Are There Political Truths?

What is the correct percentage of immigrants that a country should allow across its border each year? For fun, I put the question to Grok—one of the best available LLMs (large language models)—and received this response:

There isn’t a universally agreed-upon “ideal” percentage of immigrants to allow into a country each year; it’s a complex issue with varying perspectives and depends on a country’s specific circumstances and goals. Here’s a breakdown of factors to consider:

• Economic Needs: Some countries may prioritize immigration to address labor shortages or boost economic growth, while others may focus on social or humanitarian factors. 
• Demographic Trends: A country’s values, traditions, and capacity to integrate immigrants can influence its immigration policies. 
• International Relations: A country’s relationships with other nations and its commitment to international law and humanitarian obligations can also play a role. 
• Political Factors: Immigration policies are often subject to political debate and public opinion, which can lead to changes in immigration levels and regulations. 
• Quota Systems: Some countries, like the United States, have established annual quotas for immigrants, allocating visas based on various factors such as family ties, skills, or diversity. 
• Skill-Based Systems: Other countries, like Canada, prioritize immigrants with specific skills and qualifications to address labor shortages and boost economic competitiveness. 
• Family Based Systems: Many countries allow family members of citizens or residents to immigrate, creating a pathway for family reunification. 
• Refugee and Asylum Policies: Countries also have policies in place to provide protection and support to people fleeing persecution or violence in their home countries. 
• Integration and Social Cohesion: Ensuring that immigrants can successfully integrate into society and contribute positively to their new communities is crucial. 
• Economic Impact: Immigration can have both positive and negative economic impacts, depending on various factors, such as the skills and qualifications of immigrants, the size of the immigrant population, and the overall economic climate. 
• Social Services: Immigration can place a strain on social services, such as education, healthcare, and housing, requiring careful planning and resource allocation. 
• Public Opinion: Public opinion on immigration can be highly variable and can influence immigration policies and public discourse.

Although “political science” and “economic science” are, technically speaking, sciences as the word is commonly used (theories, data, and testable hypotheses abound), compared to the physical and biological sciences, there is something different about these fields of study. Namely they have direct implication for policy, and therein arises numerous qualifications for the search for any answers. For example, what is the right percentage for the upper income tax bracket? Once again, Grok reveals how dependent the answer is on subjective goals of a nation:

There’s no single “right” percentage for the upper income tax bracket—it depends on what you’re trying to achieve and who you ask. Economists, policymakers, and regular people have been arguing about this forever, and the answer hinges on trade-offs between revenue, fairness, and economic growth. Historically, top marginal tax rates in the U.S. have swung wildly. In the 1950s, they hit 91% for the highest earners under Eisenhower, though loopholes meant few actually paid that. Revenue maxed out at around 7–9% of GDP back then, similar to today’s levels, despite rates now topping out at 37% federally (plus state taxes in some places). Practically, it’s a mess of priorities. Want more social programs? Crank it up to 50–60%, like some European countries (France is at 45%, Denmark effectively higher with add-ons). Worried about brain drain or stifling entrepreneurs? Keep it closer to 35–40%.

“Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything … lives or dies by politics.” —Charles Krauthamme

In politics and economics, most of us think of them as determining “truth” by vote (in politics) or by fiat policy (in economics), as in the above examples of immigration and tax rates. We cannot determine the right answer in some absolute sense because it depends on the goals of a nation and the political party in power (liberals want immigration and taxes higher, conservatives want them lower). The “correct” answer is determined through the vox populi system of democratic elections (at least, in principle), which is always open to change with the next election, referendum, or Electoral College vote.

Nevertheless, such qualified truths must be sought, for as the late Charles Krauthammer wrote in his 2013 book Things That Matter:

Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything—high and low and, most especially, high— lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away.¹

In the search for political and economic truths, we must begin with an understanding of the nature of human nature. The founding fathers of the United States understood this, as when James Madison argued in Federalist Paper No. 51:

But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.²

I was thinking about Madison’s famous overview of the problem in designing a new government during an online exchange I had with Elon Musk (in his pre-DOGE days), after I asked the SpaceX CEO what documents he would recommend being consulted in setting up a colony on Mars. The U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights? The Universal Declaration of Human Rights? The Humanist Manifesto? “Direct democracy by the people,” Musk responded. “Laws must be short, as there is trickery in length. Automatic expiration of rules to prevent death by bureaucracy. Any rule can be removed by 40 percent of people to overcome inertia. Freedom.”

Direct democracy sounds good in theory, but in practice such a system can easily slide into a tyranny of the majority—AKA mob rule—which is why they are historically rare. Switzerland is an exception, although it is a hybrid, or semidirect democracy, with Federalism-like vertical separation of powers mixed in. In recent centuries we have learned that some sort of representational system appears to be necessary to obviate the inherent flaws with direct democracies. The representational democracy of the sort practiced in the U.S. constitutional republic works fairly well, although as is all too apparent, representatives can be heavily influenced by special interest groups and corporations. Perhaps a variation of delegative democracy might be tried, in which voters have an option to delegate their vote to others, although that could quickly degenerate into trading or selling votes. These experiments in democracy give us a database of what works and what doesn’t, and this process may provide evidence for truer or less true forms of political and economic systems. (Nondemocratic nations have had different criteria for “what works,” such as Lenin, for whom all government was simply a question of “whose ox is being gored” and Mao’s belief that all political answers come “from the barrel of a gun.”)

Direct democracy sounds good in theory, but in practice such a system can easily slide into a tyranny of the majority—AKA mob rule—which is why they are historically rare.

If we think about political and economic truths as determined by social experiment tried in different places, we can use the comparative method of the historical sciences to draw conclusions. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1804, “No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth.” From this experimental method, Jefferson concluded that whatever changes in politics and economics are implemented, it should be done carefully and incrementally:

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.³

There are, as well, a variety of social experiments in setting up new societies that differ from nations and states, that nevertheless may inform an analysis of what works and what doesn’t in the political and economic realm. These include unintentional communities, such as shipwrecked sailors stranded on an island, intentional communities, such as the communes established in America in the 19th century and Kibbutzim founded in Israel in the 20th century, and artificial communities, such as online communities developed in the 21st century. These natural experiments in living are deeply explored by the evolutionary sociologist Nicholas Christakis in his 2019 book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society.⁴ Let’s look at a few examples from unintentional communities and see what light might be shone on the problem, starting with Yale University sociologist (and, interestingly, physician) Christakis’s list of eight social characteristics at the core of all good societies:

1. The capacity to have and recognize individual identity.
2. Love for partners and offspring.
3. Friendship.
4. Social networks.
5. Cooperation.
6. Preference for one’s own group (that is, a mild “in-group bias”).
7. Mild hierarchy (that is, relative egalitarianism).
8. Social learning and teaching.

Whatever the right balance of these characteristics for any given society, the overall balance to be sought is between individualism and group living—individual autonomy balanced against the interests of the community.

Unintentional communities are natural experiments that have struggled to find this balance, a type of “forbidden experiment” that would never get the approval of a research university’s Institutional Review Board. Being stranded in a remote place is one such natural experiment, and—believe it or not—there’s a database of such forbidden experiments in the form of shipwrecks with survivors, or in the subtitle of an 1813 work in this genre, “A Collection of Interesting Accounts of Naval Disasters with Many Particulars of the Extraordinary Adventures and Sufferings of the Crews of Vessels Wrecked at Sea, and of Their Treatment on Distant Shores.”

Christakis includes a table of 24 such small-scale shipwreck societies over a 400-year span from 1500 to 1900, with initial survival colony populations ranging from 4 to 500 (with a mean of 119), but with much smaller numbers of rescued survivors, ranging from 3 to 289 (with a mean of 59), reflecting their success or failure in striking the right balance. The duration of these unplanned societies ranged from 2 months to 15 years, with a mean of 20 months.

Some of the survivors killed and ate each other (murder and cannibalism), while others survived, flourished, and were eventually rescued. What made the difference? “The groups that typically fared best were those that had good leadership in the form of mild hierarchy (without any brutality), friendships among the survivors, and evidence of cooperation and altruism,” Christakis elaborates. The successful shipwreck societies shared food equitably, took care of the sick and injured survivors, and worked together digging wells, burying the dead, building fires, and building escape boats. There was little hierarchy—for example, while on board, their ship’s officers and enlisted men were separated, but on land, successful castaways integrated everyone in a cooperative, egalitarian, and more horizontal structure, putting aside prior hierarchical class differences in the interest of survival. Camaraderie emerged and friendships across such barriers were formed.

The closest thing to a controlled experiment in this category was when two ships (the Invercauld and the Grafton) wrecked on the same island (Auckland) at the same time in 1864. The island is 26 miles long and 16 miles wide and lies 290 miles south of New Zealand—truly isolated. The two surviving groups were unaware of one another, and their outcomes were starkly different. For the Invercauld, 19 out of 25 crew members made it to the island, but only 3 survived when rescued a year later, whereas all five of the Grafton crew made it to land and all 5 were rescued two years later. “The differential survival of the two groups may be ascribed to differences in initial salvage and differences in leadership, but it was also due to differences in social arrangements,” Christakis explains. “Among the Invercauld crews, there was an ‘every man for himself’ attitude, whereas the men of the Grafton were cooperators. They shared food equitably, worked together toward common goals (like repairing the dinghy), voted democratically for a leader who could be replaced by a new vote, dedicated themselves to their mutual survival, and treated one another as equals.”

Is there a political system that more or less follows these criteria for what makes a good society? There is, and it is termed classical liberalism. Its founders are a veritable Who’s Who of political and economic thought, honored—perhaps more in the breach than the observance—by liberals and conservatives alike: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Adam Smith, David Hume, Thomas Paine, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Alexis de Tocqueville, and many others. It has been variously described as the system that cherishes individual liberty and autonomy, personal agency and responsibility, natural and civil rights, civil and economic liberties, religious liberty and church-state separation, free speech, free press, and free trade, private property and the rule of law, and other such principles. (In the 19th century this political and economic philosophy became known as “liberalism”, but the morphing of that word in the 20th century toward the left end of the political spectrum now requires use of the modifier “classical.”⁵) Surely most of us on both the Left and the Right today can agree—in principle if not always in practice—that these are values we share. To be more specific in articulating what classical liberalism represents, in the final chapter of The Moral Arc I enumerated a number of these principles as the “Freedom and Justice Dozen,” noting that they are necessary “to quell our inner demons and to inspire our better angels.”⁶

1. A liberal democracy in which the franchise is granted to all adult citizens.
2. The rule of law defined by a constitution that is subject to change only under extraordinary circumstances and by judicial proceedings.
3. A viable legislative system for establishing fair and just laws applied equally and fairly to all citizens regardless of race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation.
4. An independent judicial system for the equitable enforcement of those fair and just laws that employs both retributive and restorative justice.
5. Protection of civil rights and civil liberties for all citizens regardless of race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation.
6. A potent police force for protection of our liberties from attacks by people within the state.
7. A robust military for protection of our liberties from attacks by other states.
8. Property rights and the freedom to trade with other citizens and companies both domestic and foreign.
9. Economic stability through a secure and trustworthy banking and monetary system.
10. A reliable infrastructure and the freedom to travel and move.
11. Freedom of speech, the press, and association.
12. Mass education, critical thinking, scientific reasoning, and knowledge available and accessible for all.

And for a Baker’s Dozen, let’s add one more that has developed over the past century:

13. Social spending to help those in need to survive and flourish, such as the homeless, mentally ill, physically handicapped, unemployed, elderly, and children, with such necessities as shelter and housing, childcare, food, energy, education, job training, and medical care.

A word on this last point: Those on the Left feel we do not do enough to support citizens in need, while those on the Right argue that too much social spending is enabling those who should be helping themselves. There are elements of truth in both of these responses, but the fact is that today the strongest and fastest growing economies in the world allocate anywhere from 20 to 30 percent of their GDP to social expenditures, including (in order), France (31.2%), Belgium (28.9%), Finland (28.7%), Italy (28.2%), Denmark (28%), Austria (26.6%), Sweden (26.1%), Germany (25.1%), Norway (25%), Spain (23.7%), and Greece (23.5%), with the United Kingdom at 20.6%, the United States at 18.7%, and Canada at 17.3%.⁷ When social spending made through employers instead of government (such as healthcare, retirement, and disability) is factored into the equation, the U.S. rises from 21st place to 2nd in overall social expenditures.

Classical liberals emphasize the freedom and autonomy of individuals and the rights of persons, not collectives.

Germany is a model country that has balanced highly competitive free market economics—it is by far the strongest economy in the EU and the third largest economy in the world after the United States and China—with a social welfare system that provides cradle-to-grave security. My wife Jennifer is from Köln, Germany, and she is constantly amazed at what the U.S. fails to provide those in need (or even the basics we all need, such as universal health care), that her country supplies without apparent harm to its robust economy. Tellingly, a 2015 study on world human development between 1870 and 2007, conducted by the economist Leandro Prados de la Escosura, reported a positive correlation between the percentage of GDP that an OECD nation allocated to social spending and its score on a composite measure of prosperity, health, and education.⁸ (Although it is reasonable to ask if this is because those nations are rich enough to be able to afford such “generosity.”)

So, it is not only moral to help those who cannot help themselves, it pays fiscal dividends to have a strong social safety net within the umbrella of a competitive free market economy. Social spending may seem like the weather—everyone complains about it (there’s too much or too little) but no one does anything about it—but in fact it has become an integral part of all advanced nations and must be counted as a form of progress on the long arc of the moral universe. It is, perhaps, the grand bargain of classical liberalism that both conservatives and liberals might agree on a figure somewhere within that band of 20 to 30 percent of GDP, the details left to jigger depending who is in power and what, specifically, voters want funded more or less.

The central dogma both liberals and conservatives today embrace that veers from the ideals of classical liberalism is in their emphasis on the group over the individual. Under the guise of “identity politics,” liberals tend to treat individuals as members of an oppressed or oppressing group, as defined by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and political party. Under the pretense of “faith and flag,” conservatives tend to sort people into such collectivities as nation, state, tribe, family, religion, and political party. The resulting Us versus Them tribalism results in such illiberal policies as speech censorship and destructive moralizing on the left and political populism and economic nationalism on the right. The populist politics of the Hard-Right is simply the mirror image of the identity politics of the Hard-Left.

Classical liberals believe that it is individuals who are entitled to rights—not races, genders, ethnicities, religions, or nations—because it is individuals who perceive, emote, respond, love, feel, and suffer. Classical liberals emphasize the freedom and autonomy of individuals and the rights of persons, not collectives. Individuals vote, not genders. Individuals want to be treated equally under the law, not races. Many of our constitutional rights, in fact, were designed to protect individuals from being discriminated against as members of a group, such as by race, gender, and sexual orientation.

It is when individuals are subsumed into and sacrificed for the good of the group that abuses of freedom have been most widespread and body counts have skyrocketed.

To be sure, we are a social species, so we enjoy and even need the company of others, such as families, friends, and faiths. And we are a political species, so we revel in sorting ourselves into like-minded ideological tribes. However, such consortiums should not be confused with or negate the value of the individual as the primary moral agent of our ethical concern, the axiomatic inheritor of our legal rights, the principal participant in our democracy, and the ultimate subject under our laws. The unique individual is to politics what the atom is to physics and the organism is to biology—a fundamental unit of nature. Therefore our moral starting point ought to be the survival and flourishing of individual sentient beings.⁹

It is when individuals are subsumed into and sacrificed for the good of the group that abuses of freedom have been most widespread and body counts have skyrocketed. It is when people are judged not by the content of their character but by the color of their skin—or by their gender constitution, or by with whom they choose to share a bed, or which accent they speak with, or by which political or religious affiliation they identify with—that freedom falls and liberty is lost.

On that point, the historical record is clear.