details of this problem, we can state the problem as follows:
The public reason problem: For any potential political policy or moral rule P, how do we show individual reasonable citizens that they have sufficient reason to endorse P, in light of their current doxastic states? How do we show that P hooks on to what they already believe and endorse?
Public reason liberals dispute what counts as sufficient reason, which beliefs matter, and to what degree we may idealize actual citizens. They also dispute whether the arguments or reasons for P must be accessible or understandable to citizens, or whether the arguments must simply be grounded in premises the citizens already accept. But this is the basic framing.
The realist, however, introduces a new spin on the problem:
The realist version of the public reason problem: Most citizens lack sufficiently robust doxastic states upon which to “hook on” a justification for P. If citizens lack the right kind of underlying beliefs, how can we justify P to them?
Consider John Tomasi’s helpful “alphabet people” categorization of kinds of people among whom the public reason project is meant to facilitate compromise and consensus. Tomasi’s “A-people” value autonomy, creativity, and individuality; they are highly self-aware, reflective, deliberative, and ethicallyliberal. D-people (such as Nazis or theocratic citizens) are the other extreme; they are radically communitarian and authoritarian, reject political liberalism altogether, and wish to impose their comprehensive religious and/are secular views upon others through government coercion, regardless of dissent. D-people are considered “unreasonable” or “unqualified” in the public reason project, and so the liberal principle of legitimacy does not require that coercive principles be justified to them. Next to D-people are C-people. C-people may be “citizens of faith” or “reasonable romantics”. They affirm comprehensive religious or traditionalist moral doctrines in which there are strong moral and status hierarchies, and may reject many ethically liberal ideas (e.g., by holding abortion is evil or that mothers should work at home). However, they are “reasonable” because they accept political liberalism and thus believe it is wrong to impose traditional moral rules or religious/communitarian ideas of personhood through politics. Finally, B-people are ideologically between the As and C. They have weaker commitments to their not quite liberal, not quite traditional views. They find elements of both ethical liberalism and ethical communitarianism/traditionalism plausible. Like the A- and C-people, they are also committed to the public reason project. Tomasi asserts that “the great sweep of citizens” in modern democracies are B-people.
The public reason project is designed to deal with A- through D-people. It has seemingly interminable intramural debates, of course: Who count as the D-people, the ones who get excluded from public justification? How and in what ways must we accommodate reasonable citizens of faith? Public reason liberals dispute the answers, but the theory is explicitly about such belief-filled people.
Realism complicates this picture dramatically. The realist contends that few people—maybe only about 10%--in modern democracies are A, B, C, or D-people, though many more people talk like they are. Instead, we must add at least two more categories of letter people:
X-people: Citizens who are largely non-ideological. They have few political opinions, and lack what Rawls would call comprehensive moral, religious, or political views. What few opinions they have are largely ephemeral and unstable. They may be attached to a particular party, but that merely reflects arbitrary historical connections between that party and their identity; they do not endorse their parties’ politics.
Y-people: Citizens who post-hoc rationalize and assert that they agree with their party politics, but whose ideological commitments are superficial. Like the X-people, these citizens have a sense of identity, and their identities are connected to particular political parties for arbitrary, historical reasons. Unlike X-people, Y-people later learn what positions their parties advocate, and will claim that they too advocate it. However, their apparent ideology and political beliefs are fleeting and shallow. When their party changes platforms, they will change “beliefs,” usually without any awareness that they have “changed their minds”. Like the X-people, they also lack normatively significant moral, religious, or political views, despite how loudly they seem to advocate such views.
The main difference between the A, B, C, and D-people versus the X and Y-people is doxastic: A through D-people hold the kinds of beliefs which the public reason project regards as normatively significant. X and Y-people do not. They are, in Lilliana Mason’s (2018) apt description, “ideologues without issues”; they are strongly committed to their parties despite not advocating anything or sharing their platforms or values. The Y-people seem to hold political beliefs, but it turns out on further inspection that their expressed commitment to such beliefs is insincere and superficial. They express commitment to demonstrate membership in valuable social groups, not because they really believe what they say. Or, to paraphrase Robin Hanson (2018), for most people, politics is not about policy.
Y-people seem have political beliefs, but they hold their “beliefs” in a weird way. Their beliefs, if we can even call them that, do not reflect real commitments about the good or just, or about how the world works. Instead, expressing political “beliefs” is largely equivalent to wearing sports team colors; they are a form of conspicuous display intended to show membership in what are, for that voter, socially advantageous groups. For them, advocating a policy is like wearing the Patriots’ blue and silver or waiving the Steelers’ terrible towel.
Consider: Fans of the New England Patriots loudly proclaim that Tom Brady is the Greatest of All Time (GOAT), and loudly sneer at the Colts, Jets, Giants, or Bills. These conspicuous displays are part of Patriots fandom and demonstrate to others (and oneself) that one is indeed a fan.
But now consider: While it seems like such fans are committed to certain beliefs and attitudes about the sport and their team, many of these commitments are superficial. For instance, if the Pats change their colors to green and purple, then (after some complaining), the fans will change their “favorite colors” too. If Brady quits and then signs with the Bills or Giants, many fans will immediately say Brady was always overrated, and will further claim they have always said that, forgetting that a month ago they said he was the GOAT. They are committed to the view that the Pats should win; most of their other proclamations and behaviors are just expressions of that view. [Note: I wrote this before Brady signed with TB, and in fact, I see just this behavior on the Pats fan pages.]
The realists say the same goes for most citizens in modern democracies. The identity “southern evangelical Christian” is (for largely arbitrary reasons) attached to the Republican Party; the identity “Jew” is (again for largely arbitrary reasons) attached to the Democratic Party. A proper subset of such citizens—the Y-people—become ideologically-expressive voters; they will claim post-hoc they share their party’s political beliefs upon learning what their party believes. However, their commitment is no deeper than Patriots fans’ commitments to blue, red, and silver; if the parties were to change policy platforms, most of their “ideological” voters would claim they agree with the changes, and some would claim they believed such views all along. Even apparent key issues, such as views for or against abortion, or for or against free trade, are largely expensive proclamations intended to demonstrate membership in the group
To illustrate, consider how many Republicans switched their “views,” seemingly without cognitive dissonance, on a wide range of economic subjects when Trump came to power. They went from pro-free trade to protectionist almost overnight, without awareness that they switched.
On the realist view, when a typical Democrat or Republican expresses her “beliefs” about justice or politics, we should regard this not as evidence of reasonable pluralism about the good and right, but instead regard their behaviors as expressions of commitment to seeing their particular political team win, without any deeper commitment to what that team stands for. What seems like the expression of belief—and thus what seems like evidence of widespread doxastic disagreement and value pluralism—is instead the conspicuous display of party affiliation which generates external benefits for voters, by helping them form and maintain friendships, romantic attachments, and financial partnerships outside politics.