Policing Liberal Policing

Josh Barro recently wrote a piece on liberal moralizing and its counterproductive effects on liberals' political power. I will have much more to say about it, but I want to start with a few vague ideas about what is going on.

First I should note that public norms or "morals" are plastic and it is important for them to be good ones. Therefore to the extent that people can productively advance that goal, it may be worth paying a temporary political price. I don't think Barro would disagree. He would say that liberals are making a bad tradeoff between these goals. This is a topic for later, or maybe never.

Second I would observe that conservatives will amplify the most annoying, hectoring, threatening or idiotic liberals. This means that on some level it's a losing fight. Even if every single liberal who has ever heard of Barro decides to get on board with his "no moralizing" program, there will be plenty of prime examples for Fox News to choose from. Barro acknowledges this, but his solution is for liberals to call each other out—a recipe for disaster, in my opinion:

So then it should be easy for the rest of the coalition to distance itself.

— Josh Barro (@jbarro) July 18, 2017

But anyway, put all that aside. An interesting question is what has gone wrong here. Because even though there is plenty to quibble with in Barro's fusillade, there is also clearly some truth to it.

One tentative theory I have is that liberals are bad at recognizing and respecting the (often arbitrary) boundaries between different spheres of life. It's perfectly appropriate, in my view, for a parent to lecture a child about unhealthy or immoral choices, or vice versa. But the bar for "calling out" a complete stranger should be set considerably higher, and this is where things go wrong. Social media in particular blurs these boundaries.

The other theory I'm sort of mulling over is that a lot of the modern liberal "virtuous" behaviors are essentially luxury goods. Buy organic! Live in NYC! If you must drive a car, drive an electric one! So liberals are both picking a self-serving subset of issues to moralize about, and picking ones that are particularly useful as wedges in the culture wars. (And remember, the conservatives get to pick which issues get amplified.)

More later, maybe.