It sounds like you're saying that you find Marxism interesting as a philosophy, not necessarily that you think his philosophy is superior and should be enacted. If that is right, that makes sense. Or am I reading you wrong?
It sounds like you're referring to Marx's position that history will naturally progress to a point of global capitalism wherein all identity markers other than class will fade away, leaving just the proletariat on the one hand, and the capitalists on the other, and that at that point the revolution will occur and the dictatorship of the proletariat be established. Am I reading you right? If so, I think we're at my point of confusion, namely, how do you account for the fact that instead of the above occurring, the USSR and China had national largely non-industrial worker based communist revolutions that led to great famine and great oppression? I really can't wrap my head around a promotion of communism that doesn't account for what seem to be massive failures on its part. If your answer was, oh, China and the USSR didn't practice true Marxism I'd accept that as an answer but elsewhere you seem to indicate to me that you approved of Maoist tactics so am I right in assuming you do think China and the USSR are good models of communism?
It's rooted in economic ideas that were obsolete long before Marx, such as labor theory of value. Many new concepts such as marginal utility theory, economic calculation problem and comparative advantage principle are needed to understand modern economy and value of highly compensated middlemen.
Why should anyone look at centuries old philosophies that proved disastrous every time they were attempted? Marx was a reactionary who long for more pastoral times before industrial revolution without having personally experienced the hardship of pre-industrial living. He would have made great friends with the Unibomber. Now this post gives us new ideas to think about and try with possibly good results.
"Marx was a reactionary who long for more pastoral times before industrial revolution"
There are lots of bad takes on Marx, but this is easily the most hilarious.
Go read the Manifesto. It's brimming with paeans to early capitalism, touting its superiority to feudalism and praising it for abolishing "the idiocy of rural life" etc.
Later on, Marx did become concerned with the effects of capitalism on the natural environment, calling attention to what he termed the "metabolic rift". But he was faaaaaar from a luddite or a reactionary, and his theory of Communist revolution requires capitalist development, "without which want is merely made general".
Furthermore, it's hard to say how much "voting a bit more for Trump in 2020 vs 2016" is any indication of appeal in 2020 rather than an indication of *lack* of the *extreme* anti-appeal he had to these people in 2016, or the special appeal Obama had in 2012 and 2008.
There might be a few places where Trump did as well among minorities as Bush did in 2004 (I'm thinking mainly in the Rio Grande Valley and Miami), but those are rare.
That's the thing, right? What is the difference between a futures market and a sufficiently deep casino book that somehow manages to capture somewhat abstract predictions? It feels to me like the more it becomes unique, the shallower and less predictive it gets. There are plenty of real instruments that capture questions like "what will the inflation rate in the US be in 10 years" and "the electric car is the future of transportation" that seem way more robust than something that is just something like the Simon/Ehrlich bet writ large.
I mean, the GameStonks thing shows that a few billionaires like Elon Musk are able to manipulate markets *even more* than the hedge funds, by making people do it for the lulz.
So why doesn't Wal-Mart cater people who drop big money on single purchases?
If the actual numbers don't matter, why did you say $2.3 billion from 25 people? If the actual numbers don't matter why do you not want to say the full amount?
There's been research on this. The causality goes from politicians supporting certain policies to donations going to them. When politicians decide not to run for any more terms, they don't become less accomodating to the donor class. Garett Jones has been pointing out that they actually veer against populism when not "in cycle".
That's a very interesting paper! Thanks for sharing.
Although the paper does define economic elite as in the 90th percentile, so were talking about households that make $160,000+/year which is a bit different than billionaires controlling things. I'm also surprised they looked at income instead of wealth when defining their elite. Even more strange they define the average citizen's preferences as being the 50th percentile. So instead of looking at the aggregate preferences of everyone outside the elite class or everyone altogether, they are just looking at a specific middle band.
Additionally organized interest groups were split into two categories: business interest groups and mass public interest groups. I would think mass public interest groups would be a close representation of the mass public feelings, but I suppose a lot of people don't get involved in mass public interest groups. (Which fits in with what the Vox article says below.)
It looks like the first accusation is basically of p-hacking. Something we sadly see regularly today, especially in social sciences. Of the 1,779 bills in the dataset, the economic elite and the average American agreed on 1,594, leaving only 185 bills to examine the difference between them. There's some more crunch in the article itself and a rebuttle from the authors of the original paper.
By the way, I never said I thought democracy was that policy is set based on the wishes of the voters, and either you made a mistake by claiming that or are being deceptive here.
There are plenty of people willing to do it. All you have to do is lie incessantly to your constituents, say in Congress for a couple decades, and you'll have amassed a decent amount of wealth. If you aren't willing to do it, the elites can just find somebody else.
I’m not understanding what your point is. Is this oredicated on the premise that Democrats are better for the working class? Or are you arguing against the system in general. How is the article anti-white, please.
Part of the conflict theory article was about realizing he needed to learn how to talk to conflict theorists. It looks like this is an explicit appeal to conflict theorists, so therefore should look like conflict theory.
It's a pitch to a political faction which is itching for conflicts. Scott thinks they've long had a mistaken approach and he's trying to smuggle in some of his preferences under the veil of a conflict he has placed them on one side of.
Of course it strawmans the other side. It's a description of a form of demagoguery that Scott is arguing would be more effective than the current form. He may also believe that it is more nearly correct, but we can't expect a political party to limit itself to fair arguments for its position.
The transition wasn't completely binary but looking at presidential elections after 1960 and before 1990 purely based on which states the Democrat won:
Democrats did relatively worse in the South in 64, 68, 72 (only won one state and it wasn't in the South), 84 (same), and 88.
In 1980 it was about the same in the South as in other regions (although the West was especially Republican).
The only year the Democrat did significantly better in the South than in the country as a whole was 1976, when the candidate (Carter) was a southerner.
So overall I think it's safe to say that while the Democrats were still competitive in the South after the 60s, they definitely weren't "the party of the South" anymore.
Thinking further you could definitely argue that the transition took a lot longer in congressional and state elections. But even then I think the 60s is a good estimate for when Democrats stopped being "the party of the South" even if they kept a strong presence there.
Adding an edit function would be helpful. It also might make the problem worse. Perhaps an edit function that allows people to click through to see the edits?
On the other hand, it demonstrates that some people have some residual sense of shame and reconsider intemperate things they have said on the Internets. I tend to think twice before I hit "post", but that's just me.
(B) Republican presidents did well in the south because they did well everywhere from 68 to 92, winning an average of more than 40 states per election. But if you look at the vote totals, they did worse in the south until the mid to late 80s, and the south didn't vote solidly for a republican until Bush in 2000.
Yes Republican dominance in the South didn't set in until the 90s. But I don't think you can really say the Democrats were "the party of the South" during a period where their presidential candidates were more likely to win non-Southern states than Southern ones.
but they weren't. in 68, demo/dixiecrats combined win the south. 76, democrats win the south. In 1980 and 88, republicans win almost everywhere, but all the most republican states are western. in 88 there are one or two republican states that are highly republican, and then the real shift happens over the next decade. the only exception is 1972.
In 64, practically the only states the Democrats lost were in the South. In 68, saying "the Democrats won the South if you combine them with the separate party that actually won the South" isn't actually a compelling case. It's true that the landslides in 72, 80, and 84 make it harder to draw conclusions but at the least those don't show a clear Democratic overperformance in the South.
And again the key thing here is that "Democrats were the party of the South" is a much stronger statement than "Democrats were competitive in the South." And that stronger statement doesn't really seem to hold up after the early 60s.
> the Democrats won the South if you combine them with the separate party that actually won the South" isn't actually a compelling case.
Yes it is when you're claiming republicans won the south. 30% dixiecrat, 30% democrat and 40% republican is NOT republican dominance.
> And again the key thing here is that "Democrats were the party of the South" is a much stronger statement than "Democrats were competitive in the South."
the statement is republicans didn't dominate the south until the 90s. dixiecrats were democrats, not republicans. They didn't call themselves the dixiecans, after all.
I had to clean up Uncle Norman's apartment after he dropped dead at the age of 90. He had been incontinent for a while. I hired professionals. 2 bedroom apt, say 1,000 sq. ft. $10/sq.ft. I am not complaining. It was a debt of honor, a family thing.
That's quite surprising to me. In the US at least there is still a large "degree premium" which is used to explain why so many people are going to college. Is that not the case in Ireland? If so do you still only have a small minority of 18 year olds going the college route or have you also seen the same level of explosion in demand for higher education?
I'm always a bit leery when people point to random well-made items from their grandparents time that still work trying to argue that things used to be better made.
it's survivorship bias on steroids. in 100 years time some kid will be showing off their grandfathers blender from 2020 and people will make wow noises about craftsmanship... while completely ignoring the million crappier blenders sold the same year that simply didn't survive till 2120.
You can buy some really nice fancy toasters even now that will probably last extremely well but most people don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on a toaster.
Hey Internaut. What do you think is the supply demand situation for blue collar jobs in Ireland? How can we improve the prestige? What about the quality? How big of a mistake was removing the trade track from education?
Really appreciate the time and effort you put into this. It's great to get your insight, and disappointing that I can't find that insight anywhere else.
I keep hearing the degree premium is as strong as ever here in the US... but that's because wages for people without degrees keep going down rather than going up for people with a Bachelor's.
A bunch of my friends work in cleaning in ireland and it's normally not the most lucrative job unless you own your own company and have some good connections.
The degree premium is going to be confounded all to hell, especially in ireland.
Since college admission works directly off exam points it tends towards ruthlessly and brutally fair and since most of the cost of tertiary education is covered by the state with extra grants for low income students ireland is unusually good at taking bright kids from poor backgrounds and tossing them into university which means that college gets even more strongly correlated with base IQ than in the states.
So when someone with a college degree makes more money it's hard to say if it's simply that bright people are both more likely to score well on exams and do well in the workforce because that confounds it all to hell.
throw in irelands strong tradition of exporting it's young people whenever there's an economic downturn where people with good credentials have an easier time getting jobs in the UK, America, Australia... etc
Please excuse my ignorance, but what are 3D Jobs? All I'm getting from Google are results about 3D graphics and the like, and since that has no obvious connection to window washing, I'm assuming it's a case of can't find the esoteric due to similarly named mainstream.
I totally get this. Last year we bought and renovated a home in an area where we have few contacts. After a series of disappointments getting estimates from the guys on the first page of search results, we started soliciting contractors by word of mouth. Most of the guys we went with barely have a webpage, and none of them came up in Google searches. They don’t *need* it; referrals give them as much business as they can handle.
Not only were they not plugged in online, they barely use available payment tools. Some didn’t even take credit cards. But they were licensed and insured and totally professional in their work.
The contractors on the first page of results all seemed to be following some sort of SEO playbook and might even have been using the same suite of materials and tools, marketed to guys who want to up their game. They made extensive use of glossy pamphlets and scheduling tools that seemed designed to calm my assumed fears as a suburban housewife that the guy ringing my doorbell at 10am would indeed be Frank from Electro Inc. They also charged up the wazoo compared to the guys sticking to phone calls and paper checks. We simply couldn’t afford most of the guys using the Advanced Professionalism Web Optimization Package. I assume those fancy 21st century business tools consume a lot of overhead.
It occurred to me that the economy is like an iceberg; a vast amount of important stuff is underwater and we probably have no idea how much based on the parts we can see analyzing web data. Now when I hear theories about how close we are to automating everything, I wonder if the people theorizing have ever had to find someone to rewire their house.
>Most of the guys we went with barely have a webpage, and none of them came up in Google searches. They don’t *need* it;
This isn't just a working-class phenomenon. My mother made wedding cakes for decades. Most of the sugarcraft guild have no websites of their own, they don't need them because they're craftspeople who don't lack for work.
Going round wedding faires with my SO apparently I'm not allowed look at the cakes any more because I couldn't keep the expressions off my face. Almost everything I've ever seen at a wedding faire nobody in my mothers circles would have ever allowed leave their workshop. Most of it would have scored badly in the childrens sections of sugarcraft competitions.
The people who constantly have to plug for business at faires are the people who are so poor at their job that they can't get anyone to recommend them to friends and so end up short of work.
I keep hearing upper-middle class people with houses saying "are there ANY plumbers who are sane, can arrive at the agreed hour, and clean up after? willing to pay for it."
So I imagine that the ones who DO meet the requirements are in high demand and earn WAY more than a librarian or teacher.
Surprisingly, it's the same in science and engineering.
The internet will tell you a lot, but the important parts are either hidden in experts' heads or siloed in corporate R&D. There is even some in physical books that nobody bothered to OCR. Once you go past undergrad level the availability of information drops off a cliff.
Are there any online sources you do recommend for getting exposure to a variety of interesting blue-collar information? I can follow a bunch of academics on Twitter and have a reliable source of neat studies, or read the blogs of programming nerds and learn about useful computer things, but I don't know of a good way to regularly encounter a breadth of content for real-life skillsets and jobs (or trust myself to evaluate which such things are genuinely good).
This. The practical knowledge that sustains modern life is rapidly disappearing. Fucking water and heat are going to become some sort of sci-fi cult mystery.
I took it to mean jobs involving the third dimension (height). But maybe it means 'outside' jobs as distinct from paper-pushing on a desk (or pixel-pushing on a screen as it might be now).
I took it to mean jobs involving the third dimension (height). But maybe it means 'outside' jobs as distinct from paper-pushing on a desk (or pixel-pushing on a screen as it might be now).
So where do the boat paraders, brand new $70k truck ralliers, and Trump supporters who flew to the Capitol riot, staying in fancy hotels - fit in with this white working class? Maybe these "petty exurban bourgeoise" are a small sliver of Trump's base. But they're certainly the most visible and vocal.
The core assumption of this piece, that social class can beat out economic class as a principle for organizing political coalitions neglects the role of near zero real interest rates in easing tensions within coalitions. Republicans don't have to face trade-offs between low taxes, high military spending, and social security benefits for their massive elderly base. Dems don't have to face a trade-off between high taxes on their upper middle-class base and expansive welfare for poor minorities. The coalition between all the rungs of a social class ladder is possible in a zero-interest rate vetocracy where tradeoffs are nil, and the state can't do anything ambitions for the bottom rung, but I don't see it enduring if those conditions change.
Well, the party that wants to right now is geographically disadvantaged, and you need to control a trifecta in order to do anything. Dems can only do whatever their 3-4 most conservative members will sign off on jamming through in reconciliation.
The trade offs are all still there though. Deficit spending on cheap credit gives you more money to allocate but it doesn't determine who gets it. We could raise taxes and have even more military spending or higher social security payments than we do now. We could cut those things and have even lower taxes than we do now.
And everything all kind of balances anyway. Sure, if you have low interest rates you can spend on credit, but then asset prices inflate. Housing costs more. The cost of living increases relative to wages.
The way out of high interest rates is to print the debt. That causes nominal prices and wages to increase (inflation), but the consequent higher interest rates cause asset prices, i.e. housing prices, to decline relative to wages. So now the working man pays more in taxes to fund social security without deficit spending, but spends less on rent. Cancels out. The retiree's social security check comes and they spend more on food and transportation but less on rent. Cancels out again.
The inflation also makes the coalition easier to hold, because nothing looks like a cut. You get a constructive spending reduction by just not increasing spending as fast as inflation. You get a constructive increase in revenues at the same tax rate because nominal wages increase relative to nominal assets and income/sales taxes are a percentage of wages/dividends and capital gains taxes are a percentage of the *nominal* asset price increase, so that inflation and high interest rates increases real government revenues without a nominal rate increase.
It's not obvious that this actually makes a coalition politically more difficult than low interest rates.
At that point, I feel like you've basically reduced class structure to Red Tribe and Blue Tribe and just renamed them in a way that's more palatable to Red Tribe.
Thats what it kind of always was, didn't you know?
The US doesn't only think of "Class" in terms of money. Some *behaviors* are trash, while others are better.
Have you ever seen "Ghetto" Black women wrestling in the street or sidewalk, over some guy or something? How really are they at all distinct from the lardassed White trash women going at each other in the dirt of some trailer park?
If you blessed them with millions of dollars, they wouldn't be percieved differently.
Look at Trumps diet, or television habits. Until the democrats got the cue to stop mocking him for it, they did so constantly. Their mockery was aimed at unmistakable symbols of class, or a lack thereof.
McDonalds burgers, fries, and frappes? Those are what I eat, and they're awesome!
"~800-588-2300/ em-pire!" I used to hear that every morning on TV before going to school, or before my mom went to work. In my free time, I watch hours of TV. Why do these people think these mundane and okay things are so, so wrong?
> Have you ever seen "Ghetto" Black women wrestling in the street or sidewalk, over some guy or something? How really are they at all distinct from the lardassed White trash women going at each other in the dirt of some trailer park?
For the purposes of this discussion? One group is overwhelmingly likely to vote for Democrats, the other for Republicans. Either you think one group isn't voting their interests, or there's some fundamental difference in terms of their interests that isn't reflected by this analysis of class.
Or maybe the ability of Democrats to successfully culturally signal "anti racism" despite doing absolutely nothing to lift black people out of their socioeconomic position is the Right-wing version of "What the fuck is wrong with Kansas?".
It's really not that implausible that people vote against their individual interests. Jason Brennan's libertarian Against Democracy makes this point better than I do, but basically, think of it in terms of *individual incentives*. For each voter, their incentive to vote in their own interests is actually very low, since their chance of effecting the outcome is minimal. Almost certainly they could find something else to do with the half an hour it takes to vote that would have higher expected value. So it's not a priori implausible that people simply ignore their own interests in voting, since the consequences are very small. At this point, you might say 'well, why the hell do people bother voting at all then', but the answer is that people like the sense that they are performing their civic duty, that they are taking part in a big important community activity and expressing their moral identity, and voting is a very low-cost, highly visible way of doing all those things. But if that's why your voting, you'll get weird cognitive dissonance if you then try and pick the candidate who is best for you, rather than best for the nation/your community. The latter, I suppose, might lead to groups voting in the interest of the groups, even though the members aren't trying to vote in their individual interests. But Brennan provides a fair amount of empirical evidence that people tend to try and vote in the national interest specifically (though I have forgotten exactly what, and no doubt, like all social scientific evidence it could be challenged).
The idea that people vote against their own interests gets a bad rep, because it's associated with people patronizing their enemies, especially their lower class enemies, but that's a separate matter from whether it's true.
That does seem to be the fundamental paradox of the modern Republican party. I don't think they can realistically shed the class condescension, though.
> Why do these people think these mundane and okay things are so, so wrong?
They don't. It's a strawman. I'm from Tampa, I eat barbecue and fast food, and I love the Olive Garden. I can hear the tune of the ad you're referring to, and I've watched hundreds of hours of TV in recent months.
I am also a highly paid professional deep within the most ultraliberal bubble in the country. Never once, not on *any* occasion, has anyone I've met attacked me even implicitly for these traits.
' In the book, Vance describes his life at Yale as bewildering, since he was among the small number of students from poor backgrounds and constantly felt like he was playing catch-up, learning that Cracker Barrel is not actually fine dining and figuring out which fork to use. But he has mostly kind things to say about his fellow students and faculty:
Yale made me feel, for the first time in my life, that others viewed my life with intrigue. Professors and classmates seemed genuinely interested in what seemed to me a superficially boring story: I went to a mediocre public high school, my parents didn’t go to college, and I grew up in Ohio.
In the movie, though, Vance’s story plays out quite differently. After the emergency call to his girlfriend, J.D. sits at the dinner table with fellow students and attorneys from high-powered law firms. He is nervous. While making conversation, he says that he is from Ohio and that his grandfather moved there from Kentucky’s hill country to work in a steel mill.
A quiet falls over the table. Everyone glances at each other knowingly. Nobody says anything. They change the subject, while J.D. sits crestfallen and mortified.
I yelled at the screen when I saw that. (Yelling happened multiple times throughout the movie.) Reading Hillbilly Elegy, I feel some kinship with Vance. My people are not from Appalachia, but they’re working-class Northerners, by way of immigrants, potato farmers in Maine, and shoot-your-dinner-from-the-porch North Carolina rednecks. I too am the first in my nuclear family to go to college (on a massive scholarship), and to earn two master’s degrees I’ll be paying for until I retire. Growing up, Cracker Barrel was my favorite special-occasion restaurant.
But my alma mater is an elite institution. Most of my friends were well-off, though a lot of them didn’t realize that the things they took for granted — parents who could send money to them, cable TV, Pop-Tarts for breakfast — were far beyond my imagining. Like J.D., I often felt out of place.
And yet that’s exactly why this scene rang so false. It seems impossible that everyone at that table would take J.D.’s biographical note as embarrassing; instead, as Vance himself points out in his book, his background makes him intriguing, someone different from the usual bunch. '
Of course, a Vox writer is hardly an unbiased source on something like this, but Vance himself is a conservative.
The truth is that people work on two tracks with this kind of thing. When, for political reasons, they want to be mean about [outgroup] they will mock them for [outgroup] cultural norms. But when they actually meet someone from [outgroup] as an individual, they will generally refrain from hostility and try to be nice, and tolerant of difference, especially if politics doesn't come up.
But also, American liberals are actually well aware that classism is a thing and is bad: it's a central part of their mythology (I don't mean that term pejoratively) that Republicans are bad because they think the poor should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and don't understand that their lives are hard.
You're insisting on applying a singular definition of class based on aesthetics. I don't think it's as versatile as you suggest. Look around this thread for how easily your definition gets coerced as 'the upper class is [the Cultural Other I Most Distrust]. I know They hate me, therefore I must hate Them'. Helpful.
At any rate, this view is already a clear central beat of Trumpism, which claims that our aesthetics and way of life is being destroyed from the top down by a nefarious, morally vacuous and conveniently abstract elite who hate god and love nothing more than a good abortion (the fact you make no effort to integrate either of these founding dogmas when discussing New Republican Aesthetics is a dead giveaway of your SF elitism, for lack of a better term)
So, I don't see anything new here, politically. Except the prediction market stuff, which I find marvelously ironic in a post mostly about class. Do you not perceive how the SF-based futurist technobabble crowd constitutes a very coherent class, much more convincingly than the formless latte-sipping blob you seek to conjure? Is it lost on you how classist you sound, in this regard, with claims like "$TECHNOLOGICAL_SOLUTION will solve our problems and anyone who disagrees is stuck in the past (trust me I understand this better than you, guess you need to be engineer-adjacent to get it)"?
Finally, I think this interacts with your earlier piece on "gay rights are civil rites" in interesting ways, and I hope you explore that intersection in the future.
But the futurist technobabble crowd isn't a prominent political class. They exist, but they aren't an organised bloc in the same way that poor evangelical whites without college degrees and rich coastal whites with college degrees are organised blocs that vote together and each hate the other.
"$TECHNOLOGICAL_SOLUTION will solve our problems" is only a class signal in a much more European, capital-versus-labour conception of classes than Scott is gesturing towards. If you wanted an American upper-class signal about technology, you'd go for something about algorithmic bias or the impossibility of solving complex social problems with technology.
I find the idea that the only help possible for the poor is UBI or welfare more than a bit paternalistic and condescending. And quite likely untrue. Trump's answer for that was protectionism, aka make work available. And he got a lot more voters for this than Democrats get for UBI - especially among this very demographic.
Hard to find literally anyone who hasn't had significant financial problems. That is quite literally the only growth sector of our economy; financial engineering to ruin lives for profit.
They're culturally working class, with enough money to splurge on a jacked up truck. Like the blog post implies, teachers can be poor but culturally upper-class because they like espresso and read the NYT. A construction worker making good money is culturally working-class. That extra money just means a bigger truck, more date nights at Applebees, and a monster-sized TV to watch wrestling and the NFL.
It seems like a pretty reasonable suggestion, but really this is just Scott outlining what it would take to make him a Republican and I doubt he's their target demographic.
I will point out that the Conservatives have been able to appeal to the Working Class here in the UK, beating the party that's literally called "Labour" in key constituencies, so it's not implausible that the Republicans could end up using similar rhetoric. Of course, Brexit had a big role in that.
Indian immigrants to the UK typically arrived wealthier and more educated than than Pakistani's or Bangaladeshi's. But it's anyway not a recent phenomenon that British Asians vote conservative in reasonable numbers.
The premise is basically that the Tories have had success with Asian voters because they have a message that appeals to them, and policies that have done relatively well for them. And now there are quite a lot of Asians active within the party, including in top government positions.
I kept expecting it to pivot to "Here's what we can offer Asian people to try and win them back." That's what I wanted anyway (I'm not a Tory). But no... it pivots to "We should fight back by imitating the tactics of the Black Panthers".
Were they? My impression is they were part political party, part street gang. I don't recommend the melding of politics and organized crime, personally.
The Guardian hates British Indians. Or really, Indians anywhere. This is such an outrageous article. The author, Neha Shah, is getting ahead of herself to call this group names. I couldn't take her seriously and continue reading after a couple of paragraphs.
'The Guardian hates British Indians. Or really, Indians anywhere' What's your evidence for this (other than that one article)?
I have a suspicion-and it's only a suspicion, this could be totally off-base and unfair (I mean that sincerely not sarcastically), that what you *actually* are picking up on is that The Guardian hates Modi and the BJP, But that's unsurprising and not in itself indicative of prejudice against India: The Guardian is a liberal, anti-populist, secular, centre-left paper, so it hates all right-wing religious parties everywhere. It hates Modi for the same reason it used to hate George Bush. It's a straightforward ideological clash, and no doubt Modi doesn't like The Guardian much either, or its Indian equivalents.
>but really this is just Scott outlining what it would take to make him a Republican and I doubt he's their target demographic.
Are you sure? The part about expertise sounds unconvincing. I also hope Scott is not this naive on racism or the Democratic party. Or the Republican party for that matter.
That was a criticism on how prediction markets cannot replace credentialism, since you still better rely on people with credentials to design something that works. Averaging over the opinions of lots of people regarding design patterns, etc. would achieve a worse result than listening to a few experts.
Sure, but I bet prediction markets could choose a great team for designing a good Mars rover. Though when you want to buy a thing you use different financial instruments.
No, but it might do a decent job predicting whether WMDs would be found in Iraq in substantial quantities, or whether raising the minimum wage to $15/hour would substantially increase unemployment in low-cost-of-living places. Right now, we rely on experts for these predictions, and those experts are rewarded for agreeing with current consensus and their political side's preferred policies--prediction markets or tournaments or similar things might do a lot better.
Further, a lot of experts are long on credentials and short on actual knowledge--consider the large set of established findings in social science that have been overturned in the last few years. Or earlier, the psychological theories that led to deciding which criminals should be given leniency or which witnesses' testimony should not be doubted. An alternative is pretty appealing, even without the huge political/class bias of most social scientists.
I don't view expertise as credentialism. If you would generally talk about credentialism, I am so incredibly on your side, I think with a few exceptions (doctors, pilots, etc.) credentials are extremely overrated. But real expertise is key in my opinion. I don't think the prediction market is gonna come up with the theory of relativity.
After voting for Democrats all my life, I started voting for Republicans around 2018. This was the reason.
There is plenty not to like in both parties. The rampant snobbery of the Democrats I met in the bay area pushed me over the edge. I thought Democrats believed in evaluating people as individuals instead of members of groups. A long string of incidents in which people at my large Bay Area employer applied stereotypes to blacks and people from the south were eye opening.
I think our Canadian political divides may split this way too. We never had American or even British levels of polarization, but (socially) working class Western populism against Eastern cultural elites has been an important political dimension through multiple party shakeups and coalition realignments. Pity the federal Conservatives keep picking such bland leaders.
Even more: I bet A LOT of people only vote Democrat because voting Republican just isn't an option. Wasn't since I was a young and still no change in sight - there had to appear a total outsider to make them appealing outside their base.
This means there are a lot of people that don't really like Democrats and would be quite happy to vote something else, if only there was another option with its head out of its ass. At the very least Republicans should continue the separation from the ultra-religious - being just pro-religion instead of fundamentalists would open them up to huge swathes of new voters.
Sure, but I think I'd have preferred to read the entirely-serious version. I don't like reading a sloppy generalization and having to decode whether it's satire about political strategy, or genuine advice pitched in the language of politics. Or just a mistake.
Scott wants the Republicans to make a coherent argument with persuasive sway over the Democratic coalition, which then prompts a Democratic crisis, to turn against virtue signaling, pseudo-meritocracy, and the like.
If either succeed, America as a whole gets better options.
It's a pretty aspiration, but IMO a sincere reading was far too shallow to convince me that "coherent [Republican] argument with persuasive sway over the Democratic coalition" isn't an over constrained problem. More the opposite in fact, if it needed to take such liberties just to vaguely gesture in that direction.
People like Mike Rowe demonstrate exactly why any claims that the republican party is pro-working class are a calculated fiction. Rowe is bought and paid for by the Koch brothers, and a repeated theme in his advocacy is that workers need to suck up bad conditions, take personal responsibility for safety problems, and work hard until they find success. At the same time, he argues against unions, saying that they no longer serve a purpose, he argues against regulations- not just environmental regulation that could arguably cost jobs, but also basic health and safety regulation, because supposedly those should be the worker's responsibility to keep track of. He argues that there needs to be widespread vocational training to address a "skills gap", which is a discredited economic theory.
The thread unifying this is clear. Rowe's not an advocate for workers in industry, he's an advocate for owners of industry. His SWEAT pledge reads like a satirical wish list that a coal baron might have for the perfect obedient employee who'd never protest or organize. Reducing regulations might marginally reduce unemployment, but it'll make heavy industry a hell of a lot more profitable at the low cost of worker lives and our environment. And funneling young workers into vocational schools with the promise of well-paying jobs when they graduate isn't a way to give low-skill people jobs- it's to create a large non-union labor base in manufacturing and construction. It's not a coincidence that the ideological advocacy Rowe puts out just happens to align with the interests of the people who have given him massive amounts of money.
The "skills gap" idea is that high unemployment following the 2008 recession was the result of structural shifts in the labor market such that jobs were available but there weren't workers with the technical education and skills to do them. Rowe's website loudly states: "Consider the reality of today’s job market. We have a massive skills gap. Even with record unemployment, millions of skilled jobs are unfilled because no one is trained or willing to do them. "
It was a popular idea when unemployment was high, because it seemed like a simple solution- just train a bunch of people in basic vocational skills, and they'd all get jobs! The problem was, the causal arrow was in the wrong direction. When unemployment is high and labor supply outstrips labor demand, employers raise skill requirements to artificially cut down on potential applicants. When unemployment is low, those skill requirements disappear, and employers become willing to train people on the job (Here's a simple summary: https://www.vox.com/2019/1/7/18166951/skills-gap-modestino-shoag-ballance). There are some middle-skill jobs for which there are legitimate education requirements that can't be taught on-the-job, but those aren't the jobs for which Rowe is pushing vocational training. They're stuff like nursing, paralegals, or low-level management (for reference, "Job Polarization and US Worker Skills" from Brookings).
The point isn't that vocational training is secretly bad. Vocational training can be great! The point is that Rowe's advocacy favors the employers, not the employees. Training a bunch more people to weld won't lower unemployment when labor supply outstrips demand, because (as discussed in the studies in the Yglesias article) the skills requirements are a response to unemployment, not a driver of it.
This seems like the designers of roundabouts and mixed pedestrian/vehicle areas in Europe: make things less clearly (and falsely) safe to make people pay attention. But I don't know because I honestly haven't been in those conditions.
It's also good personal advice, safety first somehow found its way out of industrial litigation-avoidance language into *child rearing* and it's awful, creating fragile, neurotic people who grew up under helicoptering parents. Exposing yourself to risk and danger is valuable at the personal level, a great deal of misery can be laid at the feet of personal harm avoidance being elevated to a saintly value.
People like black and white. Activity X is safe or unsafe. If it's safe I don't have to worry. If it's unsafe I shouldn't do it. It can be stressful (probably in an evolutionarily adaptive way) to see something as containing some danger and doing it anyway. So I have complete empathy for people who are only willing or able to have binary safety functions.
One thing this thought makes me curious about are what about people who do things they acknowledge are dangerous. For example smokers or illegal drug users. From the ones I've known they don't usually come across as people who are holding a nonbinary view of safety of their activity. Are they externally saying X is unsafe but internalizing that it is safe, or can humans regularly go into a "X is unsafe and I feel it's unsafe in my bones, but I'm going to do it anyway, no big deal"?
Not that this line of questioning is probably very valuable, but I believe it's interesting to think about.
That article is a good argument for why "safety third" is a reasonable thing to say. It's also bullshit- a position Rowe retreats to when people point out that what he's arguing is that regulations are unnecessary and counterproductive. I'll quote Rowe himself, in his Ted talk:
Safety first is, I mean going back to OSHA and PETA and the Humane Society, what if OSHA got it wrong? I mean, I, this is heresy what I’m about to say, but what if, what if it’s really safety third? Right? I mean, I mean really. What I mean to say is I value my safety on these crazy jobs as much as the people that I’m working with, but the ones who really get it done, they’re not out there talking about safety first. They know that other things come first. The business of doing the work comes first, the business of getting it done. And, you know, I’ll never forget up in the Bering Sea, I was on a crab boat with the Deadliest Catch guys, which I, which I also work on in the first season. We’re about 100 miles off the coast of Russia, fifty foot seas, big waves, green water coming over the wheelhouse, right? Most hazardous environment I’d ever seen. And I was back with a guy lashing the pots down. So I’m 40 feet off the deck, which is like looking down at the top of your shoe, you know, and it’s doing this in the ocean. Unspeakably dangerous. I scampered down. I go into the wheelhouse and I say with some level of incredulity, ‘Captain, OSHA?’ And he says, ‘OSHA? Ocean.’ And he points out there and, but in that moment what he said next can’t be repeated in the lower 48. It can’t be repeated on any factory floor, any construction site, but he looked at me and he said, ‘Son,’ and he’s my age by the way, he calls me son. I love that. He says, ‘Son, I’m the captain of a crab boat. My responsibility is not to get you home alive. My responsibility is to get you home rich. You want to get home alive. That’s on you.’
Aside from the fact that the story is clearly at least in part made up (OSHA-Ocean, really?), it demonstrates what Rowe is really advocating when he says safety third. He's not saying that "safety first" makes people complacent. He's saying that "safety first" is wrong because it makes the bosses responsible for safety, that safety should be the responsibility of each individual worker, and the boss's responsibility is to make as much money as possible. The ridiculous thing is that Rowe gives this story as if it's some grand argument against regulation, when in fact it's a perfect example of why we need regulations requiring safety. Of course the boss doesn't want to bother keeping things safe! That's why we have regulations in the first place- so those bosses don't get people killed by focusing only on making profits!
"And for the rest of that day — safety first I mean, I was like — So, the idea that we create this sense of complacency when all we do is talk about somebody else’s responsibility as though it’s our own, and vice versa. Anyhow, a whole lot of things."
I think you've got an is/ought issue going on here. He isn't saying the boss's responsibility OUGHT to be making money. He is saying the boss's responsibility IS making money. So if you're trusting your boss, you're screwed. I assume based on reading the other article I linked that this line of logic continues from there: if you're trusting your safety coordinator your boss hired, you're screwed. And if you're trusting some distant agency, you're screwed. I mean, that sure sounds like what he's saying when he talks about disdain for his show's safety coordinator.
I don't have an is/ought issue, because Rowe's position is that everything ought to be the way it is. That's what his SWEAT pledge is all about: "I believe the most annoying sounds in the world are whining and complaining. I will never make them. If I am unhappy in my work, I will either find a new job, or find a way to be happy". If you've got a problem with the status quo, suck it up or leave, and any problems you have are your own responsibility.
And the whole reorientation being a narrative fiction is baked into the cake, always has been. Pointing that out on the part of the democrats(that's their project is an upper class OP) for cynical gain is how you'd get the reorientation.
And youre right that Rowe's an aide to industry, but youre misunderstanding the people who throw money at him, they want people in the trades and industry, messages like Mike's help provide an alternative narrative to COLLEGE OR NOTHING that high schoolers get drowned in.
The beautiful thing about scott's message-plan is that it allows your protestation to be dissmissed as upper class gatekeeping. "You care more about the environment and telling miners to code than you do about letting working men do their fucking job"
They make interesting noises in this direction, but haven’t fully committed. See how they’ve reacted to Romney’s recent child tax credit proposal, for instance.
This is a project that they have been *gesturing towards*, but I don't see any reason yet to take Hawley seriously in any sort of good faith when it comes to his policy goals.
He will call out companies on Twitter over the low wage they pay their workers, but he was *against* a far more modest minimum wage increase when it came to his own state a few years back (I mean I'm happy for people to change their mind, but I don't get any sense that's what happened here?).
To his credit, he *did* provide his own recent minimum wage proposal. But the structure is bizarre, and honestly makes no sense. It would place a nearly 100% marginal tax rate on people in certain settings, which really doesn't seem like what he or the GOP wants. But I honestly don't think Hawley is particularly interested in making this policy, he's just signaling his stance (and I'm honestly surprised that his aides didn't at least put more work into making that signaling a little more coherent).
Hawley's Twitter account is certainly a strident critic of Big Tech... but what are the actual policies he is proposing? I mean this genuinely, I have tried to find it, and I can't find much. Maybe they were going to be in that book deal that got cancelled, but that's the thing... he's not a pundit, he's a senator! Proposing legislation is kinda part of his job. The main thing I can find is his amendment to Section 230, but do you genuinely think he wants to pass that? I don't think it would actually fix his major criticisms of the industry?
This is not criticism of "Why doesn't the senate get anything done??". That has nothing to do with Hawley. But I think it's genuinely important to not just take "gesturing towards policy on Twitter" as equivalent to taking real substantive policy ambitions. There are lots of senators I disagree with, but you can absolutely find the concrete policies they support or reject. Like, just to stick with the obvious polarizing choices, when you go find some Bernie Sanders proposal, like it or not , I am confident that Sanders would *love* to enact that agenda. Maybe it's a terrible idea, but he sincerely thinks these are policies that should be made into law.
When it comes to Hawley, I honestly don't think that's the right perspective to take. Does he sincerely want his Section 230 Modification to pass? He doesn't really act like a senator who does. All the analysis I can find on both sides of the aisle seems to think that policy is pretty bad, and doesn't fit his mission. But is that even the point?
In his "defense", you can just say "What's the difference? The Senate won't pass anything anyways, so what matters is your performance to the public, and the values you stand up for". And like, that's actually kinda true, which is why I think you should give even less weight to the idea that Hawley is genuine about these policies.
Sorry for the rant, I admit it just bothers me. I would so much rather the GOP have real policy ambitions that I disagree with than the fact that they seem to have largely given up on those ambitions. And I think it's important to draw your own judgment on whether or not to "believe" senators on the policies they advocate, not just what they say their stance is. I think Hawley is genuinely wary of the effects of Big Tech and other large corporations, and would like to reign in their power. I do *not* believe the policies he gestures towards on Twitter are actually the ones he wants to enact. I think he knows the Section 230 reform wouldn't accomplish anything like what he wants.
The welfare stuff is odd because I think some of his *interest* in that is genuine, but he just isn't acting like it matters to him (trying to make a deal, do serious proposals, and whatnot). Until I see real reason to think otherwise, I just assume he's just got too much pressure from the conservative movement, which is still so antagonistic to welfare, for it to be anything but posturing from him. But like, I'd love to be proven wrong, his GOP colleague introduced a big new child poverty bill, let's see the support, or a genuine alternative.
A higher minimum wage that is the same for cities and the countryside where the cost of living is lower harms rural communities. So it's pretty logical why he'd be opposed to that, given the voters that support them.
Has anyone proposed a minimum wage that differs by county, based on the cost of living?
I see this as a great opportunity for a bipartisan deal. The Dems get high minimum wages for the, often black, working class employees in the cities. Reps get a more economically competitive countryside.
But it seems strictly worse than not having a formula, because a formula will be all Seeing Like A State and factor in the wrong things with the wrong weights for all the usual reasons. Whereas the local governments are closer to their own economies and better understand them and it enables local control.
Though maybe the factual question of "are tariffs good?" isn't relevant to the piece, or maybe it is but the economists who route the above article are in the 75% of at-risk experts :)
Trade benefits these people only in terms of lower costs for goods and such; it hurts them by specializing and offshoring the industries and jobs they could have obtained in the past - When the factory or the mill or the mine closes, I definitely need those low cost goods because my income is no more.
I have yet to see (could be just my ignorance) academic discussion around the jobs side of global trade that does not translate to buggy whip manufacturers learn new trades + learn to code!
I think I can argue that higher prices for goods, when coupled with much broader productive employment, is better for US society in general and many of the US middle and lower classes in specific than global wealth + low cost goods coupled with un- and under-employment because we offshored so much.
I, personally, from a upper middle class perspective, would much rather we employ more and pay higher prices for all sorts of goods than employ less and pay higher taxes to feed, house, and clean up the mess of a massive unemployed/underemployed population.
Ah, this one again. You do realise we've had three hundred years of specialisation and increased free trade in the modern era, and at no point has it led to the predicted mass unemployment someone always seems to claim. Lack of flexibility in the market means disruption can cause temporary peaks of unemployment yes, but nothing lasting. If you are going to brandish the many-times-discredited spirit of Ludd around it is surely beholden on you to provide some actual evidence here?
> and at no point has it led to the predicted mass unemployment someone always seems to claim
It's happened over and over again. Some of the revolutions of 1848 were partially triggered by mass unemployment caused by cheap imports from industrialized England. Right now, huge swaths of the US remain economically devastated due to factories closing and moving overseas. These "temporary peaks" have lasted decades.
Not to mention that disappearing industrial jobs have only been replaced with minimum wage service jobs that don't pay a person enough to live or support a family. There may not be mass unemployment but there are a huge number of people who work full time (in hours) but don't make a living wage or have health care because they've cobbled together multiple service jobs.
When I say opted out, please don't read too much into that. Obviously there are many people collecting SSDI who don't feel as if they had a choice in the matter. There is no doubt a complex interplay of factors driving the increase; including people addicted to opiates, general decrease in health and fitness driving more medical problems, etc. And certainly there is a group who are too physically unfit (or injured) for manual labor, but they're unskilled/unfit for any sort of desk job, and collecting SSDI is an attractive choice at that point.
Two things to consider here. Firstly, the reason British goods did well despite tariffs (the policy meant to stop this happening clearly didn't work, which is probably an important point) was not price but quality. More advanced manufacturing made for better quality products, as well as cheaper ones. The assumption that this was a like-for-like swap is too simplistic. The same applies for e.g. the US (or UK) automobile industry, where the products that replaced them were simply better for the majority of consumers (as good a definition of quality as you're going to get until an actual economist turns up). If your industry is producing lousy products it is going to be out-competed.
The same dynamic applies to offshoring, albeit with the quality here being that of the workers. If you need to open a garment factory you are going to do it somewhere cheap, but not anywhere. You need access to a skilled workforce, so you go to somewhere with such a body of people like Bangladesh. There one not only finds a pool of experienced workers, but you are able to employ a standard of worker who in the US would not take a factory floor job, because they have a degree or a trade specialisation. Quality employees (ideally at low cost) are important.
Secondly, is it true that loss of manufacturing causes long-standing unemployment? The pockets of deep unemployment I know are areas where resource production, basically mining and agriculture, have been out-competed. It's why chunks of West Virginia or County Durham are still basket cases whilst Detroit or Glasgow is on the up I guess. My best guess as to what is going on here is to do with transferable skills but there does seem to be more bounce-backability in former manufacturing areas than in old coal mining areas. This is impressionistic, but perhaps important.
As you can tell, I don't think the Luddite view has much merit. It seems to be based around the assumption of products being equal, and lumps together resource exaction with heavy industry. And you have to consider the possibility that what actually causes the long-term unemployment is not the actual changes but government intervention.
As a postscript, does not wanting to protect working-class jobs to protect their holders reek of upper-middle class paternalism? The underlying logic seems to be a kind of generous understanding that all these people have is their jobs, so we must protect them. As such, this policy seems not to fit with Scott's overall framework here.
Free trade costing jobs doesn't have to lead to aggregate unemployment to be true. It only has to lead to unemployment or reduced earnings for some subset of the population.
I support free trade, because it's helpful on net and doesn't distort the market like tariffs, but it is foolish to deny that outsourcing of jobs and movement of low-skill, labor-intensive jobs to other countries has severely impacted a significant portion of the US population.
Note that one of the major U.S. export industries, paying for those imports, is agriculture. Imports can be larger than exports only if foreigners are on net investing in the U.S., whether by buying stock or helping finance the deficit.
Or if the exports involve fewer jobs than the imports. How many man-hours does it take to make a smartphone, and how many to make $phone dollars worth of corn?
But to push back on your other point. The typical economist would probably say that gains from trade make everyone better off. The idea that there is a fixed amount of "work" and that if we import more goods (i.e. export the jobs) is confused. People use money to buy goods and services and to the extent that people have more money they will buy more goods and services and increase the demand for labor. Not everything can be imported, you can't get a haircut from China for instance. So if we could take the gains from trade and channel that into uses that help the people who's jobs are lost in a reasonably targeted way then we all end up better off. And it's not a matter of just paying them the lost wages, but more helping the economies in geographic areas most affected by trade to readjust so that people can find new, better jobs in sectors more insulated from international trade (services, high-value/smaller scale production, etc).
That's the theory at least, Auter et al showed pretty convincingly that that didn't happen with the "China shock" in the 90's because of the speed at which the change happened. But there is some disagreement as to how strong of conclusions we should draw from that. Was the China shock just an exceptional one-time event? It seems unlikely that we'll have a comparable dynamic arise anytime soon. It's not as if there is ANOTHER country with 1 billion people that is way below it's economic capacity and suddenly find it's footing over the course of a couple of decades. So it's not at all clear that protectionism will improve the situation at the current margin. After all, it's not as if the tariffs imposed under the Trump administration really changed the balance of trade. It just basically shifted some jobs from China to Vietnam (and other places in SE Asia) but didn't really do anything for the USs overall trade deficit: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOPGSTB.
> It's not as if there is ANOTHER country with 1 billion people that is way below it's economic capacity and suddenly find it's footing over the course of a couple of decades.
I hear India and Africa are gearing up these days.
> The idea that there is a fixed amount of "work" and that if we import more goods (i.e. export the jobs) is confused.
I don't think many people seriously advance this as the reason to stop or slow job exports. It's more that industry is regional, and the jobs that could replace them simply may not be available in those regions, and so these poor or working class people now have to relocate away from their friends and families just so they can keep eating because of policy decisions made by the political elites that don't serve or care about their interests. This seems to be one of the big reasons behind Trump's popularity.
Sure, the lower prices "help everyone" because now these poor people can afford to eat while making less money because their job no longer exists. Fantastic.
> And other poor people elsewhere in the country are making more money.
How does that work exactly? Many good paying blue collar jobs moved out of cities due to zoning, then they moved those jobs out of the country so the goods are cheaper. Which of these blue collar workers are better off exactly?
It's not an argument against change so much as an argument against too rapid a change. Younger generations are more far mobile.
Just pigpiling on Burin's comment to say: Those of us who grew up poor realize that being able to buy a laptop much more cheaply is cold comfort if there are no jobs we can do to afford to buy one.
Those who grew up poor know that the price of bread is massively important, and you buy it whether you have a job or not. And even if the bread is made with local wheat, the price of that wheat is set globally and is affected by tariffs and subsidies.
There's a reason why Home Pride and day-old bread was de rigeur growing up and not some highfalutin' brand actually made with something that didn't approach sawdust. Substitutionary effect is a very real thing to those of limited means, I assure you.
Also, no. No you don't. You skip certain foods altogether. If you can honestly tell me you've gone to a close friend's house to realize... hey it's dark.... and it's because the power got cut, feel free to chime in about your experiences. Otherwise, I can assure you: Tariffs help rich people get richer primarily. The overall positive impact on an economy is not guaranteed to spread equally. And overwhelmingly it does not.
"The overall positive impact on an economy is not guaranteed to spread equally." Is that a problem with tariffs, or a problem with the economy? Would you also recommend against automation or other productivity improvements because the benefits are spread unevenly? Or should we be looking at ways to spread the benefits instead?
Its a problem with tariffs. Productivity improvements don’t take very long to spread across society. When the wealthy can outsource the workforce to the third world and support a permanent underclass by robbing the middle class for social welfare, the benefits tend to accrue to the wealthy.
I don't think it's correct that the platform of capitalism and liberty does not excite people. I think that what is currently called "capitalism" - where there are companies that are too big to fail, who are de-facto controlling most of the economy and are in the process of taking control over the politics and public discourse - do not excite people, especially ones that are targeted for exclusion and oppression as "basket of deplorables".
I think that when a NYT journalist, fresh from participating in a struggle session where her colleague was forced to grovel and then fired because he dared to suggest that dissent from the Party Line may not be literally Hitler - when such person talks about "liberty", it does not excite people. And when some party functionary speaks about "liberty" one day, and then comes to an MSNBC show and shakes hands and exchanges smiles with people who call his electorate literally Hitler - that also makes it pretty hard to get excited about those words.
Trump got people excited because he actually tried to do what he promised to do. One may agree or disagree about whether those things were worth doing, or whether the approach he chose for doing them was the effective one, but one can see how people can get excited if a person says "I am going to do X" actually tries to do X, instead of half-assing an attempt to do 1/10 of X, failing to do even than and campaigning on "well, the other guy is even worse, so you don't have a choice but voting for me!"
That is not why Trump got people excited, and it is not even true that Trump actually tried to fulfill his promises more than other presidents.
Per Politifact, Trump kept only around a quarter of his promises, compared to nearly half for Obama (a discrepancy not explained by serving 1 term or control of congress). Notably, his border wall fell well short of what he claimed it would be, and was not paid for by Mexico. Trump had no experience governing and was not interested in learning. His focus was more on being a TV character, which is exactly what is appeal was. Being a TV character and emphatically placing the blame for all the country's problems on whatever groups, real or imagined, his base didn't like. Pure sideshow, grievance, and bigotry.
Here in your comment we also see The Great Asymmetry in our collective perception of American politics. A single comment from the Democratic nominee 5 years ago, describing half of Trump supporters as a "basket of deplorables" is still talked about today and seen as emblematic of the elitist, classist, and out-of-touch dismissal Democrats have for the rural half of the country they are supposed to be governing. And perhaps it is! But meanwhile, your average Trump-style GOPer (which is increasingly becoming simply the average GOPer) will describe *all* Democrats as literally, literally evil communists who want to literally destroy you and everything you hold dear, and no one bats an eye.
My point is your "given" is false - there are a lot more communists (at least if we're using the colloquial meaning of it, e.g. somebody what would be ideologically at home with CCP or USSR, somebody who subscribes to Marxian economics and somebody who thinks capitalism is inferior to socialism and US should become socialist country) than you think and a lot less racists that the press is telling you. Though they exist too, but if I go to an average university campus, I have about an order of magnitude more chance encountering a communist than a racist. Thought there's one important caveat here - I don't include CRT adherents into this calculation as racists, even though this theory is basically pure racism, so maybe I should. Then I'd say it's about even chance.
Well if you start calling everyone who's not a communist a communist then of course there will be lots of them but what's the point of that?
Socialism is not communism and if you actually check there are very few people who even support full fledged socialism. What you do is to call everyone who's not a hard right wing nut case a communist. There are plenty of us around.
I think it's no less reasonable to call somebody who agrees with known communists on basically every important question "communists", even if they don't carry the official party membership, than it is reasonable to call somebody who agrees with known racists on every important question "racist", even though they don't have an official paper to say so.
> What you do is to call everyone who's not a hard right wing nut case a communist.
No, that's not true. There are a lot of opinions beyond "hard right wing nut" and "communist". But people who would support the Marxist economic ideology and its conclusions, who have no serious disagreement with the communist ideology, should be rightfully called so. There are a lot of place to not agree with the "right wing nuts" and at the same time not embrace Marxism - I myself am an example of it. Ans any person who points out that he seriously disagrees with Marxism and communist ideology - is certainly not a communist, and there are very many of those, even among Democrats. But that's not the reason to ignore the existence - and the proliferation - of communist views. It's not the new thing either - there has been a lot of communists in government and Hollywood and academia in times where communism meant Joseph Stalin, not some vague "Bernie Sanders plus". If people were willing to embrace it then, no wonder they'd be also willing to embrace it now - whatever you can say about Bernie and taking his ideas to the logical conclusion, he's certainly nowhere even close to Stalin!
Around 20% of the population believe that interracial marriage is wrong according to some surveys. We can take the number of people who support this extremely racist position as an absolute minimum number of racist Americans, even on a strict definition of racism as a conscious belief in racial superiority.
I don't know what percentage of the population believes that all things should be held in common and production reflect the principle of "from each to their ability, to each according to their need", but I bet it's less than 20%. Fuck, I don't even believe it, except as a kind of distant currently impractical Utopian ideal, and I'm one of the most left-wing people I know.
But "to each according to their need" has been nothing but "distant currently impractical Utopian ideal" in any communist country that ever existed, so that's wholly in adherence with common practice. Again, I think it is logical to think that if you agree with actual ideological practice of Communist Party in a country commonly referred to as "communist", then calling you a "communist" would be appropriate, even if you had disagreement about a practical applicability of specific slogan is specific circumstance. There were a lot of tactical disagreement among communists (ask Trotsky about it) so we must allow some room there.
Black Americans are the group most likely to oppose interracial marriage, at twice the rate of white Americans and six times the rate of Hispanic Americans. (Interestingly, women are 70% more likely than men to oppose interracial marriage!)
I assume you don't believe anyone but white people can be racist, so doing some arithmetic brings me to the white population that opposes racial intermarriage to 5.4% of the total population, or about 17.8 million people.
For reference, it's about 7.2 million black people who oppose intermarriage, and 1.8 million Hispanics.
It's more difficult to determine how many Americans are communists. However, there was a YouGov poll with some interesting findings.
The same poll found that 6% of Americans think most nations of the world will have communist governments in the next 50 years. Is that an endorsement? Not sure!
The same poll found that 28% think government should control the distribution of wealth, 33% the economy overall, and 35% wages. Does that make them communists? Again, I'm not sure!
This would carry a bit more weight if you at least bothered to provide a counter-argument, let alone your substantiated opinions what it is.
> Per Politifact
I am not sure it can be considered an objective source when talking about Trump.
> Trump kept only around a quarter of his promises
Do I need to explain why promises are not fungible and treating them as replaceable commodity, numerically calculating the percentage of them as if fulfilling each of them requires the same effort and producing the same benefit is completely bogus?
Do I need to explain that trying to fullfill the promises and actually doing it is a very different thing?
> Notably, his border wall fell well short of what he claimed it would be
The question is not whether he built 100% of his largest promise, the question is whether he invested a serious and bona fide effort into getting the wall built. The answer to this question is: Yes.
> was not paid for by Mexico.
If you think anybody on the Right seriously expected it to be paid by Mexico and not federal budget, you may need to seriously adjust your ideas before discussing anything about why people liked Trump. I mean, you can engage in any delusion you like, as long as it pleases you, but rest assured it won't have anything to do with real people.
> Pure sideshow, grievance, and bigotry.
You are welcome to express you hate and disdain for people that disagree with you as much as you like, but rest assured it won't give you an inch of understanding of them. Maybe you don't want it, that's you choice. Just know you don't have it.
> If you think anybody on the Right seriously expected it to be paid by Mexico and not federal budget, you may need to seriously adjust your ideas before discussing anything about why people liked Trump. I mean, you can engage in any delusion you like, as long as it pleases you, but rest assured it won't have anything to do with real people.
Enlighten us, O Great One. What the hell does that actually mean to “real people”? I genuinely want to know.
Let me restate that so it’s completely clear: If “and Mexico is going to pay for it” doesn’t mean “Mexico will pay for it”, what does it mean, specifically to “real people”?
It's a boast, not a promise. The promise is to build the wall (and, more generally, to improve border security). If Trump can present it as "Mexico paying for it", just to stick it to the lefties, that'd be cool, but really it doesn't matter. Not anybody on the right ever objected to spending money on border security (we can leave alone the sad fact that nobody anymore objects to spending money on practically anything, that's another story), so there would be no problem if it is financed from federal budget - in fact, that was the logical expectation. I literally didn't see anybody who is not on the Left ever objecting to the fact that US money is spent on wall building - and I have seen much praise when budget allocations that Trump pushed through actually got to the building. The promise - and something that is actually discussed and meticulously tracked on the Right's forums and other hang-out places - is how much of the wall is built. The costs are very secondary and nobody is seriously talking about the Mexico part in any other way than finding some way to present it so just to stick it. But if you're interested about what the Right is discussing and what they are happy and unhappy with - literally nobody ever that I see reading Right places was ever genuinely complaining about not getting Mexico thing. Because nobody ever took it as serious geniune promise (unlike the wall itself, which people were very much upset when it was slow or not happening).
Trump had a specific policy about exactly how Mexico would pay for it. His plan was written up in mainstream liberal newspapers like NYTimes and WaPost.
I'd link it, but I don't think it would change anyone's minds by actually reading the truth.
I provided some pretty straightfoward evidence that Trump was not magically more committed to his platform than most presidents (because why would he be? Surely that onus is on you to prove), in fact the evidence suggested that Trump was significantly less of a promise-keeper than his predecessor. You responded by essentially calling Politifact fake news (on the basis of what? What specific claims about Trump's promise-keeping are false or misleading?).
Next, you maneuver to re-interpret Trump's explicit promises in a way that affords near-infinite degrees of freedom to claim success by dropping key clauses that retroactively didn't pan out and pretending like they were metaphorical all along, while also projecting onto him some sort of hitherto untapped Herculean presidential effort in achieving policy goals (do you mean... he sometimes tweeted what he wanted in all caps?) Truth is, millions of people literally believed Mexico would pay for the wall. It was even a chant at his rallies!
I've spoken with lots of "real" Trump people -- not just weird ultra-online types who read Scott Alexander -- and their reasons for supporting or admiring Trump are usually pretty simple and often based on misinformation or just plain bigotry. "He's funny", "he tells it like it is", "he's a brilliant businessman and that's just what this country needs", "I don't like him personally, but I'll take him over the socialist democrats any day", "he's been doing a pretty good job but I don't think he's gone far enough to get all the illegals out. Trust me, they are violent savages." And so on. Lots of people generally like his "strongman" vibes, they like how strongly he leans into their negative partisanship (the evil democrats), they like that he talks differently/is an outsider/is a chaotic wildcard who shakes things up. They agree with his xenophobia and Islamophobia.
Many of them also believe his lies, including his very dumb, obviously false and pointless lies. I recently spoke with a youth pastor from my hometown who believed that antifa was behind the capitol insurrection, a ridiculous lie in and of itself. But what stuck me was his insistence -- absolute insistence -- that the attendance of the preceding Trump rally surpassed 1 million people (the authorities estimated 30,000 tops). Trump was lying about his crowd sizes until the very end, and they never stopped believing him. I'm sure that pastor still believes that Mexico is paying for the wall, too.
I am not sure where your "millions" comes from, but I am sure you can find some people who believed in Mexico paying. I mean, there are people who believe Earth is flat and gosts are real and true socialism has never been yet tried. What I am questioning is that it was take seriously by majority (or even substrantial minority) of Trump supporters as a real promise they expect Trump to fullfil. Yet less it is a "key" promise - of course the "key" is bulding the wall, not who is paying for it - again, the question of paying for security has never been even the slightest concern among the right. They never asked to cut budgets or reduce expenses for any security measures, quite the contrary. So even if they thought it's a real promise, it'd certainly wouldn't be a "key" one.
> You responded by essentially calling Politifact fake news
No, that's not true. I called Politifact a biased source when it concerns Trump - based on the fact their coverage of politicians shows substantial left-wing bias, especially when it concerns Trump. I didn't analyze their coverage of Trump promise-keeping specifically, so I can not claim for a fact that their bias there is equal to their bias everywhere else, but I would be surprised if that were one area where they suddenly stopped being biased.
> and their reasons for supporting or admiring Trump are usually pretty simple and often based on misinformation or just plain bigotry
You maybe spoke to them, but I seriously doubt you understood them or even listened to them very well. Otherwise "plain bigotry" wouldn't be one of the main reasons.
> Lots of people generally like his "strongman" vibes,
Part of being "strongman" is doing what you promise to do.
> they like how strongly he leans into their negative partisanship
I don't think after the coverage we've witnessed in 2015-2021 "leans into negative partisanship" is in any way unique to Trump. Nobody has on my memory been covered in more negative light than Trump. I thought Bush Derangement Syndrome was bad, but the Trump one has been like thermonuclear explosion to a cheap firework. It moved from "he's like Hitler" to "Hitler is way better than him" and then it went to 11 times 11 times 11.
> they like that he talks differently/is an outsider/is a chaotic wildcard who shakes things up
That one you got right. Of course, you still somehow managed to attribute it to "bigotry".
> They agree with his xenophobia and Islamophobia.
If by "islamophobia" you mean, as most Party press does, a genuine concern about terrorism driven by fanatical islamist movement, then yes, they do. And they are completely justified in that. Fanatical islamist movements are real, and their actions cause many death worldwide every year. And they are active in the US too. Ignoring it out of fear of drawing the ire of wokescolds is literally exchanging lives of people for woke points.
If by "xenophobia" you mean, as most Party press does, a genuine concern about immigration law enforcement which is being dismantled by the Left, essentially trying to introduce open borders without ever passing it through Congress - then yes, they do. And they are completely justified in that: immigration law is the law, and ridiculous situation where laws are not being enforced because Democratic administration doesn't like them should not happen in a country that is not a banana republic. What's the point in having laws if people can just decide to ignore them whenever they like?
Now we note that Trump not only promised but delivered actions for both of these. Which kinda was my point. You may not like his actions and consider it "bigotry", but his supporters disagree.
> Many of them also believe his lies, including his very dumb, obviously false and pointless lies
That happens to people who follow politicians. The Left has been believing the obviously false and pointless "collusion" hoax for many years, some continue to believe it to this day. And that not concerning a litany of other lies and hoaxes we have witnessed over the years (like that Trump called Nazis "fine people", or that Kavanaugh is a rapist). Yes, lies unfortunately are part of the modern politics, and some people believe them.
> I recently spoke with a youth pastor from my hometown who believed that antifa was behind the capitol insurrection, a ridiculous lie in and of itself
BTW, why is it "ridiculous"? It may not be true that antifa was a significant driver for the riot, but why it is "ridiculous" to believe that? Say, more "ridiculous" than believing US President is Putin's puppet, absent any evidence?
Let's consider some facts:
1. In 2020, antifa instigated hundreds of riots, some continuing to this very day - i.e. antifa has rioted in Portland just couple days ago. The press largely dismissed these riots as "mostly peaceful" protests, some politicians even praising and encourging them.
2. In these riots, multiple governmental buildings were attacked, and Antifa is notorious for their willingness to fight the police and vandalize and destroy government property.
3. There were other cases where leftist groups occupied both state capitol buildings (Wisconsin) and congressional offices, as part of political protest.
4. We know for a fact that many of Antifa operatives has been repeatedly released without any punishment or avoided arrest completely, and many local governments have been adopting velvet gloves approach to Antifa actions.
5. We know that riot in the Capitol and skirmish with the police has begun before Trump called his supporters - that have been listening to his speech at the other end of the mile-long National Mall - to go to the Capitol.
6. We know for a fact that Capitol riots have been planned significant time before the elections, and FBI has been aware of the ongoing planning.
7. We know for a fact that increased security has been refused by Congressional leadership and local police leadership.
8. We have seen video and photo evidence that at least some rioters were let in by the police beyond the fences.
9. We know for a fact some known antifa operatives have been seen and filmed at the Capitol (including inside the building).
10. We know for a fact that there was IEDs placed in several places to split and disorganize police response - action fitting an organized group and not a mob inflamed by a provocative speach.
11. We know for a fact that a lot of reporting that appear in the in major press after the riot has turned out to be false, such as reporting about Brian Sicknick's cause of death, or attributing death of somebody who hasn't even been near the Capitol and died of stroke, to the riots.
12. We know that at least some protesters tried to stop the rioters from fighting the police and entering the Capitol.
Given these facts - and the events in the preceding years - why it is "ridiculous" to believe that a) some organized group is behind the riots and b) that organized group is the same one that has been behind hundreds of othe riots and c) the press and the politicians are lying to us about it? I mean, I do not claim these are true statements - as there are many statements that aren't ridiculous but still are very false - but I don't see how they are "ridiculous". Yet less how this belief is more ridiculous than beliefs of anybody on the Left who embraced the Steele dossier and the "collusion" hoax.
Maybe the permanent residents of the glass house should be throwing stones around so readily.
> A single comment from the Democratic nominee 5 years ago, describing half of Trump supporters as a "basket of deplorables" is still talked about today and seen as emblematic of the elitist,
Because it is true. It was saying the silent part loud, only this part is no longer silent for a while now. The disdain for the flyover country rubes that cling to their racist habits and need to be reeducated and reformed is heard loud and clear. Basket of deplorables is not the first one and not the last one, and if you take a poll in any bastion on the Left about whether it's true or not, you'll probably get the "yes" in the 90%s. And thanks to the internet, twitter, facebook and so on, the deplorables now know all about what their supposed betters think about them. And then one wonders - why would people think that someone who considers them barely human, uneducated, unwashed, illiterate rube in sore need of forcible reeducation and shouldn't be let anywhere near self-rule, who disdains them with their whole heart, who would say things like "all I want for Christmas is genocide" in public and be secure their peers will approve it - why would people think such a wonderful friendly people are evil and have some evil plans for them? Only bigotry could explain that!
That's not an apple to apple comparison. A single comment from the presidential candidate will of course get more reaction than a comment from a random Joe.
Now if you compare the reaction of Hillary's comments to Trumps comments; people certainly reacted to Trump and if none of this comments have the same staying power, it's because there were so many of them competing for airtime.
Well OK, I read it. What's frustrating is this is just a throw away line and I'll let him decide what drove him to write it. It detracts value for the alleged target audience, there is little shortage of opinion from people who signal hate for Republicans. Using a term such as disagree would have worked better.
What happens 99% of the time with an open letter of advice to Republicans is that the opining party suggests the Republicans should become progressives in order to fix their party. I figured it would be more substantive from the same guy who wrote "You're still crying wolf". It ended better than it started.
Since 'serious'!Scott is faultlessly charitable to everyone all the time, I read that as a reminder that he really knows he's not part of the coalition he's proposing here, even if he thinks it would be a positive realignment overall.
The part that surprised me was Scott assuming that Republicans hate him. I'm a Republican, and I love Scott. He takes surveys, so he knows he has a decent amount of Republican readers. By percentage he's much more popular with Republicans than the NYT, and probably nearly any other Democrat blogger.
I do feel like Scott could have left that line out. Quoting some other things Scott himself has written about writing, that have stuck in my mind:
> It’s written in a style of “I can see where you’re coming from, but have you considered X?” I thought I was the only person who had figured out that this worked better than “YOU ARE DUMB AND I HATE YOU. NOW PLEASE AGREE WITH ME.”
"7. Figure out who you’re trying to convince, then use the right tribal signals
[...]
Trump’s Law is that if you want to convince people notorious for being unconvinceable, half the battle is using the right tribal signals to sound like you’re one of them.
For example, when I’m trying to convince conservatives, I veer my signaling way to the right. I started my defense of trigger warnings with “I complain a lot about the social justice movement”. ..."
So either Scott got lazy here, or he didn't really target this essay at Republicans, or he felt like he needed to throw this in so no one would mistake him for a Republican sympathizer.
I read this as the loudest possible indicator that Scott could manage, right after naming it “A Modest Proposal”, that this was meant to be satirical in tone
It's a perfectly honest statement of fact and statement of intent. Frankly I think it perfectly sets the tone for the rest of the piece, and the piece would feel dishonest without it.
I read this article as really being addressed not to Republicans but to those "who all have exactly the same political and aesthetic opinions on everything, and think the noblest and most important task imaginable is to gatekeep information in ways that force everyone else to share those opinions too" -- us progressives, in other words, and the "I hate you and you hate me" comment was just a bit of self- (and us) mockery.
Interesting. I kept reading but sort of tuned out the point far before that when he linked NPR about a phenomenon that doesnt exist (There is no identity crisis in the Republican party - maybe the ones in DC arent happy about their new identity but that's unchanged since about 2015. In fact, I'd say the party is more captive to the identity now than it was then: https://twitter.com/RyanGirdusky/status/1363898468675293187)
Scott did follow with a few interesting ideas (some more than others) but the critical error he made in accepting that assumption poisons all suggestions.
One thing I've noticed, and I believe Scott has admitted to, is he will sometimes stick in explicit denunciations he either doesnt fully agree with (at least not in said full-throated manner) or in normal circumstances wouldnt feel the need to do. Something along the lines of "Richard Spencer is a moron" would fit the latter, you can fill in for the former. He does this to appease a wider audience and get some readership/possible discussion from those he would otherwise not in our current times.
I understand his motives for this and yet I believe it weakens his writing of which one of his greatest strengths is the endearing honesty of his arguments. I think you read that "I hate you and you hate me" line in the same way I have read some of those explicit denunciations before but I don't know if that's what Scott was doing here. His animosity for Republicans and Trump is real, although how hard felt it is remains cloaked.
Alas, that's where Scott departs from the "Proles" and is why he cannot properly advocate for them. He feels the need to cloak and protect himself from accusations of various -isms, as recent events attest. I don't blame him for this but it denotes the class difference.
To show this I'll commit the same sin he originally did and cite the NYT. Specifically, their recent story about Smith College. Consider the proles of the tale - the janitor, the cafeteria worker. Accused of an -ism, their response was not "I'm not racist, because xxx" or some groveling apology that pays deference to the party that aggrieved them as we have seen hundreds of times from middle and upper middle class types embroiled in these disputes. It was "When does this racist label go away?"
Whether something or someone is racist or not is not an all-consuming facet of life for these people, not in the same way it is for those who jockey for status by doling out accusations of it.
The issue Scott has is he ultimately agrees with the progressive point of view here, where he disagrees is where the lines are drawn and how much trouble you should be in if you are caught playing with fire (i.e., the nrx flirting).
The Proles have no time for that. They're not writing any dissertations about whether they are or are not guilty of racism. That's a higher class problem. All this dodging and cloaking is for someone else, maybe the conservatives in DC and various suburbs across the land that are defecting from the Republican party can have fun doing that once theyre caught in an imbroglio (and they will be).
We don't hate you, Scott. You're like the one writer I've read who absolutely loathed Trump for reasons that did not appear to be based on total nonsense, which was refreshing.
If either party were to actually do this, and do it in a way that didn't leave me suspecting it was a facade for same-old, same-old, I'd sign up, even though I have little use personally for significant parts of the culture described. (Nothing wrong with football, or church, and neither one is less desirable in the grand scheme of things than my personal hobbies, as long as I don't have to do either one.)
Importantly, this idea has already passed a critical empirical test. All of the other major British settler colonies (Canada, Australia, you can also count New Zealand) switched to race-blind points-based immigration systems several decades ago. All of them have higher % foreign born than the US, while avoiding the populist backlash that has afflicted Western countries with a higher level of low-skill immigration. Canadian support for their government's immigration policy is well above 70% the last time I checked.
It's actually quite easy to get rid of illegal immigration. You punish their employers.
Here's a policy: any illegal immigrant who is working can report their employer to the government. The illegal immigrant who reports will be made legal with their family; the other illegal immigrants working there can be offered the same deal in exchange for evidence if needed to win the case against their employer. Any remaining illegal immigrants are ejected.
The employer gets prosecuted unless they can prove that they checked the immigration status of their employees and reasonably believed that they were legal (ie the forgeries were good enough to trick someone, and they weren't just accepting any old forgery in order to escapt prosecution).
Get rid of the jobs and they stop coming, apart from actually desperate people seeking asylum, and people pretending to be such (which does mean that you need a good quality process for separating those two groups apart, which is a hard problem and any such process needs to acknowledge that it is a hard problem and that it will get it wrong occasionally, and you need to say whether you're happier with your mistakes resulting in letting in people who shouldn't be or returning people to actually dangerous situations).
We already punish employers of illegal workers in the Netherlands and otherwise make things hard for illegals. It has resulted in a substantial decrease in the number of illegal residents.
Your plan to reward illegal immigrants who snitch seems ill thought out. It assumes that they have no group loyalty, no loyalty to their employers, that they know the laws and that they have high trust in government promises.
For larger employers in the parts of the economy where illegal work is common, the better solution is just to regularly do unannounced checks at the work site. For small employees like illegal cleaning at homes, waiting for people in their environment to snitch is probably the only realistic chance.
I love Swift's Modest Proposal - is this in the same vein? Am I too stupid now to recognise that encouraging the eating of their children is a better way to feed the poor than providing charity is satire?
I don't know if you're stupid or not. I do know that I was thrilled to read someone who is intelligent outlining the issues I have in voting Democratic. And in the reality that my still-poor family largely shifted from voting 100% Democratic to almost 100% Republican in a 30 year span. Hint: It wasn't because they all became closet Nazis somewhere along the way.
Hint: Fox News manipulation and cultural propaganda likely flooded their living rooms and brains during those decades -- as real journalistic sources concerned with facts and reality were likely deemed "left wing" and thus ignored, leaving them to vote proudly and boldly against their own economic interests in order to cater to their newfound cultural biases.
It starts with "I think dead children should be used as a unit of currency. I know this sounds controversial, but hear me out." If that piques your interest, do check it out.
"Aren't I just describing well-off people? No. Teachers, social workers, and starving college students may be poor, but can still be upper-class. Pilots, plumbers, and lumber barons are well-off, but not upper-class. Donald Trump is a billionaire, but still recognizably not upper class. The upper class is a cultural phenomenon."
This is great. As someone who would like to see a smarter, better conservative movement, I couldn't agree more. For this to work you have to draw a line against the people who would like to hijack the movement and make it about economic class, because it's safer than attacking other things, i.e., wokeness.
I co-authored a report here on debunking the "working-class party myth," and it talks about the consensus in political science that economics doesn't motivate voters all that much. We say it's all about "social issues" (the left-wing academy just calls it "racism" or "racial resentment") but the idea that it's not about money or economic status is important.
Policy wise, a class based agenda can include smart stuff like war on credentialism, while if you try to do lowest common denominator economic class stuff you just get more left-wing ideas, and we already have one party pushing that.
There is a way to square the circle here, and it would be a bonfire to credentialism as you indicate. A war on the institutions seems like where younger Republicans who I've talked to are leaning, anyways, but also some voices influential with boomers, like Tucker Carlson.
You also do see in some states where energy based employment is a big local factor that Republican gains among working class voters have proved more durable, because in that case, you can genuinely have both an economic interest argument align with a class argument like Scott puts forward (think the shift in West Virginia from Bill Clinton to Trump, or states like Ohio, New Mexico, the Dakotas, etc, where blue collar Democrats have shifted in numbers of varying sizes). Promises of job retraining programs worked for the Democrats in the 90s, but very quickly that went away once it became clear that these programs entailed having to move across the country.
A problem the conservative movement has is that like all movements, of all ideologies, it has racket like tendencies. This was true in the scam PAC era, the direct mail era, and yes, now the MyPillow era as well. Its not clear to me that this is something that can be solved anytime soon. The answer I think is what the Democrats do, and that is to put their slimiest people into positions of low profile institutional power (think corrupt Congresspeople in majority black districts like Alcee Hastings, Sheila Jackson Lee, Maxine Waters, etc). The Democratic coalition allows for this to work because they don't ever need to put Alcee Hastings or Jesse Jackson in front of the wine mom crowd. The Republicans have a problem in that they don't have a good way to keep Matt Gaetz away from the Facebook feeds of winnable suburban moms.
One of the ways I've heard the argument you push back on the most is the idea that the Republicans need to become some version of Fidesz or Law and Justice, transplanted to the US. It mostly comes from people who are really pro-natalist and are jealous that the kind of social conservatism you see in those countries (the throne and altar kind, not the Barstool kind) is politically feasible. I think such an agenda would bomb in the US, and I say that as someone who likes a lot of it. Our cultural politics on fertility are not dominated by the spectre of half of our skilled college grads moving to London or Berlin to become baristas, and our fiscal situation is not one in which German and French taxpayers fork over a whole bunch of goodies to our budget every year. Mapping out a pro natalist agenda requires a recognition that much of the problem is cultural, not economic. There is a reason that Chad and Burkina Faso have replacement level fertility and we don't, and I don't think the answer is in tax credits.
1. Awful nice of you to let Josh Hawley ghostwrite a post after banning him from the comments a few weeks ago.
2. Lots of policy judgments are difficult to boil down to a number, or turn on value differences between various numbers. I am not sure exactly how prediction markets could be leveraged to solve climate change, for instance. A prediction market with a long enough time horizon might snuff out skeptics of the phenomenon itself (many bets made by climate bloggers in the 00s are just now being paid/welched) but I don't see it spurring on any action, at least distinct from the market market's consensus of "that's the future's problem."
3. In terms of rhetoric, Republicans pretty much are already here. The problem is that the working class pays the least attention to punditry and debates and therefore this cynical signaling will only go so far without actually delivering the goods. It took a once-in-a-century crisis to get them to un-ass some coin in the form of CARES, but under a Democratic administration things are going right back to deficit trolling.
A prediction market could determine that climate change exists, that it's human caused (ask it to predict temperature conditional on emissions cuts), and that it would be bad (ask it to predict number of hurricanes and famines over the next few years).
A prediction market couldn't determine that we have a moral obligation to respond to it, but neither can experts, so my claim that prediction markets could replace/complement experts still seems true.
Please post something explaining why you think prediction markets make any sense at all. I'd rather argue with you about it - and who knows, maybe you have a non-obvious-to-me point - than roll my eyes and think about how someone with good ideas can also have really bizarre blind spots every time you mention your support for them.
Pretty much all of it. What I see is people basically gambling. At best, assuming no systemic flaws, they can determine what people believe enough that they are willing to place money on it - though if they work like stock markets, that could just be because they expect to sell to a greater fool before the bubble bursts.
I don't see much reason to believe that what people _believe_ is true. E.g. for every person who makes a correct prediction in the stock market, who gains, there's someone else who made an incorrect prediction, and lost, in the same amount - except wore than that, due to transaction costs etc.
Of course I don't in fact know much about how prediction markets work, or even if they all work the same way. (Their name caused me to have a mild prior that this was something invented by marketers, to appeal to the unthinking, and should probably be avoided. Life's too short to investigate every type of snake oil ... and I wouldn't even think about them at all, if someone who's usually clueful (you) wasn't prominently supporting them.
Prediction markets can do astonishingly well, especially if designed in the right way. I'm also not sure how committed Scott* would be to them being literal markets with money changing hands - I imagine he'd be happy with something like Tetlock's Good Judgement Project as a complementary system. The crux of the idea is to move away from vague qualitative predictions to fully testable precisely calibrated predictions, because then you can move away from a system gated by class and credentials to one gated by demonstrated consistent track record.
If you'd like to know more about these methods I strongly recommend reading Tetlock's book Superforecasting, by the way - he's very reflective and smart, and he tackles a lot of the 'obvious problems' with this kind of system.
*Scott as in the version of Scott fiercely defending this manifesto, which may or may not be identical to the actual Scott.
You pretty much need to have real quantities of real money on the line for it to work. Otherwise it becomes swamped with people simply signaling their positions without any skin in the game.
I don't claim to know how well prediction markets would work in practice, but the hope is:
People have a bunch of beliefs; some of those beliefs are right, some of them are wrong.
Prediction markets make it so that the people with accurate beliefs make money, and the people with inaccurate beliefs lose money.
Over time, the people with inaccurate beliefs either (a) improve their beliefs so that they can make more money, or (b) start avoiding the prediction market in self-defense, or in extreme cases (c) run out of money and can't place any more large bets. In all cases, their inaccurate beliefs gradually come to have less impact on the market.
Conversely, the people with accurate beliefs make a lot of money, and are encouraged to keep playing.
Are there ways this could possibly go wrong? Tons. But you can also see how it at least *might* go right.
I think my argument would be something like - we all agree the stock market works, not necessarily in a fundamental way of giving the "true" value of companies, but in a sense where it prices stocks in a way that incorporates all relevant information on whether a stock will go up or down. If you see a stock you think is overpriced and definitely going to go way up next week, you're either wrong, or have some kind of unique genius or insider information which you'll add to the stock and then cause it to be priced correctly.
Prediction markets try to do the same thing, but in a way where they value of the "stock" is the percent chance the thing will happen. Right now they're terrible because of a lot of trading limits. But if there were a prediction market where you could trade as much money as you wanted, one of two things would have to be true:
1. The prediction market's estimate is smarter than yours
2. You could make basically unlimited amounts of money by betting on the prediction market
Right now it's kind of 2 - prediction markets are dumber than I am, and I made thousands of dollars betting on them last year. The only reason I'm not a multi-millionaire is because there were limits - I could only bet a tiny amount. The same is true of anyone else who's smarter than prediction markets, which is why they stay dumb. If prediction markets removed their limits, it wouldn't mean I actually became a multimillionaire, it would mean that lots of people even smarter than I am would find it worth their time to bet on them in a way that brings them down to an accurate estimate.
I'm not sure about this, because the stock market has something else that makes it work. Prediction markets are always a zero sum game. Money in always equals money out.
The stock market is a positive sum game, because it's allocating investment capital. A huge share of stock investment comes from non-gamblers. They just use the prediction market portion of the stock market for information without participating. This is what happens when someone buys an index fund. There aren't index fund equivalents for prediction markets.
I'm also worried that prediction markets will be too volatile.
Well, first of all I'm not sure the stock market works. Stocks have consensus values, with lots of random jitter, commonly called "volatility", but all those values represent is what people are willing to buy/sell the stock for at any given time.
It's well known that dividends aren't much of a thing anymore, given that "capital gains" get better tax treatment, so companies buy back their own stock rather than issuing dividends; this has the probably intended side effect of hugely rewarding executives whose compensation depends on changes in the per-share stock price (not on total market capitalization).
I rather suspect that in the ordinary case, the stock price - or even the total market capitalization - is not in fact a good estimate of the future value of the corporation and its earnings, extended to infinity - or till the company gets wound down.
For the rest, I'm not sure what kind of predictions are traded, including both how reliably they can be measured, and how meaningful they are. Also the length of time for predictions to be fulfilled, and thus pay off - or otherwise.
I should probably look at some of these markets to learn these things. But of course that's to an extent where this thread started, since I'd expect a "prediction markets 101" as part of any discussion of what they are or are not good for.
Efficient market hypothesis supports prediction markets, as you say. We should also expect Condorcet's Jury Theorem to do some work here too, at least if we assume that those willing to bet in a prediction market are (individually) better predictors than a coin flip. Then the market's prediction will be quite accurate.
>E.g. for every person who makes a correct prediction in the stock market, who gains, there's someone else who made an incorrect prediction, and lost
It's in the pricing. First, a $1 share of X Will Happen at 75c is the same as a share of X Won't Happen at 25c. So you might have people with the exact same correct evaluation of the probability taking either end of the deal depending on risk vs profit tolerance, giving the prediction market the correct price level but still ending up with winners and losers.
Second, even with divergent estimations, the 50% of people who lose may have an estimation that's much less than 50% wrong -- e.g., if half the buyers think X has an 80% chance of occurring and the other half think, correctly, that it's almost a certainty (say 100% for simplicity), the market predicts 90% even though half of the buyers still lose out.
Finally, errors tend to cancel out, absent systematic bias of some kind (e.g. overestimation and underestimation of most things tend to be about equally common), and we'd assume those with better knowledge (e.g. domain experts) are more likely to invest, moving the price toward the correct level.
>What I see is people basically gambling
Suppose a small town has a Weather Market, with shares of "It (Will/Won't) Rain Tomorrow" worth $1 if it does/doesn't rain tomorrow. The real chance of rain is 75%. A group of townspeople, looking at various things, think the chances are about 60%, and buy some shares for 60c. The market predicts 60% chance of rain.
But we're meteorologists in a club for meteorology, and we have good data that indicates an 80% chance, so we try to buy as many shares as we can until the price is 80c. The price climbs to 78c, since we've bought quite a few due to our confidence in our meteorological data (remember, the townspeople can either sell us their It Will shares for > the 60c they paid, or take the other side by buying It Won't shares for < 40c which become our It Will shares, both of which appear to be good deals to them).
(We're kind of ignoring where the shares came from in the first place here -- market makers or people taking other sides with the same estimates, whatever.)
So in this toy example, you can see how the market might work, with our confidence in our more accurate data causing the market to move in the right direction, and the townspeople's estimate not being necessarily equally as wrong as ours is right.
I believe there's some evidence that prediction markets work, in some small-scale experiments and some data on how accurate aggregate judgments tend to be, along with the theoretical considerations Scott outlines in his comment, but I don't know much about the empirical side.
If the dreamy goal of prediction markets is to direct policy better with a more clear-eyed view of consequences, then I expect market manipulation with Big Money to dwarf today's political manipulation with PACs, lobbyists, etc.
Even the linguistic framing of predictions will be subject to extreme political pressure.
Similarly, I can imagine a utopia in which decisions are made by a brilliant, humanist master computer that we all agree does a better job of making utilitarian/progressive decisions -- but can you imagine the wars over who gets to design the program? The bribes, the scandals, the gaslighting?
Even in the equities markets there are pools of capital stuck in inefficient markets because of a lack of interest or whatever. So I am left continuing to believe in boosting our appreciation of the role of government as the only central institution that is ostensibly SOLELY for the purpose of bettering the lives and environment of its citizens. (I say ostensibly, because of course there's always going to be waste, fraud, and abuse in such a big institution -- but that should be fought vigorously and continuously without demonizing the entire project -- like the GOP has been doing at least since Reagan.)
Charities are great, but they cater to the big, fuzzy, cuddly animals (so to speak). Government, if allowed to function well, should focus on needs independent of what social media is talking about on any particular day. Unfortunately, today's zeitgeist demands that our representatives respond immediately to loud public opinion, which cripples their ability to do the actual work of figuring out best practices and policies. The GOP, in fact, has totally abandoned any pretense that they respect representative democracy enough to actually do any work at all other than rousing the crowds with populist fiction.
In a functioning republic, representatives actually do shit like research and planning, knowing that members of the general public have their own lives and jobs, and simply don't have the time, resources, or facility to become experts on every policy matter. Conservatives in a functioning republic would have been doing serious research over the past decades, for example, into how climate change would impact coal jobs, etc. Coming up with solutions to, say, healthcare, instead of just reveling in the Big No.
But the current mood of "the markets" is that democracy is failing. My point is that the correction to a weakened democracy is MORE democracy, not these cynical attempts to turn us into an authoritarian state.
I see lots of conservative here defending trump voters as not actually intending to vote for authoritarianism. But the reason Steve Bannon and Frank Luntz grew confident enough in trump's viability to push his candidacy is that they were viewing years of polling showing more and more Americans were indeed thirsty for authoritarianism.
So on a macro level I'm wary of turning toward something like prediction markets (or super computers) because it may be just another step in the journey toward delegitimizing the necessary role of representatives in our representative democracy. Sure, part of the battle is the perception of elitism, etc, but if we don't stand up for democracy itself (instead catering to populist alienation fueled by the likes of Cruz and trump) I fear the end of the American experiment is just around the corner.
That reminds me that one of the scandals of coronavirus spreading through meat-packing plants was we found out managers were making bets on how many people would die; i.e. they were putting their money where their mouths were, but once the rage machine gets going, facts go out the window.
I think the biggest problem with using prediction markets as a source of truth is that either true believers can coordinate to spend money to affect the predictions, and people with a lot of money can also do so. Ideally, the market becomes so liquid that this doesn't work, but I'm not convinced that's likely to happen very soon.
Specifically, the idea of using a prediction market (what people with $$$ believe) to determine something more appropriately investigated via the scientific method pretty much reeks of snake oil to me.
You think that prediction markets have no basis in statistical or mathematical reality? I don't pretend they're infallible - see 2016's election results - but I do believe that unless people are just stupid they are much, much more than putting it all on black at The Venetian.
While I think prediction markets will "work," they'll hit the same Lucas Critique in that when they become what people use to make decisions, people will corrupt them.
Robin Hanson has done a lot of work on that idea. Attempting to bias a prediction market by betting on a favored but less likely outcome acts like a subsidy for all the smart money betting against you. And increasing liquididity makes them work BETTER.
This is a false dichotomy as no one is suggesting that the scientific method be replaced with prediction markets. Also see the replication crisis for evidence that appeals to the scientific method don’t solve every problem.
Scott suggested firing 75% of experts in favor of prediction markets? Maybe he's not suggesting a total replacement but there'd be a lot less scientific method going on.
Look, imagine two people betting on climate change. The first bets using the latest scientific research. The second one bets using guesses, crystal ball readings, and Facebook memes.
Who's going to make money on the prediction market? And who's going to lose their shirt?
You've set up a false dichotomy. Having a prediction market doesn't mean you ignore science.
It's not about what people with money believe. Is about what money believes. And (people with) money care about money, at least in the mid-long term.
People with money often have no idea where exactly they are investing; behind layers of financial instruments that wrap indices and whatnot. In the end, what performs well routinely will get money. And prediction markets (if they become reliable, legal, liquid, maybe subsidized) can be very profitable if they are inaccurate.
This is more of a method to aggregate information that is known than to discover information. Surely, the scientific method will be used and listened to by those who end up deciding where money is spent.
Imagine them more as a better method than "we polled 100 climate experts and 97% say X", while the other side dismisses the list because half of the experts are actually ex geology teachers, and then the science ends up half-ignored. It's a schelling point.
Sports have prediction markets all the time. You can watch a tennis match live and see the rates go up and down for the match, next point, next game, next set, and a ton of stuff. And they are usually priced reasonably -- at least given our political and fake-news standards.
I think the idea is that scientific results would be priced into the prediction market, since people trying to make money by betting would have an incentive to understand the science with as little political bias as possible.
What jumps to my mind is: why would this not be exactly equivalent to letting rich people or corporations set any policy they wish to, for a certain amount of money? Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk would find it cheap and easy to make the prediction market "prove" that it's the right policy to require commercial launches for all satellites and NASA's budget to be quintupled and diverted entirely to pushing for manned missions to Mars.
For that matter, wouldn't it be super easy for foreign nations to use strawmen or puppets to swing the prediction markets any way they choose? Again, why wouldn't China think it's a cheap thrill to, say, spend a billion dollars to effectively set the US military budget?
> wouldn't it be super easy for foreign nations to use strawmen or puppets to swing the prediction markets any way they choose?
Huge conspiracies like this one are very hard.
> why would this not be exactly equivalent to letting rich people or corporations set any policy they wish to, for a certain amount of money?
The idea is that as soon as the rest of the money gets a hint that some market is off its value, they would rush there for the free gains. It's self correcting. No specific person or country has enough liquid money to force a ridiculous price regardless of what the rest of the world does. At the very least, it wouldn't be super easy.
It depends on the depth of the market. If you have $1000 riding on average temperature in 2021, it totally gets gamed. If you have $10 billion, less so.
I also think you are focusing on prediction markets as dictators of policy. But before getting there, we could at least promote them as just sources of (imperfect though somewhat objective) information, that we can then use at our discretion.
*Would* they? What kind of prediction would be asked in those cases?
The question has to have some sort of empirical verifier at its core, so I don't think the scenarios you outline specifically could happen, unless I'm not thinking imaginatively enough.
But, addressing the spirit of the argument: quite possible for Bezos to push a price in the wrong direction, but anyone who knew this would be able to take his money for as long as he's willing to throw it out there, providing some sort of a counterbalance in both the short (individual prediction) and long (after a few wealth transfers of billions of dollars, those opposing would be more effective opposition).
I suppose the hope would be that the market, by the time it's used for policy decisions, is too large for one player to effectively skew (if Bezos is pouring a billion in, probably a lot of other billionaires would be willing and able to jump in too?).
Even the richest of the rich are poor compared to the size of capital markets that could be arrayed against them (and would be if it seemed there was a possibility to grab all the wealth they were throwing away).
shouldn't we expect a prediction market to overprice the likelihood of bad outcomes, as people bet on those outcomes as a hedge? essentially using the bet as an insurance policy?
The directionality is not a priori guaranteed, you have countervailing forces like underpricing worlds where money become worthless, guessing how those will interact is not trivial.
If that inefficiency were proven true, masses of people like me who don't care about that particular hedge would just buy until it was priced back to a reasonable level. Heck, there would be entire PE firms set up to do this if there was enough money in it
if the demand for something is elevated (by hedgers), and there is no corresponding increase of supply (not quantity of supply, but supply curve), we should expect the price to be elevated. the effect may be small if the supply is very elastic, but it should be greater than zero.
That is the market working as intended. A price increase as a result of hedging risk, without corresponding action on the other side, indicates increased risk.
no, i am describing demand due to people who are willing to take an expected loss for the sake lowering variance of outcomes, similar to how people pay a premium for insurance.
say there is a 5% chance my house will flood, and this is reflected in the betting market. if that happened, it would be really bad; so i want to place 1,000,000 single-dollar bets that it will flood, and now if it does i can afford to fix it with my winnings.
i run out of people who are willing to sell this bet to me at 5 cents, so i keep buying at 6 cents, because it's still worth it for the insurance. we interpret the new price equilibrium as a 6% likelihood my house will flood, but that's inaccurate, because i was optimizing for something other than expected payout.
The financial markets have the exact same dynamics: risk-averse investors will pay a premium for downside protection, and there are entire industries (e.g. insurance) that take the other side to make money. However, this isn't enough to eliminate the risk premiums (i.e. difference between actual price and theoretical fair value): there are lots of ways to make money if you have capital, and so you won't take the other side of a risky bet unless it reaches a certain hurdle of expected returns.
That hurdle of expected returns is exactly the (expected) return of other financial instruments on the market so the the risk premiums will be connected to the interest rate essentially.
Yes, that's right. There will be a risk premium, just as there is with financial instruments. Indeed, arbitrageurs will even be looking for inconsistencies between financial instruments and prediction markets, so you'd expect prediction markets to have similar risk-aversion priced into them.
Even earlier than that I think. But the point here is that Republicans have developed a distrust of experts, since many of them are culturally blue tribe-ish. Prediction markets are much harder to bias, so they may have greater trust in them. Thus, they may be a solution to the Republican's expertise crisis.
Plus Scott thinks prediction markets are a great idea and might actually outperform many current experts, if and when they are implemented correctly.
"Experts suck because they are wrong" and "Experts suck because Republicans don't believe them" are two different claims with two different solutions.
For instance, Scott says earlier that a prediction market could successfully predict global warming contingent on emissions. Perhaps it could, but so could James Hansen, who did just this, in 1984. His predictions are roundly mocked by smart-ass graphs that do not account for the "contingent on emissions part" (they projected continued CFC emissions and thus overshot warming).
Republicans would just deploy the same cheesy meme warfare against the prediction market. Opposition to climate change mitigation does not stem from some suspicion that atmospheric physicists might be left-wing, but from an extremely wealthy and powerful fossil fuel lobby that makes a lot of money by foisting its externalities on the year 2100.
Scott isn't making either claim, as far as I can tell. The entire conceit of the article is "here's how the Republican party can achieve greater political success, incidentally some of my proposals happen to align with my goals". The fact is that the Republican party base doesn't trust experts, and prediction markets are proposed as a way of compensated for the epistemic disadvantage that comes with that distrust.
I can't speak to Hanson, since I haven't looked at what prediction he made when (aside from the flooded NY interview, and I gather he has denied saying what he was quoted as saying) but the prediction in the first IPCC report gave a range for future warming, and actual warming was well below the bottom of the range. So far the IPCC has pretty consistently overpredicted, although that was, I think, the worst case. For details see: http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/03/have-past-ipcc-temperature.html
A cursory glance at the IPCC1 report shows their "Business as Usual" emissions paths (page 70) assuming CFC-11 levels doubling from the early 90s (when they actually peaked).
Etiology is complicated. Yes, the fossil fuel industry loves the denialists and funnels money into some of them. But frankly, AGW denial has grown beyond what bribery could pull off by itself. The industry may have been waving a flamethrower around, but you don't get a forest fire unless there's fuel.
And, well, when universities' social psych departments are ideological laundries and their humanities departments are finishing schools and propaganda machines, there's plenty of fuel for "academics are the enemy". STEM is nowhere near as tainted, but people who don't move in academic spheres don't have the experience to spot the difference.
Prediction markets are harder to bias- except that prediction markets, if they're at all effective, will be biased in the long run towards correct predictions. If those correct predictions contradict things republicans believe, republicans will not adjust their beliefs, they will simply ignore the prediction markets.
This is the tragedy of unilaterally favoring the truth over war. You will accede to the other when they are right, but they won't accede to you when you are right. So you do worse than if you lie.
What things? Food output has trended steadily up, not down, and there has been no clear pattern on hurricanes. So far as predictions, Chris Landsea resigned from the IPCC in protest at the person who was doing to be running the next iteration of that part of the report claiming, with no peer reviwed evidence, that climate change was increasing hurricanes. His view was that it might make them a little stronger and a little less frequent, but that the effects were too uncertain to count on.
Or am I misinterpreting what things you were referring to?
A prediction market can predict, but cannot determine. What determines whether or not climate change exists is a set of meteorological conditions. Unless there's some Straussian point I'm missing.
(By the way, confusing our understanding of the state of the world with the actual state of the world strikes me as a serious ongoing problem, so I don't mean this to be pedantic: I think there are important stakes to this.)
It would be very hard to use it to predict whether it was bad. What you are describing is predicting two out of the many different effects that have to be added up. Also, famines over the next few years, if they happen, are going to be due to political causes, as over the last few decades. What you need for that part of the argument is a prediction of total production of food crops, or perhaps prices of food crops relative to prices in general.
So far as selling ideas, I think it will be very hard to persuade masses of people about the virtues of prediction markets. You might do better by setting up a mechanism so that individual experts can make predictions and bet on them, with whether they have done so widely publicized. That's a much easier approach to explain to people.
>that it's human caused (ask it to predict temperature conditional on emissions cuts)
Can a prediction market predict a conditional probability? Do participants in the market have an incentive to predict accurately in this case?
An example: Suppose a local government is deciding whether to build a bridge. They decide that it is only worth it to build the bridge if at least a thousand people use the bridge in the first year. They use a prediction market to figure out the probability that this will happen, and they will only fund the bridge if the predicted odds are greater than 50%.
The prediction market opens, and comes up with a probability of 20%. But, you think the market is wrong. You think the real probability is more like 80%. But you don't have enough capital to single-handedly move the market to above 50%. If you bet on the bridge having more than a thousand people, then the government will decide not to build the bridge, and refund your money after resolving the market as invalid. You have no incentive to participate.
The only way I can see to keep people honest is to occasionally act against what the market predicts. So, if the market predicts the odds of the bridge being worthwhile are 1%, then sometimes you build the bridge anyway, just to make sure the participants have some skin in the game.
There's also other types of conditional questions that aren't covered by that example. You could have e.g. markets for all the conditions (covid deaths with X policy and without Y policy), and then someone might bet on all of them with the same money.
I dunno, I'm just thinking out loud here; but I thiink there's been deep thought into conditional markets, that could be interesting to read up on to get a better sense of whether they would work.
If there's a circularity where you're betting on X, and whether X happens depends on the prediction market for X, then yeah, it can sometimes completely lose its value as a prediction tool. There's often other financial instruments that might do what you want, e.g. bonds with payouts related to performance metrics.
In your example with the bridge, if it doesn't get built you gain nothing, but you lose nothing either. (I'm assuming negligible transaction costs, and perhaps an option to have the money you bet invested in an index fund to avoid the opportunity cost.) You still have an incentive to participate, as there is a chance that other bettors (along with you) eventually move the market above 50%, and the bridge does get built.
The argument is not that they are necessarily better at persuasion, but more accurate. It's likely that this makes them more persuasive, but that is not a black/white issue and not just about politics.
Even if prediction markets are more accurate in predicting the future than experts - and I would want a randomized controlled trial with specific experts before I would be willing to concede this - that doesn't make them better at producing policy that is a) persuasive to policymakers, and b) actually effective in addressing problems. A prediction market might be able to predict temperature increases due to global climate change, but can it tell you if the government should invest in renewable energy, set up a carbon tax, or just do nothing?
The goal of experts in policymaking isn't simply to be accurate - that's the bare minimum. It's also to produce policy proposals that are acceptable to both policymakers and the public, and that actually address the core problem. If prediction markets can only do the bare minimum - and again, that isn't proven - they aren't really capable of substituting for expertise.
A prediction market for climate change would be great, it would expose what I see as worst case scenario bias in environmental journalism. For example sea level rise is rarely even framed as "Sea levels are expected to rise from (min) to (max) over the next (time period) with a most likely value of (median) according to (source)". It is almost always framed "Sea level will rise up to (max)", sometimes without the "up to".
This subject has become a giant game of Dilbert's topper. All the incentives are to exaggerate as they can't be held accountable in a meaningful timeframe and they will be punished by the activists for wrong think.
I'll take the under for sea level on whatever environmental journalists come up with and invest my entire 401K on it. I suggest those numbers will come down if they had to put money on it. Extreme weather predictions would also be quite interesting, so how big an increase in extreme cold events are you predicting?
I'll be very curious to see how institutional investors (Blackrock, Vanguard, etc.) handle climate change. We've gotten a sneak preview of this with COVID where the vaccine companies are basically giving away vaccinations in part because these investors who "own" them care much more about the health of the economy and long-term cash flows than short term profits in a few small pharma companies (Matt Levine has written about this several times).
The potential parallels to climate change seem rather obvious and I will be very curious how this evolves over the next half-decade.
I am skeptical that these firms are pricing in "climate change" versus "governments will eventually do something about climate change," but I'm not sure how you would disaggregate those, in either a regular market or a prediction market if we're using these firms as a toy example.
Big money has long ago priced in climate change in markets that would be affected (insurance, agriculture, etc.)
There's definitely a lot of charitable/socially-conscious investing going on, too. The cynical take is that they're trying to appeal to their socially-conscious investors; the hopeful take is that rich and powerful people actually do care about society, too.
Was it confirmed that he actually banned Hawley and not just someone impersonating him? If so he might want to retract the banning, people like Hawley have power and even if Scott doesn't want him on his side making unnecessary enemies is never good in the long term.
The job of prediction markets (if they work) would be to predict the actual consequences of various policies.
They don't tell you what to do; you still use your personal values to decide which consequences are more important. But they tell you what you're choosing between: what you're really giving up by choosing a particular policy, and what you're really getting in exchange. They fight against wishful thinking and outright fraud.
The CARES Act, which essentially established a pop-up welfare state (a rickety one with lots of holes and cliffs, but bigger than any we've had before) in response to the pandemic. Measured by total redistribution and not memes about $600, CARES was one of the more generous schemes in the developed world, mostly by way of the superdole, which impressively reduced *overall* poverty in a time where unemployment peaked at 25% and jobless claims are still running at about 10x their pre-pandemic clip.
It is also the type of thing that Republican leadership would lay down on the tracks to stop under any circumstances other than "massive crisis, Republican president." If Hillary had been President they would've probably forced a full employer liability shield in return for some Burger King coupons.
And if they did, they would wipe the mat with Republicans. But Wokeness and idpol are central identity (ha) elements to Democrats that are not there for Republicans, so the pivot Scott describes is a lot easier for Reps.
The pivot for Dems would not have to be so dramatic. Dems are all about "equality" and "justice", so it wouldn't take much for them to pivot their "we support poor and marginalized people" rhetoric into genuine policy that supports poor and marginalized people. People like Sanders in the progressive wing of the party are already making inroads here.
The major problem with modern leftists like the Dems is that they believe that things are good for poor people that those people themselves often don't think are good for them.
Applying the theoretical 'woke' solution where financially and culturally marginalized get elevated to positions of power could work, except that they don't actually believe in the solution that they claim to believe in. After all, they are not favoring Ben Carson or Condoleezza Rice over Joe Biden, even though woke theory says they should.
If Democrats credibly became pro-gun (protect yourself from secret Nazis or whatever), they would wipe the floor electorally. But they won't and have been going the other way for decades.
Someone talked about Matt Yglesias elsewhere on this page, but he really wants the Democrats to stop picking useless fights on guns that never accomplish anything in exchange, and in exchange they win elections.
What Scott is talking about here is Idpol. It's expanding identity politics, but it is about activating and mobilizing around an identity. The same type of silly tests that people use to police who is really identity X would be used here. Did you watch the Superbowl?
I too would be interested to see this, but it's less obviously necessary; the Democrats aren't going through the same identity crisis as the Republicans, and they have lots of relatively sturdy ideology lodestars to work with - e.g., techno-liberalism, identitarianism, new socialism - any of which could result in a winning coalition. By contrast it's much less clear what a viable model for the GOP would be going forward that would be both interesting and could win elections.
Republicans run vastly more statehouses than Democrats, just recently held the trifecta (during which they locked in a dominant Supreme Court majority for the next generation), and (IMO) are a mortal lock to win back the house in 2022 and will probably claim the Senate. People are always saying shit like this about the Republicans needing to evolve or die, and for life of me I can't see why. Republicans are doing fine, and they will almost certainly continue to do fine.
Matt Yglesias is basically sketching that out in his substack.
As a crude summary:
- De-emphasise wokeness because it is a clear vote loser
- Rebuild 'state capacity' and actually do things (especially in Democrat states as models to build support for national programs)
- Favour simplicity over complexity
- Take on entrenched interests which limit state capacity (public sector unions)
- Pursue significant and sustained stimulus including 'catch-up' inflation
- Prefer universal, simple welfare to targeted and complex
- Make structural changes (districts, electoral college, filibusters, supreme court, etc) which support democrats (easier to form govt and to actually do things)
I guess the question is what are the societal and cultural factors upstream of political parties that prevent Scott's or Matt's recommendations from coming to fruition? And how to change those such that these politics could happen?
"Trump outmanuevered the Republican establishment by finding a front where he could go on the offensive. He ignored the unfavorable terrain of race/sex/etc, and focused on class."
Not sure about this part! His signature issue was immigration, and ran on banning literally every Muslim in the world from coming here. It's clear that was part of his appeal, especially in the primaries.
I think much of that was less Trump and more Biden.
Hillary was programmed in a lab in 2016 to repel white voters, while Trump was programmed to repel Hispanics. In the 2016 Dem Primary, Hillary did horrible with white working class voters, but very well with Hispanic and Black voters.
In the 2020 Dem Primary, Bernie did much better with Hispanic voters, but just as poorly with black voters. Biden did well with working class whites and black voters, but matched Hillary's lukewarm performance with wine track Democrats.
So the improvement in 2020 for Trump among Hispanics was partially because Hispanics were not antagonized, but also because Biden performed poorly with them.
My theory on why Trump also did better with Asians is that there is something repellent in the Democrat's embrace of BLM to non-black minority voters, but again, thats just my crazy theory.
I think it is a bad mistake to interpret Trump as losing votes on any front. According to Wikipedia's List of United States Presidential Elections by Popular Vote Margin, he got over 74 million votes, making him the second most voted for presidential candidate in history, after Joe Biden. That's:
- ~11.5 million more votes than he got in 2016.
- ~5 million more votes than Barack Obama got in 2008.
I voted Biden, but saying someone lost votes when they gained 11.5 million overall is a tough sell to me, and I think it drives us to draw the wrong conclusions.
That's not completely true, as his promise to bring back industry jobs in the US was a huge part of his appeal. But I agree that immigration policy is the big obstacle to the kind of realignment Scott describes.
Primarily what you know is the claims made about his campaign and his appeal are what MSM said. The same guys who got Brexit and Trump’s election wrong, so its not like they’re great social or political analysts...
Please keep in mind that the decisive part of his appeal was his opponent. If you look at the exit polls from 2016 (I haven't fully reviewed 2020 yet), you'll see that 60% of voters in swing states that Trump *won* thought that Trump was unfit for the presidency. The voters who put him over the top weren't voting for Trump, they were voting against Hillary/Democrats. People are fed up with the status quo, and Democrats keep running leftover 1990s neoliberals. I think that if Trump hadn't been an utter buffoon, or if Biden had has even an ounce of wokeness, Trump would've won again. And he would've been carried over the finish line by people who can't stand him.
I am a young rightist who works in DC. I will attest that already you will find, on staffs and in higher education, bright anti-“Cathedral” people (or whatever actually numinous term you prefer, as opposed to the vacuous ‘anti-establishment’) who not only read such authors as Lasch and Lind, but listen to avowedly “class reductionist” or “post-left” thinkers. We care about policy solutions to economic problems, but consider ourselves constrained by the “white question” within what one could call conservatism. We understand why we attract minority voters — realistic rhetoric about urban crime probably captures much of the variance — but we saw the Trump campaign systematically (some would say intentionally, with regard to Kushner et al) refrain from wholeheartedly pursuing greater gains among demographics that predictably swung to the right. What’s more, we try to persuade our friends who stop at Tucker Carlson (rhetoric) and American Compass (policy) to consider whether they go far enough in their orientation towards these problems. Our self-understanding is that we will see neither a critical mass of our kind with platforms not a growing number of representatives who are able to combine passion with prudence. But our numbers continue to grow, and our ideas will only get better. You do good work with this blog; we don’t hate you. But then again, when you address yourself to Republicans, you might well speak past us, if the party leadership has its way.
We're doing them outside, with a big fire to keep the air flowing. Bourbon is provided and consumption is encouraged for sterilization purposes. DC has about 100 new cases a day and dropping. We consider the risk on par with outdoor dining, and, of course, attendance is way down from what it was in the before time.
All right, thanks. I continue to recommend that readers not go to meetups until the pandemic is over, but I understand I don't control you and I appreciate that you're taking the risk seriously.
Saturation bombardment of the mid-Atlantic with high-yield thermonuclear warheads would accomplish that well enough. We could eradicate Covid-19 in your region by some time this afternoon. Please let's have more thoughtful and less absolute goals.
One thing to note: this kind of thinking is usually undergirded by an idea that the problem is that millionaire donors don't want to get on board. The truth of the matter is that the Republicans lost millionaire donors for the most part since 2008 and with trends ever since 1992. The Paul Singer & Charles Koch types, they don't move the needle in comparison to the gobs of corporate cash the Democrats are capable of raising.
The Republicans raise far more money from small to mid size businesses than anyone else. Construction firms, mid sized oil & energy ventures, hoteliers, franchisees, etc. They are a party that much like the Canadian Conservatives, relies on a sort of petit bourgeoise for fundraising, a group that is largely culturally conservative but also in values, very economically conservative. The state is a massive problem in their lives, from 1099 Reporting problems, taxation, regulation, and overall unhelpfulness. This group is more libertarian economically than most millionaires are. Winning them over is going to be hard without a platform that really addresses the issues that small to mid size businesses face.
If you want to know what this group looks like culturally, think back to the Tea Party upsurge in 2010. You had a lot of small business types, family farmers, etc enter Congress, and the movement that supported them was ideologically similar, but utterly out of step culturally with the professional DC Republican class.
There are probably some very real clashes of interest involved in this. I don't think pro natalism or economic interventionism is going to be a problem, but I do think that massive state action that harms this group's livelihoods and encourages more concentration of economic power into fewer hands, albeit run in concert with a state led value driven economic agenda, is going to be a problem. The US Republicans are unique among world political parties (besides the Canadian Tories and the UK Tories between Thatcher & Cameron) in appealing to this group and relying on them for support. I don't exactly treasure the concept of chucking them overboard.
Interestingly the Conservative Party in the UK has done this kind of cultural appeal with great success in the 2019 general election, where they managed to steal dozens of seats from former Labour (the biggest left-wing party in the UK) heartlands in the North of England. They had suffered from being economically 'left behind' due to the lingering effects of large scale deinsutralisation from the 1960s-80s, and the Conservatives managed to win these seats due to a promise to "Get Brexit Done", to "level up" the regional economy, and because the then Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was seen as not credible as a leader. Now they are lauching a so-called "war on woke" to try to retain these voters (see this article: https://www.economist.com/britain/2021/02/20/tories-bet-on-culture-wars-to-unite-disparate-voters). All of this is somewhat similar (if not the same in aprts) to the points in this article and I'm wondering how much of a template this is for Republicans in the US.
That's mostly about Brexit rather than directly centering appeals to the working class . The percentage of voters saying the conservatives look after the interests of the working class is more or less than same in 2015 and 2019 (with a small dip in 2017) yet they still won a lot of those voters.
Always be careful about claims the Tories are fighting a "war on woke", especially when they come from the left. The Tories have ignored huge opportunities to pick a fight with the woke, most notably when the statues were being toppled.
And when they do something about it they usually do it quietly. They've made laws protecting statues, and they've announced a new academic free speech policy. But they've not made huge speeches about it. Overall the impression I get is that the party sees this as problem and wants to solve it. Not that they want a big war to shore up their vote.
I only read Douthat intermittently, but he has alluded to young voices in the Republicans cooking up a new form of Conservatism. It's very much different to the previous iteration of neo-libralism, before the populists took over. It seems to be based on social conservatism and strong institutions.
Quite seriously Scott, there is need for a properly functioning left and right in politics, and you have really put your finger on what the right needs to do to be relevant. I'd love to read a conversation between you and Douthat. Add Dominic Cummings for flavour (although I thing you and he are rather overlapping here).
The first time I encountered Dominic Cummings' writing I was pleasantly surprised to find his high opinion of Scott -- he has a tag [1] for Scott, and his essay [2] on the "intersection of decision-making, technology, high performance teams and government" has the following pretty flattering quote in the summary:
"We could create systems for those making decisions about m/billions of lives and b/trillions of dollars, such as Downing Street or The White House, that integrate inter alia: ... An alpha data science/AI operation — tapping into the world’s best minds including having someone like David Deutsch or Tim Gowers as a sort of ‘chief rationalist’ in the Cabinet (with Scott Alexander as deputy!) — to support rational decision-making where this is possible and explain when it is not possible (just as useful)"
(sorry I don't know how to convert words to hyperlinks in substack comments, hence the links below)
1. You are using "upper class" to mean what almost everybody else means by "upper middle class". Of course "the upper middle class à la lanterne" (well, la classe moyenne supérieure...) doesn't have the right ring to it, but "les aristocrats à la lanterne" doesn't sound Republican either.
2. Isn't renaming it "the upper class" a step in precisely the wrong direction? Working-class people who vote Republican often look up to the rich (without knowing any rich people themselves), would like to be rich, etc. What they dislike is people who know more than they do or who hold themselves to know more than they do. Saying that this disliked group of people is legitimately "upper" is precisely what you don't want, if you want to appeal to those voters, no?
I think this is calling back to the previous post where money and class are separate. Trump is rich, but not upper-class (except of course he is, but for some reason it didn't take). But yeah, I think you need at least more sneer quotes if you're going after "the 'upper' class" (perhaps include a Trumpian eyeroll when you say "upper").
Upper class is just a bad label to use. I agree that it has too much cachet. That to these people, upper has a cadence of legitimacy that words like academics, elites, and establishment don't.
Invoking authority and hierarchy isn't enough. Many of these people respect kingship. What they don't respect is a king with no clothes.
Yup. Notes to Republicans: (a) Never, ever use the term "lower class". That sounds too negative. Always use "working class". As in people who actually work for a living. (b) Come up with a different term for "upper class" (which sounds too positive - upper class means rich, and we all want to be rich, even if we don't admit it). "Snob class"? Meh. I'm not a marketing person (obviously), but I'm guessing you have a few on staff.
If this is ever pursued seriously, just the term 'elites' can carry the day if deliberately and directly contrasted with 'working class'. Almost everyone who voted for Trump knows on a visceral level the contrast between these two groups and almost instinctively could define it.
> Always use "working class". As in people who actually work for a living.
Indeed, it's much more positive-sounding.
> Come up with a different term for "upper class"
Indeed. If a legislator said they weren't "upper class" I'd point out that him and people like him *literally make the laws*, so they are clearly ruling class which is pretty much a synonym for upper class.
> "Snob class"?
That's getting towards the connotations one wants to elicit: of really snooty people who look down on everyone else.
Maybe a better term might be "hoity-toity well educated people", or something like that but a bit more catchy.
But I think it's only a subset of educated people that the working class despise: those who aren't in STEM fields but instead in useless impractical stuff like critical theory. The wast majority of people respect those with real skills, such as physicians who can heal the sick, civil engineers who can build bridges that stay up, programmers whose code runs and does something useful, etc.
It's also really not clear to me that the *true* upper class exerts the same role they did in Fussell's day. I have no doubt they exist and have a lot of money but their representation in the "elites" (construed in wealth and power terms) seems pretty marginal, and I say that as someone who's been to my share of Met Galas.
My simplifying it, you are feeding the common leftist delusion that they are on the side of the working class. Trying to make the Republicans better, by doing things that make the Democrats worse is perhaps not what you intended?
I think this shows that Fussell's class book does not port well to politics in the 2020s. While Fussell's point (or was it Alexander's friend's point? I think the latter) that class is a series of separate ladders is true *to a degree*, it's hard to separate class from money completely. Rich people still vote Republican. People without college degrees who own & run successful businesses are against a minimum wage increase because it will cut into their profits; their employees want it because it will give them more money. Republicans are against minimum wage increases; it's really hard to say that this is a fight for the *working* class, or against the upper class.
Of course, Republicans *already* try and fight this in class language — they don't use the word, and they don't adopt Scott's specific proposals, but they do almost anything else; "elite" means "upper class" in Scott's sense. But it's pretty deceptive when they do: their policies help rich people (most of whom are in the Republican class—rich are still strongly Republicans!), and hurt poor people (opposite.)
Really, what we have here is a good, old-fashioned cultural conflict, of Red v Blue tribe. Class doesn't fit it.
Two additional points: First, Republicans are usually against expertise not out of class warfare but because they dislike what it tells them; above all, on climate change—a topic we really really don't have time to screw around with attacking expertise on—it mitigates against a lot of things that the Red tribe like, e.g. SUVs, suburbs, etc. It also does a lot of things that are straight-up economic: to adapt to climate change and to de-carbonize the economy both take lots of money & government programs, which Republicans are against because they hate high taxes — again, something that already fits very badly into their pre-existing class frame.
Second, I know some people think it's overstated, but there really is a lot of racism in the Republican base. IMS it was a better predictor for voting Trump than any other single variable in 2016. Going to make alliances tricky.
Basically, I think the Republicans already try this; it fits very badly with the parts of their program they are most passionate about; and in some very important areas (climate change) it is leading to utter disaster.
Your argument takes it for granted that the left's interpretation of the effect of policies is correct. The standard economic argument against the minimum wage isn't that it reduces profits or raises costs but that it makes it harder for unskilled workers to get a job, especially a first job, because it prices them out of the market. From that standpoint, the supporters of a higher minimum wage are people who won't have their employment prospects affected by it and want to feel good about how much they are helping the poor.
Climate policy would be a long argument, and this probably isn't the place to have it.
You articulate the economics 101 policy model. The problem is that when you take econ 102 and learn about market inefficiencies—or just look at actual examples that have been studied—turns out the real world doesn't look like the models. And the people actually organizing for the higher minimum wage tend to be minimum wage workers; the others are just cheering them on.
Being civil here, this is an very classist statement, both in the economic and cultural sense (both of which are inherently interwoven). Many skilled laborers are paid minimum-wage and kept there not only because of profit-model of market institutions like companies but the very socio-economic situations people live in. Farm labor, retailers, construction workers, infrastructure workers, factory labor, etc. etc. all work both skilled and necessary jobs for our society and the very least that can be done is assuring their lives are filled with less strife and economic instability. Just because they couldn't afford to get a college degree doesn't mean their labor value is worth the FEDERALLY MANDATED MINIMUM. Overall, and incredibly ignorant take on your part.
Your statement suggests that you may be overestimating how much of the labor force is paid minimum wage. Of hourly paid workers, it's a bit under 2%. That is a tiny fraction of the number who don't have a college degree.
Whether they are worth either the present or the proposed minimum wage depends on how much value their labor produces. If it costs $15/hr to hire someone for a job that produces $10/hour of revenue, he won't get hired. That has nothing to do with his moral value, only his economic value. And if your insisting that he ought to get $15/hour results in his being permanently unemployed you are hurting him, not helping him, however righteous it makes you feel.
Most of the jobs you listed make bank. Semi skilled construction and farm labour especially, at least where I am. Nowhere near our relatively high provincial minimum.
I'm confused by your reaction to my comment. Perhaps I misrepresented my position. I am agreeing with you that minimum wage people have labor skills which they can use to get hired.
By contrast, those who are unskilled, by and large people who have yet to enter the job market, but also some minimum wage workers, will not be helped by minimum wage increases and in fact be hurt because the labor market will contract, making it harder to find entry-level jobs.
In addition, a too high minimum wage can even negatively impact those with marketable job skills. See, for example, the UW minimum wage study, which found that Seattle's raising of the minimum wage to $13 an hour a few years ago "reduced income paid to low-wage employees of single-location Seattle businesses by roughly $120 million on an annual basis." On average, low-wage workers lost $125 per month.
BTW, the city council cut public funding for the study after that preliminary report. But my my city's city council could be a post in itself :-)
Your claim is way beyond what the evidence shows. There is considerable empirical data that shows that the least-productive workers (e.g. those with poor English skills) are hurt disproportionately by minimum wages. And there is lots of anecdotal evidence that the adjustment to a binding minimum wage includes things like making workers' hours less predictable, things that cut costs while making workers less happy. A solidly center-left economist such as David Neumark at UC Irvine has written a number of careful literature reviews that wipe out the "labor markets don't follow the Econ 101" view of the world.
OTOH, John Cochrane, the Grumpy Economist at Stanford, argues that the minimum wage isn't that big of a policy problem and that classical liberals ought to devote more attention to other policy distortions.
It's kind of funny telling David Friedman he needs to learn about market inefficiencies in Econ 102... although he has admitted to never taking a course for credit in either the subject he teaches or the one the school he teaches at is dedicated to.
The only "market inefficiency" argument I am familiar with that implies that the standard model is wrong is the one proposed by Card and Krueger, which requires monopsony employers of low skilled labor. Given that low skilled labor is relatively unspecialized, that seems implausible. Is that the inefficiency you are thinking of, or did you have a different one to propose?
"Rich people still vote Republican. People without college degrees who own & run successful businesses are against a minimum wage increase because it will cut into their profits; their employees want it because it will give them more money."
Got any evidence for that?
"it's really hard to say that this is a fight for the working class, or against the upper class."
Exit polls are not reliable, and the "modern racism scale" is actually an anti-racism scale; that is, one scores most racist on it if one supports treating races most equally.
"but there really is a lot of racism in the Republican base."
This sort of argument, if you want to dignify it as such, when all it really is is a slur, is so typical of mandarin political posturing (can't really call it thinking). In 2008, it was you oppose Obamacare because you are a racist. Blah, Blah, Blah.
You have cracked it: "mandarin" is the term that Scott was looking for.
- They are the historical poster children for credentialed experts leading cushy lives instead of doing real work.
- They were not actually the aristocracy, neatly resolving the dilemma of trying-to-say-upper-middle-class-but-it-is-too-awkward-so-we-said-upper-class-instead.
It further has an interesting multivocality about it. China is never far from questions of national greatness, and the term refers to a Chinese political class. This means it will be possible to call people mandarins while meaning anything from the soft use above to:
- [Aggressive] They make the country weak, and so might as well be aligned with China
- [Paranoid] They actually are a communist spy working for China
- [Racist] They seem like a Chinese person, which is bad
As a consequence it does a good job of wrapping up social class as a domestic strategy and opposition to China as a foreign policy strategy in a single word.
I firmly expect Democrats to walk face-first into the trap of condemning it as racist while simultaneously endorsing it through "akshually" style articles about how the mandarins are usually credited with maintaining an efficient imperial administration, and were a key factor in the tendency of China to remain Chinese despite being ruled by dynasties originating from outside traditional Chinese borders. In this way they will cede narrative control for a cycle or two.
Reminder that I don't endorse this. But I bet it would be effective.
This is magnificent. Hope some Republican politicians are reading this. A Republican party with this kind of platform is one I could actually wholeheartedly support, instead of only occasionally in the interests of maintaining balance of power.
I should clarify that Sir Humphrey has no *party* politics in the sense that he does not want either *party* to hold power for an extended time. This is not so far from how I feel :-)
But a GOP That Used the Word Class would not be substantively different! Certainly this would be much better messaging than whatever they're doing now (and I suppose better messaging can sometimes lead to better policy) but the whole premise of this post is that this approach has the potential to unify all the pre-existing ideological factions within the GOP.
More like: Do stuff for poor people, really do stuff instead of talking, while losing the Woke and you'll dominate elections for decades.
And I do hope Scott does a Democrats version. I'm curious as to whether his analysis of what will solidify their power is in line or opposed to my own.
The issue is that they try to do stuff for poor people, but that is often stuff that many poor people don't want and/or stuff that makes the lives of poor people worse. These policies are often things that look great from an ivory tower and/or benefit a favored poor group at the expense of another poor group.
For example, the anti-poverty policy that I hear Democrats talk most about is raising the minimum wage, but that will harms rural communities that have low costs of living and can barely compete by leveraging those low costs of production. It doesn't actually compensate for being out-competed by (illegal) migrants.
Exactly. I've had this argument several times to no avail. If minimum wage is raised to $15 or (like Costco) something higher, do they really think the guy who is only paid minimum wage and would be paid less if it was legal to do so will still have his job? That bored housewives and talented high school and college students won't come out of the woodwork for twice the pay to replace yet another lower/working class job? In major cities it's more or less moot because starting pay is already near $15 - heck, here in suburban Cleveland the lowest paying advertised fast food job is $10.75 and McDonald's is already at $13. If you're in New Hope, Kentucky though? Yeah, say goodbye to your miserable job Lower/Working Class Man and enjoy even more miserable unemployment.
Romney's and now Biden's child tax credit is such a huge thing for larger working class families precisely if it's managed through Social Security and is automatically deposited vs. playing the IRS Lottery of figuring out what or if you qualify for it at year-end. There are light years of difference between a Maybe amount of cash when you file taxes vs getting $1,000 a month auto deposited into the account you use to buy groceries.
So part of me really likes this, wants to agree with everything here, and would probably vote for this republican party. Which raises the alarm bell in my head that goes "This isn't how republicans actually think; this is just how you wish they would think".
I don't think I have any special insight as to why (that is, I can think of some reasons - it's hard to imagine someone like Ted Cruz or Mike Pence or Trump Jr. or whoever explicitly embracing this framing, and if you try to picture it and it feels weird your guess is as good as mine as to why this is). But specific points of disagreements:
Using betting markets instead of experts: This can work for top-level strategies (at least, if you have a lot of liquidity). But like I pointed out the other day (link again https://shakeddown.wordpress.com/2021/02/19/using-betting-markets-to-make-decisions/), there's an issue where betting markets are an order of magnitude slower and more complicated than the decision they reflect. You can use them for something big like "should we approve the AZ vaccine" or "should we build a transit system in Charlotte", but for short-turnaround decisions like "on which side of the street should we put the entrance to this station" You can't replace experts with them. There's no real getting around needing competent people who can make decisions in your organization.
On 4, I just have the minor point that "saying cops are bad because classism and not racism" still seems impossible for republicans because it's anti-cop? Or am I misreading the point of that bit?
Re: Cops—I imagine that a goodly number of people in the Republican party who get lumped in as "pro-cop" are really just anti-calling-cops-racist, because in their minds racism doesn't exist. I have literally seen people defending cops by pointing out that more white people are killed by cops than black people.
Bizarre. My only complaint was the opposite. I just kept thinking, "yeah, scott, this is the entire populist right and an episode of tucker carlson in a nutshell."
I am not sure that the term "class" is the best candidate for Scott's proposal. In fact, some Republicans are already articulating most of these ideas through the use of the term "elites", which I favour (I thought of using "intelligentsia" but the term is too elitist, LOL.
You can persuasively argue that elitism can be the target: a group of people who consider themselves better than the rest in everything they do: their policies, their diets, their environmental choices, the cars they drive. The Republican party can be the party of those who value hard work, decency and the traditional American cultural experience, Ford F-150 included.
You can then shed (hopefully) the linkages with racism and conspiracy theories and just represent everyone and anyone who is alienated by the sanctimonious speech and actions of the elite. Those part of the elite are detached from reality, they do not understand the real struggles of average people. And average people ought to be celebrated and protected.
The problem with choosing the elites as your enemy is that they're...well...elite. And they'll leverage that elitism to piss in your cornflakes at every opportunity, which in a 24/7 digital age news cycle makes for a whole lot of hot cereal.
The site you linked for the "college degree for childcare" has the 404 error page so I went to their homepage. Didn't find that story but saw a link for "How to get pregnant fast". Er, don't we all know how that works? And if you're trying for a baby, what worked for my sister was "have an elderly relative pray to St. Anne for a surprise for you; when your mother conveys this message, tell her "well it worked, I'm pregnant!"
5.1.2 In your care routines, can you indicate how you show sensitivity towards the child’s signals and cues and how you respond appropriately, adequately and consistently?
5.1.3 How do your interactions with the child enhance her/his potential to interact positively with other children?
Describe how you engage the child’s interest (including the child with special needs) in objects, in her/his surroundings and in social interactions with others?
Yep, for a three month old baby, the daycare has to ensure their interactions "enhance their potential to interact positively with other children".
So, all this and more being dumped on childcare providers means that the qualifications needed are becoming more academic. Straight out of school minding kids isn't enough anymore. But a bachelor's degree isn't necessary, either. We have intermediate frameworks - a Level 5 qualification is the medium standard here, and you can do it as a student or mature student on a Post Leaving Certificate course. If you're unemployed/on social welfare, you can get a Back to Education Allowance while you're on the course. You can then go into employment or progress on to a college degree in the field.
So increasing professionalism required, yes, but a college degree not necessary.
Having those milestones doesn't make professionalism reasonable; the fact that those milestones require professionalism demonstrates they are unreasonable.
I don't think any of those milestones require any degree of professionalism. They require empathy and a basic understanding of how to socialize a baby. The fact that anyone believes such things require credentials is frankly insulting.
I think there are any number of people who can care for a baby but would respond to a question like "Describe how you engage the child’s interest (including the child with special needs) in objects, in her/his surroundings and in social interactions with others?" with "Huh?". Or who couldn't translate the bureaucratese "In your care routines, can you indicate how you show sensitivity towards the child’s signals and cues and how you respond appropriately, adequately and consistently?" into something like "If the baby's crying, do you check to see if it needs to be changed or fed?"
Second question: if you get the Republicans to explicitly start opposing "expertise", do you think you're going to be able to fine-tune that you mean "oh, but MDs are still fine", or do you accept that there's a chance it might get into "everyone who wears glasses, up against the wall"?
Medical school is a trade school. Trade schools are the opposite of universities. The War on College can be extended to med school requirements. Medical school admissions may favor people who majored in biology, but they also accept people who majored in philosophy. They do not accept people who do not have a college degree. Scott has blogged before about just how useful his undergraduate degree was once he got to med school. I can't find the post at the moment, but if I recall correctly it was a less than glowing endorsement of the system.
"The degree requirement seemed like more of a class barrier / signaling mechanism than an assertion that only people who knew philosophy could make good teachers and doctors."
This manifesto could be tweaked to appeal to a significant portion of the left too - there are plenty of progressives who are tired of the tyranny of academia on policy and culture. And honestly I’m not sure the GOP is any more a natural fit for this kind of renewal than Democrats. Both parties are stacked with Yale law grads rearranging their nameplates.
Honestly this might be the best post I’ve ever read, on any subject. I would never join a party like your reimagined Republican Party, but I would certainly get it, and in a perfect world it might make the Democrats work harder to be less offputting.
Possible but unlikely. Once big chunks of the minority populations defect to the republicans it would seem pretty condescending for the democratic elites to double down on their wokeness and associated policy prescriptions that so alienated their purported beneficiaries.
Biggest problem I see with this is Republicans would have to decide where they stand on labor unions. If they still are against them, this working class rhetoric seems pretty hollow. If they decide they're for them, there goes the fundraising base.
Ah yes, my favorite definition of "rich educated people" include construction workers (the incoming secretary of labor is a former construction union president) and truckers.
I guess you'd have to polarise them, working class unions vs elitist unions (back to the using ID politics to trick non-degree holders into looking bad)
I agree. It's a lot easier to get people to vote for you if your policies make them better off financially. So if the Republicans do want to attract working class voters, they need to do more than just anti-elite culture war posturing, they need to go for economic policies that help working class people. Some ideas:
- increase minimum wage
- bringing back offshored jobs
- (possibly) UBI: this is more popular with Democrat than Republican voters but i saw a poll where 52% of Republican voters supported it, and i doubt if Biden will enact it by 2024. One downside is that many would look at is as a free handout to the lazy.
- something about affordable housing, e.g. so that any American on a full time minimum wage job can afford to buy a house.
However, slave labor in prison fits very neatly into a popular American narrative-- anyone who's accused is guilty, and guilty people deserve however they're treated in prison.
The catch is the NLRA makes unions under US law uniquely objectionable. Duty of fair representation, "good faith" bargaining requirements, and exclusivity aren't inherent requirements of collective bargaining but are the law of the land.
I don't say this often, but I don't know if you fully thought this through to the conclusion. This just teaches Republicans to be more persuasive. If they take this on and theoretically win the votes needed to gain power, they'll still be left with the same core policies, more or less. Try using "class" to support a Republican policy you DON'T like, and I think you'll see where this can backfire.
As a low-income, highly-educated, almost-Marxist, I find this oddly persuasive and kind of chilling.
It's true that the Republicans would be *better* in some sense if they adopted this sort of approach, but is that "better for the country/world" or "better at destroying everything I hold dear"?
Yeah. San Francisco has basically already shown this: If you're a highly-educated person who's not already part of the political establishment, the entire political establishment will unify in declaring you as the enemy and do everything possible to attack you, no matter how much they hurt themselves in the process.
Depends what you mean by "a real left party". I want to see well-funded public services, higher taxes on the rich and nationalisation of certain industries that I think are more effectively run in the public sector. I don't want to see academics sent to work in the fields or to re-education camps. If you think the latter are "real left" and the former are not, then we disagree on the definitions of a word.
Working class people may look on me with suspicion, hatred, or disdain (I doubt it but I'll go with it) but that doesn't make me their enemy. I would argue that their enemies are the people who control them and make their lives worse: the people who own the media, the people who own the government, and the people who own the means of production.
(substack commending is weird. Sorry if this appears twice, or deleted, or twice deleted, or some shit)
I'm taking this that, since the popular view of Republicans from Democrats/non-Republicans that I see all over social media is that they are plutocrats who hate gays, minorities, trans people, women, non-Christians, and anyone who isn't a white cishet old man, then it can only be an improvement if the GOP can shift that perception to being "we are the party of the working class and that means BiPOC as well as white persons of all genders and sexual orientations!"
I mean, to be fair, Republicans are the party of Evangelical Christianity. This doesn't necessarily mean that they *hate* gays, non-Christians, and other non-cis-heteronormative people; but it does mean that they strongly prefer a world where such people were a continuously shrinking minority. They certainly wouldn't want to pass any policies that would encourage such people to continue committing their sins, right ?
Why did you name this A Modest Proposal? Am I missing the satire? This seems like a legitimately amazing idea to me. Am I somehow a really horrible person without knowing it?
Yes! And a person who read the original Swift essay about killing, cooking, and eating children and took it seriously and thought it was a great idea would be A) a moron and B) a terrible person. I'm taking this Scott essay seriously and I think it's a great idea. Am I missing something?
I assume the idea is that despite Scott's best efforts to persuade them that social class and economic class are distinct, he still expects the idea of focusing on class to appear as outrageous to Republicans as Swift's proposal to eat children appears to non-horrible people.
I think this is right. Current Republicans equate class struggle with Marxism, and there is no place for Commies in the red party! Scott's argument only works if 'class' is defined in the Fussel manner as independent from income level.
I'll join your camp, although since I'm the target audience maybe I'm just too dumb to get it since I went to an obscure undergraduate school and Ohio State (sacre bleu!) for grad school.
This is the best article on politics I've read in... well, months at least. I'm seriously amazed by it.
I think it's about blurring the lines and maybe providing a bit of deniability. Scott here is giving a proposal for how the GOP could have an intellectually exciting platform. It also happens to cohere strongly with values that any long-time reader of SSC will recognise Scott himself holds. But Scott is a self-identified Democrat who moves in Blue Tribe circles, and saying things as blunt as "here's how you could get me to vote Republican" might not be in his best interests.
Scott has zero Blue Tribe cred; he's committed way too many blasphemies. I was "warned" against him by Blue Tribers years ago, and that was before he had a public row with the NYT that blew up into a Grey vs. Blue fireball (despite his best efforts to avoid that coding).
Listening to Scott is, among the Blue Tribe, evidence of heresy.
The Swift essay proposes a means "For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick."
His technique is based on this observation:
"I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasee, or a ragoust."
But the idea of the "War on Christmas" is not that someone with some Jewish/Hindu/Islamic etc. friends may say "Happy holidays."
This is a motte and bailey.
Upper class people do tend to be more circumspect. That's the motte.
The bailey is the "WAR ON CHRISTMAS" Jackbooted leftist bureaucrats are coming to destroy Christian culture.
Take Tucker Carlson on December 6, 2020 in relation to guidelines to limit holiday gatherings. "If death is inevitable — and that may be the one thing you’re not allowed to say in this country, but it’s still true — then maybe we should pause before we destroy the living in the name of trying to eliminate it. Politicians understand this threat. They’ve figured out that Christmas is bigger than they are, and therefore, it’s a threat to them. Better cancel it — and, in fact, they’re trying hard."
Thank you for this, really. It's such a joy to read things like that. I feel like you scraped the stew of vague ideas and intuitions in brain and shaped it into a coherent theory.
Elites like Broadway, but mainly for plays by Tony Kushner, Jez Butterworth, Tom Stoppard, and so on (perhaps a Sondheim musical here and there as a guilty treat). The lower classes crowd in to watch Mamma Mia with the Chinese tourists and then get dinner at Red Lobster.
But there's still a view that credentials are somewhat merit-based. Trump's message was "I'm working-class but just as good as the upper class, as demonstrated by my money and credentials".
This is a great piece, and with a good deal of truth in it. However, in France, Marine Le Pen's party has been trying to do that without amazing successes - the main problem is that an anti-immigration agenda is a requirement for a Republican/conservative platform and it's pretty hard to be anti-immigration without looking (and often not only looking) racist.
I would think a French politician could do it by merely being Francophile. Since French culture is the best culture in the world, why dilute it with lost of nasty foreigners, whatever their skin color?
I think that's the "without amazing success" part - she's held back by here anti-immigration line. Although considering her party were almost literally Nazis (and may just be pretending not to be now) she's at least achieved "terrifying" success.
What you are stating is the globalist delusion that only a small minority oppose immigration. Yet surveys show that wanting to reduce immigration is very popular.
Hypothesis: a large number of people might personally want to reduce immigration, and might vote for anti-immigration measures if they have secret ballots, but only people who are *much* more anti-immigration than average are committed enough to hold this opinion in *public*. Hence, the political parties which make strong commitment to reducing immigration a big part of their platforms, and their most vocal supports, are going to be much further right than the majority of their actual voters.
Anti-immigration is her main plank but she has tried to shift her party's public discourse toward (some of) the things you describe. The Rassemblement National does describe itself as a working class party (and is in fact a working class party sociologically) but it's anti-immigration stance which is at the core of the party's existence stop it to turn it's success among the working class into overall electoral success.
Eric Weinstein talks a lot about this. The Democrats/Elites/Upper class (or whatever name you want to give them) have done a great job making a popular position, that of a xenophilic restrictionist, seem non existent. The idea that you must support open borders or you are by definition a racist is nonsensical.
Keeping in mind that Scott somehow managed to accidentally become so successful at blogging that he got himself condemned by the NYT, I'm starting to worry that this is going to end with him accidentally becoming chairman of the GOP.
The problem with that is, of course, that the next blogging hiatus would be insufferably long.
If I had to choose between unhinged tweeting habits and brilliant essays in a president/politician, I would choose the brilliant essays. If I had to choose between a self-funded psychiatric clinic or a presidency/politicianship in a blogger, I'd choose the self-funded psychiatric clinic.
Reason being, mostly, that I like my bloggers a little bit more underground than being the president/major political figure in a global superpower. Just think about how huge the rate of NYT hitpieces would be, it really boggles the mind...
If you divorce class from wealth, what actually makes the class described here the "upper class?" Like, I sort of feel that way too, but that's because I'm in it, and so ascribe higher status within a blue-tribe status framework. But if the "lower class" here has more political power, and sees themselves as having higher status (i.e. a F-150 is certainly higher status than a Prius or a bus pass in at least half the country), why are they the lower class?
This only matters insofar as most people think they should be on the "lower class" side of a class war. I'm not sure in the world described by Scott here that I should support the political power of a party of pilots over the party of social workers unless I'm fully bought into its honest support of a platform broadly helpful to the poor (...and I don't see them shaking off the pathos that led them to elect Donald Trump.)
All that said, I agree that this would be a better republican party than we have now, and would push the dems to be better.
> 3. War On The Upper-Class Media: This is your new term for "mainstream media". Being against the "mainstream media" sounds kind of conspiratorial.
I think you missed a step here. Americans -- except the class designated as the opposition -- LOVE conspiracy theories. Roswell, chemtrails, JFK, Masons, you name it, you can make millions with a miniseries about it that suggests there's something to it. The underclasses tend to have even wilder (and conventional yet unacceptable to the opposition class) ones. So "mainstream media" is great, the only thing that would be better is more scare quotes
"There's a theory that the US party system realigns every 50-or-so years. Last time, in 1965, it switched from the Democrats being the party of the South and the Republicans being the party for blacks, to vice versa."
No; it realigns every 36-40 years. The current party system (seventh) started in either 2016 or 2000; the previous was either from 1976 to 2016 (Trump had a coalition right opposite that of Carter) or 1964-2000 (2000 was the first election with clear "red states and blue states").
This is a really compelling idea! You can already see parts of the Republican Party trying to find their way into this position as they figure out what to do without Trump (see Romney's new child subsidy plan and his mandatory E-Verify/higher minimum wage combo plan co-sponsored with Cotton). And they could fit an interest in anti-trust enforcement against tech companies that are disproportionately filled with left-leaning white collar workers into this framework. That position would benefit them in the culture/social media wars, too: if Amazon is less powerful, they have less to worry about if AWS kicks off Parler or if Amazon stops stocking books written by social conservatives. Oren Cass is the most famous intellectual I'm aware of who's advocating a class-forward Republican Party, but it'd be interesting to see who else would come out of the woodwork if the party starts moving in this direction.
> And they could fit an interest in anti-trust enforcement against tech companies that are disproportionately filled with left-leaning white collar workers into this framework. That position would benefit them in the culture/social media wars, too: if Amazon is less powerful, they have less to worry about if AWS kicks off Parler or if Amazon stops stocking books written by social conservatives.
A competent Trump administration, realising Big Tech is an enemy, would have pushed this.
Yeah the Romney E-Verify/higher minimum wage stuff is interesting. My guess is that having a high minimum wage and actually enforcing it would be more effective at stopping illegal immigration than a border wall, since employers would not have an incentive to hire them (although I'm not sure if I agree with this goal of minimizing illegal immigration).
Of course, part of why Scott's essay here is more persuasive than Tucker Carlson to us here is that he's writing with blue/gray tribal language. I don't think that this is coded the right way to actually get traction with most Republicans.
I am a HS grad and I loved it. I voted Trump and I loved it.
I hate the upper class media, Academics and Bullshit experts.
This hit me between the eyes.
The difference is Scott makes it clear he is on your side while Tucker has no such constraints. He is perfectly willing to say that people like you are screwing over the country and we should hate you and resist you with every fiber in our bodies.
The "upper class" that Donald Trump belongs to is a very different "upper class" from Boston Brahmins and the 'upper crust' who go to operas and throw gallant balls. See Scott's previous post for a better explanation: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-fussell-on-class
I think there’s another level of irony in there. New York of the 20th century had a thing where putting on working-class mannerisms is an upper-middle habit.
So in Trump we have someone with some rich roots and some less-rich roots putting on the New York working man face in order to get their support; then he is viewed by non-New York upper-middle as actually “worker” (and a bunch of others thought so too.) Was he from the poor part of Queens? No. He may not be “Boston Brahmin” but that’s primarily because his grandfather and mother were more recent immigrants, so there wasn’t enough geologic time to go full Brahmin.
To get taken seriously in the 1970s and 1980s New York people did that, acting the way they thought people would if they were raised over a bar and worked on a loading dock. It was a form of signaling. I saw the leftovers of it, growing up in the tri-state area. It was also an act of the imagination.
As someone currently in a PhD program, I get kinda annoyed when PhDs and grad students complain how hard they have it. Like, we literally get paid to do our hobby and work on cool research. My job is to do something that I would still want to do for free even if I were rich.
If anyone thinks 40k for a PhD job is so terrible...... well, nobody forced you to get a PhD and go into academia. You could have had a boring businessy-type job that you weren't passionate about and made more money. But part of the deal with jobs that are fun/cool/interesting is that they often don't pay as much as boring jobs.
If most PhD students were making $40k I would agree with you but most of the PhD students I know (and I know quite a few) make between $12k and $18k a year. If you factor in that many/most PhD students are pressured/forced to work >40 hours a week (especially but not only in the lab sciences) and it doesn’t look like such a good deal anymore.
I also think part of the complaints come from a recognition of how terrible the academic job market is, where most positions are temporary, without benefits, and very low paying. Most PhD students would be content if they could easily secure a professorship making $40k a year in a permanent position with benefits.
Hmmm yeah 12k-18k does sound pretty low. Most of the PhD students I know are making closer to like 25k-30k, which I think is fair. And for a PhD program I think working more than 40 hours per week is to be expected. I typically work about 60 hours per week on research projects that I enjoy and am passionate about, and I'd much rather do that than work 40 hours per week on boring stuff that I don't like.
Yeah, frankly I think even a lot of PhD students would be quite happy to see a bit less credentialism and more meritocracy in academia. Everywhere I've taught, the average quality of the adjuncts' teaching was better than many if not the majority of tenured faculty (many of whom had also not published any research for years). More meritocracy in academia might sound good. Plus fewer offices dedicated to student affairs and satisfying government requirements would mean more money for actual instruction.
It’s not popular to say it but academia treats their grad students like an unfree labor pool and thats part of the problem with academia turning out shitty ideas.
I mostly agree with this post except for the war on experts bit. I think not all fields with experts are created equal and denigrating the fields with more credible experts as being 75% useless is doing these fields a disservice. For example I would expect 98%+ of Physics experts to agree on how quantum tunnelling or a well understood process works. Sure they may disagree on the subtleties of M-theory but they will present a united front when it comes to pretty much anything we mere mortals are capable of understanding, and the front they present will be the right one. In such fields expert opinion should be treated as second only to divine revelations from God.
Conversely in fields like [redacted] (not wanting to name any names) there is far less certainty and experts will openly disagree on more fundamental questions. E.g. in public policy are mask mandates good or bad (note that this is a public policy question and not an epidemiology question; that would be more like by what percentage would infections next month reduce if R0 goes from 1.7 to 1.3) ? There will be a myriad of experts going both ways and now as a layman it is far less clear which side to trust, since having more experts on your side is only weak evidence of being right if the discrepancy is 75-25 vs 99-1 .
As a TLDR my point is that we shouldn't lump astrophysicists who can predict to the exact minute an asteroid will hit Earth with economists who are still brawling it out over whether a minimum wage is good or bad. Lumping both categories of experts into the same basket is massively unfair to the astrophysicists and just means the public trusts us less on questions where we are able to make extremely accurate predictions.
I don't think the use of "expert" here was meant to include astrophysicists. While they are experts on astrophysics (in the same way doctors are experts on medicine, lawyers on law, etc) they don't serve the social role of "expert" - the government doesn't use them to set policy, they don't get featured in NYT with exhortations that we need to "trust the experts", etc.
If someone did a prediction market on asteroid strikes, I imagine the astrophysicists would win easily and everyone would forget about it.
I have a doctorate in physics. Is that a sufficient reason for you to trust my views on climate change?
The special characteristic that distinguishes those physicists from others is that Obama selected them to be energy secretaries, which was a political decision. Do you think he would have chosen a physicist skeptical of the current climate orthodoxy, say Freeman Dyson (except he was too old), if one had been available?
I don't think my uncle, or other relatives, had any influence over the Jesuits who run SCU. The school has two ideologies — Catholicism and soft leftism. I disagree with both, but it was never a problem.
If you are curious about my qualifications to teach economic analysis of law, you might want to try reading my _Law's Order_, which you can do for free from my web page. It's been used as a text by a fair number of schools.
Are you missing my point? The fact that a political appointee with a relevant degree supports a position tells us almost nothing about whether the position is correct, beyond the fact that at least one person with that degree supports that position — because he was selected for the job in part because he supported the position the politician who selected him liked. Hence saying "climate change must be real because the Secretary of energy is a physicist and he says it is" is an error. I expect you would recognize the point if we were talking about a Trump appointee who supported a position you disagreed with.
Counterpoint, Taiwan had the best Covid response in the world and a lot of that was that Chen Jien Jen, the vice president, was an epidemiologist. And he got to make policy.
"not only do I devalue your thoughts on climate science, but I question the nepotism that got you a job at a law school."
This seems to me like a pure ad hominem attack, which in my opinion violates SSC/ACX comment norms (as shown at https://archive.is/EUvEh). I hope that you'll avoid those in future.
You are posting in country that was built by the manual labor people you despise and you happily call on them to shed their blood for you whenever your class feels threatened.
Probably should have said "War on Fake Experts" because the following sentence makes clear that he isn't proposing a war on actual experts.
There are plenty of fields where the "experts" have little credibility because they've abused it by misrepresenting their fashionable culture war stands as "science." Public health being a fine example.
There are a lot of connotations around the word expert that change drastically depending on the context. I don't think many Republicans feel the same sense of class resentment toward the expert plumber that comes to unclog their sink as they do the expert epidemiologist that tells them to shut down their restaurant.
I'm sure there are a million different variables that come in to play, but here are a couple I can think of right off the bat:
1. Experience vs education. Republicans tend to value expertise gained from work experience more highly than theoretical expertise gained from education.
2. Enabling expertise vs constraining expertise. The expert engineers who built the Mars rover aren't bothering anybody. The experts who tell people how to live their lives are.
3. Expertise with measurable outcomes vs fuzzy experts. When the plumber leaves, the sink either drains or it doesn't. When the rocket scientist pushes the button, the rocket either flies or it doesn't. Both experts are respected because we have concrete evidence that they are, in fact, experts. What concrete, physical evidence can a nutritionist or an economist or a climate scientist point at? A computer model? An impenetrable research paper? Get outta here. "Oh, you said to raise interest rates and they did, and then the economy got better? According to who? My cousin Joey got laid off last week. You can't be doing that good a job." etc etc.
There are a lot of good ideas here, but it's so divisive. I get it, it's politics, and division works. But it still makes me feel dirty, and I feel like I have one foot in both classes, so-to-speak, so the divisiveness seems even more acute.
I have a PhD in STEM, I work for an FRDC with an academic atmosphere, I drive a Subaru, believe in climate change, shop at farmer's markets, belong to a CSA, love Thai and Indian and fusion, drink craft beer and locally-made wines and ciders, travel, and got married and had a kid later in life.
But I also work alongside a lot of engineers and skilled technicians and think they're jobs are more valuable than mine is, would kind of like a truck if I thought I could pull it off, think a lot of climate activists are full of shit, also shop at the local chain grocery store, love Taco Bell and Chic-fil-a, love college/pro football, hate what the NYT has become, and feel guilty about not going to church more often.
In the event of a class war, I guess I'd side with Scott's re-imagined Republican party if forced to choose (assuming it actually came into being).
But I really wish that, instead of thinking of ways to more effectively fight the class war, we'd think of ways to more effectively have class peace. Is that so much to ask? Almost definitely.
I don't think what Scott is proposing is to persecute people with degrees, just to reduce discrimination in favor of them. You still get the job and the high salary with Shell if you actually know more relevant geology than other applicants, but not if your only qualification is having a degree they don't have.
> Dividing people into us and them is one of the biggest problems in our politics, and this approach for the GOP would just take us further down that bad road.
The USA uses FPTP which because of Duverger's Law leads to a two party system. Because elections are competitive, the 2 parties demonise each other. The actual politicians themselves are merely puppets obeying the incentives in the system.
Want to fix US politics? A better voting system such as IRV or (better still) STV with multiple winners, would be a good start.
I think the answer would be that there are two kinds of peace: the peace of a prison and the peace of a free society (also the peace of the grave, if you want 3 of them); if you are closer to the former than the latter (which would be the position of your average populist, I think), then even if you want to get to the latter, you are probably not going to want to think about peace for a while.
Of course, that analysis depends on being pretty sure that you are closer to the peace of a prison than you are to the peace of a free society.
I am a HS grad who has worked with his hands and now work online.
I voted for D's since Bill Clinton but then voted Trump twice.
This is brilliant.
I didn't vote for Trump because he would do anything, I voted for Trump because Hillary despised people like me.
Then I voted for Trump because the upper class media said I was a Nazi for voting for Trump the first time.
Fuck you.
Fact is the Joe won because the D party has become the upper class suburb party for people who lived on zoom during the lockdowns.
I HATE their smugness. I hate their condescending attitude. I hate their love of "Experts" who aren't experts. I hate colleges that basically exist to sell student loans to kids to don't know better. I hate Woke because it is a way for upper class to be bigots.
Last month, I was pumping gas into my work truck on a lonely country hwy and a lady in an expensive BMW SUV drove up and took a look at me. Not many cars like hers in those parts.
These days, I have my winter beard going for working outside and my work hoodie is stained and dirty. Basically, I looked like a guy out of central casting for “menacing country dude”
I was just going home from a job.
I watched her look at me, and then check herself in the mirror and then pick up her phone and rummage around her bag and then when I finally finished and left the gas station, in my rear view window, I finally saw her get out of her car.
"Demonize" would be too strong for that. Depending on how lonely the highway was, it could be entirely reasonable for a lady to prefer not to take a one in twenty chance of being mugged.
Trust me there are tons. I come from this type of milieu and I grew up around masses of people who are indeed often smug and condescending of those they perceive to be uneducated, religious, conservative, working class, overly patriotic, etc. It's very unpleasant, and I say this as someone who ticks all their virtue boxes.
Ι mean, when a politician, who is supposed to be "political" to win votes and sympathy from all sides, openly calls such people "deplorables", how do you think regular upper class people think and talk about their working class / fly-over country lessers?
I’m on board with you, Tim. After the last year the idea that I should defer to ‘experts’ is laughable and there isn’t a single institution in the US I wouldn’t overhaul or outright destroy. The primary reason for this state of affairs is this elite is not only incomprehensibly stupid but very vindictive. There is no core competency there, or seemingly anywhere, and they demand all aspects of this nation be as broken as they are.
How is a multicultural and multiracial nation supposed to be functional with zero trust and fostered racial strife? Either we return to an individualistic view of people to de-emphasize race or we make the nation less multiracial so as to restore trust and direction. Either way, deposing this elite is necessary. They are too stupid to rule.
As for this article in general, the line about Trump is flat wrong and it seems like Scott wants this for Democrats, not Republicans. If it was genuine advice for Republicans it wouldn’t start out with barbs and venom. The intertwining of Progressive identity insanity with elite grip on the Democrat party is the source of the problem. They subverted the nation’s standards and purpose to replace it with cynical snark, hyper focus on materialism, and widespread mental illness.
This is a powerful analysis. I think you underestimate the very well documented historic racism (ergo systemic) against black people. This is not some figment of elite class warfare against the poor majority by dividing them into races at war with one another. If you define a democratic republic as the state treating all its subjects equally (along the principles of liberty and equality), then the US did not become a republic until the late 60s. Two generations ago! We have to contend with this, and honestly.
Unless we think that decades of "whites only" signs, disenfranchisement, economic exclusion, and in many cases outright killings have literally no effect on long term life outcomes (which is a VERY strong claim that would suggest that pretty much nothing ever does), those effects remain today because the people who experienced them are still alive.
Yes, you're right, technically it's Dworkin's definition of legitimate government. Equal concern for the fate of every person over whom it claims dominion (equality). And to respect each person's right and responsibility to decide for herself what to make of her life (liberty). I jumped to democratic republic as the only legitimate form of government from there.
> technically it's Dworkin's definition of legitimate government. Equal concern for the fate of every person over whom it claims dominion (equality).
And has any actually-existing government ever done that? I very much suspect not. In all countries, the ruling class are going to care more about themselves then they do the lower classes. True in modern USA, true in Louis XIV's France, almost certainly true in ancient Sumeria.
The thing which overwhelmingly occurs to me on reading this essay is: wow, thank god I don't live in a country with two party first past-the post voting!
I would love to see universities lose their monopoly status over employment prospects for example, and I'm happy that I have options where I live other than trying to inject that agenda into a party to which I do not belong or support
Other voting systems also have their problems. For example, it is quite frustrating to see politics divided into three groups, two of them having about 45-50% votes, the third one only about 5-10% votes, and the third one has disproportionate control over the country, because they always make coalition with the higher bidder. Even if 95% of voters disagreed with them about something, they would still get it their way, because it is of course unthinkable for the two almost-50% parties to make a coalition against them, after spending most of time attacking each other.
I do not actually think there is anything wrong with this. In the coalition agreements, each coalition party will be getting something they want. In life, we make agreements with the other people who live in the world with us, nobody gets everything they want and nor should they.
Very good. It includes a few things I disagree with, such as opposition to free trade based on mistaken economics, and I don't suppose you can persuade them that more immigration will result in more working class people to vote for them, but I would be more inclined to vote for the party you describe than either the present Republican or Democratic party.
I want to see a post-wokeness that sees/knows the gears of racism and also doesn’t lean on a) lectures from the upper class and b) bureaucratic programs, to address it.
One of the Sanders mistakes was reducing race to class. There’s targeting of very wealthy African Americans (banks, loans, workplaces) which isn’t reducible to classism in part because the situations are higher-class coded in all dimensions. Wilkerson’s “Caste” probably nails this dynamic and so I have to go read that to say this properly. But yes, society needs to get past woke, the whole “now the upper-middle white intellectuals tell us how to think and feel” situation never works long term. There’s a sort of civil rights neoliberalism going on now which will cause the usual reactions to neoliberalism. But now the backlash will be at civil rights too. So I would like to see work for healing and against discrimination, survive the neoliberal coopting . In many ways the Class X bunch benefited the most from US neoliberalism. We think of “BLM” as “socialist” ...but for a lot of fans (not all) the enforcing state is supposed to simultaneously exist, and not cause problems, and that is not a thing, it’s the naïveté of neoliberalism.
Otherwise your platform is great. Make great fights between GOP/DEM if they took it seriously. Productive fights.
> I want to see a post-wokeness that sees/knows the gears of racism and also doesn’t lean on a) lectures from the upper class and b) bureaucratic programs, to address it.
What would that look like, in terms of actual policies?
Um, still working that out... Yascha Mounck had an interview with a researcher who studies the effectiveness of diversity training on getting a more diverse workplace. The name escapes me but it shouldn’t be hard to find. He said the most successful workplace diversity and inclusion programs were those which took a group of managers, showed them the statistics on race and gender of their employees (lopsided distribution) and then tasked the managers with implementing and evaluating a solution. Then they did things like start internship programs at their companies to increase minority hiring and recruit from HBCUs. If the approach was empowering to the managers they would often enough take the reins and address it. If it was “now we tell you what to think and do,” the managers would be disempowered and the climate might get worse.
Community development is also really important. A lot of it gets funded through federal and state grants, yes, but things like teen centers to give kids something to do other than be hanging out on unsafe streets. We need to come up with better ways to finance community institutions.
I do agree discrimination and harassment should be illegal, and there needs to be a better funding and staffing for the fair housing and employment enforcement. I’m not totally against “government programs” and I think a type of UBI could do a lot of good. Better police-community relationships, community mental health investment. Thinking about reparations, I’m curious about programs that would invest in communities versus invest in individual descendants, I don’t know which would work better.
I think white fragility is a thing, but I also think that ultimately bridges are built between individuals with awareness of each other. I think woke taught people to say the right things but there may still be not much “there” there in terms of greater awareness of micro and macro aggressions. And it came at the expense of ideals of individual liberty which are, um, the hamsters on the wheels that move American society. Laws don’t constrain people from thoughtcrime, nor should they. We are close to the end of the ability to punish thoughts as opposed to behavior. Compelling behavior through other means is an important problem.
Money doesn’t solve everything but it helps a lot. Money either comes from crowdsourcing or bureaucracy/taxes. I do not have this all worked out. That’s enough rant for now.
"and I think a type of UBI could do a lot of good."
How large are you imagining? My impression is that a lot of people who talk about a UBI are imagining doing it on a scale which would cost a much larger fraction of the federal budget than the realize.
Paper on UBI p. 221 about community-targeted UBI. I had no idea it was globally popular.
I have heard a large number for full US UBI.
In this context the point would be to give a specific geographical community, neighborhood or zip code access to the resources to do the top five community-transforming things they identify. Like the Stockton program but with yes larger checks and some civic participation requirements like community transformation meetings, and maybe timed out after 3 years.
Alternatively hand them $20k at the beginning instead of $1k/mo.
Or given a choice between that and zero-cost degree and job placement assistance.
Or “welfare for landlords” where owners enroll a property to be managed and maintained by a housing agency in return for a small monthly profit and no hassle. (This is not exactly like section 8.)
I’m spitballing as it were but I think UBI has power. I think Romney’s child payment plan has potential. Also the UBI figures I’ve seen for the US don’t factor in savings from reduced incarceration, reduced mental illness and SUD due to reduced poverty stress.
I dunno; I bet there are more closeted upper-class Chick-Fil-A lovers than you'd expect. It's too darn tasty. Politics be damned. (I guess it's possible to love Chick-Fil-A without speaking the name, but it's hard.)
My war on college has a number of immediate action items:
Wage and price controls on colleges: A college education shouldn't cost more than a medium size SUV. The president of a non profit institution shouldn't make more than the President of the United States. And all those vice presidents. done-ions.
Abolish sabbaticals and tenure. If they can't teach four classes they can retire.
Separate all scientific research into separate research companies that keep separate books. No more profs saying the can't teach more students because they have to do research.
Replace all selective admissions schemes with a lottery. Any high school grad should be eligible to go to any college.
Abolish irrelevant course requirements. You shouldn't have to take French literature to get a degree in accounting.
Tax endowments that are invested in anything but Treasuries or Municipals. Harvard shouldn't be a hedge fund that uses a college as a tax shelter. Undergraduates should not be concerned with whether Siwash U. owns shares in Exxon.
Shut down graduate programs if they cannot show that that their students finish within five years and get jobs afterward.
"Separate all scientific research into separate research companies that keep separate books. No more profs saying the can't teach more students because they have to do research."
I think you're vastly overestimating the average (median) profitability of research done at universities. Even though good research pays off huge, it still needs to be subsidized because good research is not just rare but unpredictably so. A big advantage of having research tied to universities is that it provides a high throughput of researchers. The more grad students we can pump through the system, the higher the likelihood we get a match between a genius in a field and the research in that field they are destined to advance. For more, see: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/v7c47vjta3mavY3QC/is-science-slowing-down
If you move research into separate research companies, you don't eliminate the problem of tenure, you just move it to a place where it's harder to get access to new talent (onus of making connections is placed on the company, rather than the student), and harder to get rid of ineffective talent (if a grad student doesn't bring anything new to the field, it's OK, they're gone in 5 years tops), and you get the same effect of fewer classes taught by smart people.
I wasn't arguing against subsidies. I am arguing for separating teaching and research. "No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other." Because research is what is rewarded, many, if not most, faculty put teaching in second place way back. Separate the two.
As the one guy with a major media platform who is able to channel the insecurities and articulate the zeitgeist of the Trump era right wing, Tucker is probably the closest thing the 2020s have to a William F. Buckley or Rush Limbaugh. Get Tucker to start proclaiming the virtues of prediction markets, and you might be surprised how quickly they get adopted as a core tenet of a right-wing policy platform. Someone should send this post to his staff.
I've been saying for years that some ideological framework similar to this is the winning formula for the Upper Midwest/B1G states (I'm from Minnesota, live in Iowa and have also lived in WI and PA so I know these states and the cultures there well). It's essentially how Trump won (via rhetoric, not actual policy) Wisconsin, Michigan, and PA in 2016 and almost won Minnesota. Minnesota! A state that hasn't gone Republican since 1972. Trump ended up being just a normal (policy-wise) but more overtly racist general GOP figure and that opened the door for a normie old-school Dem like Biden to win those states back.
> Most of what he said was offensive, blatantly false, or alienated more people than it won
Trump won almost 50% of the vote, so I would not say he alienated more people than he won. I thought the triple crown of being the world's biggest asshole, bungling the coronavirus response, and dishonorably handling the BLM protests was going to be his easy undoing. But he almost won. Liberals need to stop underestimating the Republicans, they are a Tom Cotton or a Dan Crenshaw away from the White House in 2024.
I'm a liberal, but I recently watched a movie called "Uncle Tom" about Black Republicans. It was a shockingly interesting movie. Herman Cain, who I thought was an undereducated idiot, was actually a computer programmer that programmed rockets. I'm well aware that it is as much propaganda as "left" movies are, so I take everything with a grain of salt, but they made convincing arguments. A lot of what they said made a lot of sense, it was old school conservatism where relying on oneself was more important than blaming others for your personal situation.
I think if you got a good, common sense Republican leader that wasn't an outright scumbag likes Cruz, Rubio, etc, they're already half-way there. If she/he lead with honor and grace, and espoused much of the policies you talk about above, the Republicans might have a good chance. I just don't see a single honorable Republican anywhere, which is their biggest problem. They are a bunch of political cowards that bow to perceived strength, which is why they were terrified of Trump, literally a bunch of sniveling Starscreams to Trump's Megatron.
John McCain was the last great Republican, and it's a shame he wasn't 10 years younger. If the Republicans found his moral successor, they really could have a great shot because there's a lot of moderates on both sides that would flock to a president that honorably leads with moderation without engaging in this exhausting identify politics.
Close enough for me. I voted for both men with great enthusiasm. When Trump was nominated (twice), I voted against a Republican for the first time since 1972.
As a Transformers fan, I must object to comparing Megatron with Trump. Megatron would lead Scott's Republican party. (And then start getting power hungry.)
I had a lot of trouble comparing Trump to Megatron because Megatron actually was relatively competent (he did manage to take control of Cybertron). I think it's no question that Trump would aspire to be Megatron though.
In many ways this feels a lot like the brexit realignment we got in the UK. Right now the Conservative party just won a sweep of traditionally working class labour seats and is plotting how to keep them. Though of course there are internal divisions in the party about how much they can shift on economics - their new voters are not small state true believers, and quite like spending on things like the NHS.
There's also an internal division about whether they should stoke up the culture war or ignore it. It looks like the consensus from number ten is to strike hard but quietly. Pass new rules protecting free speech on campus but don't tweet like Trump about it. Kemi Badenoch (
However post covid there's a lot of space for the Tories to move leftward economically and they're also playing a good tactical game on the culture wars. Rather than getting sucked into twitter fights they're using their government powers, most recently to tell universities to toughen up on free speech, and building their own ideological coalition. Liz Truss' speech (https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/fight-for-fairness or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0Vhrn82QtE) lays out the rival equality docrtine they're hoping to create. Kemi Badenoch also had a very well received speech on the subject (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqBTWPl-11U)
It's overall a lot less aggressive and warlike that the above suggestions, but you'd expect that in the UK. Being a UK working class party requires some left wing economics; but there's a fair bit in common too.
Funnily enough (and very randomly), back in the day Badenoch's constituency had a perennial candidate whose slogan was "Common Market no, hanging yes." It's funny how these things work out.
As someone who loves prediction markets I feel compelled to defend them from overzealous use on a few points (though I certainly would support a lot of public market-making).
1: How many people could really be replaced by well-functioning p-markets? You want to distinguish carefully between expertise in investigation and detailed knowledge and expertise in predicting. It may well be that a careful predictor can out-predict the working scientist/pundit in an area, and the market as a whole almost certainly can, but the role of most experts is not to predict, and you can't delegate the underlying research to the market or your local fox (busy prowling elsewhere, as per). You might want to center punditry around prediction markets but you still need people to explain, give context and detail, like the best of 538, and calling for better punditry is universal and not easy to legislate.
2: While I love the idea of conditional markets but I don't think we're close to being able to put them into use for major policy decisions. Capturing the relevant dimensions of possible policies is very hard and the true impact of most policies is ultimately pretty small (difference in Metaculus predictions of US emissions between Biden and Trump is approx 1 s.d., and think how many policies in a similar direction that's summing up). Also, prediction markets that have a predictable effect on policy, and especially markets that only resolve conditional on their own values, are prime meme-bait. Look at the 'Keynesian Beauty Contests' on Metaculus where they resolved positive if estimate is >98%, they were a total shambles.
3: What timescale could you meaningfully decide to hire/fire people on? You need a pretty long, statistically significant track record in areas that are relevant, and that demonstrate real understanding rather than just skill at picking base rates - you (probably) don't just want to hand the Fed to the quants, it's the wrong kind of understanding. Caplan's betting record is impressive but it took him decades and the ability to pick and choose (though in fairness he does offer many more than are accepted). It's hard to test important knowledge with regular predictions - for example I don't think that ability to predict weekly Covid cases is a huge signal of epidemiological skill. Year long predictions of covid yes, vaccine and deaths and lockdown impacts yes, but covid is perhaps the most tangible, predictable *event* in modern history, and is a bit of a best case scenario for p-markets.
You might also be interested to know that the UK civil service has an internal prediction market called Cosmic Bazaar styled on the GJP. It's predictions are quite interesting though the number of questions is limited and it's not very well sign-posted.
Nope, that's not true at all. Having PhD in Woke Studies does not make one smart, neither does it indicate that one is smart, yet less it makes one universally smart. At least PhD in physics indicates some intellectual capacity, even though I've known physics PhDs that said and did remarkably stupid things outside of their area of expertise. But at least it indicates some capacity, even if at times unengaged. Many other degrees don't indicate even that. And some degrees plainly say "I spent five figures for an overpriced daycare and all I got is a brain so indoctrinated as to preclude any possibility of independent thought".
I have a graduate degree in a STEM field and I'm pretty firmly on Team Woke if we're gonna make a two-team conflict out of this. But I appreciate that in a post about how the blue tribe is looking down on their cultural opponents, you decided to go right for "those dumb feminists can't do math".
Now? To understand where it - and thus I - went so wrong. There is a rot at the core of the cultures I'm a part of and I want to understand it so as not to repeat it again.
I didn't decide anything of the sort, please do not lie so obviously. And yes, PhD in Math doesn't also suggest somebody is smart in any other area (in fact, I've known some math PhDs that are barely functional in real world and hearing their advice on anything but their specialty would be pure madness) but PhD in Woke Studies suggests this even less. That doesn't mean somebody who has Woke Studies PhD is necessarily stupid (or does not know math - or doesn't have PhD in math) - they may be a genius. It means Woke Studies degree per se provides zero information on this. For God's sake, do I need to write out the Bayes formula? Is such a simple syllogism to hard for SSC reader? Or are you just trying to gotcha me without even trying to engage with the actual argument?
It sounds like you think P(smart|woke degree) ~= P(smart|no degree), for a certain definition of "smart". If that is your assertion, do you have any evidence to support that, and are you willing to explain your definition of "smart"?
Replace that with "any degree", and you get my point. There were a time when having an academic degree was a sign the person is likely exceptional and smart - which also had a lot to do with class even then, but at least within the class, you could use it as a signal of certain qualities and benefits. Not anymore. Anybody - who does not have certain class/income handicaps, of course - can get the paper, it means nothing of substance, at least as smart/stupid distinction is concerned. The difference with math degree is that there's an identifiable practical area where this degree still signals substantial benefit. With woke degree, there's pretty much no such area at all.
Also, it sounds like you're saying that the distribution of intelligence among people with "woke degrees" is identical to those of average college students overall. That isn't really an insult to their intelligence.
You don't need to solve differential equations to make good decisions about your life, or about ideology, or even to be useful in most jobs. You do need to have good mental habits, be capable of critical thinking, understand the society you live in - all learned traits. In one of Scott's worldbuilding utopias almost everyone could contribute to the level of a "well educated" person today.
vehemently object to "upper class" being equated with "smart". Yes, a lot of those people do have college degrees - usually in something like English Literature or History at the best, Woke Studies at the common case - but one doesn't have to be hugely smart to get a bachelor's at those. One has to be connected and rich and conformist and coherent enough to not sleep through the paper submission deadlines. Having a brain functional enough to regurgitate back whatever grovel is fed to you by the Woke Studies professor certainly help, but I never actually heard about somebody failing Woke Studies for not possessing the intellectual capacity to grasp the deep mysteries of CRT. If anything deserves the phrase "it's not rocket science", this is.
And that's btw why many people who otherwise wouldn't go near Trump are willing to support him in his stand. Because our supposed betters are so obviously not better in any way, and their claims to being better at anything so obviously and blatantly unearned. I mean at least a feudal lord could tell to a peasant "I can read and compose poems and quote ancient philosophers, and you can't sign your own name, clearly I should rule over you!" - or at least some lords probably could, if they wanted. Current lords are disgustingly and blatnatly unfit for any claim of superiority whatsoever - and yet they are behaving like they earned all of it, and they get away with it all the time. It's not hard to understand how it could infuriate any person with a sense of decency and justice. And this is where the urge to spit in their faces comes from - even though sometimes it's undeserved. But other times it is so, so richly deserved.
Remember NBC lecturing Ted Cruz on Shakespeare?
That's where all pizzagate-type conspiracies come from - they may be very wrong on the facts, but the feeling that those people are deeply no good, very much do not deserve their position, and all they say is deeply false is so strong and palpable that it must have some outlet. So one believes in whatever is easy to believe - that they are victims of their base physiological urges, or paid by Illuminati, or something as easy - instead of figuring out something that may be much more complex, much more true and orders of magnitude more scary (you can jail a person for being a part of a pedophile ring, but can you jail a person for participating in ruining a culture and causing the country to go downhill? Can you even stop it? Can you sleep knowing it's happening and you can do nothing about it? Better to have some pizza...).
Meritocracy is truly the cruelest system. It still isn't fair, but it gives elites a sense of being elite because they're smarter, harder working, and more virtuous. It's prosperity gospel for people who think they're too smart for religion. At least hereditary aristocracy openly acknowledged that their position was inherited. The meritocratic elites are under the delusion that theirs was earned and it makes them act all the more smug and cruel. No more noblesse oblige.
Epstein not suiciding himself in a federal prison throws a wrench into the idea that the elite are merely stupid. They murdered a man in a prison, the media displayed its usual faux concern for a week and then moved on, and the common man is not supposed to entertain the obvious. Don’t know who did it, know they are elite and the conformity of the elite covers it all up.
Open secrets and ‘everyone knew’ but not nationally nor publicly til all individual risk as been discharged. How much of those secrets remain right now in elite circles?
Stupid, vindictive, cruel, and murderous. But I’m supposed to believe what Lester Holt tells me on NBC.
They are not stupid, of course. But they also aren't geniuses, and their smug claims that it is their intellectual and moral superiority that makes them natural rulers over us rubes is a complete and obvious nonsense. That doesn't mean they don't have power of course - they pretty much have all of it, and the brazen murder of Epstein and the brazen bald-faced lying and coverup of it shows this power in all its naked and unashamed enormity. Yes, we can do that, and we can get away with it, and we don't even have to lie too creatively about it - because what you're gonna do? That's right, nothing.
This is what makes it difficult to discuss without being very derisive. Now "Working class" may work but everybody already claims to be for that. Instead of making "class" less of a dirty word, why not make "populism" less of a dirty word? The US constitution starts with "We the people" after all. I think I could take the Populist Liberal label myself.
The manifesto would go something like:
I am a liberal. I believe in science and knowledge and expertise and competence.
I am a person of the people. I understand that not everyone has the aptitude for academic endeavors and believe they deserve no less respect.
Democracy is inherently populist with the common person having as much weight as everyone. I believe that this is a feature not a flaw.
I recognize that the common person is inherently in a vulnerable position relative to credentialed elite.
I value education, but I am aware that education can elevate people who are already intellectually privileged and contribute to inequality. When I promote education, I always emphasize respectable paths for people not naturally talented at conventional academics.
I value equality and freedom to be who you want to be, but I understand that skillfully navigating people's differences is very complex and not within everyone's reach.
I understand that good people often require help from moral guides and belief groups. I will never seek to bring down these groups. I will instead offer to participate and help improve them.
I am anti racist and believe structural issues should be solved. At the same time, I understand that wonkish historical facts with lots of gray areas are involved and I don't expect everyone to be able to grasp the subtleties. I will never shame anyone for faux pas or lack of mastery of these subjects.
To deal with structural issues, I will attack and blame the structure, never people that were accidentally involved through their identity. When the issues are structural, fighting people instead of the fighting the structure is poor aim.
I value freedom of movement and trade across the world but I understand that the onus is on the elite to ensure that it elevates everyone's prospects and that the gains are widely distributed, that global channels are not co-opted by a small elite.
No; it isn't. Populism is just exploiting a large division of opinion between the elite and the people. Phil Scott, Emmanuel Macron, and Charlie Baker seem pretty elitist to me.
Even though I would vote for them, I do find them elitist and they are threatened by the gilet jaunes et al., by the people. Their parties would gain to acknowledge and respect the people more.
> I value education, but I am aware that education can elevate people who are already intellectually privileged and contribute to inequality. When I promote education, I always emphasize respectable paths for people not naturally talented at conventional academics.
Can you please explain what this means? I'm genuinely curious what you mean by this. When you say that "education can elevate people who are already intellectually privileged", are you proposing something to reverse this?
Isn't this largely what's already happened to the libertarian-leaning republicans like Glenn Reynolds? I could swear that, besides the Free Trade thing, that's been the libertarian-leaning republican platform for somewhere between 4-20 years.
I mean, it's a good idea, but I'm having trouble figuring out what's new here.
I'm looking at the libertarian-leaning conservatives and the conservative-leaning libertarians, more than at the purists.
I'm more of a Bryan Caplan or David Friedman style libertarian myself, but the conservative-trumpist-light libertarian block has been pretty much on point with Scott's suggestions for a long time now.
On Transgenderism, LibertyCons lean towards: Don't let people enforce trangenderism on kids, or let stupid kids decide to do stuff that's more harmful than smoking. Don't let biological males compete in women's sports. Don't require that women let biological men in their dressing rooms. It turns out that the libertarian position and the conservative position: Take seriously everyone's rights (Coase, baby), not just the minority's, matches pretty well.
I don't think there's room for someone like me near the GOP, but I think there's a lot of room for a lot of mild liberty-friendly folks, who think that Free trade is small beans compared to a censorious orthodoxy
Amash was the most libertarian and has left, but there are still the likes of Thomas Massie, Rand Paul, and even Amash's replacement Peter Meyer that are pretty libertarian. I still think that if you are a libertarian and want to vote for one of the major parties the Republicans are still the party to vote for, there really are no elected officials even close to being libertarian in the Democratic party. You do have some folks who are anti war and take civil liberties seriously in the Democratic party though.
Free trade is a tricky thing. In theory, free trade is the optimal thing to do. In practice, unilateral absence of state action towards certain trade may not be exactly free trade - if that trade is influenced by actions of other state actors, and by other actions of the same state actor. Let's say if you create onerous labor regulations that jack up the cost of hiring a local person, but 100 miles over the border you can produce the same thing half as cheap, and the government over the border would subsidize it, while taxing goods travelling the other way - would local workers be happy about it, or about the fact that somebody on the other coast doesn't care whether it's produced locally or over the border? I have a feeling telling those people to learn to code may not be welcome...
Isn't it likely the Republicans can't do this because their extremely wealthy donors/supporters would have a fit? Which isn't to say the Democrats aren't supported by wealth donors (they are, but they're liberal). I think wealthy Republican donors would have a hard time not feeling attacked by an anti-classist message no matter how much you try to explain that class isn't about wealth but by sneering better-than-you status displays.
The Democrats wouldn't stand aside either. They would do whatever was the equivalent of the Trump campaign running ads with grandma being assaulted in her home at night because she called 911 and a recording said due to defunding of the police they can't respond in less than 5 days. Which I assume would mean drawing connections to the Iranian revolution where all of the intellectuals were imprisoned and now they're an Islamic fascist state. Or at least I assume the Democrats would. Maybe they'd just let this happen because they like losing(??)
"Isn't it likely the Republicans can't do this because their extremely wealthy donors/supporters would have a fit?"
We already established that the meaning of "class" here is about cultural signifiers, not wealth. Plenty of uncouth millionaires out there selling pillows and jetskis. (The Kochs aren't uncouth, which probably does limit it, but whatever. *Of course* billionaire donors are a small group so tons of weird variance is going to end up incorporating their personal idiosyncracies for a few decades before catching up with the broader trend. Maybe Thiel is the next guy and in 2024 Mike Lindell appoints Bronze Age Pervert to SCOTUS. That would make the libs mad and drive a great news cycle until everyone forgot about it.
I did continue in that first paragraph: "I think wealthy Republican donors would have a hard time not feeling attacked by an anti-classist message no matter how much you try to explain that class isn't about wealth but by sneering better-than-you status displays."
This was great. Except for the point about protectionism (which is just an upper class attempt to insulate their businesses from competition), I actually by and large agree with most of this. As a radically anti-Trump independent, I did not expect that.
I hate this because it means the further burying of any coherent concept of class beneath a bunch of vague cultural signifiers. In turn this means it will just as likely (continue to) become true, just as every other coherent concept is buried beneath an avalanche of cultural signifiers.
If we *are* using class to refer to cultural signifiers, then the subtitle here - "pivot from a mindless... to a thoughtful..." - is violating your strategy from the start. Go be mindless! It makes the libs so mad! Destroy the "upper" "class" insistence on thinking! Return to monke! Destroy! Kill! No swing voter has ever read a policy paper! Take a shit on the stage! Set up a temple in Washington D.C. and offer up beating hearts to the sun!
Realistically I would like the Democrats to pander less to (((the extremely unpopular cultural values of people like me))) while quietly just allowing social forces to continue making them more popular, but current dynamics mean that the Rs are going to counter-signal against those as hard as they can, which is why the "thoughtful" element of your proposal is the only immodest and unrealistic part. Our current media environment can't do thoughtfulness thoughtfully; you think it can prosecute thoughtlessness that way?
As far as the proposals are serious, they're classy means for déclassé ends. But that's a politically impossible mismatch, because mass movements can't maintain a tidy means/ends distinction. Anarchists describe this situation as "prefigurative politics", the idea that in mass movements, the means you use determine the ends you reach. So if the GOP starts down the road of using classier culture-war arguments, the expected result is that they get watered down, if not outright captured, by the professional-managerial class.
So as you've described, fighting a culture war on the cultural & intellectual elite is best served by weaponizing ugliness & stupidity. It has worked well so far: in 2016, lead by Trump, the GOP won all three elected federal branches; they suffered a bit in the midterms but still took decisive control of SCOTUS; and in 2020 they gained in the House, lost the swing Electoral College states by only about 40k votes, and did very well in state races. They don't need to change strategies.
For contrast, the strategy described in this post is one that US socialists have been trying for decades. Here's a very-recent example:
An interview on the Jacobin show with Catherine Liu about her book, "Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class"
Why do we feel confident that whatever would replace the college system will be less classist? I would imagine that we’d see corporate not-for-profits like ETS and Collegeboard (I am dubious that we can consider them legitimate NGOs) arise to fill the void. And considering that often their tests measure how good we are at standardized tests rather than actual knowledge, and upper class people have a huge advantage for obtaining such skills, I’m not sure it’s a good solution. I love the idea of banning degree discrimination, but I fear something even worse would take its place.
Do others have compelling reasons to believe my prediction is wrong, or that if this happens it would be less classist than the present setup?
The post seems pretty explicit that this is a dog whistle:
"You're already doing class warfare, you're just doing it blindly and confusedly. Instead, do it openly, while using the words "class" and “classism”."
The difference is the regular whistle is something that is said plainly and is taken as it said. The dog whistle is when somebody tried to imbue meaning that is supposedly there but people fail to see it, except the explainer and imagined secret target audience of the dog whistle.
For example, if you criticize somebody for being elitist, and somebody comes and says it's actually "dog whistle" for saying he's a Jew - i.e. you are actually secretly signalling your imaginary anti-Semitic adherents that the real meaning of your message is attacking Jews, but nobody else - except for example comrade Finnydo above - could see it. Of course, usually it's complete baloney, people who are really anti-Semitic just plain say so, and they are rarely shy about it. Pretty much nobody is construing a complex narrative of class and populism to just secretly tell "jews bad" - neither most of the people who think so are actually capable of such subterfuge anyway. But this way you can smear a person without bothering with any proof - how would you prove you didn't secretly mean "Jews"? There's no evidence you could ever present to disprove such an accusation.
" Or saying you hate rootless cosmopolitans, and then it looks like boring old anti-Semitism. Or saying you hate the government, and then it looks like boring old libertarianism.
Seems like everybody does a Keynes beauty contest with their tribe for that tribes values. Any attempt to actually control what happens will be broken and devolve quickly due to the sheer size of the tribe needing to be supported. This is why I don't this Marxism will ever work, or any injection to 'fix' politics from the outside will ever work in this system either. I hope this idea does somehow get picked, but I highly doubt it.
It seems you're becoming more vitriol in your politics too, this is written as a proposal of what republican's want by what is a liberal thinking about what republican's want. So excuse me as I can't fully agree with your analysis because I don't think you see across party lines, but I do like some solutions.
I am on the right side of the isle, I came in through Trump. I thought he had good ideas that somebody was finally talking about. The nice thing about him was he was "bullet proof". he could talk about how bullshit the woke ideology is and with the inability due to social shaming in college to talk about how their ideas are counterproductive, it was fun to vote for him as a shot against elites. I can agree with you there. He fucked up the virus response yeah, but during all other times I thought he did good. Peace with North Korea, Conservative Justices, Etc.
At the end of the day it's all tribal shitflinging. A refocus to the accredited elites (as calling them "educated" is both an overloaded word and only used for feeling smug) would be a good idea. Will it be adopted? Probably not, will the democrats be just as batshit insane from the other side of the isle? Absolutely.
I worry that I don't think anything can solve this other than total system collapse, or we somehow all calm down and try working our way back from a low trust society. I think we are heading to system collapse, which would be an awful time had by all. I hope this broken mess lasts 20 more years so we get AGI to singularity us out. Otherwise, I think our progressive policies are progressing us off a cliff, and our conservatives aren't conserving anything
Scott, I love this article, but I can't link it in the conservative places I inhabit because of the preview image; it sends the wrong message almost immediately.
Actually, I think it goes even further than that. The way the article starts off with 'I hate you and think insulting things of you', or how the Marxist vibe is gotten from the title before you can get to the part saying 'but not the Marxist kind'.
The article has such great meat to it, but makes a very terrible first impression for what I would assume is the target audience.
I have half-suspicion it is there intentionally to filter our people that are looking to be offended by offending them upfront so they will go away. Just like Nigerian letters are full of typos to filter out all but the most gullible, this post may be full of triggers to filter out all but the most determined to engage on substance.
I must admit that I am not a big fan of "I hate you" part, and it's very not true the general Right would hate Scott - at least for anything more than voting Democrat. But I think it's worth going through that and engage with the substance. Though I can see how somebody not having the experience of other Scott's writings would not be willing to do that - I would certainly be tempted to disengage if the writer started with proclaiming hate for me.
I wondered if "I hate you and you hate me" was intended as a kind of warding gesture to try to reassure left-wing readers that Scott hadn't actually become a Republican supporter, which might otherwise be the impression given by most of this essay.
It's a bit like a Victorian erotic novel which ends with a paragraph explaining that obviously the characters repented of all their fornication afterwards and became model citizens.
Reminds me how during the prohibition, certain grape powders carried a warning: “After dissolving the brick in a gallon of water, do not place the liquid in a jug away in the cupboard for twenty days, because then it would turn into wine.”
Yes, that's partly deliberate. I've had posts go viral in the right-wing blogosphere before and it's brought me nothing but grief. I'd like this to hit a few Republican intellectuals who can think about it, a few liberal intellectuals who can let it reshape their idea of what Republicans are doing/want, and a few nitpicky intellectuals who can tell me what's wrong with it and help me understand the underlying dynamics better.
I remember when Trump claimed to be a "blue-collar billionaire" and Jon Stewart tore into him saying, "That's not a thing." But yeah, actually, it kind of IS a thing.
"When a cop targets a black person for a “random” stop-and-frisk, that’s racist. But it’s also coming from same thought process the cop uses to target an unkempt heavily-tattooed white guy in the bad part of town, instead of a well-groomed suit-wearing white guy in the business district."
Trump gained among Asian and Hispanic voters because of Democratic pro-criminal overreach. The solution to that is to not go pro-crime, but to go tough on crime. Also, racism is not a form of classism; the lower the class, the greater the overt Black-White conflict. As a result, Black-WWC coalitions (as seen with the Southern Democrats of the 1970s) are inherently unsustainable.
"Your solution will be prediction markets."
The problem with the proletariat is that they have a low average IQ. They couldn't care less about ideological support for prediction markets, which are highly UMC. Any R war on experts is going to end in overt defenses of astrology.
The war on college actually has a chance of working, if only because so much of the low IQ do not have a college degree and are relentlessly opposed to free college and to employers barring them from consideration if they don't have a degree. The GOP has a strong incentive to be anti-college as well, as college faculty and administrations are extremely anti-Republican and have a fair deal of institutional clout.
Calling the establishment media the "upper class media" is a brilliant rhetorical move, but little more than that. The correct response would be to create a politically-controlled state media free from the grip of the UMC.
"You would argue that capitalism is the system that lets people succeed regardless of class; even the most uncouth and uneducated person can strike it rich if they work hard and make good deals."
No; capitalism is, in fact, extremely classist. The vast majority of American companies which took a stand on the BLM demonstrations stood in favor of them. This is why an unreconstructed pro-capitalist/business conservatism would inherently perpetuate the iron grip of the UMC on the Overton Window.
My take is this: instead of trying to build coalitions, just support the best policies while projecting an image of common sense and moderation. Fight COVID (as China/Thailand/Vietnam do, not as American liberals don't). Tax new immigrants at a 60% rate to create a UBI for the native-born. Hire more police officers in the inner cities. Enforce bans on affirmative action. Fight against attempts to ban teachers from suspending students. Be the sort of party people would want to be ruled by. And, above all, defend your positions forthrightly. Putin and Charlie Baker don't have high approvals because they're anti-UMC. The myth that elections always have to be 50-50 is just that; a myth.
I'm curious of why you say "the lower the class, the greater the overt Black-White conflict". It might just be that I grew up rural Georgia, where everyone was rednecks and the hunting club my dad went to was roughly 50-50 black/white and that was normal, but I'd say that is much more of a stereotype than a given. I find ATL to be a really pleasant city racially in large part because black/white isn't as tied to the economic lines as it is in other major cities I've lived in, which I think helps to untangle race/class prejudices - if people see a person of ___ race here in ATL, it's a lot harder here to accurately gauge their economic status.
I feel like given the context of the original piece we're commenting on, citing favorability of an explicitly political movement is very different from citing research into people's actual relations with each other. There's a vast vast political gap at the moment; however, I would bet the white cali folks with BLM signs are far more uncomfortable with black neighbors than people in georgia, at least as far as their lived NIMBY actions would show?
The thing I worry about is that if you turn a bunch of good ideas into right-partisan issues, democrats will feel compelled to take a stand against them.
Because I want good ideas to win, and causing people to oppose them is a bad way of doing that. It seems like you're so consumed with hatred for your ideological enemies that war with them is more important to you than actually enacting good policy.
But isn't some of the problem that NOBODY is fighting for these good ideas now? And it's better to have one side for and one side against and both sides make their case than for nobody to care?
Seriously though, you're doing yourself a disservice by letting someone's disappointment with (I assume) your tribe prevent you from reading on to get some ideas how they think you could improve that tribe's image to a way they would be less disappointed with it. Even if that disappointment is expressed once in explicit and reductive language like "you suck".
> It could appeal to intellectuals. Right now you're doing so badly among this demographic that you're going to have trouble staffing the next generation of think tanks. That's because you have a lot of anger but no theory. Intellectuals love theories. Your theory will be something something classism, details to be filled in later. Intellectuals love filling in details, especially details about -isms, and you can assure them that they'll be very busy
This paragraph is a work of ironic art, particularly the "theory will be something something classism" bit.
> It could appeal to intellectuals. Right now you're doing so badly among this demographic that you're going to have trouble staffing the next generation of think tanks. That's because you have a lot of anger but no theory. Intellectuals love theories. Your theory will be something something classism, details to be filled in later. Intellectuals love filling in details, especially details about -isms, and you can assure them that they'll be very busy
yeah i mean maybe they could write a blog post expressing vague theories about how the blue tribe just hates everyone with the sterling intellectual charity promoted by grays
But it's cool, Republicans will clearly get right on the *real* discrimination in America against people from Tampa and a racial group whose median income is $26,000 a year higher than the national average. I mean, it's not like nearly all of Tampa voted against Trump by overwhelming margins (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/upshot/2020-election-map.html) or like there's a racial group with a median income $24,000 a year *lower* than the national average, right?
For what it's worth, pretty much ALL of this is a lot of my own personal political ideology. It's weird...it's like GET OUT OF MY HEAD SCOTT!!! (No not really. You're welcome to come in, but it's certainly at your own risk)
Especially the Collage as Status Signaling thing. Yeah, that's something that Tyler Cowen has talked about, but not quite in that way. There's actually a history of how that sort of signaling has actually built our current system of inequality that almost entirely flies under the radar.
I think this is basically what happened in Israeli politics.
The Israeli upper-educated classes are overwhelmingly Ashkenazi, and they always voted left-wing. The working classes are majority Sephardic/Oriental and voted Likud in large part driven by class/ethnic resentment. (And no one really votes based on what they think of Palestine).
Then a million Russians came, and though they immediately reached the educational attainment of native Ashkenazis they had none of the class signifiers and were gatekept from many institutions of cultural production. And so the Russians also voted right wing, either for Likud or Likud's allies like Sharansky back in the day and Lieberman today. They are responsible in large part for Netanyahu's dominance in the last decade.
In a lot of ways, Russian-Israelis are like the gray tribe of Israel. They're way overrepresented in STEM and things like the Israeli Rationality community. I wonder if anyone in the Republican party will be the American Lieberman, bringing the gray tribe into the coalition with free markets and class warfare.
This seems very explicitly wrong? Historically most people seem to vote based on Palestinian issues (this is less true in the last decade or so but still pretty true, at least in my family). Not that this doesn't correlate with Ashkenazi/Mizrahi, but it's an implicit correlation, not an explicit one (so my pro-peace Mizrahi uncles still vote centre-left, and my pro-conquest ashkenazi family vote for religious parties which caucus with Likud).
Russians (actually, former soviets) are good at reading between the lines, spotting political BS, and also they are wary of promises of harmony, equality, and social justice under the aegis of any leftist government. They know what it is in practice.
SAS, is it a good idea to alienate many of your non-leftist readers and create a polarization here as it happens in the rest of the country? And is it a good read for non-Americans (a substantial number of your followers) who have neither skin in this game nor a dog in this fight?
I honestly think most social political problems are made up to give people something to do. I don't think LGBTQ+ problems are important anymore, I don't think racism is a legitimate problem in our country aside for a few edge cases. It seems the Right and Left are in a fun merry-go-round of power to police other opinions. But at the same time. Who gives a shit about any of that? Politics should be focused on international relations, tax allocations, optimized economies with regards to human dignity, and manufactoring. Everything else is just to give people that don't understand math something to do.
"upper class" elites are not educated in anything useful, anything that is not STEM is basically creative writing. If somebody really loves some fiction or history they can be called educated in it, but I would never weight their intellect above a person that likes a different story. I notice most of Trumps criticism is because "Most of what he said was offensive, blatantly false, or alienated more people", I don't believe that. And I don't care if it did. Talk is cheap, I wanna see actual proposals.
Humans suck at governments because they politics bloated with worthless garbage, but I guess since tv got boring during lockdowns political theater is the only thing that entertains anymore.
He's wrong, but I think most of your tribe already thought that. Why get perpetually worked up about somebody you already think is wrong taking an unnuanced opinion? You will never be able to eradicate all bad takes. Nor will getting mad about this lead to better payoffs than probably just having a good time with friends and advocating for trans when it comes up. This is one of those useless distractions I was talking about
It's not just anybody; it's somebody in a position of power—one of the most powerful policymaking (let alone political) positions in the country.
I agree that among the general population, LGBTQ+ problems don't seem as bad as they used to be. But prejudicial hatred is still overrepresented in positions of power. Their opinions matter.
It sounds like you agree that reducing problems for LGBTQ+ and racial minorities is a good thing, so you should also be appalled that there are people, like Rand Paul, in positions of power actively working to reestablish or exacerbate those problems, especially when it gets in the way of them doing all that other stuff you say politics should be focused on.
Rand Paul is correct. That’s not bigotry, it’s cold hard truth about a clear social fad abusing children. That you feel the need to label it bigotry is a clear problem with you and people who throw isms around all the time.
<sidenote, You read my comment! Thx. Am big fan. Swoon> But back to the issue - yeah, I concede nearly all overseas...but US journalists do get in harms way, get threatened a ton, run around (pre Covid), sued out of existence by billionaires, etc. I admit bias but journalism seems different, less dainty than academia, government and consulting roles...its own circle of pain.
Maybe there's a difference between working-journalists and commentary-journalists? I'm not connected to that world, but do hard-hitting investigative journalists talk trash about journalists that (they might say) write freshman English essays and call it journalism?
> Yeah, yeah, "class" sounds Marxist, class warfare and all that, you're supposed to be against that kind of thing, right? [...] Trump didn't win on a platform of capitalism and liberty and whatever. He won on a platform of being anti-establishment.
I sometimes think Republicans are still fighting the 1st Cold War, the one against Russia than America won 30 years ago.
But now America is fighting the 2nd Cold War, against an enemy that calls itself "Communist" but actually represents the red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalism that Marx was railing against.
Not at all. leftists are very modern and real. They are as vicious as their October 1917 counterparts and as determined to "raze the present world of violence down to the foundations, and then build our new world. He who was nothing will become everything!" Nothing changed, and it would be a mistake to fault republicans for trying to save the country from the Neo-Marxist menace.
I suspect you are not a troll and honestly believe in what you've written. Let's put to test. Name a single place on this planet where Marxism was "correct" and helped people to live peacefully and prosper. Clearly not in Germany where it was born. Not in Russia where it murdered millions. Not in Cuba or Kampuchea. In Venezuela, perhaps? No, not there either...
I'm going to run with Scott's idea in this column!
Marxism is a bourgeoisie fantasy world, reserved only for the elite New Yorkers and the people they've fooled, a methamphetamine for the masses that the elites feed the proles.
You're off the money a bit with Russia - it had a tiny number of proletarians (taken as either industrial workers or people paid in wages) compared to any other country in Europe. Same with Vietnam, Cuba, China, South Yemen etc.
It's generally taken over where there's a crappy regime that's at least partly in hock to foreigners.
Marxists (or similar) select a "victimized" group whose interests they claim to fight for. For Bolsheviks, it was Russian proletariat; for nazis - WWI veterans and german working-class; for Jacobins - sans-culottes; for Castro and Co - campesinos, etc. That gives them a 'moral right' to take control. Then, after consolidating consolidated the power and destroying the opponents, they dispense with pleasantries and exploit the very same group whose rights they were supposedly fought for.
Leftists in the US have chosen POC, not that they really cared for minorities. In fact, the 'god-awful Trump' did more for black unemployment than the previous administration. But that's the game, and one must be a fool to take it at face value.
The problem is that Republicans leverage the undoubted atrocities of Marxism to attack ideology and policies that resemble the the social democratic parties of the developed Western world outside the US, even though those parties have a perfectly decent, even, relative to most times and places exemplary, record on civil liberties and not-murder (whatever you think of their economic views). This trick only works because the US is an outlier in not having the more left-wing of its two largest parties having been explicitly "socialist" at some point. (The German SDP even began as a explicitly Marx-influenced party, and remained so until the 1960s, and their only famous violence-supporting actions in that time were not opposing WW1 and using right-wing militias to kill left-wing revolutionaries.)
So the proposal is another dog whistle to use, in order that it will be easier to continue doing the things that divide us (that you would otherwise be against). But this allows you to frame the platform as Gray tribe approved (instead of more grievance focused?). This sounds like some fantasy to give Gray tribe a political party. It is much more conflict theory than most of what appears here.
I figure you said it in large part because your US readership is majority Democrat, but opening with "I hate you, Republicans" is sufficiently hostile that my politics-and-hatred related antibodies started fizzing to warn me the air was bad. I think there's a much more toned down version of that establishing common knowledge for the reader that you're in opposing tribes that still communicates the thing that paragraph is meant to communicate.
Tbf, he said "I hate you and you hate me." (unless he edited it after your comment?)
I feel like this post came from a place of "I wish I wasn't right." Would I be surprised if Scott's advice actually took shape in the next couple years? No actually he seems spot on. Do I think Scott would be proud of himself for calling it/helping? Probably not. He hates identity politics and that's what this post is advocating. But, the alternative is Democrat supremacy, which probably isn't better than two strong competing parties.
So I thought the opening line was a humorous set up for his contempt for the current state of things.
I think that bit was a little tongue in cheek. It was a pithy way to dispense with the caveats, and not meant to suggest actual hatred. I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am.
Substack seems to have given you more freedom and peace of mind. You spent years and years at SSC working hard to write a single full clause that looks awful out of context (so of course the Times sliced and diced into tiny pieces instead). But now you're free to say "the Republicans might as well say X", knowing that this gives the sneerers the subquote of you saying "X".
Independent of the content of the piece, it's nice to see that fledgeling confidence.
My Inner Marxist would like to log one complaint, which is that as long as one’s “class” strictly means cultural differences between Arkansas truckers and New York lawyers, and remains divorced from one’s relationship to capital, everyone who is currently being exploited and broken on the wheel of life and everyone who is making out like a bandit will stay there, even if the political currents above them all shift around wildly.
Marxism's colonial/imperialist beliefs focus on capital only to fool the rubes so they can further their empires. It's really about cultural differences.
It's fine to be hypocritical in politics, but I'll note that praising Musk and trashing Jack would require either hypocrisy or some explanation.
Maybe the distinction is about Social Media Being Worse Than Physical Objects! Sure! But then remember that the middle-aged working-class Republican voters are all on Facebook sharing Jesus American Flag Veteran Beer Gun memes. I'm not even being pejorative here; I have extended family members like this, and I acknowledge them as they are.
I think the distinction is more about what sells better to the republican’s potential demographic. Scott isn’t advocating for the correctness of the positions, but how they work rhetorically in the context of American class conflicts.
Prediction markets aren't unbiasable. It seems like if they are being used for major policy decisions, they should be really easy to bias.
You want to implement a shiny new regulation on industry X, but industry X claims that this will totally cripple their ability to do business and lead to major problems. So you create a market for conditional predictions about what will happen if the regulation is put in place. Industry X spends millions of dollars of lobbying money on the prediction that your regulation will crash the national economy. A few experts realize this is bullshit and bet against them, but don't have the same capital to invest, and so the prediction market is still showing huge odds that your regulation will ruin everything. So you don't pass your regulation and the lobbying groups don't even need to pay up on their conditional bets.
"A few experts realize this is bullshit and bet against them, but don't have the same capital to invest"
It isn't the experts who are betting against them, it's the speculators who hire the experts. The amount of capital available to make bets with large positive expected value is very large.
How much money will the speculators be willing to tie up in conditional bets that will probably end up being nullified anyway and to what degree can they trust experts that are being hired in this kind of ad hoc manner?
Vitalik Buterkin recently discussed the problem of money being locked up in prediction markets for the 2020 election. He notes that this is a bigger issue for more immature markets. As the market matures, options get developed to ease trading as participants desire. And speculators will be more willing to trust experts with a track record of predictive success.
Well for one, options also make it easier for the companies in industry X to leverage their bets. And if you need the input of experts in this particular domain, it's not clear that these experts are going to have a lot of track record to go by unless there are relatively frequent attempts to regulate industry X.
If they make it easier for EVERYONE to bet, the advantage goes to the most likely actual outcome of the bet.
You are correct that initial track records won't be as good as later ones. The ideal system is one that improves over time (even if it might do so asymptotically).
If options make it easier both for the people trying to make money by placing correct bets and for people trying to bias the system by making incorrect bets, it's not clear which side this benefits more.
The system only improves asymptotically if it is constantly having large bets about every conceivable topic. I'm not sure that this is the right limit to consider.
Alternatively, what if the bet is that prices for X will go up by whatever amount if the regulation is passed. If industry X invests heavily in this, they will be incentivized to raise prices if the regulation passes, making speculators wary of betting against them.
Alternatively, what if industry X is wall street? Who's going to take the other side of those bets?
Alternatively, what if they are just tweaking the true odds by 10 or 20 percent? Speculators might still on average take bets against them, but perhaps not enough to swing things.
How are prices being set? By a unitary actor that can stand in for "industry" or many competing firms? Even if an individual firm had bet one way, individually setting a higher price still leaves it vulnerable to be undercut by all the firms that can offer a lower price.
Sure. The companies in industry X will face a bit of a coordination problem here, but in industries dominated by a small number of major companies, these kinds of problems are generally not insurmountable.
But I agree that in industries dominated by many smaller firms without any kind of organizing trade group, this might make it difficult for the industry to act in a unified manner.
One the one hand, your example might not be the best mechanism design. I imagine there might be less gameable ways to use prediction markets for policy.
On the other hand, financial markets have similar issues with being gameable, and yet generally (albeit not always!) function okay. For example, someone with a digital call option on a stock could try buying stock to make the option in-the-money. In practice, (1) manipulation is illegal, and blatant attempts do get caught (2) there's enough liquidity in most stocks that manipulation is very expensive. I imagine both these mitigating factors could be applied to prediction markets as well.
There may well be less gameable ways to use prediction markets. But:
1) One could imagine that industries might have hundreds of millions of dollars of incentive to manipulate a market that was being used to help decide an important policy decision, and incentive that as far as I can tell doesn't really exist for stocks.
2) With a conditional prediction market, you only have to pay for your manipulation if the condition becomes true and if whether or not the condition becomes true depends on the outcome of the prediction market, if you manipulate the market enough, you don't have to pay for it.
3) If the people trying to manipulate the market also have some control over whether the prediction becomes true (e.g. it's a prediction that if regulation X passes, then the price of X will double within the next year), then they might even make money off of failing to prevent the condition from coming true.
Those are all fair points, but I think the main counterpoint is simply "don't do that". I think people are aware of limitations of prediction markets, and sometimes there are reasonable solutions, and sometimes not. If there's a policy decision that could potentially cost an industry billions, and you want to entirely base the decision on prediction markets, you better have billions in liquidity to absorb the hedges or outright manipulation that will come. Note that this problem isn't unique to prediction markets: traditional forms of corruption (e.g. bribing regulators) are a problem, too, when stakes are high.
3) This is basically the insider trading question. On the one hand, allowing insiders to trade allows their information to enter the market price, which is good. On the other hand, it makes non-insiders more reluctant to trade, so reduces liquidity, which is bad. There's a lot of room for debate whether to allow insiders to trade, or possibly trade with restrictions (e.g. requirement to disclose they're an insider). The good news is there's already regulatory experience with this sort of thing, so it should be a solvable problem: commodities are often traded by their producers who are insiders, stocks have a legal framework for when insiders are allowed to make trades, insurance has requirements about "insurable interest" to be sure people aren't placing bets against social interests (e.g. buying life insurance on someone else and then hiring an assassin).
Fair enough. I agree that using prediction markets could be a useful tool for aiding policy decisions, especially if these issues are well thought out. My original objection was to Scott's fairly strong claim that prediction markets are unbiasable, which seems wrong given how there is a pretty direct way that one can use money to bias them.
This Republican party sounds terrifyingly effective, except for the stuff about prediction markets which the average republican voter absolutely will not understand. Most of these ideas would be pretty bad, but honestly the part about colleges sounds genuinely amazing and I would be tempted to vote Republican if they emphasized it enough.
Agree with pretty much everything here, everyone (both left and right) would be better off if both parties' platform is on competing on dismantling the class system. The fake "experts" making irresponsible decisions risking thousands of human lives deserve a special place in hell (the opposite holds for actual experts).
But as a reminder to myself, the GOP in its current state is an abomination and is not even close to being a viable option. Spewing provably false statements, parading charlatans and Machiavellian politicians, nothing is off limits. As someone that tries extremely hard to stay centered, I always need to be reminded that the existence of 2 options does not mean equal pros and equal cons for both (although for whatever reason I seem to have a natural bias of trying to argue for both sides equally). In my own head, from a utilitarian perspective, the GOP is at a 15% pro (at most). v. 85% dems.
Scott, you can add a point that minimum wage is a high-class conceit, people who are *uncomfortable* with other people not being paid "enough" but unwilling to just have their taxes raised to give them money.
I think many of the things in this post are on the border between "true" and "much more complicated than that but framed in a way that Republicans will appreciate", in a way I sort of feel bad about. But I don't think any of them were completely false, and this one does seem that way - I think almost nobody has considered raising taxes for a UBI, and upper-class people are okay with having their taxes raised for welfare.
Anti-credentialism will never survive as part of the Republican party platform; they get too much money from for-profit colleges. That was a critical element of Betsy DeVos's platform as part of the Department of Education. Look up the Promoting Real Opportunity, Success, and Prosperity through Education Reform (PROSPER) Act, which was passed by the House in 2018, with support from Trump and DeVos. There's a shocking amount of money to be made from leeching off the GI Bill money of veterans without college degrees.
It's worth noting that this is only above-board money; contributions from individual investors in for-profit colleges to SuperPACs isn't listed, and my understanding is that it's substantially larger than the above-board money.
The question was whether they were a significant lobbying force relative to other industries. The page you linked to shows a total of about two million dollars from all the for-profit schools combined. Looking at the gas and oil industry, a single firm is giving more than fourteen million, the whole industry something like fifty million.
Compare it to the non-profit colleges and universities. The University of California alone is twenty-four million dollars, twelve times the whole for-profit college figure. The total for the non-profit college and universities is about eighty million, forty times the figure for the for-profit sector.
a) It's 6.7 million including lobbying totals - it's further down the page. So it's more like 5-10% of total lobbying expenditures on education, which is more than proportionate to the % of students in for-profit colleges compared to total enrollment.
The figure for total contributions from education is $320 million (https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=W04++). So if your figure is correct — I'm not sure I understand the categories they are using — the for-profit figure is about 2% of the total.
"20% of Americans go to religious services weekly - how many of those work for the New York Times?"
Offhand, I can think of Douthat, Bruenig, and possibly Brooks. Douthat in particular is notable for being an actual token conservative, contra Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin.
This is so unconvincing and full of epicycles, that I really wonder if it's motivated reasoning from Scott. It ignores tons of research on what politically motivates the "white working class." One quote will do, in his description of the "upper class". "They all have exactly the same political and aesthetic opinions on everything, and think the noblest and most important task imaginable is to gatekeep information in ways that force everyone else to share those opinions too." I can't even tell if this is supposed to be his advice to Republicans on how to posture themselves, serious, or a joke. All have the same opinions? Has he heard of this interesting website called "Twitter", where lefties regularly shred each other over differences in opinions. Or look how Jacobin treats liberals. Or how Ezra Klein treats Jacobin! It's sad, but it looks like Scott is perfoming the Glenn Greenwals/Matt Taibbi triple somersault contortion into "Those who have different opinions from mine are INSANE, I tell you!" I hope not, but that's what it looks like to me.
I think you're just unfamiliar with how Scott approaches a certain subgenre of writing. See #7 in "Nonfiction Writing Advice" (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/20/writing-advice/), "Figure out who you’re trying to convince, then use the right tribal signals". To quote:
"Your role model in this (and in nothing else) should be Donald Trump. Think about it. He supports Planned Parenthood, doesn’t want to cut entitlement programs, condemns Dubya and the Iraq war, supports affirmative action, supports medical marijuana, etc. If somebody were to tell you last year that a man with those policy positions would not only be leading the Republican primary, but leading even among the most conservative voters, you’d think they were crazy. The rest of the country has been trying to convince conservative Republicans to be more comfortable with those positions for decades, and we’ve failed miserably. Now Trump just waltzes in and everyone is like “Yeah, okay, sure”?
The secret of Trump’s success is that most conservative Republicans don’t really care about medical marijuana (or whatever) for its own sake. They care because opposing medical marijuana symbolizes membership in their tribe, they feel like their tribe is persecuted, they have a fierce loyalty to their tribe, and darned if they’re going to support somebody who doesn’t use the right shibboleths.
Trump throws them a bone. He says things like “illegal immigrants are rapists” that no moderate or liberal would ever say, things that would horrify them. He uses all the affectations of being working class. He may not quite prove he’s “one of us”, but he very effectively proves he’s not Just A Typical Outgroup Member. When Trump says “Legalize medical marijuana”, they don’t hear “I’m yet another RINO liberal pansy who hates Christian values and wants everybody to become reefer-smoking hippies”. So they only hear something boring about the regulations around pain relief medication – and who cares about those?
Trump’s Law is that if you want to convince people notorious for being unconvinceable, half the battle is using the right tribal signals to sound like you’re one of them.
For example, when I’m trying to convince conservatives, I veer my signaling way to the right. I started my defense of trigger warnings with “I complain a lot about the social justice movement”. Then I cited Jezebel and various Ethnic Studies professors being against trigger warnings. Then I tried to argue that trigger warnings actually go together well with strong versions of freedom of speech. At this point I haven’t even started arguing in favor of trigger warnings, I’ve just set up an unexpected terrain in which trigger warnings can be seen as a conservative thing supported by people who like free speech and don’t like social justice, and opposition to trigger warnings can be seen as the sort of very liberal thing that people like Jezebel and Ethnic Studies professors support. The important thing isn’t that I convince anyone that trigger warnings are really on the right – that’s a tall order – but that the rightists reading my argument feel like I’m working with them rather than against them. I’m not just another leftist saying “Support trigger warnings because it’s the leftist thing and you should be leftist and everyone on the right is terrible!”
My reward was seeing a bunch of hard-core anti-social-justice types trip over themselves in horror at actually being kind of convinced, which was pretty funny.
On the other hand, when I’m trying to convince feminists of something, I start with a trigger warning – partly because I genuinely believe it’s a good idea and those posts can be triggering, but also partly because starting with a trigger warning is a tribal signal that people on the right rarely use. It means that either I’m on their side, or I’m being unusually respectful to it. In this it’s a lot like Trump saying illegal immigrants are rapists – something the outgroup would never, ever do.
(And that’s not just my theory – I’ve gotten lots of angry comments about the trigger warnings from people further right than me, saying that using them makes me an idiot or a pushover or a cuck or something. I am always happy to get these comments, because it means the signaling value of using trigger warnings remains intact.)
Crossing tribal signaling boundaries is by far the most important persuasive technique I know, besides which none of the others even deserve to be called persuasive techniques at all. But to make it work, you have to actually understand the signals, and you have to have at least an ounce of honest sympathy for the other side. You can’t just be like “HELLO THERE, FELLOW LIBERALS! LET’S CREATE INTRUSIVE BIG GOVERNMENT AGENCIES TOGETHER! BUT BEFORE WE DO, I HAVE SOMETHING I WANT TO TELL YOU ABOUT THE SECOND AMENDMENT…”
Which I guess means that being able to consider both sides of an issue sort of gives you superpowers. That’s pretty encouraging."
I read it differently. I think this is mostly or entirely stuff Scott believes, with a juvenile mask of "I'm just giving advice." You did read the reply where he said, "I think many of the things in this post are on the border between "true" and "much more complicated than that but framed in a way that Republicans will appreciate", in a way I sort of feel bad about. But I don't think any of them were completely false..."
So the 1983 book on class completely ignored race, and that is also the big flaw here. Class is cultural, meaning race ultimately takes center stage, unfortunately.
One theme of the previous post was how each gradation of class fights like hell to differentiate themselves from the class immediately below them. Therein lies the problem with an attempt to form a political coalition of various lower classes. The Democratic coalition is often described as a high-low coalition: upper middle class + lower class. That coalition works because they both ally with their enemies' enemy, the white working class.
Flipping this script is specious because to get the necessary numbers the GOP would really need the white, black and Hispanic working classes. That won't happen because they are different classes in too close competition with each other.
I do admire the idealism of the post, however. Wish I weren't so cynical.
The GOP should start using the work "class" and mean "working class". Now more or less everything they stand for and have done is bad for the working class. So what would the point be?
Reducing social welfare programs, reducing healthcare programs, gutting environmental regulations resulting in more pollution where the working class lives and works etc.
Astonishing to see something which pretends to address "class" without addressing economic inequities, unless I missed something. Batsh!t crazy, along with the claim that "they’re understandably afraid experts will smuggle pro-Democrat bias into their judgments." It reads like a college sophomore's parody of Scott's positions, only more hastily written.
Thanks! After a very quick skim, Scott's approach still seems like an effort to define economic class out of existence, by ignoring it. Sort of like a kid hiding under the blanket.
I think this is a problem of terminology. Scott wants to talk about the thing Fussell calls "class", which doesn't realy have a better name for itself and is *distinct from* economic class. This doesn't have to mean ignoring economic classes, and the idea that one way of looking at the world would be incompatible with the other wouldn't even occur to anyone if we had two different words for these things.
I thought these were some great ideas. I did however feel this "I hate the Republican Party" was disingenuous - as if Scotts trying to hide his implicit support for the Republicans so he doesn't get attacked by the NYT again. He seems to hate the Democrats' messaging more, but can't bring himself to actually admit it.
LGBT association with elitism is pretty arbitrary. The phenomenon of "rightspeak and wrongspeak" about black issues that's entirely dissociated from productive or unproductive behavior towards actual black people has corollaries in LGBT issues; Gender studies, Queer Theory and so forth are sinecure factories that produce people who speak a very specific, largely unfalsifiable and meaningless language about LGBT people which exists primarily for signalling purposes. Actual LGBT people are in the same position in respect to the Republican party today that black people were in the time Malcolm X coined his parable of the Fox and the Wolf: We know Republicans are ill intentioned, but they're boundedly and predictably ill-intentioned, whereas we don't know anything concrete about liberals except that they find talking over real LGBT people convenient.
A suggested alternative framing: Scott's old post HOW THE WEST WAS WON (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won/). This posits a conflict between what Scott calls universal civilization (usually called western civilization, but Scott argues that those were the local cultures that industrialized civilization ate) and local cultures. Scott is undecided on whether one should cheer on the assimilation or the local resistance, asking only for consistency. I would suggest the blue tribe is the side of the universal civilization, and the red one is a local culture being eaten.
Since the universal civilization is described as basically "the best of everything", people may be resistant to associating that with the blue tribe. But consider:
• Scott gives as a paradigmatic example (along with coca cola & so-called "western" medicine) the new, equalized gender norms. The blue tribe is on the side of those, the red on the side of more conservative ones. (These days, I would add LGBT norms to that list.)
• Scott talks about how the universal civilization does better with more immigrants, while the local cultures want to resist them. This is one of the current main points of the culture war.
• Most of the "what works best" things come from experts — universal (i.e. effective) medicine from scientists. Scott has above ascribed them to the democratic (blue) tribe.
• For that matter, Scott gives as one example of a local civilization the Brexiters, for which the red tribe here is a ready parallel.
Why then do conservatives claim to be fighting for western civ? Because the term has two (at this point almost opposite) meanings. On the one hand it means the universal civilization: science, medicine, coca-cola, equal gender norms. On the other hand, it means the previous civilization which has been largely eaten by that—Scott mentions copying Latin manuscripts, which is certainly where someone like Rod Dreher seems to have his comfort zone. What the traditionalists want to go back to is the Christian church and the local culture that industrialism has devoured. (Capitalism is and always has been a revolutionary force & it was always weird for conservatives to embrace it.)
Note this gives both sides a way forward, too. The Republicans can run as a colonized civilization, and say they want the right to their traditional heritage (close to what they're saying anyway). The Democrats, on the other hand, can say that what makes unviversal civilization what it is is that it works & is good, and that we ought to want universal medicine & coca cola is tasty. This captures the cultural grievances which seem to be really the heart of Trumpism, on the one hand, and the desire for social & policy improvement that Democrats seem to love.
Scott might be exaggerating, but I can't imagine the Party is all that kindly disposed towards Bay-Area polyamorists. Not that this bothers him overmuch, as he's willing to engage anyone who isn't aligned with the cultural hegemon.
it is an oversimplification, a caricature perhaps, of a party with 35 mln members and at least as many non-members supporters. I suspect there are a few polyamorists among them.
Speaking as one...I like Scott. Plenty of Republicans just want to live and let live. Polyamory isn't for me, but who am I to tell a man what to do with his own life?
A libertarian in me says do what you want, it's no one's business. The conservative in me adds, but spare children and the innocent from the excesses of unhinged libertines. The problem with 'isms' (that includes polyamorism), in my opinion, is losing the boundaries of common sense and running away with "the idea."
Judging at least by commenters on SSC, DSL, and here, quite a lot of Republicans like and admire Scott. My impression is that such hostility as he has gotten has come mostly from the left — NYT not NR.
As a typical Rush Limbaugh fan, you'd be surprised at the variety of people in this region of the Internet who Rush would occasionally read or reference on air in his "The Little Tech Bloggers" segments.
I can't speak to the typical Rush Limbaugh fan, but National Review covered the NYT vs SSC story and had a favorable mention of the blog a couple of years ago. I expect that many of the sort of people who write for right wing media, NR or Fox, read people like Bryan Caplan, Robin Hanson, or Tyler Cowen. Some of them may even read me. So they are likely to have been exposed to SSC if only at second hand.
Isn't that more relevant than "socially adjacent"?
That's because Republicans won't dislike someone whose ideas and opinions differ from theirs. Animosity and intolerance stem from the other party, the one that claims a monopoly on inclusion and compassion.
Everyone says that about their own side and the other side. I don't expect this is entirely equal between the two sides by any means (though I don't know which is less tolerant and which is more) but it would be very surprising if, during a period of bitter political conflict, all the animosity and intolerance is on one side.
Posted this on Facebook channeling a similar vibe:
A theory: social classes don't like their immediate neighbors. At least for the classes in the middle.
The upper-middle class doesn't like the rich, whom they perceive as plutocrats who rig the system. They also don't like the lower-middle class, whom they see as ignorant and bigoted. But they speak fondly of the poor, whom they regard as having been cheated by an unfair system.
The lower-middle class, meanwhile, disdains the upper-middle class for their perceived elitism and entitlement. And in turn they don't like the poor, whom they consider lazy freeloaders who don't want to work. However, they have no problem with the very rich, whom they feel have earned their wealth.
I don't know what the very rich or the very poor think.
This is probably the most dangerous thing you have written. Congratulations!
Nature abhors a vacuum, and you have written this at *precisely* the right time to slide into the post-Trumpian hole, when the Republicans are looking for reference points but too hung over by the last four years to do anything of this sort. By sheer virtue of the following dynamic: "Well, what else are we going to do? Guess we'll do this. Also, this Scott guy can write! And he nailed what I felt but the leftist control over and turning to garbage of language didn't give me the categories to say! Go Scott!", you may become the next nucleation point of one side of the new alignment, you crafty old dog.
And honestly, this is a far better articulation and condensation/clarification/crystallisation of the positive side of Republican value than they have been able to come up with.
And you're a poster-case for a particular front in the current Kulturkampf, writing this immediately after showing bravely that 'You Shall Not Be Cancelled!', when public attention on you is still high, and you range freely, Lord of the (Substack) Leaderboard! Perfectly positioned to *actually* precipitate a new dynamic! This is a nuclear Tesuji grade move, dude; the strategic genius and chutzpah of this is astounding.
Bravo, maestro, bravo!
Three cheers for the new alignment: Long reign Scott! Long Reign Scott!!! LONG REIGN SCOTT!!!!!
Heh, if all this happens, and nothing goes horribly wrong in the realignment, and they magically pivot to being pro-immigration as part of it, I suppose i'll have to vote Republican!
But I'm pessimistic about them adopting prediction markets into their platforms, and that really seems essential. Because honestly, right now the Democratic coalition really does seem to be better at finding out important true things.
Like, okay, just look as masks. Mask-wearing started off being the "upper class" vaguely opposed for incoherent reasons; it was only supported by certain nerds. But belief in it was sufficiently justified — and it wasn't sufficiently opposed to Democratic biases — that "masks work" became common knowledge among them... at which point the Republican coalition insisted on opposing it, because they are defined by nothing other than opposition to the Democratic coalition. Same thing happened with a bunch of other true facts about pandemic — first it's common knowledge among y'all, then it's common knowledge among the blues, then it's opposed by the reds.
Since the "upper-class" "consensus institutions" do a mediocre-to-good job of figuring out what's true, if your pitch is for the red coalition to ramp up their identity being "opposition to blue" — then without prediction markets they'll continue being worse than nothing. Hopefully they become the party of legalizing accurate forecasts but I'm not holding my breath. (And in the meantime I guess I'll just keep shilling for prediction markets on our side.)
Plus, like I said, immigration is also a crux for me. The anti-immigration status quo is bad, the Republicans want to make it much worse. If warfare against "the upper class" includes warfare against the poorest people in the world, against the most disconnected people in our society... then fixing rampant credentialism isn't enough to sway me.
1. I forgot to mention free trade. My understanding is that global trade is pretty free at the moment, so I guess we have some wiggle room, but if Republican policies were sufficiently anti–free trade that too would make it harder for me to flip.
2. What do I mean by "something going horribly wrong in the realignment"? Well, look, I've been pretty consistent; from June 16th 2015 to Jan 20th 2021 my three big complaints against Trump in no particular order have been that he (1) is dumb, with very loose ties to objective reality; (2) is bigoted, especially against immigrants; and (3) has no commitment whatsoever to foundational liberal-democratic ideas (eg free speech, the idea of loyal opposition, the idea that elections are legitimate even when you lose, free press). Your strategy aims to fix #1, and as already discussed if you add in a flip-flop on immigration it fixes #2. But then there's #3; while your pitch doesn't include anything of the sort, I'm worried that if you try to keep the aesthetics/class rage of Trumpism, that will include copying over the rage against the parts of the system that we really need — and maybe executed more coherently than Trump has...
3. The reason I've been putting "upper-class" in quotes is that I'm not fully on-board with that label for this. I've always thought of class as economic class, and when someone tells me they're using a word or phrase in a very different way than I'm used to, I get worried about motte-and-baileys. E.g., "a jobs program for the upper class" sounds less bad if "upper class" includes plenty of low-mid-income people. (Not *good*, both because jobs programs are bad ways to do redistribution and because "lower class" low-mid-income people deserve redistribution too, but still.) Still, there's definitely some truth to this framing; all these deep-blue "consensus institutions" are indeed pretty upper-class.
I'll say: whenever I imagined a future where I could vote Republican, it always involved the party's powers explicit rejecting everything Trumpian. It didn't occur to me to wonder if you could keep the parts of Trumpism that appeal to people while taking away the parts that I think of as being its distinguishing features. It's more plausible than I would have thought! (Again, though — I'm not convinced Trump's appeal is just rage against the "upper-class"; there really does seem to be a lot of antipathy towards foreigners too.)
Class has always meant economically-associated culture. There's a reason there are terms like "genteel poverty" and "nouveau riche"; they describe people whose economic status doesn't align with their class status.
The man in a well-fitted suit is probably well-off economically, but so is the guy driving an F350 that clearly isn't actually a working vehicle. Yet those are clearly two different classes; one is someone from the working class but has more money, the other is an actual upper class person.
There was something said about Trump during the 2016 campaign that I can't trace the original quote from, but it I think makes the point quite well: "he's a poor man's idea of what a rich man is like". There's the trophy wives, there's the gilded rooms, the gold toilet, the golf courses, the fast food habit, the real furs and fur rugs.
Perhaps my usage has always been incorrect until Scott set me straight. (I don't know anything about cars, but if an F350 is something you need a middle income to afford, and the person who owns it affords it, I would have just said that person is middle-class, by definition.)
But if so, my vague impression is that lots of people are making the same mistake as me?
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Yeah, I remember the whole "a poor man's idea of what a rich man is like" slogan; I was always a bit uncomfortable with that and I'm grateful to Scott for making the bigger picture of Democratic "classism" clear to me.
Most rigorous definitions of "middle class" include a social as well as economic component. So there is no "by definition, someone who can afford X but not Y is middle class", even if common usage often does simplify it to just an income level.
Fussell's point, and Scott's (and many others including myself) is that the "it's just income" simplification is wrong and misleading. The successful plumber who worked his way up to running a small business with a dozen employees and now takes home $200k/year, is working-class. The barista with an MA in English Literature, living in her parents' basement on $20K/year while she looks in vain for a better job, is middle class.
You can make lots of interesting observations and predictions on this basis, which will be correct more often than not. The plumber probably owns a gun and voted for Donald Trump. The barista probably voted for Hillary and Biden, and in part because they promised stricter gun control. The barista will insist that her kids, if she gets around to having any, must go to college.
The plumber almost certainly has kids, and he's OK with their going into a trade or enlisting in the military. The poor barista, if she goes to the doctor complaining of joint pain, will get a vicodin prescription. The prosperous plumber will be thrown out as a pill-seeking junkie. The observations and predictions you can make on the basis of income alone, are mostly boring stuff like what sort of consumer goods they can afford to buy.
And even then, you'll learn more if you pay attention to what consumer goods they *choose* to buy. The person in the F-350, whether it be shiny and new or old and rusty, probably owns a gun and voted for Trump and may have a son in the military. The one in the Subaru, shiny and new or old and rusty, see above. The price tag on the vehicle is mostly a red herring.
What about vaccine funding? What about the principle that challenge trials should be illegal, covid tests should be illegal, raising the price on masks should be illegal, and distributing vaccines should be illegal unless the FDA or other authority specifically makes an exception?
The part you are missing is that the Democrat idea of a state staffed by experts where everything is illegal until approved is much worse than the Republican idea where you are free to do as you please.
Letting the experts decide is high status, defensible, obvious, and also wrong compared to a bottom up approach with limited government and a free market.
That's fair, I wish the Democratic supported those things. The pipeline from truth to Democratic common knowledge is not just too slow, but too clogged.
And yet even the Republicans, defined by opposition to Democrats, haven't come out in support of those things! They're too out there, too opposed to the status quo in an atypical direction, too outside the Overton window. The mistakes you listed were made under the Trump administration; if he or his people knew enough or cared enough, they could have fixed it. The Republicans support for free-market capitalism is at this point almost entirely rhetorical. They just don't care about it anymore, the way you and I do.
So, some true facts are too *out there* for anyone to support. Some true facts eventually filter their way to the Democratic common knowledge (at which point they are opposed by the Republicans). So until the Republicans set up a pipeline from truth to their established wisdom — even a broken pipeline, it doesn't have to be that good to compete with the Democrats' — I won't be able to support them. (Unless the Democratic pipeline gets completely severed too, I suppose.)
How would we get an objective read on which party's membership or hierarchy are better at saying true things and basing their decisions on them? It's easy enough to cherry-pick statements(Democratic rhetoric on racial issues seems to me to be quite disconnected from reality, for example), but it's not obvious how to avoid that and get a clear read.
I believe polls on knowledge of science and technology show Republicans doing a bit better than Democrats, but this may just be the fact that Republicans tend to be older, whiter, and more male than Democrats.
I feel this would only work were the Republican party purged of its activist base-Good luck convincing all the folks at Hillsdale, Claremont, etc. that 4-year college is overrated, nor do I see class being centered while politically conscious conservatives see themselves as waging a cosmic battle against the forces of Evil.
This brings us to the central problem-Social conservatism's primary appeal is as a bulwark against radical lunacy, but its core beliefs are simply obsolete in an industrial society. Traditional Christian sexual mores are not suited to a world with widely available birth control. Abortion is a perfect example of this-Both Left and Right have unpopular positions on the issue, but the Left's is more conducive to what the public wants, legal abortion up to a point, than the Right's.
As I see it, social progressivism has long enjoyed a prima facie advantage; its ideas are more appealing at a glance. It's very hard to argue, in a sexually permissive society, that homosexuality is somehow wrong. If such a case can be made (and I don't think it can), it is neither simple nor obvious. However, the Left may be losing that advantage-Ideas like "sex is on a spectrum" or "worship of the written word is white supremacist" are not, offhand, convincing. A more moderate, more proletarian social conservatism could fill the growing vacuum, but that would in turn need to defeat conservatism as it presently exists. I do not see traditionalists, bible-bashers, and the like coming quietly along.
I should add that Florida, which voted Republican this November while also passing a referendum for a $15 minimum wage, may be a harbinger of the Red Tribe's future.
I can't speak for Ukraine, but I am aware of how homosexuality was viewed here for most of the 20th century. My point is that traditional norms around it proved shaky in the absence of underlying logic. Americans didn't go straight from accepting extra-marital sex to accepting same-sex marriage, but, once the idea of sexual intercourse as a solely procreative act fell out of style, it was probably inevitable that the sex of one's partner would cease to matter.
I don't think so. I think the hostility to male homosexuality had an emotional basis deeper than belief that intercourse should be a solely procreative act. Nobody got upset over the fact that men continued to have intercourse with their wives after they got pregnant or went through menopause. The use of condoms was widely accepted pretty much as soon as they got cheap. The Catholic church has no objections to the rhythm method for preventing pregnancy.
CMC has something of a reputation for being conservative, but I'm pretty sure that's true only relative to academia and the other Claremont colleges in particular, if at all. Possibly the above commenter is mixing up the colleges with the Claremont Institute, which is conservative but is not actually affiliated with any of the colleges (and also not located in Claremont).
As terminology for the elite class I think that mandarins is the correct term like the mandarins of Imperial China they are educated in the sacred texts of their system and have taken many exams to prove it. They also believe that their education gives them the right to rule other classes.
Taxation: The Reagan Republican party spent the last 40 years lowering top marginal rates. The upper income bracket recipients of their largess responded by voting Democrat because Abortion and Gay Marriage.
The last Republican tax bill contained one feature the limitation of the SaLT (State and Local Tax) deduction that clearly made the Democrats in the Coastal States crazy.
Republicans should repay the ingratitude of the high income people by raising the top marginal rates to 50%. They should also "rescue" social security by removing the cap on taxable earnings.
Rule of law is class warfare. Should some judge be telling ORDINARY WORKING-CLASS AMERICANS like Donald Trump what to do?
Obviously, woke censoriousness is class warfare, but so is formal free speech. Some hippie is burning OUR FLAG in the street and some fucking egghead tells me an ORDINARY WORKING-CLASS AMERICAN like Gavin McInnes can't burn the hippy? Plus, formal free speech allows woke mobs to call people racist, which is the primary threat to The Spirit Of Free Speech. (Sam Francis in "Leviathan and Its Enemies," which anticipated all of these arguments, makes this point perfectly clearly. Speech is primarily used by the speechy classes, therefore when someone says civilization reach for your browning.)
Not dying in a nuclear holocaust is class warfare. You think an upper-class scumbag like an unemployed listicle writer with a degree in Shit I Don't Care About Studies is going to be useful in the post-apocalyse? Not at all! When the bombs drop, we'll all be released from our media-created woken mental prisons, and realize what we need is a REAL WORKING-CLASS AMERICAN with expertise in owning several car dealerships.
The greatest failing of the Republican party of the last decade is its inability to cultivate support from non-white ethnic groups that strongly skew socially conservative. During a (then) historically unpopular Republican presidency I watched Prop 8 repeal gay marriage in liberal California of all places. On election day non-white people rallied on the main street of my very liberal bay area town to promote it.
I can echo Scott, this cross-race class energy is there but so far the Republican party has no idea how to capture it.
I note that I fit fairly comfortably into the upper class as described, except that I love football and guns. Much of this seems already to be the Trumpist playbook, minus the use of the word "class". You would never see Trump railing against the "upper class", because he spent the majority of his life trying to convince people that he was the epitome of "upper class". This of course proves that he isn't upper class, since the upper class would never let it look like they have something to prove... which they don't.
There is a decent chunk of this they already do, and the stuff they don't do is because they are paid not to. I don't know why everyone has this stupid assumption that anyone in either party has any incentive beyond personal ambition to do anything that would be popular or help the country. They clearly do not. Once you've been elected you know you have an easy job waiting for you on K street should you lose your next election. The rest of the job is essentially political theatre; making promises you have no intention of keeping and finding creative reasons why you can't deliver, and finding ever more creative ways you can murder poor people. It's actually easier for them to be in the minority, easier to fundraise without all the hassle of governing.
If they cared at all about anyone in this country besides their donors it would be unbelievably easy to to institute broadly popular policies and soaking the rich to do so. The party that makes it so no one has to worry about going bankrupt if they see a doctor like every other non-3rd world country on the right and left has done for decades would be so popular they would be like the democrats with FDR. They don't because they do not care about winning, they care about being a good place for billionaires to write campaign checks.
That's the hard truth that everyone ignores because they have been spoon fed American exceptionalism their whole lives and reality would create cognitive dissonance. The only thing America is exceptional at is murdering poor people, at home and abroad.
They can either try to claim Ocasio-Cortez as one of their own with
> Yes, the working class should not be saddled with the debt of passing through the upper-class meat grinder!
Or they can repudiate the entire concept with
> No! Your upper-class shills won't suddenly get richer under our watch! Our constituents are the ones who were priced out of post-secondary education entirely!
How about (and this is just a guess here): "You say it doesn't matter what schools you they went to, but employers sure care. How about we forgive the debt AFTER we ban asking about college from job applications? Why does class never seem to matter when it's the upper class getting the benefit?"
"And as for your second point, we all know that money isn't going to our preschools. And it definitely isn't going to our stay at home parents. It's going to where you are going to reeducate working-class kids that their parents are evil and stupid."
This is very good. Obviously there's lots of details that could be filled in, but there is plenty of opportunity for Republicans to take this tack in a way that not only do they form a coherent message (for the first time in a long time), but they can scoop up the positions that Democrats have only lazily made any serious gesture to support. One example, and which is coherent with this emphasis on class, is to reform the education system - not by extending the credentialism that has becomes it main basis, but by reorganizing it to give a lot more emphasis to both 1) practical education (think: skilled labor) and 2) aggressive use of standardized testing to find our "best and brightest" (in a completely racially unbiased way) and provide them better concentrated forms of education that seek to maximize their potential, rather than letting them languish. An average kid should have the opportunity to start learning a skilled trade at 14, so that he can be fully independent by 18 - rather than the only track available for substantially improving his outcomes are college. Likewise, a very smart kid, regardless of race, should be provided the resources so they're earning college degrees by 18, and maybe even started on a PhD. It wouldn't require more resources, only a reorganization, and so is not only a practical improvement over the Democrat's bland insistence on a system which is simply credentialism that only helps their sinecured party supporters, but it is in line with Republican principles (such as they are) ostensibly promoting financial thriftiness.
I'm really only adding on to what you've said, this stuff is great, exactly the lines I've been thinking along for a couple years now since NRx.
You're "joking" here in the same sense that your neoreactionary FAQ was "anti" (i.e., transparently bullshitting so you don't scare off the last few naive lefties still taking you seriously).
My issue is that these proposals are all, line-by-line, very bad. Scott is an extremely influential person. He wouldn't be putting these ideas out there if he didn't think they were reasonable and worth adopting. Just look at all the people applauding the post unironically in the comment section!
This isn't "satire". This is obviously "Scott Alexanders's actual worldview" and it sucks. It's only two steps removed from mask-off neoreactionary. A war on "college, so-called experts, the media, and progressive cultural norms" is a war on "The Cathedral". Does he have to fucking spell it out for you?
The feeble, three-sentence , throat-clearing in the opening is just for maintaining plausible deniability with the leftists who he knows comprise the majority of his readers. Can't go full mask-off, not yet. Got lead people there, inch by inch.
I mean, you're not wrong, and I'm tempted to agree with you; but just saying "Scott is a neoreactionary and therefore bad bad terribad" is not super persuasive. What exactly is wrong with his actual, concrete proposals ?
I'm not interested in trying to persuade people who are that far gone.
Fortunately, we live in a democracy where universal consent of the government is not necessary. I don't actually have to convince anybody who thinks "war on experts" is a reasonable idea. So when the far-right looks up and shouts 'DEBATE US!'...I'll simply look down and whisper 'No.”
My feeling is that >75% of the public in currently unaware of what a "prediction market" is, and of these, an even larger portion would object to their use over experts once they are explained.
I think this sort of radical economic liberalism may have been able to be sold to the public 10-20 years ago, but the attitudes have been shifting against that ideology in both parties now for a while. It's an idea that showed up too late on the scene to make much of a splash IMO.
The rationalist bubble of libertarians/certain econ departments can make these ideologies seem more widespread than they really are. Even on the Predictit comment boards, its a bit of a running joke that these bets are supposed to provide "useful" information, rather than just a form of gambling with more steps.
That sounds super noble and cool, but it's also utterly unpersuasive. From my point of view, it's impossible to tell the difference between the guy who's strong and steadfast in his well-reasoned moral convictions; and the guy who doesn't have any argument at all and thus fills the void with empty bluster. I'm not a mind-reader, you know ?
I honestly believe credentialism and the current emphasis on college is bad and have said so on many occasions. I honestly believe prediction markets are good and have said so on many occasions. I honestly think the current form of wokeness is bad and have said so on many occasions. The media is too big and generalized to call good or bad, but I honestly believe it has class biases that it needs to consider and shed, and have said so on many occasions.
(I don't honestly think things like free trade are bad; an earlier version of this post included that as a nod to Republicans but I've taken it out).
I don't like the actual Republican Party, but this was an attempt to find the closest thing to the current Republican Party that I would like.
It's non-serious in the following ways: I don't expect the real Republican Party to be able to appreciate these ideas. It doesn't list all the major changes I want the Republican Party to make which are so far away from its current position that there's no way to get from there to here. It doesn't list my many disagreements with the Republican Party. It's more partisan and confrontational and conflict theorist than I would normally be.
It's serious in the following ways: I think this would be a better Republican Party than the one that currently exists, I think it would win them votes, I think the policies listed (especially banning degree discrimination and using prediction markets) are generally good ones.
You write as though this is some kind of conspiracy; as though "the bourgeois press" is *intentionally* doing this. But it isn't. It's Moloch all the way down, that's the key insight that Marxists tend to lose sight of (even though I think Marx himself had it).
Journalists don't wake up in the morning thinking "how can I nefariously spin the day's news in a way that will make capitalism look good?", they're just steeped in a classist culture themselves and so are guided by their own biases in how they look at events. If it is possible to get the individual journalists to realise and correct their biases, their writing will also cease to be biased.
I'm not interested in debating the merits of the object-level points of your post. This is not an attempt at persuasion.
This is more like...I just don't trust you anymore. How do I know what parts are serious? Which parts are tounge-in-cheeck? Are we just to pretend that your ample and devoted following aren't going to read this as a manifesto?
At the core: If you really, truly hate the Republican Party, why are you trying to give them advice that could, in your own words here, "win them votes"? Constructive criticism isn't something you do with your enemies, it's something you do with your allies! Yes, diving full-on into culture-war nonsense land, where six-digit contractors in Georgia get called "working class" while high school teachers are "upper class", may very will win Hawley the presidency. But to what end? So that you could get your no-caps prediction market? No other downsides to this plan, at all?
Because changing something he finds odious to something he finds less odious might be good, even if it's more successful? They did just elect Trump and almost re-elected him...is success the margin you need to be concerned about, or quality? Because there's a clear trade-off you aren't willing to recognize but Scott is.
There are significant downsides to cultivating "anti college, anti-expert, and anti mainstream-media" values that will encompass far more than the anodyne proposals Scott is suggesting.
A amplified "war on experts" will not merely result in lifting caps on prediction markets. An elevated "war on mainstream media" will not merely result in the NYT hiring more Ross Douthats. Enshrining the "war on college" as a policy platform will not result strictly in progressive friendly outcomes like "high school students no longer required to pledge to go to college".
I sincerely think this line of thinking of everyone is either an "allie" or an "enemy" is sincerely bad, especially when applied to a two party system where we will always have the "enemy* party. If we want things to be good in a stable way, we need a republican party that we find more reasonable. And hoping that is just Democrats v2 is unrealistic. We don't want a party of enemies.
We could easily have a two party system where one party isn't an enemy to the other. And in fact we *did* as recently as ~15-20 years ago.
So I don't call them the "enemy" because they are the "other". I call them the enemy because their policy proposals, nearly universally, are in opposition to everything I value. And I expect Republicans to feel the same way about me: an anti-nationalist, radical environmentalist, progressive authoritarian, state-socialist who would side with China over the US in a shooting war.
It's like, yes, I AM here to destroy everything you hold dear, that's right. It would indeed be rational for you to view me as your enemy, if the concept of "ally vs enemy" is to have any currency whatsoever.
As an outsider I always find it confusing why many Americans talk about their politics as if their party can deliver a final defeating blow to the other party and rule forever. I don't think that's how your system is set up, is it?
To have normal governance you need both parties to be at least somewhat reasonable. There is no other option. Take climate change, for example. How effective even the most ambitious green plan can be if every 4 or 8 years all regulations are rolled back and new coal plants erected?
But how can Republican party transform from what it is now into something that is at least somewhat more reasonable? Because whatever it will transform into will have to be supported by people who voted for Trump. I think that's a very important question.
> As an outsider I always find it confusing why many Americans talk about their politics as if their party can deliver a final defeating blow to the other party and rule forever. I don't think that's how your system is set up, is it?
Because talking about how complete victory (if we win) or total destruction (if we lose) is going to happen is part of the get-out-the-vote effort. Does it work? Doesn't matter, we are too locked in to risk it not working.
From 1933 to 1981, the Democratic Party held both chambers of congress for all but four years.
Nothing is "forever", sure. But 40 years of single-party dominance has happened in the United State's recent past. I agree of course that "Republicans get better ideas" is a nice (if fanciful) idea. But "Republicans get crushed like a bug, until everyone involved with it today has died of old age" is a far more realistic scenario (abolishing the electoral college + statehood for DC and all territories would just about seal it, no?) and one that Democrats should be aiming for.
It's honestly kind of sinister, you get the impression that people secretly want to gain absolute power and imprison all their political enemies, but rarely have the guts to explicitly say so.
Class may be the wrong word for it, but there's some real sense in which an adjunct sociology professor making barista wages and Anderson Cooper are on the same side, and it's not the same side as a dentist in a small midwestern town or a plumber in a medium-sized city.
The "real sense" is that one group is more likely to be socially and economically conservative, and the other is not. This is what unites plumbers and small business owners, and professors and rich media figures. It's no more complicated than that.
But this obvious explanation doesn't make Republicans feel like the heroic underdogs. So instead, Scott attempts to redifine "conservative" as "lower class", such that somehow Elon Musk is "lower" than a social worker making $30,000 a year. And who doesn't like a scrappy fighter (lumber barons) against the "elites" (high school teachers).
It would be humorous if people wern't appearng to eat it up ironically.
You mean the first two are likely to be Dems and the second two are likely to be Republicans (unless black)? We already have 'Democrat' and 'Republican' as words for that, right?
A: "How do you do, fellow Democrats. Here's a how-to-guide for the Republican Party to become a snake den of insane reactionaries, and start winning elections again. I think this is would be good thing!"
B: Ehhhhh....I don't know if we are even on the side anymore. This looks like you're supporting the opposite of everything that I think is good. Maybe you aren't really as opposed to the Republican Party as you say you are. Sometimes people do just go on the internet and tell lies.
You: Oh??? So you just want writing that flatters your sense of being a LEFTIST INTELLECTUAL??
I appreciate you acknowledging me as the intellectual I am. I am indeed very smart. Smart enough I know when someone is trying to trick me. Smart enough to know when coincidences turn into patterns, which turn into red flags. Yes, I do want writing that is both leftist and intellectual. I want to hear from people who are trying to make the world a better place, not a worse one. Life is too short to waste time with idiots or con-men.
I think you should append this explanation to the text of the post. While it's obvious that it's satire on a certain level, it wasn't entirely legible to me which aspects were sincere before you spelled it out, and will be much less obvious to new readers; you've been sufficiently precise about epistemic status in the past that I don't think that ambiguity is a good thing, especially on a topic people are guaranteed to get angry about.
> I think this would be a better Republican Party than the one that currently exists, I think it would win them votes
Would it really win them votes, on the net ? It seems like they'd gain your own Gray Tribe votes at the expense of their current base, which is quite extensive. Is this a tradeoff worth making ?
The majority of Christian Evangelicals and rural and/or low-income voters (though obviously there's an overlap in that Venn Diagram). Basically anyone who's motivated by hatred of the Democrats, as opposed to any kind of long-term socioeconomic policy. The same applies to Democrats, of course, just in reverse.
You think Scott is actually against immigration and free trade?
As I read it, it's a mix of positions Scott actually supports and positions that he thinks would work for the approach he is suggesting for the Republican party even if he does not support them, tied together with plausible rhetoric they could use. He may well think that it would be a good thing if the Republicans followed this line, but not because he agrees with all of it.
Does Scott talk about immigration or free trade? Did I mention it? No to both.
He's a libertarian-capitalist arguing for libertarian-capitalist things. And if that results in people being very confused about who actually has power over them (lumber baron=lower class, teachers =upper class?), that's just collateral damage I suppose. The near-verbatim overlap between between his ideal "war on [thing]" and standard NrX talking points is an exercise left to the reader.
David, we've been debating on and off for years now, and there's probably nothing I can say to change your mind. You know where I stand, and I know where you stand. I know why you follow Scott, but I know longer know why I do.
I just...don't care what he thinks anymore. We have next to nothing in common, no shared values, and we're working towards diametrically opposed goals. He's outlining a plan here that is essentially "a how-to guide to co-opting the economic left and installing reactionaries in government". I'm embarrassed that I payed as much attention to him as I did. Maybe I've changed, but maybe he's changed as well. I can't image a post like this 3-4 years ago.
In the version of the essay I read I believe he included an anti-free trade argument — it's possible that he has edited that out by now. I think there was also something about immigration, but I'm not sure. I interpreted your argument as assuming that Scott was actually in favor of all the things in the post, so was pointing out that he wasn't.
'Maybe I've changed, but maybe he's changed as well. I can't image a post like this 3-4 years ago.'
This puzzles me: 3-4 years ago he already had Nick Land and people like that on his blogroll and had written this https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/ (Yeah, he wrote the anti-thing, but nothing in the current post takes back any of the arguments from that!). I don't really see how this is different? (As someone who has always enjoyed his writing but also always felt a bit guilty about it because of the above.)
Quoting Scott Aaronson: "The [NYT] piece says that Scott once had neoreactionary thinker Nick Land on his blogroll. Again, important context is missing: this was back when Land was mainly known for his strange writings on AI and philosophy, before his neoreactionary turn."
Wait. The post is like 80% things the class-first left has been shouting on top of their lungs for years, 15% spin that would make it palatable to conservatives, 5% Scott's hobby horses. The last one is obviously his actual worldview, the middle one may or may not be, we know he's genuinely supporting capitalism, for example, but there's certainly plausible deniability. (Plus some of it feels like them being cheated. Class being about culture? Ha ha, most of is just not legibly economic, and all is downstream from the base anyway, you're now Marxists, suckers.) But how can you look at the whole, or most of it in isolation, and think it's reactionary rather than a direct consequence of observing reality from a leftist, egalitarian point of view?
This is not a rhetorical question, I am genuinely asking for an answer, from someone I recognize as writing things I usually strongly agree with. Because there's a huge rift on the left, even understood as people I actually tend to trust as being on the left, right now across these very lines. And because I've seen these exact points disregarded as "reactionary" for years, to the point where I'm increasingly ready to return the favor and just disregard anyone expressing that sentiment as, well, a liberal (by which I, obviously, mean someone invested in the perpetuation of current exploitative capitalist system). I just want to understand.
I mean, I can see you saying "the 80% is just common sense anyone can agree with, so the bad 20% is the part that actually matters". but I don't think people invested in the current system agree (so even if the remainder is all bad, I can't help but interpreting the post as beneficial by spreading ideas I don't think are being widespread enough). I think only people opposing the current system agree, and this happens to include both reactionaries and progressives (hate the term, actual people self-describing that way are too certain about where the progress leads, but there's no better word to describe "the exact [expletive] opposite of a reactionary"). I don't think this alone makes the two groups in any ways alike. Besides, you're not saying the proposals are putting a wrong spin on the real issues and solutions, you're saying they're "all, line-by-line, very bad", and I'm like, how? It's mostly regular anti-elitism, and that's good, how can it not be good? It's also very unusual for Scott for this precise reason, so, not his actual worldview, because I wouldn't expect to agree as much with his actual worldview, it would probably be much more "prediction markets" and much less "fuck the elites".
The basic crux of Scott's proposal, as I understand it (and emphasized by the title image), is that Republican should co-opt the Left's use of economic class (both in the strictly Marxist meaning, or the more colloquial "income class") in replace it with the same word, but one that means something totally different and strictly cultural. This new meaning instead places the Red Tribe friends (lumber barons and Elon Musk, for example) as part of the scrappy-underdog "lower class", while Blue Tribe folk (such as social workers, teachers, grad students) get placed in the arrogant, condescending "upper class".
The upshot to sowing of all of this deliberate confusion is that the Republican Party would become better (?) and maybe even win more votes (???).
But this is obviously a step backwards, in terms of getting working-class Republicans to understand who-rules-whom, and where power comes from. The only world in which this makes sense as a strategy, is one where the vast majority of Republicans are already soaked-to-the-bone hardcore ideological neoreactionaries, so you have nothing left to lose but to channel these hardcore commitments into something less objectionable. BUT THIS IS NOT THE WORLD WE LIVE IN. Republicans are notorious for not having strong ideological economic commitments! They're all about culture war bullshit now! How could anyone look at the trajectory of the Republican Party in the past 10 years and say, "welp, looks like we'll have to abandon getting Republicans to understanding class consciousness, they're just too ideologically committed" Republicans are closer than ever moving to the left on economics (look at minimum wage increases, Medicare expansion in red states). The are starting to hate billionaires. We should be encouraging them to lean into this, to double down. Scott suggests to do the opposite, and find a way to trick them into defending Elon Musk from tax increases.
To me, it looks like Scott realizes is worried because this trend in the Republican Party is in opposition to his libertarian-capitalist agenda, and he is simply trying to find a way to poison the well with a nonsense use of "class" before Republicans take it any further. The old way Republicans did this was saying "You know who REALLY has power over you? The immigrants taking your jobs, and the blacks on welfare checks!" Scott thinks the new, better way is to say "You know who really rules over you? Teachers, social workers, and grad students!" And yeah, sure, the Right might buy that line of thinking. It's savvy and fits with the current zeitgeist. Congrats on finding a clever way to deliberately confuse people and make the world a worse place.
But "make the world a worse place", really? Yes, really. Scott's trick here was to rattle off a list of anodyne (even progressive-friendly) policy outcomes at the end of the article, and suggest that the only route to get there is through adopting the neoreactionary framework. Raise taxes on rich universities? Make it easier for high school students to graduate? Who doesn't want that?? All you have to do is start a War on College, War on the Media, and War on Experts. Will there be any other consequences to waging these wars? Any possible unstated negative outcomes, any at all? Crickets. Again, the only way this "works" from the leftist perspective is if we assume that Republican voters are hardcore ideologues who are already waging a War on College, the Media, and Experts, so we might as well channel this into something useful. But these ideas are on the radical fringe on the Right! Most of them would be more palatable on the DSA left! And as someone else helpfully pointed out in the comments, the whole premise of this post assumes that moderate conservatives don't exist. Scott is describing the ideology of lunatic Motte posters, not the viewpoint of a party who as recently as 2012 elected Mitt Romney to be their representative.
You want to lift caps on prediction markets? Reduce the monopolistic power of social media companies? Make life easier for people without college degrees? You don't need to become a neoreactionary to do that. The idea that you do, when stated plainly, is laughable on its face. But Scott, playing a role that I can only describe as "con man", has got people pumping their fists in the comments going "HELL YEAH! finally someone who speaks to me, Scott for president 2024!" He is doing the very simple trick politicians do, were they list the good outcomes, declines to list the bad ones, and suggests that his way is the only way to get there. Don't be duped.
See you at sneerclub, I use a different pseduo there.
This is an interesting comment but there are two weird assumptions here.
The first is that it is bizarre to suppose that Scott actually has the power to "poison the well" on a nation-wide scale even if he wanted to. He doesn't. More importantly, whatever you may think of him morally, surely you agree that he is too *smart* to seriously believe that he has that kind of power. This essay cannot *actually* be meant to change the course of the Republican Party.
The second weird take is the idea that Scott is here trying to *change* the Republicans' worldview one way or the other, in the first place. As highlighted by the title ("Use The Word Class"), my understanding was that Scott was trying to tell Republicans "guys, I know you're not sure what you believe, but I think I've found the coherent theory that perfectly explicates all your current beliefs, and which must therefore be what you already believe deep down without having managed to put into words".
Which brings me to my read on this essay: beneath the satire, I read it as an attempt to present a theory of why the current Republicans believe what they believe. It is not telling Republicans "you should believe in class struggle!", but rather, informing readers (who may or may not be Republicans) "I have discovered that Republicans actually believe in a weird version of class struggle, they just don't word it that way".
1. This blog is literally the #1 substack in its leader-board category. Its readers are disproportionately wealthy, highly educated, and politically attuned. Serious media figures are known to be readers. Scott would be dumb if he *didn't* realize he has massive power to shape political discourse.
2. I know my claim of "this isn't satire, or even a Scott's impression of what those wacky Republicans believe, this is what Scott really thinks would be a good policy platform" requires a little more outside context than is available on this single page. But I'm telling you, it's at least in the ballpark (https://mobile.twitter.com/queersing/status/1361364005793632256/photo/2) There is also other outside context that I would almost certainly be banned for linking to or describing.
There's a lot in this comment I disagree with, but it also includes several concise summaries of the issues I have with the post:
>The basic crux of Scott's proposal, as I understand it (and emphasized by the title image), is that Republican should co-opt the Left's use of economic class (both in the strictly Marxist meaning, or the more colloquial "income class") in replace it with the same word, but one that means something totally different and strictly cultural. This new meaning instead places the Red Tribe friends (lumber barons and Elon Musk, for example) as part of the scrappy-underdog "lower class", while Blue Tribe folk (such as social workers, teachers, grad students) get placed in the arrogant, condescending "upper class".
The "Tribe" language is probably my least favorite product of SSC, not because it's entirely wrong but because it's thoroughly unhelpful. Reification of stereotypes doesn't increase knowledge! So doubling down by equating the upper class with the Blue Tribe is baffling.
>BUT THIS IS NOT THE WORLD WE LIVE IN. Republicans are notorious for not having strong ideological economic commitments! They're all about culture war bullshit now! How could anyone look at the trajectory of the Republican Party in the past 10 years and say, "welp, looks like we'll have to abandon getting Republicans to understanding class consciousness, they're just too ideologically committed"
The big two US parties are at their core political coalitions, not ideological movements. Any theory that depends (or worse, assumes!) on their ideological consistency is deeply flawed.
>But "make the world a worse place", really? Yes, really. Scott's trick here was to rattle off a list of anodyne (even progressive-friendly) policy outcomes at the end of the article, and suggest that the only route to get there is through adopting the neoreactionary framework.
I don't agree that Scott's using an NRx frame per se, but the disconnect between rhetoric and proposed outcomes is jarring. And I think disconnect is the right word - the gap between the two is either left empty or plugged by wishful thinking, with no tolerance for opposing actors. Political ecosystems are complicated!
>Who doesn't want that?? All you have to do is start a War on College, War on the Media, and War on Experts. Will there be any other consequences to waging these wars? Any possible unstated negative outcomes, any at all? Crickets.
+1. Wars on Things tend to only look like a good idea if you expect to be insulated from the collateral damage. This plays into the above, where the consequences of the rhetoric are unlikely to be the outcomes Scott wants.
>But these ideas are on the radical fringe on the Right! Most of them would be more palatable on the DSA left! And as someone else helpfully pointed out in the comments, the whole premise of this post assumes that moderate conservatives don't exist. Scott is describing the ideology of lunatic Motte posters, not the viewpoint of a party who as recently as 2012 elected Mitt Romney to be their representative.
I feel like in a nutshell, it's a pitch to the rightmost quintile that trades on demonizing the leftmost quintile, while not really understanding either. It's *trying* to use the Dark Arts, but Scott's not very good at them. Which is good, I guess.
[to clarify, by "more palatable for the DSA left", I was referring to the proposals such as raising taxes on universities and reducing monopolistic media control, not waging a War on College, the Media, and Experts]
I mean, NRs are authoritarian fascists. This is not fash in any sense, though it is broadly right: it's not glorifying the nation, attacking democracy, giving a vision of a pure past to which we can return, shitting on feminism. It's true that fash complain about experts and political correctness, but that doesn't distinguish them from the moderate right. I'm *far* more bothered that Scott engaged seriously with NRxers back in the day and recommended their blogs (the latter especially), or some of the things he's written about feminism, than be anything in this post. I see where your concern is coming from, a bit, I guess, but, I don't really see how this is different from what he was saying 5 years ago?
I think the words you are actually groping for as targets are "elites" and "elitism." Class resentment does not, and never will, resonate with Americans. Wealth and manners are not objectionable. Talent and success certainly aren't. It is rather the arrogant, undeserved power of the smug, entitled, and mostly mediocre "Ruling Elite." Republicans don't even have to make much effort as the Ruling Elite is discrediting and beclowning itself as fast as it can.
At some point the taboo against politicizing white identity will eventually break down in response to the elite's actual straight-up anti-white racism. It is so mainstream that Coca-Cola is literally browbeating its employees to "be less white." (How would "be less Jewish" go over as its corporate slogan?). The taboo is so strong that even this can't be called "racist" -- instead, it's bad because it's "divisive."
The Republican establishment is constitutionally incapable of being authentic or proactive. But the opposition script will write itself as the left overreaches.
What complete bullshit. Class in this country is nothing but income, no matter how badly you want to suck up to millionaire paving contractors by telling them they’re being persecuted by English teachers. Trump, assuming he has the money he says, is upper class even though he’s an ignorant ass with terrible taste.
Money buys power; education and good taste do not. If you have money, you have power, and Paul Fussell’s dimwitted sequel to The Preppy Handbook doesn’t change that fact.
The data is surprisingly tricky to run down and probably fluctuates at the true min/max, but at a glance it appears these are Long Island's South Shore (NY-2) and Tucson (AZ-2) respectively. Defining the median voter is a tricky task, but glancing at median income I find Eharding's claim difficult to believe without some pretty good evidence.
I think the fact that you can be uncertain of whether Trump does in fact materially have the money that you say would arbitrarily flip the tag from "middle-class" to "upper-class" is proof enough that there are some axes of how "status" works in America that aren't determined by the actual bottom of line of your actual current holdings.
Scott, due to having been very enthused by his reading of Fussell, has decided to call one of these other axes "class", as Fussell did. I get that this is annoying to Marxists (for whom "class" is defined neither by wealth or culture, but rather by relationship to the means of production; e.g. while a non-standard example a very successful artist, no matter how rich remains "working class" insofar as their wealth is a direct result of the work they produce), and to people who want to use the vernacular sense of "class" as a synonym for "income level". But that is what he has decided to do. Those are three different meanings of the word "class" — there may be more — not a case of being wrong about what class "is".
Ugh, that feeling when the American political system is so screwed up that the only way to fix it is for someone to write a completely sensible platform for the Republican party and that someone has to be Scott Alexander.
Couldn't you figure out how to spin switching to low tariffs? Perhaps to actually help the lower classes, rather than appearing to help some of them while hurting them more in the aggregate?
They're already in high-tariff mode so it's easier to update their messaging to continue in their current direction, although the messaging works for both.
Plus, this way it solidifies the Ds as being anti-tariff and it would be nice if both sides had some good points.
Haven't the Republicans been doing this for years with all the "elites," "coastal elites," "flyover," "peasants with pitchforks" and the rest? Also, Reagan, Bush Jnr. being "misunderestimated," Sarah Palin etc.
Also, aren't Americans too aspirational?
In terms of the policies, 3 and 4 are pretty close to where they are now. 2 soundbites down to "so-called experts don't know anything and use long words to trick you, lets trust some college professor's magic truth machine" (even if prediction markets are good, they're not explicable in soundbite form - counterargument is I can imagine Ross Perot explaining them with lots of handheld slides).
1 is an undoubtedly a good idea, given the disaster that is credentialism, but is... directly contrary to American culture? You guys love education. You pretend you don't, but nowhere else in the developed world has adverts for colleges on freeway billboards. 2/3 Americans go to college these days (fewer went in the past, hence the college-educated population is smaller), and among whites the proportion is even higher. Proles want their kids to go to college, and unlike their counterparts in some countries would throw a party if their kid went to Harvard. They're keen enough to sustain private colleges that are basically just cons (the upper middle class aren't going to those), not to mention community colleges. Trump himself endlessly banged on about how he went to the Wharton Business School, and I'd swear I saw vox pops where Trump-voters repeated it! That's how you can sustain a whole class system based almost purely on education (which in turn is why you think you're an anti-education country, as the educated mourn the fact that people who didn't go to college even exist - nowhere else on Earth could manage that). This wouldn't be like running against Jesus, or freedom, or flags, or guns or whatever. This is running against America; like the Saudi Atheist Party, or Irish prohibitionism. The GOP would have better luck if they adopted the hammer and sickle elephant.
I don't understand how prediction markets can answer long-term questions. For example, there are lots of questions on Metaculus right now to the extent of "X will happen in 100 years". What's the point on placing bets on such questions ? In 100 years, both I and Metaculus will likely be long dead. It's not like the stock market, where the stock pays dividends even if I hold it.
This is why IMO prediction markets cannot prove global warming: it's a relatively long-term process. There's no way to make any money off of it.
Suppose we ask the question "Will it be 2 degrees warmer than today in the year 2121?", we start off 50-50 uncertain, and you buy one share for 50 cents.
In 2071, it's 1.7 degrees warmer, nobody has put the slightest effort into solving global warming, and scientists have updated their predictions to say it will get 3 degrees warmer by 2121. Given that it now seems very likely that the prediction will come true, the value of your share goes up to 80 cents. You sell for a 30 cent profit, and you didn't even have to wait until 2121.
If in 2031, the government has done a bad job fighting global warming and mostly given up, and warming continues to outpace predictions, you could probably sell for 55 or 60 cents.
The point is, you don't have to wait for the event to happen. You can sell to someone else for whatever the probability seems like at any given time.
Since, if it will be 2 degrees warmer in 2121, we expect this to become gradually clearer with time, you should expect the value of your share to appreciate in a relatively consistent way.
(there's another issue where you're failing to have the money in the stock market during this time; I think the theoretical solution is that you give it to the prediction market to hold in escrow and they keep it in an index fund the whole time).
Again though, I think those entirely different ideas. The difference between "Class [Fussell]" and "Class [Marx]" is about as great as the difference between "Orange [Fruit]" and "Orange [Colour]". There is an etymological reason why they have the same name in 21st century English but they are independent, equally real concepts.
Of course, if as a Marxist you think "Class [Marx]", the economic concept, is more directly relevant, that is your absolute right and indeed you might *be* right. But that doesn't mean "Class [Fussell]", the cultural concept, cannot be a meaningful entity in its own right. The point Scott makes in this post is that most of the behaviour of current Republicans is rooted in concerns of theirs that have to do with "Class [Fussell]".
If you think "Class [Fussell]" is unimportant and shouldn't be focused on, well, that's just one more reason for you to be against the Republicans, y'know? But there's just no need to pretend that Scott is misunderstanding "Class [Marx]". He isn't. He's just talking about an orthogonal concept that happens to have the same name.
Thank you for this admission but I've going to have to reiterate my demand that you cease and desist your gatekeeping of the interests of the working class.
"If you say that more lowerclass people enjoy NASCAR while more upperclass people enjoy Polo - is that not gatekeeping?"
no, its an observation.
"Of course, I am a Marxist so I believe that class has a lot to do with your relation to the means of production."
Of course, Marx was a bourgeois parasite who never worked a day in his life so his analysis is hopelessly flawed.
"I think it's a lot more useful than quibbling over if certain hats are upper-upper-oldmoney-class or lower-middle-class or whatever."
then obviously you aren't making observations but prescriptive assertions when you make statements about the interests of what you consider the working class. Whether gentlemen prefer NASCAR or polo has no bearing on their capital relations.
Why would anyone lock up that money for 100 years to earn a mere 100% profit, when you could earn a 13000% profit by investing it in the stock market (assuming a 5% annual rate of return)? This scales to nearly any timeline. There will almost always be a better investment than a prediction market available.
This is a potentially solvable problem by having the market maker place the bets in the stock market (or whatever other financial investment you want to index to), and then using that as a payout to the winner.
That's a more financially valid proposal than simple dollar amounts, but it also makes the returns of prediction markets dependent on the broader stock market. That seems like it would create dangerous conflicts of interest for would-be forecasters - is it worth investing in a prediction that, if taken seriously by policymakers, would have negative effects on the stock market?
That being said, I may actually make my first PredictIt bet based on this. Trump is currently at ~0.30$ to be the 2024 Republican nominee on PredictIt, and I'm ~80% confident he'll run and win. That kind of rate of return over ~3.5 years beats out any reasonable stock market investment.
Yes, you're correct there can be problems with linking payoffs to stocks. More realistically, I would expect prediction markets to have the wagers earn some sort of short-term risk-free rate (the same arrangement as collateral agreements for financial instruments), so that you should be indifferent as to the market impact of the outcomes you're betting on.
For really long-term bets, where the risk-free rate is a substantial opportunity cost over returns on stocks, there still might be a benefit to offering additional contracts that are linked to higher-returning asset classes. There's some tradeoff, though, with adding too many contract variations and creating an illiquid or fragmented market.
Prediction markets driven by financial incentives have difficulty converging on truth more precisely than the rate of return of competing investments. This is immediately obvious to anyone who plays them themselves as the error on *each proposition* can often be in the neighborhood of 2-5% depending on expiry, meaning markets with many propositions can give strikingly incoherent results.
Yes, if I'm allowed to trade shares on the prediction market just as I can on the real stock market, I could make money -- sorry, I did not realize this was a standard-issue feature for prediction markets.
That said though, is there anything that prevents the idealized de-regulated prediction markets from becoming partially (or even mostly !) decoupled from the actual predictions, much in the same way as the real stock market is partially decoupled from real human productivity. What would prevent prediction markets from forming financial instruments such as CDOs; or from employing HFT; etc. ?
Great post and as a center-right guy Id be fully on board except one tiny semantic issue: Use Elitist instead of Class. Class is just too close to Marxism to pass fodder in real Republican circles. Otherwise looks completely doable.
Totally Agree with this. This describes why my family from Rural Idaho, were simultaneously Sanders Voters and Trump Voters. It all comes down to class.
As a candid data point from another side of the aisle, I’m what you’d probably call a Rockefeller Republican and I find this policy agenda horrifying, but mostly because it probably would be very successful and where the GOP is going these days anyway.
I’m a lifelong Republican, and I’ve always modeled them as a pro-business party that realizes those policies are hugely electorally unpopular, so engages in conning the poor into voting for them. I didn’t realize until relatively recently that this was even controversial. Growing up, for instance, I always figured that the reason the GOP was usually hawkish on military conflicts was to cull out their lower class ranks a bit. Everyone’s a winner: the poor with their dead-end rust belt futures would get a chance to go play soldier and die in glory, and the upper ranks maintain the careful balance of not letting the type of people that ultimately formed Trump’s base getting too many numbers. I only realized years later that others either weren’t that cynical or at least weren’t open about it. And I suppose I overestimated the casualties from our modern conflicts.
While the above does seem quite cynical after I type it out, I never saw this as ethically problematic. I’m a utilitarian, and I think a lot of policies that are wildly unpopular—free trade, open immigration, eliminating capital gains taxes and the estate tax—pretty clearly result in huge gains in human welfare, and if it takes some cynicism to make everyone on net wealthier and happier in the long run, it’s a huge win for human welfare. While I am deeply saddened by what has happened to the GOP in recent years, I admit we played with fire and got burned. Them’s the breaks.
What does especially sadden me, beyond how close we got pre-Trump before having it snatched away (I loved the Romney/Ryan ticket and Jeb), is what political home this leaves people like me. I know people keep saying the Democrats, but I don’t see it and certainly don’t feel welcome, especially with how aggressively they’ve recently courted the Bernie wing of the party. And it especially galls me how they keep trying to position themselves as the party of science on one hand, while failing to follow through on that so much in practice—if they’d just go pro-nuclear and -Keystone Pipeline I’d be somewhat happy, to pick some relatively non-controversial items.
I remember I thought that in 2016, Clinton would make a hard swing to the center at the convention, basically pull a David Cameron from the other direction as I understood his policies, and gut the GOP by forcing it into becoming a working class party. But that didn’t play out. Maybe my sense of the electorate isn’t all that great.
FWIW, I agree with you on some of those policies, and disagree on others (though I could be persuaded). Unfortunately, I could never vote Republican, since they've made it pretty clear that they're the party of traditional (bordering on Fundamentalist) Christian values. I'm not a Christian (and about half my friends are gay-married to each other, the horror !), so I'm pretty much not in their target demographic.
I find it difficult to reconcile the economic/international policies of the Republicans with their moral stance; and, from my admittedly biased perspective, any substantive policies have long ago taken a back seat to their more theocratic/Evangelical shibboleths. Ironically, Trump would've been more palatable to me than the average Republican, because he seemed to at least care about long-term economic policy in some way... you know, while being an insane shitposting clown, which is too bad.
The difference between "working class" in the cultural signifier sense and "proletariat" in the Marxian sense (those who labour in subservience to largely unaccountable managers) has been devastating to left-of-centre parties in Europe. Nowadays in most European countries you have a large population of well-educated, mostly younger people who have firmly middle-class values and are capable of doing highly-skilled jobs, but are definitely proles in terms of their real working conditions, generally with less bargaining power than their parents at the same age (even though the parents tend to be less educated and more prolish in Fussell's sense). When left-wing parties try to campaign on material interests, where they are clearly on the side of the majority, their message almost inevitably ends up coded as "white working class" (which upsets the young progressives) or "progressive" (which upsets the socially conservative "working class"), and they struggle to put the two halves of their electoral coalition together. Democrats in the USA seem to have survived this because a) compared to Europe, there are many more voters of colour and/or with a recent immigrant background in the USA, who are pushed away from the Republican coalition even if they are culturally conservative and b) most European right-wing parties have no trouble attracting female voters, whereas the US conservative position on e.g. abortion has driven away a majority of women. If you just look at white men in the USA versus white men in Europe, though, the Democrats look just as weak as their European counterparts (and in pretty much every state too).
The CDU are a very different party ideologically from the Republicans, though: they're conservative in the sense of upholding the status quo and not doing anything too radical, and they run on a message of pragmatism and competence. That kind of thing works well in Germany, where there is still something of a centrist consensus among a plurality of voters. The USA though now seems to have political demographics more like Northern Ireland, i.e. a strongly bimodal electorate. In that situation, to have a winning coalition you have to pick one of the two humps, and if you stray to close to the swing voter valley in the middle, it can work for a while but eventually your base is liable to revolt: look at how the Democratic Unionists replaced the Ulster Unionists, for example.
US men and women actually have *relatively* similar opinions about abortion, at least if you just look at basic are you pro-choice/life questions: https://www.vox.com/2019/5/20/18629644/abortion-gender-gap-public-opinion Though that's consistent with the pro-life views of the Republicans driving away women if pro-choice women just prioritize the issue more than pro-choice men, which isn't implausible. Plus since US elections are so tight at the moment, even the fact that women are marginally more pro-choice than men could be making a decent difference.
Well yes, being pro-choice is much more important to you if you might personally avail yourself of that choice. On the other side though, if you think abortion should be banned, it doesn't matter whether you personally have a uterus, because not only would you never have an abortion yourself, you're also trying to prevent others from doing the bad thing. It seems that if you force people to decide one way or the other, a majority of US men are pro-choice, but they don't particularly care about the issue. People who sincerely believe "abortion is murder" are heavily outnumbered, but the combination of their numbers with how strongly they feel about it is enough to make them an important political faction.
Hey, if they dribble well enough to get the scholarship in the first place, the drivel they write doesn't matter. ;) Also they'll manage to get a college degree and stay not-upper-class.
Let’s say the GOP goes with this message. Then what?
It’s true that class != wealth, but there is a strong correlation. Most people would not understand the nuance of difference between class and wealth. Not every reader of this blog even buys it. The imagery in the link is Communist, showing that even Scott, despite explicating the fine distinction, also rounds off class to its economic dimension when looking for a shorthand. (I realize it’s meant to be ironic and that this post itself is dripping with irony, but the kernel of truth is what is worth commenting about.)
Wouldn’t, in truth, the Democratic party be more likely to openly embrace class warfare? Sure, sure, the Democrats are the elites and all that, but their political infrastructure is still more geared for economic class warfare. Perhaps raising the minimum wage is a bad idea economically, but the masses seem to believe it is good for the poor.
I think what Scott is *really getting at* (saying this probably guarantees I am wrong) is how nice it would be if politics weren’t always bleeding at the edges into illegible and unintelligible spaces. Is Trumpism racist or not? It sure would be nice to have an unambiguously non-racist version of Trumpism.
But we aren’t going to get that because ambiguity is a big part of the hustle. That goes for both major tribes, and everyone else in the field of marketing.
From what I gleaned form the polarization post is that ambiguity is what we had before when the parties were the same. This ambiguity was outcompeted by polarization. Why wouldn't further political polarization continue to outcompete the present amount of ambiguity?
And in the mid-20th century the parties were very ambiguous and inclusive. The more clear versions of themselves outcompeted the very ambiguous version.
If ambiguity and inclusiveness was not evolutionarily successful then, why would it be so now?
I wrote a Facebook post (yaaay me!) about this exact thing sitting (outdoors) at a coffee shop last summer, and noticing the pandemic had ended the rash of New Yorkers listening to their phones and iPads full volume in public without earphones. Then I realized - all the people who complain about the no earphones crowd are the same types who most likely to be woke/hate tromp/etc. And I realized intersectionality was completely ignoring this rift between npr listeners and reality show viewers. NPR listeners, who have a cross-racial, cross-gender coalition that even spans economic classes, from relatively poor public school teachers to Vice Presidents of marketing at google, and reality tv show fans, who tend to drive Mercedes with tinted windows, like Dunkin’ Donuts, etc, but who may well have more money than the npr listeners. And you’re right: trump stoked the resentment of the no headphones cell phone listeners against the headphones wearers.
I've heard everyone from people thousands of dollars in debt to people with a couple million in net worth call themselves "middle class", and indeed it seems far more common for people to perceive themselves as middle class or upper middle class in a huge range of wealth.
I'm curious what makes you sure you're rich, rather than just middle class.
Did you draw an arbitrary line at 1% (around 10 million net worth)? At 0.5% (40 mil)?
At not having to work ever again? (various, depending on lifestyle)
In an attempt to be slightly more useful than in my previous comment, this is exactly the topic of Chris Hedges book "Death of the Liberal Class." I'm often surprised I don't hear or see more people discussing him. Maybe he's too cranky.
This made me think about how this applies beyond the US. The Trumpist sentiments definitely exist elsewhere. Could the program above be used by Tories in the UK? By Le Pen in France? Some of the important points from the article may not apply: Education may be free and relatively accessible to everyone. Inequality may be lower than in the US. And so on.
A less militant program like the above currently is being used by the Tories in the UK to great success.
For example their "war on universities" mostly begins and ends with protecting free speech from cancel culture. And there's a strong focus on economic policies to benefit the working class.
Look, it's an obvious point but, for decades now, we've been pursuing an increasingly meaningless culture war, neglecting issues like "who gets the money", "who goes to prison", "against who do we go to war and for what reason", "what happens to the environment". This proposal continues the trend.
See it seems to me that if you're going to target that you're going to have to foreground a concept of class that sees the substitute teacher and the logger as having more in common with each other, for the purposes of downwards redistribution of income.
In other words, you're going to have to use a primarily economic concept of class, not a cultural one.
Now it is true that the cultural concept of class is going to have to be part of it, but you have to go beyond that. You have to treat the cultural dimensions of class as, at least partly, a kind of mystification- a mystification that obscures our real interests and makes us believe that the woodchipper and the woodchipping CEO are on the same page. If you don't argue that, it's hard to see how this is a re distributive program- so it stops being about "who gets the money".
If you don't go beyond that, then Scott's project just turns into identity politics for Republicans. If you do go beyond that, to a redistributive vision, then I find it hard to believe Scott is naive enough to think there's a snowballs chance in the proverbial that the Republicans will embrace it.
Aargh that's as confusing as hell rereading through it, so let me rephrase.
You say that this proposal gets to the heart of "who gets the money", but I think that exposes the dilemma here.
In order to get the heart of who gets the money, it's got to be about the economic concept of class as well as the cultural concept. But Republicans fighting an economic class war? Never going to happen.
If it remains about the cultural concept only, then it's not about the money.
The points Scott focused on regarding jobs being reserved for people with non-technical signalling degrees was directly related, and in a way that Republicans could get behind.
Based on some previous essay that began with "A Modest Proposal..." I was expecting something a little more tongue in cheek. This looks entirely feasible. It would collect about 2/3 of red tribe and blue tribe voters, and force the remaining upper class twits into a "New Grand Old Party" of some sort.
Anyways, I spent a few minutes looking up relevant anagrams, as one would.
First, "Bull Moose":
Soluble Om
Umbel Solo
Next, "Bull Moose Party":
Absolutely Prom
Playroom Bustle
Outlays Problem
Amours Potbelly
Soluble Om Party has my vote. Anyone got a bumper sticker printing machine?
Scott, unless you've done so already and I've just missed it, I implore you to give us a Prediction Markets FAQ. Prediction markets are a radical and foreign idea for most people, and one that's often first met with suspicion. Lately you seem to be treating "prediction markets are the future" like it's a foregone conclusion, but I've yet to read a thorough, convincing, and accessible argument for why this is the case. IMHO, you're just the man to write that argument!
Prediction markets outperform experts in ergodic or normalized areas. I haven't noticed that they do particularly well in systems with multiple equilibria, but I absolutely support removing the taxes and friction so we can find out.
I'm so confused by this. Is Scott being satirical, or does he really not realize that this is basically just populism, but with more intellectual-friendly (?!?) terminology?
"I suggest the Republican Party become what it's becoming anyway" is... not something I'd expect Scott to bother writing a post about, even aside from the fact that it sounds suspiciously like praise for Republican populism.
It seems to me more like a desperate appeal for one of the parties to actually align itself with the lower and middle classes, by someone who is fed up of waiting for the Democratic Party to live up to its rhetoric.
Note that it's *not* about getting a party to align itself with low income people - it's just about getting a party to align itself with high income people that lack certain status markers.
I think the satire is that it turns the (nominally) fiercely-anti-communist Republican Platform into a pretty communist platform with a few moves. It's also probably satirical because things like "wars on expertise" were markers of bloody regimes like the Khmer Rouge. But it also seems like he's trying to toe the line between serious and joking here.
It seems sort of bold to say that Republicans are "post-Trump", if anything they feel like they're in a sort of political fermata, the length of which is definitely uncertain. The discordant eternal Rite of Spring intro that is the Trump Republican Party since 2015 is going to start up again at the very least by 2022.
Disagree on prediction markets part. To the extent that prediction markets work, it is because right now they are not on the radar of most people. If they ever do get on the radar then the same oil companies who fork out the money to promote the people and research that makes people doubt warming will also be able to fork out the money to distort prediction markets.
I half-agree with the college part. I agree that there should be no college requirement for babysitting or firefighting. I also think that demanding degree as a prerequisite for med school is stupid. But I disagree that companies should be required to test e.g. engineers and geologists themselves. Waste of effort as colleges would already test a candidate for years.
If it's possible for a brick-and-mortar video game retailer to double in value during a pandemic, then yes, we should expect that there are all sorts of mechanisms by which groups of people end up placing bets on expected losers just to snub the people they don't like.
While I agree with the general "class" analysis I don't like it as the rallying cry.
1- Class (socially) is easily confused with class (economically). The latter being the most well known usage and the right generally not wanting to associate with it due to the mentioned Marxist origins and usage.
2- Social class as defined here has no unifying ethos to it. It is more a collection of behaviors and attitudes that don't seem to have any cohesive virtue to them. Each class feels like a category with no particular moral or relevant quality to them. It feels as hollow as being on team blue because blue is your favorite color, and using that to guide your vote on how to run the country.
3- We have other words with a lot more gravitas that people can actually associate with. Culture (though this doesn't bridge the right left divide as well), The Soul of America, an Ethos. These are things I want to vote for, things backed by the weight of principles.
I don't really have a way to wrap this thought up. Poke holes in it please :)
He does have that Trumpian quality of causing leftist derangement beyond all reason. And that does appear to be the only way for an r to get enough attention.
"You want to know a REAL conspiracy theory? MY conspiracy theory is that even though the upper class act like they're your best friends and care about you when they're in front of the camera, behind closed doors they despise you and talk shit about you filthy poors. Those aren't MY words, by the way - that's what they call you behind your back. 'Those filthy poors.' MY conspiracy theory is that they steal your money through unfair tax loopholes and then try to convince you that they EARNED their stolen money by working harder and by being SMARTER than you. And you know what makes this conspiracy theory REALLY wild? The fact that it's ALL TRUE. Here's the data to prove it."
"Listen, the most true truth is that even though the elites act like they care about you when they're on CNN, behind closed doors they laugh at you. They call you "rurals" in the exact tone you imagine. 'The rurals.' They steal your money through unfair tax loopholes and tell you they earned it by working harder. I've seen it and I can't stand it anymore."
This is just ridiculous. Scott, it wasn't working class Trump-supporting white Christian Americans who tried to destroy your life not too long ago. It was the Blue Tribe.
Why can't Scott hate both the blues and the reds? Don't most of us? The blues and reds are idiots with faux anger who obviously want to fuck each other.
Scott signals disdain for the reds and cringing submission towards the blues, even though reds (and also far-right/neoreaction people) leave him alone while the blues are currently on a crusade to destroy Scott's career. You would never see Scott saying, "I hate you and you hate me" to the New York Times.
Saying "well, the article is negative about me and contains things that aren't truthful and I'm not interested in talking about it" is *far* more conciliatory than "I hate you". He's still reserving his real hate for the reds, even though it's been the blues who've been biting off his face.
(And even then, Scott thinks that the Times was only malicious because he complained that they were going to dox him. The idea that they were malicious all along and were never going to be fair no matter what he did is beyond his comprehension. But yeah, he does hate those Republicans.)
Twice (one of them since deleted after reader complaints, but not retracted) Scott has linked this anti-NYT rant with apparent endorsement. I think it shows a far greater level of hostility than a half-serious quip "I hate you and you hate me."
A short, direct statement "I hate X" is a far more straightforward expression of hatred than a long essay that admits there might be something negative about its subject. And it's certainly a far more straightforward expression of hatred than *linking* to such an essay. Scott is politely disagreeing with his supposed allies on the left while hating the Republicans, even though the leftists are the ones chewing on his face.
Furthermore, as I pointed out, Scott's criticism of the Times is limited. He still doesn't think the Times meant to lie about him all along.
And "half-serious quips" are Schroedinger's blogpost. They're like comedians who are making an important political statement until someone points out that it's false, and the reply is "it's just comedy". This lets the comedian say things without ever being called on them, because "it's comedy" is an excuse whenever he gets caught.
You say this, but the very fact that he gets a hostile reaction from so many blues rather calls into doubt the claim that he either is blue or is consistently submissive to them. I don't think you understand just *how much* of an affront to blue values his daliances with Murray and the NRxers were. The "cringe" stuff I think, comes from the fact that he is genuinely afraid that some of his own views objectively are bad and racist, it's not just positioning. (See what he wrote about race/IQ stuff in his review of The Cult of Smart).
In reality, he isn't "really" red *or* blue, no matter how much people want to make his political strangeness into something familiar. (I mean, I guess I would usually describe this as 'a right-wing blog', but a) that's not quite "red", since "red" is partly cultural and economic as Scott uses it, and b) I am talking to my left-wing British friends and family when I say that, whose idea of right-wing is probably rather different from the average American.)
Getting a hostile reaction from blues and being submissive to blues are not at all inconsistent. (Especially if being submissive is a failed attempt to avoid the hostile reaction.)
"Hate" might be a strong word considering how distant they are but I doubt the average white Christian Trump supporter would have a very high opinion of a polyamorous liberal Jewish Californian psychiatrist who begged his readers to vote for anyone but Trump and thinks religion is too obviously false to be worth arguing with.
People are really attached to a 'martyred by PC' narrative around here. (Though I actually can see the case for saying the NYT should have just agreed not to reveal his real name.)
Well, there were a few SneerClub and Rational Wiki types, back when Scott took down the blog, who took it upon themselves to spread his real name as widely as they could, as if this was some kind of public service. So there are some extremely online leftists/blue-tribers who, if not actually "trying to destroy his life" (this is open to interpretation), are actively hostile. But yes, some people here are in love with the narrative of Scott getting drummed out of society, even though that's not what happened.
Yeah, I don't doubt Scott gets nasty internet harassment from so over-zealous proponents of identity politics*, and I'm happy to say this is bad.
I never read SneerClub at all, because it sounds awful and also I assume it's full of the kind of nerd-hating that would fuck with my self-esteem as someone who's already kind of ashamed of being autistic. What exactly is their thing? Are they aimed against SSC specifically? LessWrong rationalism? Tech people?
* (God I wish there was a neutral term for that that was neither sneer nor endorsement.)
Instead of "upper class" and "lower class," it makes more sense to say "symbol class" and "atom class." For example, it is acceptable in the symbol class to work with your hands as long as you are not handling too many atoms. You can cook a meal for a small family but not work in a fast-food restaurant.
One thing I noticed, when reflecting on the previous post, is how deeply class has become entangled with politics. Almost by definition, the left is higher-class than the right, and mere association with or proximity to the right wing is enough to make something seen as low-class. Trump ordered the Federal government to make neoclassical architecture its house style, and suddenly everyone who's anyone demands blobby postmodern buildings or nothing. (Doubly ironic, given that Trump's own buildings are mostly glass boxes.) Taylor Swift endorses the Democrats and suddenly she's a critical darling and we forget that we ever looked down on her music as trash for the rubes in Nashville.
So this would just be making it more explicit. It was already a big part of the Trump message, but the problem with Trump was he had no idea how government works and never put in the effort to find out, which does not make it easy to get anything done in government. Well, a problem with Trump. Personally I had a lot of problems with him. But anyway.
The left increasingly has no positive vision for the future and nothing to offer except dour moralism and self-flagellation. I would start turning rightwards if the right were not incredibly, colossally stupid. It's a mixture of guilt and revulsion that keeps me on the left, but if a non-stupid right were to arise, I'd be open to it.
(Also - the bit about appealing to Asians reminds me of Wes Yang's frequent commentary on how diametrically opposed Asian-American activism is to the actual experiences and interests of non-activist Asians. The activists parrot the standard lines about "meritocracy" being a form of white supremacy that needs to be demolished, but many other Asians have done just fine within the system and don't want to change it. But of course it's the activists who get the attention of the media and the political leadership, and so it goes...)
“ I would start turning rightwards if the right were not incredibly, colossally stupid. It's a mixture of guilt and revulsion that keeps me on the left, but if a non-stupid right were to arise, I'd be open to it.”
“He’s silly and ignorant, but he’s got guts, and guts is enough”
Taylor Swift's elevation is influenced by woke stuff, but my best guess is not the woke stuff you say, or not only. It's about the gradual replacement of 'rockism' by 'poptimism', though that itself is driven by woke values. (See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockism_and_poptimism) Like a lot of rebellions against the status quo, poptimism started out as a necesssary corrective with sensible points-it is suspicious that the most acclaimed genres tend to be the ones white men like more than anyone else!, lots of hip-hop and r'n'b is sonically innovative (was 20 years ago anyway) while rock is more conservative! (I don't actually mind *aesthetic* conservatism that much though...) lot of men-who-are-proud-of-their-taste are scared to admit they like uncool things and this is silly!-but then devolved into unthinking orthodoxy, where people think Taylor Swift must be good because she's really feminine and the Guardian decides to include this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hphwfq1wLJs over this on a best UK numbers ones poll: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOl7dh7a-6g . In reality, amongst current female popstarts, Lorde and Eilish are great, and Arianna Grande's Thank U, Next is a little masterpiece of catchy spite, but Swift, whilst not flat-out *bad* is dull as ditchwater.
Really, though I deeply doubt that any of this stuff is politically important. Somewhere above someone posted a guide to political issues saying essentially that if something doesn't involve war, economics, or violence/prisons, it probably doesn't matter very much, and whilst I'd ad science and tech policy, that seems a sound rule of thumb to me. Who is harmed by journalists pretending to like Taylor Swift more than they really do.
How do you distinguish between populist and non-populist politics? In a democracy where you have to appeal to the populace all politics is populist.
If you use the Wikipedia definition "Populism refers to a range of political stances that emphasise the idea of "the people" and often juxtapose this group against "the elite"." Then what either side is doing is through a justification of a shadowy elite of either the upper class or white men.
I’m not sure how serious this piece is but the commenters mostly seem to unironically support it so: this is all insane. First of all, class is a total misnomer for the phenomenon described here: any definition of “class” that puts Donald Trump and McMansion owners below a barista with a liberal arts degree is nonsensical. The function of calling it class seems to be to guilt people described as “upper class” into thinking they’re somehow oppressing or exploiting the “lower class”. But why should being upper class under this system be a bad thing or being prole a good one? Class as described here has nothing to do with birth or wealth and much more to do with education, and why shouldn’t the educated have more status than the uneducated? Knowledge is actually better than ignorance, and getting an advanced education requires a combination of intelligence and diligence that many lack. This is why to a certain extent credentialism is actually good - it serves as a valuable proxy for actually good things. I agree there is an over-credentialism problem in this country, but the system simply needs reform, not abolition. As for declaring war on expertise and media gatekeepers - these institutions are correct far more often than not, dismissing them as just like, your opinion man is pomo garbage, and destroying them can lead to nowhere good. Replacing experts with prediction markets can’t work because who decides who gets paid? If someone claims vaccines cause autism, what stops them from asserting they won the bet and refusing to pay up when proven wrong? Finally, the idea of classism as pernicious rests on analogy to racism and sexism, but that doesn’t work. Whites aren’t better than blacks, men aren’t better than women, but “elites” are in fact better than “proles”. If you define class in terms of education, and education is earned by merit, than “class bias” is simply a sign of meritocracy.
One underlying assumption of Scott's post is that academic credentials and expertise can vary a lot in its meaningfulness. On one side, someone with an MD or an engineering or accounting degree probably actually has learned some important skills that will be useful directly. On the other, someone with an Art History degree who gets hired over someone without the degree looks more like discriminating on "class" than on actual knowledge.
I suspect irrelevant degree requirements (you can't be promoted to management until you get a BA in something from FlyByNight U) are part rational astrology, part cartel enforcement, and part class discrimination.
But they're also partly about using the fact that you got a degree as a kind of test for intelligence and diligence and general competence as a human, since it's hard to graduate college without showing up for most of your classes and managing to turn in most of your assignments. Making it legally easier to just give prospective employees an IQ test would substitute for *some* of that, but not all of it.
And some degrees are 100% scholarship and signaling and 0% actual knowledge about the world, because the underlying fields of study have little or no connection with reality and a lot of connection with political realities in academia.
There are plenty countries where using IQ tests in hiring isn't illegal (is it illegal in the US?). Why don't companies in those countries hire on the basis of IQ tests instead of college degrees?
“ First of all, class is a total misnomer for the phenomenon described here: any definition of “class” that puts Donald Trump and McMansion owners below a barista with a liberal arts degree is nonsensical.”
Nah, you just don’t understand class. Its about culture, not money.
“ But why should being upper class under this system be a bad thing or being prole a good one? Class as described here has nothing to do with birth or wealth and much more to do with education, and why shouldn’t the educated have more status than the uneducated?”
Do you think that “good” and “bad” are objective features of a thing, rather than opinions that different people have about different things?
“ This is why to a certain extent credentialism is actually good - it serves as a valuable proxy for actually good things. ”
See Goodhart’s law
“ Replacing experts with prediction markets can’t work because who decides who gets paid? If someone claims vaccines cause autism, what stops them from asserting they won the bet and refusing to pay up when proven wrong?”
Probably this intersects with how someone could be proven wrong in an objective sense, and would be reflected in the prediction market contract.
“ Finally, the idea of classism as pernicious rests on analogy to racism and sexism, but that doesn’t work. Whites aren’t better than blacks, men aren’t better than women, but “elites” are in fact better than “proles”.”
According to you, but why would we agree with you about who is better?
“ If you define class in terms of education, and education is earned by merit, than “class bias” is simply a sign of meritocracy.”
If my aunt had balls she’d be my uncle (conditions may vary, check your local thoughtcrime regulations before assuming anyone’s gender)
"“If you define class in terms of education, and education is earned by merit, than “class bias” is simply a sign of meritocracy.”"
He isn't defining class in terms of education. Lots of college graduates are schooled but uneducated, a fair number of people who haven't been to college, including some who comment here, are well educated autodidacts, and quite a lot of the people he is classifying as working class have college degrees.
As anyone who has taught the sort of large college class where many of the pupils are there to satisfy some requirement knows, a large fraction are not trying to learn anything. They are trying to memorize enough to get past the final exam and will then forget most of it.
Scott made it quite clear in the beginning of this article that this "class" concept here is actually mostly about culture. It's what puts Trump and a construction worker on one team and a NYT Editor and your local hipster Starbucks barista on the other. These people really do have two completely different versions of the country they want to live in and you can't properly place their group "class status" by just looking at their income.
>Yeah, yeah, "class" sounds Marxist, class warfare and all that, you're supposed to be against that kind of thing, right? Wrong. Economic class warfare is Marxist, but here in the US class isn't a purely economic concept. Class is also about culture.
One techinicality about prediction markets: Nobody needs to pay up. You buy shares, and if you're right you get paid and if you're wrong you don't. So compliance is not required. Also, the conditions for what constitutes a win and a loss is explicitly stipulated in the contracts. Whoever participates in the prediction market agrees to the terms of that contract beforehand.
And for whatever it's worth, this isn't the first time I hear about class not primarily being an economic distinction. In Sweden class is explicitly not about money. If anything, members of the upper class are expected to hide their wealth, and they don't accept people who flaunt their wealth among their rangs. They're expected to drive a Volvo, they wear shoes inside (it's otherwise customary to not wear shoes indoors in Sweden), they disavow new money, and they think expensive things are vulgar.
Understanding what nobility is, and how caste systems work would help to make the distinction from economic class more clear. US culture is explicitly antithetical to nobility, because that's the narrative of your history, but I think that also means Americans have a less keen eye when it comes to spotting nobility. There hasn't been nobility in America since 1776, after all!
I've got to ask -- what's the significance of wearing shoes inside? I realize it might be a purely arbitrary class marker, but does it carry any connotations? Maybe something like "oh, he's so _____ that he wears shoes inside" or "I wear shoes inside to show that I'm ____"? (with "_____" being something other than just "upper class")
Like driving a Volvo seems to suggest something like "I'm just a regular sensible person," but I don't understand what wearing shoes inside would suggest.
I couldn't tell you what the underlying logic is, and I don't want to speculate. So I googled it. There was a political movement in Sweden called "folkhemmet" (people's home), which aimed at ensuring universal access to housing, along with showing people how to live properly. Part of this effort was the state sanctioned institution of home inspectors, who would literally go home to people and make sure they lived well and make suggestions as to how to improve their living arrangements. Ensuring hygiene was a big reason for this, and removing your dirty shoes when inside became an official position. The state mandated that government housing included hallways fitted with shoe racks or cabinets.
The "folkhem" movement came from the social democrats, who were ideologically opposed to the upper class. (And here's where I'm speculating) I'm going to guess that members of the upper class viewed shoe removal as a pro-social democratic signal. Other official recommendations from the home inspectors included getting rid of "finrum" (fine dining rooms) and making more efficient use of the space. Fine dining rooms are also an obvious "attack" on the upper class.
Actually, reading about the various official living suggestions is kind of wild. It's stuff like "Open a window and air out the house for 15 minutes per day" and "walls should be painted in bright colors" and "stone walls should not be decorated with paintings" and "don't sleep in the kitchen". In some cases you even had to demonstrate compliance in order to gain access to public housing.
So yea, my best guess is that the indoors shoe thing is counter signaling against Social democracy.
"Class as described here has nothing to do with birth or wealth and much more to do with education, and why shouldn’t the educated have more status than the uneducated?"
IMO that's the standard definition of class used by economists in the US. From Wikipedia: "In the United States, the concept of a working class remains vaguely defined, and classifying people or jobs into this class can be contentious. Economists and pollsters in the United States generally define "working class" adults as those lacking a college degree,[1] rather than by occupation or income."
You seem to be implying that it's natural to think that class *does* track a moral quality gradient, while other groups don't. It seems to me that even Marx wouldn't say that class tracks an inherent moral quality - it's just that being in a certain material relation to others tends to motivate morally better or worse behavior, regardless of the quality of the person.
And while the class analysis here doesn't track the material basis Marx is tracking, it does track *something* quite important for contemporary life.
Bear in mind some people (including me) oppose the idea that you deserve more money or status simply for being more intelligent, and prefer the idea that we should stop thinking about things in terms of desert and start trying to just maximizes everyone's standard of living instead (subject to not doing things that violate human rights of minorities obviously.) Obviously meritocracy is good when recruiting people for jobs though, in the sense that you want people who'll do a good job. I think our host has the view that 'has a college education' is a really bad and inefficient proxy for this though, probably he wants to use IQ tests instead or something. Personally I think college is good *because* it makes people more liberal. I don't mean its good when people become ultra-woke in a tumblr-y way, that stuff I'd class as 'really annoying but harmless with the occasional good point rising out of the murk', I'm talking about pro-immigrant, pro-gay, dubious of sending zillions of people to prison liberal.
Their fundamentalists won't get less oppressive, while their power grab will get significantly easier. In other parts of the world, this is exactly how those people win and it's not pretty.
Also, isn't this just populism with a theory on top?
Populism has pejorative connotations because vox populi is believed to lead society off a cliff. The separation of the lower classes from power is _exactly the point of modern system_ (why are we using representational, instead of direct democracy? why are the term limits so long?), even though it's thoughtcrime to consider.
A dysfunctional society might keep the lower class uneducated, full of learned helplessness and unable to govern on purpose, to justify further entrentchment of the elite. But of course we don't do that, do we?
Things could easily be much worse. Approving medicine too slowly is a lot better than not needing approval at all, in which case no one could trust any potential medicine.
On one hand, there are no experts. No legible experts, at least.
On the other hand, there's plenty of people who are better experts than your anti-vax altmed aunt (everyone has one).
Personally I'm also in favor of making Zvi the Czar of Everything but more realistically, leaving people alone to follow whoever makes sense is a decent consolation prize.
This is a great strategy but the nazis beat you to it by a century or so. Social conservatism and socialist rhetoric is a winning strategy and its why no one in the american political system would ever use it, it would destroy any semblance of the two party system that we collectively pretend exists.
How can you write an essay as insightful as this, but not see that it's a contradiction in terms? "Populism" is literally the lower-class incarnation of what you describe as "anti-classism". It's not cool, it's not intellectual, but it's driven by the same resentments you describe here to a T, Pat Buchanan's "peasants with pitchforks." Then your entire essay just becomes complaining that populism isn't a "classy" enough way to fight classism. Yes, well, you know what they say, "if my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle."
If the lower class had a bunch of champions able to communicate their grievances as effectively as you do in this essay (which appears to be more of a thought exercise than something you really believe), then, well, they wouldn't be "lower", would they? (And we'd probably have a civil war by now.)
I mean, I sympathize, I really do, but censorship (in China, here and everywhere) is not that hard to dodge if you're a sufficiently clever speaker. In the words of Curtis Yarvin:
```
Of course, accepting that you are in Rome and when in Rome, you don’t talk garbage about Titus Livius Augustus, certainly compromises your intellectual independence. But how much? If you can’t express an idea within the inevitable restrictions of power (“free speech” is a nice idea, but I am not sure it has ever happened), frankly—are you even the right person to be expressing that idea? Maybe you should just support it silently, and leave the expressing to someone with a little more silver in his tongue.
Which complaints here about the *classiness* of populism and why is the reading of classiness on which they are one on which "classiness" isn't just a good thing we want more of?
"...they prefer a system where powerful insiders get to play favorites, where success depends on who you know and not what you know, and where good jobs are locked behind gates of correct credentials from the right colleges."
Or the right ideas!
"Point out how DC Democrats passed a law saying all child care workers must have college degrees, and how this is just a blatant attempt to take jobs away from working-class people in order to give them to upper-class people instead."
> but here in the US class isn't a purely economic concept. Class is also about culture.
This reads oddly. Really, really, REALLY oddly. I would venture that the US is the only country in which any significant group would endorse the idea that class *is* a purely economic concept; anywhere else, you'd just get laughed out of the room for suggesting it.
Heck, I was recently informed that gold jewelry is falling out of fashion in *China* because it is 俗气 ("vulgar").
Yes, I just said that. The point of my comment is that "here in the US" in Scott's sentence is a bizarre qualification; class isn't an economic concept anywhere. It looks like he read something about human society and leapt to the conclusion that it was somehow unique to the US.
Now, what does this jab mean? Well first, to cast doubt on Trump's self-reported wealth, that's he is not really as rich as he claims and so his accounts of success are fake and he can't make America great (again). But also that he's the 'wrong' kind of billionaire, unlike the deep-pocketed donors backing her. That's more than just "how many zeroes in your bank balance", that's ideological and cultural as well.
Gold jewellery being tacky and low-class and vulgar if overdone and if the plebs are wearing it is a universal thing; China catching up to it now because so many new rich people are being created that mere bling isn't enough any more, you have to signal status by how 'tasteful' you are is just China catching up to European and, yes, American mores.
Vulgar ostentation is also condemned in the US, even (or especially because of) tacky reality TV shows celebrate people who made money out of entertainment and are flaunting their wealth in the most tasteless of manners.
I think the existence of Church of England parsons and impoverished nobility in the upper class of Victorian England and the negative class implication of "he made it in trade," make it clear that class in a relatively traditional society is not defined by wealth, although it correlates with it.
If my paid subscription to Scott Alexander gives this plan *any* extra visibility to the people who could conceivably implement it, it'll be the best money I've ever spent and far more effective than mere tax dollars.
That this article can't help but equate class with economic class (by the use of the term 'working class') is exactly why this won't work. We do need a better terminology than elite, but the word 'class' can't be used unless it gets reclaimed first, which may be a hopeless endeavor.
Marx's merely recognized class as a relationship to the means of production, which is highly simplistic and flawed even in the economic context, but he completely ignored that people value other things than money and seek to gain control over those things.
In the chapter that you linked, Marx defines value as "realised human labour" and sees "money as a measure of value." I see absolutely no recognition that there is value in immaterial things, like culture, love, community, etc.
Marx was a hardcore materialist.
It's rather ironic that you regularly accuse others of misrepresenting Marx, when you obviously do so here.
I think this runs into some problems when you browse republican twitter for mentions of poor black people which tends to try to paint as many black kids as possible as criminal-by-default.
Republicans love the working class and the rural non-working class... but poor urban black people very much do not seem to be their favourite people such that this would seem to require their base change a lot of their own views.
Nobody loves the underclass, even though each side has members of the underclass who are more aligned with it than the other side. And both sides often try to group lots of the other side's members into the same bin as their adjacent underclass members--this is why it's fun to caricature Republicans as trailer-dwelling redneck white supremacists.
What you call `upper class' is usually referred to as `middle class', at least in Europe. Upper class comprises (simplifying, since it's a cultural and not an economic concept) people who have enough wealth so that they need not work if they choose not to. All working professionals are middle class and upper middle class. An Ivy League university professor is still a middle class job (not even an upper middle class job). An upper class job is being a CEO. If you ever fly economy class, you are not a member of the upper classes.
Truly, there is not a crappy stock photo of a cosmic conciousness sat in the lotus position, chakras perfectly aligned, that can express quite how galaxy-brained this post is.
Let me propose, since other commenters don't seem to be picking up on it, that Scott put the phrase "A Modest Proposal" in the title as an indication that he considers this suggestion unethical.
I think many of the things in this post are on the border between "true" and "much more complicated than that but framed in a way that Republicans will appreciate", in a way I sort of feel bad about."
You're right, he seems to have a complicated relationship with it.
So your plan to help the GOP is for them to alienate graduates in an age of ever-expanding tertiary education, make their rich donors uncomfortable, and throw one of the institutions they love (the police) under the bus for being classist? Good luck.
"To alienate graduates in an age of ever-expanding tertiary education"
Democratic Party went hard after graduates. What do I see as the result of that? Poll after poll, story after story, about how the Republicans/Trump score better with "whites who didn't go to college" and conclusions from that about how it's only dumb losers (they couldn't even manage to get into college!) who vote Republican.
Were I living in America, with my background, and I had that "if you didn't go to college you are a dumb loser who's probably also a racist and every other bad name we can throw at you" drummed into me by My Betters, then I'd be angry too. The graduates have had their prejudices cossetted. Let them feel uncomfortable for once, and let someone stick up for "we don't actually think you are a dumb idiot because you got a job instead of four years doing a degree course".
48% of white college graduates voted for Trump in 2020 and 49% did so in 2016 (4% more than those who voted for Clinton). White college graduates are a substantial part of the GOP base, going to war with them will not end well for the Republicans.
I read through this thinking "these are some decent descriptions of cleavages within American society, but the labels just seem so off" - teachers are upper class and lumber barons lower class? Ridiculous. Then I realized I hadn't read the Fussell review linked at the top. Looking at that I immediately discovered the issue - this article is using "upper class" to refer to the social / cultural group that Fussell called "middle class."
I guess I can see why if you're pitching this piece to Republicans as a good political strategy you wouldn't want to describe it as "declare war on the middle class!" but for those of us not trying to put things in a maximally friendly to Republicans framing that's probably a better description of this platform.
I find this so interesting. What is it about Marxism that you find appealing?
It sounds like you're saying that you find Marxism interesting as a philosophy, not necessarily that you think his philosophy is superior and should be enacted. If that is right, that makes sense. Or am I reading you wrong?
It sounds like you're referring to Marx's position that history will naturally progress to a point of global capitalism wherein all identity markers other than class will fade away, leaving just the proletariat on the one hand, and the capitalists on the other, and that at that point the revolution will occur and the dictatorship of the proletariat be established. Am I reading you right? If so, I think we're at my point of confusion, namely, how do you account for the fact that instead of the above occurring, the USSR and China had national largely non-industrial worker based communist revolutions that led to great famine and great oppression? I really can't wrap my head around a promotion of communism that doesn't account for what seem to be massive failures on its part. If your answer was, oh, China and the USSR didn't practice true Marxism I'd accept that as an answer but elsewhere you seem to indicate to me that you approved of Maoist tactics so am I right in assuming you do think China and the USSR are good models of communism?
It's rooted in economic ideas that were obsolete long before Marx, such as labor theory of value. Many new concepts such as marginal utility theory, economic calculation problem and comparative advantage principle are needed to understand modern economy and value of highly compensated middlemen.
I have. Their history of murdering and impoverishing their own citizens is a turn off for me.
Why should anyone look at centuries old philosophies that proved disastrous every time they were attempted? Marx was a reactionary who long for more pastoral times before industrial revolution without having personally experienced the hardship of pre-industrial living. He would have made great friends with the Unibomber. Now this post gives us new ideas to think about and try with possibly good results.
"Marx was a reactionary who long for more pastoral times before industrial revolution"
There are lots of bad takes on Marx, but this is easily the most hilarious.
Go read the Manifesto. It's brimming with paeans to early capitalism, touting its superiority to feudalism and praising it for abolishing "the idiocy of rural life" etc.
Later on, Marx did become concerned with the effects of capitalism on the natural environment, calling attention to what he termed the "metabolic rift". But he was faaaaaar from a luddite or a reactionary, and his theory of Communist revolution requires capitalist development, "without which want is merely made general".
I think he writes his own material.
test reply
Furthermore, it's hard to say how much "voting a bit more for Trump in 2020 vs 2016" is any indication of appeal in 2020 rather than an indication of *lack* of the *extreme* anti-appeal he had to these people in 2016, or the special appeal Obama had in 2012 and 2008.
There might be a few places where Trump did as well among minorities as Bush did in 2004 (I'm thinking mainly in the Rio Grande Valley and Miami), but those are rare.
That's the thing, right? What is the difference between a futures market and a sufficiently deep casino book that somehow manages to capture somewhat abstract predictions? It feels to me like the more it becomes unique, the shallower and less predictive it gets. There are plenty of real instruments that capture questions like "what will the inflation rate in the US be in 10 years" and "the electric car is the future of transportation" that seem way more robust than something that is just something like the Simon/Ehrlich bet writ large.
I think the ability to trade your bets before them being realized is a big part of it?
I mean, the GameStonks thing shows that a few billionaires like Elon Musk are able to manipulate markets *even more* than the hedge funds, by making people do it for the lulz.
Out of how much was spent overall?
So why doesn't Wal-Mart cater people who drop big money on single purchases?
If the actual numbers don't matter, why did you say $2.3 billion from 25 people? If the actual numbers don't matter why do you not want to say the full amount?
Then why did you say something to begin with?
Nice
There's been research on this. The causality goes from politicians supporting certain policies to donations going to them. When politicians decide not to run for any more terms, they don't become less accomodating to the donor class. Garett Jones has been pointing out that they actually veer against populism when not "in cycle".
"So why doesn't Wal-Mart cater people who drop big money on single purchases?" What a totally insane non-sequitur.
Staying on topic, if your argument is that America isn't an oligarchy you're just very misinformed (or intentionally lying).
This article is a good starting point if you're trying to come to grips with the fact that America is not a democracy, if by 'democracy' you mean that policy is set based on the wishes of voters: https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf
The most relevant excerpt: "When the preferences of economic elites and
the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for,
the preferences of the average American appear to have
only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant
impact upon public policy."
That's a very interesting paper! Thanks for sharing.
Although the paper does define economic elite as in the 90th percentile, so were talking about households that make $160,000+/year which is a bit different than billionaires controlling things. I'm also surprised they looked at income instead of wealth when defining their elite. Even more strange they define the average citizen's preferences as being the 50th percentile. So instead of looking at the aggregate preferences of everyone outside the elite class or everyone altogether, they are just looking at a specific middle band.
Additionally organized interest groups were split into two categories: business interest groups and mass public interest groups. I would think mass public interest groups would be a close representation of the mass public feelings, but I suppose a lot of people don't get involved in mass public interest groups. (Which fits in with what the Vox article says below.)
To showcase both sides, here's a rebuttal on Vox: https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-study
It looks like the first accusation is basically of p-hacking. Something we sadly see regularly today, especially in social sciences. Of the 1,779 bills in the dataset, the economic elite and the average American agreed on 1,594, leaving only 185 bills to examine the difference between them. There's some more crunch in the article itself and a rebuttle from the authors of the original paper.
By the way, I never said I thought democracy was that policy is set based on the wishes of the voters, and either you made a mistake by claiming that or are being deceptive here.
> Who cares?
Boy you sure gave up quick.
> Who cares? When you're getting 2.3 billion dollars from 25 people, you do whatever the fuck they want.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in-almonds/
Why don't politicians charge a whole hell of a lot more?
There are plenty of people willing to do it. All you have to do is lie incessantly to your constituents, say in Congress for a couple decades, and you'll have amassed a decent amount of wealth. If you aren't willing to do it, the elites can just find somebody else.
I’m not understanding what your point is. Is this oredicated on the premise that Democrats are better for the working class? Or are you arguing against the system in general. How is the article anti-white, please.
*predicated. Substack really needs an edit function.
Well, until we're talking about racists, at which point we must steelman them beyond all common sense.
Part of the conflict theory article was about realizing he needed to learn how to talk to conflict theorists. It looks like this is an explicit appeal to conflict theorists, so therefore should look like conflict theory.
Class issues, weren't you talking about conflict theory?
Everyone, take a drink.
Last time we played that game, 42 people were found dead of alcohol poisoning. My username is in honor of them.
So why are you bringing it up?
How much had he previously assumed?
It's a pitch to a political faction which is itching for conflicts. Scott thinks they've long had a mistaken approach and he's trying to smuggle in some of his preferences under the veil of a conflict he has placed them on one side of.
Politics is supposed to be about productive conflict between interest groups.
"Ban Mckinsey" sounds more on point.
I'm guessing Jack isn't against the idea of strategy consultants (abstractly construed) so much as McKinsey in particular. I'm reminded of this essay, written by an anonymous insider: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/02/mckinsey-company-capitals-willing-executioners
Of course it strawmans the other side. It's a description of a form of demagoguery that Scott is arguing would be more effective than the current form. He may also believe that it is more nearly correct, but we can't expect a political party to limit itself to fair arguments for its position.
Ideally you strawman people you are sure won't vote for you — ones who the people who might vote for you don't like.
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2010/11/earl_long_on_no.html
It's their side that talks most openly about liquidating kulaks, though.
>Republican party
>anti-white
lmao
Yes.
Which part of his proposal is "anti-white"?
The transition wasn't completely binary but looking at presidential elections after 1960 and before 1990 purely based on which states the Democrat won:
Democrats did relatively worse in the South in 64, 68, 72 (only won one state and it wasn't in the South), 84 (same), and 88.
In 1980 it was about the same in the South as in other regions (although the West was especially Republican).
The only year the Democrat did significantly better in the South than in the country as a whole was 1976, when the candidate (Carter) was a southerner.
So overall I think it's safe to say that while the Democrats were still competitive in the South after the 60s, they definitely weren't "the party of the South" anymore.
Thinking further you could definitely argue that the transition took a lot longer in congressional and state elections. But even then I think the 60s is a good estimate for when Democrats stopped being "the party of the South" even if they kept a strong presence there.
OT: I wish people couldn't delete their own comments.
You get people writing high-effort and thoughtful responses that suddenly make no sense because the words they're responding to don't exist.
Adding an edit function would be helpful. It also might make the problem worse. Perhaps an edit function that allows people to click through to see the edits?
Partly for this reason, I often quote the part of the parent comment that I'm commenting on.
On the other hand, it demonstrates that some people have some residual sense of shame and reconsider intemperate things they have said on the Internets. I tend to think twice before I hit "post", but that's just me.
Seconded. The Wayback Machine often lets you do an endrun around this, which seems like a good solution, but it doesn't work here.
(A) Ignoring non-presidential elections is silly.
(B) Republican presidents did well in the south because they did well everywhere from 68 to 92, winning an average of more than 40 states per election. But if you look at the vote totals, they did worse in the south until the mid to late 80s, and the south didn't vote solidly for a republican until Bush in 2000.
Yes Republican dominance in the South didn't set in until the 90s. But I don't think you can really say the Democrats were "the party of the South" during a period where their presidential candidates were more likely to win non-Southern states than Southern ones.
but they weren't. in 68, demo/dixiecrats combined win the south. 76, democrats win the south. In 1980 and 88, republicans win almost everywhere, but all the most republican states are western. in 88 there are one or two republican states that are highly republican, and then the real shift happens over the next decade. the only exception is 1972.
In 64, practically the only states the Democrats lost were in the South. In 68, saying "the Democrats won the South if you combine them with the separate party that actually won the South" isn't actually a compelling case. It's true that the landslides in 72, 80, and 84 make it harder to draw conclusions but at the least those don't show a clear Democratic overperformance in the South.
And again the key thing here is that "Democrats were the party of the South" is a much stronger statement than "Democrats were competitive in the South." And that stronger statement doesn't really seem to hold up after the early 60s.
> the Democrats won the South if you combine them with the separate party that actually won the South" isn't actually a compelling case.
Yes it is when you're claiming republicans won the south. 30% dixiecrat, 30% democrat and 40% republican is NOT republican dominance.
> And again the key thing here is that "Democrats were the party of the South" is a much stronger statement than "Democrats were competitive in the South."
the statement is republicans didn't dominate the south until the 90s. dixiecrats were democrats, not republicans. They didn't call themselves the dixiecans, after all.
🙄
The phrase "3D jobs" is fascinating!
I had to clean up Uncle Norman's apartment after he dropped dead at the age of 90. He had been incontinent for a while. I hired professionals. 2 bedroom apt, say 1,000 sq. ft. $10/sq.ft. I am not complaining. It was a debt of honor, a family thing.
Knausgaard's first book in his famous series revolves around this task that he and his brother have to manage
Fucking dog had fucking papers...
That's quite surprising to me. In the US at least there is still a large "degree premium" which is used to explain why so many people are going to college. Is that not the case in Ireland? If so do you still only have a small minority of 18 year olds going the college route or have you also seen the same level of explosion in demand for higher education?
I'm always a bit leery when people point to random well-made items from their grandparents time that still work trying to argue that things used to be better made.
it's survivorship bias on steroids. in 100 years time some kid will be showing off their grandfathers blender from 2020 and people will make wow noises about craftsmanship... while completely ignoring the million crappier blenders sold the same year that simply didn't survive till 2120.
You can buy some really nice fancy toasters even now that will probably last extremely well but most people don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on a toaster.
Hey Internaut. What do you think is the supply demand situation for blue collar jobs in Ireland? How can we improve the prestige? What about the quality? How big of a mistake was removing the trade track from education?
Really appreciate the time and effort you put into this. It's great to get your insight, and disappointing that I can't find that insight anywhere else.
I keep hearing the degree premium is as strong as ever here in the US... but that's because wages for people without degrees keep going down rather than going up for people with a Bachelor's.
A bunch of my friends work in cleaning in ireland and it's normally not the most lucrative job unless you own your own company and have some good connections.
The degree premium is going to be confounded all to hell, especially in ireland.
Since college admission works directly off exam points it tends towards ruthlessly and brutally fair and since most of the cost of tertiary education is covered by the state with extra grants for low income students ireland is unusually good at taking bright kids from poor backgrounds and tossing them into university which means that college gets even more strongly correlated with base IQ than in the states.
So when someone with a college degree makes more money it's hard to say if it's simply that bright people are both more likely to score well on exams and do well in the workforce because that confounds it all to hell.
throw in irelands strong tradition of exporting it's young people whenever there's an economic downturn where people with good credentials have an easier time getting jobs in the UK, America, Australia... etc
Please excuse my ignorance, but what are 3D Jobs? All I'm getting from Google are results about 3D graphics and the like, and since that has no obvious connection to window washing, I'm assuming it's a case of can't find the esoteric due to similarly named mainstream.
What are "WCR" and "CCU", and "this one job"?
I totally get this. Last year we bought and renovated a home in an area where we have few contacts. After a series of disappointments getting estimates from the guys on the first page of search results, we started soliciting contractors by word of mouth. Most of the guys we went with barely have a webpage, and none of them came up in Google searches. They don’t *need* it; referrals give them as much business as they can handle.
Not only were they not plugged in online, they barely use available payment tools. Some didn’t even take credit cards. But they were licensed and insured and totally professional in their work.
The contractors on the first page of results all seemed to be following some sort of SEO playbook and might even have been using the same suite of materials and tools, marketed to guys who want to up their game. They made extensive use of glossy pamphlets and scheduling tools that seemed designed to calm my assumed fears as a suburban housewife that the guy ringing my doorbell at 10am would indeed be Frank from Electro Inc. They also charged up the wazoo compared to the guys sticking to phone calls and paper checks. We simply couldn’t afford most of the guys using the Advanced Professionalism Web Optimization Package. I assume those fancy 21st century business tools consume a lot of overhead.
It occurred to me that the economy is like an iceberg; a vast amount of important stuff is underwater and we probably have no idea how much based on the parts we can see analyzing web data. Now when I hear theories about how close we are to automating everything, I wonder if the people theorizing have ever had to find someone to rewire their house.
>Most of the guys we went with barely have a webpage, and none of them came up in Google searches. They don’t *need* it;
This isn't just a working-class phenomenon. My mother made wedding cakes for decades. Most of the sugarcraft guild have no websites of their own, they don't need them because they're craftspeople who don't lack for work.
Going round wedding faires with my SO apparently I'm not allowed look at the cakes any more because I couldn't keep the expressions off my face. Almost everything I've ever seen at a wedding faire nobody in my mothers circles would have ever allowed leave their workshop. Most of it would have scored badly in the childrens sections of sugarcraft competitions.
The people who constantly have to plug for business at faires are the people who are so poor at their job that they can't get anyone to recommend them to friends and so end up short of work.
I keep hearing upper-middle class people with houses saying "are there ANY plumbers who are sane, can arrive at the agreed hour, and clean up after? willing to pay for it."
So I imagine that the ones who DO meet the requirements are in high demand and earn WAY more than a librarian or teacher.
Surprisingly, it's the same in science and engineering.
The internet will tell you a lot, but the important parts are either hidden in experts' heads or siloed in corporate R&D. There is even some in physical books that nobody bothered to OCR. Once you go past undergrad level the availability of information drops off a cliff.
Are there any online sources you do recommend for getting exposure to a variety of interesting blue-collar information? I can follow a bunch of academics on Twitter and have a reliable source of neat studies, or read the blogs of programming nerds and learn about useful computer things, but I don't know of a good way to regularly encounter a breadth of content for real-life skillsets and jobs (or trust myself to evaluate which such things are genuinely good).
This. The practical knowledge that sustains modern life is rapidly disappearing. Fucking water and heat are going to become some sort of sci-fi cult mystery.
I took.it to mean jobs in which you have to use your hands, like plumbing, unlike ones that only require you to read.
"Dirty, Demeaning, or Dangerous" jobs
I took it to mean jobs involving the third dimension (height). But maybe it means 'outside' jobs as distinct from paper-pushing on a desk (or pixel-pushing on a screen as it might be now).
I took it to mean jobs involving the third dimension (height). But maybe it means 'outside' jobs as distinct from paper-pushing on a desk (or pixel-pushing on a screen as it might be now).
So where do the boat paraders, brand new $70k truck ralliers, and Trump supporters who flew to the Capitol riot, staying in fancy hotels - fit in with this white working class? Maybe these "petty exurban bourgeoise" are a small sliver of Trump's base. But they're certainly the most visible and vocal.
See the previous post about the difference between economic class and social class.
The core assumption of this piece, that social class can beat out economic class as a principle for organizing political coalitions neglects the role of near zero real interest rates in easing tensions within coalitions. Republicans don't have to face trade-offs between low taxes, high military spending, and social security benefits for their massive elderly base. Dems don't have to face a trade-off between high taxes on their upper middle-class base and expansive welfare for poor minorities. The coalition between all the rungs of a social class ladder is possible in a zero-interest rate vetocracy where tradeoffs are nil, and the state can't do anything ambitions for the bottom rung, but I don't see it enduring if those conditions change.
Why can't the state do anything ambitions for the bottom rung? UBI, say?
Well, the party that wants to right now is geographically disadvantaged, and you need to control a trifecta in order to do anything. Dems can only do whatever their 3-4 most conservative members will sign off on jamming through in reconciliation.
The trade offs are all still there though. Deficit spending on cheap credit gives you more money to allocate but it doesn't determine who gets it. We could raise taxes and have even more military spending or higher social security payments than we do now. We could cut those things and have even lower taxes than we do now.
And everything all kind of balances anyway. Sure, if you have low interest rates you can spend on credit, but then asset prices inflate. Housing costs more. The cost of living increases relative to wages.
The way out of high interest rates is to print the debt. That causes nominal prices and wages to increase (inflation), but the consequent higher interest rates cause asset prices, i.e. housing prices, to decline relative to wages. So now the working man pays more in taxes to fund social security without deficit spending, but spends less on rent. Cancels out. The retiree's social security check comes and they spend more on food and transportation but less on rent. Cancels out again.
The inflation also makes the coalition easier to hold, because nothing looks like a cut. You get a constructive spending reduction by just not increasing spending as fast as inflation. You get a constructive increase in revenues at the same tax rate because nominal wages increase relative to nominal assets and income/sales taxes are a percentage of wages/dividends and capital gains taxes are a percentage of the *nominal* asset price increase, so that inflation and high interest rates increases real government revenues without a nominal rate increase.
It's not obvious that this actually makes a coalition politically more difficult than low interest rates.
Orwell made poignant observation of this in Wigan Pier, the upper class guy going broke trying to keep up appearances, versus the well-off laborer
At that point, I feel like you've basically reduced class structure to Red Tribe and Blue Tribe and just renamed them in a way that's more palatable to Red Tribe.
Thats what it kind of always was, didn't you know?
The US doesn't only think of "Class" in terms of money. Some *behaviors* are trash, while others are better.
Have you ever seen "Ghetto" Black women wrestling in the street or sidewalk, over some guy or something? How really are they at all distinct from the lardassed White trash women going at each other in the dirt of some trailer park?
If you blessed them with millions of dollars, they wouldn't be percieved differently.
Look at Trumps diet, or television habits. Until the democrats got the cue to stop mocking him for it, they did so constantly. Their mockery was aimed at unmistakable symbols of class, or a lack thereof.
McDonalds burgers, fries, and frappes? Those are what I eat, and they're awesome!
"~800-588-2300/ em-pire!" I used to hear that every morning on TV before going to school, or before my mom went to work. In my free time, I watch hours of TV. Why do these people think these mundane and okay things are so, so wrong?
> Have you ever seen "Ghetto" Black women wrestling in the street or sidewalk, over some guy or something? How really are they at all distinct from the lardassed White trash women going at each other in the dirt of some trailer park?
For the purposes of this discussion? One group is overwhelmingly likely to vote for Democrats, the other for Republicans. Either you think one group isn't voting their interests, or there's some fundamental difference in terms of their interests that isn't reflected by this analysis of class.
Or maybe the ability of Democrats to successfully culturally signal "anti racism" despite doing absolutely nothing to lift black people out of their socioeconomic position is the Right-wing version of "What the fuck is wrong with Kansas?".
From the perspective of the Right, perhaps. Are you sure you understand the perspective and incentives of a hypothetical Black voter?
It's really not that implausible that people vote against their individual interests. Jason Brennan's libertarian Against Democracy makes this point better than I do, but basically, think of it in terms of *individual incentives*. For each voter, their incentive to vote in their own interests is actually very low, since their chance of effecting the outcome is minimal. Almost certainly they could find something else to do with the half an hour it takes to vote that would have higher expected value. So it's not a priori implausible that people simply ignore their own interests in voting, since the consequences are very small. At this point, you might say 'well, why the hell do people bother voting at all then', but the answer is that people like the sense that they are performing their civic duty, that they are taking part in a big important community activity and expressing their moral identity, and voting is a very low-cost, highly visible way of doing all those things. But if that's why your voting, you'll get weird cognitive dissonance if you then try and pick the candidate who is best for you, rather than best for the nation/your community. The latter, I suppose, might lead to groups voting in the interest of the groups, even though the members aren't trying to vote in their individual interests. But Brennan provides a fair amount of empirical evidence that people tend to try and vote in the national interest specifically (though I have forgotten exactly what, and no doubt, like all social scientific evidence it could be challenged).
The idea that people vote against their own interests gets a bad rep, because it's associated with people patronizing their enemies, especially their lower class enemies, but that's a separate matter from whether it's true.
Thank you, that's an interesting perspective. I'll look into that book.
Only a Libertarian could oppose Democracy on the basis that people aren't self interested enough - usually the complaint is the other way around!
This post is an odd combination of class condescension and attacks on the Dems for class condescension.
That does seem to be the fundamental paradox of the modern Republican party. I don't think they can realistically shed the class condescension, though.
> Why do these people think these mundane and okay things are so, so wrong?
They don't. It's a strawman. I'm from Tampa, I eat barbecue and fast food, and I love the Olive Garden. I can hear the tune of the ad you're referring to, and I've watched hundreds of hours of TV in recent months.
I am also a highly paid professional deep within the most ultraliberal bubble in the country. Never once, not on *any* occasion, has anyone I've met attacked me even implicitly for these traits.
Here's some similar testimony:
' In the book, Vance describes his life at Yale as bewildering, since he was among the small number of students from poor backgrounds and constantly felt like he was playing catch-up, learning that Cracker Barrel is not actually fine dining and figuring out which fork to use. But he has mostly kind things to say about his fellow students and faculty:
Yale made me feel, for the first time in my life, that others viewed my life with intrigue. Professors and classmates seemed genuinely interested in what seemed to me a superficially boring story: I went to a mediocre public high school, my parents didn’t go to college, and I grew up in Ohio.
In the movie, though, Vance’s story plays out quite differently. After the emergency call to his girlfriend, J.D. sits at the dinner table with fellow students and attorneys from high-powered law firms. He is nervous. While making conversation, he says that he is from Ohio and that his grandfather moved there from Kentucky’s hill country to work in a steel mill.
A quiet falls over the table. Everyone glances at each other knowingly. Nobody says anything. They change the subject, while J.D. sits crestfallen and mortified.
I yelled at the screen when I saw that. (Yelling happened multiple times throughout the movie.) Reading Hillbilly Elegy, I feel some kinship with Vance. My people are not from Appalachia, but they’re working-class Northerners, by way of immigrants, potato farmers in Maine, and shoot-your-dinner-from-the-porch North Carolina rednecks. I too am the first in my nuclear family to go to college (on a massive scholarship), and to earn two master’s degrees I’ll be paying for until I retire. Growing up, Cracker Barrel was my favorite special-occasion restaurant.
But my alma mater is an elite institution. Most of my friends were well-off, though a lot of them didn’t realize that the things they took for granted — parents who could send money to them, cable TV, Pop-Tarts for breakfast — were far beyond my imagining. Like J.D., I often felt out of place.
And yet that’s exactly why this scene rang so false. It seems impossible that everyone at that table would take J.D.’s biographical note as embarrassing; instead, as Vance himself points out in his book, his background makes him intriguing, someone different from the usual bunch. '
https://www.vox.com/culture/21547861/hillbilly-elegy-review-netflix
Of course, a Vox writer is hardly an unbiased source on something like this, but Vance himself is a conservative.
The truth is that people work on two tracks with this kind of thing. When, for political reasons, they want to be mean about [outgroup] they will mock them for [outgroup] cultural norms. But when they actually meet someone from [outgroup] as an individual, they will generally refrain from hostility and try to be nice, and tolerant of difference, especially if politics doesn't come up.
But also, American liberals are actually well aware that classism is a thing and is bad: it's a central part of their mythology (I don't mean that term pejoratively) that Republicans are bad because they think the poor should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and don't understand that their lives are hard.
You're insisting on applying a singular definition of class based on aesthetics. I don't think it's as versatile as you suggest. Look around this thread for how easily your definition gets coerced as 'the upper class is [the Cultural Other I Most Distrust]. I know They hate me, therefore I must hate Them'. Helpful.
At any rate, this view is already a clear central beat of Trumpism, which claims that our aesthetics and way of life is being destroyed from the top down by a nefarious, morally vacuous and conveniently abstract elite who hate god and love nothing more than a good abortion (the fact you make no effort to integrate either of these founding dogmas when discussing New Republican Aesthetics is a dead giveaway of your SF elitism, for lack of a better term)
So, I don't see anything new here, politically. Except the prediction market stuff, which I find marvelously ironic in a post mostly about class. Do you not perceive how the SF-based futurist technobabble crowd constitutes a very coherent class, much more convincingly than the formless latte-sipping blob you seek to conjure? Is it lost on you how classist you sound, in this regard, with claims like "$TECHNOLOGICAL_SOLUTION will solve our problems and anyone who disagrees is stuck in the past (trust me I understand this better than you, guess you need to be engineer-adjacent to get it)"?
Finally, I think this interacts with your earlier piece on "gay rights are civil rites" in interesting ways, and I hope you explore that intersection in the future.
But the futurist technobabble crowd isn't a prominent political class. They exist, but they aren't an organised bloc in the same way that poor evangelical whites without college degrees and rich coastal whites with college degrees are organised blocs that vote together and each hate the other.
"$TECHNOLOGICAL_SOLUTION will solve our problems" is only a class signal in a much more European, capital-versus-labour conception of classes than Scott is gesturing towards. If you wanted an American upper-class signal about technology, you'd go for something about algorithmic bias or the impossibility of solving complex social problems with technology.
https://twitter.com/nathansnewman/status/1365017699433259024
I find the idea that the only help possible for the poor is UBI or welfare more than a bit paternalistic and condescending. And quite likely untrue. Trump's answer for that was protectionism, aka make work available. And he got a lot more voters for this than Democrats get for UBI - especially among this very demographic.
"A majority of the people arrested for Capitol riot had a history of financial trouble" https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/02/10/capitol-insurrectionists-jenna-ryan-financial-problems/
Hard to separate psychologically connected issues from a simple tendency to make bad decisions.
Hard to find literally anyone who hasn't had significant financial problems. That is quite literally the only growth sector of our economy; financial engineering to ruin lives for profit.
I remember the statistic was comparing to the national average, so it does mean something.
On the other hand, there are probably simpler explanations: people that are doing well just aren't as likely to be in the street, no matter the side.
yeah, and with our 40 year span of 'nobody but the top does well' economics we should have lots of violence to look forward to.
They're culturally working class, with enough money to splurge on a jacked up truck. Like the blog post implies, teachers can be poor but culturally upper-class because they like espresso and read the NYT. A construction worker making good money is culturally working-class. That extra money just means a bigger truck, more date nights at Applebees, and a monster-sized TV to watch wrestling and the NFL.
Middle class, not upper class (which is pretty invisible, but I suppose wields significant power?)
I hope the sarcastic tone I read this in is the sarcastic tone you wrote it in.
It seems like a pretty reasonable suggestion, but really this is just Scott outlining what it would take to make him a Republican and I doubt he's their target demographic.
I will point out that the Conservatives have been able to appeal to the Working Class here in the UK, beating the party that's literally called "Labour" in key constituencies, so it's not implausible that the Republicans could end up using similar rhetoric. Of course, Brexit had a big role in that.
Indian immigrants to the UK typically arrived wealthier and more educated than than Pakistani's or Bangaladeshi's. But it's anyway not a recent phenomenon that British Asians vote conservative in reasonable numbers.
Thanks. Is that the only thing they have in common with each other though?
(Presumably, this explains why this was not brought up in English speaking media)
I just don't understand any of this well.
There has been a trend of Hindus moving towards the conservatives over time: https://twitter.com/MattSingh_/status/1210305652318494739
There was an amazingly self-revealing article in the Guardian last year on this:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/27/how-did-british-indians-become-so-prominent-in-the-conservative-party
The premise is basically that the Tories have had success with Asian voters because they have a message that appeals to them, and policies that have done relatively well for them. And now there are quite a lot of Asians active within the party, including in top government positions.
I kept expecting it to pivot to "Here's what we can offer Asian people to try and win them back." That's what I wanted anyway (I'm not a Tory). But no... it pivots to "We should fight back by imitating the tactics of the Black Panthers".
They failed to achieve racial justice so they couldn’t have been that good.
Were they? My impression is they were part political party, part street gang. I don't recommend the melding of politics and organized crime, personally.
What were some of their tactics that you liked?
The Guardian hates British Indians. Or really, Indians anywhere. This is such an outrageous article. The author, Neha Shah, is getting ahead of herself to call this group names. I couldn't take her seriously and continue reading after a couple of paragraphs.
Was the article bad? Yes! Is it a huge leap to accuse an entire news organization that they hate Indians because of this? Absolutely.
'The Guardian hates British Indians. Or really, Indians anywhere' What's your evidence for this (other than that one article)?
I have a suspicion-and it's only a suspicion, this could be totally off-base and unfair (I mean that sincerely not sarcastically), that what you *actually* are picking up on is that The Guardian hates Modi and the BJP, But that's unsurprising and not in itself indicative of prejudice against India: The Guardian is a liberal, anti-populist, secular, centre-left paper, so it hates all right-wing religious parties everywhere. It hates Modi for the same reason it used to hate George Bush. It's a straightforward ideological clash, and no doubt Modi doesn't like The Guardian much either, or its Indian equivalents.
>but really this is just Scott outlining what it would take to make him a Republican and I doubt he's their target demographic.
Are you sure? The part about expertise sounds unconvincing. I also hope Scott is not this naive on racism or the Democratic party. Or the Republican party for that matter.
Elaborate on this naivete please.
What's strange about preferring prediction markets over credentialism? That's classic SSC think right there.
I guess prediction markets could not design a good Mars rover?
A prediction market just averages the opinions of lots of people, so no, it can't design anything, that's not how it works.
That was a criticism on how prediction markets cannot replace credentialism, since you still better rely on people with credentials to design something that works. Averaging over the opinions of lots of people regarding design patterns, etc. would achieve a worse result than listening to a few experts.
Sure, but I bet prediction markets could choose a great team for designing a good Mars rover. Though when you want to buy a thing you use different financial instruments.
No, but it might do a decent job predicting whether WMDs would be found in Iraq in substantial quantities, or whether raising the minimum wage to $15/hour would substantially increase unemployment in low-cost-of-living places. Right now, we rely on experts for these predictions, and those experts are rewarded for agreeing with current consensus and their political side's preferred policies--prediction markets or tournaments or similar things might do a lot better.
Further, a lot of experts are long on credentials and short on actual knowledge--consider the large set of established findings in social science that have been overturned in the last few years. Or earlier, the psychological theories that led to deciding which criminals should be given leniency or which witnesses' testimony should not be doubted. An alternative is pretty appealing, even without the huge political/class bias of most social scientists.
It would be difficult to *design* a rover, but they could predict whether the rover survives landing.
I don't view expertise as credentialism. If you would generally talk about credentialism, I am so incredibly on your side, I think with a few exceptions (doctors, pilots, etc.) credentials are extremely overrated. But real expertise is key in my opinion. I don't think the prediction market is gonna come up with the theory of relativity.
Yeah, I'd become a Republican. We could use a working class party.
I'd go Republican for this.
After voting for Democrats all my life, I started voting for Republicans around 2018. This was the reason.
There is plenty not to like in both parties. The rampant snobbery of the Democrats I met in the bay area pushed me over the edge. I thought Democrats believed in evaluating people as individuals instead of members of groups. A long string of incidents in which people at my large Bay Area employer applied stereotypes to blacks and people from the south were eye opening.
I think our Canadian political divides may split this way too. We never had American or even British levels of polarization, but (socially) working class Western populism against Eastern cultural elites has been an important political dimension through multiple party shakeups and coalition realignments. Pity the federal Conservatives keep picking such bland leaders.
Even more: I bet A LOT of people only vote Democrat because voting Republican just isn't an option. Wasn't since I was a young and still no change in sight - there had to appear a total outsider to make them appealing outside their base.
This means there are a lot of people that don't really like Democrats and would be quite happy to vote something else, if only there was another option with its head out of its ass. At the very least Republicans should continue the separation from the ultra-religious - being just pro-religion instead of fundamentalists would open them up to huge swathes of new voters.
Given the history of things starting “a modest proposal...” you’re probably at least half-right
Indeed, thisd is obviously joking, in a "ha ha only serious" way.
Sure, but I think I'd have preferred to read the entirely-serious version. I don't like reading a sloppy generalization and having to decode whether it's satire about political strategy, or genuine advice pitched in the language of politics. Or just a mistake.
I think there’s a sincere reading somewhere here:
Scott wants the Republicans to make a coherent argument with persuasive sway over the Democratic coalition, which then prompts a Democratic crisis, to turn against virtue signaling, pseudo-meritocracy, and the like.
If either succeed, America as a whole gets better options.
It's a pretty aspiration, but IMO a sincere reading was far too shallow to convince me that "coherent [Republican] argument with persuasive sway over the Democratic coalition" isn't an over constrained problem. More the opposite in fact, if it needed to take such liberties just to vaguely gesture in that direction.
Going off the book review, it sounds like he's emulating the style of the writer he is aping the classification from.
The original "modest proposal" was satire.....
This kind of is as well.
Go watch American Dharma. This is exactly what Brannon expects to happen in US politics...
Try to distinguish between what you want to happen and what will likely happen.
And analyze *exactly* why you want it.
God damn it. Brannon. Can we get editing, please?
FFS. Why is Apple constantly replacing Bannon?
I dunno, but I prefer to make my own typos, rather than having an "Artificial Intelligence" make them or me.
for me.
In other words "I hope this doesn't offend my political affiliations by insinuating that it's possible that the working class is also human".
That's a huge leap but okay.
This is the project a number of GOP senators, notably Hawley and Rubio, have been pursuing pretty explicitly: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/07/opinion/sunday/republican-party-trump-2020.html
People like Mike Rowe demonstrate exactly why any claims that the republican party is pro-working class are a calculated fiction. Rowe is bought and paid for by the Koch brothers, and a repeated theme in his advocacy is that workers need to suck up bad conditions, take personal responsibility for safety problems, and work hard until they find success. At the same time, he argues against unions, saying that they no longer serve a purpose, he argues against regulations- not just environmental regulation that could arguably cost jobs, but also basic health and safety regulation, because supposedly those should be the worker's responsibility to keep track of. He argues that there needs to be widespread vocational training to address a "skills gap", which is a discredited economic theory.
The thread unifying this is clear. Rowe's not an advocate for workers in industry, he's an advocate for owners of industry. His SWEAT pledge reads like a satirical wish list that a coal baron might have for the perfect obedient employee who'd never protest or organize. Reducing regulations might marginally reduce unemployment, but it'll make heavy industry a hell of a lot more profitable at the low cost of worker lives and our environment. And funneling young workers into vocational schools with the promise of well-paying jobs when they graduate isn't a way to give low-skill people jobs- it's to create a large non-union labor base in manufacturing and construction. It's not a coincidence that the ideological advocacy Rowe puts out just happens to align with the interests of the people who have given him massive amounts of money.
The "skills gap" idea is that high unemployment following the 2008 recession was the result of structural shifts in the labor market such that jobs were available but there weren't workers with the technical education and skills to do them. Rowe's website loudly states: "Consider the reality of today’s job market. We have a massive skills gap. Even with record unemployment, millions of skilled jobs are unfilled because no one is trained or willing to do them. "
It was a popular idea when unemployment was high, because it seemed like a simple solution- just train a bunch of people in basic vocational skills, and they'd all get jobs! The problem was, the causal arrow was in the wrong direction. When unemployment is high and labor supply outstrips labor demand, employers raise skill requirements to artificially cut down on potential applicants. When unemployment is low, those skill requirements disappear, and employers become willing to train people on the job (Here's a simple summary: https://www.vox.com/2019/1/7/18166951/skills-gap-modestino-shoag-ballance). There are some middle-skill jobs for which there are legitimate education requirements that can't be taught on-the-job, but those aren't the jobs for which Rowe is pushing vocational training. They're stuff like nursing, paralegals, or low-level management (for reference, "Job Polarization and US Worker Skills" from Brookings).
The point isn't that vocational training is secretly bad. Vocational training can be great! The point is that Rowe's advocacy favors the employers, not the employees. Training a bunch more people to weld won't lower unemployment when labor supply outstrips demand, because (as discussed in the studies in the Yglesias article) the skills requirements are a response to unemployment, not a driver of it.
For the sake of fairness, here's a link to a relavent article from Rowe for his side of the safety bit:
https://www.ishn.com/articles/93505--dirty-jobs--guy-says-safety-third-is--a-conversation-worth-having-
This seems like the designers of roundabouts and mixed pedestrian/vehicle areas in Europe: make things less clearly (and falsely) safe to make people pay attention. But I don't know because I honestly haven't been in those conditions.
It's also good personal advice, safety first somehow found its way out of industrial litigation-avoidance language into *child rearing* and it's awful, creating fragile, neurotic people who grew up under helicoptering parents. Exposing yourself to risk and danger is valuable at the personal level, a great deal of misery can be laid at the feet of personal harm avoidance being elevated to a saintly value.
People like black and white. Activity X is safe or unsafe. If it's safe I don't have to worry. If it's unsafe I shouldn't do it. It can be stressful (probably in an evolutionarily adaptive way) to see something as containing some danger and doing it anyway. So I have complete empathy for people who are only willing or able to have binary safety functions.
One thing this thought makes me curious about are what about people who do things they acknowledge are dangerous. For example smokers or illegal drug users. From the ones I've known they don't usually come across as people who are holding a nonbinary view of safety of their activity. Are they externally saying X is unsafe but internalizing that it is safe, or can humans regularly go into a "X is unsafe and I feel it's unsafe in my bones, but I'm going to do it anyway, no big deal"?
Not that this line of questioning is probably very valuable, but I believe it's interesting to think about.
That article is a good argument for why "safety third" is a reasonable thing to say. It's also bullshit- a position Rowe retreats to when people point out that what he's arguing is that regulations are unnecessary and counterproductive. I'll quote Rowe himself, in his Ted talk:
Safety first is, I mean going back to OSHA and PETA and the Humane Society, what if OSHA got it wrong? I mean, I, this is heresy what I’m about to say, but what if, what if it’s really safety third? Right? I mean, I mean really. What I mean to say is I value my safety on these crazy jobs as much as the people that I’m working with, but the ones who really get it done, they’re not out there talking about safety first. They know that other things come first. The business of doing the work comes first, the business of getting it done. And, you know, I’ll never forget up in the Bering Sea, I was on a crab boat with the Deadliest Catch guys, which I, which I also work on in the first season. We’re about 100 miles off the coast of Russia, fifty foot seas, big waves, green water coming over the wheelhouse, right? Most hazardous environment I’d ever seen. And I was back with a guy lashing the pots down. So I’m 40 feet off the deck, which is like looking down at the top of your shoe, you know, and it’s doing this in the ocean. Unspeakably dangerous. I scampered down. I go into the wheelhouse and I say with some level of incredulity, ‘Captain, OSHA?’ And he says, ‘OSHA? Ocean.’ And he points out there and, but in that moment what he said next can’t be repeated in the lower 48. It can’t be repeated on any factory floor, any construction site, but he looked at me and he said, ‘Son,’ and he’s my age by the way, he calls me son. I love that. He says, ‘Son, I’m the captain of a crab boat. My responsibility is not to get you home alive. My responsibility is to get you home rich. You want to get home alive. That’s on you.’
Aside from the fact that the story is clearly at least in part made up (OSHA-Ocean, really?), it demonstrates what Rowe is really advocating when he says safety third. He's not saying that "safety first" makes people complacent. He's saying that "safety first" is wrong because it makes the bosses responsible for safety, that safety should be the responsibility of each individual worker, and the boss's responsibility is to make as much money as possible. The ridiculous thing is that Rowe gives this story as if it's some grand argument against regulation, when in fact it's a perfect example of why we need regulations requiring safety. Of course the boss doesn't want to bother keeping things safe! That's why we have regulations in the first place- so those bosses don't get people killed by focusing only on making profits!
You cut off his conclusion in that excerpt:
"And for the rest of that day — safety first I mean, I was like — So, the idea that we create this sense of complacency when all we do is talk about somebody else’s responsibility as though it’s our own, and vice versa. Anyhow, a whole lot of things."
I think you've got an is/ought issue going on here. He isn't saying the boss's responsibility OUGHT to be making money. He is saying the boss's responsibility IS making money. So if you're trusting your boss, you're screwed. I assume based on reading the other article I linked that this line of logic continues from there: if you're trusting your safety coordinator your boss hired, you're screwed. And if you're trusting some distant agency, you're screwed. I mean, that sure sounds like what he's saying when he talks about disdain for his show's safety coordinator.
I don't have an is/ought issue, because Rowe's position is that everything ought to be the way it is. That's what his SWEAT pledge is all about: "I believe the most annoying sounds in the world are whining and complaining. I will never make them. If I am unhappy in my work, I will either find a new job, or find a way to be happy". If you've got a problem with the status quo, suck it up or leave, and any problems you have are your own responsibility.
Social Class is not Economic Class
And the whole reorientation being a narrative fiction is baked into the cake, always has been. Pointing that out on the part of the democrats(that's their project is an upper class OP) for cynical gain is how you'd get the reorientation.
And youre right that Rowe's an aide to industry, but youre misunderstanding the people who throw money at him, they want people in the trades and industry, messages like Mike's help provide an alternative narrative to COLLEGE OR NOTHING that high schoolers get drowned in.
The beautiful thing about scott's message-plan is that it allows your protestation to be dissmissed as upper class gatekeeping. "You care more about the environment and telling miners to code than you do about letting working men do their fucking job"
Spoken like someone who has never known the satisfaction of doing hard honest work.
Could you spell out "the mother of all labour misallocations" a bit? I'm not sure what you're referring to, but I'm curious.
They make interesting noises in this direction, but haven’t fully committed. See how they’ve reacted to Romney’s recent child tax credit proposal, for instance.
Yes, 100% agreed. All posturing. But the posturing is still new.
How have they reacted?
Rubio said (without referring to him by name) that Romney's plan isn't "pro-family" because it doesn't have work requirements:
https://twitter.com/marcorubio/status/1364016905435164672?s=20
This is a project that they have been *gesturing towards*, but I don't see any reason yet to take Hawley seriously in any sort of good faith when it comes to his policy goals.
He will call out companies on Twitter over the low wage they pay their workers, but he was *against* a far more modest minimum wage increase when it came to his own state a few years back (I mean I'm happy for people to change their mind, but I don't get any sense that's what happened here?).
To his credit, he *did* provide his own recent minimum wage proposal. But the structure is bizarre, and honestly makes no sense. It would place a nearly 100% marginal tax rate on people in certain settings, which really doesn't seem like what he or the GOP wants. But I honestly don't think Hawley is particularly interested in making this policy, he's just signaling his stance (and I'm honestly surprised that his aides didn't at least put more work into making that signaling a little more coherent).
Hawley's Twitter account is certainly a strident critic of Big Tech... but what are the actual policies he is proposing? I mean this genuinely, I have tried to find it, and I can't find much. Maybe they were going to be in that book deal that got cancelled, but that's the thing... he's not a pundit, he's a senator! Proposing legislation is kinda part of his job. The main thing I can find is his amendment to Section 230, but do you genuinely think he wants to pass that? I don't think it would actually fix his major criticisms of the industry?
This is not criticism of "Why doesn't the senate get anything done??". That has nothing to do with Hawley. But I think it's genuinely important to not just take "gesturing towards policy on Twitter" as equivalent to taking real substantive policy ambitions. There are lots of senators I disagree with, but you can absolutely find the concrete policies they support or reject. Like, just to stick with the obvious polarizing choices, when you go find some Bernie Sanders proposal, like it or not , I am confident that Sanders would *love* to enact that agenda. Maybe it's a terrible idea, but he sincerely thinks these are policies that should be made into law.
When it comes to Hawley, I honestly don't think that's the right perspective to take. Does he sincerely want his Section 230 Modification to pass? He doesn't really act like a senator who does. All the analysis I can find on both sides of the aisle seems to think that policy is pretty bad, and doesn't fit his mission. But is that even the point?
In his "defense", you can just say "What's the difference? The Senate won't pass anything anyways, so what matters is your performance to the public, and the values you stand up for". And like, that's actually kinda true, which is why I think you should give even less weight to the idea that Hawley is genuine about these policies.
Sorry for the rant, I admit it just bothers me. I would so much rather the GOP have real policy ambitions that I disagree with than the fact that they seem to have largely given up on those ambitions. And I think it's important to draw your own judgment on whether or not to "believe" senators on the policies they advocate, not just what they say their stance is. I think Hawley is genuinely wary of the effects of Big Tech and other large corporations, and would like to reign in their power. I do *not* believe the policies he gestures towards on Twitter are actually the ones he wants to enact. I think he knows the Section 230 reform wouldn't accomplish anything like what he wants.
The welfare stuff is odd because I think some of his *interest* in that is genuine, but he just isn't acting like it matters to him (trying to make a deal, do serious proposals, and whatnot). Until I see real reason to think otherwise, I just assume he's just got too much pressure from the conservative movement, which is still so antagonistic to welfare, for it to be anything but posturing from him. But like, I'd love to be proven wrong, his GOP colleague introduced a big new child poverty bill, let's see the support, or a genuine alternative.
A higher minimum wage that is the same for cities and the countryside where the cost of living is lower harms rural communities. So it's pretty logical why he'd be opposed to that, given the voters that support them.
Has anyone proposed a minimum wage that differs by county, based on the cost of living?
See here for how something like that could be calculated: https://www.niche.com/about/methodology/counties-with-the-lowest-cost-of-living/
I see this as a great opportunity for a bipartisan deal. The Dems get high minimum wages for the, often black, working class employees in the cities. Reps get a more economically competitive countryside.
Aren't you're now just making the case for a repeal of the federal minimum wage? The states and cities can then do as they like.
No, having a law that varies based on a clear formula is not the same as not having a formula.
But it seems strictly worse than not having a formula, because a formula will be all Seeing Like A State and factor in the wrong things with the wrong weights for all the usual reasons. Whereas the local governments are closer to their own economies and better understand them and it enables local control.
Then instead of outsourcing jobs from detroit to china, they can outsource them to north dakota. Interesting.
Possibly worth noting that trade benefits the poor, who spend more of their income than the rich on highly traded goods: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/131/3/1113/2461162
Though maybe the factual question of "are tariffs good?" isn't relevant to the piece, or maybe it is but the economists who route the above article are in the 75% of at-risk experts :)
Trade benefits these people only in terms of lower costs for goods and such; it hurts them by specializing and offshoring the industries and jobs they could have obtained in the past - When the factory or the mill or the mine closes, I definitely need those low cost goods because my income is no more.
I have yet to see (could be just my ignorance) academic discussion around the jobs side of global trade that does not translate to buggy whip manufacturers learn new trades + learn to code!
I think I can argue that higher prices for goods, when coupled with much broader productive employment, is better for US society in general and many of the US middle and lower classes in specific than global wealth + low cost goods coupled with un- and under-employment because we offshored so much.
I, personally, from a upper middle class perspective, would much rather we employ more and pay higher prices for all sorts of goods than employ less and pay higher taxes to feed, house, and clean up the mess of a massive unemployed/underemployed population.
Ah, this one again. You do realise we've had three hundred years of specialisation and increased free trade in the modern era, and at no point has it led to the predicted mass unemployment someone always seems to claim. Lack of flexibility in the market means disruption can cause temporary peaks of unemployment yes, but nothing lasting. If you are going to brandish the many-times-discredited spirit of Ludd around it is surely beholden on you to provide some actual evidence here?
> and at no point has it led to the predicted mass unemployment someone always seems to claim
It's happened over and over again. Some of the revolutions of 1848 were partially triggered by mass unemployment caused by cheap imports from industrialized England. Right now, huge swaths of the US remain economically devastated due to factories closing and moving overseas. These "temporary peaks" have lasted decades.
Not to mention that disappearing industrial jobs have only been replaced with minimum wage service jobs that don't pay a person enough to live or support a family. There may not be mass unemployment but there are a huge number of people who work full time (in hours) but don't make a living wage or have health care because they've cobbled together multiple service jobs.
Also the number of workers collecting disability has risen significantly since the 90s. There is a growing population of prime working age that has opted out of the workforce. See here: https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/statcomps/di_asr/2016/sect01.html#chart2
When I say opted out, please don't read too much into that. Obviously there are many people collecting SSDI who don't feel as if they had a choice in the matter. There is no doubt a complex interplay of factors driving the increase; including people addicted to opiates, general decrease in health and fitness driving more medical problems, etc. And certainly there is a group who are too physically unfit (or injured) for manual labor, but they're unskilled/unfit for any sort of desk job, and collecting SSDI is an attractive choice at that point.
Two things to consider here. Firstly, the reason British goods did well despite tariffs (the policy meant to stop this happening clearly didn't work, which is probably an important point) was not price but quality. More advanced manufacturing made for better quality products, as well as cheaper ones. The assumption that this was a like-for-like swap is too simplistic. The same applies for e.g. the US (or UK) automobile industry, where the products that replaced them were simply better for the majority of consumers (as good a definition of quality as you're going to get until an actual economist turns up). If your industry is producing lousy products it is going to be out-competed.
The same dynamic applies to offshoring, albeit with the quality here being that of the workers. If you need to open a garment factory you are going to do it somewhere cheap, but not anywhere. You need access to a skilled workforce, so you go to somewhere with such a body of people like Bangladesh. There one not only finds a pool of experienced workers, but you are able to employ a standard of worker who in the US would not take a factory floor job, because they have a degree or a trade specialisation. Quality employees (ideally at low cost) are important.
Secondly, is it true that loss of manufacturing causes long-standing unemployment? The pockets of deep unemployment I know are areas where resource production, basically mining and agriculture, have been out-competed. It's why chunks of West Virginia or County Durham are still basket cases whilst Detroit or Glasgow is on the up I guess. My best guess as to what is going on here is to do with transferable skills but there does seem to be more bounce-backability in former manufacturing areas than in old coal mining areas. This is impressionistic, but perhaps important.
As you can tell, I don't think the Luddite view has much merit. It seems to be based around the assumption of products being equal, and lumps together resource exaction with heavy industry. And you have to consider the possibility that what actually causes the long-term unemployment is not the actual changes but government intervention.
As a postscript, does not wanting to protect working-class jobs to protect their holders reek of upper-middle class paternalism? The underlying logic seems to be a kind of generous understanding that all these people have is their jobs, so we must protect them. As such, this policy seems not to fit with Scott's overall framework here.
Free trade costing jobs doesn't have to lead to aggregate unemployment to be true. It only has to lead to unemployment or reduced earnings for some subset of the population.
I support free trade, because it's helpful on net and doesn't distort the market like tariffs, but it is foolish to deny that outsourcing of jobs and movement of low-skill, labor-intensive jobs to other countries has severely impacted a significant portion of the US population.
Note that one of the major U.S. export industries, paying for those imports, is agriculture. Imports can be larger than exports only if foreigners are on net investing in the U.S., whether by buying stock or helping finance the deficit.
Or if the exports involve fewer jobs than the imports. How many man-hours does it take to make a smartphone, and how many to make $phone dollars worth of corn?
There has been a lot of academic work on the effects of trade on employment in the last couple decades (check out https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w21906/w21906.pdf for example for a key paper in that area).
But to push back on your other point. The typical economist would probably say that gains from trade make everyone better off. The idea that there is a fixed amount of "work" and that if we import more goods (i.e. export the jobs) is confused. People use money to buy goods and services and to the extent that people have more money they will buy more goods and services and increase the demand for labor. Not everything can be imported, you can't get a haircut from China for instance. So if we could take the gains from trade and channel that into uses that help the people who's jobs are lost in a reasonably targeted way then we all end up better off. And it's not a matter of just paying them the lost wages, but more helping the economies in geographic areas most affected by trade to readjust so that people can find new, better jobs in sectors more insulated from international trade (services, high-value/smaller scale production, etc).
That's the theory at least, Auter et al showed pretty convincingly that that didn't happen with the "China shock" in the 90's because of the speed at which the change happened. But there is some disagreement as to how strong of conclusions we should draw from that. Was the China shock just an exceptional one-time event? It seems unlikely that we'll have a comparable dynamic arise anytime soon. It's not as if there is ANOTHER country with 1 billion people that is way below it's economic capacity and suddenly find it's footing over the course of a couple of decades. So it's not at all clear that protectionism will improve the situation at the current margin. After all, it's not as if the tariffs imposed under the Trump administration really changed the balance of trade. It just basically shifted some jobs from China to Vietnam (and other places in SE Asia) but didn't really do anything for the USs overall trade deficit: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOPGSTB.
> It's not as if there is ANOTHER country with 1 billion people that is way below it's economic capacity and suddenly find it's footing over the course of a couple of decades.
I hear India and Africa are gearing up these days.
> The idea that there is a fixed amount of "work" and that if we import more goods (i.e. export the jobs) is confused.
I don't think many people seriously advance this as the reason to stop or slow job exports. It's more that industry is regional, and the jobs that could replace them simply may not be available in those regions, and so these poor or working class people now have to relocate away from their friends and families just so they can keep eating because of policy decisions made by the political elites that don't serve or care about their interests. This seems to be one of the big reasons behind Trump's popularity.
Sure, the lower prices "help everyone" because now these poor people can afford to eat while making less money because their job no longer exists. Fantastic.
And other poor people elsewhere in the country are making more money. The argument is a general one against change.
To get past that you need some argument to show that, on average, the losses are going to poor people and the gains to rich people.
> And other poor people elsewhere in the country are making more money.
How does that work exactly? Many good paying blue collar jobs moved out of cities due to zoning, then they moved those jobs out of the country so the goods are cheaper. Which of these blue collar workers are better off exactly?
It's not an argument against change so much as an argument against too rapid a change. Younger generations are more far mobile.
Employing more people in $location because they happen to have the right citizenship isn’t really a net positive to the world though.
What exactly is the reason to prefer the former scenario when the latter is presumably more economically efficient?
Just pigpiling on Burin's comment to say: Those of us who grew up poor realize that being able to buy a laptop much more cheaply is cold comfort if there are no jobs we can do to afford to buy one.
Those who grew up poor know that the price of bread is massively important, and you buy it whether you have a job or not. And even if the bread is made with local wheat, the price of that wheat is set globally and is affected by tariffs and subsidies.
There's a reason why Home Pride and day-old bread was de rigeur growing up and not some highfalutin' brand actually made with something that didn't approach sawdust. Substitutionary effect is a very real thing to those of limited means, I assure you.
Also, no. No you don't. You skip certain foods altogether. If you can honestly tell me you've gone to a close friend's house to realize... hey it's dark.... and it's because the power got cut, feel free to chime in about your experiences. Otherwise, I can assure you: Tariffs help rich people get richer primarily. The overall positive impact on an economy is not guaranteed to spread equally. And overwhelmingly it does not.
Lack of tariffs/protectionism since obviously we don't have an edit function and I need to stop and think a bit more before hitting Post
"The overall positive impact on an economy is not guaranteed to spread equally." Is that a problem with tariffs, or a problem with the economy? Would you also recommend against automation or other productivity improvements because the benefits are spread unevenly? Or should we be looking at ways to spread the benefits instead?
Its a problem with tariffs. Productivity improvements don’t take very long to spread across society. When the wealthy can outsource the workforce to the third world and support a permanent underclass by robbing the middle class for social welfare, the benefits tend to accrue to the wealthy.
I don't think it's correct that the platform of capitalism and liberty does not excite people. I think that what is currently called "capitalism" - where there are companies that are too big to fail, who are de-facto controlling most of the economy and are in the process of taking control over the politics and public discourse - do not excite people, especially ones that are targeted for exclusion and oppression as "basket of deplorables".
I think that when a NYT journalist, fresh from participating in a struggle session where her colleague was forced to grovel and then fired because he dared to suggest that dissent from the Party Line may not be literally Hitler - when such person talks about "liberty", it does not excite people. And when some party functionary speaks about "liberty" one day, and then comes to an MSNBC show and shakes hands and exchanges smiles with people who call his electorate literally Hitler - that also makes it pretty hard to get excited about those words.
Trump got people excited because he actually tried to do what he promised to do. One may agree or disagree about whether those things were worth doing, or whether the approach he chose for doing them was the effective one, but one can see how people can get excited if a person says "I am going to do X" actually tries to do X, instead of half-assing an attempt to do 1/10 of X, failing to do even than and campaigning on "well, the other guy is even worse, so you don't have a choice but voting for me!"
That is not why Trump got people excited, and it is not even true that Trump actually tried to fulfill his promises more than other presidents.
Per Politifact, Trump kept only around a quarter of his promises, compared to nearly half for Obama (a discrepancy not explained by serving 1 term or control of congress). Notably, his border wall fell well short of what he claimed it would be, and was not paid for by Mexico. Trump had no experience governing and was not interested in learning. His focus was more on being a TV character, which is exactly what is appeal was. Being a TV character and emphatically placing the blame for all the country's problems on whatever groups, real or imagined, his base didn't like. Pure sideshow, grievance, and bigotry.
Here in your comment we also see The Great Asymmetry in our collective perception of American politics. A single comment from the Democratic nominee 5 years ago, describing half of Trump supporters as a "basket of deplorables" is still talked about today and seen as emblematic of the elitist, classist, and out-of-touch dismissal Democrats have for the rural half of the country they are supposed to be governing. And perhaps it is! But meanwhile, your average Trump-style GOPer (which is increasingly becoming simply the average GOPer) will describe *all* Democrats as literally, literally evil communists who want to literally destroy you and everything you hold dear, and no one bats an eye.
Being a racist is a lot more fireable than being a Communist.
Given there are close to zero communists around and plenty of racists, what's your point?
My point is your "given" is false - there are a lot more communists (at least if we're using the colloquial meaning of it, e.g. somebody what would be ideologically at home with CCP or USSR, somebody who subscribes to Marxian economics and somebody who thinks capitalism is inferior to socialism and US should become socialist country) than you think and a lot less racists that the press is telling you. Though they exist too, but if I go to an average university campus, I have about an order of magnitude more chance encountering a communist than a racist. Thought there's one important caveat here - I don't include CRT adherents into this calculation as racists, even though this theory is basically pure racism, so maybe I should. Then I'd say it's about even chance.
Well if you start calling everyone who's not a communist a communist then of course there will be lots of them but what's the point of that?
Socialism is not communism and if you actually check there are very few people who even support full fledged socialism. What you do is to call everyone who's not a hard right wing nut case a communist. There are plenty of us around.
I think it's no less reasonable to call somebody who agrees with known communists on basically every important question "communists", even if they don't carry the official party membership, than it is reasonable to call somebody who agrees with known racists on every important question "racist", even though they don't have an official paper to say so.
> What you do is to call everyone who's not a hard right wing nut case a communist.
No, that's not true. There are a lot of opinions beyond "hard right wing nut" and "communist". But people who would support the Marxist economic ideology and its conclusions, who have no serious disagreement with the communist ideology, should be rightfully called so. There are a lot of place to not agree with the "right wing nuts" and at the same time not embrace Marxism - I myself am an example of it. Ans any person who points out that he seriously disagrees with Marxism and communist ideology - is certainly not a communist, and there are very many of those, even among Democrats. But that's not the reason to ignore the existence - and the proliferation - of communist views. It's not the new thing either - there has been a lot of communists in government and Hollywood and academia in times where communism meant Joseph Stalin, not some vague "Bernie Sanders plus". If people were willing to embrace it then, no wonder they'd be also willing to embrace it now - whatever you can say about Bernie and taking his ideas to the logical conclusion, he's certainly nowhere even close to Stalin!
Your first paragraph but replace communist with racist.
Around 20% of the population believe that interracial marriage is wrong according to some surveys. We can take the number of people who support this extremely racist position as an absolute minimum number of racist Americans, even on a strict definition of racism as a conscious belief in racial superiority.
I don't know what percentage of the population believes that all things should be held in common and production reflect the principle of "from each to their ability, to each according to their need", but I bet it's less than 20%. Fuck, I don't even believe it, except as a kind of distant currently impractical Utopian ideal, and I'm one of the most left-wing people I know.
Among general population - probably way less than 20%. On campus - I wouldn't be so sure. Evidence: https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article237089274.html
But "to each according to their need" has been nothing but "distant currently impractical Utopian ideal" in any communist country that ever existed, so that's wholly in adherence with common practice. Again, I think it is logical to think that if you agree with actual ideological practice of Communist Party in a country commonly referred to as "communist", then calling you a "communist" would be appropriate, even if you had disagreement about a practical applicability of specific slogan is specific circumstance. There were a lot of tactical disagreement among communists (ask Trotsky about it) so we must allow some room there.
As of 2017, that appears to be 9%, not 20%. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/05/18/2-public-views-on-intermarriage/
Black Americans are the group most likely to oppose interracial marriage, at twice the rate of white Americans and six times the rate of Hispanic Americans. (Interestingly, women are 70% more likely than men to oppose interracial marriage!)
I assume you don't believe anyone but white people can be racist, so doing some arithmetic brings me to the white population that opposes racial intermarriage to 5.4% of the total population, or about 17.8 million people.
For reference, it's about 7.2 million black people who oppose intermarriage, and 1.8 million Hispanics.
It's more difficult to determine how many Americans are communists. However, there was a YouGov poll with some interesting findings.
Per a 2020 YouGov poll, 18% of Americans had a favorable opinion of Marxism and 14% had a favorable opinion of communism. https://victimsofcommunism.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/10.19.20-VOC-YouGov-Survey-on-U.S.-Attitudes-Toward-Socialism-Communism-and-Collectivism.pdf
A 2019 poll found that 43% of Americans view "some form of socialism" as a good thing. https://news.gallup.com/poll/257639/four-americans-embrace-form-socialism.aspx
The same poll found that 6% of Americans think most nations of the world will have communist governments in the next 50 years. Is that an endorsement? Not sure!
The same poll found that 28% think government should control the distribution of wealth, 33% the economy overall, and 35% wages. Does that make them communists? Again, I'm not sure!
Another poll by Pew found that 9% have a very positive opinion of socialism. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/25/stark-partisan-divisions-in-americans-views-of-socialism-capitalism/
So based on this, can we say there are more communists or racists in the US? No. But they're probably in the same ballpark.
> That is not why Trump got people excited
This would carry a bit more weight if you at least bothered to provide a counter-argument, let alone your substantiated opinions what it is.
> Per Politifact
I am not sure it can be considered an objective source when talking about Trump.
> Trump kept only around a quarter of his promises
Do I need to explain why promises are not fungible and treating them as replaceable commodity, numerically calculating the percentage of them as if fulfilling each of them requires the same effort and producing the same benefit is completely bogus?
Do I need to explain that trying to fullfill the promises and actually doing it is a very different thing?
> Notably, his border wall fell well short of what he claimed it would be
The question is not whether he built 100% of his largest promise, the question is whether he invested a serious and bona fide effort into getting the wall built. The answer to this question is: Yes.
> was not paid for by Mexico.
If you think anybody on the Right seriously expected it to be paid by Mexico and not federal budget, you may need to seriously adjust your ideas before discussing anything about why people liked Trump. I mean, you can engage in any delusion you like, as long as it pleases you, but rest assured it won't have anything to do with real people.
> Pure sideshow, grievance, and bigotry.
You are welcome to express you hate and disdain for people that disagree with you as much as you like, but rest assured it won't give you an inch of understanding of them. Maybe you don't want it, that's you choice. Just know you don't have it.
> If you think anybody on the Right seriously expected it to be paid by Mexico and not federal budget, you may need to seriously adjust your ideas before discussing anything about why people liked Trump. I mean, you can engage in any delusion you like, as long as it pleases you, but rest assured it won't have anything to do with real people.
Enlighten us, O Great One. What the hell does that actually mean to “real people”? I genuinely want to know.
I think if you don't know what real people are, it's probably beyond me to explain it, sorry.
Let me restate that so it’s completely clear: If “and Mexico is going to pay for it” doesn’t mean “Mexico will pay for it”, what does it mean, specifically to “real people”?
It's a boast, not a promise. The promise is to build the wall (and, more generally, to improve border security). If Trump can present it as "Mexico paying for it", just to stick it to the lefties, that'd be cool, but really it doesn't matter. Not anybody on the right ever objected to spending money on border security (we can leave alone the sad fact that nobody anymore objects to spending money on practically anything, that's another story), so there would be no problem if it is financed from federal budget - in fact, that was the logical expectation. I literally didn't see anybody who is not on the Left ever objecting to the fact that US money is spent on wall building - and I have seen much praise when budget allocations that Trump pushed through actually got to the building. The promise - and something that is actually discussed and meticulously tracked on the Right's forums and other hang-out places - is how much of the wall is built. The costs are very secondary and nobody is seriously talking about the Mexico part in any other way than finding some way to present it so just to stick it. But if you're interested about what the Right is discussing and what they are happy and unhappy with - literally nobody ever that I see reading Right places was ever genuinely complaining about not getting Mexico thing. Because nobody ever took it as serious geniune promise (unlike the wall itself, which people were very much upset when it was slow or not happening).
It was a joke.
We laughed and smiled
And it was more fun when idiots on the left didn't get the joke.
Then we laughed at them too.
Trump had a specific policy about exactly how Mexico would pay for it. His plan was written up in mainstream liberal newspapers like NYTimes and WaPost.
I'd link it, but I don't think it would change anyone's minds by actually reading the truth.
I provided some pretty straightfoward evidence that Trump was not magically more committed to his platform than most presidents (because why would he be? Surely that onus is on you to prove), in fact the evidence suggested that Trump was significantly less of a promise-keeper than his predecessor. You responded by essentially calling Politifact fake news (on the basis of what? What specific claims about Trump's promise-keeping are false or misleading?).
Next, you maneuver to re-interpret Trump's explicit promises in a way that affords near-infinite degrees of freedom to claim success by dropping key clauses that retroactively didn't pan out and pretending like they were metaphorical all along, while also projecting onto him some sort of hitherto untapped Herculean presidential effort in achieving policy goals (do you mean... he sometimes tweeted what he wanted in all caps?) Truth is, millions of people literally believed Mexico would pay for the wall. It was even a chant at his rallies!
I've spoken with lots of "real" Trump people -- not just weird ultra-online types who read Scott Alexander -- and their reasons for supporting or admiring Trump are usually pretty simple and often based on misinformation or just plain bigotry. "He's funny", "he tells it like it is", "he's a brilliant businessman and that's just what this country needs", "I don't like him personally, but I'll take him over the socialist democrats any day", "he's been doing a pretty good job but I don't think he's gone far enough to get all the illegals out. Trust me, they are violent savages." And so on. Lots of people generally like his "strongman" vibes, they like how strongly he leans into their negative partisanship (the evil democrats), they like that he talks differently/is an outsider/is a chaotic wildcard who shakes things up. They agree with his xenophobia and Islamophobia.
Many of them also believe his lies, including his very dumb, obviously false and pointless lies. I recently spoke with a youth pastor from my hometown who believed that antifa was behind the capitol insurrection, a ridiculous lie in and of itself. But what stuck me was his insistence -- absolute insistence -- that the attendance of the preceding Trump rally surpassed 1 million people (the authorities estimated 30,000 tops). Trump was lying about his crowd sizes until the very end, and they never stopped believing him. I'm sure that pastor still believes that Mexico is paying for the wall, too.
I am not sure where your "millions" comes from, but I am sure you can find some people who believed in Mexico paying. I mean, there are people who believe Earth is flat and gosts are real and true socialism has never been yet tried. What I am questioning is that it was take seriously by majority (or even substrantial minority) of Trump supporters as a real promise they expect Trump to fullfil. Yet less it is a "key" promise - of course the "key" is bulding the wall, not who is paying for it - again, the question of paying for security has never been even the slightest concern among the right. They never asked to cut budgets or reduce expenses for any security measures, quite the contrary. So even if they thought it's a real promise, it'd certainly wouldn't be a "key" one.
> You responded by essentially calling Politifact fake news
No, that's not true. I called Politifact a biased source when it concerns Trump - based on the fact their coverage of politicians shows substantial left-wing bias, especially when it concerns Trump. I didn't analyze their coverage of Trump promise-keeping specifically, so I can not claim for a fact that their bias there is equal to their bias everywhere else, but I would be surprised if that were one area where they suddenly stopped being biased.
> and their reasons for supporting or admiring Trump are usually pretty simple and often based on misinformation or just plain bigotry
You maybe spoke to them, but I seriously doubt you understood them or even listened to them very well. Otherwise "plain bigotry" wouldn't be one of the main reasons.
> Lots of people generally like his "strongman" vibes,
Part of being "strongman" is doing what you promise to do.
> they like how strongly he leans into their negative partisanship
I don't think after the coverage we've witnessed in 2015-2021 "leans into negative partisanship" is in any way unique to Trump. Nobody has on my memory been covered in more negative light than Trump. I thought Bush Derangement Syndrome was bad, but the Trump one has been like thermonuclear explosion to a cheap firework. It moved from "he's like Hitler" to "Hitler is way better than him" and then it went to 11 times 11 times 11.
> they like that he talks differently/is an outsider/is a chaotic wildcard who shakes things up
That one you got right. Of course, you still somehow managed to attribute it to "bigotry".
> They agree with his xenophobia and Islamophobia.
If by "islamophobia" you mean, as most Party press does, a genuine concern about terrorism driven by fanatical islamist movement, then yes, they do. And they are completely justified in that. Fanatical islamist movements are real, and their actions cause many death worldwide every year. And they are active in the US too. Ignoring it out of fear of drawing the ire of wokescolds is literally exchanging lives of people for woke points.
If by "xenophobia" you mean, as most Party press does, a genuine concern about immigration law enforcement which is being dismantled by the Left, essentially trying to introduce open borders without ever passing it through Congress - then yes, they do. And they are completely justified in that: immigration law is the law, and ridiculous situation where laws are not being enforced because Democratic administration doesn't like them should not happen in a country that is not a banana republic. What's the point in having laws if people can just decide to ignore them whenever they like?
Now we note that Trump not only promised but delivered actions for both of these. Which kinda was my point. You may not like his actions and consider it "bigotry", but his supporters disagree.
> Many of them also believe his lies, including his very dumb, obviously false and pointless lies
That happens to people who follow politicians. The Left has been believing the obviously false and pointless "collusion" hoax for many years, some continue to believe it to this day. And that not concerning a litany of other lies and hoaxes we have witnessed over the years (like that Trump called Nazis "fine people", or that Kavanaugh is a rapist). Yes, lies unfortunately are part of the modern politics, and some people believe them.
> I recently spoke with a youth pastor from my hometown who believed that antifa was behind the capitol insurrection, a ridiculous lie in and of itself
BTW, why is it "ridiculous"? It may not be true that antifa was a significant driver for the riot, but why it is "ridiculous" to believe that? Say, more "ridiculous" than believing US President is Putin's puppet, absent any evidence?
Let's consider some facts:
1. In 2020, antifa instigated hundreds of riots, some continuing to this very day - i.e. antifa has rioted in Portland just couple days ago. The press largely dismissed these riots as "mostly peaceful" protests, some politicians even praising and encourging them.
2. In these riots, multiple governmental buildings were attacked, and Antifa is notorious for their willingness to fight the police and vandalize and destroy government property.
3. There were other cases where leftist groups occupied both state capitol buildings (Wisconsin) and congressional offices, as part of political protest.
4. We know for a fact that many of Antifa operatives has been repeatedly released without any punishment or avoided arrest completely, and many local governments have been adopting velvet gloves approach to Antifa actions.
5. We know that riot in the Capitol and skirmish with the police has begun before Trump called his supporters - that have been listening to his speech at the other end of the mile-long National Mall - to go to the Capitol.
6. We know for a fact that Capitol riots have been planned significant time before the elections, and FBI has been aware of the ongoing planning.
7. We know for a fact that increased security has been refused by Congressional leadership and local police leadership.
8. We have seen video and photo evidence that at least some rioters were let in by the police beyond the fences.
9. We know for a fact some known antifa operatives have been seen and filmed at the Capitol (including inside the building).
10. We know for a fact that there was IEDs placed in several places to split and disorganize police response - action fitting an organized group and not a mob inflamed by a provocative speach.
11. We know for a fact that a lot of reporting that appear in the in major press after the riot has turned out to be false, such as reporting about Brian Sicknick's cause of death, or attributing death of somebody who hasn't even been near the Capitol and died of stroke, to the riots.
12. We know that at least some protesters tried to stop the rioters from fighting the police and entering the Capitol.
Given these facts - and the events in the preceding years - why it is "ridiculous" to believe that a) some organized group is behind the riots and b) that organized group is the same one that has been behind hundreds of othe riots and c) the press and the politicians are lying to us about it? I mean, I do not claim these are true statements - as there are many statements that aren't ridiculous but still are very false - but I don't see how they are "ridiculous". Yet less how this belief is more ridiculous than beliefs of anybody on the Left who embraced the Steele dossier and the "collusion" hoax.
Maybe the permanent residents of the glass house should be throwing stones around so readily.
should *not* be... sigh.
> A single comment from the Democratic nominee 5 years ago, describing half of Trump supporters as a "basket of deplorables" is still talked about today and seen as emblematic of the elitist,
Because it is true. It was saying the silent part loud, only this part is no longer silent for a while now. The disdain for the flyover country rubes that cling to their racist habits and need to be reeducated and reformed is heard loud and clear. Basket of deplorables is not the first one and not the last one, and if you take a poll in any bastion on the Left about whether it's true or not, you'll probably get the "yes" in the 90%s. And thanks to the internet, twitter, facebook and so on, the deplorables now know all about what their supposed betters think about them. And then one wonders - why would people think that someone who considers them barely human, uneducated, unwashed, illiterate rube in sore need of forcible reeducation and shouldn't be let anywhere near self-rule, who disdains them with their whole heart, who would say things like "all I want for Christmas is genocide" in public and be secure their peers will approve it - why would people think such a wonderful friendly people are evil and have some evil plans for them? Only bigotry could explain that!
It was “All I want for Christmas is white genocide.”
That's not an apple to apple comparison. A single comment from the presidential candidate will of course get more reaction than a comment from a random Joe.
Now if you compare the reaction of Hillary's comments to Trumps comments; people certainly reacted to Trump and if none of this comments have the same staying power, it's because there were so many of them competing for airtime.
"I hate you and you hate me. But maybe I would hate you less if you didn't suck."
Stopped reading. Not sure what the rest was but this is just lazy.
You missed out, this is some good shit right here.
Well OK, I read it. What's frustrating is this is just a throw away line and I'll let him decide what drove him to write it. It detracts value for the alleged target audience, there is little shortage of opinion from people who signal hate for Republicans. Using a term such as disagree would have worked better.
What happens 99% of the time with an open letter of advice to Republicans is that the opining party suggests the Republicans should become progressives in order to fix their party. I figured it would be more substantive from the same guy who wrote "You're still crying wolf". It ended better than it started.
glad you read the rest, perhaps some other articles might help to explain some of his choices.
Since 'serious'!Scott is faultlessly charitable to everyone all the time, I read that as a reminder that he really knows he's not part of the coalition he's proposing here, even if he thinks it would be a positive realignment overall.
I don't think it's a signal, Scott just hates them.
Probably not them individually, just the aggregate, and I can't blame him tbh.
The part that surprised me was Scott assuming that Republicans hate him. I'm a Republican, and I love Scott. He takes surveys, so he knows he has a decent amount of Republican readers. By percentage he's much more popular with Republicans than the NYT, and probably nearly any other Democrat blogger.
Keep reading. I voted Trump - twice - and everything he says is what I've been saying for eons. Channeling Clinton: It's class (not race), stupid.
It's good stuff man, don't let that one sentence stop you.
I do feel like Scott could have left that line out. Quoting some other things Scott himself has written about writing, that have stuck in my mind:
> It’s written in a style of “I can see where you’re coming from, but have you considered X?” I thought I was the only person who had figured out that this worked better than “YOU ARE DUMB AND I HATE YOU. NOW PLEASE AGREE WITH ME.”
or in https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/20/writing-advice/
"7. Figure out who you’re trying to convince, then use the right tribal signals
[...]
Trump’s Law is that if you want to convince people notorious for being unconvinceable, half the battle is using the right tribal signals to sound like you’re one of them.
For example, when I’m trying to convince conservatives, I veer my signaling way to the right. I started my defense of trigger warnings with “I complain a lot about the social justice movement”. ..."
So either Scott got lazy here, or he didn't really target this essay at Republicans, or he felt like he needed to throw this in so no one would mistake him for a Republican sympathizer.
I just want to say though jarring, I liked the line. Let's start out with some
brutal honesty. It also has a bit of black humor. And I don't think his primary target is Republicans. (But that is just my take on it. )
Is it still brutal honesty if it's 100% brutal but only about 25% honesty?
I didn't stop reading, but I was very disappointed in Scott.
I expect in the long run he'll recant that line as intellectually dishonest (does he really hate them?)
I hope that the long run is short, for his apology.
I was disappointed in Scott as well for that line. I assume it was just poor writing, not true. (Perhaps that's hope).
I read this as the loudest possible indicator that Scott could manage, right after naming it “A Modest Proposal”, that this was meant to be satirical in tone
It's a perfectly honest statement of fact and statement of intent. Frankly I think it perfectly sets the tone for the rest of the piece, and the piece would feel dishonest without it.
But that's the whole point - "this is how you could be less awful AND attract more voters at the same time, win-win!"
It was pretty startling, but it's a great article. I'm glad to see your read the rest.
And don't sweat it. I suspect that in a few days Scott is going to publish an article addressing the Democrats that contains the same line.
I read this article as really being addressed not to Republicans but to those "who all have exactly the same political and aesthetic opinions on everything, and think the noblest and most important task imaginable is to gatekeep information in ways that force everyone else to share those opinions too" -- us progressives, in other words, and the "I hate you and you hate me" comment was just a bit of self- (and us) mockery.
Interesting. I kept reading but sort of tuned out the point far before that when he linked NPR about a phenomenon that doesnt exist (There is no identity crisis in the Republican party - maybe the ones in DC arent happy about their new identity but that's unchanged since about 2015. In fact, I'd say the party is more captive to the identity now than it was then: https://twitter.com/RyanGirdusky/status/1363898468675293187)
Scott did follow with a few interesting ideas (some more than others) but the critical error he made in accepting that assumption poisons all suggestions.
One thing I've noticed, and I believe Scott has admitted to, is he will sometimes stick in explicit denunciations he either doesnt fully agree with (at least not in said full-throated manner) or in normal circumstances wouldnt feel the need to do. Something along the lines of "Richard Spencer is a moron" would fit the latter, you can fill in for the former. He does this to appease a wider audience and get some readership/possible discussion from those he would otherwise not in our current times.
I understand his motives for this and yet I believe it weakens his writing of which one of his greatest strengths is the endearing honesty of his arguments. I think you read that "I hate you and you hate me" line in the same way I have read some of those explicit denunciations before but I don't know if that's what Scott was doing here. His animosity for Republicans and Trump is real, although how hard felt it is remains cloaked.
Alas, that's where Scott departs from the "Proles" and is why he cannot properly advocate for them. He feels the need to cloak and protect himself from accusations of various -isms, as recent events attest. I don't blame him for this but it denotes the class difference.
To show this I'll commit the same sin he originally did and cite the NYT. Specifically, their recent story about Smith College. Consider the proles of the tale - the janitor, the cafeteria worker. Accused of an -ism, their response was not "I'm not racist, because xxx" or some groveling apology that pays deference to the party that aggrieved them as we have seen hundreds of times from middle and upper middle class types embroiled in these disputes. It was "When does this racist label go away?"
Whether something or someone is racist or not is not an all-consuming facet of life for these people, not in the same way it is for those who jockey for status by doling out accusations of it.
The issue Scott has is he ultimately agrees with the progressive point of view here, where he disagrees is where the lines are drawn and how much trouble you should be in if you are caught playing with fire (i.e., the nrx flirting).
The Proles have no time for that. They're not writing any dissertations about whether they are or are not guilty of racism. That's a higher class problem. All this dodging and cloaking is for someone else, maybe the conservatives in DC and various suburbs across the land that are defecting from the Republican party can have fun doing that once theyre caught in an imbroglio (and they will be).
The cafeteria lady just wants a new job.
We don't hate you, Scott. You're like the one writer I've read who absolutely loathed Trump for reasons that did not appear to be based on total nonsense, which was refreshing.
He obviously meant the republican establishment and not Republican voters, so this entire discussion is moot.
If either party were to actually do this, and do it in a way that didn't leave me suspecting it was a facade for same-old, same-old, I'd sign up, even though I have little use personally for significant parts of the culture described. (Nothing wrong with football, or church, and neither one is less desirable in the grand scheme of things than my personal hobbies, as long as I don't have to do either one.)
ditto. But I would try to persuade them on trade and immigration.
Immigration is so the upper class has an easily exploitable labor force to exploit.
Low skill workers pay the price and the upper class gets their toilets cleaned for pennies.
If you want to bring in new "experts" so we can pay the existing experts half?
Hell yeah.
Importantly, this idea has already passed a critical empirical test. All of the other major British settler colonies (Canada, Australia, you can also count New Zealand) switched to race-blind points-based immigration systems several decades ago. All of them have higher % foreign born than the US, while avoiding the populist backlash that has afflicted Western countries with a higher level of low-skill immigration. Canadian support for their government's immigration policy is well above 70% the last time I checked.
Are the laws enforced? When illegal immigrants are found and in custody, are they deported?
I think the biggest concern conservatives have is that it's not really possible to eject people that sneak in.
It's actually quite easy to get rid of illegal immigration. You punish their employers.
Here's a policy: any illegal immigrant who is working can report their employer to the government. The illegal immigrant who reports will be made legal with their family; the other illegal immigrants working there can be offered the same deal in exchange for evidence if needed to win the case against their employer. Any remaining illegal immigrants are ejected.
The employer gets prosecuted unless they can prove that they checked the immigration status of their employees and reasonably believed that they were legal (ie the forgeries were good enough to trick someone, and they weren't just accepting any old forgery in order to escapt prosecution).
Get rid of the jobs and they stop coming, apart from actually desperate people seeking asylum, and people pretending to be such (which does mean that you need a good quality process for separating those two groups apart, which is a hard problem and any such process needs to acknowledge that it is a hard problem and that it will get it wrong occasionally, and you need to say whether you're happier with your mistakes resulting in letting in people who shouldn't be or returning people to actually dangerous situations).
I've proposed something much like this on the old blog, but I was wondering what the other British-settler-colonies were doing right now.
We already punish employers of illegal workers in the Netherlands and otherwise make things hard for illegals. It has resulted in a substantial decrease in the number of illegal residents.
Your plan to reward illegal immigrants who snitch seems ill thought out. It assumes that they have no group loyalty, no loyalty to their employers, that they know the laws and that they have high trust in government promises.
For larger employers in the parts of the economy where illegal work is common, the better solution is just to regularly do unannounced checks at the work site. For small employees like illegal cleaning at homes, waiting for people in their environment to snitch is probably the only realistic chance.
That's actually an ingenious idea.
I love Swift's Modest Proposal - is this in the same vein? Am I too stupid now to recognise that encouraging the eating of their children is a better way to feed the poor than providing charity is satire?
I don't know if you're stupid or not. I do know that I was thrilled to read someone who is intelligent outlining the issues I have in voting Democratic. And in the reality that my still-poor family largely shifted from voting 100% Democratic to almost 100% Republican in a 30 year span. Hint: It wasn't because they all became closet Nazis somewhere along the way.
Hint: Fox News manipulation and cultural propaganda likely flooded their living rooms and brains during those decades -- as real journalistic sources concerned with facts and reality were likely deemed "left wing" and thus ignored, leaving them to vote proudly and boldly against their own economic interests in order to cater to their newfound cultural biases.
But... if they were voting 100% Democratic, why were they watching Fox News? Why were they ignoring “left wing” real journalistic sources?
No, you're not too stupid. Maybe just not familiar with Scott's writing. He's written another "modest proposal" essay too: http://web.archive.org/web/20101014114328/http://www.raikoth.net/deadchild.html
It starts with "I think dead children should be used as a unit of currency. I know this sounds controversial, but hear me out." If that piques your interest, do check it out.
This is making me real fired up.
I recommend the book "In Defense of Elitism" by Joel Stein. Funniest book I've read in years.
"Aren't I just describing well-off people? No. Teachers, social workers, and starving college students may be poor, but can still be upper-class. Pilots, plumbers, and lumber barons are well-off, but not upper-class. Donald Trump is a billionaire, but still recognizably not upper class. The upper class is a cultural phenomenon."
This is great. As someone who would like to see a smarter, better conservative movement, I couldn't agree more. For this to work you have to draw a line against the people who would like to hijack the movement and make it about economic class, because it's safer than attacking other things, i.e., wokeness.
I co-authored a report here on debunking the "working-class party myth," and it talks about the consensus in political science that economics doesn't motivate voters all that much. We say it's all about "social issues" (the left-wing academy just calls it "racism" or "racial resentment") but the idea that it's not about money or economic status is important.
https://cspicenter.org/reports/the-national-populist-illusion-why-culture-not-economics-drives-american-politics/
Policy wise, a class based agenda can include smart stuff like war on credentialism, while if you try to do lowest common denominator economic class stuff you just get more left-wing ideas, and we already have one party pushing that.
"while if you try to do lowest common denominator economic class stuff you just get more left-wing ideas"
This isn't obvious (at least, when it comes to White people):
https://oklahomawatch.org/2020/07/01/how-oklahoma-voted-on-medicaid-expansion/
https://twitter.com/nathansnewman/status/1365017699433259024
There is a way to square the circle here, and it would be a bonfire to credentialism as you indicate. A war on the institutions seems like where younger Republicans who I've talked to are leaning, anyways, but also some voices influential with boomers, like Tucker Carlson.
You also do see in some states where energy based employment is a big local factor that Republican gains among working class voters have proved more durable, because in that case, you can genuinely have both an economic interest argument align with a class argument like Scott puts forward (think the shift in West Virginia from Bill Clinton to Trump, or states like Ohio, New Mexico, the Dakotas, etc, where blue collar Democrats have shifted in numbers of varying sizes). Promises of job retraining programs worked for the Democrats in the 90s, but very quickly that went away once it became clear that these programs entailed having to move across the country.
A problem the conservative movement has is that like all movements, of all ideologies, it has racket like tendencies. This was true in the scam PAC era, the direct mail era, and yes, now the MyPillow era as well. Its not clear to me that this is something that can be solved anytime soon. The answer I think is what the Democrats do, and that is to put their slimiest people into positions of low profile institutional power (think corrupt Congresspeople in majority black districts like Alcee Hastings, Sheila Jackson Lee, Maxine Waters, etc). The Democratic coalition allows for this to work because they don't ever need to put Alcee Hastings or Jesse Jackson in front of the wine mom crowd. The Republicans have a problem in that they don't have a good way to keep Matt Gaetz away from the Facebook feeds of winnable suburban moms.
One of the ways I've heard the argument you push back on the most is the idea that the Republicans need to become some version of Fidesz or Law and Justice, transplanted to the US. It mostly comes from people who are really pro-natalist and are jealous that the kind of social conservatism you see in those countries (the throne and altar kind, not the Barstool kind) is politically feasible. I think such an agenda would bomb in the US, and I say that as someone who likes a lot of it. Our cultural politics on fertility are not dominated by the spectre of half of our skilled college grads moving to London or Berlin to become baristas, and our fiscal situation is not one in which German and French taxpayers fork over a whole bunch of goodies to our budget every year. Mapping out a pro natalist agenda requires a recognition that much of the problem is cultural, not economic. There is a reason that Chad and Burkina Faso have replacement level fertility and we don't, and I don't think the answer is in tax credits.
1. Awful nice of you to let Josh Hawley ghostwrite a post after banning him from the comments a few weeks ago.
2. Lots of policy judgments are difficult to boil down to a number, or turn on value differences between various numbers. I am not sure exactly how prediction markets could be leveraged to solve climate change, for instance. A prediction market with a long enough time horizon might snuff out skeptics of the phenomenon itself (many bets made by climate bloggers in the 00s are just now being paid/welched) but I don't see it spurring on any action, at least distinct from the market market's consensus of "that's the future's problem."
3. In terms of rhetoric, Republicans pretty much are already here. The problem is that the working class pays the least attention to punditry and debates and therefore this cynical signaling will only go so far without actually delivering the goods. It took a once-in-a-century crisis to get them to un-ass some coin in the form of CARES, but under a Democratic administration things are going right back to deficit trolling.
A prediction market could determine that climate change exists, that it's human caused (ask it to predict temperature conditional on emissions cuts), and that it would be bad (ask it to predict number of hurricanes and famines over the next few years).
A prediction market couldn't determine that we have a moral obligation to respond to it, but neither can experts, so my claim that prediction markets could replace/complement experts still seems true.
Please post something explaining why you think prediction markets make any sense at all. I'd rather argue with you about it - and who knows, maybe you have a non-obvious-to-me point - than roll my eyes and think about how someone with good ideas can also have really bizarre blind spots every time you mention your support for them.
What part of it doesn't seem to make sense?
Pretty much all of it. What I see is people basically gambling. At best, assuming no systemic flaws, they can determine what people believe enough that they are willing to place money on it - though if they work like stock markets, that could just be because they expect to sell to a greater fool before the bubble bursts.
I don't see much reason to believe that what people _believe_ is true. E.g. for every person who makes a correct prediction in the stock market, who gains, there's someone else who made an incorrect prediction, and lost, in the same amount - except wore than that, due to transaction costs etc.
Of course I don't in fact know much about how prediction markets work, or even if they all work the same way. (Their name caused me to have a mild prior that this was something invented by marketers, to appeal to the unthinking, and should probably be avoided. Life's too short to investigate every type of snake oil ... and I wouldn't even think about them at all, if someone who's usually clueful (you) wasn't prominently supporting them.
Prediction markets can do astonishingly well, especially if designed in the right way. I'm also not sure how committed Scott* would be to them being literal markets with money changing hands - I imagine he'd be happy with something like Tetlock's Good Judgement Project as a complementary system. The crux of the idea is to move away from vague qualitative predictions to fully testable precisely calibrated predictions, because then you can move away from a system gated by class and credentials to one gated by demonstrated consistent track record.
If you'd like to know more about these methods I strongly recommend reading Tetlock's book Superforecasting, by the way - he's very reflective and smart, and he tackles a lot of the 'obvious problems' with this kind of system.
*Scott as in the version of Scott fiercely defending this manifesto, which may or may not be identical to the actual Scott.
You pretty much need to have real quantities of real money on the line for it to work. Otherwise it becomes swamped with people simply signaling their positions without any skin in the game.
I don't claim to know how well prediction markets would work in practice, but the hope is:
People have a bunch of beliefs; some of those beliefs are right, some of them are wrong.
Prediction markets make it so that the people with accurate beliefs make money, and the people with inaccurate beliefs lose money.
Over time, the people with inaccurate beliefs either (a) improve their beliefs so that they can make more money, or (b) start avoiding the prediction market in self-defense, or in extreme cases (c) run out of money and can't place any more large bets. In all cases, their inaccurate beliefs gradually come to have less impact on the market.
Conversely, the people with accurate beliefs make a lot of money, and are encouraged to keep playing.
Are there ways this could possibly go wrong? Tons. But you can also see how it at least *might* go right.
I think my argument would be something like - we all agree the stock market works, not necessarily in a fundamental way of giving the "true" value of companies, but in a sense where it prices stocks in a way that incorporates all relevant information on whether a stock will go up or down. If you see a stock you think is overpriced and definitely going to go way up next week, you're either wrong, or have some kind of unique genius or insider information which you'll add to the stock and then cause it to be priced correctly.
Prediction markets try to do the same thing, but in a way where they value of the "stock" is the percent chance the thing will happen. Right now they're terrible because of a lot of trading limits. But if there were a prediction market where you could trade as much money as you wanted, one of two things would have to be true:
1. The prediction market's estimate is smarter than yours
2. You could make basically unlimited amounts of money by betting on the prediction market
Right now it's kind of 2 - prediction markets are dumber than I am, and I made thousands of dollars betting on them last year. The only reason I'm not a multi-millionaire is because there were limits - I could only bet a tiny amount. The same is true of anyone else who's smarter than prediction markets, which is why they stay dumb. If prediction markets removed their limits, it wouldn't mean I actually became a multimillionaire, it would mean that lots of people even smarter than I am would find it worth their time to bet on them in a way that brings them down to an accurate estimate.
What part of this seems wrong to you?
I'm not sure about this, because the stock market has something else that makes it work. Prediction markets are always a zero sum game. Money in always equals money out.
The stock market is a positive sum game, because it's allocating investment capital. A huge share of stock investment comes from non-gamblers. They just use the prediction market portion of the stock market for information without participating. This is what happens when someone buys an index fund. There aren't index fund equivalents for prediction markets.
I'm also worried that prediction markets will be too volatile.
Well, first of all I'm not sure the stock market works. Stocks have consensus values, with lots of random jitter, commonly called "volatility", but all those values represent is what people are willing to buy/sell the stock for at any given time.
It's well known that dividends aren't much of a thing anymore, given that "capital gains" get better tax treatment, so companies buy back their own stock rather than issuing dividends; this has the probably intended side effect of hugely rewarding executives whose compensation depends on changes in the per-share stock price (not on total market capitalization).
I rather suspect that in the ordinary case, the stock price - or even the total market capitalization - is not in fact a good estimate of the future value of the corporation and its earnings, extended to infinity - or till the company gets wound down.
For the rest, I'm not sure what kind of predictions are traded, including both how reliably they can be measured, and how meaningful they are. Also the length of time for predictions to be fulfilled, and thus pay off - or otherwise.
I should probably look at some of these markets to learn these things. But of course that's to an extent where this thread started, since I'd expect a "prediction markets 101" as part of any discussion of what they are or are not good for.
Efficient market hypothesis supports prediction markets, as you say. We should also expect Condorcet's Jury Theorem to do some work here too, at least if we assume that those willing to bet in a prediction market are (individually) better predictors than a coin flip. Then the market's prediction will be quite accurate.
>E.g. for every person who makes a correct prediction in the stock market, who gains, there's someone else who made an incorrect prediction, and lost
It's in the pricing. First, a $1 share of X Will Happen at 75c is the same as a share of X Won't Happen at 25c. So you might have people with the exact same correct evaluation of the probability taking either end of the deal depending on risk vs profit tolerance, giving the prediction market the correct price level but still ending up with winners and losers.
Second, even with divergent estimations, the 50% of people who lose may have an estimation that's much less than 50% wrong -- e.g., if half the buyers think X has an 80% chance of occurring and the other half think, correctly, that it's almost a certainty (say 100% for simplicity), the market predicts 90% even though half of the buyers still lose out.
Finally, errors tend to cancel out, absent systematic bias of some kind (e.g. overestimation and underestimation of most things tend to be about equally common), and we'd assume those with better knowledge (e.g. domain experts) are more likely to invest, moving the price toward the correct level.
>What I see is people basically gambling
Suppose a small town has a Weather Market, with shares of "It (Will/Won't) Rain Tomorrow" worth $1 if it does/doesn't rain tomorrow. The real chance of rain is 75%. A group of townspeople, looking at various things, think the chances are about 60%, and buy some shares for 60c. The market predicts 60% chance of rain.
But we're meteorologists in a club for meteorology, and we have good data that indicates an 80% chance, so we try to buy as many shares as we can until the price is 80c. The price climbs to 78c, since we've bought quite a few due to our confidence in our meteorological data (remember, the townspeople can either sell us their It Will shares for > the 60c they paid, or take the other side by buying It Won't shares for < 40c which become our It Will shares, both of which appear to be good deals to them).
(We're kind of ignoring where the shares came from in the first place here -- market makers or people taking other sides with the same estimates, whatever.)
So in this toy example, you can see how the market might work, with our confidence in our more accurate data causing the market to move in the right direction, and the townspeople's estimate not being necessarily equally as wrong as ours is right.
I believe there's some evidence that prediction markets work, in some small-scale experiments and some data on how accurate aggregate judgments tend to be, along with the theoretical considerations Scott outlines in his comment, but I don't know much about the empirical side.
One of those e.g.-s is supposed to be an i.e... but I can't edit. Shoot.
Market Makers -- there's the rub.
If the dreamy goal of prediction markets is to direct policy better with a more clear-eyed view of consequences, then I expect market manipulation with Big Money to dwarf today's political manipulation with PACs, lobbyists, etc.
Even the linguistic framing of predictions will be subject to extreme political pressure.
Similarly, I can imagine a utopia in which decisions are made by a brilliant, humanist master computer that we all agree does a better job of making utilitarian/progressive decisions -- but can you imagine the wars over who gets to design the program? The bribes, the scandals, the gaslighting?
Even in the equities markets there are pools of capital stuck in inefficient markets because of a lack of interest or whatever. So I am left continuing to believe in boosting our appreciation of the role of government as the only central institution that is ostensibly SOLELY for the purpose of bettering the lives and environment of its citizens. (I say ostensibly, because of course there's always going to be waste, fraud, and abuse in such a big institution -- but that should be fought vigorously and continuously without demonizing the entire project -- like the GOP has been doing at least since Reagan.)
Charities are great, but they cater to the big, fuzzy, cuddly animals (so to speak). Government, if allowed to function well, should focus on needs independent of what social media is talking about on any particular day. Unfortunately, today's zeitgeist demands that our representatives respond immediately to loud public opinion, which cripples their ability to do the actual work of figuring out best practices and policies. The GOP, in fact, has totally abandoned any pretense that they respect representative democracy enough to actually do any work at all other than rousing the crowds with populist fiction.
In a functioning republic, representatives actually do shit like research and planning, knowing that members of the general public have their own lives and jobs, and simply don't have the time, resources, or facility to become experts on every policy matter. Conservatives in a functioning republic would have been doing serious research over the past decades, for example, into how climate change would impact coal jobs, etc. Coming up with solutions to, say, healthcare, instead of just reveling in the Big No.
But the current mood of "the markets" is that democracy is failing. My point is that the correction to a weakened democracy is MORE democracy, not these cynical attempts to turn us into an authoritarian state.
I see lots of conservative here defending trump voters as not actually intending to vote for authoritarianism. But the reason Steve Bannon and Frank Luntz grew confident enough in trump's viability to push his candidacy is that they were viewing years of polling showing more and more Americans were indeed thirsty for authoritarianism.
So on a macro level I'm wary of turning toward something like prediction markets (or super computers) because it may be just another step in the journey toward delegitimizing the necessary role of representatives in our representative democracy. Sure, part of the battle is the perception of elitism, etc, but if we don't stand up for democracy itself (instead catering to populist alienation fueled by the likes of Cruz and trump) I fear the end of the American experiment is just around the corner.
I thought Gwern's introduction was pretty good: https://www.gwern.net/Prediction-markets
That reminds me that one of the scandals of coronavirus spreading through meat-packing plants was we found out managers were making bets on how many people would die; i.e. they were putting their money where their mouths were, but once the rage machine gets going, facts go out the window.
Thank you
I think the biggest problem with using prediction markets as a source of truth is that either true believers can coordinate to spend money to affect the predictions, and people with a lot of money can also do so. Ideally, the market becomes so liquid that this doesn't work, but I'm not convinced that's likely to happen very soon.
Specifically, the idea of using a prediction market (what people with $$$ believe) to determine something more appropriately investigated via the scientific method pretty much reeks of snake oil to me.
You think that prediction markets have no basis in statistical or mathematical reality? I don't pretend they're infallible - see 2016's election results - but I do believe that unless people are just stupid they are much, much more than putting it all on black at The Venetian.
While I think prediction markets will "work," they'll hit the same Lucas Critique in that when they become what people use to make decisions, people will corrupt them.
Robin Hanson has done a lot of work on that idea. Attempting to bias a prediction market by betting on a favored but less likely outcome acts like a subsidy for all the smart money betting against you. And increasing liquididity makes them work BETTER.
This is a false dichotomy as no one is suggesting that the scientific method be replaced with prediction markets. Also see the replication crisis for evidence that appeals to the scientific method don’t solve every problem.
Scott Alexander38 min ago:
"A prediction market could determine that climate change exists"
Scott suggested firing 75% of experts in favor of prediction markets? Maybe he's not suggesting a total replacement but there'd be a lot less scientific method going on.
Look, imagine two people betting on climate change. The first bets using the latest scientific research. The second one bets using guesses, crystal ball readings, and Facebook memes.
Who's going to make money on the prediction market? And who's going to lose their shirt?
You've set up a false dichotomy. Having a prediction market doesn't mean you ignore science.
It's not about what people with money believe. Is about what money believes. And (people with) money care about money, at least in the mid-long term.
People with money often have no idea where exactly they are investing; behind layers of financial instruments that wrap indices and whatnot. In the end, what performs well routinely will get money. And prediction markets (if they become reliable, legal, liquid, maybe subsidized) can be very profitable if they are inaccurate.
This is more of a method to aggregate information that is known than to discover information. Surely, the scientific method will be used and listened to by those who end up deciding where money is spent.
Imagine them more as a better method than "we polled 100 climate experts and 97% say X", while the other side dismisses the list because half of the experts are actually ex geology teachers, and then the science ends up half-ignored. It's a schelling point.
Sports have prediction markets all the time. You can watch a tennis match live and see the rates go up and down for the match, next point, next game, next set, and a ton of stuff. And they are usually priced reasonably -- at least given our political and fake-news standards.
I think the idea is that scientific results would be priced into the prediction market, since people trying to make money by betting would have an incentive to understand the science with as little political bias as possible.
What jumps to my mind is: why would this not be exactly equivalent to letting rich people or corporations set any policy they wish to, for a certain amount of money? Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk would find it cheap and easy to make the prediction market "prove" that it's the right policy to require commercial launches for all satellites and NASA's budget to be quintupled and diverted entirely to pushing for manned missions to Mars.
For that matter, wouldn't it be super easy for foreign nations to use strawmen or puppets to swing the prediction markets any way they choose? Again, why wouldn't China think it's a cheap thrill to, say, spend a billion dollars to effectively set the US military budget?
> wouldn't it be super easy for foreign nations to use strawmen or puppets to swing the prediction markets any way they choose?
Huge conspiracies like this one are very hard.
> why would this not be exactly equivalent to letting rich people or corporations set any policy they wish to, for a certain amount of money?
The idea is that as soon as the rest of the money gets a hint that some market is off its value, they would rush there for the free gains. It's self correcting. No specific person or country has enough liquid money to force a ridiculous price regardless of what the rest of the world does. At the very least, it wouldn't be super easy.
It depends on the depth of the market. If you have $1000 riding on average temperature in 2021, it totally gets gamed. If you have $10 billion, less so.
I also think you are focusing on prediction markets as dictators of policy. But before getting there, we could at least promote them as just sources of (imperfect though somewhat objective) information, that we can then use at our discretion.
*Would* they? What kind of prediction would be asked in those cases?
The question has to have some sort of empirical verifier at its core, so I don't think the scenarios you outline specifically could happen, unless I'm not thinking imaginatively enough.
But, addressing the spirit of the argument: quite possible for Bezos to push a price in the wrong direction, but anyone who knew this would be able to take his money for as long as he's willing to throw it out there, providing some sort of a counterbalance in both the short (individual prediction) and long (after a few wealth transfers of billions of dollars, those opposing would be more effective opposition).
I suppose the hope would be that the market, by the time it's used for policy decisions, is too large for one player to effectively skew (if Bezos is pouring a billion in, probably a lot of other billionaires would be willing and able to jump in too?).
short and long TERM* why is there no edit
Even the richest of the rich are poor compared to the size of capital markets that could be arrayed against them (and would be if it seemed there was a possibility to grab all the wealth they were throwing away).
shouldn't we expect a prediction market to overprice the likelihood of bad outcomes, as people bet on those outcomes as a hedge? essentially using the bet as an insurance policy?
The directionality is not a priori guaranteed, you have countervailing forces like underpricing worlds where money become worthless, guessing how those will interact is not trivial.
fair!
If that inefficiency were proven true, masses of people like me who don't care about that particular hedge would just buy until it was priced back to a reasonable level. Heck, there would be entire PE firms set up to do this if there was enough money in it
if the demand for something is elevated (by hedgers), and there is no corresponding increase of supply (not quantity of supply, but supply curve), we should expect the price to be elevated. the effect may be small if the supply is very elastic, but it should be greater than zero.
That is the market working as intended. A price increase as a result of hedging risk, without corresponding action on the other side, indicates increased risk.
no, i am describing demand due to people who are willing to take an expected loss for the sake lowering variance of outcomes, similar to how people pay a premium for insurance.
say there is a 5% chance my house will flood, and this is reflected in the betting market. if that happened, it would be really bad; so i want to place 1,000,000 single-dollar bets that it will flood, and now if it does i can afford to fix it with my winnings.
i run out of people who are willing to sell this bet to me at 5 cents, so i keep buying at 6 cents, because it's still worth it for the insurance. we interpret the new price equilibrium as a 6% likelihood my house will flood, but that's inaccurate, because i was optimizing for something other than expected payout.
The financial markets have the exact same dynamics: risk-averse investors will pay a premium for downside protection, and there are entire industries (e.g. insurance) that take the other side to make money. However, this isn't enough to eliminate the risk premiums (i.e. difference between actual price and theoretical fair value): there are lots of ways to make money if you have capital, and so you won't take the other side of a risky bet unless it reaches a certain hurdle of expected returns.
That hurdle of expected returns is exactly the (expected) return of other financial instruments on the market so the the risk premiums will be connected to the interest rate essentially.
Yes, that's right. There will be a risk premium, just as there is with financial instruments. Indeed, arbitrageurs will even be looking for inconsistencies between financial instruments and prediction markets, so you'd expect prediction markets to have similar risk-aversion priced into them.
Experts had already determined all these things by the 1990s.
Even earlier than that I think. But the point here is that Republicans have developed a distrust of experts, since many of them are culturally blue tribe-ish. Prediction markets are much harder to bias, so they may have greater trust in them. Thus, they may be a solution to the Republican's expertise crisis.
Plus Scott thinks prediction markets are a great idea and might actually outperform many current experts, if and when they are implemented correctly.
"Experts suck because they are wrong" and "Experts suck because Republicans don't believe them" are two different claims with two different solutions.
For instance, Scott says earlier that a prediction market could successfully predict global warming contingent on emissions. Perhaps it could, but so could James Hansen, who did just this, in 1984. His predictions are roundly mocked by smart-ass graphs that do not account for the "contingent on emissions part" (they projected continued CFC emissions and thus overshot warming).
Republicans would just deploy the same cheesy meme warfare against the prediction market. Opposition to climate change mitigation does not stem from some suspicion that atmospheric physicists might be left-wing, but from an extremely wealthy and powerful fossil fuel lobby that makes a lot of money by foisting its externalities on the year 2100.
Scott isn't making either claim, as far as I can tell. The entire conceit of the article is "here's how the Republican party can achieve greater political success, incidentally some of my proposals happen to align with my goals". The fact is that the Republican party base doesn't trust experts, and prediction markets are proposed as a way of compensated for the epistemic disadvantage that comes with that distrust.
Scott said he was serious about the prediction market stuff and I take him at his word (and disagree with it).
I can't speak to Hanson, since I haven't looked at what prediction he made when (aside from the flooded NY interview, and I gather he has denied saying what he was quoted as saying) but the prediction in the first IPCC report gave a range for future warming, and actual warming was well below the bottom of the range. So far the IPCC has pretty consistently overpredicted, although that was, I think, the worst case. For details see: http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/03/have-past-ipcc-temperature.html
A cursory glance at the IPCC1 report shows their "Business as Usual" emissions paths (page 70) assuming CFC-11 levels doubling from the early 90s (when they actually peaked).
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/05/ipcc_90_92_assessments_far_overview.pdf
The word "CFC" does not appear in your blog post, so... thank you for proving my point.
Etiology is complicated. Yes, the fossil fuel industry loves the denialists and funnels money into some of them. But frankly, AGW denial has grown beyond what bribery could pull off by itself. The industry may have been waving a flamethrower around, but you don't get a forest fire unless there's fuel.
And, well, when universities' social psych departments are ideological laundries and their humanities departments are finishing schools and propaganda machines, there's plenty of fuel for "academics are the enemy". STEM is nowhere near as tainted, but people who don't move in academic spheres don't have the experience to spot the difference.
Prediction markets are harder to bias- except that prediction markets, if they're at all effective, will be biased in the long run towards correct predictions. If those correct predictions contradict things republicans believe, republicans will not adjust their beliefs, they will simply ignore the prediction markets.
The same goes for Democrats, of course.
This is the tragedy of unilaterally favoring the truth over war. You will accede to the other when they are right, but they won't accede to you when you are right. So you do worse than if you lie.
What things? Food output has trended steadily up, not down, and there has been no clear pattern on hurricanes. So far as predictions, Chris Landsea resigned from the IPCC in protest at the person who was doing to be running the next iteration of that part of the report claiming, with no peer reviwed evidence, that climate change was increasing hurricanes. His view was that it might make them a little stronger and a little less frequent, but that the effects were too uncertain to count on.
Or am I misinterpreting what things you were referring to?
I am referring to the temperature things, yes.
Temperature has continued to trend up, but the IPCC has pretty consistently overestimated by how much it would go up:
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/03/have-past-ipcc-temperature.html
A prediction market can predict, but cannot determine. What determines whether or not climate change exists is a set of meteorological conditions. Unless there's some Straussian point I'm missing.
(By the way, confusing our understanding of the state of the world with the actual state of the world strikes me as a serious ongoing problem, so I don't mean this to be pedantic: I think there are important stakes to this.)
It would be very hard to use it to predict whether it was bad. What you are describing is predicting two out of the many different effects that have to be added up. Also, famines over the next few years, if they happen, are going to be due to political causes, as over the last few decades. What you need for that part of the argument is a prediction of total production of food crops, or perhaps prices of food crops relative to prices in general.
So far as selling ideas, I think it will be very hard to persuade masses of people about the virtues of prediction markets. You might do better by setting up a mechanism so that individual experts can make predictions and bet on them, with whether they have done so widely publicized. That's a much easier approach to explain to people.
>that it's human caused (ask it to predict temperature conditional on emissions cuts)
Can a prediction market predict a conditional probability? Do participants in the market have an incentive to predict accurately in this case?
An example: Suppose a local government is deciding whether to build a bridge. They decide that it is only worth it to build the bridge if at least a thousand people use the bridge in the first year. They use a prediction market to figure out the probability that this will happen, and they will only fund the bridge if the predicted odds are greater than 50%.
The prediction market opens, and comes up with a probability of 20%. But, you think the market is wrong. You think the real probability is more like 80%. But you don't have enough capital to single-handedly move the market to above 50%. If you bet on the bridge having more than a thousand people, then the government will decide not to build the bridge, and refund your money after resolving the market as invalid. You have no incentive to participate.
The only way I can see to keep people honest is to occasionally act against what the market predicts. So, if the market predicts the odds of the bridge being worthwhile are 1%, then sometimes you build the bridge anyway, just to make sure the participants have some skin in the game.
There's also other types of conditional questions that aren't covered by that example. You could have e.g. markets for all the conditions (covid deaths with X policy and without Y policy), and then someone might bet on all of them with the same money.
I dunno, I'm just thinking out loud here; but I thiink there's been deep thought into conditional markets, that could be interesting to read up on to get a better sense of whether they would work.
If there's a circularity where you're betting on X, and whether X happens depends on the prediction market for X, then yeah, it can sometimes completely lose its value as a prediction tool. There's often other financial instruments that might do what you want, e.g. bonds with payouts related to performance metrics.
"Social impact bonds" is an example I was thinking of (and couldn't remember the name until after I posted)
In your example with the bridge, if it doesn't get built you gain nothing, but you lose nothing either. (I'm assuming negligible transaction costs, and perhaps an option to have the money you bet invested in an index fund to avoid the opportunity cost.) You still have an incentive to participate, as there is a chance that other bettors (along with you) eventually move the market above 50%, and the bridge does get built.
Why would this information persuade Shelley Moore Capito to vote for policies that hurt the coal mining industry?
It would be no worser than experts saying it.
If prediction markets are no more persuasive than experts to policymakers, why are they worth supporting?
Look, I'm not really sold on prediction markets, but just because there's a person who isn't listening to things it doesn't mean they are useless.
Fair. I just don't see the point of substituting markets for experts if markets don't produce better or more persuasive recommendations.
The argument is not that they are necessarily better at persuasion, but more accurate. It's likely that this makes them more persuasive, but that is not a black/white issue and not just about politics.
Even if prediction markets are more accurate in predicting the future than experts - and I would want a randomized controlled trial with specific experts before I would be willing to concede this - that doesn't make them better at producing policy that is a) persuasive to policymakers, and b) actually effective in addressing problems. A prediction market might be able to predict temperature increases due to global climate change, but can it tell you if the government should invest in renewable energy, set up a carbon tax, or just do nothing?
The goal of experts in policymaking isn't simply to be accurate - that's the bare minimum. It's also to produce policy proposals that are acceptable to both policymakers and the public, and that actually address the core problem. If prediction markets can only do the bare minimum - and again, that isn't proven - they aren't really capable of substituting for expertise.
A prediction market for climate change would be great, it would expose what I see as worst case scenario bias in environmental journalism. For example sea level rise is rarely even framed as "Sea levels are expected to rise from (min) to (max) over the next (time period) with a most likely value of (median) according to (source)". It is almost always framed "Sea level will rise up to (max)", sometimes without the "up to".
This subject has become a giant game of Dilbert's topper. All the incentives are to exaggerate as they can't be held accountable in a meaningful timeframe and they will be punished by the activists for wrong think.
I'll take the under for sea level on whatever environmental journalists come up with and invest my entire 401K on it. I suggest those numbers will come down if they had to put money on it. Extreme weather predictions would also be quite interesting, so how big an increase in extreme cold events are you predicting?
I'll be very curious to see how institutional investors (Blackrock, Vanguard, etc.) handle climate change. We've gotten a sneak preview of this with COVID where the vaccine companies are basically giving away vaccinations in part because these investors who "own" them care much more about the health of the economy and long-term cash flows than short term profits in a few small pharma companies (Matt Levine has written about this several times).
The potential parallels to climate change seem rather obvious and I will be very curious how this evolves over the next half-decade.
BlackRock has actually made this a centerpiece of their public messaging recently... See e.g. https://www.google.com/amp/s/qz.com/1957979/blackrock-is-forcing-wall-street-to-take-climate-risk-seriously/amp/
I am skeptical that these firms are pricing in "climate change" versus "governments will eventually do something about climate change," but I'm not sure how you would disaggregate those, in either a regular market or a prediction market if we're using these firms as a toy example.
Big money has long ago priced in climate change in markets that would be affected (insurance, agriculture, etc.)
There's definitely a lot of charitable/socially-conscious investing going on, too. The cynical take is that they're trying to appeal to their socially-conscious investors; the hopeful take is that rich and powerful people actually do care about society, too.
That’s funny, I didn’t realize Josh Hawley was an SSC reader. Do you mind linking to which post he commented on?
It was an impersonator. He liked my post calling him out as an impersonator, on the strength of his profile.
Was it confirmed that he actually banned Hawley and not just someone impersonating him? If so he might want to retract the banning, people like Hawley have power and even if Scott doesn't want him on his side making unnecessary enemies is never good in the long term.
It was a gimmick account, guys. (Might not be once this post gets quoted on Tucker Carlson).
"Rhetorical class war" was the cutting edge of Republican strategy in 2015 but I think all this stuff is mostly priced in.
It was an impersonator. He liked my post calling him out as an impersonator, on the strength of his profile.
The job of prediction markets (if they work) would be to predict the actual consequences of various policies.
They don't tell you what to do; you still use your personal values to decide which consequences are more important. But they tell you what you're choosing between: what you're really giving up by choosing a particular policy, and what you're really getting in exchange. They fight against wishful thinking and outright fraud.
(Again, IF they work.)
> It took a once-in-a-century crisis to get them to un-ass some coin in the form of CARES
What is this a reference to?
The CARES Act, which essentially established a pop-up welfare state (a rickety one with lots of holes and cliffs, but bigger than any we've had before) in response to the pandemic. Measured by total redistribution and not memes about $600, CARES was one of the more generous schemes in the developed world, mostly by way of the superdole, which impressively reduced *overall* poverty in a time where unemployment peaked at 25% and jobless claims are still running at about 10x their pre-pandemic clip.
It is also the type of thing that Republican leadership would lay down on the tracks to stop under any circumstances other than "massive crisis, Republican president." If Hillary had been President they would've probably forced a full employer liability shield in return for some Burger King coupons.
That was meant to be 15% not 25%. Please forgive the lack of an edit button for those of us with fat fingers.
I would vote for that version of the Republican party
This is interesting! Are you going to do a similar post for the Democrats? Would be cool to read them side-by-side.
Please make this a reality.
Democrats could do most of these things to appeal to the Republican base too.
And if they did, they would wipe the mat with Republicans. But Wokeness and idpol are central identity (ha) elements to Democrats that are not there for Republicans, so the pivot Scott describes is a lot easier for Reps.
The pivot for Dems would not have to be so dramatic. Dems are all about "equality" and "justice", so it wouldn't take much for them to pivot their "we support poor and marginalized people" rhetoric into genuine policy that supports poor and marginalized people. People like Sanders in the progressive wing of the party are already making inroads here.
The major problem with modern leftists like the Dems is that they believe that things are good for poor people that those people themselves often don't think are good for them.
Applying the theoretical 'woke' solution where financially and culturally marginalized get elevated to positions of power could work, except that they don't actually believe in the solution that they claim to believe in. After all, they are not favoring Ben Carson or Condoleezza Rice over Joe Biden, even though woke theory says they should.
If Democrats credibly became pro-gun (protect yourself from secret Nazis or whatever), they would wipe the floor electorally. But they won't and have been going the other way for decades.
Someone talked about Matt Yglesias elsewhere on this page, but he really wants the Democrats to stop picking useless fights on guns that never accomplish anything in exchange, and in exchange they win elections.
What Scott is talking about here is Idpol. It's expanding identity politics, but it is about activating and mobilizing around an identity. The same type of silly tests that people use to police who is really identity X would be used here. Did you watch the Superbowl?
I wonder what class do people fall in if they watch only the half-time show and Superbowl ads?
That's "making fun of Superbowl"
What if I run a small business where I work with my hands and also make birding jokes about the superb owl? Although I am in Canada
I too would be interested to see this, but it's less obviously necessary; the Democrats aren't going through the same identity crisis as the Republicans, and they have lots of relatively sturdy ideology lodestars to work with - e.g., techno-liberalism, identitarianism, new socialism - any of which could result in a winning coalition. By contrast it's much less clear what a viable model for the GOP would be going forward that would be both interesting and could win elections.
Republicans run vastly more statehouses than Democrats, just recently held the trifecta (during which they locked in a dominant Supreme Court majority for the next generation), and (IMO) are a mortal lock to win back the house in 2022 and will probably claim the Senate. People are always saying shit like this about the Republicans needing to evolve or die, and for life of me I can't see why. Republicans are doing fine, and they will almost certainly continue to do fine.
Matt Yglesias is basically sketching that out in his substack.
As a crude summary:
- De-emphasise wokeness because it is a clear vote loser
- Rebuild 'state capacity' and actually do things (especially in Democrat states as models to build support for national programs)
- Favour simplicity over complexity
- Take on entrenched interests which limit state capacity (public sector unions)
- Pursue significant and sustained stimulus including 'catch-up' inflation
- Prefer universal, simple welfare to targeted and complex
- Make structural changes (districts, electoral college, filibusters, supreme court, etc) which support democrats (easier to form govt and to actually do things)
I guess the question is what are the societal and cultural factors upstream of political parties that prevent Scott's or Matt's recommendations from coming to fruition? And how to change those such that these politics could happen?
"Trump outmanuevered the Republican establishment by finding a front where he could go on the offensive. He ignored the unfavorable terrain of race/sex/etc, and focused on class."
Not sure about this part! His signature issue was immigration, and ran on banning literally every Muslim in the world from coming here. It's clear that was part of his appeal, especially in the primaries.
"he gained some minority votes but lost more white votes for an overall loss."
The White voters he lost were mostly college-educated; Trump gained among the Alabama WWC.
OK, but he still lost votes, which was the point.
I think much of that was less Trump and more Biden.
Hillary was programmed in a lab in 2016 to repel white voters, while Trump was programmed to repel Hispanics. In the 2016 Dem Primary, Hillary did horrible with white working class voters, but very well with Hispanic and Black voters.
In the 2020 Dem Primary, Bernie did much better with Hispanic voters, but just as poorly with black voters. Biden did well with working class whites and black voters, but matched Hillary's lukewarm performance with wine track Democrats.
So the improvement in 2020 for Trump among Hispanics was partially because Hispanics were not antagonized, but also because Biden performed poorly with them.
My theory on why Trump also did better with Asians is that there is something repellent in the Democrat's embrace of BLM to non-black minority voters, but again, thats just my crazy theory.
I think it is a bad mistake to interpret Trump as losing votes on any front. According to Wikipedia's List of United States Presidential Elections by Popular Vote Margin, he got over 74 million votes, making him the second most voted for presidential candidate in history, after Joe Biden. That's:
- ~11.5 million more votes than he got in 2016.
- ~5 million more votes than Barack Obama got in 2008.
I voted Biden, but saying someone lost votes when they gained 11.5 million overall is a tough sell to me, and I think it drives us to draw the wrong conclusions.
That's not completely true, as his promise to bring back industry jobs in the US was a huge part of his appeal. But I agree that immigration policy is the big obstacle to the kind of realignment Scott describes.
How do you know this?
Primarily what you know is the claims made about his campaign and his appeal are what MSM said. The same guys who got Brexit and Trump’s election wrong, so its not like they’re great social or political analysts...
Please keep in mind that the decisive part of his appeal was his opponent. If you look at the exit polls from 2016 (I haven't fully reviewed 2020 yet), you'll see that 60% of voters in swing states that Trump *won* thought that Trump was unfit for the presidency. The voters who put him over the top weren't voting for Trump, they were voting against Hillary/Democrats. People are fed up with the status quo, and Democrats keep running leftover 1990s neoliberals. I think that if Trump hadn't been an utter buffoon, or if Biden had has even an ounce of wokeness, Trump would've won again. And he would've been carried over the finish line by people who can't stand him.
Agree - Biden would have won in 2016 and Clinton would have lost in 2020.
Migration is a class issue.
I am a young rightist who works in DC. I will attest that already you will find, on staffs and in higher education, bright anti-“Cathedral” people (or whatever actually numinous term you prefer, as opposed to the vacuous ‘anti-establishment’) who not only read such authors as Lasch and Lind, but listen to avowedly “class reductionist” or “post-left” thinkers. We care about policy solutions to economic problems, but consider ourselves constrained by the “white question” within what one could call conservatism. We understand why we attract minority voters — realistic rhetoric about urban crime probably captures much of the variance — but we saw the Trump campaign systematically (some would say intentionally, with regard to Kushner et al) refrain from wholeheartedly pursuing greater gains among demographics that predictably swung to the right. What’s more, we try to persuade our friends who stop at Tucker Carlson (rhetoric) and American Compass (policy) to consider whether they go far enough in their orientation towards these problems. Our self-understanding is that we will see neither a critical mass of our kind with platforms not a growing number of representatives who are able to combine passion with prudence. But our numbers continue to grow, and our ideas will only get better. You do good work with this blog; we don’t hate you. But then again, when you address yourself to Republicans, you might well speak past us, if the party leadership has its way.
You should come to the DC meetups. We're having one this Saturday!
Are things okay enough in DC that you're sure this is safe COVID-wise?
Only 200 microcovids, very low risk. https://www.microcovid.org/?distance=sixFt&duration=120&interaction=oneTime&personCount=15&riskProfile=average&setting=indoor&theirMask=n95&topLocation=US_11&voice=normal&yourMask=n95
We're doing them outside, with a big fire to keep the air flowing. Bourbon is provided and consumption is encouraged for sterilization purposes. DC has about 100 new cases a day and dropping. We consider the risk on par with outdoor dining, and, of course, attendance is way down from what it was in the before time.
Ah, If it's outdoors it's only 90microcovids
https://www.microcovid.org/?distance=sixFt&duration=120&interaction=oneTime&personCount=15&riskProfile=average&setting=outdoor&theirMask=thin&topLocation=US_11&voice=normal&yourMask=thin
this is great, thanks for the reference
The difference between indoor and outdoor should be *much* larger than 200 vs 90. This link suggests a 20x factor.
Agreed, however in my experience people wear much worse masks outdoors so I shifted from "unsealed N95" to "cotton mask".
All right, thanks. I continue to recommend that readers not go to meetups until the pandemic is over, but I understand I don't control you and I appreciate that you're taking the risk seriously.
Wanna bet? Did you see all the boos at CPAC when someone sheepishly asked them to wear their masks? Culture war at its finest!
As a resident of the mid-Atlantic, I wish you wouldn't. It's not worth the risk. Please let's beat the pandemic.
Please don't shame people for healthy and safe socialization that doesn't signal correctly to you.
Saturation bombardment of the mid-Atlantic with high-yield thermonuclear warheads would accomplish that well enough. We could eradicate Covid-19 in your region by some time this afternoon. Please let's have more thoughtful and less absolute goals.
Democrats have somehow managed to introduce a mind-virus which equates government spending with compassion.
One thing to note: this kind of thinking is usually undergirded by an idea that the problem is that millionaire donors don't want to get on board. The truth of the matter is that the Republicans lost millionaire donors for the most part since 2008 and with trends ever since 1992. The Paul Singer & Charles Koch types, they don't move the needle in comparison to the gobs of corporate cash the Democrats are capable of raising.
The Republicans raise far more money from small to mid size businesses than anyone else. Construction firms, mid sized oil & energy ventures, hoteliers, franchisees, etc. They are a party that much like the Canadian Conservatives, relies on a sort of petit bourgeoise for fundraising, a group that is largely culturally conservative but also in values, very economically conservative. The state is a massive problem in their lives, from 1099 Reporting problems, taxation, regulation, and overall unhelpfulness. This group is more libertarian economically than most millionaires are. Winning them over is going to be hard without a platform that really addresses the issues that small to mid size businesses face.
If you want to know what this group looks like culturally, think back to the Tea Party upsurge in 2010. You had a lot of small business types, family farmers, etc enter Congress, and the movement that supported them was ideologically similar, but utterly out of step culturally with the professional DC Republican class.
There are probably some very real clashes of interest involved in this. I don't think pro natalism or economic interventionism is going to be a problem, but I do think that massive state action that harms this group's livelihoods and encourages more concentration of economic power into fewer hands, albeit run in concert with a state led value driven economic agenda, is going to be a problem. The US Republicans are unique among world political parties (besides the Canadian Tories and the UK Tories between Thatcher & Cameron) in appealing to this group and relying on them for support. I don't exactly treasure the concept of chucking them overboard.
Interestingly the Conservative Party in the UK has done this kind of cultural appeal with great success in the 2019 general election, where they managed to steal dozens of seats from former Labour (the biggest left-wing party in the UK) heartlands in the North of England. They had suffered from being economically 'left behind' due to the lingering effects of large scale deinsutralisation from the 1960s-80s, and the Conservatives managed to win these seats due to a promise to "Get Brexit Done", to "level up" the regional economy, and because the then Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was seen as not credible as a leader. Now they are lauching a so-called "war on woke" to try to retain these voters (see this article: https://www.economist.com/britain/2021/02/20/tories-bet-on-culture-wars-to-unite-disparate-voters). All of this is somewhat similar (if not the same in aprts) to the points in this article and I'm wondering how much of a template this is for Republicans in the US.
That's mostly about Brexit rather than directly centering appeals to the working class . The percentage of voters saying the conservatives look after the interests of the working class is more or less than same in 2015 and 2019 (with a small dip in 2017) yet they still won a lot of those voters.
Always be careful about claims the Tories are fighting a "war on woke", especially when they come from the left. The Tories have ignored huge opportunities to pick a fight with the woke, most notably when the statues were being toppled.
And when they do something about it they usually do it quietly. They've made laws protecting statues, and they've announced a new academic free speech policy. But they've not made huge speeches about it. Overall the impression I get is that the party sees this as problem and wants to solve it. Not that they want a big war to shore up their vote.
Seems like shameless Douthat-bait to get yourself mentioned in his column ;-) He won't be able to restrain himself, and we all know he lurks here.
Ross, if you're reading this, please don't mention me in your column - I've had enough NYT mentions to last me a lifetime.
I only read Douthat intermittently, but he has alluded to young voices in the Republicans cooking up a new form of Conservatism. It's very much different to the previous iteration of neo-libralism, before the populists took over. It seems to be based on social conservatism and strong institutions.
Quite seriously Scott, there is need for a properly functioning left and right in politics, and you have really put your finger on what the right needs to do to be relevant. I'd love to read a conversation between you and Douthat. Add Dominic Cummings for flavour (although I thing you and he are rather overlapping here).
The first time I encountered Dominic Cummings' writing I was pleasantly surprised to find his high opinion of Scott -- he has a tag [1] for Scott, and his essay [2] on the "intersection of decision-making, technology, high performance teams and government" has the following pretty flattering quote in the summary:
"We could create systems for those making decisions about m/billions of lives and b/trillions of dollars, such as Downing Street or The White House, that integrate inter alia: ... An alpha data science/AI operation — tapping into the world’s best minds including having someone like David Deutsch or Tim Gowers as a sort of ‘chief rationalist’ in the Cabinet (with Scott Alexander as deputy!) — to support rational decision-making where this is possible and explain when it is not possible (just as useful)"
(sorry I don't know how to convert words to hyperlinks in substack comments, hence the links below)
[1] https://dominiccummings.com/tag/scott-alexander/
[2] https://dominiccummings.com/2019/06/26/on-the-referendum-33-high-performance-government-cognitive-technologies-michael-nielsen-bret-victor-seeing-rooms/
1. You are using "upper class" to mean what almost everybody else means by "upper middle class". Of course "the upper middle class à la lanterne" (well, la classe moyenne supérieure...) doesn't have the right ring to it, but "les aristocrats à la lanterne" doesn't sound Republican either.
2. Isn't renaming it "the upper class" a step in precisely the wrong direction? Working-class people who vote Republican often look up to the rich (without knowing any rich people themselves), would like to be rich, etc. What they dislike is people who know more than they do or who hold themselves to know more than they do. Saying that this disliked group of people is legitimately "upper" is precisely what you don't want, if you want to appeal to those voters, no?
I think this is calling back to the previous post where money and class are separate. Trump is rich, but not upper-class (except of course he is, but for some reason it didn't take). But yeah, I think you need at least more sneer quotes if you're going after "the 'upper' class" (perhaps include a Trumpian eyeroll when you say "upper").
Upper class is just a bad label to use. I agree that it has too much cachet. That to these people, upper has a cadence of legitimacy that words like academics, elites, and establishment don't.
Invoking authority and hierarchy isn't enough. Many of these people respect kingship. What they don't respect is a king with no clothes.
Yup. Notes to Republicans: (a) Never, ever use the term "lower class". That sounds too negative. Always use "working class". As in people who actually work for a living. (b) Come up with a different term for "upper class" (which sounds too positive - upper class means rich, and we all want to be rich, even if we don't admit it). "Snob class"? Meh. I'm not a marketing person (obviously), but I'm guessing you have a few on staff.
If this is ever pursued seriously, just the term 'elites' can carry the day if deliberately and directly contrasted with 'working class'. Almost everyone who voted for Trump knows on a visceral level the contrast between these two groups and almost instinctively could define it.
> Always use "working class". As in people who actually work for a living.
Indeed, it's much more positive-sounding.
> Come up with a different term for "upper class"
Indeed. If a legislator said they weren't "upper class" I'd point out that him and people like him *literally make the laws*, so they are clearly ruling class which is pretty much a synonym for upper class.
> "Snob class"?
That's getting towards the connotations one wants to elicit: of really snooty people who look down on everyone else.
"Chattering classes" captures the idea quite well (although I don't know if it's as well-known in the US as in the UK, but this could be changed).
No, Trump didn't become upper class when he was elected president.
"Snob class" feels like it's good (but probably there's still something better).
Tucker uses zoom class vs. essential workers.
I like it
"Office class"/"office drones". "Ivory tower".
Maybe a better term might be "hoity-toity well educated people", or something like that but a bit more catchy.
But I think it's only a subset of educated people that the working class despise: those who aren't in STEM fields but instead in useless impractical stuff like critical theory. The wast majority of people respect those with real skills, such as physicians who can heal the sick, civil engineers who can build bridges that stay up, programmers whose code runs and does something useful, etc.
Coastal Elites?
I watched the Tucker Carlson vid someone here linked, and he called them the "Professional Woke Class."
I agree I've simplified this for popular consumption because "upper middle class" doesn't really make a snappy-sounding enemy.
It's also really not clear to me that the *true* upper class exerts the same role they did in Fussell's day. I have no doubt they exist and have a lot of money but their representation in the "elites" (construed in wealth and power terms) seems pretty marginal, and I say that as someone who's been to my share of Met Galas.
My simplifying it, you are feeding the common leftist delusion that they are on the side of the working class. Trying to make the Republicans better, by doing things that make the Democrats worse is perhaps not what you intended?
I think this shows that Fussell's class book does not port well to politics in the 2020s. While Fussell's point (or was it Alexander's friend's point? I think the latter) that class is a series of separate ladders is true *to a degree*, it's hard to separate class from money completely. Rich people still vote Republican. People without college degrees who own & run successful businesses are against a minimum wage increase because it will cut into their profits; their employees want it because it will give them more money. Republicans are against minimum wage increases; it's really hard to say that this is a fight for the *working* class, or against the upper class.
Of course, Republicans *already* try and fight this in class language — they don't use the word, and they don't adopt Scott's specific proposals, but they do almost anything else; "elite" means "upper class" in Scott's sense. But it's pretty deceptive when they do: their policies help rich people (most of whom are in the Republican class—rich are still strongly Republicans!), and hurt poor people (opposite.)
Really, what we have here is a good, old-fashioned cultural conflict, of Red v Blue tribe. Class doesn't fit it.
Two additional points: First, Republicans are usually against expertise not out of class warfare but because they dislike what it tells them; above all, on climate change—a topic we really really don't have time to screw around with attacking expertise on—it mitigates against a lot of things that the Red tribe like, e.g. SUVs, suburbs, etc. It also does a lot of things that are straight-up economic: to adapt to climate change and to de-carbonize the economy both take lots of money & government programs, which Republicans are against because they hate high taxes — again, something that already fits very badly into their pre-existing class frame.
Second, I know some people think it's overstated, but there really is a lot of racism in the Republican base. IMS it was a better predictor for voting Trump than any other single variable in 2016. Going to make alliances tricky.
Basically, I think the Republicans already try this; it fits very badly with the parts of their program they are most passionate about; and in some very important areas (climate change) it is leading to utter disaster.
Your argument takes it for granted that the left's interpretation of the effect of policies is correct. The standard economic argument against the minimum wage isn't that it reduces profits or raises costs but that it makes it harder for unskilled workers to get a job, especially a first job, because it prices them out of the market. From that standpoint, the supporters of a higher minimum wage are people who won't have their employment prospects affected by it and want to feel good about how much they are helping the poor.
Climate policy would be a long argument, and this probably isn't the place to have it.
You articulate the economics 101 policy model. The problem is that when you take econ 102 and learn about market inefficiencies—or just look at actual examples that have been studied—turns out the real world doesn't look like the models. And the people actually organizing for the higher minimum wage tend to be minimum wage workers; the others are just cheering them on.
Right, minimum wage people, aka people who are already employed and not totally unskilled workers who have never worked a job.
Being civil here, this is an very classist statement, both in the economic and cultural sense (both of which are inherently interwoven). Many skilled laborers are paid minimum-wage and kept there not only because of profit-model of market institutions like companies but the very socio-economic situations people live in. Farm labor, retailers, construction workers, infrastructure workers, factory labor, etc. etc. all work both skilled and necessary jobs for our society and the very least that can be done is assuring their lives are filled with less strife and economic instability. Just because they couldn't afford to get a college degree doesn't mean their labor value is worth the FEDERALLY MANDATED MINIMUM. Overall, and incredibly ignorant take on your part.
Your statement suggests that you may be overestimating how much of the labor force is paid minimum wage. Of hourly paid workers, it's a bit under 2%. That is a tiny fraction of the number who don't have a college degree.
Whether they are worth either the present or the proposed minimum wage depends on how much value their labor produces. If it costs $15/hr to hire someone for a job that produces $10/hour of revenue, he won't get hired. That has nothing to do with his moral value, only his economic value. And if your insisting that he ought to get $15/hour results in his being permanently unemployed you are hurting him, not helping him, however righteous it makes you feel.
Most of the jobs you listed make bank. Semi skilled construction and farm labour especially, at least where I am. Nowhere near our relatively high provincial minimum.
I'm confused by your reaction to my comment. Perhaps I misrepresented my position. I am agreeing with you that minimum wage people have labor skills which they can use to get hired.
By contrast, those who are unskilled, by and large people who have yet to enter the job market, but also some minimum wage workers, will not be helped by minimum wage increases and in fact be hurt because the labor market will contract, making it harder to find entry-level jobs.
In addition, a too high minimum wage can even negatively impact those with marketable job skills. See, for example, the UW minimum wage study, which found that Seattle's raising of the minimum wage to $13 an hour a few years ago "reduced income paid to low-wage employees of single-location Seattle businesses by roughly $120 million on an annual basis." On average, low-wage workers lost $125 per month.
BTW, the city council cut public funding for the study after that preliminary report. But my my city's city council could be a post in itself :-)
Your claim is way beyond what the evidence shows. There is considerable empirical data that shows that the least-productive workers (e.g. those with poor English skills) are hurt disproportionately by minimum wages. And there is lots of anecdotal evidence that the adjustment to a binding minimum wage includes things like making workers' hours less predictable, things that cut costs while making workers less happy. A solidly center-left economist such as David Neumark at UC Irvine has written a number of careful literature reviews that wipe out the "labor markets don't follow the Econ 101" view of the world.
OTOH, John Cochrane, the Grumpy Economist at Stanford, argues that the minimum wage isn't that big of a policy problem and that classical liberals ought to devote more attention to other policy distortions.
It's kind of funny telling David Friedman he needs to learn about market inefficiencies in Econ 102... although he has admitted to never taking a course for credit in either the subject he teaches or the one the school he teaches at is dedicated to.
The only "market inefficiency" argument I am familiar with that implies that the standard model is wrong is the one proposed by Card and Krueger, which requires monopsony employers of low skilled labor. Given that low skilled labor is relatively unspecialized, that seems implausible. Is that the inefficiency you are thinking of, or did you have a different one to propose?
Finally, a chance for my username to check out: https://ideas.repec.org/a/aea/jecper/v16y2002i2p155-174.html
"Rich people still vote Republican. People without college degrees who own & run successful businesses are against a minimum wage increase because it will cut into their profits; their employees want it because it will give them more money."
Got any evidence for that?
"it's really hard to say that this is a fight for the working class, or against the upper class."
This is straightforward:
https://twitter.com/nathansnewman/status/1365017699433259024
"Second, I know some people think it's overstated, but there really is a lot of racism in the Republican base."
Not according to the polls.
Evidence that rich people vote Republican: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1184428/presidential-election-exit-polls-share-votes-income-us/); that racism predicts Republican voting: https://www.psypost.org/2020/07/modern-racism-can-predict-how-americans-voted-during-2016-presidential-election-of-donald-trump-study-finds-57278
There's a lot more; there's been a lot of research on these areas, to judge by the reporting.
As for the white non-college men... the working class today is significantly non-white and non-men, so that doesn't mean all that much.
Exit polls are not reliable, and the "modern racism scale" is actually an anti-racism scale; that is, one scores most racist on it if one supports treating races most equally.
https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1015760998450581506
A more accurate measure of racism would be asking people if they consider themselves racist.
I think things along the lines of "resume studies" are better for detecting bias people won't openly admit to:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/throw-whitey-under-trolley/
I think the highest income levels no longer vote Republican.
"but there really is a lot of racism in the Republican base."
This sort of argument, if you want to dignify it as such, when all it really is is a slur, is so typical of mandarin political posturing (can't really call it thinking). In 2008, it was you oppose Obamacare because you are a racist. Blah, Blah, Blah.
Go away, and take your little dog with you.
I don't endorse this, but:
You have cracked it: "mandarin" is the term that Scott was looking for.
- They are the historical poster children for credentialed experts leading cushy lives instead of doing real work.
- They were not actually the aristocracy, neatly resolving the dilemma of trying-to-say-upper-middle-class-but-it-is-too-awkward-so-we-said-upper-class-instead.
It further has an interesting multivocality about it. China is never far from questions of national greatness, and the term refers to a Chinese political class. This means it will be possible to call people mandarins while meaning anything from the soft use above to:
- [Aggressive] They make the country weak, and so might as well be aligned with China
- [Paranoid] They actually are a communist spy working for China
- [Racist] They seem like a Chinese person, which is bad
As a consequence it does a good job of wrapping up social class as a domestic strategy and opposition to China as a foreign policy strategy in a single word.
I firmly expect Democrats to walk face-first into the trap of condemning it as racist while simultaneously endorsing it through "akshually" style articles about how the mandarins are usually credited with maintaining an efficient imperial administration, and were a key factor in the tendency of China to remain Chinese despite being ruled by dynasties originating from outside traditional Chinese borders. In this way they will cede narrative control for a cycle or two.
Reminder that I don't endorse this. But I bet it would be effective.
This is magnificent. Hope some Republican politicians are reading this. A Republican party with this kind of platform is one I could actually wholeheartedly support, instead of only occasionally in the interests of maintaining balance of power.
Username very much does not check out. ;)
Sir Humphrey explicitly has no politics, besides hoping for regular changes of power :-) In any case, the username is the one I use on DSL
I should clarify that Sir Humphrey has no *party* politics in the sense that he does not want either *party* to hold power for an extended time. This is not so far from how I feel :-)
Nevertheless, I think he embodies the "upper class" that Scott talks about here. Oxford-educated, disdainful of the masses, fond of the "high arts"...
Yes, well this could also describe me...maybe I should be careful what I wish for.
But a GOP That Used the Word Class would not be substantively different! Certainly this would be much better messaging than whatever they're doing now (and I suppose better messaging can sometimes lead to better policy) but the whole premise of this post is that this approach has the potential to unify all the pre-existing ideological factions within the GOP.
I sure hope this will be followed up with a part 2: A Modest Proposal For Democrats: Use The Word "Class"
More like: Do stuff for poor people, really do stuff instead of talking, while losing the Woke and you'll dominate elections for decades.
And I do hope Scott does a Democrats version. I'm curious as to whether his analysis of what will solidify their power is in line or opposed to my own.
The issue is that they try to do stuff for poor people, but that is often stuff that many poor people don't want and/or stuff that makes the lives of poor people worse. These policies are often things that look great from an ivory tower and/or benefit a favored poor group at the expense of another poor group.
For example, the anti-poverty policy that I hear Democrats talk most about is raising the minimum wage, but that will harms rural communities that have low costs of living and can barely compete by leveraging those low costs of production. It doesn't actually compensate for being out-competed by (illegal) migrants.
Exactly. I've had this argument several times to no avail. If minimum wage is raised to $15 or (like Costco) something higher, do they really think the guy who is only paid minimum wage and would be paid less if it was legal to do so will still have his job? That bored housewives and talented high school and college students won't come out of the woodwork for twice the pay to replace yet another lower/working class job? In major cities it's more or less moot because starting pay is already near $15 - heck, here in suburban Cleveland the lowest paying advertised fast food job is $10.75 and McDonald's is already at $13. If you're in New Hope, Kentucky though? Yeah, say goodbye to your miserable job Lower/Working Class Man and enjoy even more miserable unemployment.
Romney's and now Biden's child tax credit is such a huge thing for larger working class families precisely if it's managed through Social Security and is automatically deposited vs. playing the IRS Lottery of figuring out what or if you qualify for it at year-end. There are light years of difference between a Maybe amount of cash when you file taxes vs getting $1,000 a month auto deposited into the account you use to buy groceries.
So part of me really likes this, wants to agree with everything here, and would probably vote for this republican party. Which raises the alarm bell in my head that goes "This isn't how republicans actually think; this is just how you wish they would think".
I don't think I have any special insight as to why (that is, I can think of some reasons - it's hard to imagine someone like Ted Cruz or Mike Pence or Trump Jr. or whoever explicitly embracing this framing, and if you try to picture it and it feels weird your guess is as good as mine as to why this is). But specific points of disagreements:
Using betting markets instead of experts: This can work for top-level strategies (at least, if you have a lot of liquidity). But like I pointed out the other day (link again https://shakeddown.wordpress.com/2021/02/19/using-betting-markets-to-make-decisions/), there's an issue where betting markets are an order of magnitude slower and more complicated than the decision they reflect. You can use them for something big like "should we approve the AZ vaccine" or "should we build a transit system in Charlotte", but for short-turnaround decisions like "on which side of the street should we put the entrance to this station" You can't replace experts with them. There's no real getting around needing competent people who can make decisions in your organization.
On 4, I just have the minor point that "saying cops are bad because classism and not racism" still seems impossible for republicans because it's anti-cop? Or am I misreading the point of that bit?
Re: Cops—I imagine that a goodly number of people in the Republican party who get lumped in as "pro-cop" are really just anti-calling-cops-racist, because in their minds racism doesn't exist. I have literally seen people defending cops by pointing out that more white people are killed by cops than black people.
Bizarre. My only complaint was the opposite. I just kept thinking, "yeah, scott, this is the entire populist right and an episode of tucker carlson in a nutshell."
I am not sure that the term "class" is the best candidate for Scott's proposal. In fact, some Republicans are already articulating most of these ideas through the use of the term "elites", which I favour (I thought of using "intelligentsia" but the term is too elitist, LOL.
You can persuasively argue that elitism can be the target: a group of people who consider themselves better than the rest in everything they do: their policies, their diets, their environmental choices, the cars they drive. The Republican party can be the party of those who value hard work, decency and the traditional American cultural experience, Ford F-150 included.
You can then shed (hopefully) the linkages with racism and conspiracy theories and just represent everyone and anyone who is alienated by the sanctimonious speech and actions of the elite. Those part of the elite are detached from reality, they do not understand the real struggles of average people. And average people ought to be celebrated and protected.
Thank you for the engaging piece!
The problem with choosing the elites as your enemy is that they're...well...elite. And they'll leverage that elitism to piss in your cornflakes at every opportunity, which in a 24/7 digital age news cycle makes for a whole lot of hot cereal.
The site you linked for the "college degree for childcare" has the 404 error page so I went to their homepage. Didn't find that story but saw a link for "How to get pregnant fast". Er, don't we all know how that works? And if you're trying for a baby, what worked for my sister was "have an elderly relative pray to St. Anne for a surprise for you; when your mother conveys this message, tell her "well it worked, I'm pregnant!"
Anyway, by the magic of Google, the original story comes from 2017 https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/district-among-the-first-in-nation-to-require-child-care-workers-to-get-college-degrees/2017/03/30/d7d59e18-0fe9-11e7-9d5a-a83e627dc120_story.html and is partially reasonable. Childcare - or Early Years Practitioner, as we're calling it round here where I work - is more than babysitting. With so many milestones etc. that schools, pre-schools and daycares are meant to be hitting for literal babies - see sample below of standards from the Irish National Quality Framework for Early Childhood Education:
Birth - 18 months
5.1.2 In your care routines, can you indicate how you show sensitivity towards the child’s signals and cues and how you respond appropriately, adequately and consistently?
5.1.3 How do your interactions with the child enhance her/his potential to interact positively with other children?
Describe how you engage the child’s interest (including the child with special needs) in objects, in her/his surroundings and in social interactions with others?
Yep, for a three month old baby, the daycare has to ensure their interactions "enhance their potential to interact positively with other children".
So, all this and more being dumped on childcare providers means that the qualifications needed are becoming more academic. Straight out of school minding kids isn't enough anymore. But a bachelor's degree isn't necessary, either. We have intermediate frameworks - a Level 5 qualification is the medium standard here, and you can do it as a student or mature student on a Post Leaving Certificate course. If you're unemployed/on social welfare, you can get a Back to Education Allowance while you're on the course. You can then go into employment or progress on to a college degree in the field.
So increasing professionalism required, yes, but a college degree not necessary.
Having those milestones doesn't make professionalism reasonable; the fact that those milestones require professionalism demonstrates they are unreasonable.
I don't think any of those milestones require any degree of professionalism. They require empathy and a basic understanding of how to socialize a baby. The fact that anyone believes such things require credentials is frankly insulting.
Either insulting or simply reflective too many workers chasing too few jobs.
I think there are any number of people who can care for a baby but would respond to a question like "Describe how you engage the child’s interest (including the child with special needs) in objects, in her/his surroundings and in social interactions with others?" with "Huh?". Or who couldn't translate the bureaucratese "In your care routines, can you indicate how you show sensitivity towards the child’s signals and cues and how you respond appropriately, adequately and consistently?" into something like "If the baby's crying, do you check to see if it needs to be changed or fed?"
I know lots of people who cannot successfully navigate the getting of credentials from the government but are entirely competent to care for babies.
Just one question. Why do you think Republicans hate you?
Second question: if you get the Republicans to explicitly start opposing "expertise", do you think you're going to be able to fine-tune that you mean "oh, but MDs are still fine", or do you accept that there's a chance it might get into "everyone who wears glasses, up against the wall"?
Medical school is a trade school. Trade schools are the opposite of universities. The War on College can be extended to med school requirements. Medical school admissions may favor people who majored in biology, but they also accept people who majored in philosophy. They do not accept people who do not have a college degree. Scott has blogged before about just how useful his undergraduate degree was once he got to med school. I can't find the post at the moment, but if I recall correctly it was a less than glowing endorsement of the system.
Ah, here it is. In the obvious place: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/15/increasingly-competitive-college-admissions-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
"The degree requirement seemed like more of a class barrier / signaling mechanism than an assertion that only people who knew philosophy could make good teachers and doctors."
This manifesto could be tweaked to appeal to a significant portion of the left too - there are plenty of progressives who are tired of the tyranny of academia on policy and culture. And honestly I’m not sure the GOP is any more a natural fit for this kind of renewal than Democrats. Both parties are stacked with Yale law grads rearranging their nameplates.
Honestly this might be the best post I’ve ever read, on any subject. I would never join a party like your reimagined Republican Party, but I would certainly get it, and in a perfect world it might make the Democrats work harder to be less offputting.
Or would it just make the Democrats lean harder into "the opposite of what the Republicans are like" and make them more elitist?
Possible but unlikely. Once big chunks of the minority populations defect to the republicans it would seem pretty condescending for the democratic elites to double down on their wokeness and associated policy prescriptions that so alienated their purported beneficiaries.
That would play into the Republicans' hands. If the democrats did that, they would lose a subsequent election by a landslide.
That's pretty much what happened in 2016.
Pluse Hilary as an individual came across as robotic and unlikeable.
Biggest problem I see with this is Republicans would have to decide where they stand on labor unions. If they still are against them, this working class rhetoric seems pretty hollow. If they decide they're for them, there goes the fundraising base.
Only rich educated people have unions and they have them to keep working class out.
Fuck unions.
Ah yes, my favorite definition of "rich educated people" include construction workers (the incoming secretary of labor is a former construction union president) and truckers.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic. I know lots of working class tradesmen who are in unions.
My impression from reading internet is that in USA only cops have unions.
Also teachers. The advantage of a public employee's union is that you get to sit on both sides of the bargaining table.
I guess you'd have to polarise them, working class unions vs elitist unions (back to the using ID politics to trick non-degree holders into looking bad)
I agree. It's a lot easier to get people to vote for you if your policies make them better off financially. So if the Republicans do want to attract working class voters, they need to do more than just anti-elite culture war posturing, they need to go for economic policies that help working class people. Some ideas:
- increase minimum wage
- bringing back offshored jobs
- (possibly) UBI: this is more popular with Democrat than Republican voters but i saw a poll where 52% of Republican voters supported it, and i doubt if Biden will enact it by 2024. One downside is that many would look at is as a free handout to the lazy.
- something about affordable housing, e.g. so that any American on a full time minimum wage job can afford to buy a house.
Another policy might be modern slavery including prison labour. This fits into many narratives:
- essentially all Americans think slavery is bad
- "why should American workers have to compete with slave labour?"
- plays up the anti-China angle
- multinational companies often have slave labour in their supply chains. Forcing them to get rid of it may help to bring jobs back to USA
- Kamala Harris may well be the democratic nominee in 2024. Focussing on this issue may embarrass her given her record in prison labour in California.
However, slave labor in prison fits very neatly into a popular American narrative-- anyone who's accused is guilty, and guilty people deserve however they're treated in prison.
Fundraising base? Big money all goes into the dem coffers these days. Wall Street and silicon valley are true blue.
Ever heard of a guy named Charles Koch?
The catch is the NLRA makes unions under US law uniquely objectionable. Duty of fair representation, "good faith" bargaining requirements, and exclusivity aren't inherent requirements of collective bargaining but are the law of the land.
I don't say this often, but I don't know if you fully thought this through to the conclusion. This just teaches Republicans to be more persuasive. If they take this on and theoretically win the votes needed to gain power, they'll still be left with the same core policies, more or less. Try using "class" to support a Republican policy you DON'T like, and I think you'll see where this can backfire.
Have you watch Tucker?
He has the top rated show in cable history and he has been hitting these themes non-stop for years.
That is how he goosed his rating. Picking the right enemy.
As a low-income, highly-educated, almost-Marxist, I find this oddly persuasive and kind of chilling.
It's true that the Republicans would be *better* in some sense if they adopted this sort of approach, but is that "better for the country/world" or "better at destroying everything I hold dear"?
Highly Educated people ought to be terrified of a real left party.
You are the enemy. Not an ally.
Yeah. San Francisco has basically already shown this: If you're a highly-educated person who's not already part of the political establishment, the entire political establishment will unify in declaring you as the enemy and do everything possible to attack you, no matter how much they hurt themselves in the process.
Depends what you mean by "a real left party". I want to see well-funded public services, higher taxes on the rich and nationalisation of certain industries that I think are more effectively run in the public sector. I don't want to see academics sent to work in the fields or to re-education camps. If you think the latter are "real left" and the former are not, then we disagree on the definitions of a word.
Working class people may look on me with suspicion, hatred, or disdain (I doubt it but I'll go with it) but that doesn't make me their enemy. I would argue that their enemies are the people who control them and make their lives worse: the people who own the media, the people who own the government, and the people who own the means of production.
(substack commending is weird. Sorry if this appears twice, or deleted, or twice deleted, or some shit)
I would like to see a UBI, good stable jobs, free healthcare that is EXACTLY the same for all of us and 80% of Academia shut down.
So you would outlaw someone paying a doctor with their own money for extra care? This didn't work out so well in the UK.
Requiring a college degree to be an office manager is really bullshit.
I'm taking this that, since the popular view of Republicans from Democrats/non-Republicans that I see all over social media is that they are plutocrats who hate gays, minorities, trans people, women, non-Christians, and anyone who isn't a white cishet old man, then it can only be an improvement if the GOP can shift that perception to being "we are the party of the working class and that means BiPOC as well as white persons of all genders and sexual orientations!"
In online Trump world, gays and Blacks and Latinos were showered with love.
To the point it seemed like over compensation.
Lots of times Black folks would come to argue and agitate and end up joining the community. We found common enemies.
I mean, to be fair, Republicans are the party of Evangelical Christianity. This doesn't necessarily mean that they *hate* gays, non-Christians, and other non-cis-heteronormative people; but it does mean that they strongly prefer a world where such people were a continuously shrinking minority. They certainly wouldn't want to pass any policies that would encourage such people to continue committing their sins, right ?
Why did you name this A Modest Proposal? Am I missing the satire? This seems like a legitimately amazing idea to me. Am I somehow a really horrible person without knowing it?
I assume it's named after the Jonathan Swift essay.
Yes! And a person who read the original Swift essay about killing, cooking, and eating children and took it seriously and thought it was a great idea would be A) a moron and B) a terrible person. I'm taking this Scott essay seriously and I think it's a great idea. Am I missing something?
I assume the idea is that despite Scott's best efforts to persuade them that social class and economic class are distinct, he still expects the idea of focusing on class to appear as outrageous to Republicans as Swift's proposal to eat children appears to non-horrible people.
I think this is right. Current Republicans equate class struggle with Marxism, and there is no place for Commies in the red party! Scott's argument only works if 'class' is defined in the Fussel manner as independent from income level.
I'll join your camp, although since I'm the target audience maybe I'm just too dumb to get it since I went to an obscure undergraduate school and Ohio State (sacre bleu!) for grad school.
This is the best article on politics I've read in... well, months at least. I'm seriously amazed by it.
I think it's about blurring the lines and maybe providing a bit of deniability. Scott here is giving a proposal for how the GOP could have an intellectually exciting platform. It also happens to cohere strongly with values that any long-time reader of SSC will recognise Scott himself holds. But Scott is a self-identified Democrat who moves in Blue Tribe circles, and saying things as blunt as "here's how you could get me to vote Republican" might not be in his best interests.
Scott has zero Blue Tribe cred; he's committed way too many blasphemies. I was "warned" against him by Blue Tribers years ago, and that was before he had a public row with the NYT that blew up into a Grey vs. Blue fireball (despite his best efforts to avoid that coding).
Listening to Scott is, among the Blue Tribe, evidence of heresy.
The Swift essay proposes a means "For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick."
His technique is based on this observation:
"I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasee, or a ragoust."
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1080/1080-h/1080-h.htm
It is Tucker Carlson's show for the last 4 years distilled.
It is brilliant. It is delivering the best ratings in the history of cable.
Where does the war on Christmas fit in this?
Carlson's show is grievance and some of it overlaps with this.
Santa is high class. Elves are working class. Vive la révolution!
It is always easy to spot the people who don't watch Tucker.
He viciously attacks your class night after night.
I love it.
"He viciously attacks your class night after night". Just another kind of woke.
Which class do you think says "Merry Christmas" and which says "Happy Holidays" to avoid offending someone?
But the idea of the "War on Christmas" is not that someone with some Jewish/Hindu/Islamic etc. friends may say "Happy holidays."
This is a motte and bailey.
Upper class people do tend to be more circumspect. That's the motte.
The bailey is the "WAR ON CHRISTMAS" Jackbooted leftist bureaucrats are coming to destroy Christian culture.
Take Tucker Carlson on December 6, 2020 in relation to guidelines to limit holiday gatherings. "If death is inevitable — and that may be the one thing you’re not allowed to say in this country, but it’s still true — then maybe we should pause before we destroy the living in the name of trying to eliminate it. Politicians understand this threat. They’ve figured out that Christmas is bigger than they are, and therefore, it’s a threat to them. Better cancel it — and, in fact, they’re trying hard."
I mean, there are plenty of talking points recommended that I would assume Scott doesn't actually agree with, high tariffs for instance.
Thank you for this, really. It's such a joy to read things like that. I feel like you scraped the stew of vague ideas and intuitions in brain and shaped it into a coherent theory.
>They conspicuously love Broadway
This is the only part you got wrong. Wealthy proles like Trump love the kitsch of Broadway musicals. Tacky tourists visiting NYC love Broadway.
Upper class people see off-off-Broadway plays.
Elites like Broadway, but mainly for plays by Tony Kushner, Jez Butterworth, Tom Stoppard, and so on (perhaps a Sondheim musical here and there as a guilty treat). The lower classes crowd in to watch Mamma Mia with the Chinese tourists and then get dinner at Red Lobster.
All legitimate. But replace “upper class” with “credentialed class” to avoid ongoing confusion (much of it deliberately created).
Good point. Although ironic that Trump never shut up about his own.
Countersignalling. He had unmatched wisdom.
“Unmatched” is accurate
But there's still a view that credentials are somewhat merit-based. Trump's message was "I'm working-class but just as good as the upper class, as demonstrated by my money and credentials".
This is a great piece, and with a good deal of truth in it. However, in France, Marine Le Pen's party has been trying to do that without amazing successes - the main problem is that an anti-immigration agenda is a requirement for a Republican/conservative platform and it's pretty hard to be anti-immigration without looking (and often not only looking) racist.
I would think a French politician could do it by merely being Francophile. Since French culture is the best culture in the world, why dilute it with lost of nasty foreigners, whatever their skin color?
I suspect the french regard French-speaking foreigners as culturally French, at least to some extent.
Macron gave a speech in 2018, in which he said he wanted French power to be based on lots of Africans speaking French. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7Kph52MfRo
'To some extent' doesn't mean that it is sufficient to want them to immigrate.
Judging by the story linked to, he wasn't talking about Africans in France but about Africans in Africa.
I'm confused by your invocation of Le Pen here - isn't anti-immigration her main plank?
I think that's the "without amazing success" part - she's held back by here anti-immigration line. Although considering her party were almost literally Nazis (and may just be pretending not to be now) she's at least achieved "terrifying" success.
I think that's the opposite of the truth.
What you are stating is the globalist delusion that only a small minority oppose immigration. Yet surveys show that wanting to reduce immigration is very popular.
Hypothesis: a large number of people might personally want to reduce immigration, and might vote for anti-immigration measures if they have secret ballots, but only people who are *much* more anti-immigration than average are committed enough to hold this opinion in *public*. Hence, the political parties which make strong commitment to reducing immigration a big part of their platforms, and their most vocal supports, are going to be much further right than the majority of their actual voters.
Anti-immigration is her main plank but she has tried to shift her party's public discourse toward (some of) the things you describe. The Rassemblement National does describe itself as a working class party (and is in fact a working class party sociologically) but it's anti-immigration stance which is at the core of the party's existence stop it to turn it's success among the working class into overall electoral success.
Eric Weinstein talks a lot about this. The Democrats/Elites/Upper class (or whatever name you want to give them) have done a great job making a popular position, that of a xenophilic restrictionist, seem non existent. The idea that you must support open borders or you are by definition a racist is nonsensical.
https://twitter.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1004363916397277189
Keeping in mind that Scott somehow managed to accidentally become so successful at blogging that he got himself condemned by the NYT, I'm starting to worry that this is going to end with him accidentally becoming chairman of the GOP.
The problem with that is, of course, that the next blogging hiatus would be insufferably long.
Wouldn't it be cool to have a US president who writes brilliant essays in his after-work hours, instead of unhinged tweets?
If I had to choose between unhinged tweeting habits and brilliant essays in a president/politician, I would choose the brilliant essays. If I had to choose between a self-funded psychiatric clinic or a presidency/politicianship in a blogger, I'd choose the self-funded psychiatric clinic.
Reason being, mostly, that I like my bloggers a little bit more underground than being the president/major political figure in a global superpower. Just think about how huge the rate of NYT hitpieces would be, it really boggles the mind...
By day, a mild-mannered psychiatrist. By night, a brilliant underground blogger leading the war against Moloch.
"I'm starting to worry that this is going to end with him accidentally becoming chairman of the GOP"
"What do you mean I am now President of the United States because of all the write-in votes?" 😀
Demand a recount.
If you divorce class from wealth, what actually makes the class described here the "upper class?" Like, I sort of feel that way too, but that's because I'm in it, and so ascribe higher status within a blue-tribe status framework. But if the "lower class" here has more political power, and sees themselves as having higher status (i.e. a F-150 is certainly higher status than a Prius or a bus pass in at least half the country), why are they the lower class?
This only matters insofar as most people think they should be on the "lower class" side of a class war. I'm not sure in the world described by Scott here that I should support the political power of a party of pilots over the party of social workers unless I'm fully bought into its honest support of a platform broadly helpful to the poor (...and I don't see them shaking off the pathos that led them to elect Donald Trump.)
All that said, I agree that this would be a better republican party than we have now, and would push the dems to be better.
You'll want to check out his most recent book review for an idea of separating class from wealth
I don't think he wants them to identify as the lower class but the working class.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-fussell-on-class
brb sending this to my consultant friends in the GOP
I like this proposed kayfabe arc. Republicans and Democrats, make it happen! Last season's arc is getting stale.
If you doubt politics today is purely kayfabe, listen to this short answer by Justin Amash (former House rep): https://youtu.be/P4SeBpJQL9k?t=2350
Amash: "It's literally *scripted*".
This implies that getting votes should be a goal of a political party, but we already know votes don't matter any more.
> 3. War On The Upper-Class Media: This is your new term for "mainstream media". Being against the "mainstream media" sounds kind of conspiratorial.
I think you missed a step here. Americans -- except the class designated as the opposition -- LOVE conspiracy theories. Roswell, chemtrails, JFK, Masons, you name it, you can make millions with a miniseries about it that suggests there's something to it. The underclasses tend to have even wilder (and conventional yet unacceptable to the opposition class) ones. So "mainstream media" is great, the only thing that would be better is more scare quotes
"There's a theory that the US party system realigns every 50-or-so years. Last time, in 1965, it switched from the Democrats being the party of the South and the Republicans being the party for blacks, to vice versa."
No; it realigns every 36-40 years. The current party system (seventh) started in either 2016 or 2000; the previous was either from 1976 to 2016 (Trump had a coalition right opposite that of Carter) or 1964-2000 (2000 was the first election with clear "red states and blue states").
This is a really compelling idea! You can already see parts of the Republican Party trying to find their way into this position as they figure out what to do without Trump (see Romney's new child subsidy plan and his mandatory E-Verify/higher minimum wage combo plan co-sponsored with Cotton). And they could fit an interest in anti-trust enforcement against tech companies that are disproportionately filled with left-leaning white collar workers into this framework. That position would benefit them in the culture/social media wars, too: if Amazon is less powerful, they have less to worry about if AWS kicks off Parler or if Amazon stops stocking books written by social conservatives. Oren Cass is the most famous intellectual I'm aware of who's advocating a class-forward Republican Party, but it'd be interesting to see who else would come out of the woodwork if the party starts moving in this direction.
> And they could fit an interest in anti-trust enforcement against tech companies that are disproportionately filled with left-leaning white collar workers into this framework. That position would benefit them in the culture/social media wars, too: if Amazon is less powerful, they have less to worry about if AWS kicks off Parler or if Amazon stops stocking books written by social conservatives.
A competent Trump administration, realising Big Tech is an enemy, would have pushed this.
Yeah the Romney E-Verify/higher minimum wage stuff is interesting. My guess is that having a high minimum wage and actually enforcing it would be more effective at stopping illegal immigration than a border wall, since employers would not have an incentive to hire them (although I'm not sure if I agree with this goal of minimizing illegal immigration).
Is this some sort of 'gotcha' post?
Of course, part of why Scott's essay here is more persuasive than Tucker Carlson to us here is that he's writing with blue/gray tribal language. I don't think that this is coded the right way to actually get traction with most Republicans.
I am a HS grad and I loved it. I voted Trump and I loved it.
I hate the upper class media, Academics and Bullshit experts.
This hit me between the eyes.
The difference is Scott makes it clear he is on your side while Tucker has no such constraints. He is perfectly willing to say that people like you are screwing over the country and we should hate you and resist you with every fiber in our bodies.
Tucker Rules.
Donald Trump is not "upper class?" Was that supposed to be a joke?
The "upper class" that Donald Trump belongs to is a very different "upper class" from Boston Brahmins and the 'upper crust' who go to operas and throw gallant balls. See Scott's previous post for a better explanation: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-fussell-on-class
Did you get to that part and then instantly stop reading to post a comment? Because Scott explained what he meant by that immediately after saying it.
Donald Trump is not a rich man. He's a poor man who happens to have a lot of money. There's a difference.
I think there’s another level of irony in there. New York of the 20th century had a thing where putting on working-class mannerisms is an upper-middle habit.
So in Trump we have someone with some rich roots and some less-rich roots putting on the New York working man face in order to get their support; then he is viewed by non-New York upper-middle as actually “worker” (and a bunch of others thought so too.) Was he from the poor part of Queens? No. He may not be “Boston Brahmin” but that’s primarily because his grandfather and mother were more recent immigrants, so there wasn’t enough geologic time to go full Brahmin.
To get taken seriously in the 1970s and 1980s New York people did that, acting the way they thought people would if they were raised over a bar and worked on a loading dock. It was a form of signaling. I saw the leftovers of it, growing up in the tri-state area. It was also an act of the imagination.
As someone currently in a PhD program, I get kinda annoyed when PhDs and grad students complain how hard they have it. Like, we literally get paid to do our hobby and work on cool research. My job is to do something that I would still want to do for free even if I were rich.
If anyone thinks 40k for a PhD job is so terrible...... well, nobody forced you to get a PhD and go into academia. You could have had a boring businessy-type job that you weren't passionate about and made more money. But part of the deal with jobs that are fun/cool/interesting is that they often don't pay as much as boring jobs.
If most PhD students were making $40k I would agree with you but most of the PhD students I know (and I know quite a few) make between $12k and $18k a year. If you factor in that many/most PhD students are pressured/forced to work >40 hours a week (especially but not only in the lab sciences) and it doesn’t look like such a good deal anymore.
I also think part of the complaints come from a recognition of how terrible the academic job market is, where most positions are temporary, without benefits, and very low paying. Most PhD students would be content if they could easily secure a professorship making $40k a year in a permanent position with benefits.
Hmmm yeah 12k-18k does sound pretty low. Most of the PhD students I know are making closer to like 25k-30k, which I think is fair. And for a PhD program I think working more than 40 hours per week is to be expected. I typically work about 60 hours per week on research projects that I enjoy and am passionate about, and I'd much rather do that than work 40 hours per week on boring stuff that I don't like.
Yeah, frankly I think even a lot of PhD students would be quite happy to see a bit less credentialism and more meritocracy in academia. Everywhere I've taught, the average quality of the adjuncts' teaching was better than many if not the majority of tenured faculty (many of whom had also not published any research for years). More meritocracy in academia might sound good. Plus fewer offices dedicated to student affairs and satisfying government requirements would mean more money for actual instruction.
It’s not popular to say it but academia treats their grad students like an unfree labor pool and thats part of the problem with academia turning out shitty ideas.
I mostly agree with this post except for the war on experts bit. I think not all fields with experts are created equal and denigrating the fields with more credible experts as being 75% useless is doing these fields a disservice. For example I would expect 98%+ of Physics experts to agree on how quantum tunnelling or a well understood process works. Sure they may disagree on the subtleties of M-theory but they will present a united front when it comes to pretty much anything we mere mortals are capable of understanding, and the front they present will be the right one. In such fields expert opinion should be treated as second only to divine revelations from God.
Conversely in fields like [redacted] (not wanting to name any names) there is far less certainty and experts will openly disagree on more fundamental questions. E.g. in public policy are mask mandates good or bad (note that this is a public policy question and not an epidemiology question; that would be more like by what percentage would infections next month reduce if R0 goes from 1.7 to 1.3) ? There will be a myriad of experts going both ways and now as a layman it is far less clear which side to trust, since having more experts on your side is only weak evidence of being right if the discrepancy is 75-25 vs 99-1 .
As a TLDR my point is that we shouldn't lump astrophysicists who can predict to the exact minute an asteroid will hit Earth with economists who are still brawling it out over whether a minimum wage is good or bad. Lumping both categories of experts into the same basket is massively unfair to the astrophysicists and just means the public trusts us less on questions where we are able to make extremely accurate predictions.
I don't think the use of "expert" here was meant to include astrophysicists. While they are experts on astrophysics (in the same way doctors are experts on medicine, lawyers on law, etc) they don't serve the social role of "expert" - the government doesn't use them to set policy, they don't get featured in NYT with exhortations that we need to "trust the experts", etc.
If someone did a prediction market on asteroid strikes, I imagine the astrophysicists would win easily and everyone would forget about it.
I have a doctorate in physics. Is that a sufficient reason for you to trust my views on climate change?
The special characteristic that distinguishes those physicists from others is that Obama selected them to be energy secretaries, which was a political decision. Do you think he would have chosen a physicist skeptical of the current climate orthodoxy, say Freeman Dyson (except he was too old), if one had been available?
I don't think my uncle, or other relatives, had any influence over the Jesuits who run SCU. The school has two ideologies — Catholicism and soft leftism. I disagree with both, but it was never a problem.
If you are curious about my qualifications to teach economic analysis of law, you might want to try reading my _Law's Order_, which you can do for free from my web page. It's been used as a text by a fair number of schools.
Are you missing my point? The fact that a political appointee with a relevant degree supports a position tells us almost nothing about whether the position is correct, beyond the fact that at least one person with that degree supports that position — because he was selected for the job in part because he supported the position the politician who selected him liked. Hence saying "climate change must be real because the Secretary of energy is a physicist and he says it is" is an error. I expect you would recognize the point if we were talking about a Trump appointee who supported a position you disagreed with.
Counterpoint, Taiwan had the best Covid response in the world and a lot of that was that Chen Jien Jen, the vice president, was an epidemiologist. And he got to make policy.
"not only do I devalue your thoughts on climate science, but I question the nepotism that got you a job at a law school."
This seems to me like a pure ad hominem attack, which in my opinion violates SSC/ACX comment norms (as shown at https://archive.is/EUvEh). I hope that you'll avoid those in future.
All experts are suspect.
If they live in academia and let the disease spread, they are suspect.
If every astrophysics in America disappeared over night, now would my life change?
It wouldn't. I wouldn't even notice.
So why do I need an expert like that?
You're posting on a device that is the result of the useless physics of last century. Rather hypocritical.
If you dislike "useless" physics so much, maybe consider abstaining from the products this uselessness gave you.
Funny enough, I get the same amount of voting power as you.
Insulting me isn't persuasive.
I was merely pointing out an inconsistency in your position. It was not intended as an insult.
You are posting in country that was built by the manual labor people you despise and you happily call on them to shed their blood for you whenever your class feels threatened.
Pretty hypocritical
I feel like the same person who wrote about kolmogorov complicity would understand why bounded expertise like this doesn't work.
Probably should have said "War on Fake Experts" because the following sentence makes clear that he isn't proposing a war on actual experts.
There are plenty of fields where the "experts" have little credibility because they've abused it by misrepresenting their fashionable culture war stands as "science." Public health being a fine example.
There are a lot of connotations around the word expert that change drastically depending on the context. I don't think many Republicans feel the same sense of class resentment toward the expert plumber that comes to unclog their sink as they do the expert epidemiologist that tells them to shut down their restaurant.
I'm sure there are a million different variables that come in to play, but here are a couple I can think of right off the bat:
1. Experience vs education. Republicans tend to value expertise gained from work experience more highly than theoretical expertise gained from education.
2. Enabling expertise vs constraining expertise. The expert engineers who built the Mars rover aren't bothering anybody. The experts who tell people how to live their lives are.
3. Expertise with measurable outcomes vs fuzzy experts. When the plumber leaves, the sink either drains or it doesn't. When the rocket scientist pushes the button, the rocket either flies or it doesn't. Both experts are respected because we have concrete evidence that they are, in fact, experts. What concrete, physical evidence can a nutritionist or an economist or a climate scientist point at? A computer model? An impenetrable research paper? Get outta here. "Oh, you said to raise interest rates and they did, and then the economy got better? According to who? My cousin Joey got laid off last week. You can't be doing that good a job." etc etc.
There are a lot of good ideas here, but it's so divisive. I get it, it's politics, and division works. But it still makes me feel dirty, and I feel like I have one foot in both classes, so-to-speak, so the divisiveness seems even more acute.
I have a PhD in STEM, I work for an FRDC with an academic atmosphere, I drive a Subaru, believe in climate change, shop at farmer's markets, belong to a CSA, love Thai and Indian and fusion, drink craft beer and locally-made wines and ciders, travel, and got married and had a kid later in life.
But I also work alongside a lot of engineers and skilled technicians and think they're jobs are more valuable than mine is, would kind of like a truck if I thought I could pull it off, think a lot of climate activists are full of shit, also shop at the local chain grocery store, love Taco Bell and Chic-fil-a, love college/pro football, hate what the NYT has become, and feel guilty about not going to church more often.
In the event of a class war, I guess I'd side with Scott's re-imagined Republican party if forced to choose (assuming it actually came into being).
But I really wish that, instead of thinking of ways to more effectively fight the class war, we'd think of ways to more effectively have class peace. Is that so much to ask? Almost definitely.
I don't think what Scott is proposing is to persecute people with degrees, just to reduce discrimination in favor of them. You still get the job and the high salary with Shell if you actually know more relevant geology than other applicants, but not if your only qualification is having a degree they don't have.
> Dividing people into us and them is one of the biggest problems in our politics, and this approach for the GOP would just take us further down that bad road.
The USA uses FPTP which because of Duverger's Law leads to a two party system. Because elections are competitive, the 2 parties demonise each other. The actual politicians themselves are merely puppets obeying the incentives in the system.
Want to fix US politics? A better voting system such as IRV or (better still) STV with multiple winners, would be a good start.
I think the answer would be that there are two kinds of peace: the peace of a prison and the peace of a free society (also the peace of the grave, if you want 3 of them); if you are closer to the former than the latter (which would be the position of your average populist, I think), then even if you want to get to the latter, you are probably not going to want to think about peace for a while.
Of course, that analysis depends on being pretty sure that you are closer to the peace of a prison than you are to the peace of a free society.
I am a HS grad who has worked with his hands and now work online.
I voted for D's since Bill Clinton but then voted Trump twice.
This is brilliant.
I didn't vote for Trump because he would do anything, I voted for Trump because Hillary despised people like me.
Then I voted for Trump because the upper class media said I was a Nazi for voting for Trump the first time.
Fuck you.
Fact is the Joe won because the D party has become the upper class suburb party for people who lived on zoom during the lockdowns.
I HATE their smugness. I hate their condescending attitude. I hate their love of "Experts" who aren't experts. I hate colleges that basically exist to sell student loans to kids to don't know better. I hate Woke because it is a way for upper class to be bigots.
"How many of "them" have you met personally who were smug or condescending?"
Tons
Oh, no, there are certainly real people who smugly demonize entire demographics of te US. My wife, for example.
For her, at least, it's mostly just in-group signaling. But she doesn't consciously realize that and instead believes there's an objectiveness to it.
Last month, I was pumping gas into my work truck on a lonely country hwy and a lady in an expensive BMW SUV drove up and took a look at me. Not many cars like hers in those parts.
These days, I have my winter beard going for working outside and my work hoodie is stained and dirty. Basically, I looked like a guy out of central casting for “menacing country dude”
I was just going home from a job.
I watched her look at me, and then check herself in the mirror and then pick up her phone and rummage around her bag and then when I finally finished and left the gas station, in my rear view window, I finally saw her get out of her car.
"Demonize" would be too strong for that. Depending on how lonely the highway was, it could be entirely reasonable for a lady to prefer not to take a one in twenty chance of being mugged.
It is more like 1 in 20,000 for a place like if I makes some guess based on average.
The robbery rate is about 1/25th the national average in that town.
But thx for the comments. Makes me excuse her a bit - it didn't occur to me that there were people so ignorant.
Trust me there are tons. I come from this type of milieu and I grew up around masses of people who are indeed often smug and condescending of those they perceive to be uneducated, religious, conservative, working class, overly patriotic, etc. It's very unpleasant, and I say this as someone who ticks all their virtue boxes.
Ι mean, when a politician, who is supposed to be "political" to win votes and sympathy from all sides, openly calls such people "deplorables", how do you think regular upper class people think and talk about their working class / fly-over country lessers?
That was the moment I decided to vote for Trump.
That was the moment I decided not to vote for Hillary. Trump was unfit for office. I voted third party.
I’m on board with you, Tim. After the last year the idea that I should defer to ‘experts’ is laughable and there isn’t a single institution in the US I wouldn’t overhaul or outright destroy. The primary reason for this state of affairs is this elite is not only incomprehensibly stupid but very vindictive. There is no core competency there, or seemingly anywhere, and they demand all aspects of this nation be as broken as they are.
How is a multicultural and multiracial nation supposed to be functional with zero trust and fostered racial strife? Either we return to an individualistic view of people to de-emphasize race or we make the nation less multiracial so as to restore trust and direction. Either way, deposing this elite is necessary. They are too stupid to rule.
As for this article in general, the line about Trump is flat wrong and it seems like Scott wants this for Democrats, not Republicans. If it was genuine advice for Republicans it wouldn’t start out with barbs and venom. The intertwining of Progressive identity insanity with elite grip on the Democrat party is the source of the problem. They subverted the nation’s standards and purpose to replace it with cynical snark, hyper focus on materialism, and widespread mental illness.
This is a powerful analysis. I think you underestimate the very well documented historic racism (ergo systemic) against black people. This is not some figment of elite class warfare against the poor majority by dividing them into races at war with one another. If you define a democratic republic as the state treating all its subjects equally (along the principles of liberty and equality), then the US did not become a republic until the late 60s. Two generations ago! We have to contend with this, and honestly.
I think that paragraph would definitely look different if I were writing it two generations ago.
I am younger than you and my dad remembers the day his school desegregated. This is not ancient history.
History is history. Learn to live in the present and reorient your concern toward the future.
Unless we think that decades of "whites only" signs, disenfranchisement, economic exclusion, and in many cases outright killings have literally no effect on long term life outcomes (which is a VERY strong claim that would suggest that pretty much nothing ever does), those effects remain today because the people who experienced them are still alive.
that's a pretty strange definition of "republic", IMO.
Yes, you're right, technically it's Dworkin's definition of legitimate government. Equal concern for the fate of every person over whom it claims dominion (equality). And to respect each person's right and responsibility to decide for herself what to make of her life (liberty). I jumped to democratic republic as the only legitimate form of government from there.
> technically it's Dworkin's definition of legitimate government. Equal concern for the fate of every person over whom it claims dominion (equality).
And has any actually-existing government ever done that? I very much suspect not. In all countries, the ruling class are going to care more about themselves then they do the lower classes. True in modern USA, true in Louis XIV's France, almost certainly true in ancient Sumeria.
This is a legal definition. Not a cultural one.
Mostly what I learned today is that Scott lurks Twitter harder than I thought.
The thing which overwhelmingly occurs to me on reading this essay is: wow, thank god I don't live in a country with two party first past-the post voting!
I would love to see universities lose their monopoly status over employment prospects for example, and I'm happy that I have options where I live other than trying to inject that agenda into a party to which I do not belong or support
Other voting systems also have their problems. For example, it is quite frustrating to see politics divided into three groups, two of them having about 45-50% votes, the third one only about 5-10% votes, and the third one has disproportionate control over the country, because they always make coalition with the higher bidder. Even if 95% of voters disagreed with them about something, they would still get it their way, because it is of course unthinkable for the two almost-50% parties to make a coalition against them, after spending most of time attacking each other.
I do not actually think there is anything wrong with this. In the coalition agreements, each coalition party will be getting something they want. In life, we make agreements with the other people who live in the world with us, nobody gets everything they want and nor should they.
If this happens, I'm voting red up-ballot for the first time.
Classic!
Very good. It includes a few things I disagree with, such as opposition to free trade based on mistaken economics, and I don't suppose you can persuade them that more immigration will result in more working class people to vote for them, but I would be more inclined to vote for the party you describe than either the present Republican or Democratic party.
I want to see a post-wokeness that sees/knows the gears of racism and also doesn’t lean on a) lectures from the upper class and b) bureaucratic programs, to address it.
One of the Sanders mistakes was reducing race to class. There’s targeting of very wealthy African Americans (banks, loans, workplaces) which isn’t reducible to classism in part because the situations are higher-class coded in all dimensions. Wilkerson’s “Caste” probably nails this dynamic and so I have to go read that to say this properly. But yes, society needs to get past woke, the whole “now the upper-middle white intellectuals tell us how to think and feel” situation never works long term. There’s a sort of civil rights neoliberalism going on now which will cause the usual reactions to neoliberalism. But now the backlash will be at civil rights too. So I would like to see work for healing and against discrimination, survive the neoliberal coopting . In many ways the Class X bunch benefited the most from US neoliberalism. We think of “BLM” as “socialist” ...but for a lot of fans (not all) the enforcing state is supposed to simultaneously exist, and not cause problems, and that is not a thing, it’s the naïveté of neoliberalism.
Otherwise your platform is great. Make great fights between GOP/DEM if they took it seriously. Productive fights.
> I want to see a post-wokeness that sees/knows the gears of racism and also doesn’t lean on a) lectures from the upper class and b) bureaucratic programs, to address it.
What would that look like, in terms of actual policies?
Um, still working that out... Yascha Mounck had an interview with a researcher who studies the effectiveness of diversity training on getting a more diverse workplace. The name escapes me but it shouldn’t be hard to find. He said the most successful workplace diversity and inclusion programs were those which took a group of managers, showed them the statistics on race and gender of their employees (lopsided distribution) and then tasked the managers with implementing and evaluating a solution. Then they did things like start internship programs at their companies to increase minority hiring and recruit from HBCUs. If the approach was empowering to the managers they would often enough take the reins and address it. If it was “now we tell you what to think and do,” the managers would be disempowered and the climate might get worse.
Community development is also really important. A lot of it gets funded through federal and state grants, yes, but things like teen centers to give kids something to do other than be hanging out on unsafe streets. We need to come up with better ways to finance community institutions.
I do agree discrimination and harassment should be illegal, and there needs to be a better funding and staffing for the fair housing and employment enforcement. I’m not totally against “government programs” and I think a type of UBI could do a lot of good. Better police-community relationships, community mental health investment. Thinking about reparations, I’m curious about programs that would invest in communities versus invest in individual descendants, I don’t know which would work better.
I think white fragility is a thing, but I also think that ultimately bridges are built between individuals with awareness of each other. I think woke taught people to say the right things but there may still be not much “there” there in terms of greater awareness of micro and macro aggressions. And it came at the expense of ideals of individual liberty which are, um, the hamsters on the wheels that move American society. Laws don’t constrain people from thoughtcrime, nor should they. We are close to the end of the ability to punish thoughts as opposed to behavior. Compelling behavior through other means is an important problem.
Money doesn’t solve everything but it helps a lot. Money either comes from crowdsourcing or bureaucracy/taxes. I do not have this all worked out. That’s enough rant for now.
"and I think a type of UBI could do a lot of good."
How large are you imagining? My impression is that a lot of people who talk about a UBI are imagining doing it on a scale which would cost a much larger fraction of the federal budget than the realize.
I’ll confess to being undecided. There are different purposes for it. “Targeted” UBI sounds like an oxymoron but see
https://economics.mit.edu/files/15434
Paper on UBI p. 221 about community-targeted UBI. I had no idea it was globally popular.
I have heard a large number for full US UBI.
In this context the point would be to give a specific geographical community, neighborhood or zip code access to the resources to do the top five community-transforming things they identify. Like the Stockton program but with yes larger checks and some civic participation requirements like community transformation meetings, and maybe timed out after 3 years.
Alternatively hand them $20k at the beginning instead of $1k/mo.
Or given a choice between that and zero-cost degree and job placement assistance.
Or “welfare for landlords” where owners enroll a property to be managed and maintained by a housing agency in return for a small monthly profit and no hassle. (This is not exactly like section 8.)
I’m spitballing as it were but I think UBI has power. I think Romney’s child payment plan has potential. Also the UBI figures I’ve seen for the US don’t factor in savings from reduced incarceration, reduced mental illness and SUD due to reduced poverty stress.
I dunno; I bet there are more closeted upper-class Chick-Fil-A lovers than you'd expect. It's too darn tasty. Politics be damned. (I guess it's possible to love Chick-Fil-A without speaking the name, but it's hard.)
We kind-of have this in Britain, it's called Spiked Online https://www.spiked-online.com/
Every article I have read on that website says the same thing (I have thought multiple times about making a "spiked online article generator"):
1. Currently many journalists writing about concerns over ___
2. The people making these complaints are all middle-class
3. And they look down on the people who are not complaining about ___
4. Therefore they're assholes who probably drink expensive coffee
5. Therefore ___ is nothing to be concerned about
O'Neil in particular is risibly repetitive; one could write his article for him in response to any given kulturkampf kerfluffle.
I am good with it.
My war on college has a number of immediate action items:
Wage and price controls on colleges: A college education shouldn't cost more than a medium size SUV. The president of a non profit institution shouldn't make more than the President of the United States. And all those vice presidents. done-ions.
Abolish sabbaticals and tenure. If they can't teach four classes they can retire.
Separate all scientific research into separate research companies that keep separate books. No more profs saying the can't teach more students because they have to do research.
Replace all selective admissions schemes with a lottery. Any high school grad should be eligible to go to any college.
Abolish irrelevant course requirements. You shouldn't have to take French literature to get a degree in accounting.
Tax endowments that are invested in anything but Treasuries or Municipals. Harvard shouldn't be a hedge fund that uses a college as a tax shelter. Undergraduates should not be concerned with whether Siwash U. owns shares in Exxon.
Shut down graduate programs if they cannot show that that their students finish within five years and get jobs afterward.
"Replace all selective admissions schemes with a lottery. Any high school grad should be eligible to go to any college."
Why? That'll ruin the signal.
Bingo
"Separate all scientific research into separate research companies that keep separate books. No more profs saying the can't teach more students because they have to do research."
I think you're vastly overestimating the average (median) profitability of research done at universities. Even though good research pays off huge, it still needs to be subsidized because good research is not just rare but unpredictably so. A big advantage of having research tied to universities is that it provides a high throughput of researchers. The more grad students we can pump through the system, the higher the likelihood we get a match between a genius in a field and the research in that field they are destined to advance. For more, see: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/v7c47vjta3mavY3QC/is-science-slowing-down
If you move research into separate research companies, you don't eliminate the problem of tenure, you just move it to a place where it's harder to get access to new talent (onus of making connections is placed on the company, rather than the student), and harder to get rid of ineffective talent (if a grad student doesn't bring anything new to the field, it's OK, they're gone in 5 years tops), and you get the same effect of fewer classes taught by smart people.
I wasn't arguing against subsidies. I am arguing for separating teaching and research. "No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other." Because research is what is rewarded, many, if not most, faculty put teaching in second place way back. Separate the two.
Tucker Carlson is already banging the class warfare drum along these lines.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5xu32LnDyU
As the one guy with a major media platform who is able to channel the insecurities and articulate the zeitgeist of the Trump era right wing, Tucker is probably the closest thing the 2020s have to a William F. Buckley or Rush Limbaugh. Get Tucker to start proclaiming the virtues of prediction markets, and you might be surprised how quickly they get adopted as a core tenet of a right-wing policy platform. Someone should send this post to his staff.
Tucker Carlson is very effective. I often think (not that I want this to happen) Tucker 2024.
Interestingly resonates with: https://policytensor.substack.com/p/the-5-social-classes-in-america
'upper-class media' doesn't have the same ring as 'fake news media' tho
I've been saying for years that some ideological framework similar to this is the winning formula for the Upper Midwest/B1G states (I'm from Minnesota, live in Iowa and have also lived in WI and PA so I know these states and the cultures there well). It's essentially how Trump won (via rhetoric, not actual policy) Wisconsin, Michigan, and PA in 2016 and almost won Minnesota. Minnesota! A state that hasn't gone Republican since 1972. Trump ended up being just a normal (policy-wise) but more overtly racist general GOP figure and that opened the door for a normie old-school Dem like Biden to win those states back.
> Most of what he said was offensive, blatantly false, or alienated more people than it won
Trump won almost 50% of the vote, so I would not say he alienated more people than he won. I thought the triple crown of being the world's biggest asshole, bungling the coronavirus response, and dishonorably handling the BLM protests was going to be his easy undoing. But he almost won. Liberals need to stop underestimating the Republicans, they are a Tom Cotton or a Dan Crenshaw away from the White House in 2024.
I'm a liberal, but I recently watched a movie called "Uncle Tom" about Black Republicans. It was a shockingly interesting movie. Herman Cain, who I thought was an undereducated idiot, was actually a computer programmer that programmed rockets. I'm well aware that it is as much propaganda as "left" movies are, so I take everything with a grain of salt, but they made convincing arguments. A lot of what they said made a lot of sense, it was old school conservatism where relying on oneself was more important than blaming others for your personal situation.
I think if you got a good, common sense Republican leader that wasn't an outright scumbag likes Cruz, Rubio, etc, they're already half-way there. If she/he lead with honor and grace, and espoused much of the policies you talk about above, the Republicans might have a good chance. I just don't see a single honorable Republican anywhere, which is their biggest problem. They are a bunch of political cowards that bow to perceived strength, which is why they were terrified of Trump, literally a bunch of sniveling Starscreams to Trump's Megatron.
John McCain was the last great Republican, and it's a shame he wasn't 10 years younger. If the Republicans found his moral successor, they really could have a great shot because there's a lot of moderates on both sides that would flock to a president that honorably leads with moderation without engaging in this exhausting identify politics.
>Trump won almost 50% of the vote, so I would not say he alienated more people than he won.
Only 18.89% of the 2016 US population voted for Trump.
And how many of them voted for Trump because of his personality and rhetoric, instead of voting for him because he was the Republican candidate?
Re: alienating more people than it won, see https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/12/13/trump-a-setback-for-trumpism/
Ironically, the closest thing to John McCain's moral successor in today's Republican party is Mitt Romney.
They need someone much, much closer than that!
Close enough for me. I voted for both men with great enthusiasm. When Trump was nominated (twice), I voted against a Republican for the first time since 1972.
As a Transformers fan, I must object to comparing Megatron with Trump. Megatron would lead Scott's Republican party. (And then start getting power hungry.)
I had a lot of trouble comparing Trump to Megatron because Megatron actually was relatively competent (he did manage to take control of Cybertron). I think it's no question that Trump would aspire to be Megatron though.
Admit it, Scott, you wrote this letter to yourself.
In many ways this feels a lot like the brexit realignment we got in the UK. Right now the Conservative party just won a sweep of traditionally working class labour seats and is plotting how to keep them. Though of course there are internal divisions in the party about how much they can shift on economics - their new voters are not small state true believers, and quite like spending on things like the NHS.
(It has been remarked that the political slogan that defines the center of UK politics is "Fund the NHS, Hang the pedos" - https://twitter.com/christiancalgie/status/1196701436882673665)
There's also an internal division about whether they should stoke up the culture war or ignore it. It looks like the consensus from number ten is to strike hard but quietly. Pass new rules protecting free speech on campus but don't tweet like Trump about it. Kemi Badenoch (
However post covid there's a lot of space for the Tories to move leftward economically and they're also playing a good tactical game on the culture wars. Rather than getting sucked into twitter fights they're using their government powers, most recently to tell universities to toughen up on free speech, and building their own ideological coalition. Liz Truss' speech (https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/fight-for-fairness or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0Vhrn82QtE) lays out the rival equality docrtine they're hoping to create. Kemi Badenoch also had a very well received speech on the subject (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqBTWPl-11U)
It's overall a lot less aggressive and warlike that the above suggestions, but you'd expect that in the UK. Being a UK working class party requires some left wing economics; but there's a fair bit in common too.
Funnily enough (and very randomly), back in the day Badenoch's constituency had a perennial candidate whose slogan was "Common Market no, hanging yes." It's funny how these things work out.
As someone who loves prediction markets I feel compelled to defend them from overzealous use on a few points (though I certainly would support a lot of public market-making).
1: How many people could really be replaced by well-functioning p-markets? You want to distinguish carefully between expertise in investigation and detailed knowledge and expertise in predicting. It may well be that a careful predictor can out-predict the working scientist/pundit in an area, and the market as a whole almost certainly can, but the role of most experts is not to predict, and you can't delegate the underlying research to the market or your local fox (busy prowling elsewhere, as per). You might want to center punditry around prediction markets but you still need people to explain, give context and detail, like the best of 538, and calling for better punditry is universal and not easy to legislate.
2: While I love the idea of conditional markets but I don't think we're close to being able to put them into use for major policy decisions. Capturing the relevant dimensions of possible policies is very hard and the true impact of most policies is ultimately pretty small (difference in Metaculus predictions of US emissions between Biden and Trump is approx 1 s.d., and think how many policies in a similar direction that's summing up). Also, prediction markets that have a predictable effect on policy, and especially markets that only resolve conditional on their own values, are prime meme-bait. Look at the 'Keynesian Beauty Contests' on Metaculus where they resolved positive if estimate is >98%, they were a total shambles.
3: What timescale could you meaningfully decide to hire/fire people on? You need a pretty long, statistically significant track record in areas that are relevant, and that demonstrate real understanding rather than just skill at picking base rates - you (probably) don't just want to hand the Fed to the quants, it's the wrong kind of understanding. Caplan's betting record is impressive but it took him decades and the ability to pick and choose (though in fairness he does offer many more than are accepted). It's hard to test important knowledge with regular predictions - for example I don't think that ability to predict weekly Covid cases is a huge signal of epidemiological skill. Year long predictions of covid yes, vaccine and deaths and lockdown impacts yes, but covid is perhaps the most tangible, predictable *event* in modern history, and is a bit of a best case scenario for p-markets.
You might also be interested to know that the UK civil service has an internal prediction market called Cosmic Bazaar styled on the GJP. It's predictions are quite interesting though the number of questions is limited and it's not very well sign-posted.
Just keep in mind that whenever someone uses a the euphemism, “the less educated.” They mean the stupid. They mean it because it’s true.
Nope, that's not true at all. Having PhD in Woke Studies does not make one smart, neither does it indicate that one is smart, yet less it makes one universally smart. At least PhD in physics indicates some intellectual capacity, even though I've known physics PhDs that said and did remarkably stupid things outside of their area of expertise. But at least it indicates some capacity, even if at times unengaged. Many other degrees don't indicate even that. And some degrees plainly say "I spent five figures for an overpriced daycare and all I got is a brain so indoctrinated as to preclude any possibility of independent thought".
I have a graduate degree in a STEM field and I'm pretty firmly on Team Woke if we're gonna make a two-team conflict out of this. But I appreciate that in a post about how the blue tribe is looking down on their cultural opponents, you decided to go right for "those dumb feminists can't do math".
Why do you read SSC?
Now? To understand where it - and thus I - went so wrong. There is a rot at the core of the cultures I'm a part of and I want to understand it so as not to repeat it again.
You can be on team woke and read this. I'm super left and like this site.
I don't get why.
Because we aren't the caricature?
I didn't decide anything of the sort, please do not lie so obviously. And yes, PhD in Math doesn't also suggest somebody is smart in any other area (in fact, I've known some math PhDs that are barely functional in real world and hearing their advice on anything but their specialty would be pure madness) but PhD in Woke Studies suggests this even less. That doesn't mean somebody who has Woke Studies PhD is necessarily stupid (or does not know math - or doesn't have PhD in math) - they may be a genius. It means Woke Studies degree per se provides zero information on this. For God's sake, do I need to write out the Bayes formula? Is such a simple syllogism to hard for SSC reader? Or are you just trying to gotcha me without even trying to engage with the actual argument?
It sounds like you think P(smart|woke degree) ~= P(smart|no degree), for a certain definition of "smart". If that is your assertion, do you have any evidence to support that, and are you willing to explain your definition of "smart"?
Replace that with "any degree", and you get my point. There were a time when having an academic degree was a sign the person is likely exceptional and smart - which also had a lot to do with class even then, but at least within the class, you could use it as a signal of certain qualities and benefits. Not anymore. Anybody - who does not have certain class/income handicaps, of course - can get the paper, it means nothing of substance, at least as smart/stupid distinction is concerned. The difference with math degree is that there's an identifiable practical area where this degree still signals substantial benefit. With woke degree, there's pretty much no such area at all.
Would you consider Philosophy to be a "woke degree"?
Also, it sounds like you're saying that the distribution of intelligence among people with "woke degrees" is identical to those of average college students overall. That isn't really an insult to their intelligence.
Oh get over yourself and your f-ing math proficiency. It’s not nearly as valuable as you seem to think.
That's literally my point. So I wonder why you felt the need to restate it in such adversarial way as if you disagreed with me.
Not really.
You don't need to solve differential equations to make good decisions about your life, or about ideology, or even to be useful in most jobs. You do need to have good mental habits, be capable of critical thinking, understand the society you live in - all learned traits. In one of Scott's worldbuilding utopias almost everyone could contribute to the level of a "well educated" person today.
vehemently object to "upper class" being equated with "smart". Yes, a lot of those people do have college degrees - usually in something like English Literature or History at the best, Woke Studies at the common case - but one doesn't have to be hugely smart to get a bachelor's at those. One has to be connected and rich and conformist and coherent enough to not sleep through the paper submission deadlines. Having a brain functional enough to regurgitate back whatever grovel is fed to you by the Woke Studies professor certainly help, but I never actually heard about somebody failing Woke Studies for not possessing the intellectual capacity to grasp the deep mysteries of CRT. If anything deserves the phrase "it's not rocket science", this is.
And that's btw why many people who otherwise wouldn't go near Trump are willing to support him in his stand. Because our supposed betters are so obviously not better in any way, and their claims to being better at anything so obviously and blatantly unearned. I mean at least a feudal lord could tell to a peasant "I can read and compose poems and quote ancient philosophers, and you can't sign your own name, clearly I should rule over you!" - or at least some lords probably could, if they wanted. Current lords are disgustingly and blatnatly unfit for any claim of superiority whatsoever - and yet they are behaving like they earned all of it, and they get away with it all the time. It's not hard to understand how it could infuriate any person with a sense of decency and justice. And this is where the urge to spit in their faces comes from - even though sometimes it's undeserved. But other times it is so, so richly deserved.
Remember NBC lecturing Ted Cruz on Shakespeare?
That's where all pizzagate-type conspiracies come from - they may be very wrong on the facts, but the feeling that those people are deeply no good, very much do not deserve their position, and all they say is deeply false is so strong and palpable that it must have some outlet. So one believes in whatever is easy to believe - that they are victims of their base physiological urges, or paid by Illuminati, or something as easy - instead of figuring out something that may be much more complex, much more true and orders of magnitude more scary (you can jail a person for being a part of a pedophile ring, but can you jail a person for participating in ruining a culture and causing the country to go downhill? Can you even stop it? Can you sleep knowing it's happening and you can do nothing about it? Better to have some pizza...).
Meritocracy is truly the cruelest system. It still isn't fair, but it gives elites a sense of being elite because they're smarter, harder working, and more virtuous. It's prosperity gospel for people who think they're too smart for religion. At least hereditary aristocracy openly acknowledged that their position was inherited. The meritocratic elites are under the delusion that theirs was earned and it makes them act all the more smug and cruel. No more noblesse oblige.
Epstein not suiciding himself in a federal prison throws a wrench into the idea that the elite are merely stupid. They murdered a man in a prison, the media displayed its usual faux concern for a week and then moved on, and the common man is not supposed to entertain the obvious. Don’t know who did it, know they are elite and the conformity of the elite covers it all up.
Open secrets and ‘everyone knew’ but not nationally nor publicly til all individual risk as been discharged. How much of those secrets remain right now in elite circles?
Stupid, vindictive, cruel, and murderous. But I’m supposed to believe what Lester Holt tells me on NBC.
They are not stupid, of course. But they also aren't geniuses, and their smug claims that it is their intellectual and moral superiority that makes them natural rulers over us rubes is a complete and obvious nonsense. That doesn't mean they don't have power of course - they pretty much have all of it, and the brazen murder of Epstein and the brazen bald-faced lying and coverup of it shows this power in all its naked and unashamed enormity. Yes, we can do that, and we can get away with it, and we don't even have to lie too creatively about it - because what you're gonna do? That's right, nothing.
If the Republicans adopted this, I'd actually feel comfortable identifying with a political party for the first time in my life. A boy can dream.
"Smart people? Now you're burning hot."
This is what makes it difficult to discuss without being very derisive. Now "Working class" may work but everybody already claims to be for that. Instead of making "class" less of a dirty word, why not make "populism" less of a dirty word? The US constitution starts with "We the people" after all. I think I could take the Populist Liberal label myself.
The manifesto would go something like:
I am a liberal. I believe in science and knowledge and expertise and competence.
I am a person of the people. I understand that not everyone has the aptitude for academic endeavors and believe they deserve no less respect.
Democracy is inherently populist with the common person having as much weight as everyone. I believe that this is a feature not a flaw.
I recognize that the common person is inherently in a vulnerable position relative to credentialed elite.
I value education, but I am aware that education can elevate people who are already intellectually privileged and contribute to inequality. When I promote education, I always emphasize respectable paths for people not naturally talented at conventional academics.
I value equality and freedom to be who you want to be, but I understand that skillfully navigating people's differences is very complex and not within everyone's reach.
The best AIs out there is not able to simulate advanced empathy. It is highly complex and involves multilevel recursive counterfactual meta-cognitive logic (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K4eDzqS2rbcBDsCLZ/unrolling-social-metacognition-three-levels-of-meta-are-not). Given the level of complexity, I don't expect everyone to be able to easily navigate subtle empathetic issues.
I understand that good people often require help from moral guides and belief groups. I will never seek to bring down these groups. I will instead offer to participate and help improve them.
I am anti racist and believe structural issues should be solved. At the same time, I understand that wonkish historical facts with lots of gray areas are involved and I don't expect everyone to be able to grasp the subtleties. I will never shame anyone for faux pas or lack of mastery of these subjects.
To deal with structural issues, I will attack and blame the structure, never people that were accidentally involved through their identity. When the issues are structural, fighting people instead of the fighting the structure is poor aim.
I value freedom of movement and trade across the world but I understand that the onus is on the elite to ensure that it elevates everyone's prospects and that the gains are widely distributed, that global channels are not co-opted by a small elite.
etc.
"Democracy is inherently populist"
No; it isn't. Populism is just exploiting a large division of opinion between the elite and the people. Phil Scott, Emmanuel Macron, and Charlie Baker seem pretty elitist to me.
Even though I would vote for them, I do find them elitist and they are threatened by the gilet jaunes et al., by the people. Their parties would gain to acknowledge and respect the people more.
Taibbi makes the point better than me here: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/kansas-should-go-f-itself?r=79yga&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=copy
> I value education, but I am aware that education can elevate people who are already intellectually privileged and contribute to inequality. When I promote education, I always emphasize respectable paths for people not naturally talented at conventional academics.
Can you please explain what this means? I'm genuinely curious what you mean by this. When you say that "education can elevate people who are already intellectually privileged", are you proposing something to reverse this?
Isn't this largely what's already happened to the libertarian-leaning republicans like Glenn Reynolds? I could swear that, besides the Free Trade thing, that's been the libertarian-leaning republican platform for somewhere between 4-20 years.
I mean, it's a good idea, but I'm having trouble figuring out what's new here.
I'm looking at the libertarian-leaning conservatives and the conservative-leaning libertarians, more than at the purists.
I'm more of a Bryan Caplan or David Friedman style libertarian myself, but the conservative-trumpist-light libertarian block has been pretty much on point with Scott's suggestions for a long time now.
On Transgenderism, LibertyCons lean towards: Don't let people enforce trangenderism on kids, or let stupid kids decide to do stuff that's more harmful than smoking. Don't let biological males compete in women's sports. Don't require that women let biological men in their dressing rooms. It turns out that the libertarian position and the conservative position: Take seriously everyone's rights (Coase, baby), not just the minority's, matches pretty well.
I don't think there's room for someone like me near the GOP, but I think there's a lot of room for a lot of mild liberty-friendly folks, who think that Free trade is small beans compared to a censorious orthodoxy
Amash was the most libertarian and has left, but there are still the likes of Thomas Massie, Rand Paul, and even Amash's replacement Peter Meyer that are pretty libertarian. I still think that if you are a libertarian and want to vote for one of the major parties the Republicans are still the party to vote for, there really are no elected officials even close to being libertarian in the Democratic party. You do have some folks who are anti war and take civil liberties seriously in the Democratic party though.
Free trade is a tricky thing. In theory, free trade is the optimal thing to do. In practice, unilateral absence of state action towards certain trade may not be exactly free trade - if that trade is influenced by actions of other state actors, and by other actions of the same state actor. Let's say if you create onerous labor regulations that jack up the cost of hiring a local person, but 100 miles over the border you can produce the same thing half as cheap, and the government over the border would subsidize it, while taxing goods travelling the other way - would local workers be happy about it, or about the fact that somebody on the other coast doesn't care whether it's produced locally or over the border? I have a feeling telling those people to learn to code may not be welcome...
Isn't it likely the Republicans can't do this because their extremely wealthy donors/supporters would have a fit? Which isn't to say the Democrats aren't supported by wealth donors (they are, but they're liberal). I think wealthy Republican donors would have a hard time not feeling attacked by an anti-classist message no matter how much you try to explain that class isn't about wealth but by sneering better-than-you status displays.
The Democrats wouldn't stand aside either. They would do whatever was the equivalent of the Trump campaign running ads with grandma being assaulted in her home at night because she called 911 and a recording said due to defunding of the police they can't respond in less than 5 days. Which I assume would mean drawing connections to the Iranian revolution where all of the intellectuals were imprisoned and now they're an Islamic fascist state. Or at least I assume the Democrats would. Maybe they'd just let this happen because they like losing(??)
"Isn't it likely the Republicans can't do this because their extremely wealthy donors/supporters would have a fit?"
We already established that the meaning of "class" here is about cultural signifiers, not wealth. Plenty of uncouth millionaires out there selling pillows and jetskis. (The Kochs aren't uncouth, which probably does limit it, but whatever. *Of course* billionaire donors are a small group so tons of weird variance is going to end up incorporating their personal idiosyncracies for a few decades before catching up with the broader trend. Maybe Thiel is the next guy and in 2024 Mike Lindell appoints Bronze Age Pervert to SCOTUS. That would make the libs mad and drive a great news cycle until everyone forgot about it.
I did continue in that first paragraph: "I think wealthy Republican donors would have a hard time not feeling attacked by an anti-classist message no matter how much you try to explain that class isn't about wealth but by sneering better-than-you status displays."
This was great. Except for the point about protectionism (which is just an upper class attempt to insulate their businesses from competition), I actually by and large agree with most of this. As a radically anti-Trump independent, I did not expect that.
I hate this because it means the further burying of any coherent concept of class beneath a bunch of vague cultural signifiers. In turn this means it will just as likely (continue to) become true, just as every other coherent concept is buried beneath an avalanche of cultural signifiers.
If we *are* using class to refer to cultural signifiers, then the subtitle here - "pivot from a mindless... to a thoughtful..." - is violating your strategy from the start. Go be mindless! It makes the libs so mad! Destroy the "upper" "class" insistence on thinking! Return to monke! Destroy! Kill! No swing voter has ever read a policy paper! Take a shit on the stage! Set up a temple in Washington D.C. and offer up beating hearts to the sun!
Realistically I would like the Democrats to pander less to (((the extremely unpopular cultural values of people like me))) while quietly just allowing social forces to continue making them more popular, but current dynamics mean that the Rs are going to counter-signal against those as hard as they can, which is why the "thoughtful" element of your proposal is the only immodest and unrealistic part. Our current media environment can't do thoughtfulness thoughtfully; you think it can prosecute thoughtlessness that way?
As far as the proposals are serious, they're classy means for déclassé ends. But that's a politically impossible mismatch, because mass movements can't maintain a tidy means/ends distinction. Anarchists describe this situation as "prefigurative politics", the idea that in mass movements, the means you use determine the ends you reach. So if the GOP starts down the road of using classier culture-war arguments, the expected result is that they get watered down, if not outright captured, by the professional-managerial class.
So as you've described, fighting a culture war on the cultural & intellectual elite is best served by weaponizing ugliness & stupidity. It has worked well so far: in 2016, lead by Trump, the GOP won all three elected federal branches; they suffered a bit in the midterms but still took decisive control of SCOTUS; and in 2020 they gained in the House, lost the swing Electoral College states by only about 40k votes, and did very well in state races. They don't need to change strategies.
For contrast, the strategy described in this post is one that US socialists have been trying for decades. Here's a very-recent example:
An interview on the Jacobin show with Catherine Liu about her book, "Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4WV7oswt3M
A short written review of the same book:
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/01/21/virtue-hoarders-our-scolding-elites/
What's actually happened? The Democratic Socialists of America became dominated by the PMC, with working-class union members largely sidelined.
Why do we feel confident that whatever would replace the college system will be less classist? I would imagine that we’d see corporate not-for-profits like ETS and Collegeboard (I am dubious that we can consider them legitimate NGOs) arise to fill the void. And considering that often their tests measure how good we are at standardized tests rather than actual knowledge, and upper class people have a huge advantage for obtaining such skills, I’m not sure it’s a good solution. I love the idea of banning degree discrimination, but I fear something even worse would take its place.
Do others have compelling reasons to believe my prediction is wrong, or that if this happens it would be less classist than the present setup?
I have to be honest, Scott... This sounds like a suggestion for a better way to say “Jew”.
If you're hearing lot of dog whistles, you may actually be a dog...
The post seems pretty explicit that this is a dog whistle:
"You're already doing class warfare, you're just doing it blindly and confusedly. Instead, do it openly, while using the words "class" and “classism”."
That's not a dog whistle, that's just a regular whistle.
I guess I don't keep up with the lingo. What is the difference?
The difference is the regular whistle is something that is said plainly and is taken as it said. The dog whistle is when somebody tried to imbue meaning that is supposedly there but people fail to see it, except the explainer and imagined secret target audience of the dog whistle.
For example, if you criticize somebody for being elitist, and somebody comes and says it's actually "dog whistle" for saying he's a Jew - i.e. you are actually secretly signalling your imaginary anti-Semitic adherents that the real meaning of your message is attacking Jews, but nobody else - except for example comrade Finnydo above - could see it. Of course, usually it's complete baloney, people who are really anti-Semitic just plain say so, and they are rarely shy about it. Pretty much nobody is construing a complex narrative of class and populism to just secretly tell "jews bad" - neither most of the people who think so are actually capable of such subterfuge anyway. But this way you can smear a person without bothering with any proof - how would you prove you didn't secretly mean "Jews"? There's no evidence you could ever present to disprove such an accusation.
The strange thing is that the people who seem to hear dog-whistles all the time are rarely the supposed target of the dog-whistle.
It sounds like you are wary of the weaponization of dog whistle acusations. But that doesn't mean they dont exist.
This is an exact quote from Scott's text:
" Or saying you hate rootless cosmopolitans, and then it looks like boring old anti-Semitism. Or saying you hate the government, and then it looks like boring old libertarianism.
Instead, just use the words "class" "
Hey.
I think you meant "woof!"
Tell that to those who want to eat the rich.
History repeats itself, and the iterations get ever faster.
Now I know how an actual cannibal feels reading Swift
Seems like everybody does a Keynes beauty contest with their tribe for that tribes values. Any attempt to actually control what happens will be broken and devolve quickly due to the sheer size of the tribe needing to be supported. This is why I don't this Marxism will ever work, or any injection to 'fix' politics from the outside will ever work in this system either. I hope this idea does somehow get picked, but I highly doubt it.
It seems you're becoming more vitriol in your politics too, this is written as a proposal of what republican's want by what is a liberal thinking about what republican's want. So excuse me as I can't fully agree with your analysis because I don't think you see across party lines, but I do like some solutions.
I am on the right side of the isle, I came in through Trump. I thought he had good ideas that somebody was finally talking about. The nice thing about him was he was "bullet proof". he could talk about how bullshit the woke ideology is and with the inability due to social shaming in college to talk about how their ideas are counterproductive, it was fun to vote for him as a shot against elites. I can agree with you there. He fucked up the virus response yeah, but during all other times I thought he did good. Peace with North Korea, Conservative Justices, Etc.
At the end of the day it's all tribal shitflinging. A refocus to the accredited elites (as calling them "educated" is both an overloaded word and only used for feeling smug) would be a good idea. Will it be adopted? Probably not, will the democrats be just as batshit insane from the other side of the isle? Absolutely.
I worry that I don't think anything can solve this other than total system collapse, or we somehow all calm down and try working our way back from a low trust society. I think we are heading to system collapse, which would be an awful time had by all. I hope this broken mess lasts 20 more years so we get AGI to singularity us out. Otherwise, I think our progressive policies are progressing us off a cliff, and our conservatives aren't conserving anything
Scott, I love this article, but I can't link it in the conservative places I inhabit because of the preview image; it sends the wrong message almost immediately.
Actually, I think it goes even further than that. The way the article starts off with 'I hate you and think insulting things of you', or how the Marxist vibe is gotten from the title before you can get to the part saying 'but not the Marxist kind'.
The article has such great meat to it, but makes a very terrible first impression for what I would assume is the target audience.
I'm not sure how straightforward this post is supposed to be... I would not be placing bets on who the target audience is.
I have half-suspicion it is there intentionally to filter our people that are looking to be offended by offending them upfront so they will go away. Just like Nigerian letters are full of typos to filter out all but the most gullible, this post may be full of triggers to filter out all but the most determined to engage on substance.
I must admit that I am not a big fan of "I hate you" part, and it's very not true the general Right would hate Scott - at least for anything more than voting Democrat. But I think it's worth going through that and engage with the substance. Though I can see how somebody not having the experience of other Scott's writings would not be willing to do that - I would certainly be tempted to disengage if the writer started with proclaiming hate for me.
I wondered if "I hate you and you hate me" was intended as a kind of warding gesture to try to reassure left-wing readers that Scott hadn't actually become a Republican supporter, which might otherwise be the impression given by most of this essay.
It's a bit like a Victorian erotic novel which ends with a paragraph explaining that obviously the characters repented of all their fornication afterwards and became model citizens.
At a large tangent, there is a Chinese erotic novel where each chapter ends with an explanation of why it is really teaching moral lessons.
Reminds me how during the prohibition, certain grape powders carried a warning: “After dissolving the brick in a gallon of water, do not place the liquid in a jug away in the cupboard for twenty days, because then it would turn into wine.”
What is the title, please?
The Carnal Prayer Mat
I think you are mistaken about Scott's target audience.
Yes, that's partly deliberate. I've had posts go viral in the right-wing blogosphere before and it's brought me nothing but grief. I'd like this to hit a few Republican intellectuals who can think about it, a few liberal intellectuals who can let it reshape their idea of what Republicans are doing/want, and a few nitpicky intellectuals who can tell me what's wrong with it and help me understand the underlying dynamics better.
I remember when Trump claimed to be a "blue-collar billionaire" and Jon Stewart tore into him saying, "That's not a thing." But yeah, actually, it kind of IS a thing.
Correction: Jr. said this about dad. All the same...
Except none of his policies actually helped any blue collar folks. Lol.
Go on.
"When a cop targets a black person for a “random” stop-and-frisk, that’s racist. But it’s also coming from same thought process the cop uses to target an unkempt heavily-tattooed white guy in the bad part of town, instead of a well-groomed suit-wearing white guy in the business district."
Trump gained among Asian and Hispanic voters because of Democratic pro-criminal overreach. The solution to that is to not go pro-crime, but to go tough on crime. Also, racism is not a form of classism; the lower the class, the greater the overt Black-White conflict. As a result, Black-WWC coalitions (as seen with the Southern Democrats of the 1970s) are inherently unsustainable.
"Your solution will be prediction markets."
The problem with the proletariat is that they have a low average IQ. They couldn't care less about ideological support for prediction markets, which are highly UMC. Any R war on experts is going to end in overt defenses of astrology.
The war on college actually has a chance of working, if only because so much of the low IQ do not have a college degree and are relentlessly opposed to free college and to employers barring them from consideration if they don't have a degree. The GOP has a strong incentive to be anti-college as well, as college faculty and administrations are extremely anti-Republican and have a fair deal of institutional clout.
Calling the establishment media the "upper class media" is a brilliant rhetorical move, but little more than that. The correct response would be to create a politically-controlled state media free from the grip of the UMC.
"You would argue that capitalism is the system that lets people succeed regardless of class; even the most uncouth and uneducated person can strike it rich if they work hard and make good deals."
No; capitalism is, in fact, extremely classist. The vast majority of American companies which took a stand on the BLM demonstrations stood in favor of them. This is why an unreconstructed pro-capitalist/business conservatism would inherently perpetuate the iron grip of the UMC on the Overton Window.
My take is this: instead of trying to build coalitions, just support the best policies while projecting an image of common sense and moderation. Fight COVID (as China/Thailand/Vietnam do, not as American liberals don't). Tax new immigrants at a 60% rate to create a UBI for the native-born. Hire more police officers in the inner cities. Enforce bans on affirmative action. Fight against attempts to ban teachers from suspending students. Be the sort of party people would want to be ruled by. And, above all, defend your positions forthrightly. Putin and Charlie Baker don't have high approvals because they're anti-UMC. The myth that elections always have to be 50-50 is just that; a myth.
I'm curious of why you say "the lower the class, the greater the overt Black-White conflict". It might just be that I grew up rural Georgia, where everyone was rednecks and the hunting club my dad went to was roughly 50-50 black/white and that was normal, but I'd say that is much more of a stereotype than a given. I find ATL to be a really pleasant city racially in large part because black/white isn't as tied to the economic lines as it is in other major cities I've lived in, which I think helps to untangle race/class prejudices - if people see a person of ___ race here in ATL, it's a lot harder here to accurately gauge their economic status.
"I'm curious of why you say "the lower the class, the greater the overt Black-White conflict"."
Because that is what the polls and election results say:
https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?fips=40&year=1978&f=0&off=50&elect=0
https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?fips=26&year=2006&f=0&off=51&elect=0
https://civiqs.com/results/black_lives_matter?annotations=true&uncertainty=true&zoomIn=true&race=White&education=Non-College%20Graduate
I feel like given the context of the original piece we're commenting on, citing favorability of an explicitly political movement is very different from citing research into people's actual relations with each other. There's a vast vast political gap at the moment; however, I would bet the white cali folks with BLM signs are far more uncomfortable with black neighbors than people in georgia, at least as far as their lived NIMBY actions would show?
The thing I worry about is that if you turn a bunch of good ideas into right-partisan issues, democrats will feel compelled to take a stand against them.
Excellent.
The D's already made it clear they hate the white working class. Why not make them go all the way?
Because I want good ideas to win, and causing people to oppose them is a bad way of doing that. It seems like you're so consumed with hatred for your ideological enemies that war with them is more important to you than actually enacting good policy.
But isn't some of the problem that NOBODY is fighting for these good ideas now? And it's better to have one side for and one side against and both sides make their case than for nobody to care?
Nobody is fighting for that class of people
D's are more concerned with "organizing" than representing.
The good ideas aren't coming from people like me.
Populism is a shot across the bow. Fix shit or the pitch forks are coming.
The D's have called me deplorable, racist, sexist Nazis. Fuck them.
"But maybe I would hate you less if you didn't suck." Really, Scott? I stopped there, barely one percent in, and will never read you again.
Score one for the deliberate filter.
Seriously though, you're doing yourself a disservice by letting someone's disappointment with (I assume) your tribe prevent you from reading on to get some ideas how they think you could improve that tribe's image to a way they would be less disappointed with it. Even if that disappointment is expressed once in explicit and reductive language like "you suck".
You're missing out. The rest of the essay gets a lot better.
> It could appeal to intellectuals. Right now you're doing so badly among this demographic that you're going to have trouble staffing the next generation of think tanks. That's because you have a lot of anger but no theory. Intellectuals love theories. Your theory will be something something classism, details to be filled in later. Intellectuals love filling in details, especially details about -isms, and you can assure them that they'll be very busy
This paragraph is a work of ironic art, particularly the "theory will be something something classism" bit.
> It could appeal to intellectuals. Right now you're doing so badly among this demographic that you're going to have trouble staffing the next generation of think tanks. That's because you have a lot of anger but no theory. Intellectuals love theories. Your theory will be something something classism, details to be filled in later. Intellectuals love filling in details, especially details about -isms, and you can assure them that they'll be very busy
yeah i mean maybe they could write a blog post expressing vague theories about how the blue tribe just hates everyone with the sterling intellectual charity promoted by grays
But it's cool, Republicans will clearly get right on the *real* discrimination in America against people from Tampa and a racial group whose median income is $26,000 a year higher than the national average. I mean, it's not like nearly all of Tampa voted against Trump by overwhelming margins (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/upshot/2020-election-map.html) or like there's a racial group with a median income $24,000 a year *lower* than the national average, right?
Right?
For what it's worth, pretty much ALL of this is a lot of my own personal political ideology. It's weird...it's like GET OUT OF MY HEAD SCOTT!!! (No not really. You're welcome to come in, but it's certainly at your own risk)
Especially the Collage as Status Signaling thing. Yeah, that's something that Tyler Cowen has talked about, but not quite in that way. There's actually a history of how that sort of signaling has actually built our current system of inequality that almost entirely flies under the radar.
I think this is basically what happened in Israeli politics.
The Israeli upper-educated classes are overwhelmingly Ashkenazi, and they always voted left-wing. The working classes are majority Sephardic/Oriental and voted Likud in large part driven by class/ethnic resentment. (And no one really votes based on what they think of Palestine).
Then a million Russians came, and though they immediately reached the educational attainment of native Ashkenazis they had none of the class signifiers and were gatekept from many institutions of cultural production. And so the Russians also voted right wing, either for Likud or Likud's allies like Sharansky back in the day and Lieberman today. They are responsible in large part for Netanyahu's dominance in the last decade.
In a lot of ways, Russian-Israelis are like the gray tribe of Israel. They're way overrepresented in STEM and things like the Israeli Rationality community. I wonder if anyone in the Republican party will be the American Lieberman, bringing the gray tribe into the coalition with free markets and class warfare.
This seems very explicitly wrong? Historically most people seem to vote based on Palestinian issues (this is less true in the last decade or so but still pretty true, at least in my family). Not that this doesn't correlate with Ashkenazi/Mizrahi, but it's an implicit correlation, not an explicit one (so my pro-peace Mizrahi uncles still vote centre-left, and my pro-conquest ashkenazi family vote for religious parties which caucus with Likud).
The Russian part does seem right though.
Russians (actually, former soviets) are good at reading between the lines, spotting political BS, and also they are wary of promises of harmony, equality, and social justice under the aegis of any leftist government. They know what it is in practice.
Me? Nah, I'm too old and too unskilled in politics. But this is exactly what we need.
SAS, is it a good idea to alienate many of your non-leftist readers and create a polarization here as it happens in the rest of the country? And is it a good read for non-Americans (a substantial number of your followers) who have neither skin in this game nor a dog in this fight?
How does it apply, please enlighten me? Are you referring to the neo-Marxist attack on conservative values? That wasn't clear in the post. Ironically, the French are rejecting post-modernism, considering they gave birth to it. https://quillette.com/2021/02/22/podcast-137-sociologist-nathalie-heinich-on-french-academics-opposition-to-americas-race-based-ideologies/
I thought this was giving Republicans too much credit and was angry as a leftist, but if a non leftist is upset by it... It seems pretty good.
too much credit? I would be curious to see where the center lies in this mindset.
I guess you should just read the "Dear Subhuman Filth" copypasta and call it a day.
If you identify with a political party to the extent this essay alienates you, you have a lot of growing up to do.
I honestly think most social political problems are made up to give people something to do. I don't think LGBTQ+ problems are important anymore, I don't think racism is a legitimate problem in our country aside for a few edge cases. It seems the Right and Left are in a fun merry-go-round of power to police other opinions. But at the same time. Who gives a shit about any of that? Politics should be focused on international relations, tax allocations, optimized economies with regards to human dignity, and manufactoring. Everything else is just to give people that don't understand math something to do.
"upper class" elites are not educated in anything useful, anything that is not STEM is basically creative writing. If somebody really loves some fiction or history they can be called educated in it, but I would never weight their intellect above a person that likes a different story. I notice most of Trumps criticism is because "Most of what he said was offensive, blatantly false, or alienated more people", I don't believe that. And I don't care if it did. Talk is cheap, I wanna see actual proposals.
Humans suck at governments because they politics bloated with worthless garbage, but I guess since tv got boring during lockdowns political theater is the only thing that entertains anymore.
> I don't think LGBTQ+ problems are important anymore
Rand Paul, sitting US Senator, literally today, likening trans care to third-world genital mutilation during hearings for a trans nominee: https://twitter.com/justinbaragona/status/1364972626221875204
There is *plenty* of bigotry out there still.
He's wrong, but I think most of your tribe already thought that. Why get perpetually worked up about somebody you already think is wrong taking an unnuanced opinion? You will never be able to eradicate all bad takes. Nor will getting mad about this lead to better payoffs than probably just having a good time with friends and advocating for trans when it comes up. This is one of those useless distractions I was talking about
Your post didn't say "I think you're going about solving LGBTQ+ problems wrong". It says "I don't think they are important anymore".
I know, personally, one person who has killed herself as a direct result of her family's response to her coming out, and three more who came close.
"about somebody you already think is wrong"
It's not just anybody; it's somebody in a position of power—one of the most powerful policymaking (let alone political) positions in the country.
I agree that among the general population, LGBTQ+ problems don't seem as bad as they used to be. But prejudicial hatred is still overrepresented in positions of power. Their opinions matter.
It sounds like you agree that reducing problems for LGBTQ+ and racial minorities is a good thing, so you should also be appalled that there are people, like Rand Paul, in positions of power actively working to reestablish or exacerbate those problems, especially when it gets in the way of them doing all that other stuff you say politics should be focused on.
Rand Paul is correct. That’s not bigotry, it’s cold hard truth about a clear social fad abusing children. That you feel the need to label it bigotry is a clear problem with you and people who throw isms around all the time.
My one cavil with this is that tariffs + deregulation + "tax cuts for the rich" did, in fact, help the working class
That's a big claim. Not sure there's any data to back that one up?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-wages-of-tax-reform-are-going-to-americas-workers-1524005516
Unfair assertion that journalism is a lax job https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/dec/10/42-journalists-killed-over-their-work-in-2020
Local journalism suffering isn't a class thing. It's the world choosing coca cola over yak butter tea.
agree. my sole point is that it isn't a twee job.
This article is about journalists in Mexico, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Iraq and Nigeria.
Everyone, take a drink.
No, please. I can still hear their drunken screams.
Hey, communist jokes aren't funny unless everyone gets them.
<sidenote, You read my comment! Thx. Am big fan. Swoon> But back to the issue - yeah, I concede nearly all overseas...but US journalists do get in harms way, get threatened a ton, run around (pre Covid), sued out of existence by billionaires, etc. I admit bias but journalism seems different, less dainty than academia, government and consulting roles...its own circle of pain.
Maybe there's a difference between working-journalists and commentary-journalists? I'm not connected to that world, but do hard-hitting investigative journalists talk trash about journalists that (they might say) write freshman English essays and call it journalism?
Wonderful article. I would love to vote for a party like this. I hope we can see a future like this.
> Yeah, yeah, "class" sounds Marxist, class warfare and all that, you're supposed to be against that kind of thing, right? [...] Trump didn't win on a platform of capitalism and liberty and whatever. He won on a platform of being anti-establishment.
I sometimes think Republicans are still fighting the 1st Cold War, the one against Russia than America won 30 years ago.
But now America is fighting the 2nd Cold War, against an enemy that calls itself "Communist" but actually represents the red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalism that Marx was railing against.
Not at all. leftists are very modern and real. They are as vicious as their October 1917 counterparts and as determined to "raze the present world of violence down to the foundations, and then build our new world. He who was nothing will become everything!" Nothing changed, and it would be a mistake to fault republicans for trying to save the country from the Neo-Marxist menace.
I suspect you are not a troll and honestly believe in what you've written. Let's put to test. Name a single place on this planet where Marxism was "correct" and helped people to live peacefully and prosper. Clearly not in Germany where it was born. Not in Russia where it murdered millions. Not in Cuba or Kampuchea. In Venezuela, perhaps? No, not there either...
never lived in Cuba or in any socialist country, have you? I suspect never even visited. Ignorance is bliss.
I'm going to run with Scott's idea in this column!
Marxism is a bourgeoisie fantasy world, reserved only for the elite New Yorkers and the people they've fooled, a methamphetamine for the masses that the elites feed the proles.
(Hey this is fun!)
If it's so incredibly good, why Russians and all the others switched to the market economy?
Here's an aphorism for you from Albert Einstein, no less: “In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.”
You're off the money a bit with Russia - it had a tiny number of proletarians (taken as either industrial workers or people paid in wages) compared to any other country in Europe. Same with Vietnam, Cuba, China, South Yemen etc.
It's generally taken over where there's a crappy regime that's at least partly in hock to foreigners.
That's how it works:
Marxists (or similar) select a "victimized" group whose interests they claim to fight for. For Bolsheviks, it was Russian proletariat; for nazis - WWI veterans and german working-class; for Jacobins - sans-culottes; for Castro and Co - campesinos, etc. That gives them a 'moral right' to take control. Then, after consolidating consolidated the power and destroying the opponents, they dispense with pleasantries and exploit the very same group whose rights they were supposedly fought for.
Leftists in the US have chosen POC, not that they really cared for minorities. In fact, the 'god-awful Trump' did more for black unemployment than the previous administration. But that's the game, and one must be a fool to take it at face value.
Please don't peddle your elitist nonsense here. Yes, they were able to manipulate a few poorer countries into their games, but we aren't all rubes.
The problem is that Republicans leverage the undoubted atrocities of Marxism to attack ideology and policies that resemble the the social democratic parties of the developed Western world outside the US, even though those parties have a perfectly decent, even, relative to most times and places exemplary, record on civil liberties and not-murder (whatever you think of their economic views). This trick only works because the US is an outlier in not having the more left-wing of its two largest parties having been explicitly "socialist" at some point. (The German SDP even began as a explicitly Marx-influenced party, and remained so until the 1960s, and their only famous violence-supporting actions in that time were not opposing WW1 and using right-wing militias to kill left-wing revolutionaries.)
So the proposal is another dog whistle to use, in order that it will be easier to continue doing the things that divide us (that you would otherwise be against). But this allows you to frame the platform as Gray tribe approved (instead of more grievance focused?). This sounds like some fantasy to give Gray tribe a political party. It is much more conflict theory than most of what appears here.
I figure you said it in large part because your US readership is majority Democrat, but opening with "I hate you, Republicans" is sufficiently hostile that my politics-and-hatred related antibodies started fizzing to warn me the air was bad. I think there's a much more toned down version of that establishing common knowledge for the reader that you're in opposing tribes that still communicates the thing that paragraph is meant to communicate.
Tbf, he said "I hate you and you hate me." (unless he edited it after your comment?)
I feel like this post came from a place of "I wish I wasn't right." Would I be surprised if Scott's advice actually took shape in the next couple years? No actually he seems spot on. Do I think Scott would be proud of himself for calling it/helping? Probably not. He hates identity politics and that's what this post is advocating. But, the alternative is Democrat supremacy, which probably isn't better than two strong competing parties.
So I thought the opening line was a humorous set up for his contempt for the current state of things.
But what if, like, Democrat supremacy, but without the woke?
I think that bit was a little tongue in cheek. It was a pithy way to dispense with the caveats, and not meant to suggest actual hatred. I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am.
Substack seems to have given you more freedom and peace of mind. You spent years and years at SSC working hard to write a single full clause that looks awful out of context (so of course the Times sliced and diced into tiny pieces instead). But now you're free to say "the Republicans might as well say X", knowing that this gives the sneerers the subquote of you saying "X".
Independent of the content of the piece, it's nice to see that fledgeling confidence.
I wrote this before I joined Substack and am only getting around to posting it now (I added a few recent things to make it seem relevant).
In general I think people's attempts to psychoanalyze my "confidence" or whatever have been wrong.
My Inner Marxist would like to log one complaint, which is that as long as one’s “class” strictly means cultural differences between Arkansas truckers and New York lawyers, and remains divorced from one’s relationship to capital, everyone who is currently being exploited and broken on the wheel of life and everyone who is making out like a bandit will stay there, even if the political currents above them all shift around wildly.
What percentage of the population in a typical high income/upper middle income capitalist country is the "working class"?
What would you say has been the impact of post-WW2 decolonization on the laborers of the first world?
By "more aggressive imperialism" do you mean along the lines of contemporary "neo-colonialism" or a return to something like 19th century imperialism?
Colonial imperialism is an upper-class concept, of course.
Marxism's colonial/imperialist beliefs focus on capital only to fool the rubes so they can further their empires. It's really about cultural differences.
It's fine to be hypocritical in politics, but I'll note that praising Musk and trashing Jack would require either hypocrisy or some explanation.
Maybe the distinction is about Social Media Being Worse Than Physical Objects! Sure! But then remember that the middle-aged working-class Republican voters are all on Facebook sharing Jesus American Flag Veteran Beer Gun memes. I'm not even being pejorative here; I have extended family members like this, and I acknowledge them as they are.
I think the distinction is more about what sells better to the republican’s potential demographic. Scott isn’t advocating for the correctness of the positions, but how they work rhetorically in the context of American class conflicts.
Prediction markets aren't unbiasable. It seems like if they are being used for major policy decisions, they should be really easy to bias.
You want to implement a shiny new regulation on industry X, but industry X claims that this will totally cripple their ability to do business and lead to major problems. So you create a market for conditional predictions about what will happen if the regulation is put in place. Industry X spends millions of dollars of lobbying money on the prediction that your regulation will crash the national economy. A few experts realize this is bullshit and bet against them, but don't have the same capital to invest, and so the prediction market is still showing huge odds that your regulation will ruin everything. So you don't pass your regulation and the lobbying groups don't even need to pay up on their conditional bets.
"A few experts realize this is bullshit and bet against them, but don't have the same capital to invest"
It isn't the experts who are betting against them, it's the speculators who hire the experts. The amount of capital available to make bets with large positive expected value is very large.
How much money will the speculators be willing to tie up in conditional bets that will probably end up being nullified anyway and to what degree can they trust experts that are being hired in this kind of ad hoc manner?
Vitalik Buterkin recently discussed the problem of money being locked up in prediction markets for the 2020 election. He notes that this is a bigger issue for more immature markets. As the market matures, options get developed to ease trading as participants desire. And speculators will be more willing to trust experts with a track record of predictive success.
Well for one, options also make it easier for the companies in industry X to leverage their bets. And if you need the input of experts in this particular domain, it's not clear that these experts are going to have a lot of track record to go by unless there are relatively frequent attempts to regulate industry X.
If they make it easier for EVERYONE to bet, the advantage goes to the most likely actual outcome of the bet.
You are correct that initial track records won't be as good as later ones. The ideal system is one that improves over time (even if it might do so asymptotically).
If options make it easier both for the people trying to make money by placing correct bets and for people trying to bias the system by making incorrect bets, it's not clear which side this benefits more.
The system only improves asymptotically if it is constantly having large bets about every conceivable topic. I'm not sure that this is the right limit to consider.
Alternatively, what if the bet is that prices for X will go up by whatever amount if the regulation is passed. If industry X invests heavily in this, they will be incentivized to raise prices if the regulation passes, making speculators wary of betting against them.
Alternatively, what if industry X is wall street? Who's going to take the other side of those bets?
Alternatively, what if they are just tweaking the true odds by 10 or 20 percent? Speculators might still on average take bets against them, but perhaps not enough to swing things.
How are prices being set? By a unitary actor that can stand in for "industry" or many competing firms? Even if an individual firm had bet one way, individually setting a higher price still leaves it vulnerable to be undercut by all the firms that can offer a lower price.
Sure. The companies in industry X will face a bit of a coordination problem here, but in industries dominated by a small number of major companies, these kinds of problems are generally not insurmountable.
But I agree that in industries dominated by many smaller firms without any kind of organizing trade group, this might make it difficult for the industry to act in a unified manner.
One the one hand, your example might not be the best mechanism design. I imagine there might be less gameable ways to use prediction markets for policy.
On the other hand, financial markets have similar issues with being gameable, and yet generally (albeit not always!) function okay. For example, someone with a digital call option on a stock could try buying stock to make the option in-the-money. In practice, (1) manipulation is illegal, and blatant attempts do get caught (2) there's enough liquidity in most stocks that manipulation is very expensive. I imagine both these mitigating factors could be applied to prediction markets as well.
There may well be less gameable ways to use prediction markets. But:
1) One could imagine that industries might have hundreds of millions of dollars of incentive to manipulate a market that was being used to help decide an important policy decision, and incentive that as far as I can tell doesn't really exist for stocks.
2) With a conditional prediction market, you only have to pay for your manipulation if the condition becomes true and if whether or not the condition becomes true depends on the outcome of the prediction market, if you manipulate the market enough, you don't have to pay for it.
3) If the people trying to manipulate the market also have some control over whether the prediction becomes true (e.g. it's a prediction that if regulation X passes, then the price of X will double within the next year), then they might even make money off of failing to prevent the condition from coming true.
Those are all fair points, but I think the main counterpoint is simply "don't do that". I think people are aware of limitations of prediction markets, and sometimes there are reasonable solutions, and sometimes not. If there's a policy decision that could potentially cost an industry billions, and you want to entirely base the decision on prediction markets, you better have billions in liquidity to absorb the hedges or outright manipulation that will come. Note that this problem isn't unique to prediction markets: traditional forms of corruption (e.g. bribing regulators) are a problem, too, when stakes are high.
3) This is basically the insider trading question. On the one hand, allowing insiders to trade allows their information to enter the market price, which is good. On the other hand, it makes non-insiders more reluctant to trade, so reduces liquidity, which is bad. There's a lot of room for debate whether to allow insiders to trade, or possibly trade with restrictions (e.g. requirement to disclose they're an insider). The good news is there's already regulatory experience with this sort of thing, so it should be a solvable problem: commodities are often traded by their producers who are insiders, stocks have a legal framework for when insiders are allowed to make trades, insurance has requirements about "insurable interest" to be sure people aren't placing bets against social interests (e.g. buying life insurance on someone else and then hiring an assassin).
Fair enough. I agree that using prediction markets could be a useful tool for aiding policy decisions, especially if these issues are well thought out. My original objection was to Scott's fairly strong claim that prediction markets are unbiasable, which seems wrong given how there is a pretty direct way that one can use money to bias them.
This Republican party sounds terrifyingly effective, except for the stuff about prediction markets which the average republican voter absolutely will not understand. Most of these ideas would be pretty bad, but honestly the part about colleges sounds genuinely amazing and I would be tempted to vote Republican if they emphasized it enough.
Agree with pretty much everything here, everyone (both left and right) would be better off if both parties' platform is on competing on dismantling the class system. The fake "experts" making irresponsible decisions risking thousands of human lives deserve a special place in hell (the opposite holds for actual experts).
But as a reminder to myself, the GOP in its current state is an abomination and is not even close to being a viable option. Spewing provably false statements, parading charlatans and Machiavellian politicians, nothing is off limits. As someone that tries extremely hard to stay centered, I always need to be reminded that the existence of 2 options does not mean equal pros and equal cons for both (although for whatever reason I seem to have a natural bias of trying to argue for both sides equally). In my own head, from a utilitarian perspective, the GOP is at a 15% pro (at most). v. 85% dems.
Scott, you can add a point that minimum wage is a high-class conceit, people who are *uncomfortable* with other people not being paid "enough" but unwilling to just have their taxes raised to give them money.
I think many of the things in this post are on the border between "true" and "much more complicated than that but framed in a way that Republicans will appreciate", in a way I sort of feel bad about. But I don't think any of them were completely false, and this one does seem that way - I think almost nobody has considered raising taxes for a UBI, and upper-class people are okay with having their taxes raised for welfare.
On free trade and immigration, rather then embracing protectionism wholesale, the republican program should be: Protectionism for the working class, foreign competition for the upper class. The latter could mean for example making it easier for foreign doctors, dentists and lawyers to practice in the US. Dean Baker has been banging this drum: https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/inequality-as-policy-selective-trade-protectionism-favors-higher-earners
Anti-credentialism will never survive as part of the Republican party platform; they get too much money from for-profit colleges. That was a critical element of Betsy DeVos's platform as part of the Department of Education. Look up the Promoting Real Opportunity, Success, and Prosperity through Education Reform (PROSPER) Act, which was passed by the House in 2018, with support from Trump and DeVos. There's a shocking amount of money to be made from leeching off the GI Bill money of veterans without college degrees.
Wait, are for profit colleges big enough in the US to have enough money to splash around to be a significant lobbying force relative other industries?
Yes. Opensecrets lists several million dollars from a number of for-profit colleges: https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=H5300
It's worth noting that this is only above-board money; contributions from individual investors in for-profit colleges to SuperPACs isn't listed, and my understanding is that it's substantially larger than the above-board money.
The question was whether they were a significant lobbying force relative to other industries. The page you linked to shows a total of about two million dollars from all the for-profit schools combined. Looking at the gas and oil industry, a single firm is giving more than fourteen million, the whole industry something like fifty million.
Compare it to the non-profit colleges and universities. The University of California alone is twenty-four million dollars, twelve times the whole for-profit college figure. The total for the non-profit college and universities is about eighty million, forty times the figure for the for-profit sector.
a) It's 6.7 million including lobbying totals - it's further down the page. So it's more like 5-10% of total lobbying expenditures on education, which is more than proportionate to the % of students in for-profit colleges compared to total enrollment.
b) That puts them on roughly the same level as the Waste Management industry (https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=E10) or the Savings & Loan industry (https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=F04). I'm not claiming they're on par with the defense industry, but it's still a lobby of meaningful size.
c) A lot of private equity firms invest in for-profit colleges, so not all of the money is coming directly from the companies themselves.
The figure for total contributions from education is $320 million (https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=W04++). So if your figure is correct — I'm not sure I understand the categories they are using — the for-profit figure is about 2% of the total.
Those are 2020 numbers, though, and 2020 is an obvious outlier year in campaign contributions for not-for-profit education.
"20% of Americans go to religious services weekly - how many of those work for the New York Times?"
Offhand, I can think of Douthat, Bruenig, and possibly Brooks. Douthat in particular is notable for being an actual token conservative, contra Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin.
Rubin was a conservative hack... Then she changed to being a Democratic hack. But she was always a hack.
Yeah, Bruenig and Douthat are *super* devout, as far as I can tell. Bruenig has a masters in theology!
This is so unconvincing and full of epicycles, that I really wonder if it's motivated reasoning from Scott. It ignores tons of research on what politically motivates the "white working class." One quote will do, in his description of the "upper class". "They all have exactly the same political and aesthetic opinions on everything, and think the noblest and most important task imaginable is to gatekeep information in ways that force everyone else to share those opinions too." I can't even tell if this is supposed to be his advice to Republicans on how to posture themselves, serious, or a joke. All have the same opinions? Has he heard of this interesting website called "Twitter", where lefties regularly shred each other over differences in opinions. Or look how Jacobin treats liberals. Or how Ezra Klein treats Jacobin! It's sad, but it looks like Scott is perfoming the Glenn Greenwals/Matt Taibbi triple somersault contortion into "Those who have different opinions from mine are INSANE, I tell you!" I hope not, but that's what it looks like to me.
He is telling Republicans what they should say, not what he believes.
I think you're just unfamiliar with how Scott approaches a certain subgenre of writing. See #7 in "Nonfiction Writing Advice" (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/20/writing-advice/), "Figure out who you’re trying to convince, then use the right tribal signals". To quote:
"Your role model in this (and in nothing else) should be Donald Trump. Think about it. He supports Planned Parenthood, doesn’t want to cut entitlement programs, condemns Dubya and the Iraq war, supports affirmative action, supports medical marijuana, etc. If somebody were to tell you last year that a man with those policy positions would not only be leading the Republican primary, but leading even among the most conservative voters, you’d think they were crazy. The rest of the country has been trying to convince conservative Republicans to be more comfortable with those positions for decades, and we’ve failed miserably. Now Trump just waltzes in and everyone is like “Yeah, okay, sure”?
The secret of Trump’s success is that most conservative Republicans don’t really care about medical marijuana (or whatever) for its own sake. They care because opposing medical marijuana symbolizes membership in their tribe, they feel like their tribe is persecuted, they have a fierce loyalty to their tribe, and darned if they’re going to support somebody who doesn’t use the right shibboleths.
Trump throws them a bone. He says things like “illegal immigrants are rapists” that no moderate or liberal would ever say, things that would horrify them. He uses all the affectations of being working class. He may not quite prove he’s “one of us”, but he very effectively proves he’s not Just A Typical Outgroup Member. When Trump says “Legalize medical marijuana”, they don’t hear “I’m yet another RINO liberal pansy who hates Christian values and wants everybody to become reefer-smoking hippies”. So they only hear something boring about the regulations around pain relief medication – and who cares about those?
Trump’s Law is that if you want to convince people notorious for being unconvinceable, half the battle is using the right tribal signals to sound like you’re one of them.
For example, when I’m trying to convince conservatives, I veer my signaling way to the right. I started my defense of trigger warnings with “I complain a lot about the social justice movement”. Then I cited Jezebel and various Ethnic Studies professors being against trigger warnings. Then I tried to argue that trigger warnings actually go together well with strong versions of freedom of speech. At this point I haven’t even started arguing in favor of trigger warnings, I’ve just set up an unexpected terrain in which trigger warnings can be seen as a conservative thing supported by people who like free speech and don’t like social justice, and opposition to trigger warnings can be seen as the sort of very liberal thing that people like Jezebel and Ethnic Studies professors support. The important thing isn’t that I convince anyone that trigger warnings are really on the right – that’s a tall order – but that the rightists reading my argument feel like I’m working with them rather than against them. I’m not just another leftist saying “Support trigger warnings because it’s the leftist thing and you should be leftist and everyone on the right is terrible!”
My reward was seeing a bunch of hard-core anti-social-justice types trip over themselves in horror at actually being kind of convinced, which was pretty funny.
On the other hand, when I’m trying to convince feminists of something, I start with a trigger warning – partly because I genuinely believe it’s a good idea and those posts can be triggering, but also partly because starting with a trigger warning is a tribal signal that people on the right rarely use. It means that either I’m on their side, or I’m being unusually respectful to it. In this it’s a lot like Trump saying illegal immigrants are rapists – something the outgroup would never, ever do.
(And that’s not just my theory – I’ve gotten lots of angry comments about the trigger warnings from people further right than me, saying that using them makes me an idiot or a pushover or a cuck or something. I am always happy to get these comments, because it means the signaling value of using trigger warnings remains intact.)
Crossing tribal signaling boundaries is by far the most important persuasive technique I know, besides which none of the others even deserve to be called persuasive techniques at all. But to make it work, you have to actually understand the signals, and you have to have at least an ounce of honest sympathy for the other side. You can’t just be like “HELLO THERE, FELLOW LIBERALS! LET’S CREATE INTRUSIVE BIG GOVERNMENT AGENCIES TOGETHER! BUT BEFORE WE DO, I HAVE SOMETHING I WANT TO TELL YOU ABOUT THE SECOND AMENDMENT…”
Which I guess means that being able to consider both sides of an issue sort of gives you superpowers. That’s pretty encouraging."
I read it differently. I think this is mostly or entirely stuff Scott believes, with a juvenile mask of "I'm just giving advice." You did read the reply where he said, "I think many of the things in this post are on the border between "true" and "much more complicated than that but framed in a way that Republicans will appreciate", in a way I sort of feel bad about. But I don't think any of them were completely false..."
So the 1983 book on class completely ignored race, and that is also the big flaw here. Class is cultural, meaning race ultimately takes center stage, unfortunately.
One theme of the previous post was how each gradation of class fights like hell to differentiate themselves from the class immediately below them. Therein lies the problem with an attempt to form a political coalition of various lower classes. The Democratic coalition is often described as a high-low coalition: upper middle class + lower class. That coalition works because they both ally with their enemies' enemy, the white working class.
Flipping this script is specious because to get the necessary numbers the GOP would really need the white, black and Hispanic working classes. That won't happen because they are different classes in too close competition with each other.
I do admire the idealism of the post, however. Wish I weren't so cynical.
The GOP should start using the work "class" and mean "working class". Now more or less everything they stand for and have done is bad for the working class. So what would the point be?
Reducing social welfare programs, reducing healthcare programs, gutting environmental regulations resulting in more pollution where the working class lives and works etc.
Why they vote for the GOP? Stupidity?
Astonishing to see something which pretends to address "class" without addressing economic inequities, unless I missed something. Batsh!t crazy, along with the claim that "they’re understandably afraid experts will smuggle pro-Democrat bias into their judgments." It reads like a college sophomore's parody of Scott's positions, only more hastily written.
The issue is a vast swathe of the WWC does not want "economic inequities" addressed, and a vast swathe of the CW do.
You missed something.
Quite possibly. What, specifically, did I miss?
The previous post! (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-fussell-on-class) Wherein which Scott explicates a system of "classes" that is distinct from economic concerns and is more of a tribe/cultural thing.
Thanks! After a very quick skim, Scott's approach still seems like an effort to define economic class out of existence, by ignoring it. Sort of like a kid hiding under the blanket.
I think this is a problem of terminology. Scott wants to talk about the thing Fussell calls "class", which doesn't realy have a better name for itself and is *distinct from* economic class. This doesn't have to mean ignoring economic classes, and the idea that one way of looking at the world would be incompatible with the other wouldn't even occur to anyone if we had two different words for these things.
I thought these were some great ideas. I did however feel this "I hate the Republican Party" was disingenuous - as if Scotts trying to hide his implicit support for the Republicans so he doesn't get attacked by the NYT again. He seems to hate the Democrats' messaging more, but can't bring himself to actually admit it.
He hates the messaging and some of the rhetorical tactics of the Democrats, but he disagrees with far more actual Republican policies.
LGBT association with elitism is pretty arbitrary. The phenomenon of "rightspeak and wrongspeak" about black issues that's entirely dissociated from productive or unproductive behavior towards actual black people has corollaries in LGBT issues; Gender studies, Queer Theory and so forth are sinecure factories that produce people who speak a very specific, largely unfalsifiable and meaningless language about LGBT people which exists primarily for signalling purposes. Actual LGBT people are in the same position in respect to the Republican party today that black people were in the time Malcolm X coined his parable of the Fox and the Wolf: We know Republicans are ill intentioned, but they're boundedly and predictably ill-intentioned, whereas we don't know anything concrete about liberals except that they find talking over real LGBT people convenient.
A suggested alternative framing: Scott's old post HOW THE WEST WAS WON (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won/). This posits a conflict between what Scott calls universal civilization (usually called western civilization, but Scott argues that those were the local cultures that industrialized civilization ate) and local cultures. Scott is undecided on whether one should cheer on the assimilation or the local resistance, asking only for consistency. I would suggest the blue tribe is the side of the universal civilization, and the red one is a local culture being eaten.
Since the universal civilization is described as basically "the best of everything", people may be resistant to associating that with the blue tribe. But consider:
• Scott gives as a paradigmatic example (along with coca cola & so-called "western" medicine) the new, equalized gender norms. The blue tribe is on the side of those, the red on the side of more conservative ones. (These days, I would add LGBT norms to that list.)
• Scott talks about how the universal civilization does better with more immigrants, while the local cultures want to resist them. This is one of the current main points of the culture war.
• Most of the "what works best" things come from experts — universal (i.e. effective) medicine from scientists. Scott has above ascribed them to the democratic (blue) tribe.
• For that matter, Scott gives as one example of a local civilization the Brexiters, for which the red tribe here is a ready parallel.
Why then do conservatives claim to be fighting for western civ? Because the term has two (at this point almost opposite) meanings. On the one hand it means the universal civilization: science, medicine, coca-cola, equal gender norms. On the other hand, it means the previous civilization which has been largely eaten by that—Scott mentions copying Latin manuscripts, which is certainly where someone like Rod Dreher seems to have his comfort zone. What the traditionalists want to go back to is the Christian church and the local culture that industrialism has devoured. (Capitalism is and always has been a revolutionary force & it was always weird for conservatives to embrace it.)
Note this gives both sides a way forward, too. The Republicans can run as a colonized civilization, and say they want the right to their traditional heritage (close to what they're saying anyway). The Democrats, on the other hand, can say that what makes unviversal civilization what it is is that it works & is good, and that we ought to want universal medicine & coca cola is tasty. This captures the cultural grievances which seem to be really the heart of Trumpism, on the one hand, and the desire for social & policy improvement that Democrats seem to love.
This is a bit that I also felt was missing.
Do you really hate the Republican Party, Scott? I can't speak for all Republicans, but I don't think we hate you.
Scott might be exaggerating, but I can't imagine the Party is all that kindly disposed towards Bay-Area polyamorists. Not that this bothers him overmuch, as he's willing to engage anyone who isn't aligned with the cultural hegemon.
it is an oversimplification, a caricature perhaps, of a party with 35 mln members and at least as many non-members supporters. I suspect there are a few polyamorists among them.
Speaking as one...I like Scott. Plenty of Republicans just want to live and let live. Polyamory isn't for me, but who am I to tell a man what to do with his own life?
A libertarian in me says do what you want, it's no one's business. The conservative in me adds, but spare children and the innocent from the excesses of unhinged libertines. The problem with 'isms' (that includes polyamorism), in my opinion, is losing the boundaries of common sense and running away with "the idea."
The Party is not the people.
Judging at least by commenters on SSC, DSL, and here, quite a lot of Republicans like and admire Scott. My impression is that such hostility as he has gotten has come mostly from the left — NYT not NR.
Readers of SSC are selected for liking Scott.
But people who could write nasty articles about it are not.
Scott is socially adjacent to a lot of people on the left, so they notice and criticize him. The typical Rush Limbaugh fan hasn't noticed him yet.
The typical Democrat also hasn't noticed him, since he appeals mainly to the far right tail of the bell curve.
As a typical Rush Limbaugh fan, you'd be surprised at the variety of people in this region of the Internet who Rush would occasionally read or reference on air in his "The Little Tech Bloggers" segments.
Though your point stands regardless.
I can't speak to the typical Rush Limbaugh fan, but National Review covered the NYT vs SSC story and had a favorable mention of the blog a couple of years ago. I expect that many of the sort of people who write for right wing media, NR or Fox, read people like Bryan Caplan, Robin Hanson, or Tyler Cowen. Some of them may even read me. So they are likely to have been exposed to SSC if only at second hand.
Isn't that more relevant than "socially adjacent"?
That's because Republicans won't dislike someone whose ideas and opinions differ from theirs. Animosity and intolerance stem from the other party, the one that claims a monopoly on inclusion and compassion.
Everyone says that about their own side and the other side. I don't expect this is entirely equal between the two sides by any means (though I don't know which is less tolerant and which is more) but it would be very surprising if, during a period of bitter political conflict, all the animosity and intolerance is on one side.
Posted this on Facebook channeling a similar vibe:
A theory: social classes don't like their immediate neighbors. At least for the classes in the middle.
The upper-middle class doesn't like the rich, whom they perceive as plutocrats who rig the system. They also don't like the lower-middle class, whom they see as ignorant and bigoted. But they speak fondly of the poor, whom they regard as having been cheated by an unfair system.
The lower-middle class, meanwhile, disdains the upper-middle class for their perceived elitism and entitlement. And in turn they don't like the poor, whom they consider lazy freeloaders who don't want to work. However, they have no problem with the very rich, whom they feel have earned their wealth.
I don't know what the very rich or the very poor think.
Scott wrote this wxact thing a few years ago
Oh really? I'm a fledgling student in the field of Scott studies. Is there a link anywhere?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/
This is probably the most dangerous thing you have written. Congratulations!
Nature abhors a vacuum, and you have written this at *precisely* the right time to slide into the post-Trumpian hole, when the Republicans are looking for reference points but too hung over by the last four years to do anything of this sort. By sheer virtue of the following dynamic: "Well, what else are we going to do? Guess we'll do this. Also, this Scott guy can write! And he nailed what I felt but the leftist control over and turning to garbage of language didn't give me the categories to say! Go Scott!", you may become the next nucleation point of one side of the new alignment, you crafty old dog.
And honestly, this is a far better articulation and condensation/clarification/crystallisation of the positive side of Republican value than they have been able to come up with.
And you're a poster-case for a particular front in the current Kulturkampf, writing this immediately after showing bravely that 'You Shall Not Be Cancelled!', when public attention on you is still high, and you range freely, Lord of the (Substack) Leaderboard! Perfectly positioned to *actually* precipitate a new dynamic! This is a nuclear Tesuji grade move, dude; the strategic genius and chutzpah of this is astounding.
Bravo, maestro, bravo!
Three cheers for the new alignment: Long reign Scott! Long Reign Scott!!! LONG REIGN SCOTT!!!!!
Heh, if all this happens, and nothing goes horribly wrong in the realignment, and they magically pivot to being pro-immigration as part of it, I suppose i'll have to vote Republican!
But I'm pessimistic about them adopting prediction markets into their platforms, and that really seems essential. Because honestly, right now the Democratic coalition really does seem to be better at finding out important true things.
Like, okay, just look as masks. Mask-wearing started off being the "upper class" vaguely opposed for incoherent reasons; it was only supported by certain nerds. But belief in it was sufficiently justified — and it wasn't sufficiently opposed to Democratic biases — that "masks work" became common knowledge among them... at which point the Republican coalition insisted on opposing it, because they are defined by nothing other than opposition to the Democratic coalition. Same thing happened with a bunch of other true facts about pandemic — first it's common knowledge among y'all, then it's common knowledge among the blues, then it's opposed by the reds.
Since the "upper-class" "consensus institutions" do a mediocre-to-good job of figuring out what's true, if your pitch is for the red coalition to ramp up their identity being "opposition to blue" — then without prediction markets they'll continue being worse than nothing. Hopefully they become the party of legalizing accurate forecasts but I'm not holding my breath. (And in the meantime I guess I'll just keep shilling for prediction markets on our side.)
Plus, like I said, immigration is also a crux for me. The anti-immigration status quo is bad, the Republicans want to make it much worse. If warfare against "the upper class" includes warfare against the poorest people in the world, against the most disconnected people in our society... then fixing rampant credentialism isn't enough to sway me.
* started off being *something*
Wish substack had a comment editing feature...
Anyway three more thoughts/clarifications:
1. I forgot to mention free trade. My understanding is that global trade is pretty free at the moment, so I guess we have some wiggle room, but if Republican policies were sufficiently anti–free trade that too would make it harder for me to flip.
2. What do I mean by "something going horribly wrong in the realignment"? Well, look, I've been pretty consistent; from June 16th 2015 to Jan 20th 2021 my three big complaints against Trump in no particular order have been that he (1) is dumb, with very loose ties to objective reality; (2) is bigoted, especially against immigrants; and (3) has no commitment whatsoever to foundational liberal-democratic ideas (eg free speech, the idea of loyal opposition, the idea that elections are legitimate even when you lose, free press). Your strategy aims to fix #1, and as already discussed if you add in a flip-flop on immigration it fixes #2. But then there's #3; while your pitch doesn't include anything of the sort, I'm worried that if you try to keep the aesthetics/class rage of Trumpism, that will include copying over the rage against the parts of the system that we really need — and maybe executed more coherently than Trump has...
3. The reason I've been putting "upper-class" in quotes is that I'm not fully on-board with that label for this. I've always thought of class as economic class, and when someone tells me they're using a word or phrase in a very different way than I'm used to, I get worried about motte-and-baileys. E.g., "a jobs program for the upper class" sounds less bad if "upper class" includes plenty of low-mid-income people. (Not *good*, both because jobs programs are bad ways to do redistribution and because "lower class" low-mid-income people deserve redistribution too, but still.) Still, there's definitely some truth to this framing; all these deep-blue "consensus institutions" are indeed pretty upper-class.
I'll say: whenever I imagined a future where I could vote Republican, it always involved the party's powers explicit rejecting everything Trumpian. It didn't occur to me to wonder if you could keep the parts of Trumpism that appeal to people while taking away the parts that I think of as being its distinguishing features. It's more plausible than I would have thought! (Again, though — I'm not convinced Trump's appeal is just rage against the "upper-class"; there really does seem to be a lot of antipathy towards foreigners too.)
Class has always meant economically-associated culture. There's a reason there are terms like "genteel poverty" and "nouveau riche"; they describe people whose economic status doesn't align with their class status.
The man in a well-fitted suit is probably well-off economically, but so is the guy driving an F350 that clearly isn't actually a working vehicle. Yet those are clearly two different classes; one is someone from the working class but has more money, the other is an actual upper class person.
There was something said about Trump during the 2016 campaign that I can't trace the original quote from, but it I think makes the point quite well: "he's a poor man's idea of what a rich man is like". There's the trophy wives, there's the gilded rooms, the gold toilet, the golf courses, the fast food habit, the real furs and fur rugs.
Perhaps my usage has always been incorrect until Scott set me straight. (I don't know anything about cars, but if an F350 is something you need a middle income to afford, and the person who owns it affords it, I would have just said that person is middle-class, by definition.)
But if so, my vague impression is that lots of people are making the same mistake as me?
---
Yeah, I remember the whole "a poor man's idea of what a rich man is like" slogan; I was always a bit uncomfortable with that and I'm grateful to Scott for making the bigger picture of Democratic "classism" clear to me.
Most rigorous definitions of "middle class" include a social as well as economic component. So there is no "by definition, someone who can afford X but not Y is middle class", even if common usage often does simplify it to just an income level.
Fussell's point, and Scott's (and many others including myself) is that the "it's just income" simplification is wrong and misleading. The successful plumber who worked his way up to running a small business with a dozen employees and now takes home $200k/year, is working-class. The barista with an MA in English Literature, living in her parents' basement on $20K/year while she looks in vain for a better job, is middle class.
You can make lots of interesting observations and predictions on this basis, which will be correct more often than not. The plumber probably owns a gun and voted for Donald Trump. The barista probably voted for Hillary and Biden, and in part because they promised stricter gun control. The barista will insist that her kids, if she gets around to having any, must go to college.
The plumber almost certainly has kids, and he's OK with their going into a trade or enlisting in the military. The poor barista, if she goes to the doctor complaining of joint pain, will get a vicodin prescription. The prosperous plumber will be thrown out as a pill-seeking junkie. The observations and predictions you can make on the basis of income alone, are mostly boring stuff like what sort of consumer goods they can afford to buy.
And even then, you'll learn more if you pay attention to what consumer goods they *choose* to buy. The person in the F-350, whether it be shiny and new or old and rusty, probably owns a gun and voted for Trump and may have a son in the military. The one in the Subaru, shiny and new or old and rusty, see above. The price tag on the vehicle is mostly a red herring.
What about vaccine funding? What about the principle that challenge trials should be illegal, covid tests should be illegal, raising the price on masks should be illegal, and distributing vaccines should be illegal unless the FDA or other authority specifically makes an exception?
The part you are missing is that the Democrat idea of a state staffed by experts where everything is illegal until approved is much worse than the Republican idea where you are free to do as you please.
Letting the experts decide is high status, defensible, obvious, and also wrong compared to a bottom up approach with limited government and a free market.
That's fair, I wish the Democratic supported those things. The pipeline from truth to Democratic common knowledge is not just too slow, but too clogged.
And yet even the Republicans, defined by opposition to Democrats, haven't come out in support of those things! They're too out there, too opposed to the status quo in an atypical direction, too outside the Overton window. The mistakes you listed were made under the Trump administration; if he or his people knew enough or cared enough, they could have fixed it. The Republicans support for free-market capitalism is at this point almost entirely rhetorical. They just don't care about it anymore, the way you and I do.
So, some true facts are too *out there* for anyone to support. Some true facts eventually filter their way to the Democratic common knowledge (at which point they are opposed by the Republicans). So until the Republicans set up a pipeline from truth to their established wisdom — even a broken pipeline, it doesn't have to be that good to compete with the Democrats' — I won't be able to support them. (Unless the Democratic pipeline gets completely severed too, I suppose.)
How would we get an objective read on which party's membership or hierarchy are better at saying true things and basing their decisions on them? It's easy enough to cherry-pick statements(Democratic rhetoric on racial issues seems to me to be quite disconnected from reality, for example), but it's not obvious how to avoid that and get a clear read.
I believe polls on knowledge of science and technology show Republicans doing a bit better than Democrats, but this may just be the fact that Republicans tend to be older, whiter, and more male than Democrats.
I feel this would only work were the Republican party purged of its activist base-Good luck convincing all the folks at Hillsdale, Claremont, etc. that 4-year college is overrated, nor do I see class being centered while politically conscious conservatives see themselves as waging a cosmic battle against the forces of Evil.
This brings us to the central problem-Social conservatism's primary appeal is as a bulwark against radical lunacy, but its core beliefs are simply obsolete in an industrial society. Traditional Christian sexual mores are not suited to a world with widely available birth control. Abortion is a perfect example of this-Both Left and Right have unpopular positions on the issue, but the Left's is more conducive to what the public wants, legal abortion up to a point, than the Right's.
As I see it, social progressivism has long enjoyed a prima facie advantage; its ideas are more appealing at a glance. It's very hard to argue, in a sexually permissive society, that homosexuality is somehow wrong. If such a case can be made (and I don't think it can), it is neither simple nor obvious. However, the Left may be losing that advantage-Ideas like "sex is on a spectrum" or "worship of the written word is white supremacist" are not, offhand, convincing. A more moderate, more proletarian social conservatism could fill the growing vacuum, but that would in turn need to defeat conservatism as it presently exists. I do not see traditionalists, bible-bashers, and the like coming quietly along.
I should add that Florida, which voted Republican this November while also passing a referendum for a $15 minimum wage, may be a harbinger of the Red Tribe's future.
"It's very hard to argue, in a sexually permissive society, that homosexuality is somehow wrong."
Not correct; the majority of Ukrainians remain anti-homosexual and homosexuality remained unpopular in the U.S. during the 1970s and 1980s.
I can't speak for Ukraine, but I am aware of how homosexuality was viewed here for most of the 20th century. My point is that traditional norms around it proved shaky in the absence of underlying logic. Americans didn't go straight from accepting extra-marital sex to accepting same-sex marriage, but, once the idea of sexual intercourse as a solely procreative act fell out of style, it was probably inevitable that the sex of one's partner would cease to matter.
I don't think so. I think the hostility to male homosexuality had an emotional basis deeper than belief that intercourse should be a solely procreative act. Nobody got upset over the fact that men continued to have intercourse with their wives after they got pregnant or went through menopause. The use of condoms was widely accepted pretty much as soon as they got cheap. The Catholic church has no objections to the rhythm method for preventing pregnancy.
Hillsdale is conservative. Claremont is a town and a bunch of colleges, and I don't think any of them are particularly right wing.
CMC has something of a reputation for being conservative, but I'm pretty sure that's true only relative to academia and the other Claremont colleges in particular, if at all. Possibly the above commenter is mixing up the colleges with the Claremont Institute, which is conservative but is not actually affiliated with any of the colleges (and also not located in Claremont).
As terminology for the elite class I think that mandarins is the correct term like the mandarins of Imperial China they are educated in the sacred texts of their system and have taken many exams to prove it. They also believe that their education gives them the right to rule other classes.
Aren't you supposed to be above tribalism?
Paging @oren_cass
Taxation: The Reagan Republican party spent the last 40 years lowering top marginal rates. The upper income bracket recipients of their largess responded by voting Democrat because Abortion and Gay Marriage.
The last Republican tax bill contained one feature the limitation of the SaLT (State and Local Tax) deduction that clearly made the Democrats in the Coastal States crazy.
Republicans should repay the ingratitude of the high income people by raising the top marginal rates to 50%. They should also "rescue" social security by removing the cap on taxable earnings.
>This tweet is a bit mean
well i mean
<3
been really digging your podcast
thank you! I have been having SO MUCH FUN recording it and I'm glad it's resonating :)
Rule of law is class warfare. Should some judge be telling ORDINARY WORKING-CLASS AMERICANS like Donald Trump what to do?
Obviously, woke censoriousness is class warfare, but so is formal free speech. Some hippie is burning OUR FLAG in the street and some fucking egghead tells me an ORDINARY WORKING-CLASS AMERICAN like Gavin McInnes can't burn the hippy? Plus, formal free speech allows woke mobs to call people racist, which is the primary threat to The Spirit Of Free Speech. (Sam Francis in "Leviathan and Its Enemies," which anticipated all of these arguments, makes this point perfectly clearly. Speech is primarily used by the speechy classes, therefore when someone says civilization reach for your browning.)
Not dying in a nuclear holocaust is class warfare. You think an upper-class scumbag like an unemployed listicle writer with a degree in Shit I Don't Care About Studies is going to be useful in the post-apocalyse? Not at all! When the bombs drop, we'll all be released from our media-created woken mental prisons, and realize what we need is a REAL WORKING-CLASS AMERICAN with expertise in owning several car dealerships.
I often enjoy your posts, but I don't quite get your point this time.
The greatest failing of the Republican party of the last decade is its inability to cultivate support from non-white ethnic groups that strongly skew socially conservative. During a (then) historically unpopular Republican presidency I watched Prop 8 repeal gay marriage in liberal California of all places. On election day non-white people rallied on the main street of my very liberal bay area town to promote it.
I can echo Scott, this cross-race class energy is there but so far the Republican party has no idea how to capture it.
I note that I fit fairly comfortably into the upper class as described, except that I love football and guns. Much of this seems already to be the Trumpist playbook, minus the use of the word "class". You would never see Trump railing against the "upper class", because he spent the majority of his life trying to convince people that he was the epitome of "upper class". This of course proves that he isn't upper class, since the upper class would never let it look like they have something to prove... which they don't.
There is a decent chunk of this they already do, and the stuff they don't do is because they are paid not to. I don't know why everyone has this stupid assumption that anyone in either party has any incentive beyond personal ambition to do anything that would be popular or help the country. They clearly do not. Once you've been elected you know you have an easy job waiting for you on K street should you lose your next election. The rest of the job is essentially political theatre; making promises you have no intention of keeping and finding creative reasons why you can't deliver, and finding ever more creative ways you can murder poor people. It's actually easier for them to be in the minority, easier to fundraise without all the hassle of governing.
If they cared at all about anyone in this country besides their donors it would be unbelievably easy to to institute broadly popular policies and soaking the rich to do so. The party that makes it so no one has to worry about going bankrupt if they see a doctor like every other non-3rd world country on the right and left has done for decades would be so popular they would be like the democrats with FDR. They don't because they do not care about winning, they care about being a good place for billionaires to write campaign checks.
That's the hard truth that everyone ignores because they have been spoon fed American exceptionalism their whole lives and reality would create cognitive dissonance. The only thing America is exceptional at is murdering poor people, at home and abroad.
So, under this strategy, what's the Republican response to something like https://twitter.com/aoc/status/1361916293738192896 ?
They can either try to claim Ocasio-Cortez as one of their own with
> Yes, the working class should not be saddled with the debt of passing through the upper-class meat grinder!
Or they can repudiate the entire concept with
> No! Your upper-class shills won't suddenly get richer under our watch! Our constituents are the ones who were priced out of post-secondary education entirely!
Amy I overlooking any options?
How about (and this is just a guess here): "You say it doesn't matter what schools you they went to, but employers sure care. How about we forgive the debt AFTER we ban asking about college from job applications? Why does class never seem to matter when it's the upper class getting the benefit?"
"And as for your second point, we all know that money isn't going to our preschools. And it definitely isn't going to our stay at home parents. It's going to where you are going to reeducate working-class kids that their parents are evil and stupid."
This is very good. Obviously there's lots of details that could be filled in, but there is plenty of opportunity for Republicans to take this tack in a way that not only do they form a coherent message (for the first time in a long time), but they can scoop up the positions that Democrats have only lazily made any serious gesture to support. One example, and which is coherent with this emphasis on class, is to reform the education system - not by extending the credentialism that has becomes it main basis, but by reorganizing it to give a lot more emphasis to both 1) practical education (think: skilled labor) and 2) aggressive use of standardized testing to find our "best and brightest" (in a completely racially unbiased way) and provide them better concentrated forms of education that seek to maximize their potential, rather than letting them languish. An average kid should have the opportunity to start learning a skilled trade at 14, so that he can be fully independent by 18 - rather than the only track available for substantially improving his outcomes are college. Likewise, a very smart kid, regardless of race, should be provided the resources so they're earning college degrees by 18, and maybe even started on a PhD. It wouldn't require more resources, only a reorganization, and so is not only a practical improvement over the Democrat's bland insistence on a system which is simply credentialism that only helps their sinecured party supporters, but it is in line with Republican principles (such as they are) ostensibly promoting financial thriftiness.
I'm really only adding on to what you've said, this stuff is great, exactly the lines I've been thinking along for a couple years now since NRx.
The sad descent of a once-respectable blogger.
You're "joking" here in the same sense that your neoreactionary FAQ was "anti" (i.e., transparently bullshitting so you don't scare off the last few naive lefties still taking you seriously).
What's your issue?
My issue is that these proposals are all, line-by-line, very bad. Scott is an extremely influential person. He wouldn't be putting these ideas out there if he didn't think they were reasonable and worth adopting. Just look at all the people applauding the post unironically in the comment section!
This isn't "satire". This is obviously "Scott Alexanders's actual worldview" and it sucks. It's only two steps removed from mask-off neoreactionary. A war on "college, so-called experts, the media, and progressive cultural norms" is a war on "The Cathedral". Does he have to fucking spell it out for you?
The feeble, three-sentence , throat-clearing in the opening is just for maintaining plausible deniability with the leftists who he knows comprise the majority of his readers. Can't go full mask-off, not yet. Got lead people there, inch by inch.
I mean, you're not wrong, and I'm tempted to agree with you; but just saying "Scott is a neoreactionary and therefore bad bad terribad" is not super persuasive. What exactly is wrong with his actual, concrete proposals ?
I'm not interested in trying to persuade people who are that far gone.
Fortunately, we live in a democracy where universal consent of the government is not necessary. I don't actually have to convince anybody who thinks "war on experts" is a reasonable idea. So when the far-right looks up and shouts 'DEBATE US!'...I'll simply look down and whisper 'No.”
Sounds pretty elitist/upper class to "look down" upon the [poor, uneducated] far-right and whisper (shouting is lower-class) "no."
The NRxers who he's accusing Scott of being a front for were *far* from lower class in the sense of this post.
Do you think if there were a referendum on relying on prediction markets or credentialed experts, the latter would win?
Personally, I think they might, but I'm not confident enough to claim the mantle of "democracy" for that outcome.
My feeling is that >75% of the public in currently unaware of what a "prediction market" is, and of these, an even larger portion would object to their use over experts once they are explained.
I think this sort of radical economic liberalism may have been able to be sold to the public 10-20 years ago, but the attitudes have been shifting against that ideology in both parties now for a while. It's an idea that showed up too late on the scene to make much of a splash IMO.
The rationalist bubble of libertarians/certain econ departments can make these ideologies seem more widespread than they really are. Even on the Predictit comment boards, its a bit of a running joke that these bets are supposed to provide "useful" information, rather than just a form of gambling with more steps.
> consent of the government
A Freudian typo?
That sounds super noble and cool, but it's also utterly unpersuasive. From my point of view, it's impossible to tell the difference between the guy who's strong and steadfast in his well-reasoned moral convictions; and the guy who doesn't have any argument at all and thus fills the void with empty bluster. I'm not a mind-reader, you know ?
He's asking you to persuade him, not Scott, whilst specifying he's already half-persuaded.
I honestly believe credentialism and the current emphasis on college is bad and have said so on many occasions. I honestly believe prediction markets are good and have said so on many occasions. I honestly think the current form of wokeness is bad and have said so on many occasions. The media is too big and generalized to call good or bad, but I honestly believe it has class biases that it needs to consider and shed, and have said so on many occasions.
(I don't honestly think things like free trade are bad; an earlier version of this post included that as a nod to Republicans but I've taken it out).
I don't like the actual Republican Party, but this was an attempt to find the closest thing to the current Republican Party that I would like.
It's non-serious in the following ways: I don't expect the real Republican Party to be able to appreciate these ideas. It doesn't list all the major changes I want the Republican Party to make which are so far away from its current position that there's no way to get from there to here. It doesn't list my many disagreements with the Republican Party. It's more partisan and confrontational and conflict theorist than I would normally be.
It's serious in the following ways: I think this would be a better Republican Party than the one that currently exists, I think it would win them votes, I think the policies listed (especially banning degree discrimination and using prediction markets) are generally good ones.
What part of this do you find objectionable?
It is a colonial-imperialist illusion fed to us by Marxists that the bourgeois cannot shed class biases.
I've started to get the hang of this. You say "bourgeois," "colonial," "imperialist," a lot and you really can sound like you're saying something!!
You write as though this is some kind of conspiracy; as though "the bourgeois press" is *intentionally* doing this. But it isn't. It's Moloch all the way down, that's the key insight that Marxists tend to lose sight of (even though I think Marx himself had it).
Journalists don't wake up in the morning thinking "how can I nefariously spin the day's news in a way that will make capitalism look good?", they're just steeped in a classist culture themselves and so are guided by their own biases in how they look at events. If it is possible to get the individual journalists to realise and correct their biases, their writing will also cease to be biased.
Marxbro is annoying, but I don't see anything he's said that contradicts this.
I'm not interested in debating the merits of the object-level points of your post. This is not an attempt at persuasion.
This is more like...I just don't trust you anymore. How do I know what parts are serious? Which parts are tounge-in-cheeck? Are we just to pretend that your ample and devoted following aren't going to read this as a manifesto?
At the core: If you really, truly hate the Republican Party, why are you trying to give them advice that could, in your own words here, "win them votes"? Constructive criticism isn't something you do with your enemies, it's something you do with your allies! Yes, diving full-on into culture-war nonsense land, where six-digit contractors in Georgia get called "working class" while high school teachers are "upper class", may very will win Hawley the presidency. But to what end? So that you could get your no-caps prediction market? No other downsides to this plan, at all?
I feel like I'm the mark, and you're the conman.
Because changing something he finds odious to something he finds less odious might be good, even if it's more successful? They did just elect Trump and almost re-elected him...is success the margin you need to be concerned about, or quality? Because there's a clear trade-off you aren't willing to recognize but Scott is.
It isn't an obvious choice.
There are significant downsides to cultivating "anti college, anti-expert, and anti mainstream-media" values that will encompass far more than the anodyne proposals Scott is suggesting.
A amplified "war on experts" will not merely result in lifting caps on prediction markets. An elevated "war on mainstream media" will not merely result in the NYT hiring more Ross Douthats. Enshrining the "war on college" as a policy platform will not result strictly in progressive friendly outcomes like "high school students no longer required to pledge to go to college".
I know this, you know this, and Scott knows this.
I sincerely think this line of thinking of everyone is either an "allie" or an "enemy" is sincerely bad, especially when applied to a two party system where we will always have the "enemy* party. If we want things to be good in a stable way, we need a republican party that we find more reasonable. And hoping that is just Democrats v2 is unrealistic. We don't want a party of enemies.
We could easily have a two party system where one party isn't an enemy to the other. And in fact we *did* as recently as ~15-20 years ago.
So I don't call them the "enemy" because they are the "other". I call them the enemy because their policy proposals, nearly universally, are in opposition to everything I value. And I expect Republicans to feel the same way about me: an anti-nationalist, radical environmentalist, progressive authoritarian, state-socialist who would side with China over the US in a shooting war.
It's like, yes, I AM here to destroy everything you hold dear, that's right. It would indeed be rational for you to view me as your enemy, if the concept of "ally vs enemy" is to have any currency whatsoever.
As an outsider I always find it confusing why many Americans talk about their politics as if their party can deliver a final defeating blow to the other party and rule forever. I don't think that's how your system is set up, is it?
To have normal governance you need both parties to be at least somewhat reasonable. There is no other option. Take climate change, for example. How effective even the most ambitious green plan can be if every 4 or 8 years all regulations are rolled back and new coal plants erected?
But how can Republican party transform from what it is now into something that is at least somewhat more reasonable? Because whatever it will transform into will have to be supported by people who voted for Trump. I think that's a very important question.
> As an outsider I always find it confusing why many Americans talk about their politics as if their party can deliver a final defeating blow to the other party and rule forever. I don't think that's how your system is set up, is it?
Because talking about how complete victory (if we win) or total destruction (if we lose) is going to happen is part of the get-out-the-vote effort. Does it work? Doesn't matter, we are too locked in to risk it not working.
There's also the Harlem Globetrotters vs Washington Generals setup, where you have an opposition party that's set up to lose.
From 1933 to 1981, the Democratic Party held both chambers of congress for all but four years.
Nothing is "forever", sure. But 40 years of single-party dominance has happened in the United State's recent past. I agree of course that "Republicans get better ideas" is a nice (if fanciful) idea. But "Republicans get crushed like a bug, until everyone involved with it today has died of old age" is a far more realistic scenario (abolishing the electoral college + statehood for DC and all territories would just about seal it, no?) and one that Democrats should be aiming for.
It's honestly kind of sinister, you get the impression that people secretly want to gain absolute power and imprison all their political enemies, but rarely have the guts to explicitly say so.
Class may be the wrong word for it, but there's some real sense in which an adjunct sociology professor making barista wages and Anderson Cooper are on the same side, and it's not the same side as a dentist in a small midwestern town or a plumber in a medium-sized city.
The "real sense" is that one group is more likely to be socially and economically conservative, and the other is not. This is what unites plumbers and small business owners, and professors and rich media figures. It's no more complicated than that.
But this obvious explanation doesn't make Republicans feel like the heroic underdogs. So instead, Scott attempts to redifine "conservative" as "lower class", such that somehow Elon Musk is "lower" than a social worker making $30,000 a year. And who doesn't like a scrappy fighter (lumber barons) against the "elites" (high school teachers).
It would be humorous if people wern't appearng to eat it up ironically.
You mean the first two are likely to be Dems and the second two are likely to be Republicans (unless black)? We already have 'Democrat' and 'Republican' as words for that, right?
So al you really wanted was a partisan leftist writing intelligent-sounding things to flatter your sense of being a Leftist Intellectual?
A: "How do you do, fellow Democrats. Here's a how-to-guide for the Republican Party to become a snake den of insane reactionaries, and start winning elections again. I think this is would be good thing!"
B: Ehhhhh....I don't know if we are even on the side anymore. This looks like you're supporting the opposite of everything that I think is good. Maybe you aren't really as opposed to the Republican Party as you say you are. Sometimes people do just go on the internet and tell lies.
You: Oh??? So you just want writing that flatters your sense of being a LEFTIST INTELLECTUAL??
I appreciate you acknowledging me as the intellectual I am. I am indeed very smart. Smart enough I know when someone is trying to trick me. Smart enough to know when coincidences turn into patterns, which turn into red flags. Yes, I do want writing that is both leftist and intellectual. I want to hear from people who are trying to make the world a better place, not a worse one. Life is too short to waste time with idiots or con-men.
I think you should append this explanation to the text of the post. While it's obvious that it's satire on a certain level, it wasn't entirely legible to me which aspects were sincere before you spelled it out, and will be much less obvious to new readers; you've been sufficiently precise about epistemic status in the past that I don't think that ambiguity is a good thing, especially on a topic people are guaranteed to get angry about.
> I think this would be a better Republican Party than the one that currently exists, I think it would win them votes
Would it really win them votes, on the net ? It seems like they'd gain your own Gray Tribe votes at the expense of their current base, which is quite extensive. Is this a tradeoff worth making ?
Which part of the current base do you think it would shed and why?
The majority of Christian Evangelicals and rural and/or low-income voters (though obviously there's an overlap in that Venn Diagram). Basically anyone who's motivated by hatred of the Democrats, as opposed to any kind of long-term socioeconomic policy. The same applies to Democrats, of course, just in reverse.
Minor pedantry: If it's not a satire, why the Swift reference in the title?
You think Scott is actually against immigration and free trade?
As I read it, it's a mix of positions Scott actually supports and positions that he thinks would work for the approach he is suggesting for the Republican party even if he does not support them, tied together with plausible rhetoric they could use. He may well think that it would be a good thing if the Republicans followed this line, but not because he agrees with all of it.
Does Scott talk about immigration or free trade? Did I mention it? No to both.
He's a libertarian-capitalist arguing for libertarian-capitalist things. And if that results in people being very confused about who actually has power over them (lumber baron=lower class, teachers =upper class?), that's just collateral damage I suppose. The near-verbatim overlap between between his ideal "war on [thing]" and standard NrX talking points is an exercise left to the reader.
David, we've been debating on and off for years now, and there's probably nothing I can say to change your mind. You know where I stand, and I know where you stand. I know why you follow Scott, but I know longer know why I do.
I just...don't care what he thinks anymore. We have next to nothing in common, no shared values, and we're working towards diametrically opposed goals. He's outlining a plan here that is essentially "a how-to guide to co-opting the economic left and installing reactionaries in government". I'm embarrassed that I payed as much attention to him as I did. Maybe I've changed, but maybe he's changed as well. I can't image a post like this 3-4 years ago.
In the version of the essay I read I believe he included an anti-free trade argument — it's possible that he has edited that out by now. I think there was also something about immigration, but I'm not sure. I interpreted your argument as assuming that Scott was actually in favor of all the things in the post, so was pointing out that he wasn't.
'Maybe I've changed, but maybe he's changed as well. I can't image a post like this 3-4 years ago.'
This puzzles me: 3-4 years ago he already had Nick Land and people like that on his blogroll and had written this https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/ (Yeah, he wrote the anti-thing, but nothing in the current post takes back any of the arguments from that!). I don't really see how this is different? (As someone who has always enjoyed his writing but also always felt a bit guilty about it because of the above.)
Quoting Scott Aaronson: "The [NYT] piece says that Scott once had neoreactionary thinker Nick Land on his blogroll. Again, important context is missing: this was back when Land was mainly known for his strange writings on AI and philosophy, before his neoreactionary turn."
Wait. The post is like 80% things the class-first left has been shouting on top of their lungs for years, 15% spin that would make it palatable to conservatives, 5% Scott's hobby horses. The last one is obviously his actual worldview, the middle one may or may not be, we know he's genuinely supporting capitalism, for example, but there's certainly plausible deniability. (Plus some of it feels like them being cheated. Class being about culture? Ha ha, most of is just not legibly economic, and all is downstream from the base anyway, you're now Marxists, suckers.) But how can you look at the whole, or most of it in isolation, and think it's reactionary rather than a direct consequence of observing reality from a leftist, egalitarian point of view?
This is not a rhetorical question, I am genuinely asking for an answer, from someone I recognize as writing things I usually strongly agree with. Because there's a huge rift on the left, even understood as people I actually tend to trust as being on the left, right now across these very lines. And because I've seen these exact points disregarded as "reactionary" for years, to the point where I'm increasingly ready to return the favor and just disregard anyone expressing that sentiment as, well, a liberal (by which I, obviously, mean someone invested in the perpetuation of current exploitative capitalist system). I just want to understand.
I mean, I can see you saying "the 80% is just common sense anyone can agree with, so the bad 20% is the part that actually matters". but I don't think people invested in the current system agree (so even if the remainder is all bad, I can't help but interpreting the post as beneficial by spreading ideas I don't think are being widespread enough). I think only people opposing the current system agree, and this happens to include both reactionaries and progressives (hate the term, actual people self-describing that way are too certain about where the progress leads, but there's no better word to describe "the exact [expletive] opposite of a reactionary"). I don't think this alone makes the two groups in any ways alike. Besides, you're not saying the proposals are putting a wrong spin on the real issues and solutions, you're saying they're "all, line-by-line, very bad", and I'm like, how? It's mostly regular anti-elitism, and that's good, how can it not be good? It's also very unusual for Scott for this precise reason, so, not his actual worldview, because I wouldn't expect to agree as much with his actual worldview, it would probably be much more "prediction markets" and much less "fuck the elites".
The basic crux of Scott's proposal, as I understand it (and emphasized by the title image), is that Republican should co-opt the Left's use of economic class (both in the strictly Marxist meaning, or the more colloquial "income class") in replace it with the same word, but one that means something totally different and strictly cultural. This new meaning instead places the Red Tribe friends (lumber barons and Elon Musk, for example) as part of the scrappy-underdog "lower class", while Blue Tribe folk (such as social workers, teachers, grad students) get placed in the arrogant, condescending "upper class".
The upshot to sowing of all of this deliberate confusion is that the Republican Party would become better (?) and maybe even win more votes (???).
But this is obviously a step backwards, in terms of getting working-class Republicans to understand who-rules-whom, and where power comes from. The only world in which this makes sense as a strategy, is one where the vast majority of Republicans are already soaked-to-the-bone hardcore ideological neoreactionaries, so you have nothing left to lose but to channel these hardcore commitments into something less objectionable. BUT THIS IS NOT THE WORLD WE LIVE IN. Republicans are notorious for not having strong ideological economic commitments! They're all about culture war bullshit now! How could anyone look at the trajectory of the Republican Party in the past 10 years and say, "welp, looks like we'll have to abandon getting Republicans to understanding class consciousness, they're just too ideologically committed" Republicans are closer than ever moving to the left on economics (look at minimum wage increases, Medicare expansion in red states). The are starting to hate billionaires. We should be encouraging them to lean into this, to double down. Scott suggests to do the opposite, and find a way to trick them into defending Elon Musk from tax increases.
To me, it looks like Scott realizes is worried because this trend in the Republican Party is in opposition to his libertarian-capitalist agenda, and he is simply trying to find a way to poison the well with a nonsense use of "class" before Republicans take it any further. The old way Republicans did this was saying "You know who REALLY has power over you? The immigrants taking your jobs, and the blacks on welfare checks!" Scott thinks the new, better way is to say "You know who really rules over you? Teachers, social workers, and grad students!" And yeah, sure, the Right might buy that line of thinking. It's savvy and fits with the current zeitgeist. Congrats on finding a clever way to deliberately confuse people and make the world a worse place.
But "make the world a worse place", really? Yes, really. Scott's trick here was to rattle off a list of anodyne (even progressive-friendly) policy outcomes at the end of the article, and suggest that the only route to get there is through adopting the neoreactionary framework. Raise taxes on rich universities? Make it easier for high school students to graduate? Who doesn't want that?? All you have to do is start a War on College, War on the Media, and War on Experts. Will there be any other consequences to waging these wars? Any possible unstated negative outcomes, any at all? Crickets. Again, the only way this "works" from the leftist perspective is if we assume that Republican voters are hardcore ideologues who are already waging a War on College, the Media, and Experts, so we might as well channel this into something useful. But these ideas are on the radical fringe on the Right! Most of them would be more palatable on the DSA left! And as someone else helpfully pointed out in the comments, the whole premise of this post assumes that moderate conservatives don't exist. Scott is describing the ideology of lunatic Motte posters, not the viewpoint of a party who as recently as 2012 elected Mitt Romney to be their representative.
You want to lift caps on prediction markets? Reduce the monopolistic power of social media companies? Make life easier for people without college degrees? You don't need to become a neoreactionary to do that. The idea that you do, when stated plainly, is laughable on its face. But Scott, playing a role that I can only describe as "con man", has got people pumping their fists in the comments going "HELL YEAH! finally someone who speaks to me, Scott for president 2024!" He is doing the very simple trick politicians do, were they list the good outcomes, declines to list the bad ones, and suggests that his way is the only way to get there. Don't be duped.
See you at sneerclub, I use a different pseduo there.
This is an interesting comment but there are two weird assumptions here.
The first is that it is bizarre to suppose that Scott actually has the power to "poison the well" on a nation-wide scale even if he wanted to. He doesn't. More importantly, whatever you may think of him morally, surely you agree that he is too *smart* to seriously believe that he has that kind of power. This essay cannot *actually* be meant to change the course of the Republican Party.
The second weird take is the idea that Scott is here trying to *change* the Republicans' worldview one way or the other, in the first place. As highlighted by the title ("Use The Word Class"), my understanding was that Scott was trying to tell Republicans "guys, I know you're not sure what you believe, but I think I've found the coherent theory that perfectly explicates all your current beliefs, and which must therefore be what you already believe deep down without having managed to put into words".
Which brings me to my read on this essay: beneath the satire, I read it as an attempt to present a theory of why the current Republicans believe what they believe. It is not telling Republicans "you should believe in class struggle!", but rather, informing readers (who may or may not be Republicans) "I have discovered that Republicans actually believe in a weird version of class struggle, they just don't word it that way".
1. This blog is literally the #1 substack in its leader-board category. Its readers are disproportionately wealthy, highly educated, and politically attuned. Serious media figures are known to be readers. Scott would be dumb if he *didn't* realize he has massive power to shape political discourse.
2. I know my claim of "this isn't satire, or even a Scott's impression of what those wacky Republicans believe, this is what Scott really thinks would be a good policy platform" requires a little more outside context than is available on this single page. But I'm telling you, it's at least in the ballpark (https://mobile.twitter.com/queersing/status/1361364005793632256/photo/2) There is also other outside context that I would almost certainly be banned for linking to or describing.
There's a lot in this comment I disagree with, but it also includes several concise summaries of the issues I have with the post:
>The basic crux of Scott's proposal, as I understand it (and emphasized by the title image), is that Republican should co-opt the Left's use of economic class (both in the strictly Marxist meaning, or the more colloquial "income class") in replace it with the same word, but one that means something totally different and strictly cultural. This new meaning instead places the Red Tribe friends (lumber barons and Elon Musk, for example) as part of the scrappy-underdog "lower class", while Blue Tribe folk (such as social workers, teachers, grad students) get placed in the arrogant, condescending "upper class".
The "Tribe" language is probably my least favorite product of SSC, not because it's entirely wrong but because it's thoroughly unhelpful. Reification of stereotypes doesn't increase knowledge! So doubling down by equating the upper class with the Blue Tribe is baffling.
>BUT THIS IS NOT THE WORLD WE LIVE IN. Republicans are notorious for not having strong ideological economic commitments! They're all about culture war bullshit now! How could anyone look at the trajectory of the Republican Party in the past 10 years and say, "welp, looks like we'll have to abandon getting Republicans to understanding class consciousness, they're just too ideologically committed"
The big two US parties are at their core political coalitions, not ideological movements. Any theory that depends (or worse, assumes!) on their ideological consistency is deeply flawed.
>But "make the world a worse place", really? Yes, really. Scott's trick here was to rattle off a list of anodyne (even progressive-friendly) policy outcomes at the end of the article, and suggest that the only route to get there is through adopting the neoreactionary framework.
I don't agree that Scott's using an NRx frame per se, but the disconnect between rhetoric and proposed outcomes is jarring. And I think disconnect is the right word - the gap between the two is either left empty or plugged by wishful thinking, with no tolerance for opposing actors. Political ecosystems are complicated!
>Who doesn't want that?? All you have to do is start a War on College, War on the Media, and War on Experts. Will there be any other consequences to waging these wars? Any possible unstated negative outcomes, any at all? Crickets.
+1. Wars on Things tend to only look like a good idea if you expect to be insulated from the collateral damage. This plays into the above, where the consequences of the rhetoric are unlikely to be the outcomes Scott wants.
>But these ideas are on the radical fringe on the Right! Most of them would be more palatable on the DSA left! And as someone else helpfully pointed out in the comments, the whole premise of this post assumes that moderate conservatives don't exist. Scott is describing the ideology of lunatic Motte posters, not the viewpoint of a party who as recently as 2012 elected Mitt Romney to be their representative.
I feel like in a nutshell, it's a pitch to the rightmost quintile that trades on demonizing the leftmost quintile, while not really understanding either. It's *trying* to use the Dark Arts, but Scott's not very good at them. Which is good, I guess.
[to clarify, by "more palatable for the DSA left", I was referring to the proposals such as raising taxes on universities and reducing monopolistic media control, not waging a War on College, the Media, and Experts]
I mean, NRs are authoritarian fascists. This is not fash in any sense, though it is broadly right: it's not glorifying the nation, attacking democracy, giving a vision of a pure past to which we can return, shitting on feminism. It's true that fash complain about experts and political correctness, but that doesn't distinguish them from the moderate right. I'm *far* more bothered that Scott engaged seriously with NRxers back in the day and recommended their blogs (the latter especially), or some of the things he's written about feminism, than be anything in this post. I see where your concern is coming from, a bit, I guess, but, I don't really see how this is different from what he was saying 5 years ago?
> the last few naive lefties still taking you seriously
> the leftists who he knows comprise the majority of his readers
Wait, which is it? Or are you saying his audience is mostly composed of leftists not taking him seriously?
I think the words you are actually groping for as targets are "elites" and "elitism." Class resentment does not, and never will, resonate with Americans. Wealth and manners are not objectionable. Talent and success certainly aren't. It is rather the arrogant, undeserved power of the smug, entitled, and mostly mediocre "Ruling Elite." Republicans don't even have to make much effort as the Ruling Elite is discrediting and beclowning itself as fast as it can.
At some point the taboo against politicizing white identity will eventually break down in response to the elite's actual straight-up anti-white racism. It is so mainstream that Coca-Cola is literally browbeating its employees to "be less white." (How would "be less Jewish" go over as its corporate slogan?). The taboo is so strong that even this can't be called "racist" -- instead, it's bad because it's "divisive."
The Republican establishment is constitutionally incapable of being authentic or proactive. But the opposition script will write itself as the left overreaches.
What complete bullshit. Class in this country is nothing but income, no matter how badly you want to suck up to millionaire paving contractors by telling them they’re being persecuted by English teachers. Trump, assuming he has the money he says, is upper class even though he’s an ignorant ass with terrible taste.
Money buys power; education and good taste do not. If you have money, you have power, and Paul Fussell’s dimwitted sequel to The Preppy Handbook doesn’t change that fact.
"Class in this country is nothing but income"
Clearly wrong. The median voter in the richest Obama-Trump district was lower class than the median voter in the poorest Romney-Hillary district.
The data is surprisingly tricky to run down and probably fluctuates at the true min/max, but at a glance it appears these are Long Island's South Shore (NY-2) and Tucson (AZ-2) respectively. Defining the median voter is a tricky task, but glancing at median income I find Eharding's claim difficult to believe without some pretty good evidence.
I think the fact that you can be uncertain of whether Trump does in fact materially have the money that you say would arbitrarily flip the tag from "middle-class" to "upper-class" is proof enough that there are some axes of how "status" works in America that aren't determined by the actual bottom of line of your actual current holdings.
Scott, due to having been very enthused by his reading of Fussell, has decided to call one of these other axes "class", as Fussell did. I get that this is annoying to Marxists (for whom "class" is defined neither by wealth or culture, but rather by relationship to the means of production; e.g. while a non-standard example a very successful artist, no matter how rich remains "working class" insofar as their wealth is a direct result of the work they produce), and to people who want to use the vernacular sense of "class" as a synonym for "income level". But that is what he has decided to do. Those are three different meanings of the word "class" — there may be more — not a case of being wrong about what class "is".
Ugh, that feeling when the American political system is so screwed up that the only way to fix it is for someone to write a completely sensible platform for the Republican party and that someone has to be Scott Alexander.
Couldn't you figure out how to spin switching to low tariffs? Perhaps to actually help the lower classes, rather than appearing to help some of them while hurting them more in the aggregate?
Their cost of living goes up. And, many of them are less able to absorb the higher prices.
A tariff is a tax on buying things from other countries. Lots of lower class people buy things from other countries.
please don't turn the comments section into twitter.
They're already in high-tariff mode so it's easier to update their messaging to continue in their current direction, although the messaging works for both.
Plus, this way it solidifies the Ds as being anti-tariff and it would be nice if both sides had some good points.
This is genius and would be 100% wonderful and unironically great for most Americans.
Haven't the Republicans been doing this for years with all the "elites," "coastal elites," "flyover," "peasants with pitchforks" and the rest? Also, Reagan, Bush Jnr. being "misunderestimated," Sarah Palin etc.
Also, aren't Americans too aspirational?
In terms of the policies, 3 and 4 are pretty close to where they are now. 2 soundbites down to "so-called experts don't know anything and use long words to trick you, lets trust some college professor's magic truth machine" (even if prediction markets are good, they're not explicable in soundbite form - counterargument is I can imagine Ross Perot explaining them with lots of handheld slides).
1 is an undoubtedly a good idea, given the disaster that is credentialism, but is... directly contrary to American culture? You guys love education. You pretend you don't, but nowhere else in the developed world has adverts for colleges on freeway billboards. 2/3 Americans go to college these days (fewer went in the past, hence the college-educated population is smaller), and among whites the proportion is even higher. Proles want their kids to go to college, and unlike their counterparts in some countries would throw a party if their kid went to Harvard. They're keen enough to sustain private colleges that are basically just cons (the upper middle class aren't going to those), not to mention community colleges. Trump himself endlessly banged on about how he went to the Wharton Business School, and I'd swear I saw vox pops where Trump-voters repeated it! That's how you can sustain a whole class system based almost purely on education (which in turn is why you think you're an anti-education country, as the educated mourn the fact that people who didn't go to college even exist - nowhere else on Earth could manage that). This wouldn't be like running against Jesus, or freedom, or flags, or guns or whatever. This is running against America; like the Saudi Atheist Party, or Irish prohibitionism. The GOP would have better luck if they adopted the hammer and sickle elephant.
I don't understand how prediction markets can answer long-term questions. For example, there are lots of questions on Metaculus right now to the extent of "X will happen in 100 years". What's the point on placing bets on such questions ? In 100 years, both I and Metaculus will likely be long dead. It's not like the stock market, where the stock pays dividends even if I hold it.
This is why IMO prediction markets cannot prove global warming: it's a relatively long-term process. There's no way to make any money off of it.
Suppose we ask the question "Will it be 2 degrees warmer than today in the year 2121?", we start off 50-50 uncertain, and you buy one share for 50 cents.
In 2071, it's 1.7 degrees warmer, nobody has put the slightest effort into solving global warming, and scientists have updated their predictions to say it will get 3 degrees warmer by 2121. Given that it now seems very likely that the prediction will come true, the value of your share goes up to 80 cents. You sell for a 30 cent profit, and you didn't even have to wait until 2121.
If in 2031, the government has done a bad job fighting global warming and mostly given up, and warming continues to outpace predictions, you could probably sell for 55 or 60 cents.
The point is, you don't have to wait for the event to happen. You can sell to someone else for whatever the probability seems like at any given time.
Since, if it will be 2 degrees warmer in 2121, we expect this to become gradually clearer with time, you should expect the value of your share to appreciate in a relatively consistent way.
(there's another issue where you're failing to have the money in the stock market during this time; I think the theoretical solution is that you give it to the prediction market to hold in escrow and they keep it in an index fund the whole time).
Stop gatekeeping the interests of the working class.
Again though, I think those entirely different ideas. The difference between "Class [Fussell]" and "Class [Marx]" is about as great as the difference between "Orange [Fruit]" and "Orange [Colour]". There is an etymological reason why they have the same name in 21st century English but they are independent, equally real concepts.
Of course, if as a Marxist you think "Class [Marx]", the economic concept, is more directly relevant, that is your absolute right and indeed you might *be* right. But that doesn't mean "Class [Fussell]", the cultural concept, cannot be a meaningful entity in its own right. The point Scott makes in this post is that most of the behaviour of current Republicans is rooted in concerns of theirs that have to do with "Class [Fussell]".
If you think "Class [Fussell]" is unimportant and shouldn't be focused on, well, that's just one more reason for you to be against the Republicans, y'know? But there's just no need to pretend that Scott is misunderstanding "Class [Marx]". He isn't. He's just talking about an orthogonal concept that happens to have the same name.
" its going to be entirely gatekeeping."
Thank you for this admission but I've going to have to reiterate my demand that you cease and desist your gatekeeping of the interests of the working class.
"If you say that more lowerclass people enjoy NASCAR while more upperclass people enjoy Polo - is that not gatekeeping?"
no, its an observation.
"Of course, I am a Marxist so I believe that class has a lot to do with your relation to the means of production."
Of course, Marx was a bourgeois parasite who never worked a day in his life so his analysis is hopelessly flawed.
"I think it's a lot more useful than quibbling over if certain hats are upper-upper-oldmoney-class or lower-middle-class or whatever."
then obviously you aren't making observations but prescriptive assertions when you make statements about the interests of what you consider the working class. Whether gentlemen prefer NASCAR or polo has no bearing on their capital relations.
Why would anyone lock up that money for 100 years to earn a mere 100% profit, when you could earn a 13000% profit by investing it in the stock market (assuming a 5% annual rate of return)? This scales to nearly any timeline. There will almost always be a better investment than a prediction market available.
This is a potentially solvable problem by having the market maker place the bets in the stock market (or whatever other financial investment you want to index to), and then using that as a payout to the winner.
That's a more financially valid proposal than simple dollar amounts, but it also makes the returns of prediction markets dependent on the broader stock market. That seems like it would create dangerous conflicts of interest for would-be forecasters - is it worth investing in a prediction that, if taken seriously by policymakers, would have negative effects on the stock market?
That being said, I may actually make my first PredictIt bet based on this. Trump is currently at ~0.30$ to be the 2024 Republican nominee on PredictIt, and I'm ~80% confident he'll run and win. That kind of rate of return over ~3.5 years beats out any reasonable stock market investment.
Yes, you're correct there can be problems with linking payoffs to stocks. More realistically, I would expect prediction markets to have the wagers earn some sort of short-term risk-free rate (the same arrangement as collateral agreements for financial instruments), so that you should be indifferent as to the market impact of the outcomes you're betting on.
For really long-term bets, where the risk-free rate is a substantial opportunity cost over returns on stocks, there still might be a benefit to offering additional contracts that are linked to higher-returning asset classes. There's some tradeoff, though, with adding too many contract variations and creating an illiquid or fragmented market.
Prediction markets driven by financial incentives have difficulty converging on truth more precisely than the rate of return of competing investments. This is immediately obvious to anyone who plays them themselves as the error on *each proposition* can often be in the neighborhood of 2-5% depending on expiry, meaning markets with many propositions can give strikingly incoherent results.
Yes, if I'm allowed to trade shares on the prediction market just as I can on the real stock market, I could make money -- sorry, I did not realize this was a standard-issue feature for prediction markets.
That said though, is there anything that prevents the idealized de-regulated prediction markets from becoming partially (or even mostly !) decoupled from the actual predictions, much in the same way as the real stock market is partially decoupled from real human productivity. What would prevent prediction markets from forming financial instruments such as CDOs; or from employing HFT; etc. ?
Great post and as a center-right guy Id be fully on board except one tiny semantic issue: Use Elitist instead of Class. Class is just too close to Marxism to pass fodder in real Republican circles. Otherwise looks completely doable.
Totally Agree with this. This describes why my family from Rural Idaho, were simultaneously Sanders Voters and Trump Voters. It all comes down to class.
As a candid data point from another side of the aisle, I’m what you’d probably call a Rockefeller Republican and I find this policy agenda horrifying, but mostly because it probably would be very successful and where the GOP is going these days anyway.
I’m a lifelong Republican, and I’ve always modeled them as a pro-business party that realizes those policies are hugely electorally unpopular, so engages in conning the poor into voting for them. I didn’t realize until relatively recently that this was even controversial. Growing up, for instance, I always figured that the reason the GOP was usually hawkish on military conflicts was to cull out their lower class ranks a bit. Everyone’s a winner: the poor with their dead-end rust belt futures would get a chance to go play soldier and die in glory, and the upper ranks maintain the careful balance of not letting the type of people that ultimately formed Trump’s base getting too many numbers. I only realized years later that others either weren’t that cynical or at least weren’t open about it. And I suppose I overestimated the casualties from our modern conflicts.
While the above does seem quite cynical after I type it out, I never saw this as ethically problematic. I’m a utilitarian, and I think a lot of policies that are wildly unpopular—free trade, open immigration, eliminating capital gains taxes and the estate tax—pretty clearly result in huge gains in human welfare, and if it takes some cynicism to make everyone on net wealthier and happier in the long run, it’s a huge win for human welfare. While I am deeply saddened by what has happened to the GOP in recent years, I admit we played with fire and got burned. Them’s the breaks.
What does especially sadden me, beyond how close we got pre-Trump before having it snatched away (I loved the Romney/Ryan ticket and Jeb), is what political home this leaves people like me. I know people keep saying the Democrats, but I don’t see it and certainly don’t feel welcome, especially with how aggressively they’ve recently courted the Bernie wing of the party. And it especially galls me how they keep trying to position themselves as the party of science on one hand, while failing to follow through on that so much in practice—if they’d just go pro-nuclear and -Keystone Pipeline I’d be somewhat happy, to pick some relatively non-controversial items.
I remember I thought that in 2016, Clinton would make a hard swing to the center at the convention, basically pull a David Cameron from the other direction as I understood his policies, and gut the GOP by forcing it into becoming a working class party. But that didn’t play out. Maybe my sense of the electorate isn’t all that great.
FWIW, I agree with you on some of those policies, and disagree on others (though I could be persuaded). Unfortunately, I could never vote Republican, since they've made it pretty clear that they're the party of traditional (bordering on Fundamentalist) Christian values. I'm not a Christian (and about half my friends are gay-married to each other, the horror !), so I'm pretty much not in their target demographic.
I find it difficult to reconcile the economic/international policies of the Republicans with their moral stance; and, from my admittedly biased perspective, any substantive policies have long ago taken a back seat to their more theocratic/Evangelical shibboleths. Ironically, Trump would've been more palatable to me than the average Republican, because he seemed to at least care about long-term economic policy in some way... you know, while being an insane shitposting clown, which is too bad.
The difference between "working class" in the cultural signifier sense and "proletariat" in the Marxian sense (those who labour in subservience to largely unaccountable managers) has been devastating to left-of-centre parties in Europe. Nowadays in most European countries you have a large population of well-educated, mostly younger people who have firmly middle-class values and are capable of doing highly-skilled jobs, but are definitely proles in terms of their real working conditions, generally with less bargaining power than their parents at the same age (even though the parents tend to be less educated and more prolish in Fussell's sense). When left-wing parties try to campaign on material interests, where they are clearly on the side of the majority, their message almost inevitably ends up coded as "white working class" (which upsets the young progressives) or "progressive" (which upsets the socially conservative "working class"), and they struggle to put the two halves of their electoral coalition together. Democrats in the USA seem to have survived this because a) compared to Europe, there are many more voters of colour and/or with a recent immigrant background in the USA, who are pushed away from the Republican coalition even if they are culturally conservative and b) most European right-wing parties have no trouble attracting female voters, whereas the US conservative position on e.g. abortion has driven away a majority of women. If you just look at white men in the USA versus white men in Europe, though, the Democrats look just as weak as their European counterparts (and in pretty much every state too).
The CDU are a very different party ideologically from the Republicans, though: they're conservative in the sense of upholding the status quo and not doing anything too radical, and they run on a message of pragmatism and competence. That kind of thing works well in Germany, where there is still something of a centrist consensus among a plurality of voters. The USA though now seems to have political demographics more like Northern Ireland, i.e. a strongly bimodal electorate. In that situation, to have a winning coalition you have to pick one of the two humps, and if you stray to close to the swing voter valley in the middle, it can work for a while but eventually your base is liable to revolt: look at how the Democratic Unionists replaced the Ulster Unionists, for example.
US men and women actually have *relatively* similar opinions about abortion, at least if you just look at basic are you pro-choice/life questions: https://www.vox.com/2019/5/20/18629644/abortion-gender-gap-public-opinion Though that's consistent with the pro-life views of the Republicans driving away women if pro-choice women just prioritize the issue more than pro-choice men, which isn't implausible. Plus since US elections are so tight at the moment, even the fact that women are marginally more pro-choice than men could be making a decent difference.
Well yes, being pro-choice is much more important to you if you might personally avail yourself of that choice. On the other side though, if you think abortion should be banned, it doesn't matter whether you personally have a uterus, because not only would you never have an abortion yourself, you're also trying to prevent others from doing the bad thing. It seems that if you force people to decide one way or the other, a majority of US men are pro-choice, but they don't particularly care about the issue. People who sincerely believe "abortion is murder" are heavily outnumbered, but the combination of their numbers with how strongly they feel about it is enough to make them an important political faction.
Freshman dribble. D-
Hey, if they dribble well enough to get the scholarship in the first place, the drivel they write doesn't matter. ;) Also they'll manage to get a college degree and stay not-upper-class.
What becomes the reasoning behind the "New Republican's" pro-life/choice stance? It seems to be such an important issue to the current electorate.
Good question. They probably have to keep it. Maybe link abortion to a (possibly imagined) upper class libertine life style?
Let’s say the GOP goes with this message. Then what?
It’s true that class != wealth, but there is a strong correlation. Most people would not understand the nuance of difference between class and wealth. Not every reader of this blog even buys it. The imagery in the link is Communist, showing that even Scott, despite explicating the fine distinction, also rounds off class to its economic dimension when looking for a shorthand. (I realize it’s meant to be ironic and that this post itself is dripping with irony, but the kernel of truth is what is worth commenting about.)
Wouldn’t, in truth, the Democratic party be more likely to openly embrace class warfare? Sure, sure, the Democrats are the elites and all that, but their political infrastructure is still more geared for economic class warfare. Perhaps raising the minimum wage is a bad idea economically, but the masses seem to believe it is good for the poor.
I think what Scott is *really getting at* (saying this probably guarantees I am wrong) is how nice it would be if politics weren’t always bleeding at the edges into illegible and unintelligible spaces. Is Trumpism racist or not? It sure would be nice to have an unambiguously non-racist version of Trumpism.
But we aren’t going to get that because ambiguity is a big part of the hustle. That goes for both major tribes, and everyone else in the field of marketing.
From what I gleaned form the polarization post is that ambiguity is what we had before when the parties were the same. This ambiguity was outcompeted by polarization. Why wouldn't further political polarization continue to outcompete the present amount of ambiguity?
Because ambiguity is inclusive, whereas clarity is exclusive.
And in the mid-20th century the parties were very ambiguous and inclusive. The more clear versions of themselves outcompeted the very ambiguous version.
If ambiguity and inclusiveness was not evolutionarily successful then, why would it be so now?
I wrote a Facebook post (yaaay me!) about this exact thing sitting (outdoors) at a coffee shop last summer, and noticing the pandemic had ended the rash of New Yorkers listening to their phones and iPads full volume in public without earphones. Then I realized - all the people who complain about the no earphones crowd are the same types who most likely to be woke/hate tromp/etc. And I realized intersectionality was completely ignoring this rift between npr listeners and reality show viewers. NPR listeners, who have a cross-racial, cross-gender coalition that even spans economic classes, from relatively poor public school teachers to Vice Presidents of marketing at google, and reality tv show fans, who tend to drive Mercedes with tinted windows, like Dunkin’ Donuts, etc, but who may well have more money than the npr listeners. And you’re right: trump stoked the resentment of the no headphones cell phone listeners against the headphones wearers.
<clutches pearls>
I grew up poor. I am now rich. I have no idea whether I am upper or lower class. AMA
>AMA
Why are you in Nevada?
Lower. If you were upper you would know.
Can you define rich?
I've heard everyone from people thousands of dollars in debt to people with a couple million in net worth call themselves "middle class", and indeed it seems far more common for people to perceive themselves as middle class or upper middle class in a huge range of wealth.
I'm curious what makes you sure you're rich, rather than just middle class.
Did you draw an arbitrary line at 1% (around 10 million net worth)? At 0.5% (40 mil)?
At not having to work ever again? (various, depending on lifestyle)
“Rich” is what the poor call the wealthy.
It's also what everyone at any step on the economic ladder calls the people halfway between them and the top.
Tonight, Tucker ran a master class on how to do this:
"One of the most privelidged people on planet earth says she is oppressed by her servants"
https://youtu.be/b6-SAG3OlpI
In an attempt to be slightly more useful than in my previous comment, this is exactly the topic of Chris Hedges book "Death of the Liberal Class." I'm often surprised I don't hear or see more people discussing him. Maybe he's too cranky.
https://www.amazon.com/Death-Liberal-Class-Chris-Hedges/dp/1568586795
Yes! Thank you! This is what I have been looking for. This is what I have been trying to say.
Marxist Republicans. That's something you don't see every day.
I'd say it's more Khmer Rouge than Mao, but there are similarities.
This made me think about how this applies beyond the US. The Trumpist sentiments definitely exist elsewhere. Could the program above be used by Tories in the UK? By Le Pen in France? Some of the important points from the article may not apply: Education may be free and relatively accessible to everyone. Inequality may be lower than in the US. And so on.
A less militant program like the above currently is being used by the Tories in the UK to great success.
For example their "war on universities" mostly begins and ends with protecting free speech from cancel culture. And there's a strong focus on economic policies to benefit the working class.
Look, it's an obvious point but, for decades now, we've been pursuing an increasingly meaningless culture war, neglecting issues like "who gets the money", "who goes to prison", "against who do we go to war and for what reason", "what happens to the environment". This proposal continues the trend.
Shameless self-promotion, here's my old take on that: https://deponysum.com/2020/06/23/a-rule-of-thumb-to-determine-whether-an-issue-is-worth-spending-your-political-energy-on/
I'm pretty sure this proposal is aimed straight at the heart of "who gets the money" and "who goes to prison".
See it seems to me that if you're going to target that you're going to have to foreground a concept of class that sees the substitute teacher and the logger as having more in common with each other, for the purposes of downwards redistribution of income.
In other words, you're going to have to use a primarily economic concept of class, not a cultural one.
Now it is true that the cultural concept of class is going to have to be part of it, but you have to go beyond that. You have to treat the cultural dimensions of class as, at least partly, a kind of mystification- a mystification that obscures our real interests and makes us believe that the woodchipper and the woodchipping CEO are on the same page. If you don't argue that, it's hard to see how this is a re distributive program- so it stops being about "who gets the money".
If you don't go beyond that, then Scott's project just turns into identity politics for Republicans. If you do go beyond that, to a redistributive vision, then I find it hard to believe Scott is naive enough to think there's a snowballs chance in the proverbial that the Republicans will embrace it.
Aargh that's as confusing as hell rereading through it, so let me rephrase.
You say that this proposal gets to the heart of "who gets the money", but I think that exposes the dilemma here.
In order to get the heart of who gets the money, it's got to be about the economic concept of class as well as the cultural concept. But Republicans fighting an economic class war? Never going to happen.
If it remains about the cultural concept only, then it's not about the money.
The points Scott focused on regarding jobs being reserved for people with non-technical signalling degrees was directly related, and in a way that Republicans could get behind.
African-Americans switched to the Democrats during the New Deal era, prior to Dems shifting on civil rights.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/new-deal
Based on some previous essay that began with "A Modest Proposal..." I was expecting something a little more tongue in cheek. This looks entirely feasible. It would collect about 2/3 of red tribe and blue tribe voters, and force the remaining upper class twits into a "New Grand Old Party" of some sort.
Anyways, I spent a few minutes looking up relevant anagrams, as one would.
First, "Bull Moose":
Soluble Om
Umbel Solo
Next, "Bull Moose Party":
Absolutely Prom
Playroom Bustle
Outlays Problem
Amours Potbelly
Soluble Om Party has my vote. Anyone got a bumper sticker printing machine?
This is the name of our new third party? I'm down with Soluble Om..
Princess Nausicaa could be our mascot.
Amours Potbelly stands with the common man. A pox upon our upper-class enemies.
Scott, unless you've done so already and I've just missed it, I implore you to give us a Prediction Markets FAQ. Prediction markets are a radical and foreign idea for most people, and one that's often first met with suspicion. Lately you seem to be treating "prediction markets are the future" like it's a foregone conclusion, but I've yet to read a thorough, convincing, and accessible argument for why this is the case. IMHO, you're just the man to write that argument!
1917 is the future! :)
Prediction markets outperform experts in ergodic or normalized areas. I haven't noticed that they do particularly well in systems with multiple equilibria, but I absolutely support removing the taxes and friction so we can find out.
Do you have any examples of such areas?
I'm so confused by this. Is Scott being satirical, or does he really not realize that this is basically just populism, but with more intellectual-friendly (?!?) terminology?
*populism = current, Trump-influenced populism (if you want an actual example, say maybe Tucker Carlson, though I'm not sure of his positions)
...He's quite open about how this is "how to keep Trump's surprising appeal deliberately and less farcically", though.
I think it's neither - he realises that, and is serious.
"I suggest the Republican Party become what it's becoming anyway" is... not something I'd expect Scott to bother writing a post about, even aside from the fact that it sounds suspiciously like praise for Republican populism.
It seems to me more like a desperate appeal for one of the parties to actually align itself with the lower and middle classes, by someone who is fed up of waiting for the Democratic Party to live up to its rhetoric.
Note that it's *not* about getting a party to align itself with low income people - it's just about getting a party to align itself with high income people that lack certain status markers.
I think the satire is that it turns the (nominally) fiercely-anti-communist Republican Platform into a pretty communist platform with a few moves. It's also probably satirical because things like "wars on expertise" were markers of bloody regimes like the Khmer Rouge. But it also seems like he's trying to toe the line between serious and joking here.
It seems sort of bold to say that Republicans are "post-Trump", if anything they feel like they're in a sort of political fermata, the length of which is definitely uncertain. The discordant eternal Rite of Spring intro that is the Trump Republican Party since 2015 is going to start up again at the very least by 2022.
And this isn't exactly a rest... it feels more like a note was sounded at the end of the impeachment trial that is just being held.
The Rite of Spring intro is actually quite calmed and restrained, even with the dissonance!
The thing is, the never trump crowd thinks there will be something other than the intro that will start any time now.
I keep waiting for the part of this "Modest Proposal" where Democrats are found to be eating babies. Am I the only one?
Disagree on prediction markets part. To the extent that prediction markets work, it is because right now they are not on the radar of most people. If they ever do get on the radar then the same oil companies who fork out the money to promote the people and research that makes people doubt warming will also be able to fork out the money to distort prediction markets.
I half-agree with the college part. I agree that there should be no college requirement for babysitting or firefighting. I also think that demanding degree as a prerequisite for med school is stupid. But I disagree that companies should be required to test e.g. engineers and geologists themselves. Waste of effort as colleges would already test a candidate for years.
I completely agree on the woke part, however.
What is the mechanism by which prediction markets get distorted? Placing bets on expected losers?
If it's possible for a brick-and-mortar video game retailer to double in value during a pandemic, then yes, we should expect that there are all sorts of mechanisms by which groups of people end up placing bets on expected losers just to snub the people they don't like.
While I agree with the general "class" analysis I don't like it as the rallying cry.
1- Class (socially) is easily confused with class (economically). The latter being the most well known usage and the right generally not wanting to associate with it due to the mentioned Marxist origins and usage.
2- Social class as defined here has no unifying ethos to it. It is more a collection of behaviors and attitudes that don't seem to have any cohesive virtue to them. Each class feels like a category with no particular moral or relevant quality to them. It feels as hollow as being on team blue because blue is your favorite color, and using that to guide your vote on how to run the country.
3- We have other words with a lot more gravitas that people can actually associate with. Culture (though this doesn't bridge the right left divide as well), The Soul of America, an Ethos. These are things I want to vote for, things backed by the weight of principles.
I don't really have a way to wrap this thought up. Poke holes in it please :)
I propose S.A. becomes the next U.S. President on the Republican ticket.
He does have that Trumpian quality of causing leftist derangement beyond all reason. And that does appear to be the only way for an r to get enough attention.
How's this for an inflammatory speech?
"You want to know a REAL conspiracy theory? MY conspiracy theory is that even though the upper class act like they're your best friends and care about you when they're in front of the camera, behind closed doors they despise you and talk shit about you filthy poors. Those aren't MY words, by the way - that's what they call you behind your back. 'Those filthy poors.' MY conspiracy theory is that they steal your money through unfair tax loopholes and then try to convince you that they EARNED their stolen money by working harder and by being SMARTER than you. And you know what makes this conspiracy theory REALLY wild? The fact that it's ALL TRUE. Here's the data to prove it."
Lower Middle
Okay, how would you punch it up?
I think something more like this.
"Listen, the most true truth is that even though the elites act like they care about you when they're on CNN, behind closed doors they laugh at you. They call you "rurals" in the exact tone you imagine. 'The rurals.' They steal your money through unfair tax loopholes and tell you they earned it by working harder. I've seen it and I can't stand it anymore."
Hey, that's really great. Thanks!
Scott, I think you might want to revive the old "things I will regret writing" tag for this one.
>I hate you and you hate me.
This is just ridiculous. Scott, it wasn't working class Trump-supporting white Christian Americans who tried to destroy your life not too long ago. It was the Blue Tribe.
Why can't Scott hate both the blues and the reds? Don't most of us? The blues and reds are idiots with faux anger who obviously want to fuck each other.
Scott signals disdain for the reds and cringing submission towards the blues, even though reds (and also far-right/neoreaction people) leave him alone while the blues are currently on a crusade to destroy Scott's career. You would never see Scott saying, "I hate you and you hate me" to the New York Times.
Actually, that's pretty much exactly what he said in his response to the NYT article.
Saying "well, the article is negative about me and contains things that aren't truthful and I'm not interested in talking about it" is *far* more conciliatory than "I hate you". He's still reserving his real hate for the reds, even though it's been the blues who've been biting off his face.
(And even then, Scott thinks that the Times was only malicious because he complained that they were going to dox him. The idea that they were malicious all along and were never going to be fair no matter what he did is beyond his comprehension. But yeah, he does hate those Republicans.)
Twice (one of them since deleted after reader complaints, but not retracted) Scott has linked this anti-NYT rant with apparent endorsement. I think it shows a far greater level of hostility than a half-serious quip "I hate you and you hate me."
https://www.robrhinehart.com/the-new-york-times/
A short, direct statement "I hate X" is a far more straightforward expression of hatred than a long essay that admits there might be something negative about its subject. And it's certainly a far more straightforward expression of hatred than *linking* to such an essay. Scott is politely disagreeing with his supposed allies on the left while hating the Republicans, even though the leftists are the ones chewing on his face.
Furthermore, as I pointed out, Scott's criticism of the Times is limited. He still doesn't think the Times meant to lie about him all along.
And "half-serious quips" are Schroedinger's blogpost. They're like comedians who are making an important political statement until someone points out that it's false, and the reply is "it's just comedy". This lets the comedian say things without ever being called on them, because "it's comedy" is an excuse whenever he gets caught.
You say this, but the very fact that he gets a hostile reaction from so many blues rather calls into doubt the claim that he either is blue or is consistently submissive to them. I don't think you understand just *how much* of an affront to blue values his daliances with Murray and the NRxers were. The "cringe" stuff I think, comes from the fact that he is genuinely afraid that some of his own views objectively are bad and racist, it's not just positioning. (See what he wrote about race/IQ stuff in his review of The Cult of Smart).
In reality, he isn't "really" red *or* blue, no matter how much people want to make his political strangeness into something familiar. (I mean, I guess I would usually describe this as 'a right-wing blog', but a) that's not quite "red", since "red" is partly cultural and economic as Scott uses it, and b) I am talking to my left-wing British friends and family when I say that, whose idea of right-wing is probably rather different from the average American.)
Getting a hostile reaction from blues and being submissive to blues are not at all inconsistent. (Especially if being submissive is a failed attempt to avoid the hostile reaction.)
"Hate" might be a strong word considering how distant they are but I doubt the average white Christian Trump supporter would have a very high opinion of a polyamorous liberal Jewish Californian psychiatrist who begged his readers to vote for anyone but Trump and thinks religion is too obviously false to be worth arguing with.
I don't know about average, but there are certainly Christian Trump supporters who read and commented on SSC and DSL and probably here.
He's often been quite polite about conservative Catholicism, the few times it come up at all.
Yeah he's polite about it but I don't get the impression he has much actual respect for the values or the ideas about how the world works.
Did anyone try to destroy his life? I must have missed that.
People are really attached to a 'martyred by PC' narrative around here. (Though I actually can see the case for saying the NYT should have just agreed not to reveal his real name.)
Well, there were a few SneerClub and Rational Wiki types, back when Scott took down the blog, who took it upon themselves to spread his real name as widely as they could, as if this was some kind of public service. So there are some extremely online leftists/blue-tribers who, if not actually "trying to destroy his life" (this is open to interpretation), are actively hostile. But yes, some people here are in love with the narrative of Scott getting drummed out of society, even though that's not what happened.
Yeah, I don't doubt Scott gets nasty internet harassment from so over-zealous proponents of identity politics*, and I'm happy to say this is bad.
I never read SneerClub at all, because it sounds awful and also I assume it's full of the kind of nerd-hating that would fuck with my self-esteem as someone who's already kind of ashamed of being autistic. What exactly is their thing? Are they aimed against SSC specifically? LessWrong rationalism? Tech people?
* (God I wish there was a neutral term for that that was neither sneer nor endorsement.)
Instead of "upper class" and "lower class," it makes more sense to say "symbol class" and "atom class." For example, it is acceptable in the symbol class to work with your hands as long as you are not handling too many atoms. You can cook a meal for a small family but not work in a fast-food restaurant.
Calling it "atom class" is not a good self-description.
One thing I noticed, when reflecting on the previous post, is how deeply class has become entangled with politics. Almost by definition, the left is higher-class than the right, and mere association with or proximity to the right wing is enough to make something seen as low-class. Trump ordered the Federal government to make neoclassical architecture its house style, and suddenly everyone who's anyone demands blobby postmodern buildings or nothing. (Doubly ironic, given that Trump's own buildings are mostly glass boxes.) Taylor Swift endorses the Democrats and suddenly she's a critical darling and we forget that we ever looked down on her music as trash for the rubes in Nashville.
So this would just be making it more explicit. It was already a big part of the Trump message, but the problem with Trump was he had no idea how government works and never put in the effort to find out, which does not make it easy to get anything done in government. Well, a problem with Trump. Personally I had a lot of problems with him. But anyway.
The left increasingly has no positive vision for the future and nothing to offer except dour moralism and self-flagellation. I would start turning rightwards if the right were not incredibly, colossally stupid. It's a mixture of guilt and revulsion that keeps me on the left, but if a non-stupid right were to arise, I'd be open to it.
(Also - the bit about appealing to Asians reminds me of Wes Yang's frequent commentary on how diametrically opposed Asian-American activism is to the actual experiences and interests of non-activist Asians. The activists parrot the standard lines about "meritocracy" being a form of white supremacy that needs to be demolished, but many other Asians have done just fine within the system and don't want to change it. But of course it's the activists who get the attention of the media and the political leadership, and so it goes...)
“ I would start turning rightwards if the right were not incredibly, colossally stupid. It's a mixture of guilt and revulsion that keeps me on the left, but if a non-stupid right were to arise, I'd be open to it.”
“He’s silly and ignorant, but he’s got guts, and guts is enough”
Neither the "everyone demands blobby postmodern buildings" thing nor the "Taylor Swift becomes critical darling" thing actually happened.
The second kinda did: https://www.yearendlists.com/2015/01/pazz-jop-top-100-albums-of-2014 https://furia.com/pjs/ That's an album and two singles in the top 10 in 2014, and a song in the top 10 in 2012 in the biggest US pop critic poll. No official one now because the Village Voice is gone, but some critic did an unofficial version and she made the top 10 again this year: http://rocknyc.live/facebooks-village-voice-pazz-and-jop-rip-off-poll-2020-reviewed.html So not Bob Dylan or Kanye levels of critic-love, but reasonably high support. Don't know if the timeline lines up with when she first expressed political support for the Dems though: I kind of doubt it, 2014, let alone 2012 is before that, right?
Taylor Swift's elevation is influenced by woke stuff, but my best guess is not the woke stuff you say, or not only. It's about the gradual replacement of 'rockism' by 'poptimism', though that itself is driven by woke values. (See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockism_and_poptimism) Like a lot of rebellions against the status quo, poptimism started out as a necesssary corrective with sensible points-it is suspicious that the most acclaimed genres tend to be the ones white men like more than anyone else!, lots of hip-hop and r'n'b is sonically innovative (was 20 years ago anyway) while rock is more conservative! (I don't actually mind *aesthetic* conservatism that much though...) lot of men-who-are-proud-of-their-taste are scared to admit they like uncool things and this is silly!-but then devolved into unthinking orthodoxy, where people think Taylor Swift must be good because she's really feminine and the Guardian decides to include this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hphwfq1wLJs over this on a best UK numbers ones poll: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOl7dh7a-6g . In reality, amongst current female popstarts, Lorde and Eilish are great, and Arianna Grande's Thank U, Next is a little masterpiece of catchy spite, but Swift, whilst not flat-out *bad* is dull as ditchwater.
Really, though I deeply doubt that any of this stuff is politically important. Somewhere above someone posted a guide to political issues saying essentially that if something doesn't involve war, economics, or violence/prisons, it probably doesn't matter very much, and whilst I'd ad science and tech policy, that seems a sound rule of thumb to me. Who is harmed by journalists pretending to like Taylor Swift more than they really do.
This is basically the playbook Newt Gingrich brought to Congress in 1994, and it's been working great... well, politically. The country sucks.
How do you distinguish between populist and non-populist politics? In a democracy where you have to appeal to the populace all politics is populist.
If you use the Wikipedia definition "Populism refers to a range of political stances that emphasise the idea of "the people" and often juxtapose this group against "the elite"." Then what either side is doing is through a justification of a shadowy elite of either the upper class or white men.
I don't see the difference.
I’m not sure how serious this piece is but the commenters mostly seem to unironically support it so: this is all insane. First of all, class is a total misnomer for the phenomenon described here: any definition of “class” that puts Donald Trump and McMansion owners below a barista with a liberal arts degree is nonsensical. The function of calling it class seems to be to guilt people described as “upper class” into thinking they’re somehow oppressing or exploiting the “lower class”. But why should being upper class under this system be a bad thing or being prole a good one? Class as described here has nothing to do with birth or wealth and much more to do with education, and why shouldn’t the educated have more status than the uneducated? Knowledge is actually better than ignorance, and getting an advanced education requires a combination of intelligence and diligence that many lack. This is why to a certain extent credentialism is actually good - it serves as a valuable proxy for actually good things. I agree there is an over-credentialism problem in this country, but the system simply needs reform, not abolition. As for declaring war on expertise and media gatekeepers - these institutions are correct far more often than not, dismissing them as just like, your opinion man is pomo garbage, and destroying them can lead to nowhere good. Replacing experts with prediction markets can’t work because who decides who gets paid? If someone claims vaccines cause autism, what stops them from asserting they won the bet and refusing to pay up when proven wrong? Finally, the idea of classism as pernicious rests on analogy to racism and sexism, but that doesn’t work. Whites aren’t better than blacks, men aren’t better than women, but “elites” are in fact better than “proles”. If you define class in terms of education, and education is earned by merit, than “class bias” is simply a sign of meritocracy.
Okay “better” was too extreme, how about “more suited to positions of power and influence”?
One underlying assumption of Scott's post is that academic credentials and expertise can vary a lot in its meaningfulness. On one side, someone with an MD or an engineering or accounting degree probably actually has learned some important skills that will be useful directly. On the other, someone with an Art History degree who gets hired over someone without the degree looks more like discriminating on "class" than on actual knowledge.
I suspect irrelevant degree requirements (you can't be promoted to management until you get a BA in something from FlyByNight U) are part rational astrology, part cartel enforcement, and part class discrimination.
But they're also partly about using the fact that you got a degree as a kind of test for intelligence and diligence and general competence as a human, since it's hard to graduate college without showing up for most of your classes and managing to turn in most of your assignments. Making it legally easier to just give prospective employees an IQ test would substitute for *some* of that, but not all of it.
And some degrees are 100% scholarship and signaling and 0% actual knowledge about the world, because the underlying fields of study have little or no connection with reality and a lot of connection with political realities in academia.
There are plenty countries where using IQ tests in hiring isn't illegal (is it illegal in the US?). Why don't companies in those countries hire on the basis of IQ tests instead of college degrees?
The very idea behind democracy is that this is wrong. Are you anti-democratic?
“ First of all, class is a total misnomer for the phenomenon described here: any definition of “class” that puts Donald Trump and McMansion owners below a barista with a liberal arts degree is nonsensical.”
Nah, you just don’t understand class. Its about culture, not money.
“ But why should being upper class under this system be a bad thing or being prole a good one? Class as described here has nothing to do with birth or wealth and much more to do with education, and why shouldn’t the educated have more status than the uneducated?”
Do you think that “good” and “bad” are objective features of a thing, rather than opinions that different people have about different things?
“ This is why to a certain extent credentialism is actually good - it serves as a valuable proxy for actually good things. ”
See Goodhart’s law
“ Replacing experts with prediction markets can’t work because who decides who gets paid? If someone claims vaccines cause autism, what stops them from asserting they won the bet and refusing to pay up when proven wrong?”
Probably this intersects with how someone could be proven wrong in an objective sense, and would be reflected in the prediction market contract.
“ Finally, the idea of classism as pernicious rests on analogy to racism and sexism, but that doesn’t work. Whites aren’t better than blacks, men aren’t better than women, but “elites” are in fact better than “proles”.”
According to you, but why would we agree with you about who is better?
“ If you define class in terms of education, and education is earned by merit, than “class bias” is simply a sign of meritocracy.”
If my aunt had balls she’d be my uncle (conditions may vary, check your local thoughtcrime regulations before assuming anyone’s gender)
"“If you define class in terms of education, and education is earned by merit, than “class bias” is simply a sign of meritocracy.”"
He isn't defining class in terms of education. Lots of college graduates are schooled but uneducated, a fair number of people who haven't been to college, including some who comment here, are well educated autodidacts, and quite a lot of the people he is classifying as working class have college degrees.
As anyone who has taught the sort of large college class where many of the pupils are there to satisfy some requirement knows, a large fraction are not trying to learn anything. They are trying to memorize enough to get past the final exam and will then forget most of it.
Scott made it quite clear in the beginning of this article that this "class" concept here is actually mostly about culture. It's what puts Trump and a construction worker on one team and a NYT Editor and your local hipster Starbucks barista on the other. These people really do have two completely different versions of the country they want to live in and you can't properly place their group "class status" by just looking at their income.
>Yeah, yeah, "class" sounds Marxist, class warfare and all that, you're supposed to be against that kind of thing, right? Wrong. Economic class warfare is Marxist, but here in the US class isn't a purely economic concept. Class is also about culture.
One techinicality about prediction markets: Nobody needs to pay up. You buy shares, and if you're right you get paid and if you're wrong you don't. So compliance is not required. Also, the conditions for what constitutes a win and a loss is explicitly stipulated in the contracts. Whoever participates in the prediction market agrees to the terms of that contract beforehand.
And for whatever it's worth, this isn't the first time I hear about class not primarily being an economic distinction. In Sweden class is explicitly not about money. If anything, members of the upper class are expected to hide their wealth, and they don't accept people who flaunt their wealth among their rangs. They're expected to drive a Volvo, they wear shoes inside (it's otherwise customary to not wear shoes indoors in Sweden), they disavow new money, and they think expensive things are vulgar.
Understanding what nobility is, and how caste systems work would help to make the distinction from economic class more clear. US culture is explicitly antithetical to nobility, because that's the narrative of your history, but I think that also means Americans have a less keen eye when it comes to spotting nobility. There hasn't been nobility in America since 1776, after all!
I've got to ask -- what's the significance of wearing shoes inside? I realize it might be a purely arbitrary class marker, but does it carry any connotations? Maybe something like "oh, he's so _____ that he wears shoes inside" or "I wear shoes inside to show that I'm ____"? (with "_____" being something other than just "upper class")
Like driving a Volvo seems to suggest something like "I'm just a regular sensible person," but I don't understand what wearing shoes inside would suggest.
I couldn't tell you what the underlying logic is, and I don't want to speculate. So I googled it. There was a political movement in Sweden called "folkhemmet" (people's home), which aimed at ensuring universal access to housing, along with showing people how to live properly. Part of this effort was the state sanctioned institution of home inspectors, who would literally go home to people and make sure they lived well and make suggestions as to how to improve their living arrangements. Ensuring hygiene was a big reason for this, and removing your dirty shoes when inside became an official position. The state mandated that government housing included hallways fitted with shoe racks or cabinets.
The "folkhem" movement came from the social democrats, who were ideologically opposed to the upper class. (And here's where I'm speculating) I'm going to guess that members of the upper class viewed shoe removal as a pro-social democratic signal. Other official recommendations from the home inspectors included getting rid of "finrum" (fine dining rooms) and making more efficient use of the space. Fine dining rooms are also an obvious "attack" on the upper class.
Actually, reading about the various official living suggestions is kind of wild. It's stuff like "Open a window and air out the house for 15 minutes per day" and "walls should be painted in bright colors" and "stone walls should not be decorated with paintings" and "don't sleep in the kitchen". In some cases you even had to demonstrate compliance in order to gain access to public housing.
So yea, my best guess is that the indoors shoe thing is counter signaling against Social democracy.
That's wild, thanks!
"Class as described here has nothing to do with birth or wealth and much more to do with education, and why shouldn’t the educated have more status than the uneducated?"
IMO that's the standard definition of class used by economists in the US. From Wikipedia: "In the United States, the concept of a working class remains vaguely defined, and classifying people or jobs into this class can be contentious. Economists and pollsters in the United States generally define "working class" adults as those lacking a college degree,[1] rather than by occupation or income."
You seem to be implying that it's natural to think that class *does* track a moral quality gradient, while other groups don't. It seems to me that even Marx wouldn't say that class tracks an inherent moral quality - it's just that being in a certain material relation to others tends to motivate morally better or worse behavior, regardless of the quality of the person.
And while the class analysis here doesn't track the material basis Marx is tracking, it does track *something* quite important for contemporary life.
Bear in mind some people (including me) oppose the idea that you deserve more money or status simply for being more intelligent, and prefer the idea that we should stop thinking about things in terms of desert and start trying to just maximizes everyone's standard of living instead (subject to not doing things that violate human rights of minorities obviously.) Obviously meritocracy is good when recruiting people for jobs though, in the sense that you want people who'll do a good job. I think our host has the view that 'has a college education' is a really bad and inefficient proxy for this though, probably he wants to use IQ tests instead or something. Personally I think college is good *because* it makes people more liberal. I don't mean its good when people become ultra-woke in a tumblr-y way, that stuff I'd class as 'really annoying but harmless with the occasional good point rising out of the murk', I'm talking about pro-immigrant, pro-gay, dubious of sending zillions of people to prison liberal.
Careful what you wish for.
Their fundamentalists won't get less oppressive, while their power grab will get significantly easier. In other parts of the world, this is exactly how those people win and it's not pretty.
Also, isn't this just populism with a theory on top?
Populism has pejorative connotations because vox populi is believed to lead society off a cliff. The separation of the lower classes from power is _exactly the point of modern system_ (why are we using representational, instead of direct democracy? why are the term limits so long?), even though it's thoughtcrime to consider.
A dysfunctional society might keep the lower class uneducated, full of learned helplessness and unable to govern on purpose, to justify further entrentchment of the elite. But of course we don't do that, do we?
Things could easily be much worse. Approving medicine too slowly is a lot better than not needing approval at all, in which case no one could trust any potential medicine.
On one hand, there are no experts. No legible experts, at least.
On the other hand, there's plenty of people who are better experts than your anti-vax altmed aunt (everyone has one).
Personally I'm also in favor of making Zvi the Czar of Everything but more realistically, leaving people alone to follow whoever makes sense is a decent consolation prize.
"the current technocratic elites have led us off a cliff."
It may feel that way, but only because the technocratic elites brought us up the mountain already, and we have fallen a fraction of the way back down.
This is a great strategy but the nazis beat you to it by a century or so. Social conservatism and socialist rhetoric is a winning strategy and its why no one in the american political system would ever use it, it would destroy any semblance of the two party system that we collectively pretend exists.
How can you write an essay as insightful as this, but not see that it's a contradiction in terms? "Populism" is literally the lower-class incarnation of what you describe as "anti-classism". It's not cool, it's not intellectual, but it's driven by the same resentments you describe here to a T, Pat Buchanan's "peasants with pitchforks." Then your entire essay just becomes complaining that populism isn't a "classy" enough way to fight classism. Yes, well, you know what they say, "if my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle."
If the lower class had a bunch of champions able to communicate their grievances as effectively as you do in this essay (which appears to be more of a thought exercise than something you really believe), then, well, they wouldn't be "lower", would they? (And we'd probably have a civil war by now.)
I mean, I sympathize, I really do, but censorship (in China, here and everywhere) is not that hard to dodge if you're a sufficiently clever speaker. In the words of Curtis Yarvin:
```
Of course, accepting that you are in Rome and when in Rome, you don’t talk garbage about Titus Livius Augustus, certainly compromises your intellectual independence. But how much? If you can’t express an idea within the inevitable restrictions of power (“free speech” is a nice idea, but I am not sure it has ever happened), frankly—are you even the right person to be expressing that idea? Maybe you should just support it silently, and leave the expressing to someone with a little more silver in his tongue.
```
Which complaints here about the *classiness* of populism and why is the reading of classiness on which they are one on which "classiness" isn't just a good thing we want more of?
Love this 🖤
"...they prefer a system where powerful insiders get to play favorites, where success depends on who you know and not what you know, and where good jobs are locked behind gates of correct credentials from the right colleges."
Or the right ideas!
"Point out how DC Democrats passed a law saying all child care workers must have college degrees, and how this is just a blatant attempt to take jobs away from working-class people in order to give them to upper-class people instead."
Who also happen to be suspiciously "Child Free".
> this is just a blatant attempt to take jobs away from working-class people in order to give them to upper-class people instead."
> Who also happen to be suspiciously "Child Free".
Sounds like that problem will solve itself.
> but here in the US class isn't a purely economic concept. Class is also about culture.
This reads oddly. Really, really, REALLY oddly. I would venture that the US is the only country in which any significant group would endorse the idea that class *is* a purely economic concept; anywhere else, you'd just get laughed out of the room for suggesting it.
Heck, I was recently informed that gold jewelry is falling out of fashion in *China* because it is 俗气 ("vulgar").
Plenty of people endorse incorrect ideas.
Yes, I just said that. The point of my comment is that "here in the US" in Scott's sentence is a bizarre qualification; class isn't an economic concept anywhere. It looks like he read something about human society and leapt to the conclusion that it was somehow unique to the US.
I think the US might *like* to think of class in terms of pure economic measure, hence the working-class guy who invents the handy widget and makes millions or even billions out of it can rise to be upper-class, but that's not exactly true. See Hillary Clinton's jibe about loving "real" billionaires as a jab at Trump https://www.npr.org/2016/08/03/488568418/hillary-clinton-uses-billionaire-supporters-to-undermine-donald-trump
Now, what does this jab mean? Well first, to cast doubt on Trump's self-reported wealth, that's he is not really as rich as he claims and so his accounts of success are fake and he can't make America great (again). But also that he's the 'wrong' kind of billionaire, unlike the deep-pocketed donors backing her. That's more than just "how many zeroes in your bank balance", that's ideological and cultural as well.
Gold jewellery being tacky and low-class and vulgar if overdone and if the plebs are wearing it is a universal thing; China catching up to it now because so many new rich people are being created that mere bling isn't enough any more, you have to signal status by how 'tasteful' you are is just China catching up to European and, yes, American mores.
Vulgar ostentation is also condemned in the US, even (or especially because of) tacky reality TV shows celebrate people who made money out of entertainment and are flaunting their wealth in the most tasteless of manners.
read Scott's previous essay for more here
I think the existence of Church of England parsons and impoverished nobility in the upper class of Victorian England and the negative class implication of "he made it in trade," make it clear that class in a relatively traditional society is not defined by wealth, although it correlates with it.
If my paid subscription to Scott Alexander gives this plan *any* extra visibility to the people who could conceivably implement it, it'll be the best money I've ever spent and far more effective than mere tax dollars.
That this article can't help but equate class with economic class (by the use of the term 'working class') is exactly why this won't work. We do need a better terminology than elite, but the word 'class' can't be used unless it gets reclaimed first, which may be a hopeless endeavor.
Marx's merely recognized class as a relationship to the means of production, which is highly simplistic and flawed even in the economic context, but he completely ignored that people value other things than money and seek to gain control over those things.
In the chapter that you linked, Marx defines value as "realised human labour" and sees "money as a measure of value." I see absolutely no recognition that there is value in immaterial things, like culture, love, community, etc.
Marx was a hardcore materialist.
It's rather ironic that you regularly accuse others of misrepresenting Marx, when you obviously do so here.
I think this runs into some problems when you browse republican twitter for mentions of poor black people which tends to try to paint as many black kids as possible as criminal-by-default.
Republicans love the working class and the rural non-working class... but poor urban black people very much do not seem to be their favourite people such that this would seem to require their base change a lot of their own views.
The rural non-working class? Nobody loves tweakers.
Nobody loves the underclass, even though each side has members of the underclass who are more aligned with it than the other side. And both sides often try to group lots of the other side's members into the same bin as their adjacent underclass members--this is why it's fun to caricature Republicans as trailer-dwelling redneck white supremacists.
What you call `upper class' is usually referred to as `middle class', at least in Europe. Upper class comprises (simplifying, since it's a cultural and not an economic concept) people who have enough wealth so that they need not work if they choose not to. All working professionals are middle class and upper middle class. An Ivy League university professor is still a middle class job (not even an upper middle class job). An upper class job is being a CEO. If you ever fly economy class, you are not a member of the upper classes.
That’s all covered in the previous post. I think Scott adjusted the terms to make it accessible to his “target audience” of Republicans.
Truly, there is not a crappy stock photo of a cosmic conciousness sat in the lotus position, chakras perfectly aligned, that can express quite how galaxy-brained this post is.
Let me propose, since other commenters don't seem to be picking up on it, that Scott put the phrase "A Modest Proposal" in the title as an indication that he considers this suggestion unethical.
You might look at his replies to comments in the thread to see how much he actually wants to distance himself from this suggestion.
"Scott Alexander Feb 25
I think many of the things in this post are on the border between "true" and "much more complicated than that but framed in a way that Republicans will appreciate", in a way I sort of feel bad about."
You're right, he seems to have a complicated relationship with it.
So your plan to help the GOP is for them to alienate graduates in an age of ever-expanding tertiary education, make their rich donors uncomfortable, and throw one of the institutions they love (the police) under the bus for being classist? Good luck.
"To alienate graduates in an age of ever-expanding tertiary education"
Democratic Party went hard after graduates. What do I see as the result of that? Poll after poll, story after story, about how the Republicans/Trump score better with "whites who didn't go to college" and conclusions from that about how it's only dumb losers (they couldn't even manage to get into college!) who vote Republican.
Were I living in America, with my background, and I had that "if you didn't go to college you are a dumb loser who's probably also a racist and every other bad name we can throw at you" drummed into me by My Betters, then I'd be angry too. The graduates have had their prejudices cossetted. Let them feel uncomfortable for once, and let someone stick up for "we don't actually think you are a dumb idiot because you got a job instead of four years doing a degree course".
48% of white college graduates voted for Trump in 2020 and 49% did so in 2016 (4% more than those who voted for Clinton). White college graduates are a substantial part of the GOP base, going to war with them will not end well for the Republicans.
I'm pretty sure that this would work, but I don't know, to me it sounds kind of evil, manipulative and populistic...
I read through this thinking "these are some decent descriptions of cleavages within American society, but the labels just seem so off" - teachers are upper class and lumber barons lower class? Ridiculous. Then I realized I hadn't read the Fussell review linked at the top. Looking at that I immediately discovered the issue - this article is using "upper class" to refer to the social / cultural group that Fussell called "middle class."
I guess I can see why if you're pitching this piece to Republicans as a good political strategy you wouldn't want to describe it as "declare war on the middle class!" but for those of us not trying to put things in a maximally friendly to Republicans framing that's probably a better description of this platform.
Nominated for shaggy dog story of the year- so far.