Last year, I tried to figure out why there aren’t a lot more right-wing (or apolitical) firms. A recent piece by Richard Hanania comes down firmly in favor of my Explanation #4. To review:
Explanation #4. Few moderates or right-wingers care enough to create a major profit opportunity. While they don’t relish looking over their shoulders, they prefer their current job to an alternative where they can shoot their mouths off but earn a $1000 less per year. In this story, the left proverbially just “wants it more.” And as usual, the market takes the intensity of conflicting preferences into account.
Hanania presents a pile of evidence that despite near-parity in ordinal preferences (the number of Americans who support Democrats roughly equals the number who support Republicans), there is a massive imbalance in cardinal preferences (the number of Americans who strongly support Democrats vastly exceeds the number who strongly support Republicans).
Evidence? Read the whole essay for the graphs; I’ll just summarize here.
1. Vastly more people donate money to Democrats than Republicans.
So while Biden beat Trump in the popular vote by 51%-47% (+4), in the donor game, Biden beat Trump by 61-39% (+22%). It is therefore unsurprising that Biden got more donors than Trump across most professions, and in almost every large institution.
This pattern doesn’t appear to be unique to 2020. In 2016, Hillary Clinton outraised Trump 2-1, including both the campaigns and Super PACs although Trump did beat Hillary in number of small donors as defined by those making contributions of $200 or less.
In the 2012 election, Obama raised $234 million from small individual contributors, compared to $80 million for Romney, while also winning among large contributors.
2. Left-wing protests attract far larger crowds:
In September 2009, at the height of the Tea Party movement, conservatives held the “Taxpayer March on Washington,” which drew something like 60,000-70,000 people, leading one newspaper to call it “the largest conservative protest ever to storm the Capitol.” Since that time, the annual anti-abortion March for Life rally in Washington has drawn massive crowds, with estimates for some years ranging widely from low six figures to mid-to-high six figures. March for Life is not to be confused with “March for Our Lives,” a pro-gun control rally that activists claim saw 800,000 people turn out in 2018. All these events were dwarfed by the Women’s March in opposition to Trump, which drew by one estimate “between 3,267,134 and 5,246,670 people in the United States (our best guess is 4,157,894).
3. Liberals are also much more likely to personally shun conservatives than vice versa:
Those on the left are more likely to block someone on social media over their views, be upset if their child marries someone from the other side, and find it hard to be friends with or date someone they disagree with politically.
Hanania thoughtfully adds: “Not letting politics interfere with personal relationships is a sign that politics isn’t all that important to you.”
4. Leftists are much more likely to seek low-paid jobs yet politically-relevant jobs:
A final way to understand cardinal utility is to consider the media and academia. Generally, these are professions that have absolutely terrible career prospects, and they draw people with high IQs who could expect to be making a lot more money doing something else. But for those who make it in these fields, individuals get to have an influence in society that is disproportionate to their status as measured by income.
Hanania adds:
People go into academia and journalism for generally idealistic reasons. Some conservatives might be turned away from these professions for political reasons, which poses a “chicken or egg” problem. In my experience though, a smart young person going into journalism is probably better off going into conservative media than they are liberal media, which is already saturated with people with elite degrees who cannot find stable employment. There’s a great deal of demand for conservative journalism among the general public, but few competent conservatives who want to be journalists given what the profession pays relative to what else smart people can be doing.
By the way, Hanania piece clearly surpasses mine by generalizing from business to institutions in general:
Asking why corporations are woke is like asking why Hispanics tend to have two arms, or why the Houston Rockets have increased their number of 3-point shots taken over the last few decades. All humans tend to have two arms, and all NBA teams shoot more 3-pointers than in the past, so focusing on one subset of the population that has the same characteristics as all others in the group misses the point.
I think one reason Woke Capital is getting so much attention is because we expect business to be more right-leaning, and corporations throwing in with the party of more taxes and regulation strikes us as odd. We are used to schools, non-profits, mainline religions, etc. taking liberal positions and feel like business should be different. But business is just being assimilated into a larger trend.
Corporations are woke, meaning left wing on social issues relative to the general population, because institutions are woke. So the question becomes why are institutions woke?
So the real story is just that right-wingers are apathetic? Hanania suggests a competing spin:
There’s a way to interpret the data discussed above that is more flattering to conservatives than presenting them as the ideology of people who don’t care. Those who identify on the right are happier, less mentally ill, and more likely to start families. Perhaps political activism is often a sign of a less well-adjusted mind or the result of seeking to fill an empty void in one’s personal life. Conservatives may tell themselves that they are the normal people party, too satisfied and content to expend much time or energy on changing the world. But in the end, the world they live in will ultimately reflect the preferences and values of their enemies.
Overall, Hanania provides a wonderfully compelling explanation for a wide range of social phenomenon. He doesn’t really address the question of, “What changed?” But that’s pretty obvious in his framework. What changed is that the left-right fervor gap has grown rapidly over the last few decades. Especially among the young, who famously feel more fervor than their elders. Makes sense to me.
My main criticism: Hanania still fails to explain the sheer uniformity of left-wing cultural dominance. Competition normally delivers more diversity than we’re getting. And for that, I stand by my Explanation #5, which I flesh out greater detail here.
Explanation #5. Discrimination law covertly stymies the creation of right-wing firms. Most obviously, any firm that openly and aggressively opposed #MeToo and #BLM would soon be sued into oblivion.
Which does raise the question: Since the right runs the government roughly half the time, why don’t they try a lot harder to defang the “discrimination laws” that do so much to cause political discrimination?
P.S. Hanania’s piece thoughtfully discusses several other big issues, so read the whole thing.
READER COMMENTS
David Henderson
Apr 21 2021 at 11:03am
Wow! Hanania’s article is depressingly persuasive.
KevinDC
Apr 21 2021 at 11:20am
Seeing this reminded me of something I read in Michael Shermer’s recent book Giving the Devil His Due. He had an essay on political polarization and antipathy for the other side, which included a graph showing data on how many Democrats/Republicans claimed to “hate” members of the opposing political party over time. The data was interesting – the level of hatred among Democrats was always consistently much higher that Republicans. Going back a few decades, something like 10% of Republicans said they hated Democrats, while more like 20-25% of Democrats said they hate Republicans. Both lines raised over time, but with the level of hate among Democrats always being around double what it was among Republicans – until 2016ish, when the level of hate among Republicans began to shoot up to be almost (but not quite) as high as hate among Democrats.
So now we’re in a situation where Republicans have in the last few years started expressing hatred of Democrats that matches the level of hatred Democrats have been expressing towards Republicans for decades. If you prefer anecdotes to data, this also matches my experience. I’m not a fan of either party, but I find it easy enough to be friends with people who are. Usually when my Republican friends were grousing about Democrats, it was at its worst condescending comments about Democrats being so soft hearted it made them soft headed. When my Democrat friends would complain about Republicans, it was very often bitterly angry and rage filled condemnation of the other side as being irredeemable trash and worthless human scum. If I said anything in defense of Democrats to my Republican friends, they’d usually hear me out, even if they disagreed, and often softened their stance a bit. If I said anything in defense of Republicans to my Democratic friends – in many cases that ended the friendship right there, and in the best case scenario it would result in similar insults being hurled against me, on a dime, by people I had been friends with for years.
Regarding Hanania’s suggesting that people who are more dissatisfied with their personal lives are more prone to try to find meaning in politics, I was reminded of Eric Hoffer making a similar observation in his classic work The True Believer:
Weir
Apr 22 2021 at 1:33am
Billy Wilder was talking about a movie he’d made forty years earlier and even as an old man in his 90s he couldn’t help but take a shot at Jimmy Cagney for being a Republican. Apropos of nothing in the interview, but it still irked him that Jimmy Cagney was a Republican. He made the movie with him anyway.
Now if it’s unclean to watch Jimmy Cagney movies, or Jimmy Stewart movies, or Sammy Davis movies, then that’s a lot of movies that need to be cancelled. People are going to have to burn their Ramones t-shirts and never listen to Prince again.
Chelsea Handler, on the other hand, is a Democrat, so there’s nothing impure about her contribution to the culture. And she’s passionately hateful! Nursing a fanatical grievance? Check. Haunted by the purposelessness of her life? I can believe it.
KevinDC
Apr 22 2021 at 8:30pm
I’m probably going to show my hand here in how out of touch I am culturally, but the only names I recognized in what your post were Jimmy Stewart and Sammy Davis 😛
CSK
Apr 21 2021 at 11:51am
Seems like this raises another pressing question: why do leftists care more? (And why do they care more now?)
At first thought, people could seek meaning in right-wing politics just as easily as in left-wing politics. Perhaps there is another angle here for an explanation based on anti-discrimination law (and discrimination). It just isn’t worth the costs of seeking meaning in right wing politics.
Phil H
Apr 22 2021 at 6:03am
At this moment in history, I feel like the right have manoeuvred themselves into a corner where they associate right wing politics with discrimination. Being right wing at the moment just seems to be about being anti-immigration, anti-trans, anti-Europe, anti-tax, anti-everything. There was a time when the right laid claim to being pro-business, but that has been lost a bit. In theory right-wing politics *could* be inspiring, but in practice, at the moment, it’s just not.
CSK
Apr 22 2021 at 4:53pm
I somewhat agree with these observations about the right. And most of this is not my cup of tea.
But still I wonder, where is the enthusiasm for these rightist causes? The right to life protests are “anti-abortion” and they seem to have a spark of life left in them. Where are the donations, protesters, volunteers for anti-immigrant, anti-trans, anti-Europe causes, if this is what rightists care about? Or for whatever it is they truly care about, if it’s something else?
There are “pro” framings for these things, I suppose. Pro-life, pro-America, pro-family, pro-religion. But I don’t see why an “anti” framing couldn’t be inspiring for those who care to be against something
One thought I have, is that if you support these things, you are more likely to be a pariah. You are more likely to get fired. If you tolerate these things, you are also more likely to be a pariah. You are also likely to get sued, or boycotted, if you tolerate these views in your business. But if you espouse, or tolerate, CRT, for example, you can get by. So social and legal discrimination are one explanation for why we don’t see rightist enthusiasm.
KevinDC
Apr 22 2021 at 11:40am
This will hinge on how you’re defining what “right-wing politics” means, but if we define that here as, say, the tradition of American conservatism (George Will’s The Conservative Sensibility would be a good summary of what I mean), then it’s actually very difficult to see how people could seek meaning in right-wing politics. The American conservative tradition marked by deep skepticism of politics and authority. Most would cheerfully agree with Thomas Paine’s statement that “Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.” Every now and then, a political philosopher or cognitive scientist will publish a paper or book arguing that political engagement makes people more cruel, more innumerate, more intellectually dishonest, more prone to rationalization, etc – and these sorts of results are usually welcomed and easily accepted by people on the political right, and very much resisted by people on the political left. So if you’re coming from an intellectual tradition that says the best government can be is a necessary evil, and that political engagement brings out the worst in us, it’s not at all clear how you could still find meaning in engaging in politics, or find politics to be a source of inspiration. The idea of finding meaning and inspiration in politics would barely be coherent.
CSK
Apr 22 2021 at 3:14pm
Does it? Seems like you could try out a bunch of different definitions, and none of them (or even, not all of them together) would be generating as much enthusiasm as leftism.
This doesn’t make sense to me. I think a rightist could easily say that giving the government broad powers is bad, but engaging in politics to oppose this is meaningful and worthwhile.
Introspectively, I’m sure I get some sense of meaning from my own sometimes-rightist views. I don’t like to admit it, but it seems true. So I have to wonder why more others don’t do the same. Elite social discrimination and costs imposed by “civil rights” laws seem like one possible reason. Maybe not the right ones though.
Incidentally, here’s an article I saw recently:
Virginia city fires police officer over Rittenhouse donation | WTOP
KevinDC
Apr 22 2021 at 4:55pm
That’s only half the equation though. Many (most?) people on the right don’t just view broad governmental powers as bad, they also view politics and political engagement as inherently corrupting of character. Virtually all the classics of the American conservative tradition are full of warnings about the corrupting nature of politics. That’s also what I was trying to get across when I mentioned how right-leaning people are much more receptive to the literature showing how political engagement makes us into our worst selves. Given this, they may still find engaging in politics to be worthwhile if the stakes are high enough. Bit it’s worthwhile in the sense that certain unpleasant medical procedures can still be worthwhile. It would seem a sort of reluctant necessity, and not as something that would be intrinsically fulfilling in itself, or as a way to seek meaning in life.
Tom West
Apr 25 2021 at 2:49am
I’m a believer in Jonathon Haidt’s characterization of the moral basis for political beliefs. If liberals generally only have one axis – care, then it’s pretty easy to see anyone not motivated solely by that pillar of morality as evil.
If conservatives have multiple axes of morality, perhaps liberals failing to cleave to each axis means less?
Joe.m
Apr 21 2021 at 11:54am
I suspect a a similer bit reverse situation seems to be the case in censoring TV.
Netflix has a pretty strict anti booby policy that is in the same ballpark government mandated stuff in television, at least for its English language shows.
Conservatives really hate nudity and sex in, liberals kind of like it but won’t not watch a censored TV show
Joe
Apr 21 2021 at 12:02pm
I have always been skeptical of the claim that right wing people are more happy, because as far as I can tell these claims usually rely on studies that rely they rely on self reporting.
Even assuming conservatives lie about themselves at equal rates, if your conservative your more likely to think you can control your happiness or should be happy and are therefore more likely to lie about being happy. Whereas a left wing on average seems less ashamed of being unhappy.
I strongly suspect American conservatives are a little bit better at lying to themselves than liberals, though this is mostly based on stereotypes and anecdote.
Joe Denver
Apr 21 2021 at 1:44pm
One thought. I was looking over those donation numbers. It looks like a large majority of donations are coming from state-sponsored institutions. People getting checks from state institutions: teachers, lawyers, professors, etc, make up most donations to democrats. Republicans seemed to benefit primarily from people actually making stuff, and not just a cog in the machinery of the state: Business owners, drivers, etc.
Could it be that democrats care more simply because they more so benefit from the state?
This might also make things a little less depressing than Hanania’s story. If the flow of paychecks is what’s causing people to be democrats. Stopping this flow may change their minds (though, convincing them to stop the flow is obviously the more difficult obstacle).
Weir
Apr 22 2021 at 1:21am
Maybe if the American Federation of Teachers read Brennan and Lomasky they’d spend a little less?
Under the expressive politics model it should be enough for the president to just announce that teachers are heroes whether they want to show up at school or not. No money changes hands.
There wouldn’t be any need to recycle so many trillions through the whole elaborate laundering scheme of donations and bailouts.
The president would just express his respect for teachers and the teachers would just express their respect for him, and all this is without putting anyone’s money where anyone’s mouth is.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Apr 22 2021 at 7:38am
The author does not even attempt to show that firms carrying out “woke” gestures are not in fact profit maximizing.
Mark Z
Apr 22 2021 at 6:18pm
At no point does he suggest that they aren’t maximizing profit. Isn’t it practically the whole point of the article that companies are merely responding to the fact that progressives, as consumers and employees, are willing to pay a higher premium for employers/sellers that cohere with their politics because they ‘care’ more?
A Country Farmer
Apr 22 2021 at 7:47am
Very thought provoking article by Hanania although this line is obviously a strawman: “[…] because [conservatives] are the party of those who simply care less about the future of their country.”
I care. I just get disgusted by the political process. I don’t want to devote my life to potentially clawing back freedoms I should have anyway.
Moreover, I think a better argument can be made for the inverse: those fighting for political causes care less about the future of their country because they are woefully ignorant to the unintended consequences of their policies.
We ran the experiment of large government in the 20th century and it was a resounding failure. Yet here we are, still fighting Marxists. It’s hard to avoid the idea that “liberals” are extremely dim, extremely incompetent, and/or extremely psychologically disturbed.
Mark
Apr 22 2021 at 8:26am
I think it’s completely the opposite. If the government were enacting a policy that actually materially impacted you in your personal life, you’d care about politics and fight hard.
I can see why people on the left might fight harder because right-wing policies impact people more. Left-wing policies raise your taxes a bit or rename some schools, but you can still go about your personal life more or less the same as before. But there are a lot of right-wing policies that really impact people’s entire lives if they are in certain groups, whether it’s increasing incarceration or decreasing immigration or banning abortion. People in those groups are more incentivized to fight hard.
Mark Z
Apr 22 2021 at 6:26pm
I don’t see how there isn’t and shouldn’t be a symmetry to this. E.g., if you believe abortion is murder, you’ll fight just as hard or even harder to restrict it that someone who believes it isn’t will fight to keep it legal. Likewise re immigration if you believe immigration threatens your livelihood. Of course, individual participation in politics is basically never rational because individuals are impotent. So either progressives are more innumerate when it comes to understanding the (almost nonexistent) value of personal political participation, or politics is expressive rather than about interests, and we’d still need to explain why political expression is so much more dear to some people than others.
Tom West
Apr 25 2021 at 2:36am
Odd, I’d say we have larger government than before, and almost everyone prefers it. Far from being a failure, almost universally this is exactly what the population wants, and they vote for it fairly consistently.
And to me it seems pretty obvious. What do people want as they become wealthier? Security, both for themselves and for their loved ones. And what does more government promise (and to some extent, deliver)? Security.
You may not care for the particular trade-off of security for lesser liberty and economic progress. But I’d guess, giving voting patterns across the globe, that you’re in the minority.
I don’t see any broad-based interest in going back to government spending below 20% of GNP.
Mark
Apr 22 2021 at 8:22am
For “what changed?”, I suggest the gender gap changed. Women are now much more liberal than men. Women also control something like 75% of consumer spending, tend to have broader social networks as adults, and are far more likely to work in fields that pay less but have more social influence.
Jonathan S
Apr 22 2021 at 3:18pm
Excellent points
MikeW
Apr 23 2021 at 2:48pm
The Hanania article makes a very strong case for why all the institutions are leftist, but what I really want to know is why leftists seem more and more out of touch with reality. In the past, when the main issue was socialism, I thought of believers as misguided. It seemed like most of them had good intentions but just ignored all the evidence that socialism didn’t work, and in fact could be downright dangerous. These days, it’s a lot harder for me to see good intentions behind things like “cancel culture” and critical race theory. And a lot of the positions regarding sex and transgender issues are so incredibly anti-scientific that I don’t even know what to think. (What was the recent thing? There’s no consensus about how to tell the sex of a baby? Holy cow!) How does Hanania’s theory explain something like that?!
Tom West
Apr 25 2021 at 2:23am
I think this is a matter of the number of extremists on either side has climbed recently (and more disturbingly, gained some actual power), and since they’re a whole lot more interesting than sane, reasonable people, so they get all the press
I suspect the moderates on both sides outnumber the extremists fairly substantially, but because they can understand what motivates the extremists, restrict their disapproval to eye rolling.
For the leftists in particular, the extremism is usually bred by a long history of mistreatment, so countering it would require “punching down”, which is anathema to the left.
MikeW
Apr 25 2021 at 10:28am
“and more disturbingly, gained some actual power”. Amen to that. I am constantly incredulous (and somewhat terrified) that some of these extremists have become so powerful.
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