[Ilya Somin] Three issues I changed my mind about in 2016

This year saw a major, unexpected political upheaval in both the United States and Europe. Most commentators have reacted to these events by arguing that they just reinforce the validity of the pundits’ own previous views. Whether the commentator in question is on the left or the right, they tend to claim that Trump’s strengthens the case for their own longstanding commitments.

The fact that pundits double down on their existing views does not necessarily mean they are wrong. But if you consistently claim that even highly unexpected events as proof that you were right all along, that suggests your judgment might be influenced by “confirmation bias,” the cognitive error of interpreting new evidence to conform to your preexisting views, regardless of whether it really supports them or not.

I am far from being a complete exception to these tendencies. For example, I have long argued that political ignorance is a serious problem. And I believe that ignorance was a major factor in this year’s election, and that it contributed to Trump’s victory.

Still there are some issues that this year’s events led me to change my mind about. Here are three of the most important.

I. The Perils of Polarization.

I have long argued that partisan bias is a serious problem. The body politic suffers when we reflexively support our own party and ignore its faults, while reflexively demonizing the opposition and dismissing ideas associated with it. But I also thought that political polarization – the growing ideological gap between the two parties – is not a significant problem. So what if the two parties are becoming more extreme? There is no good reason to think that extreme positions are necessarily worse than moderate ones.

I still see little inherent virtue in moderation. But polarization is much more of a problem than I thought. The more polarized we are, the greater the partisan bias, and the greater the tendency to reject anything associated with the opposition. Polarization also makes voters and political activists more willing to tolerate bad behavior by their own party and its leaders. The greater the degree of polarization, the higher the stakes of political conflict. When your opponent wins in a highly polarized environment, policy will turn against your values in a big way, not just a small one. That makes it all the more imperative to avoid doing anything that might give ammunition to the opposing party.

For that reason, among others, partisans become even more willing than usual to turn a blind eye to the flaws of their own leaders, and tolerate behavior they would never accept if the other side did it. Also, it’s easy to assume that our party leaders can’t be all that bad so long as they are fighting against the really evil people in the other party.

This sort of dynamic is one key reason why the vast majority of Republican voters ultimately “came home” to Trump, despite the fact that many had severe reservations about him. But while the Trump phenomenon helped catalyze my rethinking on on this issue, the risks of polarization go well beyond it.

II. Should We Bring Back the Smoke-Filled Rooms?

Until this year, I tended to dismiss Jonathan Rauch’s argument that the political “establishment’s” loss of control over candidate nomination processes is a bad thing. As I saw it, presidential candidates selected under the more populist process adopted in 1972 do not seem to be, on average, worse than those previously chosen by party elites meeting in proverbial “smoke-filled rooms.” In addition, the influential “party decides” school of political science argued that party elites still retained effective control over the process. As a