Bad incentives and the politics of fear. By Matthew Yglesias

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Bad incentives and the politics of fear. By Matthew Yglesias

12 - 15 minutes

Probably the single most high-impact political event of my lifetime occurred on the morning of September 11, 2001, when a coordinated group of hijackers seized control of four American airliners and tried to crash them into high-profile buildings. Two planes struck the two towers of the World Trade Center, a third hit the Pentagon, and the passengers on the fourth plane — alerted to the nature of the terrorists’ plans — stormed the cockpit and brought the plane down in a sparsely populated area of Pennsylvania.

This was of course a striking event on its own — thousands of people murdered, enormous buildings destroyed, a huge shock to the airline industry — but what made it a signature political event is that it caused the popularity of the incumbent president to soar. That was in part a “rally ‘round the flag” effect. But it also reflected a deeper reality which is that when people feel physically threatened, they tend to gravitate toward the political right, which they associate with a greater willingness to deploy unrestrained violence in order to defend the community. That’s why, for example, high-profile ISIS killings in 2014 were a problem for Democrats during the midterms, whereas al-Qaeda attacks boosted George W. Bush.

Had Palm Beach County designed its ballot better back in 2000, it’s likely that Al Gore would have been president in the fall of 2001. There was a bit of a principled disagreement during the Clinton-Bush transition as to whether the Clinton administration’s focus on non-state security threats was correct, and it seems the Bush team decided to somewhat deprioritize the Clinton-era focus on al-Qaeda relative to state actors and great power conflicts.

A Gore administration would probably not have made that choice, and it’s at least possible that a more consistent top-down focus on al-Qaeda and counterterrorism issues would have led to the unraveling of the plot. And that would have been a big news story, but hardly an era-defining political event. But by the same token, had Gore been president and not foiled the attack, he likely would not have enjoyed a comparable boon in his public opinion ratings. There would have been some rally effect, but also a lot of vicious criticism from the right blaming Democratic weakness for the security failure.

The basic dynamic here — security threats benefit the political right — is familiar enough that we sort of take it for granted. But it creates a paradoxical set of incentives. For a Democratic administration, fending off threats to people’s physical security is a political imperative, whereas if Bush’s security team had been more on-the-ball and prevented the attack, that would have resulted in a worse outcome for them politically. Had he prevented the murder of thousands of people, the GOP wouldn’t have done so well in the 2002 midterms and wouldn’t have been able to pass a second round of regressive tax cuts or the big expansion of Medicare Advantage that happened in 2003.

From the standpoint of the GOP’s interest group base, it’s bad to prevent terrorist attacks.

During the summer of 2020, the United States was rocked by massive racial justice protests, some of which were in turn marred by arson, looting, and rioting.

The extent of this is often exaggerated on the political right — it’s just not the case that dozens of American cities burned to the ground — but it was a pretty big deal, especially because it occurred in the context of a pandemic that was already dealing a blow to central cities. My sense of these events, at least on the east coast, was that the arson and looting that occurred was overwhelmingly opportunistic crime rather than political gestures. In my neighborhood, the liquor store and the cell phone repair shop had their windows smashed and ransacked, but the banks and the fast-casual salad place did not. This is to say people were looting the stores that had fun stuff they could steal rather than going after the symbols of neighborhood gentrification or global capitalism. In Portland specifically, I do think you saw more engagement from ideologically motivated anarchists. But broadly speaking, I think the rioting is better thought of as crime than as an attempt at social revolution.

But the rioting certainly had a political impact and became a major talking point on the political right and for Donald Trump’s re-election campaign.

This then became a very clear example of a similar incentive issue. I do understand the logic of “fear of looters and anarchists makes me want to turn to the political right,” but Trump was president while this stuff was happening. Both Trump and Joe Biden spoke out against rioting during the fall campaign, but you could tell by the tone that Biden was genuinely hoping that people would not riot because he thought rioting was bad for the cities where it was happening and bad for him politically, while the right greeted the outbreak of a new round of disorder in Kenosha with glee because they don’t care about cities and thought rioting was good for them.

A big part of the politics of rioting, of course, was Trump's warning that what we saw in Kenosha would spread nationally if Biden were put in charge.

I think we can now say from the standpoint of 2023 that this has not occurred. And while I of course don’t expect to see conservatives giving Joe Biden credit for anything, it’s noteworthy that conservatives don’t seem at all interested in why their confident forecasts about this were mistaken. It’s pretty important to try to hold yourself accountable for bad predictions if you want to understand the future better. But of course not everyone actually does want to understand the future better. In particular, while a person genuinely interested in minimizing the number of riots would ask a question like “why was my forecast about rioting so bad? What is it about these dynamics that I’ve misunderstood?” a person who just thinks he benefits from rioting probably won’t worry too much about this.

And just as 9/11 helped bring the country a capital gains tax cut, it seems like if we’d had more rioting in 2020 (or if it had occurred closer to Election Day), that would have spared corporate America from some of Biden’s tax hikes.

I don’t think Trump wanted to see more rioting exactly, nor did he deliberately try to make rioting happen.

But political leaders face tradeoffs and are pulled in different directions. Trump has a personality that favors drama, conflict, and tension. Faced with a situation where it was strongly in his self-interest to create a calmer situation, he would probably struggle to succeed but might at least try on the margin. But in a situation where he benefits from things spiraling out of control, those basic impulses are indulged. He restrains himself less than he might, and the people he’s surrounded himself with also know, deep down, that the rioting is good for them.

This is why the conservative response to disorder in 2020 — and in subsequent years — has been long on messaging and position-taking and short on policy.

Tom Cotton’s famous June 3, 2020 “Send In The Troops” op-ed is an interesting exception that proves the rule. This is one of the best-known pieces of opinion journalism of our era because of the staff revolts it set off, the subsequent defenestration of James Bennet, and the continuing reverberations of the incident in the New York Times building and the media more broadly. You can’t really understand the more recent story of the open letter denouncing the Times’ coverage of youth gender transition issues — or the significance of management’s non-responsiveness to those demands — absent the context of the Cotton op-ed and the fallout.

What the op-ed is not well known for is any kind of follow-on debate about the substance of Cotton’s ideas. The argument of the piece, broadly speaking, was that the military should be sent into cities where police departments were overmatched by rioting.

When I first read it, this struck me as a somewhat plausible idea that had been given a somewhat trollish frame. It seemed to me that at least some of the problems from that June stemmed from the fact that police departments themselves were not mustering maximum professionalism when asked to police protests, which were after all anti-police protests. Having a third-party force supervise the protests while police departments kept to their normal schedule of neighborhood policing could have been a good idea. That said, while it struck me as plausible at the time, I really wasn’t sure — and now almost three years later, I’m just as unsure as ever because there was barely any discussion of the proposal. No back-and-forth, no refinement of options or clarification of exactly what was meant or what the options were. I think almost everyone agrees that the results of that summer — which included mistreatment of protestors by police officers, rioting that detracted from the protests’ message, and a large increase in “routine” interpersonal violence — were undesirable, but we never had any kind of policy argument as to what lessons we should learn.

By the same token, Trump not only ran as an anti-rioting candidate, but he also ran as an anti-crime candidate even though he was the incumbent president. Then two years later, many GOP congressional candidates ran on anti-crime messages even though the big increase in crime occurred while Republicans were running the show and, by 2022, violence was dropping a bit.

This is, incidentally, something that I always respected about Rudy Giuliani even though he’s always been a bit of a psycho and has really curdled in the past 20 years. When he was a mayor, he didn’t just position himself as the “tough on crime” politician, he actually took responsibility for the crime rate. He argued that he would bring crime down, he won a narrow election victory, crime went down, and then he got re-elected by a large margin. People always have and always will debate exactly how much credit he deserves for that crime drop, but it was democratic politics functioning the way it should. What we get from Republicans in 2023 is Ron DeSantis going to Long Island to slam Democrats on crime even though there is much more violence in Florida than in New York!

The nice thing about a problem-solving mentality is that it can get people out of their political safe zones. Manhattan Institute President Reihan Salam had a piece in the Atlantic recently arguing that Democrats will never enact an abundance agenda as long as progressives remain so supportive of labor unions. I have a bunch of specific quibbles with his argument, but he certainly raises some fair points.

At the same time, whenever I write about the need for supply-side reforms — whether the context is fossil fuels or housing or industrial policy — part of what I have in mind is that whatever its interest group commitments, the Biden administration wants to see good things happen for the economy. If inflation stays high, that’s bad for Biden’s re-election. If inflation is brought down by a big rise in unemployment, that’s also bad for Biden’s re-election. What would be good for Biden’s re-election would be increased productivity driven by supply-side policy. That’s an important countervailing force against pure interest group politics. By the same token, the Trump administration actually did a great job of stiff-arming right-wing ideologues and working with Democrats to craft the CARES Act. Not because Trump is a particularly kind-hearted person, but because he believed delivering a decent economic result was important to his political fortunes. So he empowered Steven Mnuchin to be very pragmatic in working on legislation.

But that’s exactly the spirit we don’t see from Republicans on these hard physical security issues.

Instead, they claim that it’s not their fault that there was an enormous increase in crime during the Trump administration because the reason crime went up is the George Floyd protests. Of course all politicians do some blame-avoidance. But along with blaming other people for inflation, Biden knows he needs to try to bring inflation down, hence decisions like approving the Willow project in Alaska.

A conservative movement that didn’t just benefit from the salience of crime but actually needed lower crime to win would be forced to consider things like the role of firearms availability in driving violence or even the practical need to help high-crime areas recruit more police officers. Intra-coalition tensions are present for all parties at all times, and nobody governs as a pure good government wonk untainted by narrow considerations. But normal, healthy democracy does offer incentives for problem-solving and pragmatism that tend to be absent on these particular topics where the threat environment per se benefits the political right.