Micronations and the Search for Sovereignty

Political disagreement is a fact of life. Such conflict can prompt people to stand for public office and seek to realise political change. Others take a different route; they start their own country. Micronations and the Search for Sovereignty is the first comprehensive examination of the phenomenon of people purporting to secede and create their own country. It analyses why micronations are not states for the purposes of international law, considers the factors that motivate individuals to separate and found their own nation, examines the legal justifications that they offer and explores the responses of recognised sovereign states. In doing so, this book develops a rich body of material through which to reflect on conventional understandings of statehood, sovereignty and legitimate authority. Authored in a lively and accessible style, Micronations and the Search for Sovereignty will be valuable reading for scholars and general audiences.

Propaganda in the Guise of News

In the late 1940s, conservative radio commentator Fulton Lewis Jr. was embroiled in controversy after publicly criticizing consumer cooperatives for taking advantage of a federal tax loophole. Coinciding with the Federal Communications Commission’s reconsideration of its Mayflower doctrine—a ban on broadcast editorials—the dispute served as fodder for New Deal–era progressive media reformers. This article unpacks Lewis’s mostly forgotten role as an unwitting catalyst of progressive media regulations through reconsidering the FCC’s 1948 Mayflower hearings, which resulted in the fairness doctrine (1949–87). This doctrine mandated that broadcasters present controversial issues of public concern in an ideologically balanced manner. Lewis’s news-breaking thus became framed as a problem in need of federal regulatory solution by reformers who sought to sublimate radio into an idealized liberal public sphere. These reforms, however, framed political disagreement as an epistemological crisis and, in doing so, unintentionally bolstered a conservative critical disposition toward the mainstream press, exemplified in the “liberal media” trope.

Political Disagreement, Arrogance, and the Pursuit of Truth

This chapter explores two contributing factors to cognitive polarization. The first is what is known as epistemic disagreement—or disagreement over what is known, who knows it, or how we know. Crucially, even the perception that such disagreement is widespread—whether or not it actually is—can be dangerous. The second factor is intellectual arrogance. This is arrogance about what we know or think we know; it is the kind of arrogance that tells whites they have nothing to learn about racism from people of color and that reassures those who believe they know more about infectious diseases than those who spend their lives studying them. The chapter also attempts to argue that these two factors can be mutually reinforcing. This makes them doubly dangerous, because by increasing cognitive polarization, they in turn undermine the democratic value of the pursuit of truth.

Disagreement or Badmouthing? The Role of Expressive Discourse in Politics

A striking feature of political discourse is how prone we are to disagree. Political opponents will even give different answers to factual questions, which suggests that opposing parties cannot agree on facts any more than they can on values. This impression is widespread and supported by survey data. This chapter will argue, however, that the extent and depth of political disagreement is largely overstated. Many political disagreements are merely illusory. This claim has several important upshots. The implications of this idea for theories about voter misinformation, motivated reasoning, deliberative democracy, and a number of other issues are explored.

Political Disagreement and Minimal Epistocracy

Despite their many virtues, democracies suffer from well-known problems with high levels of voter ignorance. Such ignorance, one might think, leads democracies to occasionally produce bad outcomes. Proponents of epistocracy claim that allocating comparatively greater amounts of political power to citizens who possess more politically relevant knowledge may help us to mitigate the bad effects of voter ignorance. In a recent paper, Julian Reiss challenges a crucial assumption underlying the case for epistocracy. Central to any defence of epistocracy is the conviction that we can identify a body of political knowledge which, when possessed in greater amounts by voters, leads to substantively better outcomes than when voters lack such knowledge. But it is not possible to identify such a body of knowledge. There is simply far too much controversy in the social sciences, and this controversy prevents us from definitively saying of some citizens that they possess more politically relevant knowledge than others. Call this the Argument from Political Disagreement. In this paper I respond to the Argument from Political Disagreement. First, I argue that Reiss conflates social-scientific knowledge with politically relevant knowledge. Even if there were no uncontroversial social-scientific knowledge, there is much uncontroversial politically relevant knowledge. Second, I argue that there is some uncontroversial social-scientific knowledge. While Reiss correctly notes that there is much controversy in the social sciences, not every issue is controversial. The non-social-scientific politically relevant knowledge and the uncontroversial social-scientific knowledge together constitute the minimal body of knowledge which epistocrats need to make their case.

Political difference and polarization in the family: The role of (non)accommodating communication for navigating identity differences

This study joins the relatively modest literature examining the effects of political disagreement in the family. We consider the effects of communication accommodation on shared family identity in the context political disagreement. To do this, we utilize survey responses from a quota-stratified sample of participants in an online panel ( N = 833) taken immediately after the contentious 2016 presidential election. We find that more disagreement and more affective polarization are associated with less communication accommodation and that shared family identity suffers as a result. Furthermore, our findings reveal that respecting divergent values is the most influential communication accommodation strategy and is also among the most adversely affected by political differences in the family. We conclude that political disagreement in the family reduces the likelihood of communication that is respectful of differences in political values, but that this accommodation strategy is crucial to reduce the deleterious consequences that political differences can have on family relationships.

Friend or Foe?: Bernard Williams and Political Constitutionalism

This article looks at Bernard Williams’s relevance to particular debates in constitutional theory about the legitimacy of two competing models of institutional design: political constitutionalism which endorses giving the final say on the meaning of constitutional rights to legislatures; and legal constitutionalism which endorses giving the final say on the meaning of rights to courts. Recent defences of political constitutionalism have made claims about the realism of their accounts when compared with legal constitutionalism and have co-opted Bernard Williams’s realism to support their case. This article examines these claims, concluding that these accounts of political constitutionalism rely on a distinctly non-Williamsian form of political moralism in that they assume a legitimacy for political constitutionalism which is prior to politics and political disagreement. It offers an alternative defence of political constitutionalism, a partial defence, which, it argues, is closer to the realism of Bernard Williams than these accounts.