Now that Bleeding Heart Libertarians has closed up shop, the BHL diaspora has begun. Jason Brennan, Chris Frieman, and Jess Flanigan – all friends – have started up a new blog with a different approach – 200-proof liberals. I recommend subscribing to it, though it is meant to have a very different rhetorical style than the BHL project. J has posted a summary of a piece he has written criticizing public reason views for failing to grapple with what we know about political psychology, especially that people engage in post-hoc tribal reasoning in politics. But public reason liberalism, the dominant approach to legitimacy in political philosophy, supposes that people reason independently of their tribe, at least to some extent, such that clear rational commitments can be identified, and justifications for laws and policies can then be crafted in terms of those fairly stable reasons. So public reason liberalism is wrong because it depends on people having more stable rational commitments than they actually do. Obviously I disagree with this argument, which Brennan has constructed by drawing on the new Achen and Bartels book in particular. Fortunately, I think the argument is good enough that I devote some time to it in my forthcoming book, Trust in a Polarized Age. Here I’m going to reproduce much of what I say there. But before I do, let me just say this. I think Americans these days tend to be more impressed by the irrationality of political behavior than Europeans. Many Europeans countries aren’t especially polarized, and some of these countries are very trusting, like the Nordic countries, and so I don’t think the trends J is pointing to are universal features of democratic polities. People are politically tribal to varying degrees, and the US is in a particularly but peculiarly bad place right now relative to some other democracies. So if we take an international perspective, I think the idea that politics is necessarily war looks less plausible even from 30,000 feet. OK, with that, here’s what I have to say about the main line of argument. I summarize the Achen-Bartels view J appeals to in section I. So if you know the view, skip to section II. I. Achen and Bartels’s Challenge. The thesis of Achen and Bartels’s Democracy for Realists is that elections don’t produce responsive government. Instead, “voters, even the most informed voters, typically make choices not on the basis of policy preferences or ideology, but on the basis of who they are—their social identities.” The worry is that “if voting behavior primarily reflects and reinforces voters’ social loyalties, it is a mistake to suppose that elections result in popular control of public policy.” Instead, election outcomes are simply “erratic reflections of the current balance of partisan loyalties in a given political system.” I have already addressed the possibility of using small-scale deliberative bodies to reveal the preferences and reasons of citizens in chapter 7, but Achen and Bartels argue that empirical studies of these small political bodies “seem to be less relevant for understanding democratic politics on a national scale.” For the purposes of this section, I will assume that microcosmic deliberation cannot serve as a substitute for national elections. Part of Achen and Bartels’s argument is that citizens lack enough information and motivation to engage in retrospective voting, voting based on the past performance of political parties and candidates. In general, Achen and Bartels claim to cast “considerable doubt on the view that citizens can reliably form and act upon sensible retrospective judgments at election time.” Retrospective voting is complicated by three factors: low political knowledge, mistaken assessments of one’s own well-being, and a limited time horizon for economic accountability where citizens only attend to their economic condition in proximity to a national election. Achen and Bartels embrace a group theory of politics. This means that “the primary sources of partisan loyalties and voting behavior … are social identities, group attachments, and myopic retrospections, not policy preferences or ideological principles.” This is so in part because extra information doesn’t make citizens more accurate; instead, “party identification colors the perceptions of the most politically informed citizens far more than the relatively less informed citizens.” Citizens are not generally responsive to information about political parties, candidates, and the like, but rather filter the information to empower their group and disempower out-groups. Achen and Bartels think their research has profound implications for democratic theory. It leaves democratic theory “in a shambles” because all “the conventional defenses of democratic government are at odds with demonstrable, centrally important facts of life,” specifically human limitations in information and motivation. II. Preliminary Difficulties I think Achen and Bartels overstate their case. One reply is that voting based on group membership can be an informational shortcut insofar as one’s group allegiance leads one to support the candidates one’s reasons would lead one to support. For instance, if black Americans vote based on how leading black legislators tell them to vote, that may indeed be a reasonable heuristic that helps protect them from serious harms by more powerful social groups. Thus, voting based on group membership, while sometimes problematic, may not be irrational. We can only show that it is irrational if we can show that following the views of the leaders of one’s group leads one to embrace more objectionable policies than one might otherwise accept. Second, Achen and Bartels need to argue that because we determine our policy preferences by group membership, those preferences are unjustified. But what makes our beliefs rational is not how they came about (the causes of the beliefs) but whether the beliefs are justified by good reasons at present (the sustaining justifications of the beliefs). Thus, to show that our political preferences are problematically arbitrary, it is not enough to show that the beliefs are caused by group membership; it has to be shown that the influence of group membership shows that political preferences are irrational. After all, most of our beliefs are heavily affected by all kinds of nonrational