Our current difficulties have prompted a wave of debate about the role norms and culture play in supporting a free society. I have to say it’s something of a bittersweet development. On the one hand, I’ve been obsessing about these questions for the past few years and I’m writing a book on them, so it’s nice that people are taking an interest. On the other hand...I’d rather American democracy not collapse.
Part of what I’m interested in doing is exploring what these norms actually are and how they influence the flow of historical events. There are, as you might imagine, many different perspectives on such questions. Consider this recent, thought-provoking piece by Henry Farrell, discussing how to think about norms-as-guardrails in the context of the battle over Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Supreme Court seat. One popular view of how norms work is that they maintain their power or collapse depending on how dutifully different actors adhere to them. In this view, Democrats should not respond to Republicans’ violation of the norms surrounding judicial appointments with norm violations of their own (like expanding the court) because doing so simply accelerates the process of norm-erosion and moves the country closer to a crisis. Henry argues that is a naive assessment of how norms work:
[N]orm maintenance requires not just that political actors worry about the chaos that will ensue if the norms stop working. It also relies on the fear of punishment – that if one side deviates from the political bargain implicit in the norm, the other side will retaliate, likely by breaking the norm in future situations in ways that are to their own particular advantage.
What this means, pretty straightforwardly, is that norms don’t just rely on the willingness of the relevant actors to adhere to them. They also rely on the willingness of actors to violate them under the right circumstances. If one side violates, then the other side has to be prepared to punish.
In other words, sometimes you have to be willing to flout norms to save them. It’s a compelling argument, and also an attractive one, given the harsh reality that if Democrats are not prepared to violate a few norms during the next Congress (by abandoning the filibuster, for instance, assuming they win a Senate majority) then their agenda will essentially be dead on arrival.
Is it right though? One potential problem is time consistency. A credible threat to violate a norm which succeeds in deterring another threat to violate a norm manages to secure the power of the relevant norms without their ever being violated. But what does a violation in retaliation for another violation accomplish? Arguably, it just confirms that the equilibrium in which both sides exercise self-restraint in order to uphold norms has been abandoned, and the fight becomes a pure power struggle. Reestablishment of mutual respect for the norm does not strike me as the most likely outcome of tit-for-tat.
But more importantly, I’m not sure that Henry’s characterization is the best way of understanding how norms work. I think there’s something more subtle, and perhaps more powerful, going on than participants in a strategic game rationally weighing up the costs and benefits of defecting from rather than adhering to an established norm.
The response to a norm violation does matter. As I wrote a few weeks ago:
[W]hat sustains a cultural norm is public respect for that norm: people doing what the norm says they should, and others responding to actions with the laudatory or critical reaction the norm demands.
But how does a negative response matter? Is it that punishment shapes a rational actor’s assessment of the payoffs to different strategies and influences his choices in that way? Or something else? Let’s imagine a rule with slightly lower stakes: like the norm that dog-owners should clean up after their pets when walking them in public spaces. Direct retaliation in response to violations of this norm can be an unpleasant thing to experience; getting caught by a neighbor for not picking up after a dog can lead to the humiliating experience of being chewed out, publicly shamed, scorned by your neighbors, etc. But if you’re out walking the dog late at night when the streets are quiet, the risk of being caught is low. So why do people, a good many of them at least, still do what they’re supposed to do?
It is not a matter of rational calculation—or not only a matter of rational calculation, at least. Rather, there is an intrinsic motivation, consisting of the ideas that 1) the rule to be followed is a just rule, and 2) that the dog-walker conceives of themselves as the kind of person who follows just rules. It is a matter of values and identity, in other words. A person does what is right not because they have calculated that the payoffs to doing so justify the choice, but because doing what is right in such a circumstance is the course of action most consistent with their own self-conception. You pick up after your dog because you think it’s important not to be an asshole and you recognize that not picking up after your dog is a dick move.
If that’s the case, then why does retaliation matter at all? Yes, it matters in part because payoffs are not entirely irrelevant. But retaliation also helps define the social circles and the identity characteristics that go along with respect for a particular norm. When you come to think of yourself as the kind of person who does x or doesn’t do y, you don’t arrive at that determination in a vacuum. In making a cultural precept a part of your identity, you are associating yourself with a group of others who share that precept in common: perhaps because you admire them, or because you perceive them to enjoy high status, or because you see adherence to such norms as a route to social or economic success, or because there is a geographic or ethnic association to which you feel an affinity, or something of that sort. Negative feedback in response to norm violation demonstrates publicly which people, associated with which groups and behaviors, care about such things. And depending on the cultural groups to which you perceive yourself to belong, or to which you aspire to belong, it demonstrates whether you should care or not.
More succinctly: culture is a means by which we collectively communicate with each other about what kinds of things are good to do and what kinds of things are bad. We associate ourselves with different groups based on how we see ourselves and what we aspire to be (though also by accidents of birth or circumstance). Membership in these groups shapes our sense of identity and influences our behavior, by nudging us to act in ways which are consistent with our own self-conception.
Now, let’s apply this to the matter of democratic norms. Why do senators hew to certain norms, even when doing so potentially undermines their own avowed political goals? Once again, personal payoffs do matter to some degree. Perhaps paying respect to a norm is cover for fundamentally self-interested behavior (maintaining personal power by not relinquishing control over a veto point, say, or betraying a stated political goal to appease a rich donor). Or maybe the cost of potential retaliation is seen as too high to make crossing the norm worth it, as Henry argues.
But looking across history, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that senatorial behavior is very often a matter of living up to an identity: as a patriot, or a statesman, or even simply a senator. Keeping a norm is a means by which politicians associate themselves with the great leaders of the past, who exercised self-restraint in order to build and preserve democracy. To see themselves as they wish to be seen, they must abide by certain rules. Reverence for a norm is a way of amplifying their own greatness and the importance of the tasks in which they’re engaged. That’s why it works! Reverence for long-standing rules turns senatorial ego into a guardrail which helps keep orderly democratic government from degenerating into lawless rule by those with the power to do as they wish.
What happens, though, if that reverence fades? People have complex identities which derive in part from the fact that they are members of many cultural groups. If one’s identity as a senator becomes less important than one’s identity as a party leader, or a Machiavellian force of history, or an ideologue, or a servant of god, or whatever, then the power of senatorial identity to constrain behavior erodes. If there is no shared identity between Republican and Democratic senators built around a conception of statesmanship and a common reverence for the institution, then there’s no psychic cost to transgressing norms. At that point, there are only the direct payoffs to be considered, and unless the transgressor stands to personally shoulder a large share of the ensuing costs, there’s not much reason to keep up the old act.
Mitch and the gang seem to have long ago made up their mind about the costs and benefits of norm-shredding. Betraying Trump, his party, and whatever personal codes Mitch McConnell abides by would absolutely be more psychically and materially costly to the majority leader than ignoring Senate tradition. He’s already done the backward induction and worked out that whatever norm violations Democrats are prepared to undertake in the 117th Congress are entirely worth accepting as a reasonable price for seating a new justice and doing whatever else he decides to do between now and January 3rd.
Which is to say that Democrats in the next Congress should not view their own violations of norms as justified on the grounds that such measures help affirm the old norm-abiding equilibrium. That battle has been lost. But neither does that mean that Democrats should feel free to violate norms in whatever way they see fit. Norms should instead be violated in a carefully calculated way aimed at establishing a new, healthy equilibrium. So to take one hypothetical example: suppose Democrats win majorities in both houses and the presidency, and determine that eliminating the filibuster is the price that has to be paid to enable Congress to pass a major economic stimulus bill which supercharges growth through a first Biden term. If Democrats can also position themselves as the actual respecters of law and order and democratic principles—and not flouting norms willy nilly is probably an important component of this effort—then these latter principles might also enjoy a cross-party increase in status and legitimacy because of their association with a strong economy. Or perhaps not; this is merely an illustrative example.
But the hope has to be that a cross-party consensus around the norms governing democratic institutions can be reestablished. Because I disagree with Henry when he writes that:
[N]orms are institutions (more precisely, they are informal institutions that are not supported by formal external punishments but by the expectations of the actors that adhere to them)...
I don’t see a meaningful distinction between norms and “formal institutions”. Formal institutions are not autonomous things which automatically respond to x infraction with y penalty. They are, rather, like the Senate: collections of individuals whose aggregate behavior is shaped by shared values. An institutional response to some action is the aggregate effect of lots of choices made by individuals, who are each influenced by their beliefs and sense of identity, who each have to decide whether to do this or that, obey this law or not, mete out this legitimate punishment or not, follow this president’s order or not. You can’t replace a norm with nothing. If you don’t like the old norm, you need to come up with a better and more just one to replace it. Because for better or worse, it is norms all the way down. And it’s a long way down.