I find the implication of these surveys very hard to believe. Historically, it has been the far left (not far right) that has openly encouraged lying for the cause.
Yeah, I can see your point like with all their lies about pretending that ethnic and socio-economic differences in academic performance are solely explained by environment and not genetics… like they pretend that the children do worse or are prone to crime due to poverty rather than bad genetics… also lies about women and men being intellectual equals and pretending that the gender wage gap isn't explained by men simply having bigger heads? (very obvious that men tend to have bigger heads and that should explain why they have higher income), could also be explained by their superior physical strength being economically advantageous in blue-collar labor.
Like maybe amongst families of lower socio-economic status who are blue-collar workers, the men would be making more money and this could be attributed to having more physical strength for jobs that require this.
Crime is not caused by poverty- although there is some evidence poverty causes an increase in property crime (as crimes of opportunity) related to poverty. And it's not bad genetics. The key difference is fatherhood rates at the community level- also the single most important driver in terms of social mobility (Dr Raj Chetty).
The best examples comes from the UK, which has extensive data on crime by ethnicity at a granular level. At one point Afro-Caribbean British kids under 25 were over twenty times more likely to be victims or offenders in knife crime, and four times more likely to be excluded from school. At the same time, African British kids showed no difference in knife crime from Whites or in terms of school exclusions and obtained better exam results than the White British population. The rates of fatherhood for Afro-Caribbean communities hovered around the 40% mark, in most African British communities (other than the Somali British) fatherhood rates were in the high sixties. Poverty rates were the same.
Economic studies show that at the aggregated level the gender pay gap disappears once one accounts for personal and economic choices.
Of course, it's still possible to make a Left-leaning argument about crime and poverty. The evidence shows that in the modern economic landscape successful marriage which lasts has become a luxury good. Economic stresses and the inability to make quality time have been destroying the two parent family for the white blue collar class, in the same way that it destroyed the Black family. Wealthy conservatives have the most successful marriages, by the numbers, closely followed by wealthy liberals and progressives. Even the world's few matriarchal societies understood that pubescent boys needed to be socialised by men at the group level. Why else would rites of passage be set so universally across cultures? William Golding was only wrong about the age.
Flood Western markets with cheap starter homes- a commodity which has all but disappeared from American housing markets- and the West might just have a chance at recovery. Rentier economics is not a formula for stable family formation. If not, the inevitable path is managed decline. It's also a great way of providing the well-paying blue collar jobs ailing communities desperately need to save themselves from social disintegration, endemic crime and the fentanyl crisis.
Very good point. The best research was done by Richard Tremblay in Canada on Chronic Physical Aggression in children. He won the Stockholm Prize in Criminology in 2017 for his work. Of course, you can find quite a few papers of his on Google Scholar, but this rarely watched YouTube video is a great source. The graphic at 35.30 is pretty instructive. Towards the end of his career he started to place an increasing emphasis on epigenetics, but his last paper was perhaps disappointingly guilty of recidivism towards a Rousseauvian worldview.
The thing that most people miss is ecosystem. If you’ve read Robert Plomin’s Blueprint you will know that polygenics are pretty predictive, but Plomin himself argues that healthier ecosystems for humans more generally can shift our society upwards and improve outcomes. The problem is this argument is dominated by Leftists with an approach of direct interventions which mainly fail, or remove benign nurturing systems which have been working for hundreds or thousands of years. A better approach would be something along the lines of Libertarian Paternalism with an absolute injunction against using state sponsored fear to try to influence populations.
This is a nice demonstration about the pitfalls of self-scoring. One of the biggest issues in the contemporary mainstream left (just as most hegemonic worldviews beforehand) is the "I'm in favor of everything good, and against everything bad" pretense, never considering or even admitting the existence of trade-offs.
For a simple example, imagine one person saying they're strongly against lying, but then in practice they hard censor everything but the consensus, since obviously consensus=truth so saying anything else is lying.
And then another person saying lying isn't THAT bad, but in practice this just means they allow open discourse and truth-finding (which requires not punishing people who write false things too harshly).
Indeed, casual empirics would argue that the American left is totally fine with lies for a good cause. Phrases like "false, but accurate" or obvious nonsense like "fiery but mostly peaceful protests" suggest that it isn't the relative truth value of statements they care about, but being able to rationalize it as not actually false.
'The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.' - Bertrand Russell ‘29
'The masses have never thirsted for the truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master….Whoever attempts to destroy those illusions is always their victim.' - Gustave Le Bon 1895
I think the type of lie matters. I consider myself heterodox, although I will admit to a certain degree of anti-ideology animosity. A more nuanced question might be something along the lines of 'are you willing to tolerate lying in your political leaders if it furthers the cause of your political tribe'. One would expect to see more positives in the partisan camps.
However, there is an element of structural asymmetry to the question itself- conservatives are generally reactionary and are defined by opposition. The Left actually believes in government as a positive force. Sure, it can be- but is generally not, especially in terms of execution. The key understanding is that the most benignly positive forces for any society are generally ground-up rather than top-down. William Easterly demonstrated just how disastrous top-down technocratic influence can be in his book The Tyranny of Experts. It's not an exaggeration to state that the research shows that the history of foreign aid in Africa is one which at best achieved absolutely no remediation of poverty and at worst was a positively harmful force in preventing populations from dispensing with bad leadership and institutions.
The Western decline is driven by the same force. There's some nuance to it- experts are a lot more useful in closed systems, but generally their attempts at 'help' through interventions is almost always harmful.
Anyway, I asked Grok and other AIs to find examples of where cost cutting by DOGE had led to the ending of actual poverty programs and, with the exception of a disruption of FEWS NET, no evidence was forthcoming.
Seriously. I can't understand why people take him seriously. He's clever, but also possibly multiple people living in the same head. If it turned out he was a destabilizing agent serving a foreign power, but one of those powers whose dictator changes every few weeks and then makes their horse a Senator, it would track.
"Seriously. I can't understand why people take him seriously. He's clever, but also possibly multiple people living in the same head."
Agreed. Haniana is tagged as a right-wing political commentator. Yet he posts comments like this on X.
"Very good piece that gets to the central question at the heart of my work. The left is an epistemologically superior position. The fact that the right is filled with dummies and liars has to be taken seriously when thinking about who is correct on substantive issues."
'Richard Hanania should give up his dumb libertarianism and be the earnest liberal he wants to be.' - David Sessions
That's the strange thing, he isn't even libertarian, either. He shows very little interest in individual liberty, individual rights, small government, free markets... about the only libertarian position he holds is open immigration, which is contentious among libertarians. The best model I can come up with for him is that he was a young edge-lord, and at the time being right wing in a performative way was edgy; now that he is older and doesn't feel that need for that he has drifted towards the conventional academic mainstream of leftism.
Shrug. Any objective examination of liberal media's treatment of Trump for the last decade shows that Democrats are perfectly fine with outright lying and politicians lying as long as it's targeted at their partisan foes. For example, Biden outright campaigned on claiming that that Trump had called Nazis "very fine people" long after that oft repeated lie of commission had been widely debunked.
What the American survey mostly gets at is a consistent finding that Republicans have lower expectations of politicians in general (and for that matter, of humans in general). If you asked how many of your followers agree with the sentiment "How can you tell a politician is lying? His lips are moving" you'd almost certainly see higher agreement from the Right than the Left. If you ask whether people are inherently good and learn to be wicked or inherently wicked and must be taught to be good, you'll find the Right more often endorses the original sin side.
1) *Social Desirability Bias*, i.e. people giving answers to polls/surveys based on what they think the *expected* answer is as opposed to their real opinions/views.
2) Luke Conway's work on the Left's authoritarian problem, of which the Left is unaware (& thus unable to report on meaningfully).
3) Gary Saul Morson's outstanding essay *Leninthink* in *The New Criterion* (which explains that for the Bolshevik Left, truthfulness isn't even an operative concept).
There is something seriously wrong with Hanania. He's far more interested in provoking people on the right than he is in saying anything serious or insightful.
I suspect that people across the political spectrum tend to overestimate the extent to which people they disagree with are lying, as opposed to genuinely believing what they are saying (even if it is blatantly false). What people want to be true, what their social circles think, and what serves their own self-interest have big effects on the views people hold, but they're very good at rationalizing false viewpoints and thinking that they reached it for good reasons.
Maybe a better survey would allow followers to choose between two statements: One containing an assertion that is complimentary to RWers but widely-known to be untrue, and another disparaging of RWers but widely-known to be true. Then append "+ RW" & "+ LW" for four choices.
"Give me an example," you say. IDK. If I think of something I'll reply to this.
I'm interested in whether the studies were age-matched. Are people identifying as Left younger than those identifying with Right? Could it be that the Right is older and more realistic about lying politicians than the younger and more naïve Left? I'm genuinely asking - just putting forward a hypothesis.
The US Democrats of the Trump era constantly lie about almost everything: Crime rates, killings of unarmed blacks by police, border security, "Russian collusion", Charlottesville 2017, January 6, the reality of left-wing violence, Hunter Biden laptop, a long list of lies relating to COVID and a host of other things like (for example) First Amenmdent jurisprudence. Maybe the answer to this puzzle lies in self-proclaimed leftist Batya Ungar-Sargon's claim that Trumpism is the true leftism at this point in US history. Not entirely unconvincing, since we all know that Dems are now demographically the party of the rich. Also obvious the Dems are now the party of jingoistic war, mass censorship and a special Soviet-style justice system for "enemies of the state." In conclusion, note that Hanania now puts both DJT and Calvin Coolidge in the socialist camp because low immigration and tariffs are socialist policies.
What does it say about the fact that the very worst leftists — RFK, Hindu cultist Tulsi Gabbard, Chelsea "Don't Call Me Bradley" Manning, Ian Miles Cheong, and practically every Dem who faces or has faced corruption charges — so easily find a home in the Trumplican party today?
Nothing good about the modern Anglophonic Right, least of all in its American incarnation.
I find the implication of these surveys very hard to believe. Historically, it has been the far left (not far right) that has openly encouraged lying for the cause.
Yeah, I can see your point like with all their lies about pretending that ethnic and socio-economic differences in academic performance are solely explained by environment and not genetics… like they pretend that the children do worse or are prone to crime due to poverty rather than bad genetics… also lies about women and men being intellectual equals and pretending that the gender wage gap isn't explained by men simply having bigger heads? (very obvious that men tend to have bigger heads and that should explain why they have higher income), could also be explained by their superior physical strength being economically advantageous in blue-collar labor.
Like maybe amongst families of lower socio-economic status who are blue-collar workers, the men would be making more money and this could be attributed to having more physical strength for jobs that require this.
Crime is not caused by poverty- although there is some evidence poverty causes an increase in property crime (as crimes of opportunity) related to poverty. And it's not bad genetics. The key difference is fatherhood rates at the community level- also the single most important driver in terms of social mobility (Dr Raj Chetty).
The best examples comes from the UK, which has extensive data on crime by ethnicity at a granular level. At one point Afro-Caribbean British kids under 25 were over twenty times more likely to be victims or offenders in knife crime, and four times more likely to be excluded from school. At the same time, African British kids showed no difference in knife crime from Whites or in terms of school exclusions and obtained better exam results than the White British population. The rates of fatherhood for Afro-Caribbean communities hovered around the 40% mark, in most African British communities (other than the Somali British) fatherhood rates were in the high sixties. Poverty rates were the same.
Economic studies show that at the aggregated level the gender pay gap disappears once one accounts for personal and economic choices.
Of course, it's still possible to make a Left-leaning argument about crime and poverty. The evidence shows that in the modern economic landscape successful marriage which lasts has become a luxury good. Economic stresses and the inability to make quality time have been destroying the two parent family for the white blue collar class, in the same way that it destroyed the Black family. Wealthy conservatives have the most successful marriages, by the numbers, closely followed by wealthy liberals and progressives. Even the world's few matriarchal societies understood that pubescent boys needed to be socialised by men at the group level. Why else would rites of passage be set so universally across cultures? William Golding was only wrong about the age.
Flood Western markets with cheap starter homes- a commodity which has all but disappeared from American housing markets- and the West might just have a chance at recovery. Rentier economics is not a formula for stable family formation. If not, the inevitable path is managed decline. It's also a great way of providing the well-paying blue collar jobs ailing communities desperately need to save themselves from social disintegration, endemic crime and the fentanyl crisis.
> And it's not bad genetics. The key difference is fatherhood rates
Fatherhood rates are not influenced by genetics?
Very good point. The best research was done by Richard Tremblay in Canada on Chronic Physical Aggression in children. He won the Stockholm Prize in Criminology in 2017 for his work. Of course, you can find quite a few papers of his on Google Scholar, but this rarely watched YouTube video is a great source. The graphic at 35.30 is pretty instructive. Towards the end of his career he started to place an increasing emphasis on epigenetics, but his last paper was perhaps disappointingly guilty of recidivism towards a Rousseauvian worldview.
The thing that most people miss is ecosystem. If you’ve read Robert Plomin’s Blueprint you will know that polygenics are pretty predictive, but Plomin himself argues that healthier ecosystems for humans more generally can shift our society upwards and improve outcomes. The problem is this argument is dominated by Leftists with an approach of direct interventions which mainly fail, or remove benign nurturing systems which have been working for hundreds or thousands of years. A better approach would be something along the lines of Libertarian Paternalism with an absolute injunction against using state sponsored fear to try to influence populations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOAi-yyGSJ4
This is a nice demonstration about the pitfalls of self-scoring. One of the biggest issues in the contemporary mainstream left (just as most hegemonic worldviews beforehand) is the "I'm in favor of everything good, and against everything bad" pretense, never considering or even admitting the existence of trade-offs.
For a simple example, imagine one person saying they're strongly against lying, but then in practice they hard censor everything but the consensus, since obviously consensus=truth so saying anything else is lying.
And then another person saying lying isn't THAT bad, but in practice this just means they allow open discourse and truth-finding (which requires not punishing people who write false things too harshly).
In general imo this kind of study shows us that the current left thinks that they're better people, not that they actually are. And we already knew that. For another real but slightly off-topic example of this kind of arrogance in the college-educated: https://www.themotte.org/post/1189/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/256018?context=8#context
Indeed, casual empirics would argue that the American left is totally fine with lies for a good cause. Phrases like "false, but accurate" or obvious nonsense like "fiery but mostly peaceful protests" suggest that it isn't the relative truth value of statements they care about, but being able to rationalize it as not actually false.
On consensus:
'The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.' - Bertrand Russell ‘29
'The masses have never thirsted for the truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master….Whoever attempts to destroy those illusions is always their victim.' - Gustave Le Bon 1895
I think the type of lie matters. I consider myself heterodox, although I will admit to a certain degree of anti-ideology animosity. A more nuanced question might be something along the lines of 'are you willing to tolerate lying in your political leaders if it furthers the cause of your political tribe'. One would expect to see more positives in the partisan camps.
However, there is an element of structural asymmetry to the question itself- conservatives are generally reactionary and are defined by opposition. The Left actually believes in government as a positive force. Sure, it can be- but is generally not, especially in terms of execution. The key understanding is that the most benignly positive forces for any society are generally ground-up rather than top-down. William Easterly demonstrated just how disastrous top-down technocratic influence can be in his book The Tyranny of Experts. It's not an exaggeration to state that the research shows that the history of foreign aid in Africa is one which at best achieved absolutely no remediation of poverty and at worst was a positively harmful force in preventing populations from dispensing with bad leadership and institutions.
The Western decline is driven by the same force. There's some nuance to it- experts are a lot more useful in closed systems, but generally their attempts at 'help' through interventions is almost always harmful.
Anyway, I asked Grok and other AIs to find examples of where cost cutting by DOGE had led to the ending of actual poverty programs and, with the exception of a disruption of FEWS NET, no evidence was forthcoming.
Haniana also believes the media is basically honest, except for the things they lie about.
Seriously. I can't understand why people take him seriously. He's clever, but also possibly multiple people living in the same head. If it turned out he was a destabilizing agent serving a foreign power, but one of those powers whose dictator changes every few weeks and then makes their horse a Senator, it would track.
"Seriously. I can't understand why people take him seriously. He's clever, but also possibly multiple people living in the same head."
Agreed. Haniana is tagged as a right-wing political commentator. Yet he posts comments like this on X.
"Very good piece that gets to the central question at the heart of my work. The left is an epistemologically superior position. The fact that the right is filled with dummies and liars has to be taken seriously when thinking about who is correct on substantive issues."
'Richard Hanania should give up his dumb libertarianism and be the earnest liberal he wants to be.' - David Sessions
That's the strange thing, he isn't even libertarian, either. He shows very little interest in individual liberty, individual rights, small government, free markets... about the only libertarian position he holds is open immigration, which is contentious among libertarians. The best model I can come up with for him is that he was a young edge-lord, and at the time being right wing in a performative way was edgy; now that he is older and doesn't feel that need for that he has drifted towards the conventional academic mainstream of leftism.
Shrug. Any objective examination of liberal media's treatment of Trump for the last decade shows that Democrats are perfectly fine with outright lying and politicians lying as long as it's targeted at their partisan foes. For example, Biden outright campaigned on claiming that that Trump had called Nazis "very fine people" long after that oft repeated lie of commission had been widely debunked.
What the American survey mostly gets at is a consistent finding that Republicans have lower expectations of politicians in general (and for that matter, of humans in general). If you asked how many of your followers agree with the sentiment "How can you tell a politician is lying? His lips are moving" you'd almost certainly see higher agreement from the Right than the Left. If you ask whether people are inherently good and learn to be wicked or inherently wicked and must be taught to be good, you'll find the Right more often endorses the original sin side.
Three points I would like to mention:
1) *Social Desirability Bias*, i.e. people giving answers to polls/surveys based on what they think the *expected* answer is as opposed to their real opinions/views.
2) Luke Conway's work on the Left's authoritarian problem, of which the Left is unaware (& thus unable to report on meaningfully).
3) Gary Saul Morson's outstanding essay *Leninthink* in *The New Criterion* (which explains that for the Bolshevik Left, truthfulness isn't even an operative concept).
There is something seriously wrong with Hanania. He's far more interested in provoking people on the right than he is in saying anything serious or insightful.
I suspect that people across the political spectrum tend to overestimate the extent to which people they disagree with are lying, as opposed to genuinely believing what they are saying (even if it is blatantly false). What people want to be true, what their social circles think, and what serves their own self-interest have big effects on the views people hold, but they're very good at rationalizing false viewpoints and thinking that they reached it for good reasons.
I wonder if Hanania would argue that your readers are unrepresentative in important ways: smart, disagreeable, truth-seeking non-conformists
That result would contradict other studies, as well as the work of Jonathan Haidt.
Maybe a better survey would allow followers to choose between two statements: One containing an assertion that is complimentary to RWers but widely-known to be untrue, and another disparaging of RWers but widely-known to be true. Then append "+ RW" & "+ LW" for four choices.
"Give me an example," you say. IDK. If I think of something I'll reply to this.
I'm interested in whether the studies were age-matched. Are people identifying as Left younger than those identifying with Right? Could it be that the Right is older and more realistic about lying politicians than the younger and more naïve Left? I'm genuinely asking - just putting forward a hypothesis.
The US Democrats of the Trump era constantly lie about almost everything: Crime rates, killings of unarmed blacks by police, border security, "Russian collusion", Charlottesville 2017, January 6, the reality of left-wing violence, Hunter Biden laptop, a long list of lies relating to COVID and a host of other things like (for example) First Amenmdent jurisprudence. Maybe the answer to this puzzle lies in self-proclaimed leftist Batya Ungar-Sargon's claim that Trumpism is the true leftism at this point in US history. Not entirely unconvincing, since we all know that Dems are now demographically the party of the rich. Also obvious the Dems are now the party of jingoistic war, mass censorship and a special Soviet-style justice system for "enemies of the state." In conclusion, note that Hanania now puts both DJT and Calvin Coolidge in the socialist camp because low immigration and tariffs are socialist policies.
What does it say about the fact that the very worst leftists — RFK, Hindu cultist Tulsi Gabbard, Chelsea "Don't Call Me Bradley" Manning, Ian Miles Cheong, and practically every Dem who faces or has faced corruption charges — so easily find a home in the Trumplican party today?
Nothing good about the modern Anglophonic Right, least of all in its American incarnation.