The Genetic Drift of Ideology

 In his efforts to build a Republican political coalition that can get him reelected, Trump has often resorted to appeals to naked self-interest. "You may not like my style," he seems to be saying—"but I will deliver the goods." Oil and gas companies, he says, should back him because he is going to "drill, baby, drill," as soon as he returns to office. Wealthy CEOs should donate to his campaign, he points out, because he is going to lower corporate tax rates even further if he wins the election. 

These shameless acts of political bribery (which, incidentally, put the lie to the supposed "populism" of Trump's campaign) don't work in every instance. Some CEOs leave these meetings feeling insulted at the notion that they can be bought so easily. But, in all too many cases, Trump's strategy has worked precisely as intended. He has managed to land some surprisingly big game by the simple technique of saying: "you will make even more money if you back me for president." (Or, as in the case of erstwhile GOP critics, such as Nikki Haley, he has been able to say: "If you want to have any political future in this party, you'd better fall in line." And that, too, appears to have worked.)

The cynical response to this would be to shrug and say—"well, what do you expect?" Some social scientists, after all, have argued that people's political beliefs always line up with their self-interest. Marx's theory of ideology suggests that it is something close to impossible for people to cast a ballot for anything other than their own class interest. Vachel Lindsay's proposal, then, (in one of my favorite poems) to "vote against our human nature," would—on this theory—be a pipe dream. 

But such a narrative is of course too simple. History is replete with examples of people who sacrificed their own interests in political life. There is always the handful of cases of billionaires who vote for a higher tax rate, for instance. And while sometimes, no doubt, this can be attributed to some sneaky backhanded way in which they will personally pay less under their proposed tax regime, due to the way their fortunes are structured—this is not always the case. Even in Trump's appeals to the CEOs, after all, he did not have uniform success. 

There is the long history that Robert Michels discusses, in his sociological classic, Political Parties, of children of the bourgeoisie who cross the picket line, as it were, to join the workers' cause. And while the cynic may again allege that these individuals simply hope to gain more power as government functionaries some day in the new socialized regime (and Michels lends some support for this interpretation too), it is undeniable than in some cases, especially early on in the movement, they have actually made genuine sacrifices to identify themselves as socialists.   

The cynical interpretation of human motives cannot account, that is, for the defections that occur in the early, heroic stages of socialism—when the struggle's eventual victory appears most in doubt, and there is as yet no party bureaucracy to provide cushy jobs that would soften the blow of the personal and financial repercussions which, as Michels observed, the bourgeois "class traitors" often faced from their own former friends and families, once they had gone over to join the opposing side.

Nor can the "self-interest" theory of ideology explain such political phenomena as the French nobility who stepped up to voluntarily foreswear their feudal privileges, on the eve of the Revolution. Vilfredo Pareto likewise noted that bourgeois readers were responsible for the proliferation of socialist tracts in his era, even though the latter appeared to be preparing their doom and ran entirely contrary to their purported class interests. It would seem, then, that the possibility of political self-sacrifice and altruism is at the very least possible. 

It may be that such acts, if they are to be made at all, must be made—like the French nobles' oaths—in a single burst of passionate feeling. Michels noted that "The joy of self-sacrifice is comparable to a fine gold coin which can be spent grandly all at once, whereas if we change it into small coin it dribbles imperceptibly away." (Eden trans.) Thus, he observed, employees of the socialist party apparatus still need to be paid for their efforts, if the bureaucracy expects to keep them for any length of time. 

The same phenomenon can be observed, for what it's worth, in the case of non-profits and modern-day progressive advocacy organizations, as I know from personal experience. People will often sign up to work for these organizations at a reduced salary. They will do so out of idealism, because they have a "passion for the work," etc. But, all such nonprofits have learned through bitter experience that eventually—if such employees are to be retained—they must be offered a "competitive" wage. The alternative, the employees will all eventually learn to say, is "not sustainable." 

Such phenomena perhaps explain why so many CEOs—or even GOP politicians—who daringly criticized Trump in the past have eventually found their way back into the Republican fold. One can give up a political career or a financial gain for principled reasons in one great burst of feeling. But to sustain the same willingness to sacrifice—to keep marching on the same hard road for years—to lose all one's former friends and allies and to receive nothing but scorn and contempt for your renunciation—is not something everyone can bear for long. 

But still, I say, there are always the exceptions. There are the people who genuinely gave it all up in order to speak truth to power. There are the people who chose the stony road of martyrdom and actually stuck to it. For every Nikki Haley, that is to say, who obediently trots onto the RNC stage and endorses Trump as if the last twelve months of her life had never happened; for every Marco Rubio who parrots Trump's lies in the hope of a VP spot that never materializes—there is also a Mike Pence, or a Mitt Romney, or a Mike Gallagher, or a Liz Cheney, or an Adam Kinzinger, who makes real sacrifices in order to vote their conscience. 

All such people not only had to sacrifice once—they had to part with what could have been decades of political power. They had to sustain a sacrifice over years. Anyone who doubts their heroism or their altruism should try giving up even half as much. No; it is clear that the cynics, then, are wrong—it is in fact possible to "vote against our human nature," as Vachel Lindsay advised. There must be a hole, somewhere, in the conventional social scientific theories of ideology. 

In reading Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality earlier this week, I caught a glimpse of how to resolve the paradox. The authors point out that the "self-interest" theory of ideology must be inadequate to some extent. Religious and political ideologies, after all, are frequently divorced from people's quest for power. They may actively run counter to a person's "class interest"—or simply be irrelevant to it. 

The authors suggest, then, that the content of a person's ideology may be partly formed through their self-interest—but never exclusively so. Self-interest, like all the other ingredients that go into making "social reality," in the authors' telling, always exists in a dialectical relationship with other forces. Some elements of a person's ideology may appear there simply because they were already available in that person's cultural surroundings, for instance. They were ready-to-hand. 

The authors give the example of the Roman Empire's adoption of Christianity under Constantine. It is by no means obvious prima facie, after all, why a small sect originally embraced predominantly by members of the lower class would be a vehicle for the self-interest of the Imperial elite. It is more likely that the chain of causality ran in the opposite direction: the Empire embraced Christianity at first simply because it was there ("something else might have served equally well," the authors note)—and then reshaped the content of the religion so that it would serve their class interests. 

It occurs to me that this alternative theory of ideology resembles in some ways the evolutionary concept of genetic drift. In the development of evolutionary theory, after all, biologists eventually had to reckon with the fact that Darwin's theory of natural selection could not account for all the variation in phenotypes that they observed. There were some species, after all, that appeared to have evolved in a frankly self-defeating direction. Other variations appeared to be simply random and unrelated to the organisms's fitness in its environment. 

The scientists eventually concluded that genetic drift—the random accumulation of certain alleles over time, which can be especially potent in shaping the evolutionary histories of relatively small populations—must account for some of the changes they were observing in species. Without jettisoning the concept of natural selection, then, they nonetheless had to accept that it could only explain some of the available phenomena. It was engaged in a dialectic with other evolutionary forces. 

On this analogy, then, the original Marxian theory of ideology could be described as the "natural selection" account. It understood political and religious ideologies to be adaptations that would advance the fitness (i.e., serve the self-interests of) the classes and individuals that expressed them. The variations in these belief systems, according to the doctrinaire Marxist school, could be attributed entirely to the fact that each group gained a concrete benefit from espousing its preferred ideology. 

But as we have already seen, this theory cannot account for every manifestation of political and ideological behavior we observe. It cannot explain the phenomenon of political self-sacrifice, for instance. It cannot explain the Gallaghers and Cheneys and Romneys of the world. Nor can it explain the seemingly random and outré elements that find their way into various ideologies. Some elements of a given person's belief system will appear "well-adapted," but others may seem downright maladapted—or merely nonadaptive.

To give a canonical example, take Weber's theory of the Protestant Ethic. Surely, many elements of Puritan ideology did indeed serve to advance the class interests of the emerging urban bourgeoisie. The emphasis on "election" and the "outward signs of inward and spiritual grace," as Weber argued, did indeed serve to justify early capitalism. But self-interest can hardly explain every tenet of the Puritan ideology. To the contrary, many of the things they believed were there simply because they were Christians, and had inherited a certain belief system ready-made. 

There is no obvious reason, after all, why believing that Christ rose on the third day—rather than the second or fourth—serves the class interests of a nascent bourgeoisie. It is plain that the Puritan doctrine, then—like all ideologies—was compounded of some parts self-interest and other parts the results of phylogenetic history. Ideology, we can say, emerges from a dialectic interaction between self-interest and "genetic drift" of the ideological material that already happens to be available. The hunt for adaptive "fitness" may play some role in altering the forms of ideology that people practice—but it can only change these forms so far. The range of variation the ideology can exhibit will always be constrained, to some degree, by its phylogeny. 

If "genetic drift" is the most apt analogy, this would also explain why ideologies often seem most divorced from people's concrete self-interest when they are held by only a small sect of people. We can see, then, in these sects, something analogous to the "Founder effect" in population genetics. An idiosyncratic and even counter-adaptive trait will be most likely to persist in a relatively small and genetically isolated community. And it is in such communities too that the most outré and self-defeating ideologies will take root. It is always in the small sects that one finds people willing to go to the stake over a fine distinction in Christology, or the question of whether this-or-that Marxian theory is "revisionist" or not.

Of course, political altruism—the "voting against our human nature" phenomenon—may also be analogized to such evolutionary dynamics in nature as kin selection or group selection. Some animals evolve the capacity for self-sacrifice on the part of the individual because groups that allow for this genetic trait to persist in their ranks survive better as an aggregate over time. 

On this theory, then, the Adam Kinzingers and the Liz Cheneys and the Mike Pences of the world are analogous to the birds that issue an alarm call at the first sign of predators—drawing attention to themselves and placing themselves at greater risk, for the sake of warning the rest of the flock about the impending danger. 

When Mike Pence did his constitutional duty by certifying the results of the 2020 election, that is—thereby preserving democracy for at least four more years, and simultaneously dooming his own political career in the GOP—he was doing it for all of us. He was falling on his sword to save you and me. He was issuing the alarm call, drawing the predator away from the rest of the herd so that we could all move off to safety in time—even as he knew, while he was doing it, that he would end up in the predator's jaws as a result (and that's exactly what happened). The result of his sacrifice is that our own society—our democracy as a whole—may yet survive this predator, and emerge stronger as a result. 

It may seem strange to the cynics, then, that people make sacrifices for such things as mere principle—that people "vote against their human nature" and doom their own political survival, for the sake of what they believe to be right and true. And yet, they cannot deny that it happens. To borrow a line from John Davidson, "the thing is daily done, by many and many a one." Self-sacrifice is an empirical truth, then, and must be accounted for by theory—however ill it fits with the prevailing cynicism of our times.