Like a lot of people, I think, I’m a bit dazed by the fact that apparently, really, the British public has voted to leave the EU. I’d prefer we lived in a world that was coming together rather than fraying apart. Other than that I’ll refrain from comment and just wish everybody the best.

I do want to remark on a piece by Kevin Drum, written perhaps too quickly in reaction to the results. Drum writes:

I am sick and tired of watching folks like Boris Johnson, Marine Le Pen, Donald Trump and others appeal to the worst racial instincts of our species, only to be shushed by folks telling me that it’s not really racism driving their popularity. It’s economic angst. It’s regular folks tired of being spurned by out-of-touch elites. It’s a natural anxiety over rapid cultural change.

Maybe it’s all those things. But at its core, it’s the last stand of old people who have been frightened to death by cynical right-wing media empires and the demagogues who enable them—all of whom have based their appeals on racism as overt as anything we’ve seen in decades. It’s loathsome beyond belief, and not something I thought I’d ever see in my lifetime. But that’s where we are.

I would never want to shush Kevin Drum. I’m extraordinarily fond of him. But I think he is making a mistake here, empirically and morally.

It is not in fact broadly true that emerging racially-tinged right-wing movements are a “last stand of old people”. Marine Le Pen’s Front National, for example

is strongest among younger voters. It took the votes of 30% of those aged under 35, 27% of those aged 35 to 59 and 21% (noticeably less than its average vote) among the over 60s.

Greece’s overtly fascist Golden Dawn movement

are mainly men with low incomes…43 percent of the voters are between 25 and 39 years, followed by 24 percent being 40 to 50 years old and 15 percent aged 55 to 64 years.

In Great Britain, Leave supporters skew old, as do Trump supporters in the US. But if you wish to look for commonalities between right-wing nationalist movements, I think you’d be better off looking at gender, or profession, or the economic status of the localities from which people hail, more than age.

Drum is certainly right to characterize the explicitly racist appeals of these movements as loathsome. But it isn’t enough to say “that’s where we are”. His interlocutors are right to point to economic anxiety and other disruptive changes rather than leave it there. We have to share the same world with every other human. Drum and I have to share the same country with Trump voters. We try to understand the world in order to better live in it. Explanations or assertions that don’t contribute to that are not worth very much.

How we attribute causality is a social choice, and it is a choice much less constrained than people who clothe themselves in the authority of “social science” or “the data” often pretend. Quantitative methods like instrumental variable analysis at their best indicate that some element is a factor in causing a measured phenomenon. For anything complex, they are rarely strong enough to even suggest either the necessity or the sufficiency of a factor. Social outcomes like susceptibility to racist appeals are affected by lots of things, and are probably overdetermined, so that one could generate equally strong results implicating a wide variety of different factors depending upon what is excluded from or included in ones model.

In political life, there are nearly always multiple reasonable models to choose from. Our choice of models is itself a moral and political act. For example, conservatives prefer cultural explanations for communities with high rates of young single motherhood, while liberals prefer economic explanations. These explanations are not mutually exclusive, both can be simultaneously true, but cultural explanations serve mostly to justify the social stratification that correlates with single motherhood, while economic explanations invite remedies. It might be true, and demonstrable in the usual statistical ways, that a certain neurological state “causes” the verbally expressed sensation of hunger. It might also be true and demonstrable that a prolonged absence of food causes the same expressed sensation. Both of these models may be true, but one of them suggests a more useful remedy than the other. And a more moral remedy. Prescribing a drug to blunt the hunger may yield a different long-term outcome than feeding food, in ways that are morally salient.

It may or may not be accurate to attribute the political behavior of large groups of people to racism, but it is not very useful. Those people got to be that way somehow. Presumably they, or eventually their progeny, can be un-got from being that way somehow. It is, I think, a political and moral error to content oneself with explanations that suggest no remedy at all, or that suggest prima facie problematic responses like ridiculing, ignoring, disenfranchising, or going to war with large groups of fellow citizens, unless no other explanations are colorable. It turns out that there are lots of explanations consistent with increased susceptibility to racist appeals that also suggest remedies less vague and more constructive than, say, “fighting racism” or censoring the right-wing press. With respect to Britain’s trauma, for example, Dan Davies points to Great Britain’s geographically concentrated prosperity, and the effect that has had on the distribution of native versus immigrant young people. I can’t evaluate the merits of that explanation, but it might at least be useful. It does suggest means by which the British polity might alter its arrangements to reintegrate its divided public.

I don’t mean to pick on Kevin Drum, whom I’ve read for more than a decade, and whom I really like a great deal. But it seems to me that the alleged “good guys” — the liberal, cosmopolitan class of which I myself am a part — have fallen into habits of ridiculing, demonizing, writing off, or, in our best moments, merely patronizing huge swathes of the polities to which we belong. They may do the same to us, but we are not toddlers, that is no excuse. In the United States, in Europe, we are allowing ourselves to disintegrate and arguing about who is to blame. Let’s all be better than that.

p.s. Read more Chris Arnade [and more].

I mean to write a bit about the “DAO hack“, which provides a fascinating true-crime introduction to the fascinating (virtual) world of blockchains and cryptocurrency if you don’t already follow this stuff. But before saying what I think about that DAO-stardly DAO-eed, I think it might be useful to explain what I think “blockchains” are, in social rather than technical terms.

A blockchain is just a parliament without a parliamentarian.

Like a parliament, a blockchain is a means by which a group of people collaborates to produce an ordered list of accepted “resolutions” that is deemed authoritative and legitimate by some community it represents. That list of resolutions may cause the construction of alteration of some side-product. Laws passed by Congress create or alter the United States’ legal code. “Blocks” accepted by Bitcoin “miners” change account balances in an implicit ledger of who owns what Bitcoins. But the authoritative source is always an ordered list of accepted resolutions, from which the state of the side products may mechanically be derived.

A traditional parliament requires a lot of work and organization, and it doesn’t scale very well. It’s hard to coordinate getting even a few hundred legislators into a room to vote on a resolution. Keeping an orderly chamber requires organization and hierarchy. Typically there is some kind of leadership, there is a hierarchical structure and “rules of order”, whose purpose is to orchestrate the consideration of resolutions. A “parliamentarian” acts as a keeper and adjudicator of those rules, which are often obscure even to the membership of the parliament. The parliamentarian and the hierarchy her rules enshrine may not be neutral. Most obviously, the leadership of a deliberative assembly may be capable of preventing consideration of resolutions that the membership would pass if required to vote on the question. Anyone who follows real-world politics understands that it matters very much who “controls” a legislative house.

A blockchain represents a deliberative assembly that may be very large (thousands or millions of participants bound by computer networks), and that may be very open (anyone may participate, “legislators” may come and go at will). Traditional rules of order are not up to the task of managing this sort of assembly. Further, the inventors of blockchains did not approve of the traditional prerogatives of a parliament’s “leadership”. Among blockchain enthusiasts, preventing the consideration of a potentially acceptable resolution is usually referred to as a “censorship attack”.

So, instead of a “leadership” that orchestrates the consideration of resolutions, blockchains hold a kind of lottery among its legislators, who are called “miners”. Every few minutes, or even seconds, the winner of a new lottery is announced. The winner gets to submit resolutions for consideration by the parliament, and is financially rewarded if her “block” of resolutions is accepted by the majority. The proposal of resolutions is not restricted to miners. They may be submitted by, well, anyone at all. Miners check the resolutions and decide if they are likely to pass. They combine the ones that do seem likely to pass into a “block”, and hope to win the lottery. A miner may try to exclude resolutions that are likely to pass but that she herself disagrees with, but that sort of censorship is unlikely to have any effect, since she is unlikely to win the lottery in any particular round. Once a block of resolutions pass, each participant updates its own personal copy of the list of passed resolutions to include the new ones. Only participants with a fully up-to-date copy of the list may participate in the next lottery. Since winning the lottery and proposing a successful block is financially rewarded, while censoring proposals or ignoring blocks that the majority would accept is ineffectual, participants usually propose anything that they think would pass and go along with anything that has already passed. Blockchains reward consensus: It is lucrative to go along with most others would go along with. Understanding the will of the majority of their colleagues and bending to it is the job of each and every legislator.

In the most prominent, current blockchains, the norms about what sort of resolution is likely to pass are simple and widely shared. On the bitcoin blockchain, most resolutions amount to something like, “Unspent money belonging to User A in an amount of 3 BTC should be assigned to User B.” A miner checks that User A does in fact have 3 BTC unspent, and that the resolution is properly signed by User A. If so, this transaction is very likely to pass, as the core shared norm of the community of BTC miners is that people should be able to spend their own unspent money however they choose. Note, though, that this in only a norm. If more than half of the participants in the Bitcoin blockchain suddenly decided that User A was evil and should not, in fact, be permitted to spend her money, then lottery-winners would quickly learn to exclude her resolutions, and that would become a new, communally enforced norm. People in the Bitcoin community who consider a norm like this illegitimate would refer to it as “censorship” or a “51% attack”. But “51% attack” is just another way of describing “majority rules” when you don’t like the decision of the majority.

But majority of whom? Open blockchains, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, permit anyone who wishes to participate as a miner, without any kind of vetting or “voter ID”. That’s obviously a problem, because over the internet it is easy to pretend to be a hundred or a thousand or a million people if you want to (a tactic evocatively referred to as a “Sybil Attack” in the blockchain community). To prevent that, instead of “one person, one vote”, blockchains are something like “one GHz, one vote”. Ones weight in the parliament is determined by how much computing power one can bring to bear, and, it turns out, sometimes by the form of the computing power, as Bitcoin for example is best run by very specialized chips. The legitimacy of blockchains, as of more traditional parliaments, derives in part from notions of participation or at least representation, and also from expectations that they will honor and reinforce communal norms. The power of blockchains, as of more traditional parliaments, may depend to a certain degree on their continued legitimacy, but might also survive a loss of legitimacy by virtue of network effects. Congress itself produces nothing but a set of official minutes, but those minutes create important social facts because we each expect other people to take them seriously, so we ourselves take them seriously, so the contents of those minutes create important social consequences. The Bitcoin blockchain produces lists of who spent what to whom of an imaginary, artificial, funny money. But Bitcoin users have become willing to surrender objects of real value for appearing on lists of Bitcoin recipients, and as long as we expect that to be true, we must take the blockchain’s adjudication of who owns what seriously. A blockchain, like a parliament, is much more a social institution than a technological one, although very clever technology was necessary to design blockchain systems that could become socially credible. Like political systems, some mix of continued legitimacy and path-dependent coordination equilibria (“network effects”) determine how durably and powerfully blockchains will be able to shape social facts into the future. Continued legitimacy may depend on continued adherence to widely shared norms, on perceptions of fairness and representation, and on how effectively the blockchain’s decisions serve the actual interests of the community that relies upon it. Ethereum‘s is the most interesting and ambitious widely deployed open blockchain, a parliament whose job is to enforce the behavior of social institutions and financial contracts inscribed as directly consequential computer programs rather than in human habit or legal text. That was never going to be straightforward, and the DAO hack has beautifully surfaced some the difficulties and contradictions inherent to the enterprise. More on that soon, I hope.

FD: I am a critic, but also an enthusiastic participant in the blockchain hyposphere. I am financially and professionally invested in the Ethereum project in particular. I am also a DAO token holder, directly injured by the DAO hack. I’m more intrigued than angry about it, though. Nothing that has already been perfected is very interesting.

Many of us understand and agree that the way you lose to terrorism is to cop to its premises in the way that you react to it. If ISIS or Al Qaeda want to claim that there is a war of civilizations, a religious war between “Muslims” and “The West”, the worst thing we could do is to live up to the role into which the terrorists have cast us by indiscriminately harassing and attacking Muslims. Acts of ostentatious violence are calculated to goad us into reinforcing the enemy’s framing of the conflict. Unfortunately, the tactic frequently works, because “we” are not a monolith, and some domestic factions in fact share a commonality of interest with the terrorists. During the Republican primary season, at least as abhorrent as anything Donald Trump said was the emergence of recitations of “We are at war with radical Islamic terrorism” as a kind of litmus test of seriousness among the allegedly sensible candidates. Perhaps I am cynical, but the sprawling, shadowy, money-drenched national security state is still disproportionately a Republican constituency, and that strikes me as relevant to why these politicians would garb themselves so enthusiastically in a costume sewn by our enemies. (Of course, there is no evidence of any quid pro quo, and I’m sure the candidates are all perfectly sincere in their way. So let’s not call it corruption.)

Similarly, if Donald Trump wants to start a race war, I wonder whether the best approach is to step in and take the other side. You might win an election that way, but you might also take us from a country of people who, still, mostly, don’t think of themselves as partisans for their race to one in which organizing along racial lines becomes a matter of self-defense. Of course, it often has felt that way, and really has been that way, for African Americans. Although there might be a certain justice in extending that condition to the rest of the country, I’m not sure that it would ultimately work out well for any of us. Functional nation states generally try to reduce the salience of socioethnic difference in favor of a national identity. That one of America’s two political parties has sometimes sabotaged this objective for political reasons doesn’t mean it would be a good idea if they both did. It seems to me an overtly racialized United States would be a lot more, rather than less, comfortable place for Donald Trump or the 20th Century politicians to which he is often compared.

I think that the “war on terror” cannot be won by defeating ISIS or Al Qaeda or any other enemy, but will end when the people of the Middle East have hope of living decent lives in stable countries with legitimate governments. Most problems in the world must be solved, not defeated, however attractive the branding of yet another “war on” may be. In the United States, I don’t doubt that various forms of racial animus drive the support of Donald Trump, to some degree. But you can’t solve “Trumpism” by defeating racism. The so-called “white working class” has lots of reasons to be aggrieved besides race or resentment over changing racial hierarchies, including legitimate grievances that would be shared by the not-white working class. Racism itself is an outcome as much as it is a cause. If interpreters of political affairs make wild efforts to dismiss colorably legitimate explanations of grievance in favor of unsympathetic racial resentments, that might be politically useful in delegitimizing support of Donald Trump. It might, less usefully, actually be believed, both by the people whose concerns are being caricatured (and so who come to see themselves as racists) and by others (who take an ever harder line with a cartoon moral enemy).

Of course, socioethnic conflict can be useful. It is an old strategy of colonialists to create racial strife in order to divide and rule. In Europe, elites turned a crisis that emerged from venality among bankers and poor regulation by Brussels into an ethnonational morality play that has destroyed the legitimacy of the EU and continues to devastate several countries, precisely in order to deflect blame from themselves. An America as unequal as ours has become engenders lots of blame that may require deflecting. Carl Beijer writes, “[L]iberalism relentlessly co-opts identitarian politics as a way to channel civil unrest away from class struggle.” (ht Ryan Cooper)

To be clear, I don’t think the writers with whom I am taking issue are intentionally sowing discord. They are writers whom I often admire, who, I think, have given less thought to the implications of the lines they are taking than I wish they would.

Update: This piece is not a response to the awful events in Orlando, which I learned of just after hitting “post”. Stupid fucked-up world.