Devil Shift (Part Two)
In part one I introduced the concept of devil shift to illustrate how your engagement with partisan politics is likely distorting your view of reality. In part 2, I will provide a more scholarly discussion of how devil shift may help elucidate the dynamics of polarization.
Introduction
In this second installment in my two-part series on devil shift, I will bring this notion of Sabatier’s into dialogue with my own concept of an ‘elite worldview consensus’. In doing so, I hope to illustrate how the greater involvement of the non-elites in politics exacerbates polarization and destabilizes liberal democracy.
The Elite Worldview Consensus
In my PhD thesis, which I am in the process of seeking to publish as a book, I advance the following theory. Humans in their political activities are driven primarily by a will to the Good. This is not to say that they are never corrupted by material self-interest or a will to power, but that — in principle — their pursuit of whatever political ends is driven by the conviction that these ends are right. Metaphysically speaking, this is our response to the Absolute immanent within us calling us back to it. Whether the ends one then pursues are good or ill is down to correct or incorrect apprehension of reality. Very few people knowingly pursue evil. Even the most wicked believe themselves to be righteous. There is every indication that Adolf Hitler and Mao Zedong believed themselves to be advancing what is good and true.
To satisfy this drive toward the Good is a necessary precondition for liberal democracy. The mechanism for liberal democracy is competition. More specifically, it is self-restrained competition. In order for competition to remain so, the stakes of the contest must be lowered. Elites must share a common worldview. They must be in agreement on those issues of existential importance — those issues the disputation over which carries the real possibility of violence. This I call the elite worldview consensus. What elites then compete over, what the masses get a choice over, in a stable liberal democracy are then matters of marginal disagreement amongst the elite. Liberal democracy is in reality vitiated, as the masses do not choose on issues of primary importance but have their choices confined to relative trivialities. Do taxes go up slightly, or down slightly? Will the rate of immigration be slightly higher or slightly lower? Will prison sentences be slightly longer or slightly shorter?
This boxing in of voter choice is not, contrary to the view promulgated by populists, a product of cynicism on the part of elites — but rather a direct product of their sincere commitment to their stated beliefs. What is more, this is not even necessarily deleterious to the public interest. There is good reason to doubt the competence of voters to choose beneficial or even coherent policies (see the work of Caplan). Now, this is not a defense of the preferences of the elite. I certainly see the elite’s policies as highly objectionable. However, one suspects that leaving these questions to majority opinion would not lead to better outcomes.
This then is the theory of the elite worldview consensus. The elites must view each other as friendly competitors rather than as enemies for liberal democratic competition to remain restrained. For this to be, they must form a consensus on their worldview. It follows then, that a breakdown in this consensus leads to the destabilization and, if it goes unchecked, the collapse of liberal democracy.
Having recapped my theory, I will in what follows make the following expansion to the theory. What is the role, if any, of non-elite actors in the process of eroding the worldview consensus?
The Mass and The Activists
Before proceeding, first a word of caution. There is a temptation to assume that the United States is currently seeing it’s elite’s worldview consensus collapse. If this is happening, it is in its very early stages. It may well be happening, but so far there are no historical instances of a liberal democracy’s elite consensus collapsing. We cannot know, therefore, what exactly such a collapse will look like. The description that follows, as with the one in my thesis that it supplements, are therefore to be taken as speculative and conjectural.
Once a consensus forms on issues of existential importance, dissensus persists on secondary issues. It is not inconceivable that dissensus on this secondary level could gradually grow to the point where it starts to affect the bedrock of existential issues. One can imagine a small, superficial crack in the floor of a building gradually widening and deepening until it begins to split the foundations. The elite consensus may also be challenged by the arising of new, potentially existentially serious, issues not covered by the consensus like climate change, immigration driven demographic change or a pandemic such as COVID-19.
In either or both of these scenarios, non-elite actors may play the role of an accelerant in opening the fissures in the elite worldview consensus. I ground my perspective on these issues in elite theory. This is to say, I take it as a given that organized minorities (i.e. elites) dominate the political process. Pace vulgarized accounts of elite theory (for example, that of Neema Parvini) this does not mean that non-elites are irrelevant to events.
Non-elites are often styled ‘the People’. I reject this term as it denotes a social construct whose existence is necessitated by the ejection of God from the schema of political legitimacy. The People denotes an imagined unitary actor capable of having a will, conformity with which confers legitimacy. No such actor, in fact, exists — only a collection of individuals and families. There are people, but no such thing as the People. I therefor employ the term ‘the mass’ to denote the totality of non-elite actors in a state, as it does not imply any unified will but instead evokes the image of a collection of disparate actors. For the greatest part of the mass, their involvement in politics in liberal democracy is limited to voting in elections every half decade or so, if they even do that. The Suharto regime coined the helpful term “the floating mass” to denote this concept. A minority, in many cases an extreme minority, of non-elite actors are, by contrast, chronically involved in politics. This group I term ‘activists’.
This bifurcation can meaningfully be related to some concepts presented by Jason Brennan in his work Against Democracy. Brennan distinguishes between “hobbits”, who are basically disinterested in politics and want to be left to engage in their personal projects unmolested, and “hooligans” who engage in politics, but whose engagement is essentially tribalistic. For hooligans, their political affiliation becomes an essential part of their identity and their attitude to their opponents is essentially combative. Both of these Brennan distinguishes from “vulcans”, who engage in politics but in an unemotional and optimally rational manner. Brennan wisely recognizes that these are ideal typical models, with few real people conforming perfectly to any of these three. To relate this to the Schmittian concepts I use in my thesis, hooligans are more likely to see politics in terms of the friend-enemy distinction (that is to say, as truly political). The Vulcans, by contrast, are more amenable to abolishing the political and instead seeing their opposition as friend-competitors. In other words, the Vulcan is more likely to seek to reduce politics to administration.
One runs the risk here of being overly generous in the characterization of existing liberal democratic elites. Their flaws are not to be denied. However, the past couple of centuries have demonstrated the possibility of a liberal elite consensus delivering a political arrangement that, while fundamentally illegitimate and unsatisfactory from the perspective of Tradition, is stable and preferable to the modern alternatives both in the comparatively minimal material suffering it inflicts and the comparatively greater space it affords to the exercise of traditional religion. One need not have a rosy view of liberal democratic elites to appreciate that they have at least the potential of approximating Vulcanhood. The vast majority of the masses, as has been recognized by Traditional teachers from Manu through to Plato and Kongzi, are generally devoid of agency and are content to follow received wisdom so long as their needs are met. When the masses do engage in politics, they are more likely to become hooligans than Vulcans.
The Elite/Activist Relationship
In communicating to their activists and potential activists, elite factions will emphasize the differences in beliefs and values between themselves and the competitor faction. Since the worldview consensus operates primarily at the metapolitical level, it is not something elite actors are conscious of most of the time. In their day-to-day dealings, it is invisible to them. So, the differences between elite faction A and elite faction B are not fabrications to deceive supporters and the masses into believing there is real competition. The differences and competition is real, but marginal to the areas of agreement. The difference between the elite and activist perspectives, however, is that elites experience the differences differently. While the elite is not conscious of the metapolitical phenomenon of a worldview consensus — the consensus amongst them exists and so is experienced by them. They directly engage with each other at work and socially. They are close competitors and experience their commonly held values. This experience, combined with the shared experience of being elites, leads to a common sense of identity. Indeed, in stable democracies they identify with each other more strongly than they do with their activists and mass voters.
The reader is urged to avoid two mistaken conclusions at this juncture. Firstly, simply sharing elite status does not in itself give rise to this sense of identity. Shared values are the more major of the two components. Secondly, at the risk of being repetitive — communicating primarily differences to activists and masses despite commonality being what is primarily experienced is not a cynical and contemptuous deception. The differences are real, and it is part of the rules of the competition that this is how disputes over policy are settled. What would the point of communicating commonalities be when this is not in contention? Commonalities are taken for granted, and need only be communicated when they are under threat.
Nonetheless, activists are not privy to the experience of the elite. For them to be is a structural impossibility. Instead, they only experience the differences. True, in a state of democratic stability, they also accept the consensus. But this acceptance is a passive, receptive act. It is the choice of party affiliation, the affirmation of difference, that is their positive act. It is in this that they exercise agency. The elite participate in the construction and sustaining of the consensus — the activists only participate in the competition. So, it is unsurprising that the mindset of the activist should be, even in the most stable of democracies, closer to the political than that of the elite.
Although, as I have stressed, real existing democracy does not entail intentional deception on the part of the elite as to the democratic content of the system[1], democracy does function as a kind of political formula. That is to say, the beliefs that are entailed in the idealized understanding of democracy serve to legitimize the status quo amongst activists and the masses. It is an illusion in that it does not reflect the actual state of affairs, it is instrumental in that it serves a purpose (the legitimization of the system and, as a concomitant, of the rule of the Elite) but it is not a deception in that it is not intentionally formulated by any actor, but organically comes into being. As with most of the concepts I have drawn from other thinkers in developing my theory, this is a mutatis mutandis version of Mosca’s idea of the political formula. That democracy is, amongst other things, a political formula, is a problem for the solidity of the elite worldview consensus.
In both my and Mosca’s usage, a political formula is distinct from a noble lie. A noble lie is known to be a lie by the elite, and the elite may therefore take measures to maintain the illusion and to circumvent problems arising from the lie. A political formula is believed in by the elite themselves, and so they do not have the freedom of maneuver of the hypothetical lying elite. The political formula of democracy does not include any notion of an elite worldview consensus (or else I would have no role to play in writing this text) or a consensual union of the elite. For the elite, this poses no challenge as these things are experienced realities. However, the situation is different for activists. Because it accords with the political formula of democracy, activists believe that the struggle with the other side is the all-important matter in the life of a democracy. Although this view is muted amongst elites by their above-described experience of their competitors, because democracy is a political formula and not a noble lie, they are once again unable to rein in activists’ hostility to the other side. Once more, we see the activists are closer to the political than their elites.
Finally, there is the matter of activists having higher preferences over beliefs than their elites. Earlier in this work, I made reference to Brennan’s trichotomy of psycho-political types; hobbits, hooligans and Vulcans. I follow Brennan in his claim that when hobbits become politicized, they generally become hooligans and not Vulcans. Or, in my terminology, when a member of the masses becomes politicized, s/he generally becomes an activist, and activists are generally best characterized as hooligans. They are more fanatical, uncompromising and radical in their principles than the Elites or the masses. This can be seen instances of intra-party democracy, like primaries, where activists are consistently seen to have more hardline and radical preferences than either the masses or their own factions of the Elite (Shapiro 2016). Without valorizing the elite, it is true to say that — at least relative to their activist-hooligans — they are by and large Vulcans. That is to say, they are cooler, more dispassionate, more rational and tolerant of their competitors than are the activist-hooligans. There are a number of reasons for this. It is the case that, on average, they are more intelligent and better educated than their activists. In addition, there is the aforementioned experience of the worldview consensus they share with their competitors. Perhaps it would be wise to extend Brennan’s football derived metaphor and say that while activists are hooligans, elites are players. Finally, I will again draw on Caplan’s work and observe that the actions of elites are of far greater direct bearing on policy outcomes than those of activists. Caplan’s theory holds that this means that elites will have lower preferences over beliefs than will activists — causing them to take on more Vulcan like traits in their behavior.
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The combined effect of these factors is that activists are predisposed to have an outlook on democratic competition closer to the political than that of their elites. That is to say that their view of their competitors is harsher, and more proximate to that of viewing them as enemies than the perspective of their elites. There is also an important distinction in the identity that their pursuit of the Good gives rise to. Both factions of the elite share a common identity stemming from a common pursuit of a more or less common conception of the Good. Activists share amongst themselves a conception of the Good which is defined, in part, in contradistinction to the other side’s pursuit of the Good. This differing sense of identity creates a difference in dynamic when it comes to the phenomenon of devil shift. While devil shift affects both activists and the elite, the extent of devil shift is limited in the latter case by them being a consensually united unit. The reader has likely experienced devil shift in their personal lives. Reflecting on this will allow for a better understanding of the phenomenon I am describing. Re-employing the metaphor of a domestic dispute from my thesis will allow the reader a better grasp of devil shift. In a domestic dispute with a beloved family member one may psychologically exaggerate the extent of said family members wrong doing and, dependent on contingencies, their degree of power in the relationship dynamic. However, love — by which I understand the will to union[2] — places limits on how far devil shift will proceed. This is the experience of the elite.
The experience of the activists is fundamentally different. It is not of individuals or factions of individuals within a unity, but between units. This makes one regard Brennan’s hooligans metaphor as particularly apt. Hooligans, both metaphorical and literal, develop their identity in contradistinction to the opposition. As such, not only do they view the opponent as more morally wicked than they objectively are, but this becomes intertwined with their notion of the Good. More accurately, they identify the opponent with the bad, and the Good comes, in part at least, to be identified with what the other side is not. The pursuit of the Good then, logically, entails distancing themselves from the other side.
As this psychological identification takes place on both sides, a vicious cycle begins to take place. There is a dispute over a point of policy, both camps of activists see the other as more wicked, powerful and irrational than themselves. They thus conjure a non-existent specter — an object of fright and horror. This resonates with Brennan’s description of hooligans as being unable to adequately explain let alone present the arguments for the position they opposed. This is because what they oppose is not their actual opponents, but specters of their own conjuring. Those who are pro-choice on the question of abortion never see themselves as opposing people concerned for the lives of unborn children, but only ghouls bent on controlling women’s bodies for some unknown but doubtlessly nefarious end. The respective camps are, in reality, not so distant from each other as the effects of devil shift leads them to believe but, with the passage of time, their moral disgust at the specter of their opponents drives them to distance themselves from the evil — and so they gradually move towards occupying the position of their own specters. Thus, the hooligan nature of the activist leads them, when affected by devil shift, to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Not only this, but the change in position of their opponents evokes a horror in them — causing them to conjure a new specter, or perhaps more precisely for the specter to occupy a new position, yet more morally wicked.
This process can be observed in the language that both sides use. Hyperbolic language is used, because this is expressive of the hooligan mindset. Political terms with specific meanings are employed as terms of abuse (racist, Marxist, fascist, socialist, white supremacist), triggering a reaction that drives the opponent to more closely resemble the accusation, leading to still shriller leveling of the accusation. One could see this as evidence by way of inversion for Kongzi’s teaching that “the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names”.
As this process advances, a tension emerges between activists and their elites. For all the reasons already enumerated, the effects of devil shift at the level of activists are more dramatic and take on a cyclical character, while this is not the case at the elite level. In this sense, polarization at the level of activists is in advance of that at the level of the elite. This leads to dissatisfaction amongst activists towards their own faction of the elite, and pressure is placed upon them to conform with the wishes of the activists.
Success for the activists in this endeavor can be measured in terms of the extent to which the beliefs and values gap between the two camps of activists is reflected at the level of the Elite. Thus, activists become agents of erosion of the elite worldview consensus. The more successful they are in getting elites to accede to their wishes, the greater the breadth and depth of the fissure in the worldview consensus becomes. Successes for one camp of activists feeds into the cycle of devil shift. Elites demonstrating conformity to activists wishes generates further “evidence” to vindicate the opposing camp’s activists’ fears, and so compounds the effects of devil shift and furthers their need to pressure their elites.
By what mechanism do activists pressure their faction of the elite? This is no mystery, the liberal democratic system is intentionally designed to allow the masses to pressure elites. Naturally, as the masses are by nature passive, and because organized minorities can always outmaneuver unorganized majorities, the masses pose little threat to the elite consensus. However, activists are not passive and are an organized minority. Or rather, they are a plurality of organized minorities. This gives them far greater strategic maneuverability to employ the mechanisms of democracy to undermine the elite consensus. Let us consider the responses the elite may employ.
Contrary to the position of the naïve cynic, the elite in democracies generally do hold a sincere belief in democracy. The elite’s profession of democratic conviction is not a “noble lie”[3]. This is not to say that the elite does not deviate from what is consistent with their convictions — they do, indeed quite often. As described in my thesis, the elite regularly declares a state of exception to the liberal democratic rule when confronted with the enemy. We can also see violations of supposed democratic principles in foreign policy, particularly in the United States frequent and ongoing support for non-democratic regimes and the overthrow of democratically legitimate regimes.
Such inconsistency is not irreconcilable with my claim that democratic elites do sincerely believe in democracy. Firstly, if one adopts the position, which I hold, that one of the central truth claims of democrats — that democracy is the optimal political decision-making process — is false, and then views the above apparent inconsistency through the lens of Caplan’s preferences over beliefs, the inconsistency is resolved. The elite holds a sincere belief in democracy, but this belief is challenged by the disjuncture between democratic beliefs (the democratic process is infallible) and reality (the democratic process is fallible). Since elites have an ethic of responsibility, they cannot afford to have more than a moderate preference over beliefs. Furthermore, since democracy is void of positive values — as I have argued above — when a commitment to democracy comes into serious conflict with elites’ positive values (for example, those of social-to-classical liberalism), the preference over maintaining democratic beliefs is likely to be valued lower than the preference over liberal beliefs. So, when either the interests of those over whom the elite in question are responsible are threatened (as said elite understand those interests) or the pursuit of the Good (again, as the elite in question understands it) come into conflict with democratic principles, domestically or abroad, the latter will likely have to give way. Thus, the undemocratic behaviour of elites is not inconsistent with a commitment to democracy, but rather instances of the elite fulfilling their function as a collective Sovereign in a manner Schmitt would likely have approved of (at least prior to his conversion to National Socialism)[4].
Keeping in mind what has been said above about the relative weighting of the elite’s relative commitments to democratic and more positive values, they can be expected to resist the pressure placed on them by activists. They may seek to undermine very aggressive activists by mobilizing more compliant activists against them — although this strategy is not guaranteed to succeed. Alternatively, they may pay lip service to the demands of their activists at election time, or perhaps try to meet their activists halfway by offering moderated forms of their demands. Either way, such lip service can be forgotten about or moderated into oblivion once an election is won. The success of such a strategy turns on the energy (to hold their elites to account after elections) and intelligence (to realize their elites’ ploy) of activists. Regardless, such a strategy carries risks. Paying lip service, even in moderated form, vindicates the claims of their own activists and confirms the fears of the opposing activists.
However, as it relates to the matter of the threat of polarisation and the pressures of activists, such sincere belief is a weakness. It means that the elite only acts in a manner contrary to democratic values after the threshold of its preferences over beliefs has been crossed — and not pre-emptively. Perhaps an elite could be convinced to do so, but Schmitt’s experience trying to convince the Weimar Republic to do just this bodes ill for such a project. Since the elite’s normative commitments prevent it from acting to arrest the development of fissures, they will eventually open up. If one does not do maintenance, decline is inevitable. This is not to say that the process cannot be arrested later on, however. Furthermore, to return to Schmitt’s Weimar era failure — it should be remembered that Weimar Germany never had an elite settlement in the first place, and so there are limits to the lessons that can be drawn from the comparison.
Conclusion
In this article I have brought Sabatier, Hunter and McLaughlin (1987)’s concept of devil shift into dialogue with my own theory of the elite worldview consensus. I have discussed the general character of that minority of politically active non-elite actors I have termed ‘activists’. I have used the idea of devil shift to examine how activists’ experience of politics differs from that of elites, and how activists may act to accelerate the process of polarization that undermines the elite worldview consensus. I concluded by considering the prospects of elites resisting the pressures of activists to polarize.
Bibliography
Brennan, J. (2017). Against democracy, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Caplan, B. (2007). The myth of the rational voter: Why democracies choose bad policies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Mosca, G. (1939). The ruling class. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Book Company.
Parvini, N. (2022). The populist delusion. Perth, AUS: Imperium Press.
Sabatier, P., Hunter, S. and McLaughlin, S. (1987). “The Devil Shift: Perceptions and Misperceptions of Opponents”, The Western Political Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 3: pp. 449–476.
Shapiro, I. (2016). “[Lecture] Ian Shapiro: The Long Term Impact of Trump on the Evolution of American Democracy”, YouTube, 19 August, available at:
(Accessed 27 February 2024)
[1] All that I mean by this is that there is no intentional manipulation of the masses leading them to believe the state is democratic when it is not — as much Marxist theory would have it. This is not to say that the elite do not engage in deception and manipulation in discrete areas of policy rather than as to the character of the state as a whole. They do, and on a large scale. I would argue it is virtually impossible not to manage the masses without resorting to deception and manipulation. How this is reconcilable with the elite’s supposed commitment to democracy is once again explicable by reference to preferences over beliefs (Caplan).
[2] The metaphysic informing this understanding is well beyond the scope of the present work, and will be addressed in a future work.
[3] The naively cynical view that such a profession is a noble or ignoble lie is increasingly widespread at the popular level and at the scholarly level amongst some Marxists as well as followers of Pareto. Mosca’s notion of political formulas, however, offers a more nuanced view — albeit one still more cynical in its underlying notions of human motivations than what I argue here.
[4] There is an additional objection to be raised to the notion that the Elite’s stated commitment to democracy is insincere — to be compatible with the demonstrable intra-Elite competition (as opposed to inter-elite strife) in a democracy, insincere commitment to democracy on the part of the Elite implies such a highly improbable level of competence on the part of the Elite that it borders being a conspiracy theory. The poly-Sovereign structure of democratic Elites is such that such a charade would be all the more complex, and as a consequence all the more improbable. A democracy whose Elite does not genuinely believe in democracy despite claiming publicly to do so would in all probability cease to be a democracy.
