The CYA

A lawyer once told me about a legal technique that he called “the CYA.” A typical manifestation of the CYA is when a district court judge (the first judge to render judgment in a lawsuit) decides the case on multiple, independent reasons. That way, if the judgment gets appealed and one line of reasoning is deemed incorrect, the overall ruling can still hold.

Here’s an example of the CYA that I noticed in a competition law case we were reading called Streetmap v. Google. The case had to do with whether Google favored its own product (Google Maps) to kick a competitor (Streetmap) off the market. The essence of the theory is that if you have a “dominant position” in a certain market (here, Google’s internet search engine), you can’t leverage that dominant position into a different market (here, the market for internet mapping software) to privilege your own product over another. Why? Because doing so enables you to artificially out-compete other market players.

Here, Streetmap claimed that Google added a “OneBox” function so that if you search for any location (or even anything related to a location — say, Korean BBQ) in Google, the first thing that shows up is a map. And that map, of course, is Google Maps — not Streetmap. The typical consumer will use the map right in front of them, going directly to Google Maps rather than Streetmap. So even if Streetmap is a better product than Google Maps, and even if most consumers would prefer Streetmap in a head-to-head comparison against Google Maps, Google redesigning its search engine can enable Google Maps to outcompete Streetmap. Such conduct, Streetmap claimed, amounts to an “abuse . . . of a dominant position” that violates Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, which is one of the core competition provisions in EU law.

The court in Streetmap said that to succeed on the lawsuit, Streetmap would have to show a three facts: (1) Google had a “dominant position” on the market for internet search; (2) Google used that dominant position in a way that is “reasonably likely to harm the competitive structure” of the market for internet maps; and (3) the likely anticompetitive effect is “appreciable” (it is more than a “de minimis” effect). Additionally, even if Streetmap can prove all three facts, Google can still prevail in the lawsuit by demonstrating that there were justifications for its conduct — that its conduct has benefits for consumers that counter-balance its anti-competitive effects and that its conduct is proportionate to achieving those pro-consumer benefits.

The way that the court went about assessing Streetmap’s claims are interesting from a legal perspective, but for the sake of this post, I’ll focus on the structure of the court’s argument. In essence, the court assumes without deciding fact #1 (that Google in fact has a “dominant position”) because it is going to conclude that Streetmap failed to show #3 (that the likely anti-competitive effect was appreciable). The court spends some eleven pages making the argument that the effects of the conduct were not reasonably likely to be appreciably anti-competitive (a mouthful, I know!).

The court writes of that conclusion: “That is sufficient to dispose of the allegation of abuse.” But, the court continues, “in case I should be wrong in that conclusion . . . I proceed to consider the issue of objective justification.” The opinion goes on for another nine pages to find that just in case Google’s actions were in fact reasonably likely to have an appreciable anti-competitive effect, there were sufficient objective justifications for Google’s conduct. CYA.

In this example, I think the CYA is a positive tool. There are of course other times in which the CYA isn’t so positive.

Take this silly Twitter thread between two Yale professors (one of whom is a Sterling professor!). As far as I can tell, one professor (Stanley) tweeted about how few Black philosophy colleagues he has had in his time in academia. Another professor (Christakis) tagged him and asked him about whether Yale (or its philosophy department?) is racist, and whether Stanley would leave his job since “I myself would not work for a racist institution, nor tolerate racial prejudice if I saw it.” Stanley’s response was that he “simply stated facts” and neither called Yale racist nor absolved it of racism: “I’m sticking to facts and not making normative claims.”

Before I sound like I’m creating a false equivalence, let me note that I think Christakis is being absurd and obtuse, and I think he’s looking for a fight for no apparent reason. That being said, I think Stanley’s response is a typical CYA answer: I didn’t say anything beyond facts, and I haven’t taken any normative position; you’re just assuming what I’m saying. It’s clear that Stanley’s comment about the few Black colleagues he’s had is meant to be an indictment of the departments he’s been in, as well as the wider field. No reasonable person would think he’s “just making an observation,” even if he leaves the normative point unsaid. But by leaving the actual call-to-action, the real normative argument, implied and unsaid, he accomplishes a CYA — that way, when pushed, he can simply say, “I have stated facts” and “don’t know what to think . . . .”

One last example. I’ve been amassing books on the Voting Rights Act for my dissertation, and I was perusing the CV of a Caltech historian, J. Morgan Kousser, since I knew he was active in the field. It turns out that last year, he reviewed a book I really enjoyed — Acharya, Blackwell, and Sen’s Deep Roots, which argues that the prevalence of slavery in 1860, measured by county, can predict racial attitudes of White southerners living in those counties today. It is a provocative thesis. Indeed, Acharya, Blackwell, and Sen claim that an institution that was outlawed a century-and-a-half ago is a better predictor of contemporary White racial attitudes than the current demographics of those counties. To me, that’s an incredibly powerful statement, and their evidence for it is quite persuasive.

But we should be specific. Note what they aren’t claiming. Acharya, Blackwell, and Sen never said that current demographics don’t predict White racial attitudes in the Deep South. Instead, they use statistical tools to show that the proportion of a county’s population that was enslaved in 1860 is a better predictor than the contemporary proportion of a county’s population that is Black for White racial attitudes. From a theoretical perspective, they’re trying to show that certain institutional decisions (here, the unfolding of Reconstruction and the post-Civil War political economy of the South) matter more for White racial attitude formation than racial threat theory, which posits that White people become more racially conservative when the proportion of racial minorities living near them increases out of a fear of having their power displaced.

When we read Deep Roots, the theoretical contribution we take away is, in essence, that “slavery, not racial threat theory, explains Southern White racial attitudes today.” But the book can’t actually say that. In other words, the book can’t, and doesn’t, “rebut” racial threat theory. It merely shows that a different factor has more predictive ability.

Kousser notes this point and shows how Acharya, Blackwell, and Sen essentially employ the CYA to preempt critiques of the book that defend the validity of racial threat theory. He writes, “Provocative in their subtitle and in some sweeping statements, [Acharya, Blackwell, and Sen] often qualify their thesis that contemporary differences in counties’ black proportions cannot account for observed contrasts in whites’ racial attitudes by inserting such words as ‘in part’ (pp. 14–15), ‘alone’ (p. 43), ‘exclusively’ (p. 78), ‘only’ (p. 101), ‘fully’ (p 107), or ‘solely’ (p. 162).” By including these nebulous qualifiers, the authors can effectively dodge criticisms, even as their theoretical contribution — the thesis that most readers will take away from the book — is meaningfully implicated by those critiques!

To take a general lesson, I think there’s two kinds of CYA — call them “constructive” and “destructive” CYA. With constructive CYA, the arguer bolsters their conclusion by adding superfluous information. Streetmap could have been decided solely on the appreciable anti-competitive effects analysis, but the judge added additional analysis just to cement the conclusion. With destructive CYA, the arguer subtly adjusts the conclusion (I’m not saying racial threat theory is wrong, just that it can’t explain everything!) to mask the limits of the argument. If a solid argument relies on a proportional relationship between the reasoning and the conclusion, constructive CYA bolsters the reasoning to strengthen the “ratio” of reasoning to conclusion; destructive CYA, in contrast, limits the conclusion so as to make it seem like the ratio is more proportionate.

The examples I gave of destructive CYA are, I think, helpful for spotting other CYAs. In the first example, the actual conclusion is left unsaid. By leaving the conclusion amorphous, the arguer can easily but subtly shift the goalpost upon encountering criticism. If an argument lacks a well-identified conclusion, that’s a sign of destructive CYA happening. In the second example, the addition of unquantifiable adjectives to modify the conclusion similarly allows the arguer to shift the goalpost. Weasel words and passive construction are good examples of this second form of destructive CYA.

One of my friends made a sly remark to me about nebulous new year’s resolutions a month ago. At the time, I suspected I was getting some side-eye for including a nebulous resolution about “improving my writing.” But thinking about the CYA has given me a few ideas for improving.

First, I will try my best to be more active in my sentence construction. Passive construction allows for the first kind of destructive CYA since you don’t have to identify a particular actor.

Second, I will try to ensure that my writing always has a central, identifiable takeaway — again to avoid the first kind of destructive CYA. This one is a bit harder since I’m also trying to cut the amount of time I spend on these posts; I find that when I write in a more stream-of-consciousness way, I more often than not find my conclusion by the end of the writing rather than having the conclusion at the beginning. Nevertheless, I will still strive to have articulated somewhere in each of these posts a central argument that is clear.

Third, I will try to ensure that those central arguments are phrased proportionately and precisely. That is, I will try my best to avoid nebulous adjectives (many, often, somewhat) in favor of specific claims to ensure falsifiability. One of my professors, I’m noticing, is really good at identifying the central idea behind a long article, and he’s very willing to distill it into a single statement. The result is that he phrases arguments very bluntly. To take an example, I once asked him about whether he thought the field of regulation formed an “epistemic community” that leads to a narrow way of thinking about regulation and that avoids asking questions about, say, the distributional consequences of regulatory decisions. It was a windy and overly complicated question. His response: “So you’re asking if we’re a cult?” I liked that response a lot because, in hindsight, I realized that I didn’t know that that’s what I was asking — but it definitely was.

* * * * *

Rose: This has been a fairly quiet week. I’ve spent a good amount of time thinking about my dissertation, though, and I made a trek to the LSE campus to get books! It was exciting. And my arms were pretty tired after carrying the stack home. Notice, at the top of the stack, a book edited by one Lorn S. Foster — a Pomona professor who just retired recently (and, in fact, whose successor I played a minor role in selecting). It was cool to find the volume as a kind of collision of a few of my different worlds. I also got to call a good number of friends this week and had a nice chat with my capital markets professor (who is terrifyingly brilliant and is the head of LSE’s law department and yet still made time to explain to me the magic of stocks).

Dissertation Reading :D

LSE (1)

LSE (2)

Bud: This Wednesday, everyone in the Regulation program is presenting on their dissertation topic. I’m excited to try to hammer out mine and to see what everyone else is planning on doing.

Thorn: I’ve noticed that there are birds that love to chirp outside my window from around 2 to 3 am. It’s always a sad moment to hear them chirping — and, alas, even worse to hear them stop chirping.

Gratitude: One of the other Marshalls in London reached out recently to go for a walk. It turns out that he’s going back to the US soon until the lockdowns ease up. I felt like I hadn’t kept up with him super well even though both of us were in London, but I do really like his company. So I’m grateful that he reached out, and that we got to go for a walk, before he leaves.

Future topics:

* The question of tying-and-bundling versus refusal-to-deal in competition law — basically, there are two different theories of harm in competition law that are somewhat interchangeable as applied to contemporary questions of competition in technology markets. And the debate on how to distinguish between the two is actually really interesting.

Educated, and Roots

Late last night, I finished Tara Westover’s 2018 memoir, Educated. There’s a lot to say about this beautiful book, and I want to return to it in a subsequent post. But for now, I want to write about a few narrow things about the book in relation to two conversations I had this week — one with a statistician from the Department of Justice and one with a Pomona friend.

Both conversations were, I think, a kind of return to roots. I knew the statistician from my time in DC. I spent Spring 2018 “studying abroad” on the DC program, and I was an intern at the Voting Section of DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. When I first began, I honestly hadn’t thought much about voting rights outside of the gerrymandering context. But I remember feeling an instinctual reverence at being in the Section that enforces the Voting Rights Act, which I knew to be the crown jewel of the Civil Rights Era and perhaps the most effective civil rights law in American history. Over my time there, I remember being inspired by the lawyers and staff at the Section, whose knowledge and passion about voting rights seemed never ending. I remember their gentle advice on my memos (which were often quite bad), their insights on oral arguments, their enthusiasm for maps and history, their reflections on the people they’d met in the field when investigating potential infringements of voting rights law.

I left the Section in May 2018 feeling determined to become a voting rights lawyer. I took classes in statistics over the next year; I (unsuccessfully) sought internships the next summer to get back in the game; I tried to keep up with folks I met at the Section. There are few places in the world where I feel rooted, but DC — in part due to the Voting Section and in part due to the church I attended — was one of them.

Since then, I’ve drifted from thinking about voting rights. In part, research took over my mental space — human rights treaty monitoring, habeas corpus, federalism, the Office of Legal Counsel, seed dispersal. Different questions were on my mind. But there’s also a communal element of education and passion. Learning about and dedicating oneself to a cause are so much easier when there are others who are like-minded. Losing contact with the people in the Section over the last year-and-a-half allowed me to drift, and it was easy to justify that drift (they were all busy people, and I probably asked them so many dumb questions that most of them didn’t want to talk anymore).

It was about a week ago that I realized I could — and should — pick that interest back up. It came to me through a bit of a funny way. When I applied for the Marshall, I asked to do my second year studying quantitative political science to bolster my ability to analyze elections. The purpose was to put me in a position to become a successful voting rights litigator. I’ve begun doing my applications for next year, which reminded me of that original purpose.

It turns out that writing about my passions a year ago had a kind of ratcheting effect on me. It concretized my plans and allowed me to feel more stable in my professional interests. And though I drifted away, reading those essays pulled me back, because I genuinely felt, and continue to feel, that I had captured something about myself in those essays. Writing and thinking about those essays strengthens the likelihood that I follow this path; the ratchet cranks and constrains my future possibilities.

In any application, I think, you feign a kind of certainty and clarity of purpose. You are meant to be optimized, to be sure-footed. You tell stories about your past that lead in a Whiggish way to a present that, in turn, has set the stage for a bright future. You connect the dots in a way that can never be completely accurate, because history is always more complex than the stories we tell. Things have a kind of randomness to them: a friend tells you about an opportunity, there’s free pizza at some event, a mentor makes a stray comment that resonates with you. But you don’t say that. Every cover letter you write makes it sound like this job is the greatest opportunity in the world, even as you write twenty different letters.

Can this cynicism cohere with my earlier contention that my application had felt genuine? Yes. When Butterfield wrote about Whig histories, he emphasized that telling such stories of the past — what he referred to as “studying the past with reference to the present” — helps construct who we are.

Educated reminded me of Butterfield’s observation. Lurking underneath Westover’s narrative throughout the book is her systematic journaling, a kind of history-writing that, later, she will come to doubt. At the height of her mature crisis, she writes about a nagging self-doubt that leads her to question even her journals. They were scrutinizable records, concrete and contemporaneously written. Could they be false? In her state of delusion, she thought they must be. “That meant that more than my memory was in error,” she agonizes. “The delusion was deeper, in the core of my mind, which invented in the very moment of occurrence, then recorded the fiction.” Her reading of the past was not just colored by her present state of mind. It was fully coincident with her present understanding of herself.

The culmination of her growth is when she overcomes that doubt. It’s when she feels capable of finding her own truth separate from the truths she had been told her entire life, truths that made her dependent on others’ stories. She writes, “Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create.” It’s a different story. A different past. And a different present.

There’s a consciousness implicit in her conclusion. To self-create is to evaluate, to construct. One must actively narrate, to impose a structure on one’s past and present, to come to a sense of self. There’s going to be some trickery in that process. I don’t know myself well enough to be able to narrate a perfectly accurate story. But I’m telling this story about voting rights because I believe there is truth there. Because I want to live as if the story were true. And because the act of storytelling helps make that story true — because it cranks the ratchet. Better to believe the self-fulfilling prophecy than to surrender to the angst-inducing inertia of everyday life.

Calling the statistician from the Voting Section helped reinforce this story. It was a captivating conversation — it’s always a pleasure to hear how the work of the Section is going — but it also gave me a sense of optimism that there was something to my idea of writing about enforcement of the Voting Rights Act for my dissertation. It helped remind me of why I thought voting rights were so intellectually interesting and morally urgent. The ratchet cranked. Next, I talked to the head of my program yesterday to ask him whether the idea would be appropriate for a regulation dissertation. His answer? It was a “lovely” idea with many applications to regulatory studies. He was so encouraging, and had so many ideas on the regulatory literature’s intersection with voting rights enforcement, that I’m feeling profoundly optimistic about this project. Another crank of the ratchet. I just emailed a historian to talk about research questions, and I’m so eager to hear his advice when we talk tomorrow (“between stints of shoveling snow,” apparently).

Later on Thursday, after talking to the statistician, I called a friend from Pomona. We talked about her experiences with internships and her plans for the rest of college. We talked about the value of an education, and how she increasingly felt like it was primarily a credential rather than some more amorphous, lofty undertaking associated with searching for freedom or the Good Life. It’s a perspective I sympathize with, one that I feel like many of my current peers at LSE also share. It’s a sense that education is about developing skills and connections, to launch a career and to find stable employment. I was raised to believe this: education was the ticket to “success” in life, and that meant getting into a prestigious college in order to study computer science or engineering, which in turn would lead to a well-paying job at a technology firm. Economic stability was the priority. Reading books, thinking about politics, yearning for pure science — these were to be pastimes, gratuitous allowances, not livelihoods.

But the twin privileges of economic stability and supportive teachers allowed me to believe in a very different philosophy of education. Starting in elementary school, my teachers uniformly urged me to stay curious, to study what I wanted. By college, I had firmly settled on a different understanding of the purpose of education — that it did have to do with those loftier ideals of freedom and ethics, virtue and discipline, conscientiousness and consciousness. Education is about feeling capable of choosing a calling — about self-exploration and -creation that lead to refinement of one’s purposes. Education is about excellence in that calling — about fostering the best version of oneself toward that end. And education is about understanding the incompleteness and unevenness of that trajectory — about always searching, and reflecting, and learning more.

It was sad to hear from a friend that she had come to a much more utilitarian view of education despite being at Pomona, a place of relative opulence, where (one hopes) students have sufficient support to be able to focus on nurturing their curiosity. But it was also sad because it reminded me of times when I had inadvertently succumbed to that view by being transactional with educational opportunities. I had first met this friend by editing one of her essays. I remember being laser-focused on legal and argumentative technicalities in that piece. I spent a long time on those edits, and, at the time, I was proud of those edits. But I didn’t do much beyond those technical edits. I focused too much on the essay’s specific arguments rather than trying to incorporate broader lessons about how to do research or write persuasively. The experience was transactional. Lost was the creation of a collaborative relationship, the process of engaging in dialogue and discussion — the most meaningful and enjoyable parts of education.

Thinking about these conversations has reminded me of some of my deeply held convictions. Faith in liberal education and clarity in my aspirations help me feel rooted. But, perhaps paradoxically, education is meant to be a life-long, challenging process. In an interview (since you know me, it’s obviously from Talking Politics), Westover described how education ought to be dangerous — how it should never be sterilized or become a kind of factory, where the outcome is predetermined. In that sense, her story reflects education at its finest. Her remarkable life shows how dynamic a good education can be. It also demonstrates how uprooting a good education can be — by the end of her memoir, she had left rural Idaho and resided in two different Cambridges; she had become estranged from much of her childhood community; and she had, at long last, discarded a part of her past personality. As I continue to learn more — as I hope to maintain a challenging education — l wonder how, and whether, I’ll change.

* * * * *

Rose: I had a lot of fun calls this week: with old Pomona friends, with professors, with a Marshall friend, with my exercise buddies. It also snowed last Sunday in London! I got a picture of a few cute snowmen. I was hoping to go cycling with my LSE friend, but, alas, it was quite windy on Friday. We went for a short walk near King’s Cross instead.

Art on a Boat!

Graffiti near King's Cross

Snow!!

Architecture on Architecture

Cute Snowmen

Bud: I did some training sessions this week to start volunteering with a pro bono legal clinic that helps immigrants with deportation proceedings. I’m excited to get a side project that’s very different from everything else I do and that is focused on helping others. I think it’ll be good grounding outside of my arcane studies and academic research. Oh, and also, the next season of History of Ideas starts on Tuesday! I am very stoked.

Thorn: Like last week, this week has also been exhausting.

Gratitude: I’m thankful for the colleague from the Voting Section I called this week and his advice.

Future topics:

* Gamestop. I’m talking to my capital markets regulation professor this week to get her take on how to interpret what happened (is happening?).

American Nationalisms

This last week was the first time that I’ve felt curious about a presidential inauguration. Four years ago, I felt worried. Before that, I’m not sure I was sufficiently interested in politics to be all that curious about the inauguration itself. (Oddly enough, I recall talking about the horse race of the 2004 election between Kerry and Bush II, but I definitely don’t think I had the attention span to listen to or think about the inaugural address, the prayers, and so on.)

The inauguration, honestly, felt kind of silly. The central part of the process is an old guy, hand on an absurdly large book, repeating a few words from another old guy. There’s lots of music, including, in my opinion, an oddly cartoonish song for the presentation of the national colors, and many flags. But the overall ceremony was Very Serious because our nation is Very Serious, and its Laws and Constitution must be Very Respected. The rituals mean something by shaping our understanding of the nation: a nation that is orderly, that is mighty, that respects its heritage, and so on. The inauguration is a formal, legal process — remember the constitutional questions raised when the Chief Justice messed up Obama’s first oath? — but it’s more importantly a nation-building process. For such a purpose, it’s probably not surprising that his speech was filled with platitudes about America (“We look ahead in our uniquely American way — restless, bold, optimistic — and set our sights on the nation we know we can be and we must be”), calls to unity, and echoes of the past (“our ‘better angels’ have always prevailed”; “not merely by the example of our power but by the power of our example”). It’s a rather anodyne kind of nation-building.

I’ve also been wondering about the prevalence of flags and the intensity of rallies among Trump supporters. It seems to me that in these rallies there is an aspect of nation-building that sets it apart — both from normal partisan politics and from inauguration-type nation-building. Maybe it’s just their enthusiasm — perhaps Trump is just good at riling up his base. But it’s hard for me to shake the image of an insurrectionist in the Capitol waving a Confederate battle flag, or to forget the video of a man beating a fallen police officer with an American flag. There seems to be a fervor to this kind of politics that feels more like nation-building than mere partisan politics.

I’ve been thinking about Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, and I’m going to try to use some of its insights to guide my scrambled thinking here. I want to make a basic argument: American partisan divides can be understood as a manifestation of dueling forms of nationalism. At least some of the trends Anderson identified underpinning the rise of nationalism from the seventeenth through twentieth centuries have parallels in our contemporary domestic politics. Moreover, Anderson’s observations can help us understand why American politics seems so intense, and they suggest that our politics will only get more so.

At the outset, I should note that while I was mostly motivated to think about nationalism after seeing so many flags among Trump supporters, this post is about left-liberals and whether we might think of them as a kind of nation.

Let’s start with definitions. At the core of the idea of nationalism is, of course the idea of the nation, which Anderson says is “an imagined political community — and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” There’s four components to this definition.

The nation is imagined, because you will never meet everyone in your nation, yet you can imagine whom the nation comprises. That the nation is imagined, Anderson stresses, doesn’t mean it isn’t “real”; basically any community requires some imagination (have you met everyone in your family or your school?), so what distinguishes communities has to do with how they’re imagined.

The nation is a community in the sense that there is a level of equality there — every member of the nation has some kind of dignity as part of the nation. Anderson suggests this “deep, horizontal comradeship” is crucial for understanding nationalism, because that “fraternity . . . makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.”

The nation, furthermore, is inherently limited — there are imagined members of the nation and, conversely, outsiders. A nation has a border, and that’s what makes nationalism different than, say, an evangelizing religion: “No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind. The messianic nationalists do not dream of a day when all the members of the human race will join their nation in the way that it was possible, in certain epochs, for, say, Christians to dream of a wholly Christian planet.”

Finally, the nation is sovereign, in that it seeks autonomy and freedom to make decisions for itself. When Anderson wrote that “nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time,” he was taking note of how colonized peoples across the world revolted in the name of their nation; independence was a crucial element of the nationalisms that Anderson witnessed.

Nationalism, for Anderson, is a “cultural artefact” that came to dominate global politics due to a set of unique historical circumstances. I’m not going to go through his entire argument — to be honest, I don’t think I understand his entire argument — but I did want to note two interlocking threads of his thinking: first, on language; and second, on imagining time.

On language, Anderson argues that, before nationalism arose, monolinguistic, religious communities predominated across the globe. Think Christianity with the Catholic Church and the privileging of Latin in medieval Europe or Islam based in classical Arabic. In each community, there was a single language that was understood to be linked to divine truths and that bound the community in mutual recognition. A thirteenth-century denizen of Timbuktu could, on his hajj, meet a fellow pilgrim from Aceh, and, despite speaking completely different languages, mutually identify with each other through their common Arabic text. But that exclusive hold on divinity decayed over time. Latin-based worship, we know, would be mostly replaced by worship in the vernacular; bibles would be translated into French, Spanish, English, and so on. Language and religion bound people together. Conversely, the separation of language from religion enabled new, differentiated forms of organization.

Two more specific practices relate the rise of the vernacular to the creation of nations. First, beyond religious text, what Anderson calls “print capitalism” led to a proliferation of publications that, in time, would be readable by normal people across the world. Especially important for creating an imagined, bounded community, Anderson suggests, were the novel and newspaper — an idea I will return to later.

Second, in the time of colonialism and imperialism, the vernacular would be important for administrative purposes. European empires, seeking to exercise control over vast dominions, needed to build state capacity, and they adopted certain vernacular languages for administrative efficiency purposes. Anderson says that this administrative choice had huge consequences for why certain peoples began to see themselves as a nation despite, say, their ethno-religious diversity. Colonial bureaucrats were educated in the vernacular and were sent on “secular pilgrimages” across the empire, meeting with other bureaucrats from far away and seeing the scope of the administrative province. These meetings enabled the bureaucrats both to see themselves as a class of people and to recognize the uniqueness of their experiences as bureaucrats in a colony as opposed to bureaucrats coming from the metropole (i.e., the imperial capital, in Spain or France, etc.). That new nation-states across the world in the postcolonial period created borders that followed the administrative boundaries drawn by the empire, and not the boundaries of precolonial polities, suggests Anderson’s argument about the connection between colonial state-building and revolutionary nationalism.

A second factor: a changing idea of time. Anderson describes time, to the medieval European, as a kind of “simultaneity-along-time.” He points to medieval European artistic depictions of Old Testament stories, where the people are depicted in the garb of medieval Europeans rather than, say, ancient Israelites. Time is imagined as folding on itself rather than as linear: “Figuring the Virgin Mary with ‘Semitic’ features or ‘first-century’ costumes in the restoring spirit of the modern museum was unimaginable because the mediaeval Christian mind had no conception of history as an endless chain of cause and effect or of radical separations between past and present.”

Integral to changing that idea of time, Anderson argues, were novels and newspapers. I’m not going to bother discussing the argument about novels and instead will focus on newspapers.

Newspapers, he suggests, helped construct people’s understanding of time in two ways. First is “calendrical coincidence.” Consider that the front page of the New York Times right now discusses the coronavirus in America, scenes from Wuhan, the Trump impeachment, Russian protests against the arrest of Navalny, the death of Hank Aaron, Canada’s legalization of marijuana, and the aftermaths of the Arab Spring in Egypt. While some of these events obviously are related, there’s no necessary reason to juxtapose them on the front page beyond time and editorial choice. Seeing them together leads the reader to imagine these events as connected in time — as being simultaneous. But the inevitable churn of the printing presses means the next day will bring new news, and the old newspaper will be outdated. Newspapers compel a particular notion of linear, progressive time, in contrast to the medieval notion of simultaneous time.

Second, and related, the newspaper’s temporality (like a book of “ephemeral popularity,” a “one-day best seller[,]” Anderson muses) creates an “extraordinary mass ceremony,” where the reader knows that some others are reading the newspaper simultaneously, yet the reader lacks any knowledge of who those others are. In other words, the reading of the newspaper leads the reader to imagine a community of readers — fellow speakers of the same vernacular, who share similar interests, and who partake simultaneously in this daily ritual. (I’ve been reading the London Review of Books, and I’m always amused by the last page of advertisements, where many folks have taken out ad space in search of romantic partners and Zoom dates — their “newspaper” has led them to imagine a particular kind of community comprising readers with whom they seek to connect.)

I’ve spent a long time recounting (probably very poorly) a complex historical argument, but let me try to identify some parallels with American political divides today.

Start with language. Americans for the most part obviously share a language. But it seems to me that there is a way that our vocabulary is beginning to diverge. It’s, of course, not unheard of for different regions to develop accents or slang — the “yinz” of Pittsburgh or the “y’alls” of the South. I think, though, that words that are formally descriptive and lacking in judgment have become tied to membership in political groups. I have a feeling that I can guess your politics based on whether you use, in normal conversation, any of the following words: “Latinx,” “alien,” “fake news,” “diversity,” or “BIPOC.” Certainly whether your news sources use these kinds of words is suggestive of the source’s ideological slant. But the more it becomes clear that a certain language corresponds to a certain politics, I think the easier it becomes to imagine that fellow-speakers as a kind of closed community, approaching a nation.

I noted earlier that when Anderson talked about the vernacular, he identified two specific ways in which the vernacular mattered for building a sense of nationhood — print capitalism and secular pilgrimages. I just mentioned print capitalism and the role of media outlets in facilitating certain vernaculars. On secular pilgrims, I think the pattern exists today, too.

The analogy for secular pilgrimages today, I think, is college-goers. As with the historical secular pilgrims, college-goers learn to speak a certain vernacular, and they tend toward a cohesive class of people, i.e., they run in similar circles, in similar cities, with similar interests. (David Runciman made a funny comment on a podcast, which goes something like, “The thing that’s most annoying about college-educated people is that they’re the only tribe that acts like they aren’t a tribe.”) Moreover, they become inculcated in a certain culture: a New Yorker-tote-bag carrying, kombucha-drinking, Peloton-cycling, Tinder-swiping, Instagram-posting culture. It is a culture that feels natural — doing these things, as everyone else in your imagined community does, makes you smarter, healthier, happier, and more ethical, because you’ve learned it at a mecca of objective education, one that is densely networked with other such citadels of enlightenment. The secular pilgrim has learned a way of life, and even if they don’t abide by its particular tenets (actually, I work out using the Nike Fitness Trainer app, not Peloton!), the culture has entered into their imagination as the norm of what one ought to do. (I don’t know anyone that actually does all of those things — but I would be surprised if any of my college friends didn’t recognize some part of themselves, or their friends, in that description.)

Finally, I also think Anderson’s discussion of time has a nice parallel in social media — and, for people in my cohort, especially Twitter and Instagram. (I’ll confine my comments to Twitter because I’m not on Instagram.) It is almost cliche to say that social media has enabled instant communication. But beyond the instantaneous nature of community, it has enabled truly simultaneous engagement. I remember experiencing some of the major political events of the last few years — the killing of Suleimani, the November election, the insurrection at the Capitol — “with” others. For in real time, I could see people reacting, sending out Tweets and processing the information, just as I was. The insurrection at the Capitol was perhaps the best example of this. I was literally by myself, shut away in my flat in London. Yet I could so easily feel like there was a community of like-minded people, equally horrified and equally concerned about the constitutional and moral implications of these events, all watching together, eyes glued to our television or streaming devices to get new information. Simultaneity has become so much more visceral than when information traveled by printed newspapers sent along colonial trading routes by boat. On the one hand, that means the individual has to do less work to imagine the community of fellow-watchers. On the other hand, that makes the community feel so much more real, so much more embodied — so much more natural.

When Anderson first wrote his book in 1983, he was witnessing how powerful a political force nationalism was. For the nation, millions of people were willing to lay down their lives. Why? Anderson says that nationhood approaches being natural — it is “something unchosen” and thus something fundamental. He writes of the family, which he compares to the nation: “[T]he family has traditionally been conceived as the domain of disinterested love and solidarity.” One is loyal to and defends one’s family not because it is in their self-interest to do so, but because it is what one ought to do. There is something pure, in Anderson’s eyes, about the defense of the family. So, too, he thinks, of the nation: “[T]he whole point of the nation is that it is interestless. Just for that reason, it can ask for sacrifices.”

Anderson also therefore thinks nationhood is fundamentally different than a political party or a socioeconomic class. Nationhood’s purity differentiates it from factional or ideological identifications. A faction one can leave. A faction advocates for particular interests. A faction is not natural but rather the result of organization. It is “representations of ineluctable necessity,” Anderson suggests, that make a nation different — and it is analogous claims to necessity, purity, and disinterestedness that enable other forms of organization to have similar abilities to compel sacrifice as nationhood. Anderson asks rhetorically, “If people imagined the proletariat merely as a group in hot pursuit of refrigerators, holidays, or power, how far would they, including members of the proletariat, be willing to die for it?” In that sense, my argument probably can’t be that partisanship per se is what is dividing American politics; rather, there is some underlying cultural difference that has become embedded within partisan politics, and that difference drives partisan rancor.

Let me try to sum up the argument. American politics is increasingly characterized by dueling vernaculars, where people use different languages in accordance with their political-ideological identification. Driving the development and adoption of such vernaculars is a mix of an increasingly splintered news media environment and the rise of college-educated voters as a growing proportion of the electorate. Such college-educated people, our modern day secular pilgrims, have an imagined, homogeneous culture that is linked with a particular political-ideological worldview.* And social media platforms enable such people, who are densely networked with like-minded others by virtue of their pilgrimage to college, to experience politics together — a kind of simultaneity that strengthens how viscerally one can feel the existence of their imagined community. Because these developments are deeply rooted in a cultural background, a language, and method of social networking, the imagined community of such college-educated, politically active folks will feel more ingrained over time. And as this community continues to feel ever more natural — ever more fundamental — its effects on politics will become more important. Attacks on that culture will trigger ever more visceral responses; defending those cultural mores will feel ever more obligatory. Politics, in short, will feel ever more consuming for this imagined community. Compromise with the outsiders of the imagined community will feel ever more barbaric and unacceptable.

* * * * *

Rose: I went cycling with my cycling buddy yesterday, which was fun! I haven’t gotten out of the flat too much (probably a good thing, given the lockdown), so it was nice to stretch my legs. We went south of the Thames and then walked along the river. It was a gorgeous day, and I also learned the colloquial (perhaps one might say vernacular) names of some of the City of London skyscrapers: “The Gherkin,” “The Walkie-Talkie,” and “The Cheesegrater.” See if you can identify the buildings on the picture of the City skyscrapers.

City of London (right)

A Statue, feat. Us

Tower Bridge and the City

Hope (Sufferance) Wharf

Biden Wharf?

A Pilgrim Once Drank Here (1)

A Pilgrim Once Drank Here (2)

The Circle

View from the Thames

Bud: I’ve been thinking about dissertation topics recently, and while writing applications for my program next year, it hit me that I should go back to some of my roots and write about voting rights. So I have a dissertation idea to study enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, which seems so much more fun and fulfilling than my next best contender (a study of regulatory independence and how executive informal interpretations of law can shape formal independent regulatory agencies’ separation from the central government — bored yet?). I’ll be calling one of the folks from the Voting Section to ask him about it this week; I’m very excited.

Thorn: I’ve been sleeping very poorly recently, so I’ve been very tired this week. Alas, I hope to get on a better schedule soon.

Gratitude: This last week was my first week of classes, and I was very moved by how hard my professors are trying to make online teaching work. I kind of imagined LSE would be like the stereotypical R1 university, where professors care much more about research than teaching. And though it’s clear that most of the LSE professors are insane researchers — so many “pubs,” as they say — they also really are trying to be good teachers. I’m grateful for their dedication.

Future Topics:

* I think I will want to write about the dissertation idea once it gets more settled.