No-Account

On a recent episode of The Rest Is Politics, Rory Stewart related the story of a Roman general who had given his army explicit orders not to engage with the enemy. The general's son accepted a challenge to single combat with an opposing champion, with the stakes being the field of battle. The son wins the single combat, and so the Romans win the day without needing to fight a pitched battle. The general executes his son on the spot for defying his order not to engage. Mr. Stewart told this story in the context of President Biden's pardoning of his son Hunter, in the service of making the point that the President should have held his son to a higher standard that he holds others to, even in the face of the understanding that Republicans were going to attempt to use Hunter as a way of attacking him personally.

All fine and good, but what's in that for the President? Mr. Stewart clearly respected the Roman general from his story, but of what use to President Biden would Mr. Stewart's respect be? Mr. Stewart is British, he can't vote Democratic.

And this raises one of the problems that one often sees in modern society: acting to appease one's critics rarely works, and it tends to do little to bolster one's allies. In the news recently has been the debate among the Make America Great Again/America First movement over the use of H1B visas to bring highly-skilled foreign workers to the United States and the accusations that the PayPal Honey browser extension has been stealing affiliate commissions. My initial response to these things was my usual one: If people feel that programs like the H1B visas or economic systems like capitalism are in place, deliberately or organically, as weapons against them, they aren't going to support them, and so the people who support these institutions have a responsibility to ensure that they're accountable to the rules. Sound familiar?

After a bit of thought it did to me, too. And I realized that I was holding on to an idea that I flatly believed didn't work. Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk have nothing to gain by aggressively policing the H1B visa program for fraud, or making sure that it hasn't become a way to justify neglect of the American educational system. Likewise, Mr. Musk and other staunch defenders of free-market capitalism have no incentive to come down like a ton of bricks on PayPal (which was presumably aware of Honey's business model when they acquired them) or Amazon (which likely inked a custom agreement with Honey, allowing them to act in contravention of their blanked affiliate program rules). Their supporters are simply going to resent the increased scrutiny and their critics are going to see their actions as further proof of their criticisms and demands for change.

The incentive structures involved tend to lead to an impasse, where the most rational action for a person to take tends to be whichever one they understand to be in their personal interests, regardless of their stated principles. In stories from ancient history, principles can always win out, and killing one's son when he asks for forgiveness instead of permission is the best course of action, because they're morality plays. If the morale of the Roman army immediately plunged, and it took a few decimations to get them to fight well again, that can be conveniently left out of the narrative, and the fact that the modern world has never been shown to work this way can be cast as a problem with modernity, rather than with the stories themselves.

But the fact that holding the things one supports to a higher standard of behavior, of evidence or whatever than other things is simply not a successful strategy on a day-to-day basis is a problem. It reveals the incentive structure that pushes people to adopt partisan viewpoints that don't allow for any internal criticism. Dirty laundry must always be kept hidden; because admitting to its existence is nothing more than a form of self-incrimination. Even if this removes the need to ever actually wash it clean.