In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
If Mearsheimer is right, then the entire edifice of liberal political theory, liberal journalism, liberal education, liberal foreign policy, and liberal institutional self-understanding rests on a fundamental mistake about what humans are. The mistake is not a minor technical error. It is categorical. It produces systematic failures across every domain where the mistake is institutionally operative.
Let me work through what follows if Mearsheimer’s claims are accepted as accurate.
What follows for reason. If reason is the least important of the three ways humans determine their preferences, then political theory that treats reasoned agreement as the foundation of legitimate political order is building on what is actually the weakest foundation humans have. Rawls’s overlapping consensus, Dworkin’s interpretive community of reasonable citizens, Habermas’s communicative rationality, all of these depend on reason doing work it is actually not capable of doing. Reason does not produce the commitments these theorists treat as its products. Reason elaborates and rationalizes commitments that socialization and innate sentiment have already produced.
This does not mean reason is useless. It means reason’s role is different from what liberal theory assigns to it. Reason works within commitments rather than generating them. Reason can extend commitments to new cases, identify contradictions within existing commitments, produce sophisticated articulations of what socialization has already deposited. Reason cannot produce the foundational commitments from scratch through neutral analytical operations. Those commitments arrive through other channels.
What liberal theorists have been doing when they seem to produce political commitments through reason is something else. They are articulating commitments their socialization produced in them. The articulation feels like reasoning because they perform it using the vocabulary and procedures of reasoning. The feeling does not change what is actually happening. The commitments preceded the articulation. The articulation elaborates them. The articulation does not generate them.
This means that every liberal political philosopher who has built his system on the assumption that his reasoning could reach universal principles all reasonable people should accept has been doing something other than what he thought he was doing. He has been articulating his specific cultural formation in the vocabulary of neutral reason. His system’s apparent universality reflects the universality of the articulation vocabulary, not the universality of what is being articulated.
If humans have a long childhood in which they are exposed to intense socialization before they develop critical faculties, then the critical faculties that later emerge cannot be used to evaluate what the socialization deposited without circularity. The critical faculties themselves reflect the socialization that produced them. They cannot operate from outside the socialization to assess what the socialization did. They can only operate within the framework the socialization established.
This has substantial implications for what philosophy can accomplish. Philosophy has often been understood as the use of critical reflection to evaluate the commitments that ordinary life and culture have deposited in us. The Socratic examined life. The Cartesian methodical doubt. The Kantian critique of pure reason. Each of these presupposes that philosophical reflection can evaluate pre-philosophical commitments from a position that is not itself shaped by those commitments.
If Mearsheimer is right, this presupposition is false. Philosophical reflection cannot operate from outside the socialization that produced the capacities used in reflection. The capacities are themselves products of the formation being examined. Their apparent independence from the formation is illusory. They examine the formation using tools the formation provided. The examination cannot reach conclusions that transcend the formation because the examination operates within the formation’s framework.
This does not make philosophy useless. It means philosophy is something other than what its practitioners typically claim. Philosophy is the articulate working through of commitments from within the formation that produced the philosopher. The articulate working through can produce substantial intellectual work. It cannot produce assessment of the formation from outside the formation. No such outside position is available.
What follows for moral codes. If people have limited choice in formulating moral codes because so much of their thinking comes from inborn attitudes and socialization, then moral progress as liberal theory typically understands it is not what liberal theory describes. Liberal theory typically understands moral progress as the gradual recognition of universal principles through sustained rational reflection. The universal principles are discovered through the reflection. The discovery expands the circle of moral consideration, produces increasingly just institutions, brings human conduct into closer alignment with what reason requires.
If Mearsheimer is right, moral progress is not the discovery of universal principles through rational reflection. Moral progress, to the extent it occurs, is the gradual displacement of some culturally produced commitments by others. The displacement happens through specific social and political processes that include rational elaboration but are not primarily driven by it. The new commitments that displace the old ones are not more rational than the old ones. They are culturally sustained by different conditions that make them institutionally dominant.
This reframing does not mean moral progress does not exist. It means moral progress is something other than what liberal theory claims. Societies can develop commitments that produce better outcomes on various measures than previous commitments produced. The development is not the discovery of universal truth. It is the cultural replacement of one set of culturally produced commitments with another. The replacement can be welcomed or resisted on various grounds. The grounds for welcoming or resisting are themselves culturally produced. There is no neutral ground from which to evaluate the change.
This is destabilizing for liberal self-understanding. Liberal self-understanding treats its moral commitments as the discoveries of reasoned reflection rather than as one cultural formation among others. If the treatment is incorrect, then liberal confidence in the superiority of liberal commitments over alternative commitments cannot be grounded in the way liberal self-understanding assumes. The superiority, to the extent it can be defended, must be defended on other grounds. The other grounds are themselves culturally produced and do not escape the general condition Mearsheimer identifies.
What follows for innate sentiments. If humans are born with innate sentiments that strongly influence how they think about the world, then the blank slate assumption that has structured substantial liberal theorizing is wrong. Humans are not infinitely plastic material that liberal institutions can shape in any direction through sustained training. Humans have genetically transmitted propensities that operate alongside and sometimes against what liberal institutions try to produce.
The propensities are substantial. Evolutionary psychology has documented many of them across varied research programs. In-group preference. Kin favoritism. Male competition for status. Female selectivity about mates. Sexual division of labor in response to differential reproductive costs. Disgust responses to potential contaminants. Group loyalty under threat. The list extends across most of what makes human social life distinctive.
Liberal theory has typically treated these propensities as obstacles to be overcome rather than as constitutive features of what humans are. The overcoming would happen through sustained cultural training that replaces the propensities with universalist commitments to individual dignity, equal respect, and rational cooperation regardless of biological heritage. The training has been attempted across substantial institutional apparatus for decades.
The results have been mixed. The propensities have proved more durable than the training’s ambitions assumed. They re-emerge whenever institutional pressure slackens. They operate through populations that have received substantial training in universalist commitments but revert to in-group preference under stress. They produce political movements that reassert tribal loyalty against the institutional cosmopolitanism liberal training aimed to produce. The reassertions are not temporary setbacks in a steady march toward universalism. They are persistent features of human populations operating through their actual biological constitution rather than through what liberal training tried to install.
If Mearsheimer is right about all of this, then contemporary American politics looks different from what liberal self-understanding assumes it to be. The political conflict is not between those who recognize universal principles and those who remain trapped in tribal commitments. The conflict is between different tribal commitments that have been institutionally packaged differently. Liberal institutional commitments are tribal commitments that have been trained to present themselves as universal. Populist commitments are tribal commitments that present themselves as tribal. The difference is in presentation, not in underlying structure.
This reframing changes what political conflict is about. It is not about whether to accept reason and universal principles. It is about which tribal commitments will be institutionally dominant. The institutional dominance of liberal commitments for several decades was a political achievement, not the triumph of reason over irrationality. The current resurgence of populist commitments is not the regression from reason to irrationality. It is the political reassertion of tribal commitments that liberal institutional dominance had suppressed but not eliminated.
The reframing does not automatically favor populist commitments over liberal ones. It removes the automatic favor liberal commitments have enjoyed through their self-presentation as universal rather than tribal. Both sets of commitments must be defended on grounds other than claims to universality. The grounds are whatever reasons people can offer for preferring one set of commitments over another. The reasons are themselves tribal in the sense that they operate from within cultural formations. There is no neutral ground from which to adjudicate. The adjudication happens through political processes that include rational argument but are not primarily determined by it.
If Mearsheimer is right that reason is the least important of the three ways humans determine their preferences, then Mearsheimer’s own argument is itself not primarily the product of reason. It is the articulation of commitments his socialization and innate sentiments produced. His realism in international relations theory reflects tribal and cultural commitments rather than neutral assessment of evidence. His critique of liberalism operates from a cultural formation that makes the critique possible rather than from trans-cultural assessment.
Mearsheimer would likely accept this. Realist international relations theory does not claim to be the view from nowhere. It claims to be accurate about human nature in ways that liberal theory is inaccurate. The accuracy claim can be evaluated on evidence without requiring that realism transcend cultural formation. The evaluation is itself culturally located. No neutral position is available. What can be asked is whether the evidence supports the realist claims better than it supports the liberal claims. The asking happens from within cultural formations that shape what evidence is admitted as relevant and how it is weighted.
Mearsheimer’s argument operates within the condition it describes. The operating within does not make the argument false. It makes the argument coherent rather than self-refuting. An argument that claimed to transcend the condition it describes would be self-refuting. Mearsheimer’s argument does not make this claim. It offers itself as better cultural articulation of human nature than liberal alternatives, to be evaluated by whatever standards evaluators bring to the evaluation.
If Mearsheimer is right, liberal political theory has been substantially mistaken about humans for the entire period of its institutional dominance. The mistake has produced pathologies across American institutional life. The pathologies include the failures of American foreign policy Mearsheimer’s book targets. They include the inadequacies of mainstream American media to cover political developments that operate outside liberal frameworks. They include the failures of American universities to engage substantial portions of the populations that fund them. They include the inability of American political theory to address contemporary political developments that do not fit its assumptions.
The pathologies cannot be corrected without acknowledging the mistake. The acknowledgment is resisted by the institutions that have been built on the mistake. The resistance is structural rather than accidental. Acknowledging the mistake would require reconstructing the institutions around different assumptions about what humans are. The reconstruction is difficult and expensive. The institutions have considerable inertia. They tend to persist through accumulating pathologies rather than through acknowledging and correcting the underlying mistake.
This is where contemporary American politics currently stands. The institutions built on the mistake are under sustained pressure from populations whose actual human nature does not fit the institutions’ assumptions. The institutions respond to the pressure in ways that accumulate rather than resolve the pathologies. The responses deepen the divisions rather than healing them. The trajectory continues because no political coalition has both the will and the capacity to reconstruct the institutions around more accurate assumptions.
Whether this situation will persist, worsen, or eventually produce significant institutional reconstruction is not predictable in advance. The situation has features that suggest either outcome is possible. The population that benefits from the current institutional arrangements retains substantial resources to defend them. The populations that do not benefit from the arrangements have growing resources to challenge them. The conflict between these forces will shape how the situation develops.
What Mearsheimer’s argument contributes to understanding the situation is the diagnosis. The diagnosis is that the conflict is about more than policy disagreements. It is about the fundamental assumptions on which the contemporary institutional order has been built. If the assumptions are wrong, the institutions cannot fully serve the populations they nominally serve. The populations will push back against the institutions until either the assumptions or the institutions change. The pushing back is what American politics has been doing for at least the past decade. The pushing back is likely to continue because the underlying assumptions have not changed and the institutions have not been reconstructed.
Charles Taylor identifies the buffered phenomenology that liberal institutions require to function. Mearsheimer identifies that the phenomenology is not grounded in what humans actually are. Together they describe what contemporary American institutional life is up against and why the up against is not easily resolved.
If Mearsheimer is right in that passage, the buffered self cannot be what Taylor’s theory sometimes presents it as. It cannot be an achieved condition in which the most important things are actually inside the self. The passage rules this out directly. If socialization is more important than reason, if childhood formation deposits values before critical faculties develop, if innate sentiments operate before thought can evaluate them, if people have limited choice in formulating moral codes because so much comes from inborn attitudes and socialization, then no self can actually be what the buffered phenomenology reports it to be. The most important things cannot be inside the self because the self’s interior was filled by external formation before the self existed as something distinguishable from the formation.
What then is the buffered self? It is a phenomenology that particular cultures have trained some of their members to experience. The phenomenology reports accurately that members experience themselves as bounded individuals whose commitments feel like their own. The phenomenology reports inaccurately that the commitments actually are the members’ own in the sense of having been generated by the members rather than deposited by formation. The experience is real. The interpretation of what the experience tracks is wrong.
The buffered self is therefore a cultural production that trains its subjects to experience as interior what is the deposit of exterior formation. The training is real cultural achievement. It produces institutional goods. It also misrepresents what the trained subjects actually are.
The theory becomes a theory of cultural formation rather than a theory of selves. Taylor’s framework tracks what happens when particular cultural conditions produce particular phenomenology in particular populations. The phenomenology is not universal human achievement. It is cultural production that emerged under particular conditions in particular societies. The production requires continuing cultural conditions to sustain itself. Remove the conditions and the production erodes. The erosion is not loss of what humans naturally are. It is loss of a cultural achievement that was never what humans naturally are.
This reframing preserves most of Taylor’s empirical claims while changing their interpretation. Modern Western societies did produce populations with distinctive phenomenology that earlier societies and most other contemporary societies did not produce. The populations do experience themselves differently than populations in other cultural contexts experience themselves. The experience has consequences for what the populations can do institutionally and intellectually. All of this remains accurate.
What changes is the interpretation of what the phenomenology tracks. Taylor’s framework sometimes presents the phenomenology as tracking increasing individuation, increasing reflective autonomy, increasing capacity for self-determination against external forces. The framework treats the phenomenology as achievement in the sense of humans becoming more fully what they can be rather than merely differently what they are. This presentation cannot survive the Mearsheimer passage.
The reframed presentation treats the phenomenology as one cultural achievement among others. The achievement has distinctive features and produces distinctive effects. It is not privileged over other achievements that produce different phenomenology. It is different in ways that have implications for what it enables and prevents. Other achievements enable different things and prevent different things. None of the achievements transcends the cultural production that produces it. All are cultural productions that can be described, compared, evaluated on various grounds.
The theory becomes less ambitious but more defensible. Taylor’s framework as sometimes presented makes ambitious claims about what modern Western phenomenology has achieved. The claims position the buffered self as genuine human advance that other cultures have yet to accomplish. The positioning cannot survive Mearsheimer. The ambitious claims must be abandoned.
The framework can still make more modest claims that remain defensible. Modern Western societies produce distinctive phenomenology. The phenomenology has features worth identifying. The features have consequences for what institutions and practices the phenomenology supports. The consequences are available for analysis. The analysis is useful for understanding what contemporary Western institutional life actually involves.
These modest claims do not require the ambitious claims. They can stand on their own empirical grounding without needing the philosophical defense of buffered phenomenology as genuine human achievement. The modest version of Taylor’s framework is closer to descriptive anthropology of modern Western societies than to philosophical theory of what humans have become. The anthropological framing is sustainable after Mearsheimer. The philosophical framing is not.
The porous self is not deficient in what the buffered self has achieved. The porous self operates through more accurate self-understanding than the buffered self has. The porous self knows he is part of something larger that shapes him and exceeds him. This is what humans actually are. The buffered self has been trained not to recognize this about himself. The training is cultural achievement in the sense of producing particular effects. It is not cultural achievement in the sense of reaching accurate self-understanding.
The comparison between the two self-understandings therefore runs in the opposite direction from what Taylor’s framework sometimes suggests. The porous self has better understanding of what he is. The buffered self has worse understanding. The better and worse is not a matter of taste or cultural preference. It is a matter of accuracy. One self-understanding tracks what Mearsheimer’s passage identifies as human reality. The other self-understanding masks what that passage identifies.
This does not mean the porous self is always admirable or always produces better institutional outcomes. Societies dominated by porous phenomenology have produced pathologies that societies dominated by buffered phenomenology have avoided or reduced. Pre-modern religious conflict, ethnic cleansing, tribal warfare all emerge more easily from populations operating through porous phenomenology than from populations trained into buffered phenomenology. The institutional goods that buffered phenomenology supports include reductions in these pathologies. The goods are real even if the phenomenology’s self-understanding is inaccurate.
What useful fiction means in this reframing. Calling the buffered self a useful fiction captures that the phenomenology is productive institutionally while misrepresenting what it tracks. The usefulness does not depend on the phenomenology being accurate. It depends on the phenomenology sustaining institutions that produce particular goods. The institutions require members who experience themselves as buffered. The experience is produced through cultural training that begins in early childhood and continues through sustained institutional embedding.
The fiction is sustained through the institutions that require it. Universities train students to experience themselves as autonomous rational agents whose reflection can reach universal principles. Professional cultures reward displays of the experience. Media environments model it as sophisticated default. Legal systems presuppose it in their operations. Political theory articulates it as foundational. The institutional infrastructure is substantial. It produces and maintains the phenomenology through sustained cultural investment.
The fiction is also cost-bearing. Populations excluded from the institutional infrastructure do not develop the phenomenology. They operate through their actual human nature without the cultural training that masks it. They are often experienced by buffered populations as backward or uneducated. The experiencing reflects the buffered population’s mistake about its own situation. The buffered population thinks it has achieved what other populations have yet to achieve. The achievement is actually cultural masking rather than human advancement. The populations without the masking are not behind. They are operating without the cultural production that trains selves to misunderstand themselves in particular ways.
Contemporary American political conflict involves the confrontation between populations that have been thoroughly trained into buffered phenomenology and populations that have not been. The confrontation is not between sophisticated and unsophisticated citizens. It is between populations operating through different cultural productions that produce different phenomenology. The buffered populations experience the porous populations as regressive because their self-understanding treats their own phenomenology as advanced. The porous populations experience the buffered populations as self-deceived because their self-understanding recognizes what the buffered phenomenology systematically masks.
Both experiences are accurate within their own frames. The buffered populations do produce institutional goods the porous populations have more difficulty producing. The porous populations do retain accurate self-understanding the buffered populations have been trained to lose. The difference is real. Neither side holds the position of transcendent understanding from which to adjudicate the difference. Both sides operate from within cultural formations that shape what they see and how they evaluate what they see.
Political conflict between the two operates at cross purposes because each side treats itself as having accurate understanding the other side lacks. The buffered side treats its institutional goods as vindication of its phenomenology. The porous side treats its accurate self-understanding as vindication of its position. Neither acknowledges what the other side brings that its own side lacks. The acknowledgment would require stepping outside cultural formations in ways Mearsheimer’s passage suggests is not possible.
What is possible is recognition that both sides operate from cultural formations that have their own resources and limits. The recognition permits more honest conversation than the sides typically achieve when each is convinced it holds the position of transcendent understanding. The conversation might proceed through acknowledged cultural difference rather than through one side’s effort to convert the other to its supposed universal truth. The conversation would not eliminate the conflict. It would change the character of the conflict in ways that might make some kinds of cooperation more possible than they currently are.
After Mearsheimer, the theory of the buffered self should be understood as a theory of cultural formation that produces distinctive phenomenology in populations subjected to it. The formation has emerged under particular historical conditions in particular societies. It is sustained by particular institutional infrastructure. It produces particular goods and particular pathologies. It trains its subjects to experience themselves in ways that do not accurately track what they actually are.
The theory can still track what it has always tracked empirically. Modern Western societies produce buffered phenomenology. Pre-modern and many non-Western societies produce more porous phenomenology. The difference has consequences for what institutions and practices each kind of society can sustain. The consequences are available for analysis. The analysis is useful.
What the theory cannot do after Mearsheimer is treat the buffered phenomenology as genuine human achievement that transcends other cultural formations. The transcendence claim cannot be sustained. What can be sustained is descriptive account of what the phenomenology is, how it is produced, what it enables, what it prevents. The account is humbler than some presentations of Taylor’s framework suggest. The account is also more defensible than the more ambitious versions of the framework permit.
Is Mearsheimer right in the opening quote?
The claim that humans are profoundly social is supported by converging evidence across multiple disciplines. Developmental psychology shows that human infants require sustained care relationships for normal development. Children raised in institutional settings without consistent attachment figures show severe developmental problems. The evidence from Romanian orphanage studies, from primate deprivation research, from attachment theory across decades of replication is substantial. Humans are not minor variations on asocial animals. Social embedding is constitutive of normal human development.
The claim that childhood formation deposits values before critical faculties develop is well-supported. The cognitive capacities needed for rational moral evaluation develop gradually across childhood and adolescence. Moral intuitions, emotional responses, basic values, and identity formation occur well before these capacities mature. This sequence is empirically documented across developmental research. Adults who later reflect on their commitments are reflecting on what their formation produced, not generating commitments from neutral starting points.
The claim that innate sentiments influence thinking is well-supported by evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics, and cross-cultural research. Twin studies show substantial heritability for personality traits, political orientation, religious attitudes, and moral intuitions. Evolutionary psychology has documented species-typical responses including in-group preference, disgust sensitivity, status concerns, kin favoritism, and mate preferences that operate across cultures with particular variations. These are not speculative claims. They are supported by multiple independent research programs with replicated findings.
The claim that socialization matters more than reason in determining preferences is well-supported by research on motivated reasoning, cultural cognition, and political psychology. Jonathan Haidt’s work is part of a broader research tradition including Dan Kahan’s cultural cognition research, Drew Westen’s emotional brain work, and extensive empirical literature showing that reasoning typically operates in service of prior commitments rather than generating commitments from neutral inquiry. The research is not controversial within cognitive science and political psychology. It has substantial replication across multiple labs and methods.
What is more contested. Mearsheimer’s framing that reason is the “least important” of the three ways we determine preferences may overstate the case. The research supports that socialization and innate sentiment dominate, but reason does substantial work within the frameworks they establish. Reason extends commitments to new cases, identifies inconsistencies, produces articulated positions from inchoate intuitions, enables sustained cultural development across generations. Reason is not the primary source of foundational commitments but it is not negligible either. Calling it “least important” is a rhetorical move that may be stronger than the evidence requires.
The claim about limited choice in moral codes is largely supported but has exceptions worth noting. Individuals do sometimes reach commitments that break substantially from their socialization. Religious converts, political defectors, intellectual innovators exist. The cases are not numerous enough to refute Mearsheimer’s general claim, but they indicate that the constraint is not absolute. People within the same cultural formation sometimes reach quite different commitments through their own experiences and reflections. The formation constrains but does not determine completely.
The tribal framing sometimes gets stronger than the evidence supports. Humans are socially constituted but not always tribally constituted in the strong sense Mearsheimer sometimes suggests. Social identity theory and related research show that humans form in-groups easily but the in-groups are often quite flexible and context-dependent rather than fixed tribal categories. The tribalism is real but less rigid than Mearsheimer’s framing sometimes implies.
Mearsheimer’s use of this material serves his critique of liberal universalism in international relations. The critique has empirical grounding but also ideological direction. A more politically centrist summary of the same research would emphasize that humans are socially constituted while preserving more room for rational reflection, cultural evolution, and moral progress than Mearsheimer’s framing permits. The empirical evidence supports his core claims without requiring his political conclusions.
This matters because the passage could be used to justify positions Mearsheimer himself might not endorse. Strong tribalist readings of human nature can support both realist foreign policy and various kinds of ethnonationalist domestic politics. The empirical evidence does not support any particular political program. It rules out some liberal universalist claims while leaving substantial room for various political responses to human social nature.
The credibility score. On core empirical claims: highly credible. The basic picture Mearsheimer presents is supported by converging evidence across multiple disciplines. The general direction of the argument matches what cognitive science, developmental psychology, evolutionary psychology, and political psychology have been documenting for decades.
On framing: somewhat overstated. The rhetorical emphasis on reason as least important, on limited choice, on tribal core may be stronger than evidence requires. A more measured version of the same claims would preserve more room for the features Mearsheimer’s framing downplays.
On political implications: not entailed by the empirical claims. The empirical material is compatible with various political programs. Mearsheimer’s political conclusions draw on his realism as much as on the empirical claims. The empirical claims do not mandate his political conclusions.
If we accept the credible part of the Mearsheimer quote, it converges with the work of David Pinsof and the Rony Guldmann book Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression. These frames produce a coherent account of what is happening in contemporary American (and Australian, and British) institutional life.
Humans are profoundly tribally constituted. Their moral commitments come primarily through socialization and innate sentiment rather than through rational reflection. The commitments mark tribal membership and coordinate action within tribes. Different tribes produce different moral vocabularies that serve tribal needs.
Contemporary progressive institutional culture is one tribe among others. Its distinctive feature is that it has trained its members to experience their tribal commitments as transcendent universal principles. The training produces phenomenology in which tribal members cannot see their own tribal nature. The phenomenology serves particular functions within the institutions the tribe controls. It also misrepresents what the tribe actually is.
The tribe’s institutional dominance gives it capacity to impose its tribal commitments on other tribes in the name of neutral principles. The imposition operates through tacit mechanisms that cannot be openly defended because the defense would require acknowledging the tribal nature of the commitments being imposed. The operation through tacit mechanisms produces what Guldmann calls conservaphobia and what Pinsof would identify as standard coalition policing against out-group members.
Conservative populations encountering the institutions experience the imposition correctly as tribal dominance by one tribe over others. The experience is accurate. The institutional tribe interprets the conservative experience as resistance to universal principles from backward populations. The interpretation is inaccurate. It reflects the institutional tribe’s inability to recognize its own tribal nature. The inaccuracy is not incidental. It is constitutive of the institutional tribe’s operation. The tribe cannot recognize its own tribal nature without losing the phenomenology that produces its institutional goods.
Several analytical moves become available that were not quite available when the frameworks operated separately.
The claim that progressive institutional culture is not more rational than conservative populations can be defended on empirical grounds. Mearsheimer provides the grounds. Reason is not the primary determinant of moral commitment for anyone. The institutional culture cannot claim to be operating through reason while conservative populations operate through tribal commitment. Both operate through socialization and innate sentiment. The institutional culture has been trained to experience its operation differently than the conservative populations have been trained. The difference in training does not track difference in actual operation.
The claim that progressive institutional power is tribal dominance rather than the legitimate application of universal principles can be defended on empirical grounds. Pinsof provides the grounds. Moral vocabularies are coalition technologies. The vocabularies the institutional culture uses are the coalition technologies of one tribe. The tribe benefits from having its vocabulary treated as universal. Other tribes do not benefit. The treatment is coalition strategy rather than neutral application of universal standards.
The claim that conservative populations are being systematically mistreated through mechanisms that cannot be openly defended can be defended on empirical grounds. Guldmann provides the grounds. The mechanisms operate through tacit norms rather than explicit rules. They produce conservaphobic patterns that are visible to those subjected to them but not easily articulated by those producing them. The articulation would require acknowledgment that the tacit norms are tacit rather than the neutral standards they present themselves as.
The refinement of Guldmann’s argument. After Mearsheimer, Guldmann’s argument becomes sharper than Guldmann presents it. Guldmann sometimes treats conservative commitments as substantively correct against progressive commitments. This is not necessary for the argument to work. The argument works as long as progressive commitments are acknowledged as tribal rather than universal. Once they are acknowledged as tribal, they lose the privilege to impose themselves on other tribes in the name of neutral principles. The imposition becomes tribal dominance rather than universal principle application. Tribal dominance can be legitimate or illegitimate depending on how it is achieved and sustained, but it cannot claim the immunity from evaluation that neutral principle application claims.
Guldmann is not contending that conservatives are right and progressives are wrong on substantive moral questions. He is contending that the progressive institutional culture’s treatment of conservatives proceeds through mechanisms that cannot be defended once the mechanisms’ actual nature is acknowledged. The contention holds regardless of which substantive positions one prefers. Conservatives who are right about particular questions and conservatives who are wrong about particular questions both suffer the systematic institutional mistreatment Guldmann documents. The mistreatment is not justified by whichever substantive questions it is directed at. It is justified, within progressive institutional culture, by the tacit assumption that conservative commitments are beyond the pale of reasonable discourse. The tacit assumption is what needs to be examined. The examination shows that the assumption reflects tribal commitment rather than neutral standard. Once this is clear, the systematic mistreatment cannot be defended on the grounds the institutional culture invokes.
The conscious moral life is not separate from alliance considerations. The moral commitments themselves are alliance products. The phenomenology of moral commitment is how alliance operation is experienced from within the coalition. There is no separate track of sincere moral reflection that operates independently of alliance dynamics. The sincere moral reflection is itself alliance operation, experienced from within as individual moral response to moral questions. The individual moral response is tribal operation happening through the individual.
Once the integrated framework is accepted, contemporary American political conflict becomes legible as conflict between tribes whose commitments differ and whose institutional power differs. The progressive institutional tribe has substantial dominance achieved through particular historical processes. The dominance is being resisted by other tribes whose commitments and populations have not been accommodated by the institutional arrangements the dominant tribe has produced.
The conflict is not about whether reason should prevail over irrationality. All sides operate primarily through socialization and innate sentiment rather than through reason. The conflict is about which tribes’ commitments will be institutionally dominant. The dominant tribe has treated its position as the expression of neutral universal principles. The resistance from other tribes reveals that the principles are not universal but tribal. The revelation does not automatically favor any particular tribal resolution. It does strip the dominant tribe of the privilege to impose its tribal commitments under the guise of universal principle application.
