It’s reasonable I think to use Democrat and Republican to refer to beliefs. But yeah, saying that Facebook and Goldman Sachs are Democrat led in the same sense as saying the national lawyers guild or the aclu or the unions are Democrat led is entirely unedifying about the actual decisions the organizations and people within will make
In section II, when discussing how rich Americans might be shifting left: "If this is real and continued, it might bring the US closer to the European mainstream."
Wouldn't that move us *away* from the European mainstream? In Europe, it looks like rich people vote right.
But "right European" is left of "left American". So rich Americans shifting left is moving closer to European center, or put another way rich Americans shifting left is getting closer to European right?
This is a myth. European center right parties would not be “left “ in America. On social issues especially Europeans tend to be more conservative than Americans. More pragmatic might be a better word.
For instance > The CDU applies the principles of Christian democracy and emphasizes the "Christian understanding of humans and their responsibility toward God". ... The CDU's policies derive from political Catholicism, Catholic social teaching and political Protestantism as well as economic liberalism and national conservatism. (Wiki)
CDU is the biggest party in Germany and are center right - I have no clue how much they hold to that but you can imagine that even rhetorically isn’t “left in America” exactly.
Also European multi party system parties just tend to have a variety of different views that may be left or right or neither and it depends on the country.
Universal healthcare and strong union laws (in Europe’s case the employment shit is quite undesirable, imo) and safety nets are not the only left wing policy positions, there are many others, and even those vary a bit.
Europeans as a whole being far more religious than Americans, is an element this article essentially skipped but really limits any apples to apples comparison
The universal health care system in Germany was instituted by the Christian Democrats. The labor protections may go overboard in certain areas, but the end result is management and labor interact as partners in corporate success, as opposed to the U.S. model that generally considers labor just another drain on the bottom line.
From my vague readings of someone on Reddit relaying a second hand read Daily Mail article about a train company or software company or janitor or something, I had believed that labor protections make running a rapidly changing business in Germany sucks
As a European I would say that what constitutes a "social issue" is simply very different. Most EU countries (with very few exceptions, such as Poland (but not Hungary)) are basically irreligious compared to the US (they definitely lack strong lobby groups like evangelical Christians), so the traditional wedge issues of US culture wars such as abortion, gay marriage, school curricula, etc. are simply not part of the mainstream political discourse. American gun culture is also quite unique. In Europe homeschooling is generally illegal, and the vast majority of people have no issue with that. The combination of serious religiousness and individualistic, pro-business predisposition that defines the right wing of US politics is very much outside the Overton window in the rest of the first world.
Yup, there's this fantastic effortpost on the topic. I don't know enough to describe this as a "debunking", but it's a great post arguing against this myth:
I think that's probably true overall, but very much not true on an issue-by-issue basis. Suggesting adopting something like the American healthcare system (or lack thereof) would, rightly, get you laughed out of town in just about any country in Europe, but there are plenty of countries with e.g. more homophobia per capita and more anti-gay laws than America.
The description is quite old. It could have been true during Carter / Reagan era, maybe until Bush era too. Europe used to have genuine not insignificant socialist and communist parties, pulling center parties to left.
There is also a tendency to view the US as something it is not. When I was 9 years old, I thought the US had only libraries with entry fees. At the time, some leftists politicians were vocally defending our libraries. Unrelated, they and all the adult people in newspapers were sneering at the horribly right-wing capitalist US.
And that kind of attitude is not limited to children. My high school history teacher described the US as the most liberterian state experiment that could possibly function without outright collapse. I think he genuinely was not aware about the US unemployment insurance systems, and I am uncertain what he knew about the much-talked social security.
I doubt even over all. Depends on how you define right - left. On econ yes most of Europe is just as hopelessly neoliberal as the us with a few exceptions like labor unions, but on social issues I'd say you are correct.
I posted a series of propositions a bit down thread. I'd appreciate you (or anyone who agrees with you) answering them. I really don't understand this impression that the US is especially right wing comes from.
Europe is generally to the left of the US on economic issues, but definitely not on identity politics issues (race, gender, sexual orientation, immigration). It's primarily the latter axis on which the American elite is moving leftward, not the former.
I believe that on abortion, which is one of the major tribal issues in the US, most of Europe is to the right of the US, although not as far as the American right. Typically early abortion is entirely legal, late term restricted.
On healthcare, Americans tend to imagine that the UK system is the norm in Europe but it isn't. My understanding is that most of the European countries have mixed systems with a substantial private sector. Even before Obama, about half of all healthcare expenditure in the US was by government and the rest regulated in various ways, so I'm not sure that the systems in European countries have a larger government role, as opposed to a different government role.
Most European governments have universal healthcare, which means that the government is committed to funding every citizen’s access to medical care using tax revenues. Some employ the private sector and personal health insurance as tools to get there, but in all cases this is a government objective with a large government spending component.
It's important to note that they can afford this due to a lack of defense spending. If America reduced its defense spending to European levels, we could afford so many nice things for ourselves. Free college, end homelessness permanently, pay off the debts of every American making less than $100,000 a year, a border wall 100 feet tall, and a pony.
But no. Instead, we pay a ruinous cost for Europe's defense and in return we get scorn and ingratitude for our enormous contributions to European peace for the last 80 years, the longest peace they had in a thousand years.
The idea that Europeans can spend more on health than Americans, because they spend less on defence, is simply false, because Europeans spend a lower proportion of GDP on healthcare than Americans (c. 10% to c.18% -- figures from gapminder).
The US system is both incredibly expensive, and fails to produce good health outcomes.
Anecdotally, I get fantastic health outcomes from the pre-selected providers I get to choose from. Yes, it is expensive, but it returned mobility and a better life to me; tangentially, it saved my son's life. Selfishly speaking, I'm perfectly satisfied with the system as it has worked for us. It has also kept many friends gainfully employed of which I'm also happy about. YMMV
You can’t ignore the fact that European health systems, like the rest of the globe, piggy back on the amazing medical breakthroughs that are made here in America where research is heavily subsidized both by the government and the public. It’s highly expensive, inefficient, but also quite remarkable. However for every one success there are hundreds if not thousands of failures that Americans pay for both through our taxes and as the primary market where biopharmaceutical companies can charge at the highest price points since they’re negotiating not with a single government entity but multiple private insurers. The price point set here determines what overseas governments are willing to pay, which is often as little as a tenth the price here. And worse, countries like India and China benefit the greatest thru Lax IP laws and IP theft. They’ll often just synthesize the same drug that took J&J or Pfizer hundreds of millions to discover for free.
I bet you can’t name one major medical breakthrough in the last 25 years that the US or a US company had no involvement in.
Better Intl IP enforcement and cost-sharing by western countries would reduce the burden put on the American taxpayers and patients for the cost of the same treatments in Europe.
That depends on what you mean by "being on the right". Yes, in France, say, abortion on demand is available only during the first 12 weeks after conception. At the same time, it is easily available, state-funded, non-stigmatized (I was taking a shortcut through a leafy suburban hospital the other day, and there was an arrow with "maternal health, IVG [= voluntary early-term abortion], etc." clearly marked) and uncontroversial in mainstream society - Simone Veil, the politician who introduced the law legalizing IVG became a national hero. After 12 weeks, abortion is available only for medical reasons, but that includes, say, Down syndrome (96% of all detected cases of trisomy 21 result in abortion); that, again, is uncontroversial outside narrow circles. (The spectacle of Ohio banning second-trimester abortion in cases of Down syndrome was stunning to me: isn't that one of the main reasons why a sensible, responsible person would abort in the second trimester?)
What the US has arguably had since Roe vs. Wade is a legal framework that is more permissive in theory than that in France, while having a population whose average attitudes towards abortion are far more regressive. That does make for a stable equilibrium. Didn't RBG comment on that, expressing some regrets that abortion hadn't been legalized more gradually - possibly by the Supreme Court, but following a different route?
>>>isn't that one of the main reasons why a sensible, responsible person would abort in the second trimester?
...occasionally it's good to hear other people actually say this out loud.
I mean, *no* a sensible, responsible, ethical, *sane* person would not kill another just to make their own life easier, especially when it wasn't that other person's fault.
I do allow for stress and despair creating temporary madness - as when a person driving a car strikes a pedestrian accidently and drives off in a panic. I get that. Humans can do horrible things under stress.
But there is no reason to legalize hit-and-runs.
And yes, RBG did express strong reservations about the quality of the RoevWade decision (most everyone says it was bad law, even those who support the outcome.)
So you are basically saying that all of Europe is not sane?
Second trimester is not viable outside of the womb, what about the other life that is created when the couple potentially tries again? Does it not have a right to life?
As I said, in France, a distinction is made between IVG (abortion on demand by the woman, within the first three months) and IMG (abortion for medical reasons, *including the certainty or probability that the eventual child be born with a serious, incurable condition*, such as Down syndrome: https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F1101). Both are legal and funded by the public health system. To me, the notion of "trying again" is entirely sensible, and part of the justification for IMG; I've only heard it decried (as "indecent") in the US, including by some people who believe that abortion should remain legal for reasons of bodily autonomy.
What is true is that viability is not the deciding criterion in Europe, or for that matter in any country other than the US that I know.
A person with Downs is not in pain or misery. Many of them live decades - limited in scope and ability, yes, but still alive, still *people*. Killing such a person for no other reason than ones self interest is murder.
And it is not rational to weigh possible potential lives over the certainty of the life here at hand. More than that - it is a false choice, because it implies that bearing a live Downs child means no more children. The parents are able to try again after the birth of the first child, not just after it's death by abortion.
Scott, big fan, and I appreciate the response. You write in the caption:
"Hanania uses this graphic to show that Democrats donate more than Republicans. But it's also worth noting that top Democratic donor groups include professors, educators, and nonprofit employees, and top Republican donor groups include (*squints really hard*) homemakers, welders, and disabled people. Which coalition do *you* expect to end up with more power?"
That's actually part of the theory, probably more important than the other stuff about donating money, etc. People aren't randomly assigned to careers, they can decide what tradeoffs they make when they select what field to go into. Liberals tend to do the stuff where you get more prestige/status/influence than money, conservatives the opposite. Journalism and academia are the clearest examples of this.
Most welders I've known have made more money than grad students I've known, and lived in more affordable areas. The grad students chose one career, and the welders another for a reason.
Yeah, the odds are not good for your average grad student to ever actually become a professor. Plus with 4 years of college, then 5-8 years of grad school, you're forgoing a lot of income. Point is most grad students are not making the financially best decision, because they want status and influence.
Maybe anecdotal evidence, but all the failed grad students I know ended up in management consulting, start-ups, NGOs or politics. All of them are paid pretty well- certainly better than welders.
I was curious about the same thing (n.b. I got a PhD and then immediately left academia for a consulting career) and as it turns out the National Science Foundation has some really detailed data related to that here: https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20198/data#supplemental-tables
(Table S3-6) Across all of Science and Engineering doctorate holders Education (4 year+2 year) is still the largest sector with 43.2% but only barely ahead of Business and Industry (excluding non-profits) at 42.1%. And looking at median income after graduation (S3-12) this makes a lot of financial sense, with the Business folk pulling down $104K/year over $60K/year they'd have if they stayed in the academy.
I don't think anyone goes into grad school to get rich, but once you're out it's not unlikely.
Note: All data is from 2017; This covers primarily STEM fields so not your poor humanity grad students starving in garrets, they're probably at least as screwed as you would expect.
Your anecdotal evidence might be really biased here - did you meet those people before or after they dropped out? The ones you met after they dropped out are selected to be the sorts of people you run into - all my grad school coworkers have great jobs, but that's pure selection effect.
What college(s) did they go to? I thought those careers (if we substitute "founded a company" for "joined a startup") were mostly restricted to graduates of elite universities.
A lot of grad students are getting masters degrees, which often take 1-3 years, so not as big a loss of income. My PhD (in engineering) took 4 years, and although I probably get paid more than I would have without it, that's almost certainly not enough to make up for the years I was on a grad school stipend. I did it more to end up with an interesting job, not so much an influential one, but status/influence might have been a factor too.
Part of the problem with a career as a welder is that there's not a ton of opportunity for advancement. Maybe you could end up supervising welders. But in general, after the first few years, your skills don't provide steadily more value as you gain experience.
Status, maybe. I went for a PhD and exited through the master's side door. The main reason I tried it in the first place was that I'd had internships and didn't care for working for a living. When I found that working towards a PhD was a lot of work for crappy pay, I figured if I was going to have to work anyway I might as well get paid well.
Anecdata and all that, but, I'm not sure you have grad students modeled well.
Do people really go to grad school for "status and influence"? I have been a college professor for a few years, and I don't consider myself particularly high status, and I certainly do not have any influence on anything. Which is ok, because I do not care at all for either of those things.
The odds are not good for your average grad student ever having wanted to become a professor in the first place. That's a cliche limited to a narrow subset of postgraduate education, and the large majority of grad students with other ambitions are much more likely to achieve them.
`Journalism and academia are the clearest examples of this`. Don't the people in those fields who get ACTUAL prestige/status/influence as opposed to the aspirational kind form tiny super-elite? It seems like there are at most a few dozen and certainly fewer than 100 journalists who actually have leverage over opinion, and absolutely everyone else is at best making 45K a year and working at buzzfeed, or perhaps now, substack.
I don't think that really explains the data. Harvard students already skew extremely Democratic before they choose jobs (source: I'm sure this is true, but I'm not going to bother proving it unless you disagree). Any job that disproportionately selects its candidates from the elite is already fated to be liberal regardless of Democrats caring more about politics or not.
So I reject the idea that "any elite" will be liberal. If you gave IQ tests or had an oligarchy of business titans, it would be more evenly spit. We're just ruled by journalists and academics (at least on cultural issues), and those are the people who chose power and intellectual status over money.
This doesn't quite address Scott's point. He's not saying that elites are innately liberal. Just that the elite institutions that newspapers hire from are all liberal. The filtering still isn't happening at the level of job-selection, but upstream of that at the level of college admissions.
Ultimately, both Scott-theory and Richard-theory are consistent with the empirical evidence. I still think there's a real difference here though.
I think we can reduce the disagreement to a counterfactual. According to Scott-theory, if newspapers decided to start hiring from Liberty University and the Clairemont Institute you'd see a right-wing slant to cultural institutions. According to Richard-theory, you would see passionate leftists slowly but surely take over Liberty U and Clairemont. These both seems plausible, so I'm not sure who's more persuasive.
I like the idea of reducing the disagreement to a counterfactual. But is that the point of Scott's theory? If it's just a matter of Harvard and newspapers are gatekeepers, we agree on that. But I think his theory is more universal, and that's why he's talking about different countries, because he seems to think there's some kind of law where elites will always be liberal, or at least will be liberal in modern societies some reason. So the newspapers and universities would never give control to Liberty University, for whatever reason, or Liberty grads would always get outcompeted or something.
I mean, why hasn't, in the past 40 years w/ half the population as an audience, a strong right-leaning paper or TV news station advanced beyond tabloid news and right-wing talk radio?
There should be an audience for basically, a version of CBS or NPR that's right-coded, but what you actually get is Fox News, Daily Caller, and right-wing radio.
The reality, is bluntly, you're right that liberals are willing to have worse lives financially to push through what they believe in, while conservatives want the nice house in the suburbs.
Fox News is the version of CBS that's right coded.
If you want right coded NPR, check out the podcast Morning Wire. It's a 15 minute daily news podcast that is definitely chasing the "NPR but right coded" aesthetic. As a conservative who has listened to a lot of NPR I was surprised how well they've done it.
There’s a theory here in the U.K. that everything seems polarised because lots of Centre-right content is hidden behind a paywall. Whereas most left with publishers are free to read and work off ads/donations and then more reactionary papers are free with ads.
So the guardian and observer are left wing and get read lots and the Daily Mail is very right wing and gets read lots, but the centre-right papers like Telegraph and Times, but don’t reach as many people and therefore don’t have such an impact on wider debate, particularly online. So the whole system feels very polarised.
I'd maybe point to First Things. Which also highlights something that's not really covered in this post -- religion is part of the answer here. Conservatives who are more "principles-oriented" are likely to be religious, and thus to focus on advancing Christianity over conservatism per se.
Mainstream conservativism is pretty dang lacking in intellectual energy (and I say this as a rightist). Most of the right's intellectual energy runs contrary to mainstream conservativism, whether it ends up in TradCath/Calvinist/Orthodox quarters, or various other Dissident Right quarters. This is not true on the left -- there are intelligent contrarian leftists, but also plenty of intelligent mainstream leftists.
I think a better question is still why are Harvard and the like liberal? After all, generations back they were bastions of Puritan orthodoxy. Yet, somehow, the institution founded by the Puritans in 1639 to maintain Calvinistic rigor had been captured by liberal elements sufficiently that the orthodox Congregationalists founded a new university to maintain Calvinistic Orthodoxy in 1701. This was known as Yale University. Yale, in turn, began to go liberal within a generation and had the first of many fights to restore Calvinistic orthodoxy in the student body and faculty. Eventually, the conservatives lost their last redoubt at Yale (the seminary) in the early 20th century when the remaining conservatives decamped to found Westminster Seminary rather than serve under explicitly liberal administration.
Quite frankly, I expect Liberty U and Clairemont to start going liberal any time. Liberty has nothing on Harvard or Yale in terms their old conservatism, nor the gap between their norms and those of the liberals at elite institutions now (certainly nothing like between the Mathers and the Unitarians).
Nor is the process terribly unique to the US. The Church of Scotland had a bunch of liberal patrons seeking to remake the place in 1843. The conservative evangelicals walked out with a third of Scottish church membership and founded their own denomination complete with multiple schools of higher education (New College in Edinburgh, Christ's College in Aberdeen, and Trinity College in Glasgow). Within a generation the colleges were going liberal. By the early 20th century, the Free Church was reuniting with established Scottish Church on decidedly non-conservative grounds. Similar patterns played out in the Netherlands where the conservatives founded a new denomination and university (Free University of Amsterdam).
The cycle of liberals taking over explicitly conservative organizations, often ones founded explicitly to preserve some grand old ideal, is centuries long at this point. The times when conservatives take over old institutions (rather than just founding their own new ones) are exceedingly rare.
The best examples of Conquest's Second Law are probably foundations like those founded by Ford & MacArthur winding up with politics completely opposed to their founders. The John M. Olin foundation was required to dispense all of its endowment within a certain period of time to avoid that.
> [Scott] seems to think there's some kind of law where elites will always be liberal, or at least will be liberal in modern societies for some reason.
Hi Richard, thank you for engaging in this discussion. Yes precisely, there is "some kind of law"-- it's Darwinian social signaling for selfish benefit. The display of "unconditional empathy for [various disadvantaged groups]" has achieved bandwagon status; witness suddenly-woke corporate America.
At the same time, we're also observing classic handicap-principle "costly signaling", wherein individuals demonstrate high fitness by taking a robust public stance against the liberal orthodoxy, *without* getting cancelled. Per theory, we should see these rebels being awarded higher status, for beating the steep odds.
It sounds like you might fall into this category. Another success story is comedian Ryan Long, he's very clever and fearless. Ryan commented with a smile on Mikhalia Peterson's podcast that "there's a huge reward right now for saying, you know, 'the truth'.. There's also a huge cost to it." QED ;)
One example of an elite that is not particularly liberal: Federal judges, who despite almost definitionally having a postgraduate degree, are split about 50-50 in their partisan makeup because there's a filtration mechanism in the form of the President and Senate, which regularly flip from one party to another. Moreover, this effect began in the 80s and really took on steam in the 90s, when the GOP started getting serious about appointing judges they viewed as ideologically reliable (with, at least at first, mixed success).
I don't think anyone would suggest that as a result legal culture reflects a down-the-middle viewpoint, but it's certainly true that since this phenomenon began conservative ideas like textualism are taken far more seriously (by both liberals and conservatives, both in the academy and in practice) than they were in the 60s and 70s. Elite law schools like Harvard under Elena Kagan make attempts to hire prominent conservatives, conservative ideas aren't dismissed out of hand, etc.
I suspect the openess to conservatism at law schools is not long for this world. Deans and professors of the mold of an Elena Kagan have given way to a far more censorious bunch
They do want their graduates to get clerkships and such with conservative judges, so they might very well keep a few token conservatives around since those can help facilitate good placements that the school can brag about. Though perhaps after Kavanaugh, that kind of bipartisan support for more elite influence might be over (see the recent underhanded campaign to remove Chua at Yale).
This situation is the target of much derision on the left as they claim the clerkships being generally politically equal results in affirmative action for otherwise underqualified conservative law students. If this is the case though, you'd think that you might see many more talented conservative students choosing law as a profession to take advantage of that, but that doesn't seem to be happening (though I'd love to see statistics on this).
It should be noted that Presidential appointment alone wouldn't be enough for that level of filtering. The bureaucracy is Dem leaning enough that Dem presidents can just appoint Dems, whereas Reps will appoint more of a mix. And when there's a misalignment between the head of a bureaucracy and the President, costs go up as the former slow-walks any initiative.
"those are the people who chose power and intellectual status over money."
This strikes me as a) based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how those people's psychology works and b) unfairly perjorative.
I think it's much more accurate to say that those are mostly people who chose intellectual /fulfilment/ over either money or status - which tend to be closely linked.
But people who chose family and religion can also be choosing fulfillment. They just don't get it through politics or activism. So I think the idea that they seek power and influence makes sense and separates them from conservatives, although we can describe it however we want.
Fulfilment, absolutely - lots of people find different things fulfilling, but not /intellectual/ fulfilment.
The thing that I think specifically characterises a lot of the people you're describing is that in order to feel fulfilled they need jobs that provide a particular flavour of intellectual challenge.
I think you're wrong to present the minority of blue-tribe types who end up in the rare jobs like journalism or politics that do offer some modicum of political influence as significantly different from the larger number who take up other white-collar jobs that don't, but that do have other things in common, and that makes me fairly confident that "desire for power" is not a core part of the motivation; the common factor is that they are (disproportionately likely to be, although very much not always) people for whom family and religion alone are not enough to make them feel fulfilled without (a particular type of often academics-flavoured) intellectual stimulation.
Or who just identifies differently at different points in life. I variously call myself a librarian (among the deepest blue dots) and a homemaker (the reddest dot of all). If you ask my family, they’ll tell you I’m absurdly liberal. If you ask my friends, I’m almost dangerously right-wing. Although maybe all this lines up perfectly with my personally perceived deep centrism?
I think there are lot more reasons beyond politics and activism that liberals seek fulfillment as jounalists or academics rather than welders. To put it bluntly, one of those jobs is physically demanding and intelectually unchalenging.
Hm, I wouldn't say that it's pejorative. I've heard multiple college professors say basically that -- they could have made a lot more money in industry, but there are a lot of other benefits to being a professor. Influence and prestige are surely among them, though it's perhaps slightly gauche to call it out explicitly.
I think a lot of people like to say they could have made more money if they'd done so-and-so, but they chose their profession out of a self-flagellating desire to help society or the downtrodden. That's a lot more appealing than saying "I didn't really know how to get a fancy finance job or run a business but I was qualified to be a social worker" or whatever.
That sounded mean, I think it's great to be a social worker or a professor. Just, you know, people tell their life stories in a way that makes them look good.
Lots of people say that, but in the case of most college professors it's just screamingly obvious that they could make more in the private sector. That said, college professors are a very, very small percentage of the population so maybe we should avoid generalizing from them.
I'm a former academic who sold out and went into industry for more money.
I thought that the thing I'd miss the most was the opportunity to do intellectually satisfying work. But in practice it turns out that what I really miss is having an impressive-sounding answer to the question "So what do you do?" at parties.
That's an upsettingly honest comment! It rings true though. My only regret about bailing out of my PhD is that I'm not Dr Aspden. I used to think that "Mr" was a sort of provisional title that you had until you'd proved you weren't an idiot.
Look at how academics present themselves in literary fiction. It’s remarkably heavy on the pettiness of academic life and the joys of chasing students, and remarkably light on the respect provided by the rest of society…
This is enough of a cliche that it’s hard not to see something real there.
I think that one is probably a generational thing, in that I don't think chasing students (romantically, I presume) is permitted at all these days. Pettiness and office politics abound though, that part is definitely real. As to respect form society, the words are there, but society hasn't put its money where its mouth is, neither literally nor metaphorically - people would rather listen to celebrities than experts.
Part of the benefit of being a professor, or a schoolteacher, is that you spend a lot of time as the highest status person in the room, and humans like status.
I think part of the reason these comments are allow over the place is that multiple different "academia's" are being conflated.
I think the goals and worldviews of STEM academia (and this splits even within STEM) are very different from those of professional school academia, and those again from humanities/liberal arts academia.
Then we have the completely different dimension of top tier academia (the small minority who manage to acquire tenure at any Ivy or equivalent) vs bulk academia working at "never heard of it College"...
This is an empirical question. And the data say Republicans are happier than Democrats.
Now that’s not exactly the same thing as “intellectual fulfillment” but it’s close enough that I don’t find your argument convincing. That may be what people tell themselves, but it’s not the elephant in the mind.
Or maybe because liberals have higher neuroticism they're more motivated to find a job that makes them happy, whereas conservatives are just happier no matter what their job is? I think I might be wading into just-so story territory with this one
That's an important point. Claiming that liberals chose their careers in order to get more power is similar to claiming that people support conservative policies because they are racists. It begs the consequences instead of finding inner structure in the decision making process.
>If elites are selected through a subjective process by left wing college admissions officers, of course Harvard students will be liberal.
Find a control sample to check the hypothesis. Are universities viewed similarly left-wing in culturally similar countries with more objective admissions process?
On the UK yes, but not to the same extent as in the US. Certainly you don't get conservative academics hounded out of their jobs although many do not publicise their political views particularly probably due to normal social pressures. Notably though the leadership of many UK universities is less 'liberal' than in the US, and other than the trans-radical feminist arguments 'woke' issues are not a major flashpoint in university communities.
Our government, with its newly-formed coalition of the non-elite and the wealthy, has also made it clear that it won't tolerate intellectual hegemony being imposed in universities. This is probably overreach at least for the good universities, but as the opposition are sensibly not opposing this too much (they recognise their coalition of urban elites and (for the moment) ethnic communities can't win an election without outreach) it seems that this is policy for a while.
You do get that in the UK. See Noah Carl for a recent example. And UK academics are frequently very left wing. The makeup of SAGE should be a good hint of this; one of them is a literal member of the communist party.
I'd not seen the Carl case, but note that whilst this clearly looks politically motivated, the actual accusations are not wrong think but misuse of data. Do we have examples of people not violating academic norms being chased out? I suspect mind you this wouldn't have happened say to a communist...
And talking of Communists, Susan Michie is not a member of SAGE, but the self-appointed left-wing group Alternative SAGE, who are activists not government-appointed advisors. Sure, academics skew strongly left, but in the UK the culture is not that totalitarian left.
If rejecting people for Farming and ROTC is discrimination against conservatives then I am sure the people they rejected for majoring in underwater basket weaving could also claim they had their liberalism discriminated against. What a ridiculous article.
The issue isn't people who majored in farming or ROTC but high school applicants to elite schools whose admissions chance was lowered not by what they hadn't done but by what they had. The relevant analogy would be a student who had been active in anti-war activities and was less likely to be admitted as a result. You would not find that disturbing as evidence of political discrimination?
Schools generally take participation in clubs, especially in a leadership role, not as a substitute for academic accomplishment but as an additional plus. The evidence offered is that if the clubs are ones that correlate with conservative political or culture, it is treated as a minus.
"Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student’s chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis."
Frankly I have my doubts about whether all other things were considered in this analysis... I went to a very liberal elite college and later learned that a military-school background was a big part of the reason I was admitted--the admissions people thought it added diversity to the student body.
Except that those items don't show up on your transcript. You had to alert them to them yourself in a cover letter or essay. I am not at all convinced that those items are detrimental but if you are then it behoves you not to trumpet them.
A poor city kid who makes it through high school and feeds his family by selling weed but never does drugs is admirable in my book. I don't think it would serve him well to include that in his college application.
It's not about conservative or liberal. It's about being able to message that you are akin to your future classmates and likely to succeed in the institution. (Much like interviewing for a job)
if the position you have to message is "I am blue tribe", regardless of whether you actually are, then that is precisely the discrimination we're discussing.
Club leadership roles are frequently on a CV, not necessarily called out in an essay, and controlled experiments for this sort of thing will either have that line item removed for the control or flip it to a Democrat equivalent, while literally leaving all other terms the same. (Thinking of an experiment I read where the relevant item was volunteering for the local branch of the political party)
Harvard prospects have spent the better part of their lives paying very close attention to what their teachers tell them. These (poorly-paid) teachers are overwhelmingly left wing. They are like this either because of Richard's theory of left-wingers prioritizing activism or because a strange force compels "intellectual" types to be left wing (I am not trying to demean alternatives to Hanania's idea; scenario B is as plausible as scenario A).
Ultimately, both theories are mostly compatible, but Richard's focus is novel in a way the Picketty/Scott analysis isn't. This makes it more illuminating.
I expect the coalition who gets more votes to end up with more political power.
The other significant Republican donors are military/first responders. Those jobs have power and prestige in their respective communities.
Isn’t the better explanation that liberals took control of academia and academia feeds all of professional society? Sorta like how conservatives created the Federalist Society to influence lawyers and now control the Supreme Court. It all feels much more path dependent than baked in attributes.
Federalist Society is not an example of what you're describing. R's control the supreme court because rural areas are overrepresented in our political system plus their judges retire more strategically. Federalist Society hasn't shifted most lawyers right, it just gives a clear signal to elected Republicans who to appoint.
Well yes, but that's what liberal means in US politics today. Language changes. You're better off saying they are not classic liberals unless you we attempting a gotcha.
I believe the distinction between Leftism and Liberalism is an important one to preserve. (Crazy that so many came to conflate the two - even as Communism served as the West's global foe). In fact, I'd say it's increasingly important, given current trends in the American Left. Also, "Classical Liberal" seems to mean something closer to "Libertarian", with an implied support for economically-hands-off-government that I don't think is universal to "Liberalism".
The old meaning of "Liberal" is close to modern libertarianism, although not identical. To some extent it keeps that meaning outside the US. The modern US meaning is very different, what I describe as democratic socialism in dilute acqueous solution, but includes respect for at least non-economic liberty — the ACLU of twenty years ago. That meaning now covers only part of the American left, with the other part commonly self-describing as progressives, having stronger versions of some of the views but rejecting the part that supported free speech and related ideas as important values. Hence there is a (modern) liberal vs progressive conflict within the left as well as a left vs right conflict.
Part of that intra-left conflict is fighting over the term "progressive" itself. The word has a positive connotation for most people on the left, so you end up with everyone from Joe Biden to Pete Buttigieg to Bernie Sanders to Robin DiAngelo calling themselves progressive. To some, the race/identity issues define progressivism, and to others (myself included), it's defined by reforms that put an emphasis on class/wealth. Those in the former camp ("the woke") might be said to reject free speech, but not so much the latter. Conservatives seem to have a tendency to just lump all those people together, then write off the whole bunch by pointing out how inane and illiberal the woke stuff is.
I’m wondering if you’re familiar with The Prince, because parts of what you wrote felt very similar to Machiavelli’s formulations in chapter 9. Specifically this:
“To steelman the populist position, democracy does not reflect the will of the citizenry, it reflects the will of an activist class, which is not representative of the general population. Populists, in order to bring institutions more in line with what the majority of the people want, need to rely on a more centralized and heavy-handed government. The strongman is liberation from elites, who aren’t the best citizens, but those with the most desire to control people’s lives, often to enforce their idiosyncratic belief system on the rest of the public, and also a liberation from having to become like elites in order to fight them, so conservatives don’t have to give up on things like hobbies and starting families and devote their lives to activism.”
Kinda rhymes with this:
“ But coming to the other point—where a leading citizen becomes the prince of his country, not by wickedness or any intolerable violence, but by the favour of his fellow citizens—this may be called a civil principality: nor is genius or fortune altogether necessary to attain to it, but rather a happy shrewdness. I say then that such a principality is obtained either by the favour of the people or by the favour of the nobles. Because in all cities these two distinct parties are found, and from this it arises that the people do not wish to be ruled nor oppressed by the nobles, and the nobles wish to rule and oppress the people; and from these two opposite desires there arises in cities one of three results, either a principality, self-government, or anarchy.
A principality is created either by the people or by the nobles, accordingly as one or other of them has the opportunity; for the nobles, seeing they cannot withstand the people, begin to cry up the reputation of one of themselves, and they make him a prince, so that under his shadow they can give vent to their ambitions. The people, finding they cannot resist the nobles, also cry up the reputation of one of themselves, and make him a prince so as to be defended by his authority.”
It reminded me of a similar ideas in a dialogue between two conservative ancient greeks about the problems of democracy. There they were claiming that demos doesn't know what it want, consist of the worst people in the city-state, and can't distinguish good policy from a bad one, supporting just the things that sounds good. Therefore monarchy would be much better. It's funny how the justifications are kind of opposite, but nevertheless the conclusion is the same: conservative dictatorship.
Such things make me really suspicious about concervatives who are totally against strong goverment but have to support dictatorship nevertheless as the lesser of two evils. I want to be charitable and not assume other people believes for them but I still can't figure out how to pass the ideological turing test.
Conservatives supported strong authoritarian regimes throughout the history. And this talk about anti big goverment seems specifically US thing, conviniently where libertarian sentiments are somewhat strong, so republicans are trying to unite both pro-strong-man-dictatorship voters and libertarian ones under one roof. This makes all the sense from political point of view. But I can't understand it as a coherent position in ones mind.
I agree that "people aren't randomly assigned to careers", but they are randomly assigned, by the social milieu of their birth and upbringing, a strong disposition towards going into one or the other direction. It's not completely random, but it's not governed entirely by some a priori rational choice.
I don't have a substantive comment on this beyond saying that "Whiteshift" by Kaufmann touches on many of these issues (not so much institutional tilt but growing educational polarization in politics) in the context of trying to explain Brexit and Trump, and is truly excellent.
I think it is hard to discuss this without mentioning the two-party system, which itself is a biproduct of electoral college and first past the post voting. Saying something like "Given that there are approximately equal numbers of Trump voters and Biden voters in elections" just isn't really true in that context. The Republican candidate has lost the popular vote is all but 1 of the past 8 elections. What is happening a smaller coalition of voters with higher voting power (conservatives in states with smaller population) reach an equilibrium with the opposite coalition of voters with less voting power (liberals in high population states) so that the end result is closer to a coin toss, but the actual population split isn't. The overall population thus skews left of center while these factors exist.
No, because polling indicates responses to parties that are strategizing on the basis of the system that exists, not some ideal philosophical view of the parties. So the neglect of the big blue states by Republicans is reflected in the polls as well as the popular vote.
That's a little bit true but mostly not, because the parties (and related media/activists/whatever) aren't just focused on winning the electoral college. They care just as much about winning congressional and senate seats, state legislatures, governors, and even local offices and judges. So when you look at, like, party registration in New York, it's based heavily on demographics. Lots of upstate districts are Republican because they're rural, etc. I could imagine the numbers changing a little if Republican presidential candidates visited more often, but it's not like there are a lot of democrats-by-default who've never heard a conservative speak.
Can of worms here, but there are path-dependent cultural and historical reasons for our differences besides the obvious superiority of our unapologetically FPTP Westminster parliament.
That's still 2.86 million votes. Given the imprecision of the electoral college, that really is a coin toss. But it's nowhere near a coin toss for "Clinton had a plurality of voters," even if you gained or lost a number of voters at the margin (e.g. reroll the election with different weather).
That's just president, though. The split is much more evident in other elections. Democratic candidates for US Senate in 2018 won 12 million more votes than Republican candidates, for instance, yet Republican candidates won more seats.
The question of why generally Democrat-leaning voters seem to not vote for the Democratic presidential candidate is an interesting question, though. I'm so cynical about the whole process that I don't even bother to vote most of the time, but I do remember in 2004 voting for Bush just because I lived in California and knew it wasn't going to make a different either way. I definitely don't want to speculate that a sizable number of voters in non-swing states are just shit-voting out of frustration, but you never know.
California has a “jungle primary” system - all primary candidates of both parties run in the same contest and the top two vote getters compete in the general election, regardless of party. So California senate contests are often Democrat vs Democrat.
There’s nothing especially wrong with that as an electoral system, but it does mean that tallying up nationwide senate votes is going to be misleading as the state with the largest number of Republican voters doesn’t count for a single Republican Senate vote.
We just adopted RCV where I live and it’s beyond unintuitive. I don’t understand why people think this is somehow a panacea for our electoral process when our current problems are mostly around transparency.
~11% of ballots cast in RCV elections were spoiled. That’s a lot of people who didn’t understand how to fill out the ballot.
There’s also been cases of the candidate receiving the most votes but losing. I doubt anyone could look at a table of raw RCV results and intuitively know who the winner is. People find that unintuitive.
People watch and vote on reality shows where contestants are eliminated one at a time, and if their preferred one gets eliminated, they vote among the rest, right? And they don't have much trouble understanding it. I don't think it's complicated, but it has to be presented in an intuitive way, and any change requires a bit of time to sink in.
The link doesn't mention anything about ~11% of ballots being spoiled. It does say IRV "exhausts more than 10 percent of ballots", which is, er, not a real problem. Plurality voting usually exhausts more than 50% of ballots, after all.
That said, I do agree that IRV is a really lousy way of doing ranked voting. I'd much prefer Ranked Pairs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_pairs . The Ranked Pairs method respects every majority, and if there are conflicting majorities it respects the largest majorities. And it has a variety of nice properties your link raised as important such as monotonicity and avoiding spoiled ballots (by allowing ties and skipped ranks).
Score voting is just like giving stars to different hotels or restaurants, whomever gets the most stars wins. Pretty simple.
Though if you want an even simpeler voting system that also doesn't have the problems of FPTP you can try approval voting. Instead of saying who your one favorite candidate is, you say which candidates you approve of. Whomever gets the most approvals wins.
The voting reform advocates have promising ideas with the best of intentions.
I think it’s worth reflecting on whether all their effort has been worth the squeeze. Or maybe we should spend time on other forms of electoral reform like redistricting.
I’m supportive of municipalities running experiments and seeing how it goes. Just not where I live :) There's just a lot more obvious stuff to work on.
That's a little bit like a whataboutism. Electoral reform bills don't come along very often, so I would argue that we should try to squeeze as much utility out of them as possible. When the bill improves one aspect of the election, why not use that opportunity to improve other aspects too? It's not like we can/should only work on one thing at a time.
It’s more like, all the smartest people said RCV was going to solve all these problems so it’s worth reflecting on why it hasn’t done that instead of coming up with new social science projects to foist on the electorate.
Reform bills happen more frequently at the local level. I’m happy for people to experiment with it. Start small with the well intended, clever ideas.
Frankly, voting systems seem more like a pet project for math-y types than a bona fide effort to accomplish a goal. And what’s the goal again? The goal posts move a lot.
> I think it is hard to discuss this without mentioning the two-party system, which itself is a biproduct of electoral college and first past the post voting
Disagree; Australia has preferential (instant runoff) voting, and nothing resembling an electoral college, and still has (effectively) a two party system. Two parties is a stable equilibrium under a lot of conditions.
I don’t think it’s quite accurate to say Australia has nothing resembling an electoral college.
Just like in the US, we don’t directly vote for the National leader but for people (or electors) who will choose the national leader. It’s likewise possible for “Electors who promise to elect X as leader” to receive fewer votes overall but win the election, as happened in 1998.
It’s just that our “electors” are also parliamentarians with actual legislative power.
Is Australia really an effectively two party system? It is in the lower house that selects the government, but the Senate looks much more like a multi-party system.
It pretty much is. The ruling party needs to get enough crossbench votes to get their legislation through the Senate, so there’s a bit of negotiation. But the agenda is still set by the ruling party. They always have the numbers in the lower house so nothing can happen without their support.
I don’t agree with this. The reason America has such a dominant two party system is because the parties are very decentralised and individuals within the parties have a lot of freedom to adopt their own personal policy views.
This means that West Virginia can have a Joe Manchin while NYC gets a AOC and they can coexist in the same party and neither has the power to force the other out.
Whereas in parties with more central control, you get more consistency in publicly expressed views, which mean that individuals may not be as well suited to their own particular electorate, which creates an opportunity for competitors.
So you see situations like the UK where there is first past the post voting and elections are won by parliamentary majority which is pretty analogous to the electoral college, and yet the two party system is much weaker.
Yes, the two-party system is important. And when D FDR ran as a frugal States Rights D in 1932, won, fired 200k federal workers appointed by the spendy centralizer R Hoover, then did a 180 and hired 500k federal workers by 1936 while spending the country into massive debt, well, that changed things. Between D FDR, D JFK, and D Johnson, the D party has a lock on federal workers and administrators. Civil service unions are D party machines.
The control of government, across the three elected bodies (president, house, senate) tends to be about even between Republicans and Democrats over time. However, since those aren't elected by pure numbers, the actual number of voters for each party doesn't not tend to be 50/50. Democrats have won the popular presidential vote each year since 1988 (except 2004, with the effect of 9/11) and usually by a sizable majority, but the Republican party has had about equal control over the government.
A plurality is not a majority, and in most of those elections there was either no majority or a very narrow majority, even if there was often a significant plurality.
Here's the popular vote plurality winner and their vote percentage for each election:
1992: Dem, 43.0%
1996: Dem, 49.6%
2000: Dem, 48.4%
2004: Rep, 50.7%
2008: Dem, 52.9%
2012: Dem, 51.1%
2016: Dem, 48.2%
2020: Dem, 51.3%
To me, that looks like the Democrats have a fairly consistent edge in recent years in the national presidential popular vote, but a narrow one that often falls short of 50% and never exceeds it by much.
It's been a long time since we've seen blowout Presidential winners with around 60% of the popular vote like in 1984, 1972, 1964, 1956, 1936, 1932, 1928, and 1920. Characterizing the current political alignment as a 50/50 split is a misleading oversimplification, but it's got some truth in that we're more like a 50/50 nation than like the 60/40 nation we often were for much of the 20th century.
Ah sorry, I misspoke there. I meant a plurality, not a majority. I definitely agree that it's closer to 50/50 than before 1990, but the edge has been around 5% since then.
Sliced another way, the average popular vote in US Presidential elections since 1992 is 49.1% Dem, 45.3%, and 5.6% third party candidates. The floors and ceilings in the same period seem to be:
Dem: 43.0% and 52.9%
Rep: 37.5% and 50.7%
Reform: 0% and 8.4%
Libertarian: 0.3% and 3.3%
Green: 0% and 1.1%
Again, looks to me that Dems has a consistent small edge in the two-party vote that falls short of a consistent majority, with the balance held by a motley assortment of third party candidates.
meaning election results are approximately equal, but there are about 10% more biden voters than trump voters. so shouldn't the baseline be there are more biden donators?
Do you think selecting 5% randomly and placing them on the right would overcome the 88% to 12% donor disparity shown when sampling employees who donated from the from top 100 companies' [the bubble chart]?
I'm skeptical. Then again, no one here is discussing how representative that sample of the population is...
No 88/12 is obviously way above the baseline. I must have gotten some chart fatigue by that point, as that seems to be one of the only parts were an absolute number like that is given... for so many charts, I really wish they were better charts.
What do you think of the thesis that this is all driven by Big-5 personality types, mainly Openness being correlated with both education and left-wing social views? The book Open vs. Closed makes a fairly compelling case.
That's my read of it too. In the 1950s the economic elite were owners of manufacturers like Ford. Those companies benefit from a standardization and strong manager-employee hierarchies to crank out units of production.
In the 2020s they are more likely to be Silicon Valley and Wall Street types who benefit from creativity and individuation.
I work in a left dominated institution in a left dominated metro area. Left wing people are not more open. This analysis of the big five is a post-facto justification of left wing people enforcing an oppressive monoculture.
My similar experience suggests the same, though I'm not ready to generalize it to the entire population. People on the left are almost certainly more avant-garde than the right. I don't know if that constitutes openness in the OCEAN sense though. There's a deep insight here relating to reference frames...
That is pretty close to correct. The Openness/Intellect domain has two sides - the Intellect one is mostly defined by a willingness to expend effort in thinking about things. One narrow construct within the Intellect sphere would be Need for Cognition: https://www.midss.org/sites/default/files/ncogscale.pdf
This does not mean intelligence, but intrinsic motivation to do autism. Even low-Intellect people do the effortful processing if they get rewarded for it. Habits more than capability.
The other part, called Openness to Experience, is related to an aesthetic sensitivity. One of its underpinnings is a mechanism called latent inhibition. This is a subconscious process which essentially judges whether some association is real or spurious nonsense. The higher the inhibition, the more concrete an association has to be for it to feel real and serious. The lower the inhibition, the more tenuous the kinds of associations that can be taken seriouly or that feel like they have a point to them. If you ever listen to a song and the lyrics tickle your brain like it feels like there's a point there, but then you look at the sentence and it's just nonsense, or see an analogy that's just pretentious fart-smelling artfaggotry, you're in part seeing the border of your latent inhibition.
If that sounds like too low latent inhibition could lead to delusions, that's absolutely correct, and high aesthetic Openness (which is correlated with low latent inhibition) is a risk factor for developing psychosis. There's a reason for the troubled artist stereotype, mental illness really does run in the family.
Some O/I measures, especially older ones are problematic in this respect though. They literally include items like "Vote for liberal political candidates" and "Vote for conservative political candidates"
I'd need some evidence to agree that. Both left and right wing people are generally open in my experience, with the problem being when one set of beliefs are locally common enough to allow them to become social norms. Then openness reduced rapidly on a social level, but this probably doesn't reflect the personality types of those involved so much as normal in-group/out-group dynamics.
This is ANECDOTAL AS FUCK, but an example of my experience has been: Working in an office with some conservatives, and some liberals.
We vote to share what music gets played.
The conservatives pick music that they already like. They prefer not to listen to anything new, and they strongly prefer not to listen to any new genre "Turn that shit off and play some stones!".
The liberals still prefer stuff they know they like, but If someone makes a case for a weird new Japanese jazz band, they say "What the fuck, lets try it!".
This seems to extend across all facets of life. Conservatives who haven't tried sushi for 50 years, who go to the same place every year on vacation, who have only ever owned ford trucks, etc.
This type of attitude seems much more prevalent among conservatives, AGAIN ANECTODE ALERT.
I think openness, in terms of the Big 5, is perhaps a misnomer, and definitely is condescending to people who score low. Maybe a better way to think of it is a tendency towards novelty seeking and seeing the world in abstract terms, where people who score low tend to prefer stability and see the world more in terms of common sense and human nature. We can debate exactly what these terms mean, but people who score 1 way on personality tests tend to go to college, move to cities and hold left wing social views while people who score the other way tend to not go to college, live in rural areas and hold right-wing social views. The Big Sort is another great book on the subject.
He wrote a book titled "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids". He says it's the book he's proudest of writing (despite being more ignored among intellectuals) because people have said it actually did inspire them to have more kids.
“ Natalism promotes child-bearing and parenthood as desirable for social reasons and to ensure the continuance of humanity. Natalism in public policy typically seeks to create financial and social incentives for populations to reproduce, such as providing tax incentives that reward having and supporting children.”
So maybe public policy natalism would be more accurate? I’ve only heard the term natalism used to refer to financial and regulatory support to encourage more and larger families.
My understanding about jobs needing a college degree is that is a proxy for *something*. There are a whole bunch of questions you can't ask people in an interview, so instead of asking them, they simply require a college degree.
It's mostly not you can't ask questions without making people agree - there are a whole bunch of things that you can't reliably measure in a hurry.
In a fictional society where 50% of the population, chosen at random, spend 3 years going through a process that taught them nothing the other lot weren't also learning but which gave a moderately-reliable measure of their ability to focus on tasks that are a pretty good proxy for a lot of intellectually-challenging jobs, and the other 50% learned just as much but weren't graded reliably, you'd expect most of the most competitive jobs to go to the first lot.
And that's even before you factor in that a) colleges are selective, so the average college graduate was smarter than the average non-graduate even before college, and b) for a lot of jobs the skills taught in college are actually useful, and for many of the highest-status ones they're virtually essential.
One important factor here is the increasing salience of technology and tech companies, which are disproportionately young, and young people are disproportionately liberal.
I don't think there has ever been a situation where young people have been able to outearn their elders as what we have now. This applies only to a small minority of young people, but they have been able to sidestep all the gatekeeping set up by elders and gain access to warchests very early, on their own terms.
A small set of young people that control every sense making institution and the main mediums of communication* Most young people are economically screwed.
Not really sure what you mean. Libraries and universities dedicated to making young people learn stuff have existed for a bit now. The internet is transformative though yes
I misread him. That said, tech is in no way the first time one class (or just group) of new young people have upset the earning and power of another older group.
Yeah, I think the claim itself is likely not correct. Gold rushes would be a good example of another period in which a class of young people can get wealth and power independent of established old power interests - and in that case even independent of the universities.
I think during the 80s old people were more left-leaning, which was explained because they had come of age at a time when the Democratic party instilled a very strong sense of loyalty.
It was also before the collapse of the USSR, which blew a hole in the credibility of the socialist narrative. You still see the echos of that when 'classical' leftists complain that the modern left doesn't care about class distinctions anymore.
One point on this: one of the big divides for the Brexit vote was whether the voter had been around prior to the Common Market. Young people had never known the alternative.
It's not quite the same thing as the past. These are not parties that have been around for ever, and their leaders weren't aristocrats though their countries typically had them. Among fascists of different countries the Phalangists were closer to being conservatives, and they themselves wrote that they weren't sure if they were fascist... because they were Catholic. The Greater East-Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere was not something that had existed in the past, nor were Hitler's plans to overthrow the Anglo-dominated world order and conquer eastern Europe all the way to Russia a return to the German past (particularly since Germany had only unified rather recently). The closest to a revival of the past among the Axis leaders was Mussolini thinking he could re-establish the Roman empire, and that was still somewhat like a modern wiccan thinking they have any continuity with actually existing paganism.
The Nazis were a left wing party. Academic historians and others love to try and hide this fact, but read their manifesto, or they're propaganda magazine produced for Western audiences, or simply compare their actions to that of the undoubtedly left wing USSR.
Nazism (/ˈnɑːtsiɪzəm, ˈnæt-/ NA(H)T-see-iz-əm),[1] officially National Socialism (German: Nationalsozialismus [natsi̯oˈnaːlzotsi̯aˌlɪsmʊs]), is the ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP, or National Socialist German Workers' Party in English) in Nazi Germany. During Hitler's rise to power in 1930s Europe, it was frequently referred to as Hitlerism. The later related term "Neo-Nazism" is applied to other far-right groups with similar ideas which formed after the collapse of the Nazi regime.
Nazism is a form of fascism,[2][3][4][5] with disdain for liberal democracy and the parliamentary system. It incorporates fervent antisemitism, anti-communism, scientific racism, and the use of eugenics into its creed. Its extreme nationalism originated in pan-Germanism and the ethno-nationalist Völkisch movement which had been a prominent aspect of German nationalism since the late 19th century, and it was strongly influenced by the Freikorps paramilitary groups that emerged after Germany's defeat in World War I, from which came the party's underlying "cult of violence".[6] Nazism subscribed to pseudo-scientific theories of a racial hierarchy[7] and social Darwinism, identifying the Germans as a part of what the Nazis regarded as an Aryan or Nordic master race.[8] It aimed to overcome social divisions and create a homogeneous German society based on racial purity which represented a people's community (Volksgemeinschaft). The Nazis aimed to unite all Germans living in historically German territory, as well as gain additional lands for German expansion under the doctrine of Lebensraum and exclude those who they deemed either Community Aliens or "inferior" races.
The term "National Socialism" arose out of attempts to create a nationalist redefinition of socialism, as an alternative to both Marxist international socialism and free-market capitalism. Nazism rejected the Marxist concepts of class conflict and universal equality, opposed cosmopolitan internationalism, and sought to convince all parts of the new German society to subordinate their personal interests to the "common good", accepting political interests as the main priority of economic organisation,[9] which tended to match the general outlook of collectivism or communitarianism rather than economic socialism. The Nazi Party's precursor, the pan-German nationalist and antisemitic German Workers' Party (DAP), was founded on 5 January 1919. By the early 1920s, the party was renamed the National Socialist German Workers' Party to attract workers away from left-wing parties such as the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Communists (KPD), and Adolf Hitler assumed control of the organisation. The National Socialist Program, or "25 Points", was adopted in 1920 and called for a united Greater Germany that would deny citizenship to Jews or those of Jewish descent, while also supporting land reform and the nationalisation of some industries. In Mein Kampf, literally "My Struggle", published in 1925–1926, Hitler outlined the antisemitism and anti-communism at the heart of his political philosophy as well as his disdain for representative democracy and his belief in Germany's right to territorial expansion.[10]
The Sturmabteilung (SA) and the Schutzstaffel (SS) functioned as the paramilitary organisations of the Nazi Party. Using the SS for the task, Hitler purged the party's more socially and economically radical factions in the mid-1934 Night of the Long Knives, including the leadership of the SA. After the death of President Hindenburg, political power was concentrated in Hitler's hands and he became Germany's head of state as well as the head of the government, with the title of Führer, meaning "leader". From that point, Hitler was effectively the dictator of Nazi Germany – also known as the Third Reich – under which Jews, political opponents and other "undesirable" elements were marginalised, imprisoned or murdered. During World War II, many millions of people—including around two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe—were eventually exterminated in a genocide which became known as the Holocaust.
So let’s go over each point here.
Fascism - right wing m(reactionary, militarist, natural hierarchy, racialist, anti equality, anti democratic, dedication to the state) but we can skip that
“Disdain for liberal democracy” - certainly far right coded ... fascists disdain all democracy (like moldbug, although not enough for him). Leftists only criticize liberal democracy for not acktually being democratic, lol
“Antisemitism” - actual antisemitism, of the form of calling for the killing of the Jews, is - although it happens in Palestine, and Palestinians are allied with the left - a form of explicit racial inferiority claims, which is very much not left wing - and one of the criticisms of the left is that allying with Palestine is dumb when Palestinians are culturally far right
Anti communism is right wing and not left wing, as communism is a goal of far leftists and a good yet broken ideal for more center leftists
Ditto for scientific racism and eugenics. The left dislikes inferiority based racism and murdering the bad races much more so than the right - a common (reasonable) criticism of today’s left is that they are to obsessed with that to a disturbing extent and the detriment of anything else that’s worthwhile
“Extreme nationalism” - right wing, nationalism is considered right wing nowadays. Historically messy but whatever.
“Cult of violence” - right wing. Who loves the military, guns, power, strength, etc. it was right wing back then too. Not eating having a strong military or whatever is bad, but a cult of strength and violence is right wing.
> Nazism rejected the Marxist concepts of class conflict and universal equality, opposed cosmopolitan internationalism
Both right wing. Universal equality is an axiom of politics today, for good or not, and moving away from it is right wing. And being anti internationalist today is also ... right wing - immigration, free trade, globalist elite, etc. again not doing any moral judgement here, hitler was a good speaker and that doesn’t make being a good speaker evil, any coherent political system will end up agreeing with a lot of even bad evil peoples points, just going over point by point.
> sought to convince all parts of the new German society to subordinate their personal interests to the "common good"
Helloooo Patrick Deneen and sohrab ahmari! Liberal individualism vs ancient collective goodI think their programs are dull and pointless, but this is somewhat right wing, or generously neutral.
> which tended to match the general outlook of collectivism or communitarianism rather than economic socialism
This can be cast as left wing if you restrict yourself to the Cold War, but if we go farther back it is very mixed. Many left wingers were less collectivist than right wingers, and many more were more collectivist. It’s really a confusing term and idea. Regardless, even if we accept that as left, which we shouldn’t, that’s one of ten?
> attract workers away from left-wing parties such as the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Communists (KPD)
This was very common. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beefsteak_Nazi - but leftists were regularly purged. A successful party will obviously take many followers from other parties. And naziism did take a lot from socialism (as did conservatism and every other politics that exists since then or today). Wow trump sure must be left wing because he took a lot of past Democrat voters with him! The French Revolution was actually right wing as it was supported by past elite right wingers :o.
> political power was concentrated in Hitler's hands and he became Germany's head of state as well as the head of the government, with the title of Führer, meaning "leader". From that point, Hitler was effectively the dictator of Nazi Germany
Total dictatorship with power in the hands of one person tends to be a right wing ideal - when done by the left, it’s done “in the interests of workers, to be eventually dissolved for the communist state” while for the right the dictatorship is for the dictator and for them to make good decisions. (Were monarchies left wing? Ayatollahs left wing?) But we can call this neutral.
Overall, the nazis did draw a lot of inspiration from socialists. But so did everyone. On the whole, they’re quite right wing. I’ve read all sorts of nazi stuff, clearly right wing. I can go get excerpts from speeches if you want but that’d take even more time.
When I joined Google, a couple years after their IPO, it had a distinctly libertarian bent, at least in the parts of the company I was in. I remember one year on April 1st some wag found a way to send email anonymously to engineering and used it to distribute a spoof poster advertising unionisation. Because back then the whole idea was literally a joke. My first manager was a former entrepreneur who had made back selling his company (not to Google), a Frenchman who held French business in contempt because it wasn't capitalist enough. The guy sent to train the team had moved country for tax reasons and was happy to tell everyone, lunchtime conversations were frequently on pro capitalist topics of various kinds. And of course the companies entire mission statement encoded libertarian values - make information universally accessible and good things will follow: by the way adverts are also information.
Let's not forget that Twitter was once "the free speech wing of the free speech party".
So what changed? In my view it was primarily caused by an addiction to needless hiring. The culture established there early on was a naive one based on the belief that the company would never run out of good ideas. This meant that hiring was always being described as everyone's top priority. After enough years of that, when the money never runs out, it becomes ingrained. But whilst the money never ran out, the pool of experienced candidates did, big time. The software industry just isn't that large and add a consequence these firms became heavily dependent on hiring new graduates because there simply weren't enough experienced engineers left on the market after the first 7-8 years of growth.
What happens if you start driving from a firehose of inexperienced grads who never worked at a normal company, and then put them in an environment that is basically budget free? You get a lot of very left wing employees and eventually they come to dominate the normal people who built the company, especially as more and more of the OGs retire early or check out in other ways.
Google's original culture was built on respect for the whole population. Modern Google is a different beast. Lesson learned: the cost of hiring is not merely in the comp package, and it was naive to think that a "hiring culture" would not one day cause problems.
Here's another way to break this cycle: get rid of first past the post voting. Remove the underlying structures that force us to exist in the current situation.
“When life (America) gives you lemons (crappy voting schemes), don't make lemonade (change party affiliation). Make life take the lemons back (abolish FPTP)! Get mad!"
Most European nations have different voting systems and plenty are doing alright. I don't think Israel is really a good comparison for anywhere given the other factors affecting the country
I used to be more of a fan of some sort of proportional representation, but then I saw struggles to form governments in Italy, Germany, Belgium, and probably a few others that I'm forgetting. I'm not opposed to more experimentation at the state and local level, but I don't think electoral reform is a magical fix for everything that's wrong in the US.
Speaking about Germany, these struggles are customary ways of balancing opposing interests and usually result in something functional. The appearance, though, has to be something dramatic, because each faction needs to signal internally that "That's the best we could get and we put up the hardest fight we were able to", and to externally actually advance as much as possible of their position without losing access to power because they could not become part of a coalition.
Also, the majorities in the Bundestag are most of the times counterbalanced by Bundesrat majorities, so no ruling coalition can feel safe from a retaliation.
This has so far kept a destructive polarization in check that would lead to dysfunctionalities.
However, this is part of the political culture, and would not work e.g. in Italy, imo. A functional democracy resides on fundaments it cannot produce itself out of nothing, as a common wisdom here goes.
Belgium has found out that they can have a functional state without a formal government a while ago. :)
I mean what parts of German or Israeli or whatever politics do we want in the US? What can they do or haven’t they done that we should or shouldn’t? Are they less dysfunctional or more efficient or innovative or representative or less disruptive?
People get used to the system they have. It's true that proportional representation in a broad sense leads to more coalitions. But if you switched a FPTP country to PR or vice versa, there would be twenty years of government very far from the local equilibrium, until parties and voters adapted to the new system.
Doing alright? I guess it depends on your priorities. Italy hasn't had a leader who was actually elected for years. In some ways it doesn't deserve to be called a democracy at all. Other countries have also gone through long periods in which the entire government simply wasn't elected. They didn't collapse into anarchy but it seems unwise to consider this state of affairs fine.
I mean, I actually think it would be a better system, but it would disappoint both the people who think there are a bunch of socialists or a bunch of "Real American" types.
Even in this system, the most important voter would still be...middle income non-college educated with moderate views. Now, they'd be slightly different voters because of no more Electoral College, but still the type of swing voters the Left & Right gets frustrated by would still rule.
1. RCV is not just a synonym for instant runoff; Condorcet methods have better behaviors (specifically monotonicity). N.B., per Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, there's no perfect system. FPTP is strictly worse than both.
2. The interface is not the system. Just because initial attempts at designing RCV ballots led to confusion does not invalidate the math.
3. The expected effects on turnout, campaigning, &c. are long-run equilibria; evaluating them in the short term is in bad faith.
The end of the post feels a little weird to me, I honestly don't see a reason to try and salvage coalitions and turn them into something more positive. I think the far better option is to change our voting systems so that coalitions are less necessary, and less adversarial.
The catch-22 is that in order to effect those changes, you need a majority coalition first, especially for really huge things like constitutional amendments. But once you have a majority your priorities shift to maintaining the status quo that got you a majority in the first place.
I do not believe that anyone has ever implemented a political system in which coalitions did not have a decisive advantage over not-coalitions, and I am skeptical that such a thing is possible. As a proposal, it's right up there with "change our system of government so that it only does good things"; great, but really needs details.
Also, philosophically, conservatives believe gov has a smaller role and personal life should be more primary (the opposite of the ‘personal is political’). So being less active in gov, which you believe should be less pervasive in the lives of the polity, is consistent.
Libertarians believe that, and Republicans twenty years ago believed that, but I'm not sure it's extremely accurate today. The Trump-leaning side of the Republican party doesn't seem to be especially small government. On top of that, there are definitely issues, like abortion, where conservatives want government to have a larger role in controlling personal life.
So many internet right leaning libertarians left libertarianism to ... very far right ... stuff. anyway, the mainstream Republican Party is probably heading away from libertarianism towards where their internet compatriots went just like the Democrat party was a lagging version of internet lefties in many ways.
As gbear said that’s what libertarians believe. And in the US those folks are more common on the right. Viktor Orban is very into a natalist welfare state for example.
Trump's policies were definitely anti free trade compared to Biden's policies. To some extent Trump doesn't match with the Republican party as a whole, but Republican voters are also more against free trade compared to Democrat voters. As of 2018, 67% of Democrats said that free trade has been good for the US while only 43% of Republicans say the same. There was even a point in 2016 where 59% of Democrats were in favor of free trade compared to 29% of Republicans.
The left still believes in the welfare state, environmental regulation, worker protections etc. Lots of things wealthier states can afford because there's an industry paying high taxes, but that a poorer state might not because it has less fiscal capacity and lower costs are one of the few ways it can compete.
I strongly disagree with this. Conservatives /say/ that they believe that government has a smaller role and personal life should be more primary, but if you look at the actual fault lines outside of economic issues - abortion, the war on drugs, gay rights, euthanasia, police powers and sentencing, etc - then again and again you see that it's actually conservatives who believe in the state exercising control over individuals' private lives, and liberals who stand up for letting people make their own choices (except when it comes to business and the economy, where it's the reverse).
A saw that characterises what people actually believe - as opposed to what they believe they believe - more accurately is that liberals believe politics belongs in the boardroom but not the bedroom, and conservatives are the reverse.
I disagree, in that I think the number of conservatives these days who want to put politics back in the bedroom is extremely small. There's no constituency for the re-criminalisation of sodomy.
Do you have any polls on that? I'm not an American, and the Americans I hear from tend to be the very-online ones who I suspect are disproportionately unlikely to; I could easily believe anything from 3% to 30%
I don't have any polls or statistics on hand (though gbear seems to have provided some). What I do have is experience growing up in a fundamentalist Christian school. A small school, to be sure, but considering how much I learned about how acceptance of homosexuality is a slippery slope to far worse things, I'm quite certain that there are still True Believers out there seeking to illegalize it.
And I should note that they weren't only against homosexuality, but against any casual sex. Sex, after all, is only for procreation. So anything that turns the "natural use" into the unnatural is a horrible sin.
No, but there are an awful lot of people on the right who, even if they don't any more, opposed things like legalising gay marriage and letting gay people serve openly in the armed forces (and who still oppose letting trans people do so).
I think that shows that "let people make their own choices in their private lives" wasn't actually a core value of the conservative movement 10 years ago, even though they were claiming it was. And I find it very unlikely that it's suddenly become so, especially given all the other examples above (I notice that I left of immigration and trans rights from my list, if you need more examples).
At every step over the past century, important non-economic individual freedoms from state control have been won by liberals in the face of opposition from the right; the reverse has hardly ever happened.
It's possible that things are changing slightly at the moment - I think that the strength of the correlation between "liberals/the left are for individual freedom, conservatives are against it (while pretending to be in favour of it)" over the past century has come from two things lining up and positively reinforcing.
The first is that there are genuine strands of "let people make their own choices" as a core liberal value and "coercively impose cultural homogeneity" as a conservative value.
The second is that "the state should use its power to stop people doing bad things" looks much more tempting when you're socially dominant and defining "bad things", and "people should be allowed to make their own choices" looks much more tempting when you're weak, and the imposed choices aren't the ones you prefer, and up until the 20th century the right was clearly socially dominant.
Now, as this thread points out, that's changing, the two trends are interacting negatively rather than positively, and we're seeing the rise of post-liberal leftists who are seeing the temptation of banning things they think are bad, while the people who wanted to ban flag-burning are suddenly seeing freedom of speech in a very different light when it comes to baking cakes for gay weddings.
But in general, at the moment, outside the sphere of economics it's still more likely to be the left who either want to let you make your own choices or to limit the coercion applied to social pressure, and the right who support state control over people.
Letting people make their own choices is a central tenet of classical liberalism, or small-L libertarianism, in the libertarian-vs-authoritarian political compass sense.
Traditionally, this was aligned with the economic and cultural left. But more recently the left seems to have abandoned it and it's become aligned with the economic and cultural right.
This shift is more advanced in some places than others, so people talk past each other, with some assuming it's a right-wing value and always has been, and others still assuming it's a left-wing value.
> But in general, at the moment, outside the sphere of economics it's still more likely to be the left who either want to let you make your own choices or to limit the coercion applied to social pressure, and the right who support state control over people.
As I see it, these days, some of the most salient questions regarding social policy are about things like whether you are allowed to discriminate against gay people or not, whether organizations are required to increase the proportion of black people or women in various positions, whether you are allowed to "harass" members of various demographic groups at a workplace (which often seems to be interpreted as including saying anything that related to an underrepresented group that many members of that group find objectionable), or whether to criminalize hate speech.
So I argue that at this point the left is for more limits on most questions of both economic and social policy, with a few exceptions. (Some of the questions above could be classified as economic policy on the grounds that it's mostly businesses that the relevant laws directly affect, but then a large majority of the most controversial political questions are questions of economic policy.) Of course my assessment is affected by which policy areas I consider the most important (economic freedom, freedom of speech, and eliminating affirmative action).
I don't consider gay marriage a matter of people's private life. Marriage in part regulates the relationship of the two people and the state. And much of the part that regulates the two people's relationship to each other can be replicated by a regular contract. Likewise, the abortion debate is primarily about whether fetuses should be considered persons with rights, a question mostly orthogonal to questions of individual choice. (That is, most of us who want abortion to be legal want that because we don't think a fetus is a person in the relevant sense, not because we think the pregnant woman's choice should prevail even if it were.)
> At every step over the past century, important non-economic individual freedoms from state control have been won by liberals in the face of opposition from the right; the reverse has hardly ever happened.
For the most part, politics were moving in a progressive direction ("liberal" in the American sense). So it's natural that every (non-economic) freedom gained was gained by progressives, and every freedom lost was taken away by progressives.
> The second is that "the state should use its power to stop people doing bad things" looks much more tempting when you're socially dominant and defining "bad things", and "people should be allowed to make their own choices" looks much more tempting when you're weak, and the imposed choices aren't the ones you prefer, and up until the 20th century the right was clearly socially dominant.
Yes. There are a few people who support freedom as a terminal value, and many more people who use the rhetoric of freedom when the government is generally limiting freedom in favor of the other side, but they would be just as willing to limit freedom to achieve their goals.
As far as I understand, this is how the use of the label "liberal" evolved in some countries such as the US. People who sympathized with the poor and with disadvantaged demographic groups and poor people started calling themselves "liberal" back when the government limited freedom in favor of the rich (?), the majority ethnic group, men, heterosexuals, and they kept the label even when the state started limiting freedom in favor of the poor, minorities, women and gay people with their support—to the point where people who are still on the side of freedom had to invent a new label for themselves ("libertarian"). (I put a question mark next to "rich" because, while European governments intervened in favor of the nobility for a long time, and classical liberals challenged that, I'm not sure if the US government ever had a tendency to intervene in favor of the rich, outside of race relations. So I don't really know how it happened that the economic center-left started calling itself liberal in the US. Perhaps support for the poor was correlated with support for various non-ecomonic freedoms, and the label "liberal" got attached to it that way.)
And yes, while conservatives often use the rhetoric of freedom, they don't generally hold it as a fundamental principle (even as a matter of definition; those who do are better termed libertarians).
Of course the fact that all these labels have multiple and shifting meanings makes it difficult to discuss these matters in a clear way.
> It's possible that things are changing slightly at the moment - I think that the strength of the correlation between "liberals/the left are for individual freedom, conservatives are against it (while pretending to be in favour of it)" over the past century has come from two things lining up and positively reinforcing.
> The first is that there are genuine strands of "let people make their own choices" as a core liberal value and "coercively impose cultural homogeneity" as a conservative value.
This seems to assume that "liberal" and "conservative" still refer to the same values they did in the past, and will continue to do so into the future.
I'd put it like this: the historical correlation between liberalism and support for freedom comes from the fact that liberalism was originally *defined* as holding "let people make their own choices" as a core, but in the US it isn't anymore. As far as I can tell, at this point, in the US, the term "liberal" is associated firmly enough with support for the poor and for (historically) disadvantaged groups that it will mean that no matter how anti-correlated it becomes with support for freedom. Whether one sees liberalism as still being in favor of individual freedom depends on how much weight one assigns to the policy areas where liberals are still on the side of freedom; people who both hold freedom as an important value and call themselves liberal are people who assign a large weight to those issues.
Also, citation required. A google search turns up https://news.gallup.com/poll/1651/gay-lesbian-rights.aspx, which suggests that there is still a really large constituency for the re-criminalision sodomy, although obviously N=1.
Well you should probably realize that most everyone hated homosexuality a few hundred years ago, and there’s been little but left wing success at bringing that down. That sixth is a threat to you in the same sense that a herd of cows, heads in gates, most of whom have already been bolt gunned to the head, are to the butcher. Not saying that there’s no threat of right wing resurgence, just that that sixth is nothing but a testament to how thorough the dissipation of anti homosexual sentiment has been.
Gun control would be an exception to the pattern you describe, and it is not really an economic issue. Opposition to the war on drugs has generally been a left-right coalition. Restrictions on home schooling I think tend to be from the left, although I'm not sure, and opposition to school choice pretty clearly is.
Neither party is in favor of free trade, but at the moment the Republicans are more against it than the Democrats. You will note that Biden hasn't moved to abolish Trump's trade restrictions.
I would argue that the for profit prison system is a right leaning institution and benefits from the war on drugs. I think that a majority of the opposition comes from the left.
"outside of economic issues" This is quite the qualifier! Economic issues are the vast majority of all political issues in a person's day-to-day life and it's not even close.
With respect to the other issues: Do you have public opinion polls to back this up?
I think you're conflating two things: (1) Conservatives believe that the government should be responsible for prosecuting things that are criminal, and (2) conservatives believe that people should be moral in their personal lives. This doesn't mean conservatives want to ban immoral behavior.
In contrast, it's progressives who want to criminalize "hate speech", firearm ownership or possession, insufficient insurance, etc.
And your examples aren't even that great:
Abortion: A form of murder, or at least a form of medical care, which is plainly within the government's role to regulate if not criminalize.
War on drugs: This ignores the bans smoking & cigarettes generally pursued by the left.
Gay rights: This is not really the divisive issue it previously was; and to the extent it is, conservatives are concerned about encouraging a strong family unit, and two-parent households (as opposed to one-parent), which is certainly beneficial by any conceivable metric.
Euthanasia: Consider: Should I be able to sell myself into slavery? If your answer is "No", consider the possibility you have more in common with conservatives than you think.
Police powers and sentencing: This is literally THE legitimate use of government according to conservatives. I mean, if we're not going to agree that we should convict people for violence and theft, why do we even have a government, again?
I was surprised to not see this in the actual article. The thesis that right wing voters care less about their country is shocking. I haven't looked at Hanania's data yet, but I imagine it's hard to disentangle "right wing voters care less" from "right wing voters want less". There's certainly exceptions (abortion, LGBT rights), but those seem like necessary stances for the party to galvanize its traditional contingent.
I'd love to see a deep-dive of this though. Has anyone seen one?
There's also "right wing voters expect less". I'm right wing and I want a while lot of things, but I know I'll never get them, because the right is too busy mounting desperate rear-guard actions against the left's latest desire to actually pursue goals of our own.
What do I want? Well for starters I want all taxes abolished and replaced with a "membership fee" that's the same amount for everyone, rich and poor. I want the people who can't afford to pay the fee to be resettled into whichever foreign country can be bribed into taking them.
I'm very struck - but not surprised - by how fast we've gone from "Conservatives believe in small government and individual rights" to "The poor should be forcible expelled from their homeland".
I haven't heard much about conservatives mandating styles of clothing; could you elaborate?
If this is just the trans-rights thing, saying "wearing a dress doesn't make you a woman" is not mandating a style of clothing; for that you'd need "...and because you're not a woman you're not allowed to wear a dress". Which I have not seen very much of.
I've seen guys people expelled from conservative private schools for wearing nail polish, and you gotta admit that looking down on people for being too fem/masc is pure conservative (At least, in the adult world). Think about all those Michelle Obama == Gorilla memes, showing up all the way from grandpas facebook to Fox news.
As an example, go into any conservative space, and try acting against traditional gender archetypes, and see what it gets you.
Not many leftists out there talking about how soy is destroying manliness.
If "looking down on people" counts as a mandate, then we have to throw in all the people who look down on anyone who wears a suit and tie, etc, and by the time we're done I think that "mandating" styles of clothing is something liberals do about as much as conservatives, they just have different preferred styles.
Conservatives may believe the government *should* have a smaller role. But that doesn't explain why, if the government currently plays a way too big role, they don't work hard to reduce it.
Conservatives are well known to support initiatives to lower taxes, which would seem to be one of the most effective interventions for decreasing the size of the government. You can blue tribe and call this greed or you can red tribe and call it "effective capital allocation".
By making laws to restrict the spheres that government could act in, perhaps when conservatives controlled the house, senate, presidency, and supreme court for 2 years.
That was their chance to show us what they really wanted. What did they do?
This doesn't work, given that the government is spending tons of money regardless of the tax level, and the difference just goes to deficits. (There's a debt ceiling but it doesn't constrain anything, they just raise it every time.) I have heard a theory that the "starve the beast" strategy is bad from an anti-government perspective, because it gives the public the impression that government spending is really efficient and pays for lots of services compared to what's on their tax bills.
One possible explanation of what happened might be the march through the institutions, that the left somehow captured the universities, and, now that a large minority of the population goes to university, that gave the basis for a left coalition of the educated.
Nozick has an interesting explanation for why academics tend to be left. Through high school, kids are facing two different status systems, an informal decentralized one of social status, a formal, centralized, one of academic status. Kids who do well on grades, not so well on social status, naturally come to prefer the formal, centralized model, go on to become academics. That could give a general tendency for academics to be left, which matters more when such a large fraction of the population has spent four formative years in academia.
This explanation seems to have an implied premise that left-leaning people are more likely than right-leaning people to have good grades and poor social status, *before* they become academics?
I think the causal direction is that kids with good grades and low status are attracted to left-wing ideas.
Of course these days, kids with good grades and low social status have another obvious career path, software engineering. That, I think, explains a lot about the politics of Silicon Valley, and how earning $600K a year doesn't seem to make people join the party that supports lowering taxes on the upper middle class.
I'm not a left-winger, but if I could steel-man the overall left-wing memeplex I think it comes from sympathy (unsteelman: excessive and irrational sympathy) for the downtrodden. And the downtrodden come in two flavours: the genuinely downtrodden, and unpopular high school kids.
Chris Arnade calls this the distinction between "front row" and "back row" Americans. People raised I the front row expect things to be fair, legible, explicate, etc., whereas people raised in the back row are used to being looked down on and coerced.
I think there's also a major self-reinforcing aspect if certain issues get the ball rolling. Once a coalition is more closely affiliated with academia, it's more likely to listen to the academia / higher-education demographics and take policy positions that are attractive to those voters. Spending decades denying global warming etc. makes a party less attractive to educated voters, which makes them less likely to take attractive positions in the future since those groups are now smaller parts of their base.
Not to be blunt, but it could also be because the right has, in recent memory, denied climate change, fought against masks and vaccines, claimed the existence of massive voter fraud, etc. etc.?
Like, I won't deny that democrats have done some anti-science stuff in the past, or that there aren't more fringe-left people saying really stupid stuff. But if you just look at mainstream political figures on the left and right and say 'which one is saying things that actual domain experts would agree with more often' I think Democrats are way ahead at the moment. So I'd expect actual domain experts - academics - to side with them heavily.
The disagreement here is not being "pro" or "anti" science, it's that people on the left reflexively assume that academics are domain experts, whereas people in the right do not. Go look at some climatology sceptic blogs. They aren't railing against science. Their arguments are all science based and usually of the form, "why aren't these bloody academics doing science properly". Whereas the left generally just assume that to be academic is the same thing as being correct, without deeply checking their work.
The voter fraud question isn't really a science question, at least in anything like the normal sense. And the masks and vaccines thing will surely have some element of a values conflict (like, sure, there are some nutters claiming the vaccine is Bill Gates' plan to insert an ID chip into everyone, but there are others for whom it's simply intolerable that the government should have the power to force you to take any medical treatment on pain of being denied the right to travel, participate in commerce etc., which is a position that reasonable people can disagree with, but not an obviously anti-science one).
On the other side we have the current sex and gender hysteria, and indeed the cognitive creationism hysteria, which are overwhelmingly coming from the blue team (I just spent a while looking for the meme that is just a screenshot of this slide of Jonathan Haidt's lecture - https://youtu.be/b86dzTFJbkc?t=3316 - but my google-fu is apparently not up to the tastk), and which do involve a fair bit of science denialism.
Obviously the red team does have its equivalent irrationalities, but at the current moment the blue team is more obviously the team of science-as-attire than the team of actual science.
Part of what is going on with the voter fraud question is that a lot of people, especially Trump supporters, have correctly concluded that the dominant sources of public information cannot be trusted. Since the fact that the NYT says Trump lost isn't evidence that Trump lost, nor is there other evidence from sources they trust, they choose instead to believe what they want to believe, that he won and Biden stole the election.
I think you have incorrectly assumed how many people in the blue team fervently support the “gender hysteria” stuff versus how many people on red team oppose basic epidemiology. I would add that trans rights have very little effect on the average American, bar female athletes etc. However, the red team refusal to take personal measures against the pandemic greatly effects the average American, as is seen by recent covid numbers in red states (eg Florida). It also increases the risk of a further variant, which I think gives credit to the point made that Republicans just don’t care. They can’t even look one year into the future where we might have to take drastic measures again to prevent the spread of a new variant, let alone 50 years down the road for the impact of climate change.
..."how many people on red team oppose basic epidemiology".
There's a lot of nonsense there, no doubt ... but there's a lot of nonsense on the blue team too - given all we know about how hard the virus is to spread outdoors, anyone who is in favour of people being required to mask up outdoors, or who will personally berate people for going unmasked outdoors (as opposed to just keeping enough interpersonal distance to not be breathing into each other's lungs) is also guilty of opposing... I guess we'd need to call it *applied* epidemiology in this case, since we're talking about this particular virus, but still...
Plus the degree of 'trust the science'-ing and support for the official channels coming from the blue team even after the utter clownshow that was their response to the pandemic is (see https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2021/08/12/things-the-establishment-got-wrong-about-wuhan-coof/ for a round-up) ... well, let's just say that even on areas where I think the establishment is now correct, I find it very hard to begrudge a low-to-moderate-information normie on the red team if he has a skeptical attitude.
That's not to say that the blue team are necessarily *worse* in terms of being anti-science at the moment, just that I'm not convinced that they are obviously far-and-away doing better than the red team.
Regarding variants, either we plan to drive the virus to extinction (which is still what Bret Weinstein thinks we should be aiming for, but he seems to be a lonely voice on that), or we don't, in which case herd immunity and regular new vaccines for vulnerable populations, like we currently aim for with the flu, is the best we can hope for. There's a difference between 'we don't care' and 'the chances of driving this thing to extinction are so low that we don't think it's worth the draconian restrictions it would require for us to even have a chance, so let's just accept things and get back to as close to normal as we can'.
I disagree with the comparison that asking/forcing people to wear masks outside is as bad as refusing to do wear them. People are dying because of one and not the other. I forget how the saying goes exactly, “your freedom ends where mine begins”. I think a majority of the anti mask population would not give such a well thought out retort re your last sentence. I would rather anticipate some vitriol a la Fox News. You also mentioned the clown show that was blue teams response to the pandemic yet it was the red team in charge when it started so I’m not sure I get your point there. Claiming that wearing masks is a draconian restriction is a hyperbole by any stretch of the imagination. I believe that both sides want it to end just as badly but there’s one side saying fuck it who care who dies and the other side trying to avoid that as much as possible. Which is quite ironic given we know which side is pro-life.
Furthermore, The denial of science goes far beyond just the pandemic and it is rather unique to the US, which is after all the country with the most adults that believe angels are real.
"I think a majority of the anti mask population would not give such a well thought out retort re your last sentence."
The majority of anyone would not answer with a thought out sentence about a highly partisan public policy spat. The vast majority of everyone mostly regurgitates inane slogans.
All of the trends under discussion were solidly established before those issues entered the public consciousness. If there's a causal relationship, it almost certainly points the other way - low-education voters skew Republican, therefore Republican politicians are more likely to adopt positions that educated people would disagree with. And there may not be a causal relationship.
You are offering a very recent cause as an explanation for a much earlier effect.
If we go back pre-Trump, the left was unwilling to look at evidence with regard to IQ issues, where both heritability and correlation with real world outcomes were well established. The left argued for legalized abortion and easily available contraception in large part as ways of reducing the number of children born to unmarried mothers. What actually happened was the precise opposite of their prediction, and yet that had no visible effect on their views.
The left, although not only the left, treated population increase in the sixties and seventies the way climate change is treated now, the looming catastrophe that required immediate drastic action. Outside of China there was no immediate drastic action, and the poor countries that were supposed to be doomed by population growth got both population growth and a sizable increase in income and nutrition. I haven't noticed anyone publicly apologizing for the error, and Ehrlich in particular, who predicted unstoppable mass famine for the 1970's, has never even said that his argument was wrong.
Climate change is an issue where, as far as I can tell, people on both sides hold views not supported by the evidence, with the catastrophist position farther from what the evidence supports than the "no problem" position. But that would be a long argument.
I think both sides accept science when they like its implications, deny it when they don't. One pretty clear example would be the left attributing all differences in outcomes by either race or sex to discrimination, implicitly assuming that there is no difference in the distribution of relevant characteristics. In the case of sex, that pretty much requires that one not believe in evolution, since Darwinian evolutions selects for reproductive success, males and females differ precisely in their role in evolution, and while it is logically possible that the same distribution of characteristics is optimal for both roles, it's not likely, certainly not what one should assume without evidence — and such evidence as we have goes the other way (tighter IQ distribution for woman than men).
On the other hand, climate change provides an argument for doing things the left wants to do anyway [http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/11/a-revealing-cartoon.html], so not only do they believe in it they massively exaggerate its implication — flooding large parts of the world with sea level rise (by the end of the century on the high emission scenario) equal to about half the distance from low tide to high tide.
"We do not see predatory pricing, collusion, or cartelization among the tech giants. What we do see are those giants acting as vehicles for the ideological rents being sought and extracted by the specialized labor cultures they employ."
Left-wingers tend to care more about politics because neuroticism/hysterics is far more associated with both left-wing politics and increased activism.
From AP news on Census: “The figures show continued migration to the South and West at the expense of counties in the Midwest and Northeast. The share of the white population fell from 63.7% in 2010 to 57.8% in 2020.”
Conservative regimes have been less and less about governing and diverse opinions. Cleek’s Law of Republican’s opposing whatever Democrats want, updated daily, is not a long term strategy. It’s just flailing reactionism, chasing the laser pointer. A slow trend towards populism for a shrinking majority does not incubate competency and we’re fortunate for that (until a really smart populist who knows the levers of power comes along).
It’s taken 50 years to take back the Supreme Court and a bit of that was random luck. We’ll see that kneecap and slow some progression but we won’t see conservatives get any better with the hard logistical requirements of revanchism.
That the invention of air conditioning and airplanes has taken several generations to be reflected in the geographic location of people. Rural areas have continued to decline in population while urban areas have continued to grow (even if the pandemic briefly deflected urban growth to further continuation of suburban growth).
I thought as well, until recently when I read that population movement from rural areas is offset by their higher birthrates so that they basically stay at their (low) levels. Although I think much of our population growth is in suburban areas, where it's still legal to build.
The left might be winning on symbolic issues like "wokeness", but when it comes to actually important stuff like foreign policy the dominant forces are right-wing or centrist.
I think many people, particularly on the right wing, vastly overestimate the power of the left because they see centrists like Biden and Harris as left-wingers. If anything, they lean right. The centrist wing of the Democratic Party often seems to prefer Trump to Sanders, and I have no doubt that they would've jumped ship to the Republicans in a hypothetical Jeb Bush vs Bernie Sanders 2016.
Centrism, incidentally, appeals to both financial and educational elites.
He got his way on some foreign policy issues, but partly I'm not sure he really had a foreign policy. The Republican party as an entity tends to though.
He hasn't reduced the tariffs to anything like the standard Washington Consensus level of 1990-2016.
And is it accurate to say the border is "more open" when non-US citizens still can't legally cross any land border without "essential business", and Europeans aren't allowed to enter for any reason unless they've spent 14 days elsewhere? I believe that after an initial statement that Biden would keep refugee numbers at the level Trump set, he eventually relented a bit, but still hasn't brought them up to the previous standard.
There's been a lot of moderation in rhetoric, but actual policy is still far more restrictive than at any point from the end of the Cold War until the beginning of Trump.
I mean surely you believe that there should be covid restrictions, right? Neither side can be open borders right now.
Biden probably isn’t going to go back to the old system of tariffs for many reasons, not least because it hasn’t been a huge success for the US/China strategy - the idea that they will magically become democratic when they are rich, and it hasn’t been great for US workers either. And in a era of environmental catastrophe globalism has to take a backseat.
No, all COVID restrictions should have been lifted once vaccines was available to every adult. That's hardly a left-wing position in America of course.
But even regardless of that, a lot of COVID-related border restrictions, by America and many other countries, have made little sense, such as restrictions towards countries with similar or lower case counts than the destination country. E.g. America has banned Europeans even at times when case counts were far lower in Europe.
I guess travel bans are a common ground between the left and the right, as the left is more in favor of COVID-related restrictions in general, while the right likes the nationalist angle.
Nice shifting gears there. You say, "He’s reduced the tariffs with China and the border is more open." He says essentially, "no he really hasn't." To which you reply, "Yeah but for good reason!"
Why would you want restrictions in people coming from countries with a lower infection rate than ours, which I think is true of all the EU and a good deal of the rest of the world at present? Their presence lowers the average infection rate, hence the chance that a random encounter will lead to transmission of the virus. The argument is still weaker if you require a negative Covid test before entry, which is easy to do.
The argument for free trade didn't depend on the effect on the politics of trading partners but on the benefit to us of trade. That hasn't changed.
Yes, the conflation of centrists (or ‘liberals’) with the left is a very widespread piece of imprecision. It often turns an otherwise interesting article into a frustrating useless mess. They are fundamentally distinct groups, albeit that they sometimes act together.
That's a matter of where one draws the boundary. Liberals (in the American sense) are left-of-center on the American political spectrum, so considering them left-wing isn't an unreasonable definition.
I see where you’re coming from, and you are of course correct about the way a lot of Americans use the term, but I don’t find that approach helps me. To explain:
Imagine you are trying to build an accurate and useful model of the interacting agents: you need to know (a) what they actually believe and (b) where they actually sit in relation to other ideologies. Anything that obscures meaningful distinctions just leaves you blind to what is actually going on.
The ‘centre’ shifts over time, differs (as you say) from country to country and it often serves the interests of liberal and conservatives to pretend that the left doesn’t exist at all. Starving a set of ideas of airtime because it serves the interests of Brahmin and Merchant elites to pretend they don’t exist at all (or only addressing them in strawman forms) is something anyone actually left is wearily familiar with.
Calling everyone ‘left wing’ who falls left of where a particular part of a particular political culture feels is the centre is at this particular moment doesn’t help me build an accurate picture of what is actually happening.
But I think there's an even more fundamental reason not to call centrists leftists: centrists hate leftism, and are determined to prevent it from gaining power. Leftists return the hatred, and would return the suppression if they got the chance.
If one faction is trying to keep another faction away from power, then they're not the same faction. Really, that's the basic definition of separateness with regard to political factions.
A Bush v. Sanders election would resemble Corbyn v. Johnson. Also, wildness is not a "symbolic issue"; it will decide whether the US of 2100 is majority Black or not.
"Probably solving racism would help shake up political coalitions, so somebody should do that too."
I would appreciate more specificity here. Is the point that the democrats are more successful with minorities because racism exists and a decisive portion of minorities care about the issue enough and think the democrats care about it enough to swing them democrat?
But also, what would solving racism mean? Equality of outcomes across every race? Nobody says anything racist anymore?
Right. But it's such a simplistically righteous line that it seems beneath Scott and more appropriate for say Teen Vogue. It should have been either expanded on or excluded IMO..
Maybe, but covid passports for example will cause a lot of collateral damage for some minorities. Likewise if you're conservatively inclined you might argue that democratic policies and rhetoric cause corrosive collateral damage to minorities through agency-denying infantilization -- everything that doesn't work out for you can be blamed on racism.
You can't do something about being seen as a Muslim though, and much of the post-9/11 targeting was based on appearances. Sikh believers aren't Muslim but were often targeted by people mistakenly thinking that they were.
Was there actually all that much "post-9/11 targeting", or are we talking a few dozen instances in a country of 300 million people that happened to get a lot of media coverage because it fit a preferred narrative?
If voter ID is racist, covid passports are super-duper racist, because being able to go places is worth about 10^8 times more than a 10^-8 chance of influencing an election, and the difficulty of obtaining ID is about the same as the difficulty of getting vaccinated (and I had to show ID to get vaccinated).
Getting ID as an adult if your family is dysfunctional is way way harder than getting vaccinated. Getting ID is a simple process if (and only if) step 1 is "you ask your parents to give you your birth certificate and social security cards, and they do have them and hand them over promptly" and also there is an appropriate office with reasonable hours that you can get to with the transportation you have during hours when you're not needed at work.
If you have to actually figure out how to get your primary documents, or if your county offices are sufficiently kafkaesque, it can get surprisingly challenging.
Do you think the Democrats are solving any racisms? What incentive do they have to solve a racism? If they solved racism, black people would vote more like the mainstream instead of massively for democrats. If anything, you have a vested interest in hyping the racism and race difference if the minority is in your community while providing symbolic patronage but not enough to actually solve the problem.
Well for one I'd like to define the problem first. Racism had become so amorphous that it's almost useless these days to pinpoint meaning.
I agree with you that the Democrats attempt to benefit from creating a demand for racism, amorphously defined as it is, that seems to exceed the supply.
It should be outside the Overton window for me to have a grievance against you because of what your ancestors did to my ancestors. Let bygones be bygones.
(and the impression that Europeans in 1600-1914 were especially evil is based a distortion of history. If anything their moral norms were a little better than their contemporaries elsewhere [e.g, no cannibalism, no scalping, no human sacrifice, being early to abolish slavery] , but they had more might with which to pursue the universal objectives of territory, resources, and prestige and were pretty successful at it. So now the descendants of the losers have grievances against the descendants of the winners even though if the Balance of Power were reversed the losers' ancestors would have done the same or worse.)
It can only be outside the Overton window when you are no longer economically effected by what your ancestors did to my ancestors. As long as wealth is intergenerational, the person whose ancestors were hurt will be worse off. If your grandfather took money from my grandfather and gave that money to you, it's perfectly reasonable for me to want their money back.
The issue would be helped massively if we had a 100% inheritance tax and peoples education (and credentials!) couldn't be influenced by the wealth of their parents.
The state definitely *could* do it, at gunpoint, but I don't think that would be a good idea. Hopefully there's some middle ground that is both helpful but not too tyrannical.
Georgia ran lottery to randomly give away huge tracts of land. There was a 50 year follow-up study:
"Sons of winners have no better adult outcomes (wealth, income, literacy) than the sons of non-winners, and winners’ grandchildren do not have higher literacy or school attendance than non-winners’ grandchildren."
I think that's an interesting study, but I am very sceptical about generalising from land grants in the 1830s to the effects of other forms of wealth in other times and cultures.
I don't think that's right: after all African Americans are much better off economically than sub-Saharan Africans. So if we can judge people based on the long term economical effects of the actions my ancestors took towards yours, then black people would owe white people a debt of gratitude. I don't think they do. I don't think they owe white people anything.
Sub-Saharan Africans were also hurt by actions taken by Europeans, so it's not an equal comparison. It's hard to say exactly how it would've ended up in the counterfactual where Europe never affected sub-Saharan African, but the countries that were relatively less exploited by Europeans in the 1800s (eg. Japan, Korea) tend to be better off today. Some countries in the middle-east was less exploited and were doing fairly well prior to oil.
within Africa, the duration of colonization is positively correlated to GDP per capita now, so that's a strike against "poor because exploited".
Also within Africa, GDP per capita rankings relative to the rest of the world were higher pre-decolonization than they are now. That's strike two against "poor because exploited".
Rome certainly exploited the Gauls, but I don't think the Gauls' descendents ended up worse off because of it. Quite the contrary. They got a lot of new technology and ideas and written language which eventually made them better off.
GDP per capita during colonization is meaningless since the economy is forced to produce economic goods at the cost of social welfare. The US could temporarily increase its GDP by forcing all teachers to instead be construction workers and making children work in factories, but that doesn't mean that the US is better off doing so.
And you would also expect colonization to be correlated with GDP per capita since the countries that were colonized first are the countries that were the easiest and most rewarding to extract resources from. Mines are valuable both today and in the 19th century. Countries that were relatively difficult to develop for geographic reasons are still relatively difficult to develop. That doesn't mean that exploitation causes economic growth.
> Sub-Saharan Africans were also hurt by actions taken by Europeans
Were they? Where's the evidence for that?
Even the poorest African countries these days have, in some places, things like running water, electricity, toilets, modern(ish) hospitals and agricultural practices... none of which they would be likely to have come up with on their own without European contact. Sub-Saharan African countries are poor by the standards of the rest of the world, but not by the standards that they had in circa 1500.
Certainly at a basic level sub-Saharan African was exploited in the past by Europeans, just look at what Belgium did in the Congo. Theoretically that could have had limited effect on today. However consider that Japan also has those things today and would not have developed (most) them without European contact. But Japan wasn't ruthlessly exploited by Europeans and is much better off today because of it.
"the countries that were relatively less exploited by Europeans in the 1800s (eg. Japan, Korea) tend to be better off today. "
And why weren't they colonized? Sub-Saharan climate and pathogens was not favorable to Europeans, why didn't Europeans colonize Korea and Japan with their temperate climates instead? Maybe because those were already the most developed non-western countries and so are not a fair-comparison group? Liberia and Ethiopia would tell you more.
To be fair, Japan when Commodore Perry arrived was pretty technologically backward, having sat in isolated stagnation for a good 200 years. And at the end of WWII South Korea was a rural and agricultural backwater, poorer than the Philippines.
Korea and Japan didn't have the raw resources of sub-Saharan Africa, the base number of people (useful as soldiers and working in the extractive institutions), and were just a lot further away from Europe.
Lets take at face value that Sub-Saharan Africa would be richer and more prosperous today if they had not been hurt by the actions of Europeans. Doesn't that mean African-Americans owe White Americans an even greater debt of gratitude? If we hadn't bought them and put them to work in America they would have been exploited by European Colonization. Thanks to us, they now enjoy much greater economic success! They should be paying us back! /s
Yes, but for a shorter amount of time and in a way, from my understanding, that was less about resource extraction. I'm only vaguely familiar with it though, so I could be mistaken.
After two or three generations in the United States (or most any other modern liberal democracy), it is highly unlikely that you are being economically affected by what anyone's ancestors did to your ancestors. We can see that from the many waves of immigrants whose ancestors were screwed out of everything but the clothes on their backs by someone else's foreign ancestors, and then subject to a generation of nativist bigotry by the ancestors of contemporary middle-class Americans, but within a generation or two are solidly middle-class Americans.
Multi-generational poverty, whether among inner-city blacks or Appalachian whites, isn't the permanently-entrenched result of someone screwing over someone else's ancestors. I'll leave it to you to figure out what does cause it.
>>After two or three generations in the United States (or most any other modern liberal democracy), it is highly unlikely that you are being economically affected by what anyone's ancestors did to your ancestors.
Do you have a source for this? You seem to be citing evidence for the proposition "social mobility is not 0%" in support of the proposition "social mobility is 100%" and hoping no-one notices. But actually, we know that while rags-to-riches absolutely does sometimes happen, children of poor parents are much more likely to grow up to be poor than children of rich parents.
And if someone screws over not just your ancestors as individuals, but the entire culture and community that they're part of, I'd expect that to be much more likely to have effects lasting over multiple generations.
Intergenerational social mobility for immigrants has always been high, even when the original immigrants were "screwed out of everything" by the process of immigration and/or by whatever they were trying to escape. Intergenerational social mobility for immigrants has always been high, even when the immigrants and their children and their children's children have been of a visibly different race and subject to both racist and nativist bigotry to the extent such things exist. Intergenerational social mobility for immigrants has always been high even when the immigrants are blacker than the average American Descendent of Slavery and Jim Crow.
There are demographic groups for which intergenerational social mobility is low, but there is plenty of contrary evidence for the theories, "it's because their ancestors were screwed over by someone else's ancestors" and "because racism". Have you *considered* looking for other theories?
>It should be outside the Overton window for me to have a grievance against you because of what your ancestors did to my ancestors. Let bygones be bygones.
Cool, so you're ok if I throw you and your family out of your house at gunpoint, move my family in, shoot you, then kill myself? You feel my family should keep the house, and yours should be homeless, at that point?
Lots of poor fathers might be willing to take that deal if it means their family gets to live in a mansion after they're gone. There are lots of despair suicides among the poor already, this seems like an amazing deal for some of them.
You think Native American incomes being 44% lower than white incomes has nothing to do with having all their wealth confiscated and being put on reservations for centuries? You think black incomes being 56% lower than white incomes has nothing to do with it *their living grandparents* living under Jim Crow and their earlier ancestors being literal slaves unable to own property or be educated?
Take all American politics out of the equation - if I told you about a fantasy setting where half-orcs were enslaved for hundreds of years and then denied civil rights and excluded from institutions until 2 generations ago, you would expect them to still be an economic underclass in that setting. You just can't escape the effects of history that quickly
"You just can't escape the effects of history that quickly"
1. South Korea did, a few decades after Japanese imperialists and communist invaders were kicked out.
2. Jews did, only a couple of decades after the holocaust.
3. Japanese-Americans did, only a couple of decades after FDR had them stripped of property and sent to internment camps.
4. Irish-Americans did, only a few decades after the potato famine forced them to leave Ireland with nothing.
5. Vietnamese-Americans did, only a couple decades after being dirt-poor in Vietnam and oppressed by a communist dictator.
Intergenerational wealth is barely even a thing. Prodigal sons spend it and lose it on bad investments. New people make new fortunes. There was a 60% turnover rate on the Forbes 400 over just 12 years.
For me it's not about ancestors - it's about how racial discrimination operates in our society, today. My ancestors weren't even in the US until the 20th century and had nothing to do with slavery. So I'll start with a personal example of racial discrimination.
Many years ago I worked at a community theatre and we were doing some renovations. I went home very late one night after a late show and afterparty - it must have been around 4am, when the buses stopped running, so I was walking down the street in Ridgewood, Queens from the L train to my home, which was about 3km. My clothes were covered in paint spatters and gypsum dust. A black man was walking the other way down the street and when we approached each other he asked if I could spare some change for the subway fare. For context, he didn't look homeless or disheveled - his clothes were certainly cleaner than mine. I gave the guy subway fare and by chance we ended up in conversation. After about a minute, an unmarked car pulled up and flashed police lights at us. Four plainclothes officers emerged - one from each door, simultaneously - it was all very dramatic. The officers walked up to us and one of them addressed me with the following words:
"Excuse me, sir: is this guy bothering you?"
"No," I said. "We're just having a conversation."
The police officer apparently felt the need to justify his suspicions to me, because he explained: "Cause you know, when you see a White guy and a Black guy out on a street corner at night, you have to think it's either a drug deal or some kind of problem."
"Ah. No problem. Just a couple of neighbors talking."
The officer then asked if I was carrying anything - drugs, weapons, etc. I admitted that I was carrying a utility knife, which I had been using to cut sheet rock all day. The officer asked to see it and I handed it over. He inspected it and then suggested that in the future I should leave it in a locker at work rather than carry it around. By the way, I know the law in New York City, and you are definitely allowed to carry a utility knife home from work. Then they sent me on my way.
As I walked away, I turned and saw that the Black guy was being held up against the hood of the police car and frisked. I'm not sure how much you know about stop and frisk in New York City (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop-and-frisk_in_New_York_City) but there is ample data. I am just telling you this story because it was so unambiguously and explicitly racist, with the officer in charge openly mentioning race in his explanation for the stop. I, a dusty, paint-splattered, disheveled White guy with a knife was not frisked. He, a Black guy, clean, non-threatening, and vouched for by me, was frisked. I know there are explanations for the disparate racial impacts of stop-and-frisk - data showing that stops correspond with neighborhoods with high crime rates which happen to be where Black people live, or that they correspond with higher rates of crime committed by Black people. This wasn't that. We were in the same neighborhood, on the same corner, involved in the same activity. We were racially profiled and I was judged as not a candidate for frisking, and he as a candidate for frisking, solely because of our respective races.
I have Black friends, Black relatives, Black neighbors (well, I did when I lived in the US), and I know for a fact that they experience racism right now, in today's America. I've witnessed it personally, on more than one occasion. So that would be one thing to work on fixing.
In terms of the politics, I definitely think that if police departments took steps to address police racism, Black Americans would be more likely to support pro-police political candidates (who in many cases are Republicans). I think if Republicans weren't transparently attempting to sabotage Black voting rights, many more Black Americans would support Republican candidates. I think there are a lot of socially-conservative, fiscally-conservative, religious, pro-police Black Americans who would gladly vote for conservative candidates if those candidates weren't either openly racist or proponents of openly racist policies and institutions.
But don't make the mistake of thinking that racism is an issue of ancestors or bygones. It's not even close.
That sucks that that happened to that guy, but we're talking about an n=1 anecdote of a one minute add-on to the inconvenience of getting stopped by police.
Here in Las Vegas I see obvious drug dealers all over the place. Often someone will try to sell me drugs within 10 feet outside the door as I exit a casino. Tourists are passed out on the sidewalk from taking too much heroin, or hallucinating and talking to themselves from taking too much of whatever. If the police just opened their eyes and frisked a few obvious drug dealers, they could find a lot of drugs (and illegal firearms) But they don't, because they're too afraid of false positives and seeming racist.
The utilitarian cost-benefit analysis should ask: how many false positives does it take to be bad enough to cancel out the benefit of a true positive? If the ratio is better than that, frisking is worth it. But maybe they can also get better at targeting it instead of just sliding a giant lever from "less" to "more" frisking.
BTW it was kind of funny when, at the peak of the lockdown in 2020, when the whole strip was closed for almost three months, the career drug dealers of Las Vegas adapted to it by loitering in front of every grocery store and major intersection in Summerlin. It was kind of ridiculous, because there were so many of them fighting for so few customers, and because they were so obvious. After the casinos reopened, they went back to the strip and downtown.
They might as well just legalize all drugs and tax and regulate them, instead of having this weird system of de facto looking the other way 99% of the time, but occasionally throwing some random unlucky person into jail for a long time.
You only need one "anecdote" to prove that something exists. My comment was a response to your implication that solving racism was about addressing the crimes of our ancestors. I simply provided a counterexample: racism is not limited to ancestors. I, a White American whose ancestors had nothing to do with slavery and weren't even in the same hemisphere at the time, received the privilege of being treated with deference and respect by officers of the law. My neighbor, a Black American, did not receive that privilege. I see that as a problem which needs to be solved, and again, it has nothing to do with our ancestors.
But just to be clear, is it your contention that this particular instance of racism was the only instance of racism to occur in the United States in the last two decades, and I just happened to be lucky to have witnessed it? Or do you acknowledge that this is the sort of thing that Black people are talking about when they talk about police racism?
"Here in Las Vegas I see obvious drug dealers all over the place."
I'm not sure what this has to do with the question of racism unless it is your contention that Blackness is a constituent element of being an "obvious drug dealer". (I also don't agree that recreational drug use should be a matter which merits police intervention, but let's put that aside.) If you are arguing in favor of racial profiling by police, then you aren't arguing that racism doesn't exist - you are arguing instead that we should consider the benefits of racism.
But perhaps what you meant to say is that police are engaging in "reverse" racial profiling - declining to stop Black "obvious drug dealers" for fear of being called racist? That does not seem to comport with statistics which show that Black Americans are disproportionately subject to stop-and-frisk but I haven't specifically looked at data from Las Vegas, so you may be right and I'd be open to being convinced.
In any case, I would note that the solution to police being afraid to be called racist for frisking a Black person would be for police to take measures to alter the public perception that they are racist - in other words, solving the problem I've identified also has the benefit of solving the problem you've identified.
I wasn't saying that the ancestral-grievances thing is the only race-related thing that needs to be solved, so it was a "counterexample" to something I didn't say.
My profile of an obvious drug dealer is someone of any race who loiters at the entrance to an establishment for a long time, isn't on their phone, has bulging pockets, makes eye-contact with a lot of random strangers passing by, and occasionally says something to them like "hey bro, you need anything"?
The police could probably catch a lot of obvious drug dealers if they paid attention and were willing to risk a 40% false positive rate and a news story about a false positive who happened to be black. Seems like the pendulum here has swung all the way to the "less frisking" side so much so that even obvious drug dealers have free reign and this is a problem in terms of tourists ODing on adulturated street drugs that they ought to be able to buy in safer legal dispensaries instead.
Back to the main topic, if you look closely at the US statistics, evidence of a net-average police bias against black people is not there. Blacks are a smaller percentage of violent crime arrests than violent crime offenders on the national crime victimization survey (a government survey that asks a large representative sample of Americans about their victimization by crime). Blacks are also shot less by cops relative to their violent crime rates and cop-killing rates.
Relevant graphs to back up all the claims in the preceding paragraph, with sources inline:
"I wasn't saying that the ancestral-grievances thing is the only race-related thing that needs to be solved, so it was a "counterexample" to something I didn't say."
I don't know of any way to interpret your comment other than in the context of what it was a reply to, but if this is not what you meant, then what point, if any, were you trying to make by bringing up the idea of ancestral grievances?
"evidence of a net-average police bias against black people is not there"
Again, I'm not talking about a net-average police bias - I'm talking about the impact of individual instances of police bias on the ability of conservatives to attract Black voters into a coalition. If 9 out of 10 Black voters know someone who has been (or believes they have been) discriminated against by police then the party that talks about addressing police bias is going to get more traction than the party that dismisses those concerns.
That said, we could presumably spend years exchanging studies which prove or disprove police racism in the US. I could give you this list - https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/opinions/systemic-racism-police-evidence-criminal-justice-system/ - and you could give me this list - https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2020/06/03/american-racism-and-the-anti-white-left/ - and we could debate each study in each list, and other studies from other lists, to try to arrive at a reasonable interpretation, and finally at the end of the process perhaps we would have reached some shared understanding or perhaps we would have concluded that we have incompatible values or evidentiary standards. But your claim that evidence of "net-average" racism "isn't there" is mistaken - there's tons of evidence from hundreds of studies - we just, presumably, at present don't agree on the interpretation of that evidence.
And for the many people who interpret that evidence as supporting the conclusion that there is net racism amongst American police, that conclusion provides a barrier to cooperation on other potential issues of agreement.
You sound opposed to the drug war, yet also strangely convinced that it works. It doesn't. Stricter enforcement has been tried. It does not have a noticeable impact on drug use or overdose deaths. People end up getting their drugs one way or another. If you arrest a dealer, another one will be hungry enough to fill the job in no time. Cops know this at this point. Going buck wild arresting every drug dealer just fills up the courts and prisons and requires administrative work, all for no actual reduction in drug use or deaths. It's primarily useful as a tool for easily arresting people responsible for more serious crimes.
Well Scott is being a little glib, I do think the most dangerous thing for the Left, and I say this as a member of the Left, is if there was a conservative movement, that could appeal to larger swaths of the minority vote. The issue is, many of those socially conservative minority voters are more liberal on the questions that the socially conservative base cares about right now, aka, immigration and police reform.
Plus, to be blunt, your average conservative black voter cares less about something like trans issues than your average conservative white voter.
Getting to equality in terms of things like wealth, income, geographic spread, homeownership, representation in positions of power, etc. etc. etc., so that minorities no longer have divergent interests from white people.
Simple experiment: would a neutral company that takes a conservative position benefit economically or be hurt economically? The former would back Scott’s theory (they would benefit but just don’t because they’re led by all progressives), the latter would back Richards (they would be hurt because progressives care more and would cause a big stink).
I think the company being relatively neutral (ie not Chick Fil A) is important here.
My own experience working in corporate finance and dealing with multi-billion dollar CEOs makes me lean toward Richard’s explanation. Most C-level don’t really care about wokeness and largely think it’s silly - but they’re relatively ambivalent and just don’t want to deal with the headache.
Also an important piece that I think is missing: yes most educated financial and biz elite (including C level execs I work with) are prob Democrats - but the type of people that control institutions are *WAY* to the left of them. Current American elite institutions aren’t just unrepresentative of the median American, they’re unrepresentative of the median *Democratic voter*.
I don't think that explains the extent though. Young potential customers/employees are "woke" - but they're also fiercly intolerant to anything that isn't also "woke".
It's also not that a majority of employees are "woke", but a vocal minority are, and the rest of us have learned to shut up if we want to keep our jobs.
Preach. We shouldn’t anthropomorphize Corporations. Management responds to incentives and there’s an incentive to be woke right now. 10 years ago it was “thank you for your service”.
You don’t get to run large organizations by being ideologically fussy.
I take issue with the idea that "liberals dominate" - domination implies some kind of set of tangible victories, of which we see hardly any. Gay marriage I guess? Healthcare exchanges? Corporations are as powerful as ever, the military is as big as ever, the welfare state hasn't blown up, there hasn't been significant progress on climate change, etc. Culture war narratives simply perpetuate the status quo, which academia/corporations/media/politicians all find useful for different reasons. If liberalism is supposedly so powerful, why does everything look so illiberal in practice?
Corporations have a massive amount of power. You can get kicked off Twitter, Facebook, etc. Try to start a competitor to those? Amazon Web Services might not host you. Or Paypal, banks, etc. won't allow you into the financial system. Write a book that Amazon won't sell? Good luck getting anyone to publish it. Corporations can't jail you, but they can keep you from using your assets and ban you from plenty of activities. Corporations have also been threatening legislatures and voters for years (MLB moving the all-star game out of Georgia, pressure from various companies on Indiana and NC for laws seen as anti-gay or anti-trans).
Corporations do have a lot of power over people's lives though to the degree that their lobbyists are immensely influential in terms of actually shaping the law. Much of the soft power which corporations exert is exerted *on* the government.
Academia has no power over us? I must have been imagining it when I was confined to my home despite not being sick, purely on the "advice" of academics? I guess it wasn't academics who came up with any of the other policies that have dominated our lives in the past year and a half. And I guess government policies on energy and climate don't come from academics either.
Please. Our society is run by academics. That's part of the problem with it!
>>Academia has no power over your life once you graduate.
That strikes me as an odd way of framing it.
1. Academic institutions control access to most desirable careers, both through the formal credentialing function and in the more informal sense of conferring social and cultural capital necessary to advance in many professions.
2. Most societies expend a lot of energy on inculcating a particular set of beliefs and dispositions in the young. The implicit assumption is that influencing people at a malleable age gives leverage over how they'll think and behave throughout the life-cycle. It'd be very surprising if that assumption were totally wrong.
3. Even if all we care about is academia's supervisory authority over people during the time they're enrolled as students, that period has greatly expanded in absolute terms. People who used to exit the system after high school now routinely go on to 5-6 years of postsecondary study. In the aggregate, that's a lot more time for whoever's running academia to run your life before you get to "once you graduate."
4. On the subject of government coercion... Like most people, I've never been to jail. So my experience of agents of the state exercising direct physical control over my person basically consists of (a) being patted down by TSA a handful of times a year, and (b) my entire time in K-12 public school. Which strikes you as a more significant exercise of power?
"1. Academic institutions control access to most desirable careers, both through the formal credentialing function and in the more informal sense of conferring social and cultural capital necessary to advance in many professions."
This seems a bit like, "Windows control access to the most important and life giving air. Thus they hold the most power."
I mean, a window is just a commonplace object with no agency of its own. But if there were a group of people sitting around deciding for everybody else who gets to have air to breathe and who doesn't, then yeah, I guess I'd call that a position of power.
So are you making a fully general counterargument against controlling access to things of value ever being a form of power? Or is the claim that the way in which academia gatekeeps is more passive and window-like as opposed to, say, the way a Bond villain might control access to air?
I am pointing out that for the most part academic gatekeeping is like a window. If you have the grades and you can pass a test you can get into a university. You might have to write an essay.
And whether you are Liberal or Conservative you probably ought to write the essay as if you are capable of pretending to fit in with the people who are likely to be your classmates.
>But if there were a group of people sitting around deciding for everybody else who gets to have air to breathe and who doesn't, then yeah, I guess I'd call that a position of power.
That would depend on how much discretion they have in making that decision, and how much information they have with which to exercise that discretion. Trying to discern someone's sociopolitical views from their high school transcript, SAT score, and the essay they wrote in a conscious attempt to game the system, doesn't give you all that much to work with.
Realistically, I do not believe that "academic institutions" have the power to lock anyone who would likely learn to be a competent engineer or accountant with a decent education, out of a desirable career in engineering or accounting. *Maybe* your engineering career starts out half a rung lower on the ladder because MIT was trying to fill an informal quota of woke minority candidates that year and you had to go to State instead. But the idea that you have to be or pose as woke or progressive or even just liberal to enter and advance in a wide range of desirable careers, does not pass the giggle test with me.
There are probably *some* careers where that is the case, and they may be particularly influential ones in shaping public discourse (e.g. journalism). But that's a much narrower claim, and if that's all there is to it we'd expect to still see plenty of well-paid engineers, accountants, etc, donating to the GOP. So we're looking for something different here.
In trying to understand the force of the "window" analogy -- which I grasp better now, thanks to Robert for clarifying -- I may have given a misleading impression about what I was originally arguing.
I never said anything about politicizing admissions decisions or anybody needing to "pose" to avoid being locked out. My claim was that academia's gatekeeper function gave it a certain kind of social power. I didn't say that power was easily instrumentalized in the service of narrowly political ends.
I think we probably have some minor differences about how much to be interested in the picking-winners-and-losers aspect of the gatekeeping. Sometimes this looks like, you're good at math, you always do well on the Big Math Test, you get waitlisted at MIT and go to State and come out with the same great career as an actuary you would've had in any case, and it's not obvious that the institution's internal culture made any difference to that outcome. Sometimes it looks like people driven to distraction parsing the nuances of what sort of cheese plate to bring to Amy Chua's house because she has a direct line to all the best federal clerkships and will reward your mastery of bizarre subtleties of Yale-local-culture etiquette.
But that's not really my point. I think you can abstract away from the question of institutions' discretion to advance or obstruct individual careers and still see how the gatekeeping role positions them to exert social influence in important ways.
It's like, imagine there's one bridge crossing the river into the big city, and you have a billboard next to the bridge. Anybody who pays the toll can use the bridge, but everybody has to cross at this one place and it usually takes a while for the traffic to clear. That'd be a pretty valuable place to own a billboard, right?
In other words, whenever a society decides, "our entire leadership class will be processed in their formative years through this one institution," that institution acquires an outsized ability to shape the character of society as a whole. In many historical societies, and some still today, that institution has been the military. In the US over the past couple generations, it's the university.
So if I were to tell you, like some fairy godmother, "John, I'm going to send you every single person who might someday become a leader of your society. You'll never get to choose who I give you, and you may never tell anyone which of the ones I send you like best. But you can decide everything about the context in which they first become inspired by ideas, acquire a worldview, fall in and out of love, make lifelong friends, take on adult responsibilities and acquire basic notions about fairness, duty, empathy, profit and honor, gain and loss. You decide what stories are venerated there, which words are sacred, what conduct is forgivable, which institutional forms become the template for future expectations. You may never penalize a student for rejecting your teaching. But I will guarantee that *nobody* attains a position of social prominence without passing through your school first."
As we become wealthier as a society, wealth becomes less salient. Basic needs are more likely to be met - and they are indeed better met now despite yawning inequality - so people's needs move up Maslow's pyramid. Today people not only want material security, they also want emotional security. That means demanding not only that you don't starve, but that society looks the way you want it to look. With the latter demand in mind, liberals are winning it in a walk.
Totally agree. Liberals are losing on all the consequential goals they've had for the past 20 years. Universal healthcare, wealth distribution via taxation, foreign policy, climate policy, gun control, pro-union legislation, constitutional reforms, voting reforms. Criminal justice and ending the drug war seems to be moving in the right direction, but *far* slower than should be the case. Gay marriage is the one big exception, and I would hardly consider it as consequential as the other categories I named.
I'm not surprised that two conservatives agree that the liberals are dominating, however. Conservatives also are achieving nothing of substance (maybe because the whole purpose of the party representing them seems to be to prevent anything substantive from happening?...) except for filling the courts with Federalist Society picks. Meanwhile they find themselves surrounded by more and more people espousing liberal opinions as public perception (and with it popular culture) generally shifts more and more to the left.
Another problem I have with this whole analysis is that it seems to conceive of liberalism purely as "wokism", whereas I consider wokism to just be an annoying, distracting sideshow from genuinely worthwhile liberal (left) policies. Scott has a tendency to focus too much on the woke aspects of the left, which is horribly unproductive in my view.
Yet another problem I have with the analysis is that it ignores a major and obvious interpretation of what we're seeing - that more educated people lean more liberal because the more you learn, the more you find liberal arguments more convincing...as in the facts are, in fact, on the side of the left. I'm not dismissing other explanations, but it kinda seems like this interpretation should be the default.
One final note: I generally prefer to distinguish between "liberals" and "the left" and "progressives", but they seemed to use the terms more or less interchangeably here to mean the broader left-of-center, democratic-voting coalition, so I did as well.
That would be the default assumption to start from, yes. I don't know enough about right-wing parties from the time to provide a thorough analysis or anything though. From what I do know about the 70s and 80s at least, I could offer different explanations that might override that default assumption.
From the 1950s graph, it looks like the income effect could be part of an alternate explanation.
What seems difficult, though, is that it seems hard to imagine both that the right wing parties were right on the facts in the 50s-80s and the left wing are right in the 90s-10s. Not impossible to believe, of course, but ... tricky.
I'm certainly oversimplifying (so possibly not helpful), but it would seem odd to say, "to be the most correct, you have to believe what the right-wing parties believed in 1960 and what the left-wing parties believe in 2020".
Yes, it would seem odd to say that. There's no need to come to such a reductive explanation. There are certainly lots of factors at play here. There's a fair amount of overlap between what would be considered left vs right viewpoints now and then, not to mention the world changed enormously throughout that time and probably made views which were appropriate and justified in 1960 less appropriate and justified in 2020.
It just seems odd to me to entirely ignore the (partial) explanation "being educated makes you know more, and knowing more makes you end up more liberal in recent decades".
In that (somewhat famous) quote about the stupid party and the evil party, aren't the Republicans the stupid one? Though I don't know the date on the quote, so maybe it was after the shift ...
The Affordable Care Act might not have achieved universal healthcare, but it got pretty close. Losing on healthcare would be like "Republicans are slowly gutting Medicare by cutting reimbursement rates and shrinking the scope of services it covers," and that hasn't been the case at all. Instead the trend is toward expanded coverage via state level Medicaid programs and health insurance exchanges. Let's not forget that the Bush Administration oversaw a large expansion of Medicare ~15 years ago, too. Maybe progressives haven't gotten everything they wanted in this regard, but they've gotten....say 60% of it, maybe?
Yeah this is a fair response. Part of the issue here is that I said "universal healthcare" when I really specifically meant single-payer, government-run healthcare. Call it Medicare for All, if you want. From most progressive perspectives (I'm making a distinction here from mere democrats), the ACA was never going to "fix" the healthcare system, and it predictably hasn't brought our costs down substantially. It's categorically different from Medicare for All, which is the real goal of most progressives. I can see how you'd say we've gotten 60% of our goal there, but from my perspective it's closer to 25%. Still nice, but far slower than I would have hoped for us to progress on that issue.
The thing is, most people want progressive change, but the sizable minority of conservatives prevents that from happening, or slows it down. So it's like the "wins" are lagging behind public support, which can make the so-far-unattained-wins feel like losses.
Why is it that right-wingers are "conservatives" anyway? Why don't we live in a society where it's the left-wingers who are "conservative" and the right-wingers are perpetually pushing society further and further towards their right-wing utopia while the left-wingers attempt to stand athwart history crying "Stop!"
The standard explanation is the same as the one that many physicists give for the direction of the second law of thermodynamics. The initial state of the universe/the political system was a state of extremely low entropy (big bang)/extreme right-wingery (absolute monarchy with an established religion). Drift should be expected to move towards the center of the mass of possible states, which is away from that initial state.
I guess that makes sense in a world view where "Left" and "Right" are really two sides of some sort of political spectrum.
My world view looks more like this: a vast multi-dimensional political space, where "Left" is a small region of possibility space and everything else is labelled "Right" by default. (This explains why theocracy, big-business Romneyism, fascism and libertarianism are all labelled "Right" despite having nothing in common while "Left" positions differ only in exactly how much practicality you're willing to season your Marxism with.) In this world view, the question is why people keep wanting to drag us one-dimensionally back and forth from the very specific "Right" point where we started (divine right of kings etc) to the small region labelled "Left" instead of exploring all the other possible regions of political solution space.
I agree that it's better to think of the space as highly dimensional.
I disagree that the "Right" is more diverse than the "Left". Woke YIMBY technocrats, anti-woke Marxists, anarcho-communists, and Millian liberals all count as "Left" in the same way as the four examples you give count as "Right".
Isn't it all because of the National Assembly during the French Revolution? Folks that wanted a liberal republic (Robespierre et all) sat on the left while the folks that wanted a constitutional monarchy(/some royalists) sat on the right (until they got purged). In the context of 1790s France, that split works. Unfortunately, it is no longer the 1790s and most of the world isn't in France so the whole left-wing/progressive and right-wing/conservative terminology no longer makes sense, but that's what we're stuck with.
On some issues, that's exactly what's happening. But conservatives are still called conservatives, regardless. Names are weird like that.
Reagan, patron saint of modern American conservatism, changed a lot of stuff. But that didn't make the people who wanted to preserve the previous status quo against his changes into conservatives. The nomenclature remains the same, even when the conservatives are trying to make progress and the progressives are trying to conserve things.
I'm not sure I understand the nature of the objection being raised here. Nobody's claiming that the list of institutions dominated by liberals includes Congress, or state legislatures, or the federal judiciary. If you're just asking, why doesn't control of various nongovernmental bodies (universities, media, tech companies) translate more consistently into leverage over the political system, I agree that that is a very good and interesting question!
But this came across more as acting like liberals' inability to control the political process counts somehow as evidence against liberals controlling all sorts of other institutions that are influential in their own right.
I would like to separate out two phenomena: self-interest and ideology/religion. From a pure self-interest perspective, rich people's self-interest tends to align them with the right and poor people's self-interest tends to align them with the left. However religion/ideology is much more important than self-interest. Also, on the margin, poor people will tend to vote more according to self-interest (for obvious reasons) while rich people can better "afford" to vote according to religion or conscience. I think that in the 50's there was one dominant religion in the US, namely Christianity, which was right-wing affiliated. In 2010, there were two religions, namely, Christianity/traditionalism and leftism/humanism, which were strongly correlated with education (and thus also income). People in 2010 were also much richer in real terms than people in the 50's, and thus could afford to vote their conscience more. I think this explains the large-scale phenomenon of elites going to the left. There is a separate and probably at least partially internet-driven phenomenon of hyperpolarization (that creates things like the blue bubble diagram of institutions), where a "critical mass" of a particular ideology in a particular environment creates a purity spiral, like what happened with Christianity in the late Roman empire or revolutionary radicalism in the French revolution.
This is also important - in 1910, children were being sent to work where their appendanges were being ripped off, and very rich men were shrugging at it.
OTOH, and I say this as a social democrat who supports a larger welfare state, life isn't that bad for even many poor people in the US, who are housed in decent housing, have access to thousands of hours of entertainment, and cheap, calorie dense food.
> in 1910, children were being sent to work where their appendanges were being ripped off, and very rich men were shrugging at it.
I mean, they still are, and we still are, it's just that we've outsourced all the horrendous labour conditions to China where we don't have to see it or think about it, and we can get our cheap plastic shit even cheaper.
"From a pure self-interest perspective, rich people's self-interest tends to align them with the right and poor people's self-interest tends to align them with the left"
Not true in general. Rich people who are rich through political influence, such as LBJ, find increases in government power to be in their self-interest. Poor people who are prevented from working by a minimum wage law that prices them off the market or from being barbers by licensing laws or from housing they can afford by restrictions on what housing it is legal to provide pushed from the left find their interest aligned with parts of the right.
I'm talking about trends, rather than particulars here, and even more specifically trends in perception rather than the reliability of those perceptions. In particular, people like LBJ are a very small minority and most rich people believe that they would be better off financially if right-wing politicians came to power. To say what I mean more clearly here's an example: I think if you polled people over 100k income whether they are Republican or Democrat then the split would be close to 50/50. But if you polled them whether they would do better financially under a Republican or Democratic president, >60% would say under a Republican president (and pre-Trump, I'd give the number as >70%). I also think that if you could somehow control for ideology (for example, if you polled people with similar views on moral issues) then poorer people would be more in support of welfare policies than rich people.
"People in 2010 were also much richer in real terms than people in the 50's, and thus could afford to vote their conscience more. "
Your vote has essentially zero chance of changing the outcome in a large population polity. The relevant self-interest consideration isn't how the policies you vote for would affect you but how your political position affects your interaction with those around you.
I think you're right that most people's "conscience" is far from some kind of Kantian ideal of consequentialist/independently articulated belief system. It is deeply embedded in social context and dependent on how what they believe would affect them. This is why I am calling it a religion or ideology vs. a clearly formalizable set of core principles, so we're in agreement here
This is technically true, but I think you're making the mistake of confusing humans with rational self-interested agents.
In fact, I think that perceived self-interest with respect to the parties' platforms does have a non-trivial impact on how many people vote, even though, as you say, the chance of actually changing the outcome is neglibible.
I know this is opening a can of worms, but I didn't see it mentioned anywhere else in the article or comments. In the long term, traditional religion is diminishing as a force in society. And traditional religion is part of the right-wing coalition and has been so since the left-right divide existed. In fact it was one of the fulcrum issues that caused the left to splinter off from traditional societies, which are closer to conservative positions. I predict conservatives will be unable to conserve traditional religion, which has historically been their number one duty. (Conservation of wealth is a more recent addition to their roster of duties.)
Now I make a distinction between traditional religion in particular and religion in general, because I see religion in general as a stickier phenomenon. Religion in general need not concern itself with a god, as long as it serves its main purpose of creating and sustaining myths that unify society. I already see the sprouts of a new kind of religion that moves beyond theology but nonetheless offers a totalizing worldview that outstrips the evidence in support of it.
When you make the distinction between "traditional religion" and "religion in general", would that divide things like Catholicism and Conservative Judaism from things like prosperity gospel megachurches?
No, I'm defining traditional religion as god-centered, so I would define all of those as traditional religions. While religion in general, as I am using the term, performs the function of being a shared myth that organizes a community and sets its norms. This could include Catholicism or Islam, but it could also include environmentalism, the Marxian dialectic, the Washington Consensus, etc. I know a lot of people like to require a deity for religion status, but I consider any system of received wisdom believed in because of community norms, and not because of personal reflection or investigation, to be of a religious nature. There are degrees and there's no hard cutoff, but a telltale sign is when common sense and conflicting experiences are dismissed in favor of an essentially deductive approach using an axiomatic framework.
I see this generalized form of religion as a necessity for social functioning, because not everyone has enough time to come up with their own epistemology, and getting everyone, or at least a lot of people, on the same page lubricates society. That's why it's sticky; as the traditional god religions diminish, they will be replaced by newer religions that are not god-centered but nonetheless build consensus via myth.
That sounds like Clifford Geertz's definition of religion (which I also happen to subscribe to)...
"Religion is a system of symbols which establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic."
And I think you're very correct about people being unable or unwilling to "come up with their own epistemology" — which I take to mean an unwillingness to question their assumptions and to examine their world in detail to test their assumptions.
My political outlook tests out as radical left and very non-authoritarian on the left/right authoritarian/non-authoritarian political compass — but I consider myself to be a utilitarian leftist and not an ideological leftist. And I've come to the conclusion that the reason righties, at least most Christianist righties, are generally so anti-science is that they consider science to be a competing religion. And in a certain way they're right, because most lefties embrace science as if it were a received religion — i.e without understanding how it works or its limitations. An unwavering trust in science without understanding I would call Scientism. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has made this very clear to me. My lefty friends say, "Trust the Science!" even though the science of the epidemic was still being worked out (and it's still is being worked out). But I find the right's suspicion of science more unsettling than the left's unqualified embracement of science, because at least the lefties (with a few exceptions) will let scientist do their research without interference. While the righties want to shut down scientific inquiry if i offends their sensibilities.
Clifford Geertz's definition is a better description than my own, but I think we're describing the same thing.
And yes, not all religions, according to this definition, are created equal. Some are better at describing the world accurately, or being humane, etc. I don't consider it good or even possible to excise religion from public life. The best we can hope for is a benign, accurate religion.
And I also agree, that for many and maybe even most people, science is a competing religion with Christianity et al. One reason the right is hobbled, perhaps permanently, is because its foundational belief system is on the wrong side of the evidence. And once that goes out the window, the edifice it leaves behind is pretty rickety. Lots of conservative (in the west) beliefs sprang from attitudes and beliefs grounded in Christianity. Foremost among them is an essentially top-down view of life (god created everything), rather than the bottom-up view that science has evidence for (everything began as plasma and differentiated into more complex arrangements). This top-down view of life is, at root, at odds with observed reality, and it's also the root of the authoritarian tendency on the right. (The left also has an authoritarian tendency, but it is justified differently.)
Scott wrote: "I think I would go with the same recommendations ... try to decrease the salience of college in society, so that not every smart person needs to get a college degree, and not every important job is degree-gated."
I don't think that would be possible with the way corporations need to be free to higher and fire their workforce to deal with economic positive and negative economic stresses. Charlie Stross discusses the rise of credentialism from a British perspective, but there's a lot similarities between what went down in the UK and the US during the 1980s...
"Consequences of Thatcher revolution include: emphasis on credentialism — if you don't have a job for life, you need proof (on paper) of skills that were formerly acquired in the workplace — combined with deprecation of apprenticeship system (where's the incentive to provide a 5 year apprenticeship for a trainee if they then turn round and go find a job elsewhere?). Demand for pieces of paper as proof of fitness for employment goes through the roof."
... and thus the increased salience of college education in today's "knowledge" society.
Generally nodding along with this post, while getting increasingly uncomfortable as more of the elephant comes into view and you don’t notice, and then it ends with a big fuck-you.
Scott, it’s simpler than you think, in the American context. There is an oligarchy dominating both parties, and many of the differences between them are fake, but the PEOPLE in the two parties have been sorted to be quite different and at odds, which suits the oligarchy. Also, one party is more reformable than the other.
From the right, it is obvious that the concept you are missing is “left entryism”—the left loves to infiltrate respected institutions and gut them, sometimes wearing the corpse as a skin suit to demand the respect it used to deserve. The right isn’t this devious, they prefer to simply avoid institutions they regard as bad rather than plunging in and remaking them. That does NOT MEAN THEY CARE LESS. It only means they’re stupid to have allowed themselves to ignore the entryist dynamic until the institutions were too far gone to defend.
I think entryism (at least as defined on wikipedia: "a political strategy in which an organisation or state encourages its members or supporters to join another, usually larger, organization") is attributing too much to top-down strategy something that can already be adequately explained by emergent phenomena. Once a party spends a couple decades denying global warming, it loses more of academia (and sympathetic individuals / organizations), which makes it *even less* likely to take positions that attract them in the future, since they are now an even narrower portion of their base.
Where this gets tricky is the elites in either faction have some ability to change the opinions and direct the attention of their base. If you went purely by public opinion surveys shortly before the Iraq war, you might come to the conclusion that Bush was a populist responding to some sort of grass-roots movement to invade Iraq.
Same thing with the (now waning) global-warming-denial movement, I don't think that either was responding to some strong, grass-roots opinion on climate science.
I think where the Republican party went wrong is that some time ago they were taken over by a narrower group of elites within the party when it used to contain a much wider group (Charles Murray basically is/was a member of the winning faction and describes the timeline in one of his books), which of course distances the party from the elites in society as a whole.
It looks like the current establishment is starting to lose control of the party, but I'd put decent odds for them holding on since they control most of (their faction's) media and it's easy enough for candidates to copy whatever rhetoric is popular right now. Long term there are demographic problems if you maintain democracy but I think the base is getting more sympathetic to alternatives (didn't Tucker recently spend a week promoting Orban?) so it could go either way really.
Speaking of an Orban like natalist welfare state. Hungary's birth rate is down to 1.55 births per woman. With very little immigration the right in that country is all about the government doing whatever it can to get that number up. Would a continued fall in the US birth rate (and a clamp down on immigration) also push the right in the US toward a more statist/natalist welfare state direction?
Is there evidence that welfare states can improve fertility? Intuitively it seems like it would but last time I checked European countries have lower fertility than the United States. I could be wrong about this though.
It's been noted in many studies over the past fifty years that fertility goes down as the standard of living and/or economic security increases. Therefore, a welfare state that provided an optimal economic safety net for its citizens should have lower fertility rates than societies without any economic security. India and the various Southeast Asian countries have shown this pattern as the standard of living has increased. However, it's also been shown that command-and-control economies — which may provide a strong social safety net without economic opportunities — disincentivize procreation even further.
For instance, the fertility rate in the GDR dropped so dramatically in the late 1950s that the Government lowered the age of consent to 14 and actively encouraged teens to explore their sexuality (only heterosexual sexuality, though). I can't find them on Youtube anymore, but the GDR produced some very "frank" educational films to teach kids how to masturbate (without being visually explicit) and to teach kids about the stages of sexual arousal in males and females. These weren't very explicit either, but they did show how teens should make out (including heavy petting). Basically, it was, "You're sexually mature now, go out and have fun!" with the subtext of "make babies for the GDR."
1. values of a society are an adaptation to subsistence strategies
2. technological change drives changes in values, with conservatives trying to maintain values they learned from their parents/when they were kids, liberals trying to adapt to new circumstances
3. technological change is happening faster, so the division between liberals and conservatives is widening
4. in this context, liberals will tend to thrive as they are by definition the ones who are attempting to adapt to new technologies, and 4.a. the specific form of this thriving will be in education and tech
Again this is post-facto moralization of power politics by arguing your side is deriving the benefits through increased virtue as opposed to institutional capture.
It's not a moralization and I didn't say anything about virtue. I am not stating that one side has the "right" values and one has the "wrong" values. I am saying that one side makes a deliberate attempt to maintain received values while the other side makes a deliberate attempt to alter values in response to changes in circumstance. The latter strategy explains liberal domination of education and tech, without any requirement that the changed values are in any way "better" or more moral or virtuous.
I think the overall level of technological change is a bit slower now than it was 100 years ago, but one particular technology (social media) radically altered the habitat of memes by creating niche filter bubbles, and that's the source of most of the polarization. Essentially ethnogenesis induced by people splitting off into their own communities which reinforce whatever prior tendencies they had.
Maybe a downside of Archipelago is potentially creating a bunch of radically different cultures that hate each other. The internet is already sort of like Archipelago.
I'm more talking about how technology affects how we make a living. For example, we've had this transition to a knowledge and service economy. Arguably mental health/well-being is more important for knowledge/service workers compared to factory workers - service workers need to be able to deliver service with a smile, whereas factory workers presumably rarely had their moods policed on the factory floor. So modern liberals place a great deal of emphasis on mental health/"self-care" and have invented concepts like "emotional labor". Or perhaps you see these trends as self-involvement brought on by decadence, but if so, the decadence is still enabled by this transition from an economy of material production to an economy where productivity gains from technology have made it so most people don't have to be involved in material production.
And so maybe it's the case that adopting an ethic where taking care of your mind is of great importance and working with your hands is a secondary concern, if it is a concern at all, just ended up being a better fit for academia than the traditional/conservative "Protestant" work ethic (which is not to say that it is "objectively" better - just more adaptive to this context) and maybe that's why as the knowledge/service/gig economy grows, so too does liberal domination of academia. I don't know, it's just a vague theory.
It strikes me that technological change from 1950 to 2000 or so was slower than in the previous 50 years, but it's not clear that technological change since 2000 has been as slow. The smartphone and social media revolutions have made some very big changes in how people live, even if still not as big as the washing machine or the gas/electric oven.
To begin to try to answer it, I suppose we should look at who is preventing people from using the internet? Worldwide, unsurprisingly it is authoritarian (that is, illiberal) regimes - overwhelmingly religious or ethnic nationalist and traditionalist - which engage in anything like mass cancellation from using the new technology. Here's a map of internet shutdowns in 2021 - https://www.accessnow.org/who-is-shutting-down-the-internet-in-2021/ - and I think the trend is clear.
Of course China is an interesting case because the traditionalists are left-wing rather than right-wing and so the main political division is between the liberals and the left. It will be interesting to see if US politics goes that way - e.g. if libertarians stage a takeover of the Republican party and illiberal progressives takeover the Democratic party - although I personally don't think either of those outcomes are likely. In any case it's instructive to note that you can't necessarily conflate liberalism with leftism for the purposes of answering this question.
I think it bears mentioning that authoritarian-leaning figures like Erdogan have resorted to internet blackouts to quell resistance and prevent anti-regime organization, so this map isn't necessarily comprehensive - it's only for 2021.
So I think I would say that attempts to prevent people from using a new technology would be more associated with authoritarianism and attempts to maintain the status quo.
Your use of the term "canceled" implies that you are referring specifically to American progressive activities, but most cancelations that I could find by google did not involve social media bans, and I've never heard of a cancelation which involved anything like a blanket internet ban. I was able to find two prominent examples of conservatives being shut out of individual internet services - AWS canceling parler, and twitter canceling Trump. Both of these were associated with the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
In the interests of utter fairness I think we need to explicitly compare these examples to authoritarian internet shutdowns to see if they are indeed the same sort of thing. After all, if it's fair for AWS to refuse to host parler after an "insurrection", isn't it fair for Erdogan to shut down access to facebook, twitter, and youtube during an ongoing coup attempt?
I have a slight libertarian inclination towards drawing a very sharp distinction between the actions of a private corporation and the actions of a state authority backed by a police force and a military, so it seems to me that these are not the same sort of thing at all. But I have also previously argued that the state should get involved in regulating whether, and under which circumstances, private corporations (like AWS or twitter) can unilaterally deplatform someone (like parler or Trump) for ideological reasons. Perhaps if you believe that a bakery should not be allowed to refuse service to a gay couple for ideological reasons, that implies that a social media company should not be allowed to refuse service to a conservative for ideological reasons. But is it liberal or illiberal for the government to ban ideological deplatforming? It seems like it's both, which is why the libertarian distinction may not be the most useful lens through which to regard the issue. If you regard both the government and private corporations as subject to social and political rules, then a "liberal" social and political system would have something like a First Amendment for corporations - protecting free speech from corporate censorship just as it currently protects free speech from government censorship. Of course the last time I suggested the government might get involved in regulating when and how social media companies are allowed to censor speech or deplatform individuals and organizations, the suggestion was met with disdain and derision here - so I think the consensus on this site is that the government should allow deplatforming in the name of "liberalism", but perhaps there was some misunderstanding there.
So then I would just note (as I did in the last debate) that the First Amendment already has exceptions for things like inciting violence, planning crimes, and organizing treason, and so even if there were some general ban on deplatforming it arguably wouldn't have protected parler (which Amazon said was being used to make death threats and plan anti-government violence) or Trump (who twitter claimed was attempting to organize a second coup attempt). But again, Erdogan might use the same argument - people were using social media to organize treason - and so you would need some set of principles to decide when deplatforming is allowed and when it isn't.
Courts often decide such cases based on whether the restriction of liberty is narrowly tailored or overbroad. I think it's clear that closing down access to all of fb, twitter, and youtube is overbroad, whereas closing down a single twitter account which has violated the law is narrowly tailored. The parler case is trickier but I think a court might have said it was overbroad. Courts also establish rules on what counts as protected speech and what doesn't - in this case, Trump's speech is debatably protected, whereas the death threats and such on parler were certainly not. So I think reasonable people can debate whether these cancelations would violate some kind of theoretical First Amendment but for private corporations, but I don't think it's debatable at all that the First Amendment would prevent the US government from entirely shutting down three major social media networks to stifle dissent, as Erdogan did. Therefore I would argue that the parler and Trump cancelations were not really comparable to the actions of an authoritarian regime in widespread suppression of social media.
To round out the analysis - every generation decides what sorts of speech will be tolerated and what sorts of speech will not be tolerated. I would argue that the advent of the printing press ushered in a democratization of religion which put pressure on societies to relax blasphemy laws, as it became impractical to suppress unorthodox opinions when anyone could just pick up a copy of their religious text and make their own analysis of it. This arguably increased religious pluralism and contributed to the innovation by liberal institutions that the government shouldn't take sides in religious debates or mandate religious practices at all. But at the same time, once anyone could publish a broadside or a pamphlet, suddenly making and enforcing laws against libel became important. When mail came along we needed to make laws about mail fraud. When telecommunications came along we added laws about wire fraud. So I think it's reasonable to expect this generation to try to figure out which rules and laws should apply to social media, and how, and if any new rules and laws are needed. I think it's reasonable to expect that in some cases attempts to regulate new media will overreach until the society settles on a consensus regarding what is and isn't allowed in the new media. But that consensus takes time to build - it might take decades, even - whereas modern social media undergoes changes every few years. So again, that's why I think we see this very wide gulf between people who are trying to figure out how to adapt to social media environments and people who are trying to apply traditional norms and standards to the new media.
I don't have much in response to this. Just wanted to say thanks for a good, thoughtful response. I too lean libertarian and wrestle with how to deal with platforms kicking people off. I think I would lean toward letting them use their own discretion to kick off whoever they wanted, but I would want to curtail any such actions that were done at the urging of a state actor.
I think I am leaning a bit in the other direction - although not fully convinced - but I think that in terms of maximizing freedom of speech, given the choice between maximizing facebook's liberty at the expense of its users, and maximizing users' liberty at the expense of facebook's, I might lean towards maximizing users' liberty.
After all, if the point of liberal free speech in a Millian sense is to increase ideological diversity, exercise individual reasoning faculties, and allow unpopular but true opinions to compete in a marketplace of ideas, then allowing facebook to stifle ideas at its own discretion not only decreases liberty, on net, but it also strips us of some of the other benefits of free speech.
Important to note, though, that even Mill himself advocated using a "harm principle" to determine the limits of protected speech and used incitement to violence as an example of speech which should not be allowed.
In any case I think in general I am more in favor of personal individual liberty than I am in favor of liberty for corporations. I think it would be legitimate for the government to set rules limiting e.g. ideological discrimination by a social media company.
I'm also on record here saying that social media companies were overzealous in censoring information about the pandemic - in particular, getting lab leak wrong - and that it might be preferable to have the government set limits on how much influence social media companies can be allowed to have on what information the public gets. As a mask early adopter, I'm imagining how much danger my family might have been in if we lived in an alternative universe where I'd only had access to the official CDC line on masks because Scott's post on the subject had been flagged as "misinformation" for contradicting the official narrative. I don't think social media companies or ISPs should be allowed to restrict access to potentially life-saving information.
Still, if you're operating as a deontological libertarian reasoning from the NAP it's totally counterintuitive to say that an ISP should required to carry Scott's mask post in the name of freedom of speech. But I think I lean more towards the Millian utilitarian liberalism, where the point of having freedom of speech is to secure the benefits of free speech - not because every entity (including non-human entities, like facebook) is a priori morally entitled to non-interference.
Neal, I think all of these are legitimate points. In a perfect world, I would probably agree. But I personally don't trust the government enough to regulate this in a sensible way that yields a net benefit to society. (But I also don't trust the government to do much of anything, so take this with a grain of salt.)
In my experience - for example, with their damnable cookie notification law (do you guys get those in the US?) - the EU tends to be overzealous and trample all over user experience, so I don't expect them to do a very good job with this. Personally I've just stopped using facebook entirely. But I think the global trend is pointing towards a less free internet in general (look at the latest from Apple on scanning everyone's iPhones) and there seems to be a general government-corporate alignment on depriving us all of freedom and privacy. In a sense we have the worst of both worlds, with corporations stepping up to do things the First Amendment prevents the US government from doing. So maybe it would be good to have some kind of codified protection in law.
>Your use of the term "canceled" implies that you are referring specifically to American progressive activities, but most cancelations that I could find by google did not involve social media bans, and I've never heard of a cancelation which involved anything like a blanket internet ban
There's a selection ban in that a "cancellation" that involves someone being fired from their job and/or subject to a torrent of hate mail including death threats, is far more newsworthy and googleable than someone "just" being banned from Facebook or Twitter.
As for "blanket internet ban", no, but some internets are more equal than other. If (outspoken leaders / proponents of) one political faction are limited to the pre-2011 internet and the other faction gets to use the 2021 internet, that's a pretty big tilt. Particularly as the pre-2011 internet atrophies; most of the old blogs are gone and there aren't many new ones to replace them, the discussion has moved on to "social media" from which one can be banned.
OTOH there is Substack; too early to tell how that will play out going forward.
Both Hanania and yourself (Astral Codex) are trying too hard to avoid a much more simpler explanation: oligarchy. A class of people dominated by government and PMCs that is self perpetuating and self-promoting.
One clue: look at the shift in income demographics around Washington DC over the past 3 decades. It used to be middle class, now it is upper class.
It's weird that DC was ever middle class - why would the capital city of a world power be a mid-sized, low-rise, middle class place? That seems to need explanation more so than the ongoing transition to being larger and wealthier.
My mom has a nice pension from being a high level bureaucrat for 30 years but she's not exactly rolling in dough. I made the same in my first year after college at Google as she was making while managing 300 people.
I just looked up more recent numbers and even now GS-15s make about the same as entry-level programmers in silicon valley. That's the highest rung on the general schedule, and to make more than that in a government job you'd have to be in the Senior Executive Service working 80 hours a week. And even that is capped below 200k.
So if you're an honest lifer at a government agency, you're not getting rich. The real money is in lobbying and in the revolving door between regulatory agencies and the private companies they regulate.
You can buy the equivalents of those pensions and health care programs for money. So the real question is "how large is the differential in compensation", and it's more than large enough to offset the theoretical purchase price of those benefits. Any halfway decent engineer working in the SV tech sphere (or similar) while spending non-zero effort optimizing for compensation would have no trouble retiring at 45 (in the FIRE sense).
So tell me how much lump sum cash is required to purchase an unlimited duration health care and open ended pension annuity for say, $90K (mid-range GS13).
As with Will previously - I also don't see SV programmers as being equivalent to the real world. Why don't we comp vs. Goldman Sachs bankers while we're at it?
A software engineer making 200-300K year also absolutely has a fantastic health care plan to go with it. They also have a 401k with employers matching up to 3-5% of contributions. And it is not just Google and the other FAANGS paying those salaries now either. And you can make that much by your mid-30s, with equity to boot that could be worth millions on top of that (and again, not just talking about startup equity "lottery tickets" but equity comp in established, highly lucrative businesses).
Of course if is only a smallish subset of software engineers who do that well but even a "middle of the road" SE is probably going to do better than whatever civil service job they would be doing as an alternative.
Government employees get decent middle class salaries and pretty good benefits, but nothing that would make them rich. $200K and good benefits is very nice but it isn't "rich" and it doesn't explain all the fancy mansions in the DC suburbs.
There's definitely people getting rich in Washington DC, but it's not government employes.
I do understand what you are trying to say, although you are also understating the value of guaranteed employment plus lifetime pension and health care.
But GS scales aren't the only way which people get paid by the US government: think tanks, NGOs, lobbyists, consultants, contractors are just a few of the categories which GS scales don't apply. There are also the appointed special committee heads, the Cabinet and immediate management under them, etc etc.
I would only note that it isn't quite so black and white.
There are increasingly large numbers of appointees, think tanks, government appendage NGOs and what not which also net high paying jobs. These aren't exactly lobbyists or defense contractors. I'd also note that "low government pay" isn't exactly true either for heads and upper management in government.
I shamefully admit spending time in the federal government. There’s no better place for no talent ass clowns to do nothing. The compensation:work ratio is off the charts.
Figure 2 is all in comp. The feds are crazy overpaid whichever way you slice it. I don’t know what that kid from Google is talking about.
There’s no comparison in the sheer amount of deadweight. I don’t know what data I could produce to prove that besides my >7 years in the federal government. There are >1000 person organizations that literally just do make work.
You're right - I had only looked at the first graph which was wages. There's a 2nd graph later which includes benefits.
Doesn't change the core message: the government pays far better than the private sector overall.
In fact, I read somewhere that one of the reasons for red state/rural distrust of government is that the teachers and government workers in those areas are relatively well paid and infinitely more job secure than anyone else. If you're in a coal mining town or factory town that is shutting down/shut down, the teacher and postal workers is doing really damn well.
Why wouldn't it be middle class? Government employees largely were middle class through most of the post-spoils system era. DC also sucks as a place to live, that is why Maryland gave up the land. No one would choose to live their before widespread AC became available, so say 1980 or so.
It does seem inevitable that it would grow into a wealthy cosmopolitan city, but I believe the decision to create a capital de novo (instead of just use an existing large city as the capital rich as NYC or Philly) was intentional. To physically separate the seat of government from the economic elites. That is the story anyway, there is probably a less high-minded explanation.
There were many reasons, but for most of the founders the primary reason was that they feared undue local control over the federal government. If Philly/New York/Baltimore was the capital city they feared that the state government would have a lot of pressure they could put on the feds. For instance, cutting off water, or selective policing.
This is also why DC had no voting rights at all, and no representative. It was presumed (I think correctly) that the views of the capital would be over-represented even without a rep in congress. This I think has proven out in modern times.
In a democracy, civil servants or even elected officials collecting rich-people pay looks too much like corruption, and granting them particularly lofty non-financial status looks too much like aristocracy, so most of the people who run the government are going to be middle-class. And each of them supports at least half a dozen middle- and working-class baristas, nannys, plumbers, small business owners, etc.
If I see a capital city with a conspicuously upper-class population (by local standards), I'm guessing kleptocracy or oligarchy.
The other man clue is that when you ignore elections and look only at what policies actually become law, Conservatives always lose ground over culture, and Leftists always lose ground over finance. Often this is transparently because the powerful are manufacturing cultural problems and then making grandiose concessions, in exchange for consolidating their power.
I understand where you are coming from, but I'm not sure I agree.
Deregulation was something which both Clinton (i.e. modern) Democrats and Reagan Republicans seemed to agree on. Deregulation is, to me at least, clearly about culture and not about finance.
I don't really think it matters to the powerful exactly how they get what they want. We simply observe in your example case that, yet again, they got it.
One other factor in team red team blue partisanship is that policy positions become divorced from the brand. You'll see that often in comment sections - someone very partisan will be convinced that everything they personally believe their party also believes. And is many cases they don't or in fact they believe the complete opposite.
This is actually less true than it was in the past - millions of people regularly voted, until very recently, for conservative Republican's for President, then fairly liberal Democrat's for Senate, and this wasn't a case of two moderates, but rather completely conflicting views on many issues - it's just that those issues weren't centered, and there wasn't national cable news talking about cultural issues a lot of the day, and more importantly, you didn't really know how your Senator voted, unless it was something super major, like the Civil Rights Act.
A good example is George McGovern - he fought for farmers, and he bombed the Axis in World War II, so that was enough for South Dakota to send him to the Senate multiple times, but he then lost his seat two years after being the Democratic nominee, because South Dakotans were now aware he was on the same side as the feminists, civil rights extremists, cut and runners, etc.
Hell, there are a decent amount of rural fairly conservative Democrat's in state legislature who survived Reagan, the 90's Republican Revolution, and even John Kerry, but they couldn't survive being put beside Obama in a flyer, because until then, many of their voters literally didn't connect them w/ the Democratic Party they hated.
Now, outside of New England, ticket splitting is basically dead, since everybody knows which Other you're allied with - whether that Other is feminists, illegal immigrants, or BLM rioters for the Right, or bigoted, racist, sexist rurals for the Left.
It would be interesting to see the liberal/conservative breakdown by major or field of study. I'm guessing that the people majoring in agricultural or mechanical engineering lean a lot more conservative than the people majoring in journalism or gender studies.
So maybe the rise of the tech/knowledge of economy has changed the types of institutions (or the types of people within institutions) that gain power, from those that leaned conservative to those that lean liberal.
Now, why certain fields of study might select for political ideology is a different question.
My first thought is to use a sort of material analysis - just look at raw economic interests. Is there some reason why highly-educated people - especially in more theoretical rather than practical fields - might find their economic interests aligned with a liberal/left policy platform?
I think the economy isn't really great for knowledge workers, which is what you probably aspire to be if you are studying journalism or gender studies. On the contrary if you study mechanical engineering you are entering a career path where you will be able to make a good living. So maybe it's as simple as saying that the economy doesn't really need more farmers, so there are a lot of people whose labor isn't strictly speaking necessary for society's subsistence, so those people gravitate towards a system of politics which values people independently of their labor or productivity, which provides a strong social safety net, and which assigns status and possibly some kind of financial benefits to knowledge workers, service workers, and others who are in jobs that are not associated with the production of material goods.
This is kind of what I meant in my other comment when I said that our values are related to an attempt to adapt to our society's subsistence strategies.
So to go a little bit Marxist here - you might assume that people who expect to benefit from the traditional arrangement of labor and capital will support more traditional values, while people who expect to be excluded from those benefits - or who want to completely disrupt the traditional arrangement - will support more radical values.
The only engineering discipline with more red than blue graduates is petrolium engineering, for what I hope are obvious reasons. Ten or twenty years ago engineering was far more consdervative than it is today.
Scott, it's been said before but your imagination of the '1950's' is a cardboard cut-out.
Consider, which party had complete control of the USG during the Depression and WWII, at a time when government power at home and abroad increased as never before?
What was the basic ideology/polarity of FDR and his advisers? Did the 'Republican' Eisenhauer administration manage to meaningfully role back much of the New Deal, or recreate the old right-wing foreign policy ideal of American isolationism?
I think you could improve your historical thinking by thinking less about the '50s' (fake) and more about USG in the 30/40s (real, scary, and still with us).
The conservative movement, as we know it now, began in the 1950s when traditionalists felt beleaguered and liberal society seemed unassailable. The traditional part of the 50s was the culture, otherwise you're looking at historically high rates of union membership and compressing inequality. As the old saw goes, liberals want to work in 50s and conservatives want to live in the 50s.
Regarding the questions you raise about focusing on decreasing partisanship and the observation that there seemed to be less partisanship in the 1950s, I would strongly recommend reading Lee Drutman's book "Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop" for an analysis that sheds some light on why partisanship was less of an obstacle in that era.
Essentially he argues that we had a hidden four-party system at the time where there was a "party" of fiscally conservative urban voters within the Republican party and a "party" of fiscally liberal rural voters within the Democratic party. This both made it easier to identify with and understand some members of the other party, and allowed the main difference between the parties to be on an economic axis, rather than an identity axis, making compromise easier.
Starting from the civil rights movement and finishing in the 90s and 2000s, these groups started to re-align based more on identity issues, which is more difficult to compromise across, and has led to a more complete split between the parties, increasing partisanship. This also fits well with the graphs you're considering here, as it offers an explanation for why high-income is no longer strongly predictive of party preference.
There's a great old Hayek paper (possibly intellectuals and socialism) about self-selection driving this sort of thing, especially around the dimension of focusing on making money/business/trade VS focusing on reading/writing/intellectual pursuits. Intellectuals are generally always far more likely to be liberal (this has been true for a long time).
A big difference recently, in the US at least (can't speak to any other country) might be that "intellectuals" have ended up being a much larger proportion of wealthy elites than they used to be. Highly educated types are increasingly rich types as well - the economy increasingly rewards high intelligence/education (and offers a lot more interesting work to those with such things), which pulls intellectuals into the corporate world and blurs the selection boundary between people who like trade and money and people who like intellectual pursuits. Think tech start-ups dominating the business landscape rather than manufacturing companies. They're run by radically different types of people. The latter are far more likely to be Hayekian intellectuals (they come from universities, they like other highly educated/intelligent people, etc.).
Anyways, speculative, but I suspect this is driving at least a sizable chunk of things.
"The Labour Party managed to change its ways - all we can do is hope the Republicans can too."
Not as reassuring as you intend it to be; Maynard Keynes might have longed for the "intellectuals" to run things, but the problem was that the intellectuals in Labour *did* start running things in the 60s and 70s, and you got the rise of the "champagne socialists" and college students arguing Marxist dialectic and one sub-group sniping at another sub-group over its lack of ideological purity. The party moved from the old blue-collar working-class base to the middle-class college graduates - the rise of New Labour in Britain (and Ireland), where - to take an example from my own country - someone who had the nickname "Ho Chi Quinn" as a student radical getting involved in politics and rising up the ranks, while also gradually transitioning from the radical roots to the business-friendly model popular today (and from a solidly middle-class background, with family members the kind of comfortable capitalists his student self would have excoriated): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruairi_Quinn
The trouble is not that Labour didn't get run by the intellectuals, the trouble was that in the end it did, and they so remoulded it that now you have the kind of divide this post describes: how is it that an elite on one side is rivalled by an elite on the other, where they should naturally be the elite versus the commoners, and that the financial elite are happy to divide along the same lines?
"try to decrease the salience of college in society, so that not every smart person needs to get a college degree, and not every important job is degree-gated"
That horse has bolted and the stables has been razed to the ground and a shiny new technology park built where it used to stand.
Indeed. The labor party's intellectuals successfully tanking the British economy while also ruining its rail infrastructure isn't something I'd aspire to.
Deiseach, I have a question for you or any other Catholics. One of my family members has gone completely off the deep end. They think among other things, that Pope Francis is the antipope who will pave the way for the Anti-Christ. That all COVID vaccines are the mark of the beast and that anyone who receives, administers or encourages others to get vaccinated will go to Hell. Also, that the world will end within 3 years. I have no idea what to say to them.
I'm sorry to hear this. Yes, sometimes people go off the deep end when they worry too much about the end of the world. There's not much advice I can give you, save a few basic statements.
(1) Are they talking about Garabandal or other alleged revelations? Often there is a Marian element to the loopiness.
(2) There seems to be a persistent belief about the Three Days of Darkness, and because one at least of the visionaries has been beatified, that acts as "proof" for some people that everything they reported would come true in a specific way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Days_of_Darkness
(3) The only cure for that is to remind them of the doctrine on private revelations. There is no new prophetic inspiration by the Holy Spirit ,no 'continuing revelation' since the time of the Apostles. Whatever someone alleges they have seen or has been communicated to them, must *always* be checked against Scripture and the Magisterium. Even if a saint has said it, it does not mean that this has to be believed by everyone.
(4) The Gospels say "You know not the day nor the hour" and that people will seek signs and wonders, and try to interpret the signs of the times. Nobody can say that "within three years it will be the end of the world", Christ Himself has said "“But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only". It will come upon us unawares, we will be living our ordinary lives as in the days of Noah and the Deluge. So anyone prophesying a definite date out of their own or another person's knowledge is wrong. If they are contradicting the Gospel and the words of Jesus, you should believe Jesus Christ and not a mortal.
(5) Antipopes - look, I'm not a huge fan of Francis. He's done some ill-considered things. BUT he is the Pope, and we owe him filial obedience. He hasn't given any signs of being an antipope, but even if he is - so what? We've had a long list of antipopes already, and we've survived them! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipope
Who the Antichrist will be and when he will come and who will precede him - that is all part of the end times, where we've already established "you know not the day nor the hour".
(6) Vaccines - this is probably the "mark of the beast" thing, yes? This sounds heavily influenced by American Protestant Millenarianism, where they are always trying to figure out when will the Tribulation come and the fine divisions. If you're Catholic, we're amillennialists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amillennialism
The mandatory vaccines are NOT the mark of the Beast, no-one is damned to Hell by getting vaccinated, requiring others to be vaccinated, or administering the vaccines. Otherwise every single person since the chickenpox inoculations would be in Hell. If you get Covid and die you may or may not go to Hell depending on the state of your soul, but the only thing that has to do with the vaccines is "didn't get vaccinated, got sick, died".
Again, NOBODY can say that anyone is definitely and definitively going to Hell. The worst, most outrageous sinner can yet be saved, the most virtuous person can yet stumble. Despair and presumption are equally sins.
When someone is this obsessed with End Times stuff, it's hard to dig them out. All you can do is stand on the basic Scripture readings and the Catechism, and if they insist on "it definitely will happen like this" then don't argue with them. Just remind them do they think with the mind of the Church or not on this? If they prefer their own individual opinion, then they are veering near heresy.
Just be patient with them, don't get into arguments, and pray for them (if you engage in prayer). Good luck and God help your relative to be restored to peace of mind and trust in the Lord.
>>Maybe this is the wrong axis and we need to focus on decreasing partisanship somehow?<<
My money is on this one. I don't know that I'm particularly optimistic about it decreasing, but I think the core problem is hyperpartisanship. We need to make party-affiliation a less salient aspect of one's identity.
I wonder to what extent this is driven by an increase in meritocratic sorting in institutions.
In a toy model of the 50s-70s, rich and well-connected people would be selected for the Ivy League -> Government/Wall Street pipeline solely on the basis of their class, so there was no sorting effect, and the institutional ideological distribution would look like that of the upper-class as a whole. As each of those pipeline steps has become more dominated by performance and merit, it's more selecting for a certain type of person (eg, high conscientious correlates with liberals as well as people who are willing to follow steps that look good to admissions committees).
In the 1950 compared to today, a person born to parents in the bottom quarter of the income distribution was more likely to reach the top quarter by the time they reached their parents age. Also vise versa where the person born to top quarter parents falls to bottom quarter.
In the 1950 compared to today, a college educated parent was more likely to have a non-college educated child.
In the 1950 compared to today, a hyper-wealthy person was most likely to have inherited their wealth. Today, the most likely founded a tech company.
Only one of those sounds like meriticractic sorting to me, and its the very very rare one.
Ok, so lets take your ivy league example. The % of ivy league students today with parents who attended any ivy league insitution is higher than it was back then as well.
My own observation is that the elite institutions are less of a meritocracy now than they were a few decades ago. I attended an elite technical school, worked at NASA, and have worked elite legal and technical instutions full of ivy league grads my life, and had a number of coversations with my sibling who has worked in the White House and is on a UN advisory councel. We've both noticed the absolute lack of other people with our background (growing up dirt poor in a destitutue rural community). Maybe we've just got big egos, but I know I was very, very luck to have the life trajectory I got and basically never run into other people with similar backgrounds.
I didn't say legacy though. It was any ivy league college. On mobile so can't go searching for the cite though. You can choose not to believe me if you like.
To expand on this for just a moment, maybe we are arguing about different things. I think that the doorway to get into the elite institutions are less meritacratic than any time before in my academic or profesional career. Once through the door, these insitutions are more or less meritocratic depending on how close they are to rubber-hitting-the-road. NASA struck me as very, very, not meritocratic even amoung the non-partisan lifetime civil servant areas. Ditto academia. OTOH, elite legal firms are incredibly meritocratic (along particular dimensions) because the billable hour and the litigation or transaction outcome are both incredibly rubber-on-the-road.
So maybe I'm saying the gate is not meritocratic, and you see everyone past the gate getting sorted, and may be we are pointing to different parts. And front to back, bottom to top, every part of me wishes the world was far, far more meritocratic than it is.
I think you have it backwards - the door to get in is more meritocratic than it was, but once in, it's less so. Nobody fails out of the Ivy League and all that.
Not discounting your personal experience, but I don't think NASA is an elite institution in the way that either Scott or Hanania mean - do social circles at NASA control the political agenda in any meaningful sense?
Difficult to say. In a functioning meritocratic society you shouldn't expect to see much in the way of income mobility between generations, because merit is highly heritable. Smart people make good money, marry other smart people, and have smart kids, who grow up to make good money. Dumb people make little money, marry other dumb people, and have dumb kids, who grow up to make little money.
Moving from the lowest to the highest band is something that happens mostly to smart-but-poor immigrant families from poor countries. If it happens frequently to native-born people then it should actually be an indication that your society is rather non-meritocratic, because it implies that financial success is being accrued by something less heritable than merit.
And a quick google also shows the same thing happening in 2020.
So I think that strand of your thesis is probably mistaken - like the US, America is now in the top-left quadrant, with the rich leaning (weakly) right-wing while the educated lean (strongly) left-wing.
That means that if you adjust for education (which the wealthy tend to have a lot of), the wealthy would lean strongly right-wing. I'm not sure that the uneducated wealthy population has a significant pull though since there are relatively few of them.
I think what is going on is that if you were to scatter-plot voters by wealth and education, and then colour the right-wing voters blue and the left-wing voters red (N.B. European rather than American convention, for consistency with the graphs above), you'd see a long, thin, diagonal oval running from the rich/educated corner to the poor/uneducated corner, divided along its long axis with most of one side of the oval being red and most of the other side being blue.
So if you change your coordinates by 45 degrees then the really predictive thing is wealth-education, but that has a low standard deviation, whereas wealth+education, which varies a lot, is still not very predictive.
An aspect of this I've thought about: as educational achievement predicts liberal politics more and more strongly, the arguments conservatives make become at least worse from the perspective of educated people and at most simply worse in some semi-absolute sense because there are a lot fewer educated people working on them.
I don't see the most domininat progressive arguments being the most persuasive, just the ones made by the people with the power to ruin me personally by taking away my job, blacklisting me in my industry, etc. I find the most persuasive arguments for progressivism to be quite out of vogue.
I can't really find, for example, postmodern critiques of power relationships better in an absolute sense than the more historical liberal appeals to individual dignity.
Instead of any coalition system, how about instituting voting methods that don't have a vote-splitting system so that giant coalitions don't need to form at all? :P (Yeah, OK, there would still be other forces pushing towards big coalitions, but it would be nice to lessen it...)
You still need coalitions at some point. The key difference is that in two party democracies, the coalitions form before the election, while multiparty democracies form coalitions after the election.
I'm not convinced it has to be that way. It's true in *existing* multiparty democracies, but those all work roughly the same way. If you could make things more granular, and do more to eliminate vote-splitting *even within the government*, I think you could do more to reduce the need for it.
For instance, what if instead of having *amendments* to bills, you had *variants*? And instead of voting on amendments followed by voting on the bill, you just accumulated variants, and then had one big vote at the end on all the variants, along with "none of these", done via an approval vote?
...OK admittedly in parliamentary democracies you have to "form a government"; that seems like the biggest obstacle to this idea, the thing that would most require a coalition. Still, eliminating vote-splitting doesn't just have to be for elections, and it's not clear to me that the problem is unsolvable.
You don't *need* coalitions, it's just that typical government systems involve them. It's easy to design a system that doesn't need them. For example:
First, start with a multi-party parliamentary system in which the ballot lets voters *rank the parties*. Use a good Condorcet system (e.g. Ranked Pairs) to find the most-preferred party. Award that party 50%+1 of the seats in the parliament. Award the remaining seats proportionally to the *other* parties based on voters' first-rank preferences. This guarantees a single party a bare majority in the parliament, preventing any minor parties from playing kingmaker and gaining outsized power in a coalition. That party would be guaranteed enough power to do just the things they all agree on. So parties that wanted to *win* would be incentivized to produce a manifesto that was compelling to the median voter and that had full support within the party.
Second (similar to Sniffnoy's comment), within the parliament, require that votes for bills *also* use a good Condorcet system, where all MPs can contribute their own version of the bill under discussion and MPs are required to rank all the bills. This ensures that the minority parties still get a hearing and an official vote for their concerns and have a reasonable chance of finding compromises that are acceptable to the majority. And in turn that would incentivize minor parties to exist and compete for votes of ideologically motivated demographics.
The question isn't whether you can design a system of government that doesn't "need" coalitions. The question is whether you can design a system of government where coalitions won't have an overwhelming advantage over non-coalition actors. None of your proposals accomplish that.
On the contrary, in the given example, a coalition offers no advantage. The majority party has nothing to gain from coalition, as it already has a sufficient majority to implement its will, and the minority parties also have nothing to gain from coalition, as they cannot overtake the majority.
The majority party *is* a coalition. As the majority party, it's the giantest of coalitions. Probably a particularly stable one as well, though that's not guaranteed. But that's what parties are; political coalitions intended to endure across many electoral cycles, which gives them an advantage over coalitions established for a specific and transient purpose.
Well, OK, *theoretically* you could have a party that is one particularly charismatic politician and a bunch of hirelings designated to accept the leftover votes in a proportional-representation scheme, then take their seats and vote the way their boss tells them to. But in practice, parties are coalitions between many politicians with interests sufficiently aligned that they'd rather have the advantage of committed allies than the flexibility of allies you have to negotiate every issue with.
That's changing the goalposts. The topic under discussion was about coalition governments as in political science, not the semantic argument about whether we should call a single party a coalition. Coalition governments are common in systems with proportional representation and are frequently considered a downside of PR compared to First Past the Post.
I think you can find a lot of parallels to the education split today with Marx's writing.
Marx was right that the two revolutionary classes were the bourgeoisie and the urban proletariat. The proletariat--urban, industrial workers--at the time were something completely new (so new, in fact, they were really only a thing in the UK at the time of Marx's writing). We typically just think proletariat=poor or proletariat=workers, but the people Marx wrote about also had some socio/psychological characteristics that united them as much as they were united by their economic situation. This was a mass of people who had left the countryside trying to find a better life. These are strivers who were willing to leave their family, friends, and community behind. One would imagine if you gave them a big five personality test, they would score "high openness to experience" and "low consciousness." So they came to the factories in the cities to find a better life, and instead they were being ground into the dirt. You have ambitious people, those who are the least tied to traditional ways of life, and they've been stymied by a bad system.
The bourgeoisie were also something completely new--wealthy people outside of the noble classes. Again, this is a class of people who are strivers, who started businesses, took risks, and amassed wealth. But within the old feudal systems, they lacked the ability to influence government. Again, ambitious people, not tied to the old ways, stymied by a bad system.
So the first revolution (per Marx) would be a bourgeois revolution focused on individual rights (American Revolution, French Revolution, Revolutions of 1848, Russian Revolution of 1905, etc.) and the second would be the revolution of the proletariat.
I think what Marx got right here is that the *left wing* of a society will always be most strongly backed by ambitious strivers who separate themselves from traditional modes of life and who are in some way held back by the system (or at least view themselves that way). In a feudal society, that's the bourgeoisie. In an early capitalist society, it's the urban proletariat.
So where will you find ambitious people today who feel held down by the system? That would be liberal arts grads with 60k in student debt living in expensive urban areas. That's the "proletariat" of our day.
Burke's Reflections discusses how men of "ability" will be at odds with men of "property" (inherited property, in that case), and he regarded it as the duty of wise governance to preserve said property.
Yes, I think it's with the New Left that you start seeing groups like the Black Panthers proclaiming that the lumpenproletariat are the actually revolutionary class rather than the "labor aristocracy" in the labor unions.
"there is now no group in advanced industrial society which unites the four characteristics of: (1) being the producers on whom society depends, (2) being exploited, (3) being (with their families) the majority of society, and (4) being in dire need":
In his model, conservatives are motivated by a fear of what he calls feudalism, what I'd call endemic warfare, and what Hobbes calls "the war of all against all". In other words, they fear that society could break down, like <a href=https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-57835756>South Africa just did</a>. Conservatives want institutions that are strong enough to protect us from the chaos that is always at the gates.
Conversely, liberals are motivated by intolerance of injustice. They abhor the intrinsic unfairness of existing institutions and try to erase the stains of the past. Unfortunately, the deeper they look the more injustice they find, and frequently they feel the need to dismantle the whole system (at which point endemic warfare comes back and systematic oppression is replaced with poverty and random violence).
In his model, conservatives build institutions to protect people from chaos. Liberal spend the strength of the institutions on a fairer and more just society. When the institutions are spent, the chaos comes back and it's time to try again.
To the extent that I have rightist leanings it is basically: nature is chaos, the default state of things is not to work, turning nothing into something is important and honorable, it is not some travesty that people who are successful at doing that in a big way get more respect or more material comfort than those who aren’t.
Whereas it seems like the left position is that technology is inevitable, productivity growth falls out of the sky, all we do is allocate its fruits. If I believed that then I would be righteously indignant about income inequality too.
I think a key difference here is a background change in definition. With Picketty you bring in the point about how 'college educated' now means 32% of people instead of 6% of people.
I'd also point out the definition, goals, and actual reality and actions of the parties have changed. The US probably looks strange in the data to a degree because the 'Liberals' are not liberal at all. The Democrats are akin to a group of rich people concerned with a managing the poor to avoid riots and revolution while maintaining their power. While the Republicans are a group of wealthy people more in the 'let them eat cake' group of getting richer no matter what.
The US has no liberal party and the Dems are a middle right wing party while the Republicans are a far right wing party.
How else to explain a total lack of delivery on every single lower class concern since Carter, maybe since FDR? That's 50+ years of Democratic party demonstration of right wing goals as they gave money to the rich, failed to provide the healthcare of the developed nations, actively scheme with Wall Street and under Clinton deregulated/make crimes legal several activities which led to financial speculation and the GFC.
Clinton also oversaw the full blown use of massive inflation manipulation to reduce 'entitlements' to starve out teh minimum wage and benefits from the poor while entitlements/welfare/subsidies/cash handouts for funnsies to the wealthy expanded.
I think a key factor here is the total divorce of the Unions from the Democrats in the US. There has never been a Labour party in the US while there has been in every other Western nation.
If you look at the increasingly right wing Dems, the lack of union power overall or political power on the left to get anything workers actually want, and the changing demographics of who votes with fewer people voting and many convict non-voters amongst poor males....then the 'change' we are seeing is more of an illusion.
To me it is no wonder that an increasingly wealthy and increasingly diverse group of elites are looking to feel good about themselves and their massive wealth inequality. The message of 'take it all, guns and god' from the republicans is simply not an enticing message for newly rich gay black men or similar demographic who are less religious, more urban, and more wealthy who have no relationship with anything like a factory or a union.
So the Dems offer a highly woke, and highly status quo of the rich getting richer and no one doing anything about it. Have your rainbows and gay marriage and vague armchair concern around BLM and the 'problem' of wealth inequality. But with that cultural veneer aside, which is no more than branding, the wealth pipeline to the top 20% or people keeps flowing while the bottom 80% can have their entire wealth surpassed by a few hundred billionaires.
Being an elite who supports the Dems/'Liberals' who gets massive corporate handouts vs being a Republican elite supporter is simply a matter of taste, presentation, and wanting to avoid pitchforks. They can claim they are for all these things for the poor...which they never do. Instead of being open about not caring or wanting those things - every dollar given to a poor person is a dollar that could be given to a rich person. Namely, themselves.
They'll 'feel for the poor', but have to recognise the reality that we have limited resources after the latest round of tax cuts which mostly went into their own pockets. How about a charity gala dinner for the wealthy to 'give back'?
Bill Gates (can we even mention him or is he a total mind killer at this point?) is giving away 90% of his wealth...please ignore that he's multiple times richer now than he was back when he said that! He's a 'Liberal'! in this new definition of right wing elite businessmen who claim to enjoy other people looking at rainbows.
I'm not trying to break the rules or be overly partisan here. But any non-US perspective can see that all of the major things working people want from a 'Liberal' party are simply not on the table anywhere in US politics. So the idea of the elite becoming more 'liberal' is an illusion. I'd say the 'liberal' terminology has changed in definition.
How else to describe it when the so called liberals in California or right now in DC fail to pass into law a single significant change which would benefit the bottom 80% or in any way change anything about 'the game'. No healthcare, no unions, no increased minimum wage...but plenty of corporate handouts and ultra wealthy donors getting what they want.
If the head of the Dems was the same person who was the head of the AFL-CIO....do you think they'd be taking money from Wall Street or Big Tech? In most other nations the Unions/workers at least have an actual seat at the table in their so called 'liberal' political parties.
"The US has no liberal party and the Dems are a middle right wing party while the Republicans are a far right wing party."
I've heard this claim repeatedly from people on the far left. I've always found it rather ridiculous. But perhaps I'm wrong. I'd like to understand it better since it's an increasingly popular talking point.
Do you have any evidence for any of the following:
1.) The US is significantly more right wing than the world generally. Please do not exclude the third world or used weasel words like "any ADVANCED nation" unless you are willing to admit the US is more left wing than 80% of the world.
2.) The US is significantly more right wing than the OECD norm. Keep in mind the OECD includes Mexico, Korea, Chile, and Japan. If you can only point to a few countries in Western Europe countries please proceed to point 3...
3.) You are now down to maybe 10 countries out of about 200. As with the headline I read yesterday that the US ranks 11th out of 11 countries. At this point we're down to a few specific party platforms. What features do you specifically feel exist in these systems that don't exist in the US? All these countries have vigorous conservative movements. How do you feel they're different than American conservatives?
I would also add - make sure to include policy around immigration and citizenship in the discussion, and not just policy around taxation and health insurance.
I assume they oppose viruses. They certainly opposed lockdowns more vigorously including liberal darlings like Sweden.
The Republicans are unusually accepting of vaccines as far as first world conservative movements go. 40% of Republicans intend to never get the vaccine vs 25% of the general public and 10% of Democrats. In France the general population is at 40% and a majority of conservatives are anti-vaccine. And those numbers are fairly typical.
I assume you (like me) would prefer vaccine skepticism was lower. And while Republicans are the problem there, they're less of a problem than those vigorous European conservative movements.
> as far as first world conservative movements go.
Why are you saying "first world" here? You wanted anyone arguing with you to consider the world as a whole, rather than try to draw distinctions between "first world" and "third world".
Because you quoted a statement specifically about Western Europe. "All these countries" meant Western European countries as you can see in the initial statement. I wouldn't have made the statement, because I do not think, every country has a vigorous conservative movement. But western democracies mostly do.
To be frank, it seems like you're trying to change the frame of reference to wriggle out of the fact you thought the Republicans were unique in vaccine skepticism and the US was unusually vaccine-phobic.
I am aware of France's vaccine hesitancy in the general population, though I believe vaccine hesitancy is not politicized along liberal/conservative lines in France. There is a confounding factor here - for a long time, the only vaccine you could get in France was the AstraZeneca vaccine, which correlated with six very high-profile cases of blood clots in its initial rollout.
I am not aware to what extent vaccine hesitancy is aligned with the liberal/conservative spectrum in Western Europe. I'll try to find more information on this, but for now my thesis is still that the US Republican Party is driving US vaccine hesitancy, while in Western Europe, political party does a much worse job of predicting vaccine hesitancy.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. The US does not have a liberal party and a conservative party. It has a party that claims to be liberal but is actually conservative, and a party that claims to be conservative but is actually batshit insane.
It's not really that complicated - corporations are 'woke' because 50 year olds in rural Wisconsin made up a larger percentage of Nike's pie in 1990 than they did in 2020, and education is even more liberal, because a lot of those Republican professors were Rockefeller Republican types. Actual right-wing professors were always basically non-existent, by the standards of the time. Plus, conservative spent forty years telling their kids, "go get an MBA, then open up a small business, and buy a nice house in the suburbs," while liberals went, "do what you love and fight for people, even if it doesn't make you rich."
People want really complicated explanations. Sometimes, stuff is simple.
I'm not sure that is actually an explanation though. Young people are definitely more into consumer culture so it might explain why Nike is more left-wing (at least in their branding) but in general older people are wealthier so it seems a bit odd that Goldman Sachs would be more left wing in their branding. Maybe it is to attract talent (who are going to be younger) but still you would think that would be more than balanced out by their client base being (on average) more conservative.
But even if we grant all that then why is it exactly that young people are so much farther to the left now? And for that matter WHY are there no Republicans/conservatives in academia? Pointing to the fact that it was true even in the 1950s makes it even more perplexing (to me at least). In 2021 you could tell a plausible story about more conservative people who have the talent and work ethic to get a tenure track position in academia are more likely to be interested in pushing a more lucrative career in the business world but I think that would be somewhat less true in the 1950s when there was less income inequality and the relative wealth difference between a college professor and corporate executive was smaller.
At some level the (apparent) fact that left wing people seem to care more about politics has to be explained.
1.) People are more liberal because we live in a globalized world, where it's harder to "keep them on the farm," even when they're literally on the farm. A 16 year old teenager can go on the Internet and learn about how most of other rich countries have free health care or watch makeup tutorials from somebody who will pepper in talk about how being gay is totally normal.
2.) Kids aren't *that* left-wing. It's just the GOP is so in-hock to their current older base, they can't make the moves to peel off a decent chunk of pro-LGBT, pro-immigrant kids who also don't care about taxes or large social programs. Right now, the GOP is doing the equivalent of the Right still running against interracial marriage in 1975.
3.) Most customers of Goldman Sachs don't care how 'woke' the junior associate is, as long as their account goes up at the end of the day. So, if it means being pro-LGBT to get the smart kid from Yale, instead of him going over to Citibank, that's what you do.
4.) Caring about knowledge and such has always been left-coded to a degree while caring about creating a business has always been right-coded to a degree. I'm not saying this a a slam on right-leaning people, but as the truth.
> Maybe there’s a natural tendency for some of these organizations to lean left wing (eg colleges are heavily exposed to the opinions of young people, who lean left)
I think there is some tendency here. I'm a big believer of the Moral Foundations Theory that Jonathan Haidt talks about in his book The Righteous Mind. A liberal/progressive/leftist is someone who consistently care about care vs harm more than the other morals. Institutions that are about providing care to people should have a tendency to lean left. I think education would be one of those institutions.
I think the causation wrt young people goes the other way. They tend to lean left as they spend half their day in an institution where left leaning adults are over-represented.
The leftward turn of the youth didn't really start until '04 (Bush & Gore basically split them w/ 5 points going to Nader), and Reagan even won the youth vote. I do actually doubt the teachers of the early-to-mid 90's were that more liberal than the teachers of the late 70's.
> Institutions that are about providing care to people should have a tendency to lean left. I think education would be one of those institutions.
Seeing educational institutions as being about "providing care to people" seems a fairly left-wing viewpoint to begin with. A more right-wing viewpoint of the purpose of education would see it as something along the lines of "teach young people useful facts and skills so they can succeed in the world and carry on the torch of civilisation" or something along those lines, it's not about care and cuddling.
Let me suggest an alternative (or a different slant on) "liberals care more", namely "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Mob".
Although the phrase Great Awokening is occasionally used, few of those users look at the issue at a deeper level than the obvious historical parallels. But to me the current US' versions of the great -ism's look like nothing so much as a resurrection of Calvinism, call it KKKalvinism. Recall that the defining trait of Calvinism is that man is born sinful, and that this stain cannot be removed from his soul no matter how he tries.
Now replace sin with racism/sexism... Replace Augustine with Implicit Association Tests as the proof that we're all racists/sexists... Replace the obsession with outward forms as ways to try to prove (to ourselves and our friends) that we're of the elect with, well, the obsession with outward forms as ways to try to prove (to ourselves and our friends) that we're of the elect...
Puritanism (ie Calvinism) in America never totally dies; it's reborn every few generations in a new round of youth utterly ignorant of history while just as utterly convinced they understand humanity's master plan.
ie this round of "liberalism", ie KKKalvinism, carries the whip for basically the same reasons that it did in Geneva in 1550, or in Moscow in 1930, or in or in Shanghai in 1970, or in Teheran in 1990; because there's a large (never a majority, but a large enough minority) fraction of people, especially among the youth, who thrill to the idea that they can bring about utopia and, at the same time as carrying out the divine plan, also punish their enemies.
And it takes the exact form it does today in America purely for contingent reasons, just as it took the form it did in Geneva, in Moscow, in Shanghai, in Tehran. You won't understand the movement by obsessing over these contingent "America in the 2000s" details.
As our host has said elsewhere: the ideology is not the movement. In every one of these cases, the ideology is merely a cudgel with which to beat up the opposition; the movement is based on the emotions of "you mean I can punish other people [like my parents]? and make the world a better place? and impress girls? Sign me up!"
If that's the sort of thing you are after, KKKalvinism is, today, the primary game in town. Sure you could join a few other variants playing the same game, but genuine revolution ala The Weathermen seems way too dangerous, and the White Power crowd not only listen to different music and follow different customs, they're unlikely to ever be on the winning side --- those are for actual ideologues, not for posers and chancers who're just in it for the signaling and the chance to tell other people what to do.
I have to argue for decades of censorship creating a humanities universe which contains almost nothing except left-liberalism and a few conservative caricatures. People are thinking they are leftists when they have seen nothing else. The smarminess and self-dealing of university humanities over the past 50 years has been significant. It’s not that thinkers are inherently left; it’s that the only people not shamed out the door of the vestibule of intellectuality are the next generation of left-liberal acolytes. If personal=political, personality is political, then certain politics requires a certain personality. That’s been happening at least since the 80s which I’ve seen and probably longer.
Academia was not a rich and powerful club until the research-industrial complex grew in it. It is now though and a middle-class obedience mindset has been catapulted into the upper class, where, power joined to inflexible, parroted, gate-keeping left vocabulary words, we have the nightmare of the hungover philosophy PhD, in which soooo many people are discussing theory, but it’s slowly going to hell.
I like to think rich people, if they are aware they are rich, become acquainted with trade offs and management decisions; newly empowered middle class, not thinking of how to wield power responsibly, carry out each treasured vengeance instead.
Tech created class churn like nothing else. The idea-ocracy may become a disaster; there’s more to leadership than ideas, but the bucket of ideas to draw from has been very restricted.
As for dictatorship apologia: I remember a lot of Democrats talking about how democracy is failing or the US is no longer a democracy and we need some kind of auto-coup to remove Trump in 2016. One person, I believe a Twitter exec, wrote a piece about how the right needs to be completely excluded from power for a generation. The trending tweet at one point was by a former member of the Clinton administration about how Republicans need to be outright banned from holding any position of responsibility. I think the new phenomenon is that the losing side is less likely to accept it. Both for the presidency and lesser offices. If they accept they just lose power while if they maintain THEY are the rightly elected person they get rewarded by their own side. Which is ominous in of itself!
This is, as far as I can tell, the sophisticated anti-democrat's (little d) case. We're heading for a dictatorship so you should make sure it's left-wing/right-wing. That's not new: dictatorial movements generally make the case there's no alternative. The enemy and siege mentality are a common feature of such regimes.
Personally, I see the modern period as a replay of the 19th century in the US or the 17th century in Britain. Both of which led to violence and even civil wars. There's a lot of similarities even down to some very specific points. Though neither ended democracy such as it existed at the time over the long term.
Both those conflicts usually get sociologically described as a conflict caused by economic/technological changes creating a new rising middle class elite. This elite leveraged a power base in the middle class against a more traditional elite whose power came from institutions and whose popular support lay in the lower classes and various minorities. And that's broadly what I think is happening now. My impression is the Democrats represent both the very elite of society and the lower classes plus minorities while the Republicans represent the broad middle. If so, the faction more equivalent to the Republicans won both times in Britain/the US. But not everywhere. Other countries followed different paths and a few didn't even have a decisive winner.
A bunch of clowns on Twitter isn’t a prelude to war. We’ll keep having elections. They’ll keep being peaceful. People will keep being butt hurt that their people didn’t win. Then we’ll do it all again.
No one actually wants violence (the real kind; not the “hurting my feelings is violence” kind)
Trying to think of something conservative that was celebrated fifty years ago and drawing a blank. Columbus Day? That has its roots in big city Democrat machine politics.
In fifth grade I did get a portable New Testament from a local Christisn evangelical organization.
The greater the population density the more likely it is that voters tilt liberal. At around 900 people per square mile in the US, populations move from mostly D to mostly R. The liberal enclaves in Red states are all in their larger cities.
The paper proposes a few causal mechanisms for the divide and its growth over time.
One major cause explained in the paper is the Big 5 "Openness to experience" trait. People higher in this trait are more likely to value education, which makes it more likely they go to college. Colleges are in areas where the population density exceeds the threshold (even in mainly rural states the college itself is a locus of higher density.) People with higher Openness are more likely to be liberal. So even you are surrounded by people who are liberal, which is likely to move you in that direction if you are already oriented that way (and especially if you are high in Agreeableness)
College education increases the likelihood you will not go home and pursue a career in a mainly rural profession but instead migrate to an urban center where there are more career opportunities for the educated. And there you are surrounded by more people who tilt that way.
And institutions? Institutions are density-centric. You find most institutions in larger cities more than smaller cities and the exurbs. So people who are inclined (or socialized) to be liberal will go to the places where the institutions live
As we continue to move from an economy where there's a lot of wealth created in low-density areas--farming and resource extraction--to an economy where increasing amounts of wealth are created (and captured) in high-density areas, the power tile inevitably moves in that direction
The density divide is robust across all 50 states and several countries where it has been studied
"Conservatives did dominate institutions somewhat in the 1950s, though there were still a lot of socialist professors and newspapers."
Academia and media were far less monolithic back then, so there was much more of a mix among independent institutions. Hollywood *was* monolithic, though--and sure enough, communists were being purged at least as ruthlessly as conservatives are today.
The two big tribes/coalitions have evolved a lot since then, of course. The PMC grew in numbers and status to the point where it could take over the "blue" coalition, evict the working class and replace it with the poor and minority groups. (That was the upheaval of the 1960s.) The working class responded by joining the previously business-focused "red" coalition. (That was the "Reagan revolution".) The 1990s boom enriched the PMC to the point where their interests started converging with those of the formerly-red "investor class", creating the bipartisan crony capitalism of the Bush-Obama years, and now "woke capital". And the red coalition, reduced to a white working-class (T)rump coalition, is now responding by trying to lure more of the previously-blue minority groups left behind by the PMC-business alliance that controls the blue coalition.
But I don't see any fixed rule or order to this evolution--rather, the shared interests that form the coalitions' foundations gradually shift tectonically, producing occasional earthquakes that realign them along new fault lines. In particular, when there's an imbalance of power between them, then the least well-aligned constituencies within the stronger one stand to gain by defecting to the weaker one, until balance is re-established.
The Republicans are facing a demographic time bomb of their own making. The Democrats have bet the farm on corralling all the non-white voters, plus much of the white population disgusted with Trump's emphasis on whiteness. The Republicans just need to undertake a slight marketing switch to totally derail this strategy. Instead of being anti-minority, they need to become pro-meritocracy again. Latinos and Asians were planning on following in the footsteps of the Germans, Irish, Jews, Italians and Poles, working hard and earning their move up in American society on the merits. Instead Republicans decided to focus on being pro-white, which explicitly excludes them. And the whites are split down the middle depending on whether they are attracted or repelled by the pro-white message. Only Blacks are the logical core of the Democratic Party, and even there of course there is a good sized subgroup of middle and upper income Blacks who stay Democrats because the Republicans don't want them. Republicans need to accept amnesty for all Latinos currently living in the US, enforce a strong border preventing further illegal immigration, and focus on the traditional low tax low regulation regime that boosts economic outcomes for all regardless of ethnicity. The Democrats can only offer more taxes, unpopular affirmative action programs that mostly benefit Blacks at the expense of Latinos and Asians, and calling their remaining white elite supporters racist just because they're white. It just seems so obvious and yet it's obviously not or it would already be happening.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. The political skews of the various ethnic groups are well known, and I don't think I'm contradicting any of it.
Nope. My comment was about the Republican and Democratic political coalitions. It's indisputable that the Republican coalition consists of white people and the Democratic coalition consists of everyone else plus white elites. Your graphs just show this, and the fact that Trump did marginally better with some minority groups in 2020 is common knowledge.
I'm not sure why *stopping* the Piketty ferris wheel would be a way to end this perceived control of certain institutions by one party. Rather, you'd want to *speed up* the ferris wheel, so that the other party cycles in sooner, rather than the party currently in control remaining there.
People sometimes like to point out the similarity (with opposite colors) between the 1892 presidential election and the 2012 one to show the half orbit of the ferris wheel.
I think the truth is a bit more complex - it's true that the urban/rural divide (surprisingly not mentioned in this post!) has basically perfectly reversed since 1892, but business has been on the side of the Republican party all the way since 1852, with 2020 being really the closest we've come to that not being the case.
>note that Hanania himself is conservative, so this isn't a cheap attack
Downplaying your own side's strengths to make it look like you're the underdog fighting against powerful institutions can indeed be a cheap trick. You see it all the time on both sides - the equivalent on the left would be "Democrats are spineless cowards who give Republicans everything they want in the name of bipartisanship."
I'm also doubting if some of these "left-leaning institutions" actually have any meaningful support for the left. Raytheon and Lockheed Martin (major defense companies) show up as slightly left-leaning on the chart, but I don't think most people would say the military-industrial complex serves left-wing interests.
If liberals donate more than conservatives in general, as Hanania says, then an industry that's right in the center politically would show up as "liberal" on the chart even though it's not "captured" in any meaningful sense.
> Downplaying your own side's strengths to make it look like you're the underdog fighting against powerful institutions can indeed be a cheap trick
It can be an intentional cheap trick, and I expect it's often deployed maliciously in fundraising appeals and the like. But from an individual perspective, it can be sincerely believed and (paradoxically) even true to an extent across the political spectrum.
As a cognitive illusion, your side's weakness looks larger than it really is because many of your side's victories, especially defensive victories, are easy to overlook or dismiss as things merely working as they "should". But the other sides victories stand out as dire and outrageous.
As a real phenomenon, remember that the parties are coalitions, not ideological monoliths. From an individual perspective, typically there's at most one faction within a party coalition that's consistently on your side. The rest of the party are unreliable allies, or even the kinds of friends who make you prefer your enemies. So every 10-20% slice of the ideological spectrum can reasonable view 80-90% as being as least partially again them.
Could there be a connection between the Political Party Ferris Wheel and the Style Barber Pole? Something about counter-culture generational rebellion spawning political movements?
(From an Australian author several decades ago). O’Sullivan’s First Law: “All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.”
If this is a First Law, I would like to propose a few others.
Second Law. "All organizations that are centre-left will over time become implicitly, and complicitly, Marxist in character.”
Third Law. "Any organisation, campaign or regime that is explicitly anti-West, regardless of whether it is far-left, ultra-conservative, racist or fascistic, will be supported by the far-left.”
Fourth Law. “All entities in Law 3, seemingly of the opposite political beliefs to the far-left, will have a term of opprobrium invented on their behalf, to be used against political opponents in the west, in order to allow overt far-left support.”
Fifth Law. “All western institutions will become increasing anti-western over time.”
Sixth Law. “All centre-leftist organisations who express some sort of support for a far-left campaign will be set increasingly difficult and absurd hurdles to overcome, until inevitable failure allows a far-left takeover and the Second Law to come to pass”.
I've seen the first law above attributed to Robert Conquest, as Conquest's Second Law.
Conquest's First Law is "Everyone is conservative about what he knows best."
Conquest's Third Law is "The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies."
Your final paragraph says it. From the Scopes Monkey Trial to the last 40 years of climate denialism, too much of American conservativism has been hostile to science for over a century, and it shouldn't come as a huge surprise that it lost academics. When right-leaning politicians push things like low taxes, stronger borders, and activist foreign policy, they've had plenty of broad support. I don't pretend to fully understand why the GOP felt it had to get in bed with the American equivalent of the Taliban to get a large enough coalition to win national elections, but it did and it lost a whole lot of people who are not naturally left-leaning in any meaningful general way. This perception that "woke" causes are winning some broad culture war just feels like you guys are in a bubble because you spend too much of your time on Twitter. If I asked my dad, a dark-skinned Mexican, life-long union man, Democrat to the bone, how he felt about trans athletes competing in the Olympics, I'm reasonably sure he'd stare blankly back at me and have no clue what I was talking about. These causes don't have any broad support, and if they end up becoming platform-core issues for the Democratic party rather than things people actually care about, we're going to be asking the exact opposite set of questions in 2120. It's not like the left has some permanent monopoly on evidence-based beliefs. But it's probably fair to say after the 1980-2020 dominance of moral majority and fossil fuel extraction politics, "reality has a liberal bias" is a common perception among educated people even if it isn't broadly true.
I came here to say this. (Not a US citizen). Consider the fact that some of the ideas upheld by prominent corrent republicans are just objectively wrong. (Denial of evolution, global warming, vaccines). If I was American any of this would be a deal breaker regardless of taxation, foreing policy, health care reforms...
Might this explain why the effect discussed is somewhat less in Europe?
I think it does. European right-wing parties are just plain old-fashioned nationalists, and nationalism has plenty of broad support. It also explains Donald Trump's success. He threw enough dog whistles at religious fundamentalists not to lose them, and they had no plausible alternative anyway, but those in the center and on the left willing to vote for him with their noses held knew from the entire history of his public life that he wasn't actually religious and didn't believe any of that nonsense.
The reality of two-party politics is when you only have two parties but a huge diversity of interest groups they need to appeal to, both parties have no choice but to make concessions to the extremer sides of their parties. In the 30s and 40s for the Democrats, that was socialists, and thanks to the Cold War and the global track record of intercom, that didn't go so well. But then for the Republicans, that became tent revival televangelists and the John Birch Society, and that is presently not going so well. I'm sure it'll swing back the other way eventually.
Incidentally, this is the part of the culture war conservatives really are losing. The United States may be a century behind western Europe in shedding biblical literalism and scripture-based oppression of sexually queer people, but it is happening and won't reverse. This will happen to the real Taliban eventually, too, though they may be a century behind the United States.
Meanwhile, authoritarian regimes like China and the Phillippines might have some plausible shot at long-run success since they are not based in reality-denial, as long as they don't make the mistakes of the Nazis and the Japanese in trying to conquer parts of the world with stronger militaries than their own.
"some of the ideas upheld by prominent corrent republicans are just objectively wrong. (Denial of evolution,"
I'd like to see more on this! Have we any names of "prominent current Republicans" who have made public statements about evolution? That's something that is a little nit-picky, but there's the whole "no evolution at all" and "yes evolution for animals, no evolution for humans" positions which are not quite identical.
So let's take the list of 2016 presidential candidates:
Ben Carson: seemingly he's a Seventh Day Adventist, Biblical literalist, and annihilationist (does not believe in Hell) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Carson#Religion So if he's a "literal six-day creation" type then okay, probably not a believer in human evolution?
John Kasich: raised Catholic, drifted away, became an Episcopalian, stayed with a conservative Episcopal church during The Anglican Wars, so probably okay with evolution every way, may or may not be liberal on some social issues
Me, I'd make him take it up with the Dominicans if he wants to be writing his own legislation on this instead of accepting current Church teaching, they're happily arguing over "is Thomism evolution-compatible?" https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2018/03/20975/
Rand Paul: Raised Episcopalian, is he still practicing? No definite news there. Opinions? No idea either.
Mike Huckabee: Baptist, I think Southern Baptist - he has been ordained a minister. So probably more on the anti-human evolution side.
Regarding climate change and so on, again there seems to be a range of views there from "yes and it's serious" to "qualified yes" to "no and here's why" to "don't know, don't care".
The position on science is not as simple as "Democrats believe in science, Republicans don't" but it's become a very handy and convenient label to slap on, for the media and for others.
Thank you for the detailed evidence! I must agree that the views among elite Republicans on these issues diverge from the stereotypes, and the same is probably true among most Republican voters.
But at the same time it's unfortunately true the partisan association is still real. The groups arguing for creationism in public schools and against action informed by climate science have done that work within the Republican party, and the groups arguing against creationism in public schools and for action informed by climate science have done that work within the Democratic party. The 2-party system is dreadful.
You absolutely can NOT infer the issue position of a politician, especially a national politician, from their nominal religion. (And even less so on culture-war stuff.) The official Catholic position on capital punishment is "no", but how many Republican Catholic politicians declare that? And of course the current US President is a pro-choice Catholic.
On climate change, how many prominent Republican politicians say it isn't happening, how many say it isn't the looming catastrophe it is commonly represented as? It's pretty easy to misrepresent the second position as the first.
Going outside the U.S., my reading of Putin is that he knows perfectly well that climate change is happening, but he can read a map and conclude that an increase in average global temperature will be a benefit for Russia, much of which is cold.
"From the Scopes Monkey Trial to the last 40 years of climate denialism, too much of American conservativism has been hostile to science for over a century, and it shouldn't come as a huge surprise that it lost academics."
Y'know, next to The Galileo Affair, the other case that causes me to lose my mind is the Scopes Monkey Trial.
Not being American, I heard a lot about this but didn't know anything, so I went to look it up. And like a lot of similar cases, it was one where the people and activists who wanted to have a law overturned deliberately provoked a case so they could go to trial over it (see the Lawrence versus Texas and of course Roe versus Wade).
"The Scopes Trial, formally known as The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes and commonly referred to as the Scopes Monkey Trial, was an American legal case in July 1925 in which a high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which had made it unlawful to teach human evolution in any state-funded school. The trial was deliberately staged in order to attract publicity to the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, where it was held. Scopes was unsure whether he had ever actually taught evolution, but he incriminated himself deliberately so the case could have a defendant.
Scopes was found guilty and fined $100 (equivalent to $1,500 in 2020), but the verdict was overturned on a technicality. The trial served its purpose of drawing intense national publicity, as national reporters flocked to Dayton to cover the big-name lawyers who had agreed to represent each side. William Jennings Bryan, three-time presidential candidate and former Secretary of State, argued for the prosecution, while Clarence Darrow served as the defense attorney for Scopes. The trial publicized the Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy, which set Modernists, who said evolution was not inconsistent with religion,against Fundamentalists, who said the Word of God as revealed in the Bible took priority over all human knowledge. The case was thus seen both as a theological contest and as a trial on whether modern science should be taught in schools."
So a law that arose out of an intra-denominational squabble and was passed as much for partisan political advantage as out of true conviction, a law which would probably have quietly died on the vine in time, was made to dance and jiggle its bones in public for the sake of some activists who wanted to push ahead with how progressive they were, and the end result was that attitudes were entrenched and people started pushing ahead aggressively with demonstrating that "I choose the Bible and the Word of God!", and so you got the mess in American public schools over the teaching of evolution.
Meanwhile, here in priest-ridden Catholic Ireland, my secondary school biology teacher was a nun, there were no problems or controversy over teaching evolution in my convent school science classes, and we never had those particular kinds of big splashy trials.
Yes, which is related to the notion that conservatives, at least with respect to religion, are not nearly so batshit in Europe compared to the US. Catholicism has been pretty reasonable for a long time, and incidentally, many of the most religious US ethnic minorities are Catholic. I think it would be a lot more intellectually acceptable for a university professor to be Catholic and vote for Catholics compared to becoming and voting for Southern Baptists. Heck, Biden is Catholic.
Gosh, how dare those liberals start a controversy over something so harmless as... *checks notes* a law that prevents science teachers from teaching science. It's obvious that they simply wanted to signal virtue, because why would anyone ever care what their children are being taught in school?
And what do you mean by "it would have naturally died on the vine"? Scopes lost his case, and the law stayed on the books for 45 years. That's a pretty long time to wait for a "natural" death.
And I 100% don't accept the argument that creating a test case is in some way wrong because you're "stirring up controversy." Test cases are a necessary part of US activism, since you can't challenge something unconstitutional without an actual court case.
(A lot of famous civil rights cases came about as a result of the NAACP finding people who would look sympathetic when getting arrested and then using that to publicize the injustices of Jim Crow. But I suppose that Rosa Parks should have just stayed at the back of the bus and waited for those laws to naturally wither away, rather than sparking the dreaded controversy?)
"It's not time for a change yet" is a vacuous argument, one that can be brought out against literally any sort of activism, because nothing ever changes without people first speaking about the need for change.
Here we go again. Once more for the people in the back;
The mythology of the Scopes Monkey Trial: In 1925 down in some nowhere town in Tennessee, where we are already deep in knuckle-dragging redneck territory, a mild-mannered high school teacher is dragged into court by the Bible-bashers for the heinous crime of teaching SCIENTIFIC TRUTH. Unhappily, the Bible-bashers win the epic trial of "Science versus Religion" and our hero is fined for being guilty of the offence of not being a knuckle-dragging redneck. Happily, in the long run, SCIENCE! wins.
The truth: In 1925 in Tennessee, some local bloviator politician gets a law passed that pretty much everyone thinks is dumb, but because fighting it at this time is like fighting against Mom and apple-pie and Truth, Justice and the American Way, it gets passed and then ignored. It is not being enforced. In fact, the school textbooks used to teach science are technically in violation of the law, but nobody cares.
Meanwhile, in some nowhere town in Tennessee, a confluence is about to occur: the ACLU is spoiling for a fight on this and similar laws and is looking for a test case. A blow-in from New York who is a Methodist (and from the start, the "Science versus Religion" narrative is undercut) and thinks this law is phooey, tells a few local big-wigs that this is the perfect chance to get their little town, which is dying on its feet and badly needs *something* to revitalise it, into national news. They agree that a show trial is just the thing - and one of them being a School Superintendent, he calls on a local highschool teacher. "Ever teach evolution in class?" our hero (for this is the role he is being cast in) is asked. "Can't remember, but I'm willing to say I did. I'm your man!" replies our hero.
Rubbing hands with glee, everyone on both sides of this farce start piling on the melodrama. The defence first try to get H.G. Wells (!) involved and when he is smart enough to smell a rat, Clarence Darrow jumps aboard. For the prosecution, William Jennings Bryant steps up - God alone knows why, various motives have been attributed to him. What is important is that there is a heck of a lot more going on here than merely "Science versus Religion" for everyone involved: the religious types want to challenge fundamentalist, literalist Bible interpretation so the Modernists versus the Fundamentalists line up. The agnostics/atheists/freethinkers want to give *all* religion, moderate or not, a poke in the eye, so Darrow and H.L. Mencken jump in - Mencken sniffs out the opportunity for a good story, and if it's not already one he'll make it so, so his reporting on the case is tuned for maximum provocation.
This is the heyday of Social Darwinism and the budding Eugenicist movement, so people concerned about *that* also stick their oars in - if it's anti-science and anti-progress to be anti-eugenics, then so be it!
And the circus comes to town.
Since the defence *want* maximum publicity, Darrow asks the jury for a guilty verdict so they can appeal to a higher court. This is done. Eventually the Tennessee Supreme Court throws it out on a technicality, to the disappointment at least of Darrow who wanted a Constitutional decision on this (if he'd been around for Roe versus Wade. he'd have gotten his penumbras of emanation).
And so a dumb law that was being ignored and that would have died quietly was fanned into a blaze by people using it for manifold reasons, it went down into pop culture as "Science versus Religion" and resulted in a polarised battleground where people felt they were being forced to choose between God and Science, and they picked God, and so the teaching of science in American schools continues to be a hot-button topic *to this present day*.
More than that, attitudes on Biblical literalism - the Fundamentalists versus the Modernists - were hardened as now one side felt it had to defend religious belief itself from being watered-down and rendered irrelevant.
I don't think anybody came out of that trial having won very much of anything.
But sure! I am of course only ranting about nice people who only wanted to teach science - and certainly had no ulterior motives, be it "get our small town hopping once more", "I can make this a publicity stunt to get my anti-religion views before a wider audience", "we must fight to protect the Bible" and "this is going to sell *so* many newspapers!"
Now imagine if the Parks case resulted in the worst of all worlds: the appeal on her case finally gets to the Supreme Court and instead of a decision about constitutionality, it gets thrown out on the technicality that she was not, in fact, sitting in the 'whites only' section, and so even today there are rows about segregated buses which continue to ply their trade.
The Civil Rights movement happened in the middle of a lively and actual situation. The Scopes trial created the very problem it set out to solve. That's the difference here.
One thing I find exhasperating is how lousy people on the right (like me) have been at building alternative institutions. The network of think tanks built, I think, mostly during the Reagan era were something of an achievement, but that's now 30 years in the rear view mirror. If you think of right wing media outlets, they're too unscrupulous to do more than preach to the choir, mostly, and too many media figures they produce are people like Sean Hannity and Mark Levin, ie, long on bombast, short on integrity. Universities: mostly nada.
I have a couple pet theories on this:
1. If you think of conservatives as people motivated to defend a traditional American strand of individualism, the result is these people are just less motivated to do stuff where the benefits mostly accrue to the group rather than to them personally, like becoming an activist or starting a non-profit.
2. Advocating for still more government spending and programs creates more opportunities for personal profit and career advancement for folks on the left, because hey, maybe some of those new appropriations find their way into your pocket, one way or another, or maybe there's a cushy job waiting for you at that new agency being created, and so the supply of people willing to go in for this is simply a lot higher. This is particularly true in our current post-industrial economy, where government employment, contracting, and the like makes up a greater share of the opportunities available to educated workers.
I'm not wedded to either of these, just putting them out there.
Great comment. It really is telling that there isn't much in the way of a journalistically strong, non-cheerleader conservative media outlet (maybe the WSJ, but see below). Things like the Daily Wire quickly went in the cheerleader direction and National Review isn't exactly known for its hard-hitting original reporting. The Free Beacon and the Examiner occasionally make noises about getting more journalistic, but since they're basically vanity projects by R donors they don't end up going there. City Journal has potential, but their shameful treatment of Sol Stern for questioning right-wing doctrine on school choice again underscores that there's plenty of ideological conformity to go around on the right too (Reason's had issues with that as well).
Conservative universities have similar issues. There are still some clearly right-leaning colleges out there, but they usually have some kind of explicit religious litmus test (which, as bad as "Statements of Commitment to DEI" are these days, is not the same as requiring allegiance to specific statements). Even if you created a non-religious new conservative super-university from scratch, there are all kinds of gatekeeping issues. What would happen if a professor hired at a conservative university changed their mind and moved left? Would liberals be hired as professors or allowed to enter as students? What kind of student would want to come to a school that would give them a "scarlet letter" degree? And of course, the wealthy donors who created such an institution would probably want some kind of voice/veto that, like with previous donations by the Kochs, would raise questions around academic freedom.
It seems like the ideal here would be to establish not necessarily explicitly conservative institutions, but rather institutions that are not hostile to conservatives and which actually embrace free speech and a marketplace of ideas. It would be great if some of the conservative super-donors would be more like Bezos with the WashPost and hands-off with any institutions that they run. That said, I do wonder if over time such institutions would drift leftward as well due to some of the ideas discussed in Hanania's piece. The WSJ's news division for instance has definitely been getting more liberal in its tone and coverage in recent years even as the opinion section has been split between red meat cheerleaders/hackish PR people and some legitimately good conservative writers and thinkers. It's a challenge to keep more highbrow conservative institutions afloat anyways as more college-educated people move leftward, so there's not much in the way of a market for that (ironically).
Yup, the Daily Caller explicitly said in their initial announcement, "we want to be the New York Times of the right."
That didn't work out, and they quickly became a tabloid 'own the libs' site.
The reality is the type of overlap of an audience that enjoys say, a woke take on comic book movies + an article about the child tax credit, but the opposite doesn't really exist on the conservative side, for whatever reason, so Vox is successful, and there is no right-wing version of Vox.
As I've said before, the closest thing is Reason, but the issue is, while they do put out the occasional culture war piece about how free speech is doomed or whatever, they, unfortunately, for the sake of their own power within the right-leaning coalition, continue to also point out immigration is good and cops are not great.
Yep. In general, there are too many lukewarm "takes" among the conservative intelligentsia and not nearly enough shoe-leather reporting or intelligent cultural criticism. The near-complete lack of 538-style data journalism, for instance, on the right is striking. The Dispatch is kind of doing a more "reported opinion" approach, but they're generally pretty anchored to the old Weekly Standard perspective and sometimes lapse into being a platform for AEI opeds that couldn't get placed elsewhere. I really hope they succeed though since they seem best-positioned to do things outside the standard highbrow conservative publication mold.
There's also nothing like "The Weeds" on the right that really digs into policy details in an accessible, listenable format. All the conservative group podcasts from NRO, Commentary, the Examiner, and even The Dispatch kind of blend together as a sea of mostly surface-level zombie Reaganism policy and uneven commentary on current news from nice-enough DC/NYC suburbanites. There are a few with smart guests that can occasionally go well, but the left really seems to have much more interest in talking through policy details as opposed to more surface-level stuff. The median mainstream R podcast, of course, seems to be far more populist/Trumpy talk radio stuff.
I do wonder if this affects partisan sorting. If you're a young person interested in government and the details of how it runs and such, there's not much for you to consume within the media environment on the right. You can read Buckley and Burke and such, which might explain why there are at least a decent number of conservative political theorists, but there's no Vox explainer to dig into about a policy topic. And from a pop culture perspective, there's no right-wing "West Wing" that glorifies government service. I know there *are* plenty of right-wing wonks and policy hands out there, but they seem far less visible than TV celebrities/sometimes outright grifters within the right-wing media environment compared to the left (which, of course, has their share as well).
I think #2 is mostly true, though it operates more in the mysterious subterranean way class self-interest often does rather than being how liberals explicitly think. If you tend to see the administrative state in that sort of disenchanted, purely transactional light, you're probably a conservative to begin with.
I'm more skeptical about #1. It does describe part of the current situation, but in a longer perspective I'm not sure it holds up very well. E.g., for most of my lifetime the stereotype of the two US parties that I'd hear from political people was that the Republicans were the disciplined army able to submerge disagreement for the good of the cause, and the Democrats were the fractious coalition of subgroups motivated by their own peculiar interests. And conservatives being generally the more "groupy" tribe obviously fits with the sort of Haidt-style paradigm of authority/loyalty/etc as moral foundations.
Conservatives also have a long and conspicuous history of being motivated to do stuff where the immediate benefits accrue more to the group than to the individual, when that stuff is called "church."
So on balance I still lean toward the sense that something's happened to institutions in our particular historical moment that's made them much more congenial to one political tribe, rather than the current divide in attitudes to institutions being something that just flows naturally from ideological first principles.
Speculation: The current divide is between large families on the right and small families on the left. Family size is currently correlated with income and anti-correlated with education.
The trouble with this analysis is it implies the causal direction is like: educational elite flips to Dems --> institutions turn left. But that doesn't really fit the chronology suggested by the graphs.
The highly educated don't start tilting Democratic until the 1990s. But the decisive period in the capture of "institutions" (meaning primarily: higher ed and NGO's, maybe also prestige media though my grasp of the history there isn't so firm) by the left is generally agreed to be the late 1960s.
That's more consistent with the reverse causal path: institutions turn left, at a time when left-leaning people are still a minority among the highly educated --> people formed by those institutions, or wanting to advance within them, increasingly come to identify with the Democratic Party, eventually reshaping that party in their own image.
And also prima facie more consistent with the Hanania approach. Because it suggests that institutional capture isn't an organic outcome of coalitional shifting, but might instead be a kind of exogenous shock that arises for idiosyncratic reasons and resets coalitions in unpredictable ways.
That's the answer to the question posed in the piece: what happened between the 50s and now?
The 60s happened. Post-Second World War, the economies were generally booming, there was more money available to larger sections of the population, and college became something that went from "is only for our betters" to "I work on an assembly line but I want more for my kids" and became affordable for the higher levels of the working class.
And as we saw with the student protests of May 68 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_68, college students became radicalised in various wars, some to do with the Vietnam War, others to do with the whole counter-culture thing. And the universities resisted at first, then capitulated.
And the next generation of academics, journalists and the like were the ones who had been the student protesters. In time, they became part of the Establishment but they continued to think of themselves as the protesters sticking it to The Man. Their kids went the same way.
It would be interesting to see data on college attendance by political affiliation. I would bet that, controlling for IQ, liberals are more likely than conservatives to go to college and also more likely to go to elite colleges. And that this is due less to anti-conservative attitudes in the admissions offices than to liberals' higher motivation for elite degrees.
If there is actually a difference of this kind, then education doesn't really explain anything. Saying "journalists are liberal because they're Ivy Leaguers" is sort of like saying "journalists are liberal because they're liberal".
I grew up in a very conservative subculture. Hanania is on to something, but I don't think "liberals care more" is the best way to explain it. Conservatives and liberals have very different strategies for dealing with hostile institutions. The liberal tendency is Infiltrate--->Take Over--->Purge, but the conservative tendency is Withdraw--->Recreate.
Previous generations of conservatives grew uncomfortable with the increasing liberalism of the public schools, so they put their kids into private schools. Now the private schools have gotten more liberal, so there's been a huge upswing in conservative homeschooling.
This is not the behavior of people who "don't care much". These alternative approaches to schooling are a LOT more difficult for middle class people. Private schools cost a lot of money, and parents often spend more than an hour a day just driving their kids there and back. Homeschooling is effectively a job. Public schooling seems laughably easy by contrast- it's free, and they literally pick up your kid at your front door.
Ultimately, I think conservatives are the spiritual descendants of the people who settled the United States-people who dealt with conflict by striking out for the colonies, and then for the frontier, and building new communities with immense effort from scratch. Now we have no frontier and no escape.
> Does this explain why so many institutions are so liberal? Because they draw from mostly educated people, and educated = liberal these days?
I think this is pretty straight forward obvious. Liberals have dominated education for decades. Especially higher education, just look at your own graph. Professors and educators are the most likely to donate to democrats. Once you control education, it's becomes possible to route every other institution. Everyone who goes through your education pipeline has their opinions shifted more liberal. They then go into every other institution and drive out everyone who's not part of their coalition. If your HR department is filled with liberals, then you can drive out any other conservatives. So now you control companies. You can then use those institutions to apply pressure to other institutions who don't sufficiently share your ideological makeup. For example, threatening to pull your advertisement spending, denying access to payment processing services, deplatforming, etc....
I guess you could call it the long march through the institutions.
My bid for a solution is 'Get the Republican party to adopt positions that educated people find less distasteful,' but some people may claim that the causal arrow points the other way there. I think you could make a good case that the Republicans actually held positions educated people would like more in the past, and don't now - I would offer 'democrats ate their lunch by becoming pro-market economic conservatives' as a primary factor - and this could be a genuine change that explains why the educated affiliation has flipped.
I also wonder how much rural vs urban divide matters here. Urban people are 73% more likely to get a college degree than rural people, so 'educated' is a pretty good proxy measure for 'urban vs rural'. If the real issue is just that urban areas are democratic, and urban areas are where all national institutions are headquartered, that's also a simple explanation.
"My bid for a solution is 'Get the Republican party to adopt positions that educated people find less distasteful'"
In other words, "make the Republican Party the same on socially liberal positions as the Democratic Party".
This still doesn't mean things get better; our two major parties are now happily in coalition with each other, where once that would have been a "has Hell frozen over?" situation as they arose literally shooting at each other in our Civil War. One of them, Fine Gael, has gone from being the party of Oliver J. Flanagan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_J._Flanagan to "yay us, we legalised gay marriage!"
But even in our happy current days of "Tweedle-dee is the same as Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dum is the same as Tweedle-dee", there are still scandals and public disapproval:
(2) Zapponegate B, the "one law for the rich, another for the poor" mini-scandal over "hey, how come those in power who are forbidding us from having First Communion and Confirmation ceremonies are attending outdoor gatherings that break the regulations they themselves put in place?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrion_Hotel_controversy
First of all, if the two parties moved to agreement on following experts or w/e, they would still find new areas to disagree about - that's pretty much definitional in a two-party system. But, they might end up disagreeing about meaningful things, instead of stupid things.
Second, what is your point regarding individual scandals? How is that relevant to this topic? I don't see the connection.
I took the point to be that partisan animus operates somewhat independently of actual ideological disagreement. So you could have the two parties adopt the same positions on everything, but partisan media would just shift to attacking the other side over highly personalized instances of hypocrisy or venality.
I think Hanania is right that the Blue Tribe cares more about defeating the Red Tribe than the Red Tribe does about defeating the Blue Tribe, and that this is relevant to Blue takeover of institutions (Blue purges Red more effectively than Red purges Blue).
What he leaves out is *why*. I don't think Red is especially incapable of worrying about things, but while Blue is a nearly-pure counterculture, Red's primary focus is external threats. The threat of Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe was something that held Red together and allowed Red-based ideological purges (e.g. McCarthy), but there was no threat for a while and the alarm bells around the PRC don't seem to be ringing as loudly (at least, in the USA - in Australia we're plenty scared).
"I think Hanania is right that the Blue Tribe cares more about defeating the Red Tribe than the Red Tribe does about defeating the Blue Tribe"
I think that there is a difference, but that it's almost precisely /not/ that. The Blue Tribe has a long policy shopping list, which defeating the Red Tribe will be necessary to achieve; the Red Tribe cares passionately about defeating the Blue Tribe to the point where that, rather than a positive alternative program, has become its driving force.
I think the word "reactionary" is a relevant one here.
And I think that may be part of why the Blue Tribe comes across as caring more - it's not that they actually /do/ care more, its that it's easier to manifest caring when what you care about is policy programme rather than a tribal feud.
I wanted to ask "How can a discussion of woke companies be complete without a mention of 'harassment law', 'hostile workplace environment', 'anti-discrimination' or 'civil rights act'?" but one of Hanania's followups discusses just that.
Companies are woke because hostile workplace environment laws and guilt-presuming anti-discrimination laws make it too risky to hire a manager who is outspokenly right-wing about race, sex, sexual orientation or gender identity. It's not that laws require companies to celebrate gay pride, but when every manager is either a SJW or keeps quiet about politics, the SJWs can push the stuff well beyond what the law or even the company's interests require, without pushback.
Programmers aren't uniformly progressive. As far as I can tell, conservatives are uncommon, but libertarians are common. E.g. according to polls 56% of Google employees didn't think Damore should have been fired, and IIRC 40% agreed with him (though I can't find the source for the latter). That suggest a pretty even split. It's the management that uniformly takes the progressive side—while commentators as well as the EEOC argued that Google would have risked harassment lawsuits if it doesn't fire him.
I don't follow Hanania's argument though that it's civil rights laws that make conservatives care less about politics even in ways that aren't regulated by those laws, such as going to protests.
I managed to find a source for the Google internal polls: 36.3% agreed with Damore and 48.5% disagreed; 30.3% thought the document was harmful and shouldn't have been shared and 57.4% disagreed.
One factor is probably related to how, in a non-authoritarian system, it takes much more time and effort to synchronize conservative action (i.e., to restrain new projects) than to make “noise” or new pilot initiatives of a new/liberal type.
Here’s a small scale, slightly obscure, but real life example:
Essentially, Portuguese Praxe consists of initiation rituals that last your whole degree, in many ways similar to American fraternities and sororities, although usually with no common housing.
In Portugal, a university course in which there is no Praxe is in a state of unstable equilibrium. Any given year, 2 or 3 students can simply decide to start doing initiation rituals to consensual 1st year students. In a non-authoritarian system, what can the conservative do to refrain this voluntary action to stop from happening? Other “conservative” students would have to spend much time *convincing* people not to join this initiative. in practice, every year the ritual easily grows in numbers.
In essence, there’s a bias in the system to make it easy for social “innovation” and pilot projects of volunteers. (And in the case of Praxe, several mechanisms exist to perpetuate the practice).
This could probably be solved if the existence of Praxe was voted on every year. But as it is initially proposed, it is not a mandatory action, so why not.
This effect might be specially true in countries whose identity is so attached to individual freedom. Same-sex marriage was always going to become legal in the US, since it is something that does not really affect other people. Of course, secret voting delays the passing of the law.
My intuition is that, when X correlates with Y, but X and Y have opposite correlations with A, that there is very likely some fourth factor B strongly at play that correlates the other way round with X and Y than does A.
Here, surely B must be age? Even though education correlates a lot with wealth, there's also this huge age effect where older people are richer just due to building up wealth over time, getting promoted through organisations, gaining skills and seniority, etc., but they're also a lot less well educated because they had their formal education back when any given person at some given point on the intelligence spectrum generally got a lot less schooling than they do now.
So these poor educated people voting left are going to disproportionately the young educated people, with the older educated people being more right wing, and then those older educated right-wing people are also rich, and then the uneducated rich people are also old, and they're right-wing too, and then the old uneducated people generally left wing and poor.
I've tried to write that sentence a bunch of times but basically any four-dimensional system like that is ass to explain, and I'd want it all drawn out on a 3D graph of voters in one of the countries that exemplifies this new alignment (say, UK) with income and education on the X and Y as here, but then age on a Z direction, and colour to represent the parties as here, and I think you'd essentially see a very nice graph of with eight 'boxes' of which four would be mostly empty, and you would see all the correlations that way, and how you end up with income and wealth correlating with each other, but correlating opposite ways with both age and vote. You could even do a before/after shift showing a transition between the one where everything lines up, and the one where it all splits off in different directions.
Doing that would provide the sort of intuitive grasp of what I'm trying to say that I have in my head but can't remotely explain in words. This is why data visualisation is an important skill - it's much easier to see this than read someone ham-handedly try to explain it.
If you're analyzing the "modern" US political alignments, I don't think you can skip noting the *absolute dominance* of the Democratic Party of Congress from 1933 through 1995 - the Dems held the majority in both houses for most of that period, and an *unbroken* 40 year run of control of the House from 1955 to 1995.
Now, the wider ideological intra-party diversity of this period makes this a *little* less interesting (at their centrist ends, the parties' memberships in Congress overlapped significantly, the rightmost Dem was well to the right of the leftmost Republican - this overlap has pretty much disappeared in my lifetime).
There's a lot of complications in the details, but the broad outline of the story is that the old alignment was anti-democratic. The Dixiecrats ran one-party states in the South for much of the 20th century, effectively taking their Congressional seats out of competition. Outside the South, the two parties competed for the remaining seats, and split them relatively evenly. That meant the coalition of white supremacist Dixiecrats + labor-associated Democrats was unfairly larger than the population it represented, and the education-and-business-associated Republicans unfairly smaller. When there's a dominant party, it pays politically for minority party representatives to make compromises and bring porkbarrel spending home. Our current national polarization is largely a result of the Civil Rights movement's victories putting more Congressional seats into the national competition and making it more politically expedient to refuse to compromise.
For basically my entire lifetime, "reformers" have been tearing down the systemic tools that encouraged intra- and inter-coalition compromises; with the (entirely, if technically, correct) observation that, in practice, these result in corrupt bargains, pork, and distorts the political landscape.
But with the House now being entirely responsible to their districts and almost not at all to the national parties, the seats are *still* not in contention (because the representatives are still reflective of their constituents without the pressure of the rest of the national parties) and they're less willing OR able to compromise to the national pressures.
I think most political disagreements come down to factual disagreements rather than value disagreements. Imagine a world where one party was dominated by a philosophy that was largely correct and the other was dominated by a philosophy that was popular and intuitive but fundamentally flawed. The 'correct' party would gain more support among educated and intellectual elites (because these people are better at telling truth from lies). The 'mistaken' party would gain support among those who benefit from the realisation of its philosophy. If they had the means, these people would then persuade other groups that the mistaken philosophy was good. This could be through religion, divide-and-rule tactics, personal charisma, targeted advertising, and many other methods.
You'd get a contradiction if educated and intelligent people also tended to fall into the group who benefit from the mistaken philosophy, because then they have incentives in both directions. Possibly gradual improvements in education over the course of decades cause them to vote more with what they think is correct and less with what benefits them personally. Perhaps economic growth makes them less worried about their personal wealth and gives them the freedom to vote for what they think is correct. Perhaps some other factor.
Bingo. The reason you see "woke capital" supporting Pride Month is because they know it's the better PR move than the alternative, and they'd rather have people arguing about race than arguing about things that could actually threaten their power, like class and our economic system.
Sure, that too. It's just overall in their interest to be supportive now that enough of the country is. A few decades ago they would risk paying a price with consumers for supporting queer people.
"Piketty thinks the same process might be happening in other countries with eg Muslim immigrants"
Can partially confirm this for Sweden. The Social Democratic party has essentially monopolized the muslim vote through extremely close relationships with muslim organizations, but in the process lost a large chunk of uneducated, especially rural, especially male, whites to the anti-immigrant populist Sweden Democrats. For the first time ever, the Social Democrats have to fight tooth and nail to maintain control over the unions against a challenge from the right.
Sorry if someone else has made this comment, but I feel obliged to make it in all discussions of this type: 95% (or maybe 99%) of the answer is everything isn’t woke, it’s just that you live in a very particular media bubble. The remaining few percent of the answer is just that we are still engaged in the long, long process of offering real equality to people who are a bit different. The law is still more radical than most people.
Yeah but that media bubble is made of the media bubbles that high level administration staffers and powerful journalists and political appointees and high level lawyers and powerful people in tech companies are in. The lower classes being illiterate Christians did not stop the enlightenment.
The good old fashioned kinds of equality: equality by race, sex, and sexual orientation. Racism and sexism didn’t disappear in the 1960s; hetero discrimination didn’t end with the legal victories for gays (that only came 10 years ago!). There may be class discrimination in there, too.
I mean “no discrimination” and “equality” aren’t synonyms necessarily. I was thinking “equality before the law”. I fail to see much relevant sex or sex orientation discrimination (there is some, sure, but there’s also some pro gay and woman discrimination!) in most aspects of society, especially the emerging frontiers like tech, and race ... probably not worth getting into, but plenty of POCs like Indians have done quite well in aggregate (highest average income for any ethnic group (except Jews maybe I forget lol) in the US at double the average - 120k household) despite being brown
If you honestly believe that there is no distorting discrimination left in America, then I disagree, but my argument doesn't even rely on that. Suppose that you're right, and there is no damaging sexism or racism in America in 2021. Just by looking at the law, we know that there definitely was damaging sexism and racism in America within the lifetimes of many of the people alive today. People of my mother's generation, for example (baby boomers) weren't given the same opportunities if they were women. So their situation will never be fair, and the distortions that that created ripple on (e.g. through lack of women in leadership positions) for at least a generation. Similarly, the gay people who were disowned by their families, and so don't get to inherit houses, end up at a disadvantage in insane housing markets.
With sustained fairness, eventually these problems will disappear into random noise. But those massive injustices don't just disappear overnight when the law changes.
There’s obviously discrimination in America, I just object to the idea that that discrimination is *evil* or even particularly bad. There is “terrible” ageism and ableism and lookism and nepotism everywhere. But that’s just kinda normal. I don’t think women in leadership positions is a sexism issue, women just are way less commandingly aggressive and nasty on average as well as willing to build their own thing and tend to follow the “pack” or gestalt more, even (and, honestly, especially - women in supposedly sexist cultures often do hard sciences more and are more assertive when need be, although that could be for other reasons) when raised in equal western cultures. And yeah people who get disowned have less money and even if they had money the lack of connections would be bad, but what on earth should one do about that? Women outnumber men in college already, and plenty of people get disowned from society or family for being racist. If one adds the discriminations all up for the new generation, women and minorities get much more “unfair” due than the reverse at this time. Someone I know knows someone who “was told
by his lawyers he had to hire some racial minorities for anti discrimination law protection, looked around the specialized technical talent pool for his particular area, couldn’t find any, so made up some useless communications and diversity positions and gave those to people”. My essential argument is that nothing is exactly fair, and that the current state of play is as fair to women or gays as it is to several dozen other classes.
This might be too CWey actually I’ll delete if someone says ro
Please don't delete. I'll need this as useful evidence when someone says, "no-one is that crazy". But here you are literally telling me that the discrimination suffered by racists is just as bad as the discrimination suffered by gay people.
One very important aspect that is neglected in this post (but brought up in the comments) is the rural-urban divide. Living in cities is one of the most predictive factors for voting Democratic, and most of today's elites (for a variety of reasons) live in cities. Likewise, most of today's important institutions are run from medium-to-large cities. That alone could account for much of this disparity.
I do think Hanania's hypothesis is a little bit conspiratorial. For example, professors in all disciplines lean left pretty severely (depending on the field, professors identifying as Democrats outnumber professors identifying as Republicans by between 3:1 to 10:1). However, I think that the number of, for example, physics professors who chose to become professors (rather than, say, hedge fund managers) *in order to exert political influence* is minuscule. I know a decent number of STEM professors, and not a single one has ever indicated that weilding political influence was even a small factor in going into academia (anecdotal, yes, but telling nonetheless).
Today's "elite" also includes things such as FAANG tech workers. These tech workers also tilt heavily to the left. But it's pretty evident that most tech workers choose those jobs not out of political ideology, but rather because the compensation is good, the conditions are comfortable, and the work is interesting. Perhaps you could argue that the left-leaning tech workers are more vocal than the right-leaning tech workers, but you would *also* need to explain why there are just so many more left-leaning tech workers to begin with, and Hanania fails to do that.
Finally, I think people here are *vastly* overstating the effect that teachers and professors have on political discourse and society at large. I have spent many years in academia and in academia-adjacent areas, and generally speaking, professors are delighted if they can even convince their students to do the readings and hand in assignments on time, never mind permanently change their political ideology. Furthermore, while perhaps some parts of the humanities have large political components, the vast majority of disciplines are not really related to politics. I studied a STEM field in undergrad and graduate school, and political topics were basically never discussed with professors. Students' political views are much more likely to be affected by the views of their (overwhelming left-leaning) peers rather than by professors.
The commenters who have proposed explanations such as "academia was captured by the left" or "the great march through the institutions" seem to be missing the big picture. Academia, universities, and teachers *worldwide* lean left. Institutional capture could potentially explain why some American universities are left-leaning, but it doesn't explain why university professors throughout almost all of the Western world are left-leaning (unless you posit some sort of "global institutional capture", which I think strains credulity).
A much more credible explanation is that significant planks of the modern right's platform are off-putting to (or even incompatible with) academics and intellectuals. I don't think it's controversial that there is a very strong anti-intellectual strain in today's GOP (such thinking also exists in the Democratic party, but it's better kept in check). Ignoring policy, is it not clear that Barack Obama's style of communication is more appealing to academics than Donald Trump's? The right has a fairly large faction that is extremely skeptical of "expert opinion", and academics are (some of) those who determine expert opinion: the conflict between these things is evident. Politicians on the right are much more likely to "go with their gut". Going with your gut doesn't cut it in academia. Religiosity is another big factor here.
In short, is it really so surprising that the political ideology that has elevated being anti-elite, anti-academic, anti-intellectual and anti-expert finds itself out of favor with the elites, academics, intellectuals, and experts?
> Finally, I think people here are *vastly* overstating the effect that teachers and professors have on political discourse and society at large
Professors isn’t the same as your local college English teacher. Lots of people with very important political influence are also professors of political science, economics, business, foreign policy, law, etc. the professors at top colleges very much mingle with and feed people to political influence.
Except various studies have shown that college actually moves left-wing students toward the center. College is a machine to create center-left liberals, not left-wing Marxists. Now, if you're a social conservative, OK, that's a problem, but that's a different argument than the "Marxist professors are creating woke culture via English 101 lectures about white privilege."
I’m not talking about leftism or ideology here. I’m just saying that at many colleges professors there do have an outsized influence on society at large, and you can tell because of how many political positions and political appointments and political influence and friendships with important politicians and judge positions and all sorts of things they have
This has had many different impacts, many leftwards and some less leftwards
Also, for every study showing that “college moves left students center”, I can get you a literal thousand studies showing that Chinese traditional medicine or homeopathy or priming or racial bias or whatever. Anecdotal claims of studies are as useless as, and IMO worse, than actual anecdotes (well it depends on the field and topic)
>In short, is it really so surprising that the political ideology that has elevated being anti-elite, anti-academic, anti-intellectual and anti-expert finds itself out of favor with the elites, academics, intellectuals, and experts?
I think you're three quarters right and one quarter... not necessarily wrong, but not exactly right, either... with the one quarter being "anti-elite".
"Academics", "intellectuals" and "experts" are all fairly well-defined groups that do indeed have a political valence. "Elites" is a fairly meaningless political slogan; left and right both claim to be anti-elite, and mean very different things by it (respectively "against the economic interests of the rich and big business" and "against academics, intellectuals and experts") by it. I think pretty much /any/ political movement /has/ to claim to be against "the elite" and on the side of "ordinary people", and can then interpret that to cover pretty much anything it wants to do.
I think Red's problem is that it *has* to oppose the chunks of academia that engage with politics the most (e.g. social psychologists attempting to pathologise being Red), and it's quite a lot of bandwidth to say "a large chunk of academia is effectively a propaganda factory that should be ignored, but this other bit is fine".
(The other bit is that the cards on global warming - hippies being for it, loadsamoney being against it - fell in a way that turned it into a political issue. That one's an own-goal for the LPA and the Republicans, straight up.)
So I've been trying to draw a bead on the motivation and mindset of the rationalist community for a while now. My current take is that they are trying eliminate emotion and are skeptical of any and all preconceived notions. They want to work from first principles so to speak with high value for hard numbers, especially reproducible hard numbers.
If you will forgive me a little skepticism of my own there also seems to be sort of inordinate fondness for Bayes Theorem. At times this seems like the sort of fondness for beetles and stars that J.B.S. Haldane ascribed to The Creator. I do get its importance. I think. At times it does seem overdone here.
I'm curious though if there is any room at all for noetic knowledge with rationalists. The sort of insight that comes through mediation or prayer or fasting or ingestion of entheogens. I see that taken at literal face value a rationalist would reject this out of hand. I'm just probing for any wiggle room that a rationalist might be open to.
I wonder whether the fundamental reason isn't simply that the left has always assigned a lot of importance to intellectuals, whether as skilled technocrats or as a liberal vanguard whose superior education allows them to transcend the prejudices of the conservative masses. People naturally like being told they're important, so it's not really surprising that intellectuals should be attracted to the set of ideologies that makes them the stars of the show.
I haven't finished the post yet, and so not even tackled the replies. But this may be my fav. post since 'a modest proposal for republicans'.
1.) I keep thinking have you read "Coming Apart" by C. Murray. You don't have to agree with his bias, but his idea's should be considered. We have made the costal elite. The best people from, say, my home town Buffalo, have gone to good colleges on one of the coasts, and the best of those have stayed there... making more kids together.
2.) As far as a Caesar: (voting in a dictator) have you listened to Dan Carlin's "Death throes of the Republic" about Rome? I think we pick a dictator, when we get sick of the two party political system not working. Where you lean politically has little to do with your disgust with the current system.
Does the multi-elite party theory fit in with Turchin's ideas of elite surplus? When the elites are few in number they share a common destiny and naturally congregate in one party, but when there are so many that they can't all be on top, they have to segregate so they can jockey for position.
Maybe a Just So story -- I haven't explained why they can't jockey for position within one party.
I think the fundamental problem that we are working with is that the basic cleave that separates the parties and Americans, is who counts as an American. This is not something that can be negotiated. Either someone is an American with the full rights and privilege that that gives or they are not. People in institutions and those who run them tend to believe that we need to include people because that gives the most possibility to getting the correct people and the fact that lots of different people already are there.
The American public are policy liberal, in general they want the government to do more to help folks. But people vote based on their identity. So some people will define themselves by how much they don't like black people and how much they don't like gay people and how much they don't like trans people and so on. No matter how much you want the government to do things if you don't like your fellow Americans and believe that they should not be part of the body politic then you will not vote for Democrats. Not all republicans think this way. But all of the people who believe this tend to vote republican.
All of these institutions have a law based duty to have diversity. They don't quite succeed but if you run one of these institutions you need to try and if you are going to try then you need to believe and not have a dislike of your fellow Americans. If you want to join these institutions then you know you are going into a rather diverse place and need to not care about that. So when this basic issue interacts with politics all of these institutions look liberal and democratic because people who have problems with diversity won't be there.
Looking at Pew Research's numbers the total number of undocumented immigrants in the US as of 2021 was around 10.5 million people. Total population of the US is 328 million. Mexicans are no longer the largest group of unauthorized immigrants.
Of the around 47 million foreign born immigrants in the US 20 million are naturalized citizens. The US foreign born population is around 13.7 percent. Now it will seem larger than that because this has been going on for a while and people replace themselves with kids. So there is a lot more than 13.7 percent of the population that does not look like what are tv's did in the 1950's.
Trump and the Republicans may have screamed loudest about unauthorized immigration, but they also worked hard to reduce legal immigration. In some cases ICE deported legal residents and citizens. I'm sure that was not exactly frowned against by the top.
But the funny thing about all that is roiling the US, is that we are again become like we were in the past. The 1940's to the 1970's was one of the weirdest times in American history. People got married younger, the political parties got along, immigrants were only 5 percent of the US population. For a long time in the US from the 1860's to the 1930's, US foreign born population hovered between 10 percent and 15 percent, the parties hated each other, and people got married in their mid to late twenties or not at all.
Hell we didn't even have any immigration laws until the Chinese exclusion acts in the 1880's.
But this is the same stupid freakout that happened in the teens. All of a sudden the folks coming over weren't western europeans like germans and such, instead it was eastern europeans who were jewish or catholic and the italians who were swarthy and catholic and the people who thought they were anglo saxon's went we can't have that restricted immigration.
I mean, every group of America has been *replaced*
The initial old stock WASP's were replaced by the initial wave of German, Scandinavian, etc. immigrants..
That wave was replaced by Irish and Italians
That wave was replaced by Polish and other Eastern Europeans, along with some Chinese til we shut the doors.
Then, all those groups were replaced by Latino's and other Asian immigrants.
Hell, Ben Franklin was warning the citizenry about the swarthy...Swedes during the colonial era.
The history of America is demographic replacement, and future generations trying to protect their status by using the arguments that were thrown at them, to attack the newcomers.
Maybe the dot-com boom had something to do with it ? All of a sudden, you could jump from "educated" to "rich" without going through the traditional corporate/finance hierarchy. Thus, liberals remained as liberal as they were even after their transition to elite status.
I don't see much in the discussion yet about the recruitment of intelligent working class people into the ranks of the better paid intelligentsia via free and subsidised education, and I think that's a key part of the puzzle. Prior to WWII there isn't much of a path to rise in socio-economic class via education (at least in the systems I'm most familiar with - AU/UK/US). The university elites were the children of the wealthy - inasmuch as the wealthy were right wing supporters, that would be perpetuated into the next generation.
However, after WWII you get:
US (40s) - GI bill which allows the expansion of education opportunities to a wide cross section of men
UK (60s) - Education grants supporting any students of whatever financial means to go to university
AU (70s) - Start of free tertiary education
And I'm sure there are similar examples in other systems that I'm less familiar with.
So working class kids who grew up in left wing social circumstances became more educated, got good jobs, got paid well but retained their left wing affiliation, therefore moving the left-wing support average towards the "more educated" side. The education helped them get more well-paying jobs which moved their income up somewhat - the main graph shows income effects coming after education effects which is exactly what I'd expect under this model. The apparent relative movement of the right is probably just a reflection of the fact that what's considered "right" and "left" changes over time - conservatives have stayed pretty much the same, but society moved right.
The next phase appears to be that when you have a clump of left-wing support among those who are personally well off, they gradually cease to care about the economic equality side of left wing politics and start focusing more on the "identity" side. And although society has move socially left pretty continuously since ... hmmm ... I'd say about the early nineteenth century, economic leftness seems to have peaked in the 60s with high wages, 90% tax rates and the building of welfare states in various nations, which has gradually been walked back since then.
The marriage of social left/right with economic left/right is honestly a bit odd because they're opposed on the "should governments intervene in this?" metric. There seems to be no a priori reason why those particular pairings should stay linked apart from "this is what we're familiar with so we predict it will continue"
"Prior to WWII there isn't much of a path to rise in socio-economic class via education (at least in the systems I'm most familiar with - AU/UK/US). The university elites were the children of the wealthy - inasmuch as the wealthy were right wing supporters, that would be perpetuated into the next generation."
My father and uncle were born more than a century ago, the children of East European immigrants, and ended up as University of Chicago professors. The father of one of my high school friends fought on the losing side of the Russian civil war as a teenager, walked out through China, made it to the U.S., and also ended up as a U of C professor.
How much was this mobility enabled by the existence of a university scholarship and how large a pool of such scholarships were available? If we were to look at the entire cohort of students of that generation what would the parental class breakdown look like?
The gist of it is that shifting alliances happen because diving questions become exhausted, or rather the debate around them does. Once it's no longer a really big deal whether or not the state legalizes gay marriage, the coalitions that formed on either side of that issue look at those they are allied with and realize they don't really agree on much.
What I think is likely in this case is we'll see a split among the Democratic party. Each side will ally with various elements in the Republican party and you won't have the same level of institutional monopoly.
I think Bernie Sanders would have upended this system and changed the whole political landscape, if he had won the nomination in 2016.
Elections are a contest of ideas (yes, yes, I'll pause while you laugh, I'm serious though) and over the past few decades there has been very little difference between the major currents of the left and the right parties.
Eventually a new type of socialism will emerge and then liberalism will be on the back foot, it will be the conservative poor versus the educated rich liberals once again.
One thing that's consistent, and consistently annoying, both in the comments section and in Scott's writing, is what should be called just old fashioned ignorance and bias on what the Tribes actually think in relation to the Tribal leaders. In a strict sense.
It's come up multiple times in the comments already that the woke nonsense is a product of a bubble, normal Blue Tribe people don't know or care or agree about any of this. This is almost certainly true.
However this assumption is not carried over to the Red Tribe. People are still talking about stuff like evolution denial and gay marriage or whatever Obviously Wrong (TM) idea as if they were just massively popular with the Tribal Leaders, and that Tribe Members and prospective Tribe Members all accurately gauge this significant popularity.
Consider that these opinions are the woke opinions of the Red Tribe. Treat evidence for it exactly as you'd treat evidence in favour of "Blue Tribe holds woke beliefs."
I wish the natural conclusion from thinking "this 2-party system has given the opposite tribe too much power" was "we should break up the 2-party system and devolve power" instead of flirting with dictatorship. Especially since our main political cleavage is rural versus urban, it should be really easy in theory to divide up so that local control keeps the large majority of people happy.
Hanania's case also feels weak to me because I always thought that Republicans cared more about their politics than Democrats.
For instance, it was explained to me that the reason why Trump wanted mail-in voting to be banned was that only Republicans would care about to line up in front of the polling booths in the middle of a pandemic, whilst the Democrats would be too lazy/unwilling to do anything but send in a mail-in vote
It seems to me that those that attend college and expose themselves to serious inquiry of historical events in human history, Piketty-style analysis - which is about an honest exploration of data as you can get - as well as reading deeply and often - are going to skew LEFT in the current U.S. political environment, simply because of the way in which the two parties, right now, approach the very real problems that we as humans and our planet faces. There are significant differences.
Let's say you are 23 or 24 and you have finished your Bacc. studies and you turn on Fox News, listen for awhile, and then turn on MSNBC, and listen for awhile. Which is going to ring truer? Or you listen to Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene and then listen to AOC or Brian Tyler Cohen? Which actually makes more sense to a 23 or 24-year old who just went through four years on campus?
Or, more likely, they look at the their phones and sweep down the algorithmic highway on whatever social media channel(s) they subscribe to -- I just don't think people of that age group that have been through four or five years of college are going to buy the right-wing narrative. At least not the way it is currently fed to the algos.
I agree with the comment regarding an apology for dictatorship. Those who have been exposed to fascist ideology (through ready history) from last century and even more recently in Europe and the results, and who also happen to live in a demographically changing country are going to feel pretty uncomfortable with the rhetoric espoused by the U.S. Right. If one side is willing to throw the system out with the bathwater rather than relinquish political power for a cycle or two, this will make educated people pretty nervous. And honestly, calling "Cancel Culture" or "Mask Mandates" a new type of fascism is just a little too silly to be taken seriously.
Having said that, all of this right/left polarity is disheartening and counter-productive. Two of the most serious problems - real problems - that we face are : 1)Economic inequality, which has been very well documented by Piketty himself, and 2) A rapidly-changing climate that we all selfishly thought might have been our kids' and grandkids' problem, and which is now very much OUR problem.
I believe the only way we can seriously face these very real issues is to stop with the political bickering over emotional, hot-button political issues like, say, gun control, abortion, cancel-culture, etc. We might have had the luxury to engage issues like this in during the last generation, but we simply no longer have that luxury - the luxury of division. There are important things to be done and we must do them together.
Will true existential threat erase these mundane arguments? Or will we, as a country, go down in flames from above while fighting each other over issues that are artificially delivered to us and embraced as important?
I think the main point of the Keyes quote is that any party in which the elites are not taking the lead is really not fit to govern. Functional government is always government by elites. Thucydides (referencing Pericles) said that democracy works best when the masses ("the many") leave policy making to the elites ("the few") and limit their participation to choosing between the options crafted by the elites, usually by voting for the particular elite person with the policy positions they most agree with. This goes off the rails when the masses don't like any of the options that the elites crafted, so they start to insist on policies of their own crafting. The big one in the last decade was immigration. A bipartisan group of Senators crafted some workable immigration reforms, but the right wing masses rejected it not because it would not work, but because it did not inflict pain past illegal immigrants and it did not inflict pain on the Democrats. Many pundits conclude that this shows that right wing populism is driven by pure mean-spiritedness. There probably is a good dose of that in there, but I think mostly Populists don't have the mental tools or discipline to analyze policy on its merits, so they rely on the heuristic that they like any policy if it is liked by people they like and hated by people they hate. They have a mindset that everything in life is zero sum - one side wins, the other side loses. They don't believe in win-win solutions. If the other side is not crying in pain, then you are probably the loser and should start howling. Trump did not do much on delivering effective policy if one looks at it objectively, but he made the Democrats howl in pain, so the right wing populists figure he must have been doing something right. That is why they love him so much.
When we look at the US political system from the distance and see two movements with nearly equal numbers but somehow one is winning the culture this may look weird, especially if 50 years ago it was the other way around. But when we look closer, the mystery disolves quickly.
Our null hypothesis is that's some part of a global trend. And indeed liberalism seems to be winning over concervativism in general. But why?
Huge part of the liberal ideology is niceness. In this case it's not even fair to call this ideology. We do not need complex narrative not to harass people around us - it's the default mode. Being mean and justifying it, on the other hand, requires an ideology. The question is now reframed: How comes societies become nicer with time? This is much less mysterious question. Scientific progress is an obvious part of an answer.
But there is even more obvious problem with conservatism. It's trying to stand still in the world which is constantly moving. It worked in the middle ages when the progress was slow, but not now. Why is the world moving faster and faster? Once again we can obviously blame the science.
There also was an important philosophical shift which left conservatism out of fuel. We used to have no real alternative to religious point of view and "banishment from heaven" narrative. Now we do. Making world a better place is such an blatantly obvious idea that people are made fun of for even mentioning it aloud. But that's because everyone shares it. Fashism tried to restore the former narrative but fashism failed hard. Religion became less of a political drive and more of a personal choice. Whatever memetic adoptations of separate magisterium people installed in their minds to preserve their religion, it predictably decreased their ability to act on their religious beliefs.
One more thing. It's kind of weird to mention it, but conservatism is plainly falser than liberalism. It's not a huge surprise as conservative narrative is built upon religious one. Additionally as conservatism requires more justification of meanness it's more complex therefore more likely to be false. And when some part of the narrative is revealed to be false it affects it perspective of memetic spread.
Could it be that there's really no shift in people's political affiliations/engagement levels based on education/affluence, but rather a general changing trend in who gets a higher education or makes money which happens to be letting more left-leaning people into elite groups?
I think this would fit best with a more "hereditary" model of political attitudes, which feels more in line with my personal experiences and observations...
Left wing ideology legitimize state power as a moral good
therefore people with left wing pov are more likely to go into government and far more likely to use that power to both impose their pov AND expand the power of the state
this expands to all sectors of the public that are dependent on the state like finance or the law
also a side note on "education"
a 50's BA is NOT the same as a 2020's BA
any attempt to explain political changes that doesn't take that into account is BS
neither Hanania nor Piketty nor SA seem to acknowledge that
It's easy to cherry pick examples when left narrative favours goverment involment, but just as easy to point at counter examples like defunding the police. It would be very consistent for a truly statist movement to both oppose individual gun ownership and celebrate goverment policing, but it's not what we see in the US democratic party. Seems that their true values lies elsewhere.
Again I've already pointed that simple appealing to the consequences of an action as it's true cause can lead us astray. By this logic all conservatives are indeed racists as they continiously support policies which disproportianally harm racial minorities. I'm not even sure there are as good counterexamples here as with defunding the police.
There’s an alternative hypothesis to both of these convoluted explanations about the power of liberalism, and it rhymes with Schmurtis Schmarvin. The three of you should get on a podcast together.
I kind of think Hania and Scott are both wrong, but I’m not really confident that I have the “right” answer. I work for an investment bank, and I can tell you that (1) my employer has become annoyingly woke, (2) I’m fairly confident that most of the actual bankers are not personally woke. As examples of the atmosphere, I have been invited to attend “conversations” with the white fragility lady and some expert on “the power of allyship”, and now when we hire someone we have to report statistics and receive permission based on the % of candidates who were “diverse” (this hasn’t been defined for me but I think it means anyone who isn’t a white male, though I’m unsure of the status of white females).
As far as I can tell an overwhelming majority of employees think it’s all awkward at best. Why are we doing it? My best guess is that management feels that we will look bad and open ourselves to criticism if we don’t. What causes this dynamic? Again, I’m guessing, but I think historically the conservative position has often been proven not only wrong but bigoted. At various times in the past, the conservative position would have been (1) don’t hire blacks and don’t let them vote, (2) don’t hire women, (3) gays are maybe ok as long as they stay in the closet, but they certainly can’t get married. These are all very embarrassing positions in retrospect.
Today, the conservative position might include things like: (1) we shouldn’t have explicit racial quotas and certainly shouldn’t be required to hire unqualified candidates just because of their ethnicity, (2) colleges should stop pretending that Asian students have bad personalities in their “holistic review” to justify massive explicit racial discrimination, (3) biological sex is a thing that actually exists, and I don’t need to tell you my pronouns.
In 30 years, will all of these positions seem like the moral equivalent of denying blacks the right to vote? I don’t know, but I suspect a lot of organizations have essentially internalized the policy “the conservative position will always be proven obviously morally wrong in retrospect, so always take the other side.”
When class is defined by education level that creates a dangerous dynamic whereby the sectional interests of the educated (e.g openness, globalization, financialization, foreign intervention, high volume migration, subsidies for higher education, etc) face no articulate or institutional opposition. The core self-representational systems of society (media, politics, education) are coded by the highly educated and there are no institutional islands which can speak from outside that monopoly.
I would argue this is not just a platitude - because historically it is highly unusual that 'the highly educated' are also the core of the ruling class of any society - as opposed to just their loyal attendants, advisors, ritual specialists, administrators or socially distant bankers. Historically, there were always landed aristocrats, the military, guilds, trades unions, caste organizations, etc whose institutional power was not based on educational status. Educational meritocracy has homogenized the ruling institutions to a very unusual degree.
With great and unopposed power comes hubris, followed by collapse, or an anarchic backlash - with Jan 6th as a very small foreshadowing perhaps.
1: Leftism is all about using power to make people be the way you want them to be. That’s why the politics of expert rulers appeals so much: it is the way modern Americans can legitimately force people to fit a certain mold.
2a: Experts must be educated, by definition, so if you are leftist you are going to want as much education as possible.
2b: The public schools have long been indoctrination centers extolling the use of power in the hands of experts. The longer anyone stays in the schools, the more that rubs off onto them.
The recipe for preventing the institutional capture by educated elites (be they left-leaning or otherwise) is the exact opposite of dictatorship. It's direct democracy of the Athenian type.
When all major policy questions are decided in referendums and all office holders and public servants are chosen by sortition, institutions can't be captured by any particular group.
Could this be a weird effect created by how they defined top educated?
They defined highly educated as 10% vs bottom 90%. In the 50s, you point out that 6% of people had degrees. So the top ten captures the elite.
Now, with a third having college degree, the top ten % essentially captures professionals, pHDs and whomever got a masters after not getting a job post undergrad. It’s not capturing the same group of people…
For example, Mr Silver spoon that got a ba to then take over his fathers business is the top ten % in 1950, but not now.
Weirdly enough, most of Silicon Valley (with all that income), might not hit the top 10% now as coders and the start up crowd tend to not to have much more than a bachelors.
I get the underlying point that more educated people seem to be very left these days, but this “creative class” barely existed in the 50s, and, as you mention, the rump of it that existed back then (journalists, profs etc) was as left wing as they are now no?
Regarding your closing paragraph--sure it's easy to see that R decisions are dominated by "those who do not know at all what they are talking about", but good grief why single out the R's?
It’s reasonable I think to use Democrat and Republican to refer to beliefs. But yeah, saying that Facebook and Goldman Sachs are Democrat led in the same sense as saying the national lawyers guild or the aclu or the unions are Democrat led is entirely unedifying about the actual decisions the organizations and people within will make
In section II, when discussing how rich Americans might be shifting left: "If this is real and continued, it might bring the US closer to the European mainstream."
Wouldn't that move us *away* from the European mainstream? In Europe, it looks like rich people vote right.
But "right European" is left of "left American". So rich Americans shifting left is moving closer to European center, or put another way rich Americans shifting left is getting closer to European right?
This is a myth. European center right parties would not be “left “ in America. On social issues especially Europeans tend to be more conservative than Americans. More pragmatic might be a better word.
For instance > The CDU applies the principles of Christian democracy and emphasizes the "Christian understanding of humans and their responsibility toward God". ... The CDU's policies derive from political Catholicism, Catholic social teaching and political Protestantism as well as economic liberalism and national conservatism. (Wiki)
CDU is the biggest party in Germany and are center right - I have no clue how much they hold to that but you can imagine that even rhetorically isn’t “left in America” exactly.
Also European multi party system parties just tend to have a variety of different views that may be left or right or neither and it depends on the country.
Universal healthcare and strong union laws (in Europe’s case the employment shit is quite undesirable, imo) and safety nets are not the only left wing policy positions, there are many others, and even those vary a bit.
Europeans as a whole being far more religious than Americans, is an element this article essentially skipped but really limits any apples to apples comparison
Either you meant to say "less", or I'm in for a real viewpoint shakeup.
It depends which country. The UK is clearly less religious. The Calvinist Netherlands or Catholic Poland clearly more so.
Europeans are generally less religious, but there's not as much "congress shall make no law" to scare parties away from religious rhetoric.
The universal health care system in Germany was instituted by the Christian Democrats. The labor protections may go overboard in certain areas, but the end result is management and labor interact as partners in corporate success, as opposed to the U.S. model that generally considers labor just another drain on the bottom line.
From my vague readings of someone on Reddit relaying a second hand read Daily Mail article about a train company or software company or janitor or something, I had believed that labor protections make running a rapidly changing business in Germany sucks
As a European I would say that what constitutes a "social issue" is simply very different. Most EU countries (with very few exceptions, such as Poland (but not Hungary)) are basically irreligious compared to the US (they definitely lack strong lobby groups like evangelical Christians), so the traditional wedge issues of US culture wars such as abortion, gay marriage, school curricula, etc. are simply not part of the mainstream political discourse. American gun culture is also quite unique. In Europe homeschooling is generally illegal, and the vast majority of people have no issue with that. The combination of serious religiousness and individualistic, pro-business predisposition that defines the right wing of US politics is very much outside the Overton window in the rest of the first world.
>>In Europe homeschooling is generally illegal, and the vast majority of people have no issue with that.
There are some European countries (Germany, Sweden, parts of South East Europe) where it's illegal, but in most countries it's legal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling_international_status_and_statistics gives more details.
Yup, there's this fantastic effortpost on the topic. I don't know enough to describe this as a "debunking", but it's a great post arguing against this myth:
https://new.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/hjsk2l/the_democratic_party_being_center_right_in_europe/
> But "right European" is left of "left American".
Huh?!? Wdym by this? Data & graphs, please!
People who say this usually have an image of the left-right axis that is dominated by taxes supporting universal health insurance coverage.
Yeah that. Somehow along this axis are also minimum wage, gun rights, climate policies and many other issues, all on the same axis.
I think that's probably true overall, but very much not true on an issue-by-issue basis. Suggesting adopting something like the American healthcare system (or lack thereof) would, rightly, get you laughed out of town in just about any country in Europe, but there are plenty of countries with e.g. more homophobia per capita and more anti-gay laws than America.
The description is quite old. It could have been true during Carter / Reagan era, maybe until Bush era too. Europe used to have genuine not insignificant socialist and communist parties, pulling center parties to left.
There is also a tendency to view the US as something it is not. When I was 9 years old, I thought the US had only libraries with entry fees. At the time, some leftists politicians were vocally defending our libraries. Unrelated, they and all the adult people in newspapers were sneering at the horribly right-wing capitalist US.
And that kind of attitude is not limited to children. My high school history teacher described the US as the most liberterian state experiment that could possibly function without outright collapse. I think he genuinely was not aware about the US unemployment insurance systems, and I am uncertain what he knew about the much-talked social security.
I doubt even over all. Depends on how you define right - left. On econ yes most of Europe is just as hopelessly neoliberal as the us with a few exceptions like labor unions, but on social issues I'd say you are correct.
I posted a series of propositions a bit down thread. I'd appreciate you (or anyone who agrees with you) answering them. I really don't understand this impression that the US is especially right wing comes from.
Europe is generally to the left of the US on economic issues, but definitely not on identity politics issues (race, gender, sexual orientation, immigration). It's primarily the latter axis on which the American elite is moving leftward, not the former.
Major reddit vibes from this comment
Good luck for trying to decide whether "Law and justice" in Poland would be considered left or rightwing in USA.
I believe that on abortion, which is one of the major tribal issues in the US, most of Europe is to the right of the US, although not as far as the American right. Typically early abortion is entirely legal, late term restricted.
On healthcare, Americans tend to imagine that the UK system is the norm in Europe but it isn't. My understanding is that most of the European countries have mixed systems with a substantial private sector. Even before Obama, about half of all healthcare expenditure in the US was by government and the rest regulated in various ways, so I'm not sure that the systems in European countries have a larger government role, as opposed to a different government role.
Most European governments have universal healthcare, which means that the government is committed to funding every citizen’s access to medical care using tax revenues. Some employ the private sector and personal health insurance as tools to get there, but in all cases this is a government objective with a large government spending component.
It's important to note that they can afford this due to a lack of defense spending. If America reduced its defense spending to European levels, we could afford so many nice things for ourselves. Free college, end homelessness permanently, pay off the debts of every American making less than $100,000 a year, a border wall 100 feet tall, and a pony.
But no. Instead, we pay a ruinous cost for Europe's defense and in return we get scorn and ingratitude for our enormous contributions to European peace for the last 80 years, the longest peace they had in a thousand years.
The idea that Europeans can spend more on health than Americans, because they spend less on defence, is simply false, because Europeans spend a lower proportion of GDP on healthcare than Americans (c. 10% to c.18% -- figures from gapminder).
The US system is both incredibly expensive, and fails to produce good health outcomes.
Anecdotally, I get fantastic health outcomes from the pre-selected providers I get to choose from. Yes, it is expensive, but it returned mobility and a better life to me; tangentially, it saved my son's life. Selfishly speaking, I'm perfectly satisfied with the system as it has worked for us. It has also kept many friends gainfully employed of which I'm also happy about. YMMV
The main cause of this is obesity, not lack of quality of healthcare.
Asian-Americans live longer than any other group on the planet. Why? They get American healthcare without being lardos.
You can’t ignore the fact that European health systems, like the rest of the globe, piggy back on the amazing medical breakthroughs that are made here in America where research is heavily subsidized both by the government and the public. It’s highly expensive, inefficient, but also quite remarkable. However for every one success there are hundreds if not thousands of failures that Americans pay for both through our taxes and as the primary market where biopharmaceutical companies can charge at the highest price points since they’re negotiating not with a single government entity but multiple private insurers. The price point set here determines what overseas governments are willing to pay, which is often as little as a tenth the price here. And worse, countries like India and China benefit the greatest thru Lax IP laws and IP theft. They’ll often just synthesize the same drug that took J&J or Pfizer hundreds of millions to discover for free.
I bet you can’t name one major medical breakthrough in the last 25 years that the US or a US company had no involvement in.
Better Intl IP enforcement and cost-sharing by western countries would reduce the burden put on the American taxpayers and patients for the cost of the same treatments in Europe.
That depends on what you mean by "being on the right". Yes, in France, say, abortion on demand is available only during the first 12 weeks after conception. At the same time, it is easily available, state-funded, non-stigmatized (I was taking a shortcut through a leafy suburban hospital the other day, and there was an arrow with "maternal health, IVG [= voluntary early-term abortion], etc." clearly marked) and uncontroversial in mainstream society - Simone Veil, the politician who introduced the law legalizing IVG became a national hero. After 12 weeks, abortion is available only for medical reasons, but that includes, say, Down syndrome (96% of all detected cases of trisomy 21 result in abortion); that, again, is uncontroversial outside narrow circles. (The spectacle of Ohio banning second-trimester abortion in cases of Down syndrome was stunning to me: isn't that one of the main reasons why a sensible, responsible person would abort in the second trimester?)
What the US has arguably had since Roe vs. Wade is a legal framework that is more permissive in theory than that in France, while having a population whose average attitudes towards abortion are far more regressive. That does make for a stable equilibrium. Didn't RBG comment on that, expressing some regrets that abortion hadn't been legalized more gradually - possibly by the Supreme Court, but following a different route?
>>>isn't that one of the main reasons why a sensible, responsible person would abort in the second trimester?
...occasionally it's good to hear other people actually say this out loud.
I mean, *no* a sensible, responsible, ethical, *sane* person would not kill another just to make their own life easier, especially when it wasn't that other person's fault.
I do allow for stress and despair creating temporary madness - as when a person driving a car strikes a pedestrian accidently and drives off in a panic. I get that. Humans can do horrible things under stress.
But there is no reason to legalize hit-and-runs.
And yes, RBG did express strong reservations about the quality of the RoevWade decision (most everyone says it was bad law, even those who support the outcome.)
So you are basically saying that all of Europe is not sane?
Second trimester is not viable outside of the womb, what about the other life that is created when the couple potentially tries again? Does it not have a right to life?
"All of Europe"? No, the comment was specifically about France. Abortion laws vary widely across Europe.
As I said, in France, a distinction is made between IVG (abortion on demand by the woman, within the first three months) and IMG (abortion for medical reasons, *including the certainty or probability that the eventual child be born with a serious, incurable condition*, such as Down syndrome: https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F1101). Both are legal and funded by the public health system. To me, the notion of "trying again" is entirely sensible, and part of the justification for IMG; I've only heard it decried (as "indecent") in the US, including by some people who believe that abortion should remain legal for reasons of bodily autonomy.
What is true is that viability is not the deciding criterion in Europe, or for that matter in any country other than the US that I know.
A person with Downs is not in pain or misery. Many of them live decades - limited in scope and ability, yes, but still alive, still *people*. Killing such a person for no other reason than ones self interest is murder.
And it is not rational to weigh possible potential lives over the certainty of the life here at hand. More than that - it is a false choice, because it implies that bearing a live Downs child means no more children. The parents are able to try again after the birth of the first child, not just after it's death by abortion.
He was referring to rich people apparently moving back *right* in 2020, and was discussing the outcome of *that* being "real and continued".
Scott, big fan, and I appreciate the response. You write in the caption:
"Hanania uses this graphic to show that Democrats donate more than Republicans. But it's also worth noting that top Democratic donor groups include professors, educators, and nonprofit employees, and top Republican donor groups include (*squints really hard*) homemakers, welders, and disabled people. Which coalition do *you* expect to end up with more power?"
That's actually part of the theory, probably more important than the other stuff about donating money, etc. People aren't randomly assigned to careers, they can decide what tradeoffs they make when they select what field to go into. Liberals tend to do the stuff where you get more prestige/status/influence than money, conservatives the opposite. Journalism and academia are the clearest examples of this.
Most welders I've known have made more money than grad students I've known, and lived in more affordable areas. The grad students chose one career, and the welders another for a reason.
The grad student comparison is odd because that’s a temporary 2-8 years as opposed to a career of welders.
Median salary of welders ($38k) is close to journalists ($37k) but less than teachers ($47k) and college professors ($72k).
The lower living cost seems more likely to be true though.
Yeah, the odds are not good for your average grad student to ever actually become a professor. Plus with 4 years of college, then 5-8 years of grad school, you're forgoing a lot of income. Point is most grad students are not making the financially best decision, because they want status and influence.
Maybe anecdotal evidence, but all the failed grad students I know ended up in management consulting, start-ups, NGOs or politics. All of them are paid pretty well- certainly better than welders.
I was curious about the same thing (n.b. I got a PhD and then immediately left academia for a consulting career) and as it turns out the National Science Foundation has some really detailed data related to that here: https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20198/data#supplemental-tables
(Table S3-6) Across all of Science and Engineering doctorate holders Education (4 year+2 year) is still the largest sector with 43.2% but only barely ahead of Business and Industry (excluding non-profits) at 42.1%. And looking at median income after graduation (S3-12) this makes a lot of financial sense, with the Business folk pulling down $104K/year over $60K/year they'd have if they stayed in the academy.
I don't think anyone goes into grad school to get rich, but once you're out it's not unlikely.
Note: All data is from 2017; This covers primarily STEM fields so not your poor humanity grad students starving in garrets, they're probably at least as screwed as you would expect.
Your anecdotal evidence might be really biased here - did you meet those people before or after they dropped out? The ones you met after they dropped out are selected to be the sorts of people you run into - all my grad school coworkers have great jobs, but that's pure selection effect.
What college(s) did they go to? I thought those careers (if we substitute "founded a company" for "joined a startup") were mostly restricted to graduates of elite universities.
A lot of grad students are getting masters degrees, which often take 1-3 years, so not as big a loss of income. My PhD (in engineering) took 4 years, and although I probably get paid more than I would have without it, that's almost certainly not enough to make up for the years I was on a grad school stipend. I did it more to end up with an interesting job, not so much an influential one, but status/influence might have been a factor too.
Part of the problem with a career as a welder is that there's not a ton of opportunity for advancement. Maybe you could end up supervising welders. But in general, after the first few years, your skills don't provide steadily more value as you gain experience.
Status, maybe. I went for a PhD and exited through the master's side door. The main reason I tried it in the first place was that I'd had internships and didn't care for working for a living. When I found that working towards a PhD was a lot of work for crappy pay, I figured if I was going to have to work anyway I might as well get paid well.
Anecdata and all that, but, I'm not sure you have grad students modeled well.
Do people really go to grad school for "status and influence"? I have been a college professor for a few years, and I don't consider myself particularly high status, and I certainly do not have any influence on anything. Which is ok, because I do not care at all for either of those things.
The odds are not good for your average grad student ever having wanted to become a professor in the first place. That's a cliche limited to a narrow subset of postgraduate education, and the large majority of grad students with other ambitions are much more likely to achieve them.
Huh wow I make (barely) more than the median welder as a grad student. California, so colors it, but still not at all what I expected.
What specialty is that generous? It pretty much caps out at 30 in math.
Astronomyish
`Journalism and academia are the clearest examples of this`. Don't the people in those fields who get ACTUAL prestige/status/influence as opposed to the aspirational kind form tiny super-elite? It seems like there are at most a few dozen and certainly fewer than 100 journalists who actually have leverage over opinion, and absolutely everyone else is at best making 45K a year and working at buzzfeed, or perhaps now, substack.
I don't know, writing something daily that thousands of people read feels like a kind of prestige, even if you don't "have leverage over opinion".
I don't think that really explains the data. Harvard students already skew extremely Democratic before they choose jobs (source: I'm sure this is true, but I'm not going to bother proving it unless you disagree). Any job that disproportionately selects its candidates from the elite is already fated to be liberal regardless of Democrats caring more about politics or not.
There's a lot of research showing that elite college admissions discriminates against conservatives, which I'm sure nobody has trouble believing.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/not-kind-diversity-ramesh-ponnuru/
If elites are selected through a subjective process by left wing college admissions officers, of course Harvard students will be liberal.
If you define elite by business success, CEOs as of 2019 were more Republican than Democrat
https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/14/business/republican-democrat-ceos/index.html
So I reject the idea that "any elite" will be liberal. If you gave IQ tests or had an oligarchy of business titans, it would be more evenly spit. We're just ruled by journalists and academics (at least on cultural issues), and those are the people who chose power and intellectual status over money.
This doesn't quite address Scott's point. He's not saying that elites are innately liberal. Just that the elite institutions that newspapers hire from are all liberal. The filtering still isn't happening at the level of job-selection, but upstream of that at the level of college admissions.
Ultimately, both Scott-theory and Richard-theory are consistent with the empirical evidence. I still think there's a real difference here though.
I think we can reduce the disagreement to a counterfactual. According to Scott-theory, if newspapers decided to start hiring from Liberty University and the Clairemont Institute you'd see a right-wing slant to cultural institutions. According to Richard-theory, you would see passionate leftists slowly but surely take over Liberty U and Clairemont. These both seems plausible, so I'm not sure who's more persuasive.
I like the idea of reducing the disagreement to a counterfactual. But is that the point of Scott's theory? If it's just a matter of Harvard and newspapers are gatekeepers, we agree on that. But I think his theory is more universal, and that's why he's talking about different countries, because he seems to think there's some kind of law where elites will always be liberal, or at least will be liberal in modern societies some reason. So the newspapers and universities would never give control to Liberty University, for whatever reason, or Liberty grads would always get outcompeted or something.
I mean, why hasn't, in the past 40 years w/ half the population as an audience, a strong right-leaning paper or TV news station advanced beyond tabloid news and right-wing talk radio?
There should be an audience for basically, a version of CBS or NPR that's right-coded, but what you actually get is Fox News, Daily Caller, and right-wing radio.
The reality, is bluntly, you're right that liberals are willing to have worse lives financially to push through what they believe in, while conservatives want the nice house in the suburbs.
I’d argue that The Wall Street Journal and National Review fit that bill
Fox News is the version of CBS that's right coded.
If you want right coded NPR, check out the podcast Morning Wire. It's a 15 minute daily news podcast that is definitely chasing the "NPR but right coded" aesthetic. As a conservative who has listened to a lot of NPR I was surprised how well they've done it.
There’s a theory here in the U.K. that everything seems polarised because lots of Centre-right content is hidden behind a paywall. Whereas most left with publishers are free to read and work off ads/donations and then more reactionary papers are free with ads.
So the guardian and observer are left wing and get read lots and the Daily Mail is very right wing and gets read lots, but the centre-right papers like Telegraph and Times, but don’t reach as many people and therefore don’t have such an impact on wider debate, particularly online. So the whole system feels very polarised.
I'd maybe point to First Things. Which also highlights something that's not really covered in this post -- religion is part of the answer here. Conservatives who are more "principles-oriented" are likely to be religious, and thus to focus on advancing Christianity over conservatism per se.
Mainstream conservativism is pretty dang lacking in intellectual energy (and I say this as a rightist). Most of the right's intellectual energy runs contrary to mainstream conservativism, whether it ends up in TradCath/Calvinist/Orthodox quarters, or various other Dissident Right quarters. This is not true on the left -- there are intelligent contrarian leftists, but also plenty of intelligent mainstream leftists.
I think a better question is still why are Harvard and the like liberal? After all, generations back they were bastions of Puritan orthodoxy. Yet, somehow, the institution founded by the Puritans in 1639 to maintain Calvinistic rigor had been captured by liberal elements sufficiently that the orthodox Congregationalists founded a new university to maintain Calvinistic Orthodoxy in 1701. This was known as Yale University. Yale, in turn, began to go liberal within a generation and had the first of many fights to restore Calvinistic orthodoxy in the student body and faculty. Eventually, the conservatives lost their last redoubt at Yale (the seminary) in the early 20th century when the remaining conservatives decamped to found Westminster Seminary rather than serve under explicitly liberal administration.
Quite frankly, I expect Liberty U and Clairemont to start going liberal any time. Liberty has nothing on Harvard or Yale in terms their old conservatism, nor the gap between their norms and those of the liberals at elite institutions now (certainly nothing like between the Mathers and the Unitarians).
Nor is the process terribly unique to the US. The Church of Scotland had a bunch of liberal patrons seeking to remake the place in 1843. The conservative evangelicals walked out with a third of Scottish church membership and founded their own denomination complete with multiple schools of higher education (New College in Edinburgh, Christ's College in Aberdeen, and Trinity College in Glasgow). Within a generation the colleges were going liberal. By the early 20th century, the Free Church was reuniting with established Scottish Church on decidedly non-conservative grounds. Similar patterns played out in the Netherlands where the conservatives founded a new denomination and university (Free University of Amsterdam).
The cycle of liberals taking over explicitly conservative organizations, often ones founded explicitly to preserve some grand old ideal, is centuries long at this point. The times when conservatives take over old institutions (rather than just founding their own new ones) are exceedingly rare.
The best examples of Conquest's Second Law are probably foundations like those founded by Ford & MacArthur winding up with politics completely opposed to their founders. The John M. Olin foundation was required to dispense all of its endowment within a certain period of time to avoid that.
> [Scott] seems to think there's some kind of law where elites will always be liberal, or at least will be liberal in modern societies for some reason.
Hi Richard, thank you for engaging in this discussion. Yes precisely, there is "some kind of law"-- it's Darwinian social signaling for selfish benefit. The display of "unconditional empathy for [various disadvantaged groups]" has achieved bandwagon status; witness suddenly-woke corporate America.
At the same time, we're also observing classic handicap-principle "costly signaling", wherein individuals demonstrate high fitness by taking a robust public stance against the liberal orthodoxy, *without* getting cancelled. Per theory, we should see these rebels being awarded higher status, for beating the steep odds.
It sounds like you might fall into this category. Another success story is comedian Ryan Long, he's very clever and fearless. Ryan commented with a smile on Mikhalia Peterson's podcast that "there's a huge reward right now for saying, you know, 'the truth'.. There's also a huge cost to it." QED ;)
One example of an elite that is not particularly liberal: Federal judges, who despite almost definitionally having a postgraduate degree, are split about 50-50 in their partisan makeup because there's a filtration mechanism in the form of the President and Senate, which regularly flip from one party to another. Moreover, this effect began in the 80s and really took on steam in the 90s, when the GOP started getting serious about appointing judges they viewed as ideologically reliable (with, at least at first, mixed success).
I don't think anyone would suggest that as a result legal culture reflects a down-the-middle viewpoint, but it's certainly true that since this phenomenon began conservative ideas like textualism are taken far more seriously (by both liberals and conservatives, both in the academy and in practice) than they were in the 60s and 70s. Elite law schools like Harvard under Elena Kagan make attempts to hire prominent conservatives, conservative ideas aren't dismissed out of hand, etc.
Propublica is.
I suspect the openess to conservatism at law schools is not long for this world. Deans and professors of the mold of an Elena Kagan have given way to a far more censorious bunch
They do want their graduates to get clerkships and such with conservative judges, so they might very well keep a few token conservatives around since those can help facilitate good placements that the school can brag about. Though perhaps after Kavanaugh, that kind of bipartisan support for more elite influence might be over (see the recent underhanded campaign to remove Chua at Yale).
This situation is the target of much derision on the left as they claim the clerkships being generally politically equal results in affirmative action for otherwise underqualified conservative law students. If this is the case though, you'd think that you might see many more talented conservative students choosing law as a profession to take advantage of that, but that doesn't seem to be happening (though I'd love to see statistics on this).
It should be noted that Presidential appointment alone wouldn't be enough for that level of filtering. The bureaucracy is Dem leaning enough that Dem presidents can just appoint Dems, whereas Reps will appoint more of a mix. And when there's a misalignment between the head of a bureaucracy and the President, costs go up as the former slow-walks any initiative.
"those are the people who chose power and intellectual status over money."
This strikes me as a) based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how those people's psychology works and b) unfairly perjorative.
I think it's much more accurate to say that those are mostly people who chose intellectual /fulfilment/ over either money or status - which tend to be closely linked.
But people who chose family and religion can also be choosing fulfillment. They just don't get it through politics or activism. So I think the idea that they seek power and influence makes sense and separates them from conservatives, although we can describe it however we want.
Fulfilment, absolutely - lots of people find different things fulfilling, but not /intellectual/ fulfilment.
The thing that I think specifically characterises a lot of the people you're describing is that in order to feel fulfilled they need jobs that provide a particular flavour of intellectual challenge.
I think you're wrong to present the minority of blue-tribe types who end up in the rare jobs like journalism or politics that do offer some modicum of political influence as significantly different from the larger number who take up other white-collar jobs that don't, but that do have other things in common, and that makes me fairly confident that "desire for power" is not a core part of the motivation; the common factor is that they are (disproportionately likely to be, although very much not always) people for whom family and religion alone are not enough to make them feel fulfilled without (a particular type of often academics-flavoured) intellectual stimulation.
Or who just identifies differently at different points in life. I variously call myself a librarian (among the deepest blue dots) and a homemaker (the reddest dot of all). If you ask my family, they’ll tell you I’m absurdly liberal. If you ask my friends, I’m almost dangerously right-wing. Although maybe all this lines up perfectly with my personally perceived deep centrism?
I think there are lot more reasons beyond politics and activism that liberals seek fulfillment as jounalists or academics rather than welders. To put it bluntly, one of those jobs is physically demanding and intelectually unchalenging.
Hm, I wouldn't say that it's pejorative. I've heard multiple college professors say basically that -- they could have made a lot more money in industry, but there are a lot of other benefits to being a professor. Influence and prestige are surely among them, though it's perhaps slightly gauche to call it out explicitly.
I think a lot of people like to say they could have made more money if they'd done so-and-so, but they chose their profession out of a self-flagellating desire to help society or the downtrodden. That's a lot more appealing than saying "I didn't really know how to get a fancy finance job or run a business but I was qualified to be a social worker" or whatever.
That sounded mean, I think it's great to be a social worker or a professor. Just, you know, people tell their life stories in a way that makes them look good.
Lots of people say that, but in the case of most college professors it's just screamingly obvious that they could make more in the private sector. That said, college professors are a very, very small percentage of the population so maybe we should avoid generalizing from them.
I'm a former academic who sold out and went into industry for more money.
I thought that the thing I'd miss the most was the opportunity to do intellectually satisfying work. But in practice it turns out that what I really miss is having an impressive-sounding answer to the question "So what do you do?" at parties.
That's an upsettingly honest comment! It rings true though. My only regret about bailing out of my PhD is that I'm not Dr Aspden. I used to think that "Mr" was a sort of provisional title that you had until you'd proved you weren't an idiot.
Look at how academics present themselves in literary fiction. It’s remarkably heavy on the pettiness of academic life and the joys of chasing students, and remarkably light on the respect provided by the rest of society…
This is enough of a cliche that it’s hard not to see something real there.
I think that one is probably a generational thing, in that I don't think chasing students (romantically, I presume) is permitted at all these days. Pettiness and office politics abound though, that part is definitely real. As to respect form society, the words are there, but society hasn't put its money where its mouth is, neither literally nor metaphorically - people would rather listen to celebrities than experts.
Part of the benefit of being a professor, or a schoolteacher, is that you spend a lot of time as the highest status person in the room, and humans like status.
Highest status person in a room of children...
I think part of the reason these comments are allow over the place is that multiple different "academia's" are being conflated.
I think the goals and worldviews of STEM academia (and this splits even within STEM) are very different from those of professional school academia, and those again from humanities/liberal arts academia.
Then we have the completely different dimension of top tier academia (the small minority who manage to acquire tenure at any Ivy or equivalent) vs bulk academia working at "never heard of it College"...
This is an empirical question. And the data say Republicans are happier than Democrats.
Now that’s not exactly the same thing as “intellectual fulfillment” but it’s close enough that I don’t find your argument convincing. That may be what people tell themselves, but it’s not the elephant in the mind.
Or maybe because liberals have higher neuroticism they're more motivated to find a job that makes them happy, whereas conservatives are just happier no matter what their job is? I think I might be wading into just-so story territory with this one
Equaling valuing intellectual fulfillment with happiness seems plainly false.
That's an important point. Claiming that liberals chose their careers in order to get more power is similar to claiming that people support conservative policies because they are racists. It begs the consequences instead of finding inner structure in the decision making process.
>If elites are selected through a subjective process by left wing college admissions officers, of course Harvard students will be liberal.
Find a control sample to check the hypothesis. Are universities viewed similarly left-wing in culturally similar countries with more objective admissions process?
On the UK yes, but not to the same extent as in the US. Certainly you don't get conservative academics hounded out of their jobs although many do not publicise their political views particularly probably due to normal social pressures. Notably though the leadership of many UK universities is less 'liberal' than in the US, and other than the trans-radical feminist arguments 'woke' issues are not a major flashpoint in university communities.
Our government, with its newly-formed coalition of the non-elite and the wealthy, has also made it clear that it won't tolerate intellectual hegemony being imposed in universities. This is probably overreach at least for the good universities, but as the opposition are sensibly not opposing this too much (they recognise their coalition of urban elites and (for the moment) ethnic communities can't win an election without outreach) it seems that this is policy for a while.
You do get that in the UK. See Noah Carl for a recent example. And UK academics are frequently very left wing. The makeup of SAGE should be a good hint of this; one of them is a literal member of the communist party.
I'd not seen the Carl case, but note that whilst this clearly looks politically motivated, the actual accusations are not wrong think but misuse of data. Do we have examples of people not violating academic norms being chased out? I suspect mind you this wouldn't have happened say to a communist...
And talking of Communists, Susan Michie is not a member of SAGE, but the self-appointed left-wing group Alternative SAGE, who are activists not government-appointed advisors. Sure, academics skew strongly left, but in the UK the culture is not that totalitarian left.
If rejecting people for Farming and ROTC is discrimination against conservatives then I am sure the people they rejected for majoring in underwater basket weaving could also claim they had their liberalism discriminated against. What a ridiculous article.
The issue isn't people who majored in farming or ROTC but high school applicants to elite schools whose admissions chance was lowered not by what they hadn't done but by what they had. The relevant analogy would be a student who had been active in anti-war activities and was less likely to be admitted as a result. You would not find that disturbing as evidence of political discrimination?
Schools generally take participation in clubs, especially in a leadership role, not as a substitute for academic accomplishment but as an additional plus. The evidence offered is that if the clubs are ones that correlate with conservative political or culture, it is treated as a minus.
"Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student’s chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis."
Frankly I have my doubts about whether all other things were considered in this analysis... I went to a very liberal elite college and later learned that a military-school background was a big part of the reason I was admitted--the admissions people thought it added diversity to the student body.
Except that those items don't show up on your transcript. You had to alert them to them yourself in a cover letter or essay. I am not at all convinced that those items are detrimental but if you are then it behoves you not to trumpet them.
A poor city kid who makes it through high school and feeds his family by selling weed but never does drugs is admirable in my book. I don't think it would serve him well to include that in his college application.
It's not about conservative or liberal. It's about being able to message that you are akin to your future classmates and likely to succeed in the institution. (Much like interviewing for a job)
if the position you have to message is "I am blue tribe", regardless of whether you actually are, then that is precisely the discrimination we're discussing.
Club leadership roles are frequently on a CV, not necessarily called out in an essay, and controlled experiments for this sort of thing will either have that line item removed for the control or flip it to a Democrat equivalent, while literally leaving all other terms the same. (Thinking of an experiment I read where the relevant item was volunteering for the local branch of the political party)
Harvard prospects have spent the better part of their lives paying very close attention to what their teachers tell them. These (poorly-paid) teachers are overwhelmingly left wing. They are like this either because of Richard's theory of left-wingers prioritizing activism or because a strange force compels "intellectual" types to be left wing (I am not trying to demean alternatives to Hanania's idea; scenario B is as plausible as scenario A).
Ultimately, both theories are mostly compatible, but Richard's focus is novel in a way the Picketty/Scott analysis isn't. This makes it more illuminating.
I would recommend both of you read this Hayek essay: https://cdn.mises.org/Intellectuals%20and%20Socialism_4.pdf
I expect the coalition who gets more votes to end up with more political power.
The other significant Republican donors are military/first responders. Those jobs have power and prestige in their respective communities.
Isn’t the better explanation that liberals took control of academia and academia feeds all of professional society? Sorta like how conservatives created the Federalist Society to influence lawyers and now control the Supreme Court. It all feels much more path dependent than baked in attributes.
Federalist Society is not an example of what you're describing. R's control the supreme court because rural areas are overrepresented in our political system plus their judges retire more strategically. Federalist Society hasn't shifted most lawyers right, it just gives a clear signal to elected Republicans who to appoint.
They aren't liberals. They are merely left-wing.
Well yes, but that's what liberal means in US politics today. Language changes. You're better off saying they are not classic liberals unless you we attempting a gotcha.
I believe the distinction between Leftism and Liberalism is an important one to preserve. (Crazy that so many came to conflate the two - even as Communism served as the West's global foe). In fact, I'd say it's increasingly important, given current trends in the American Left. Also, "Classical Liberal" seems to mean something closer to "Libertarian", with an implied support for economically-hands-off-government that I don't think is universal to "Liberalism".
The old meaning of "Liberal" is close to modern libertarianism, although not identical. To some extent it keeps that meaning outside the US. The modern US meaning is very different, what I describe as democratic socialism in dilute acqueous solution, but includes respect for at least non-economic liberty — the ACLU of twenty years ago. That meaning now covers only part of the American left, with the other part commonly self-describing as progressives, having stronger versions of some of the views but rejecting the part that supported free speech and related ideas as important values. Hence there is a (modern) liberal vs progressive conflict within the left as well as a left vs right conflict.
Part of that intra-left conflict is fighting over the term "progressive" itself. The word has a positive connotation for most people on the left, so you end up with everyone from Joe Biden to Pete Buttigieg to Bernie Sanders to Robin DiAngelo calling themselves progressive. To some, the race/identity issues define progressivism, and to others (myself included), it's defined by reforms that put an emphasis on class/wealth. Those in the former camp ("the woke") might be said to reject free speech, but not so much the latter. Conservatives seem to have a tendency to just lump all those people together, then write off the whole bunch by pointing out how inane and illiberal the woke stuff is.
"Progressive" is a terrible word for distinguishing a category. Everyone favors progress, but disagrees on how to define it.
Hi Richard, thanks for your contributions!
I’m wondering if you’re familiar with The Prince, because parts of what you wrote felt very similar to Machiavelli’s formulations in chapter 9. Specifically this:
“To steelman the populist position, democracy does not reflect the will of the citizenry, it reflects the will of an activist class, which is not representative of the general population. Populists, in order to bring institutions more in line with what the majority of the people want, need to rely on a more centralized and heavy-handed government. The strongman is liberation from elites, who aren’t the best citizens, but those with the most desire to control people’s lives, often to enforce their idiosyncratic belief system on the rest of the public, and also a liberation from having to become like elites in order to fight them, so conservatives don’t have to give up on things like hobbies and starting families and devote their lives to activism.”
Kinda rhymes with this:
“ But coming to the other point—where a leading citizen becomes the prince of his country, not by wickedness or any intolerable violence, but by the favour of his fellow citizens—this may be called a civil principality: nor is genius or fortune altogether necessary to attain to it, but rather a happy shrewdness. I say then that such a principality is obtained either by the favour of the people or by the favour of the nobles. Because in all cities these two distinct parties are found, and from this it arises that the people do not wish to be ruled nor oppressed by the nobles, and the nobles wish to rule and oppress the people; and from these two opposite desires there arises in cities one of three results, either a principality, self-government, or anarchy.
A principality is created either by the people or by the nobles, accordingly as one or other of them has the opportunity; for the nobles, seeing they cannot withstand the people, begin to cry up the reputation of one of themselves, and they make him a prince, so that under his shadow they can give vent to their ambitions. The people, finding they cannot resist the nobles, also cry up the reputation of one of themselves, and make him a prince so as to be defended by his authority.”
It reminded me of a similar ideas in a dialogue between two conservative ancient greeks about the problems of democracy. There they were claiming that demos doesn't know what it want, consist of the worst people in the city-state, and can't distinguish good policy from a bad one, supporting just the things that sounds good. Therefore monarchy would be much better. It's funny how the justifications are kind of opposite, but nevertheless the conclusion is the same: conservative dictatorship.
Such things make me really suspicious about concervatives who are totally against strong goverment but have to support dictatorship nevertheless as the lesser of two evils. I want to be charitable and not assume other people believes for them but I still can't figure out how to pass the ideological turing test.
Conservatives supported strong authoritarian regimes throughout the history. And this talk about anti big goverment seems specifically US thing, conviniently where libertarian sentiments are somewhat strong, so republicans are trying to unite both pro-strong-man-dictatorship voters and libertarian ones under one roof. This makes all the sense from political point of view. But I can't understand it as a coherent position in ones mind.
I agree that "people aren't randomly assigned to careers", but they are randomly assigned, by the social milieu of their birth and upbringing, a strong disposition towards going into one or the other direction. It's not completely random, but it's not governed entirely by some a priori rational choice.
I don't have a substantive comment on this beyond saying that "Whiteshift" by Kaufmann touches on many of these issues (not so much institutional tilt but growing educational polarization in politics) in the context of trying to explain Brexit and Trump, and is truly excellent.
I think it is hard to discuss this without mentioning the two-party system, which itself is a biproduct of electoral college and first past the post voting. Saying something like "Given that there are approximately equal numbers of Trump voters and Biden voters in elections" just isn't really true in that context. The Republican candidate has lost the popular vote is all but 1 of the past 8 elections. What is happening a smaller coalition of voters with higher voting power (conservatives in states with smaller population) reach an equilibrium with the opposite coalition of voters with less voting power (liberals in high population states) so that the end result is closer to a coin toss, but the actual population split isn't. The overall population thus skews left of center while these factors exist.
Yeah but you can still tell by national polling that the Democrats would have a big advantage.
No, because polling indicates responses to parties that are strategizing on the basis of the system that exists, not some ideal philosophical view of the parties. So the neglect of the big blue states by Republicans is reflected in the polls as well as the popular vote.
That's a little bit true but mostly not, because the parties (and related media/activists/whatever) aren't just focused on winning the electoral college. They care just as much about winning congressional and senate seats, state legislatures, governors, and even local offices and judges. So when you look at, like, party registration in New York, it's based heavily on demographics. Lots of upstate districts are Republican because they're rural, etc. I could imagine the numbers changing a little if Republican presidential candidates visited more often, but it's not like there are a lot of democrats-by-default who've never heard a conservative speak.
Can of worms here, but there are path-dependent cultural and historical reasons for our differences besides the obvious superiority of our unapologetically FPTP Westminster parliament.
In 2016, Trump won 46.1% of the vote and Clinton won 48.2%. That's pretty much a coin toss.
Agreed. The past 8 elections look a lot closer than Ty makes it out to be (link for popular vote: statista.com/statistics/1035521/popular-votes-republican-democratic-parties-since-1828/)
2008 (Obama's first term) and 1996 (Clinton's second term) are the best examples of a large difference though.
These are all tiny differences compared to swings in other countries' politics. You make Canada's two-dominant-party system look downright dynamic.
That's still 2.86 million votes. Given the imprecision of the electoral college, that really is a coin toss. But it's nowhere near a coin toss for "Clinton had a plurality of voters," even if you gained or lost a number of voters at the margin (e.g. reroll the election with different weather).
That's just president, though. The split is much more evident in other elections. Democratic candidates for US Senate in 2018 won 12 million more votes than Republican candidates, for instance, yet Republican candidates won more seats.
The question of why generally Democrat-leaning voters seem to not vote for the Democratic presidential candidate is an interesting question, though. I'm so cynical about the whole process that I don't even bother to vote most of the time, but I do remember in 2004 voting for Bush just because I lived in California and knew it wasn't going to make a different either way. I definitely don't want to speculate that a sizable number of voters in non-swing states are just shit-voting out of frustration, but you never know.
The Senate number us an artifact of Democrats getting to count all 11 million+ votes in California because of their election quirks.
Please elaborate...
California has a “jungle primary” system - all primary candidates of both parties run in the same contest and the top two vote getters compete in the general election, regardless of party. So California senate contests are often Democrat vs Democrat.
There’s nothing especially wrong with that as an electoral system, but it does mean that tallying up nationwide senate votes is going to be misleading as the state with the largest number of Republican voters doesn’t count for a single Republican Senate vote.
"Biproduct" is a great pun, if perhaps unintentional.
yes it was unintentional but you are also correct that it is a great pun. thanks for pointing it out.
Spot on. If you want to see which voting systems are out there I recommend the electo-wiki: https://electowiki.org/wiki/Main_Page
I am personally partial to score voting: https://electowiki.org/wiki/Score_voting
Though if you want something a little more fancy you can check out my post on department voting: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ztnEXJSysJLQ9yzpp/department-voting-2
We just adopted RCV where I live and it’s beyond unintuitive. I don’t understand why people think this is somehow a panacea for our electoral process when our current problems are mostly around transparency.
How can it be unintuitive?
Rank from Best to Worst is pretty simple.
More details here: https://alaskapolicyforum.org/2020/10/failed-experiment-rcv/
~11% of ballots cast in RCV elections were spoiled. That’s a lot of people who didn’t understand how to fill out the ballot.
There’s also been cases of the candidate receiving the most votes but losing. I doubt anyone could look at a table of raw RCV results and intuitively know who the winner is. People find that unintuitive.
People watch and vote on reality shows where contestants are eliminated one at a time, and if their preferred one gets eliminated, they vote among the rest, right? And they don't have much trouble understanding it. I don't think it's complicated, but it has to be presented in an intuitive way, and any change requires a bit of time to sink in.
It’s been used in SF since 2004 and they recently had an election where more ballots were spoiled than were legit.
SF has smart people (the smartest of people?). And it’s been around awhile.
I’d be open to the idea that RCV sucks.
The link doesn't mention anything about ~11% of ballots being spoiled. It does say IRV "exhausts more than 10 percent of ballots", which is, er, not a real problem. Plurality voting usually exhausts more than 50% of ballots, after all.
That said, I do agree that IRV is a really lousy way of doing ranked voting. I'd much prefer Ranked Pairs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_pairs . The Ranked Pairs method respects every majority, and if there are conflicting majorities it respects the largest majorities. And it has a variety of nice properties your link raised as important such as monotonicity and avoiding spoiled ballots (by allowing ties and skipped ranks).
Candidates being able to lose when winning the most votes is a feature, not a bug.
If an outright majority of voters hates you more than any other candidate you should not be able to win.
RCV ≠ Score Voting
Score voting is just like giving stars to different hotels or restaurants, whomever gets the most stars wins. Pretty simple.
Though if you want an even simpeler voting system that also doesn't have the problems of FPTP you can try approval voting. Instead of saying who your one favorite candidate is, you say which candidates you approve of. Whomever gets the most approvals wins.
The voting reform advocates have promising ideas with the best of intentions.
I think it’s worth reflecting on whether all their effort has been worth the squeeze. Or maybe we should spend time on other forms of electoral reform like redistricting.
I’m supportive of municipalities running experiments and seeing how it goes. Just not where I live :) There's just a lot more obvious stuff to work on.
That's a little bit like a whataboutism. Electoral reform bills don't come along very often, so I would argue that we should try to squeeze as much utility out of them as possible. When the bill improves one aspect of the election, why not use that opportunity to improve other aspects too? It's not like we can/should only work on one thing at a time.
It’s more like, all the smartest people said RCV was going to solve all these problems so it’s worth reflecting on why it hasn’t done that instead of coming up with new social science projects to foist on the electorate.
Reform bills happen more frequently at the local level. I’m happy for people to experiment with it. Start small with the well intended, clever ideas.
Frankly, voting systems seem more like a pet project for math-y types than a bona fide effort to accomplish a goal. And what’s the goal again? The goal posts move a lot.
Yeah; it's bad and largely replicates the flaws of FPTP. Score voting is far superior.
> I think it is hard to discuss this without mentioning the two-party system, which itself is a biproduct of electoral college and first past the post voting
Disagree; Australia has preferential (instant runoff) voting, and nothing resembling an electoral college, and still has (effectively) a two party system. Two parties is a stable equilibrium under a lot of conditions.
I don’t think it’s quite accurate to say Australia has nothing resembling an electoral college.
Just like in the US, we don’t directly vote for the National leader but for people (or electors) who will choose the national leader. It’s likewise possible for “Electors who promise to elect X as leader” to receive fewer votes overall but win the election, as happened in 1998.
It’s just that our “electors” are also parliamentarians with actual legislative power.
Is Australia really an effectively two party system? It is in the lower house that selects the government, but the Senate looks much more like a multi-party system.
It pretty much is. The ruling party needs to get enough crossbench votes to get their legislation through the Senate, so there’s a bit of negotiation. But the agenda is still set by the ruling party. They always have the numbers in the lower house so nothing can happen without their support.
I don’t agree with this. The reason America has such a dominant two party system is because the parties are very decentralised and individuals within the parties have a lot of freedom to adopt their own personal policy views.
This means that West Virginia can have a Joe Manchin while NYC gets a AOC and they can coexist in the same party and neither has the power to force the other out.
Whereas in parties with more central control, you get more consistency in publicly expressed views, which mean that individuals may not be as well suited to their own particular electorate, which creates an opportunity for competitors.
So you see situations like the UK where there is first past the post voting and elections are won by parliamentary majority which is pretty analogous to the electoral college, and yet the two party system is much weaker.
Yes, the two-party system is important. And when D FDR ran as a frugal States Rights D in 1932, won, fired 200k federal workers appointed by the spendy centralizer R Hoover, then did a 180 and hired 500k federal workers by 1936 while spending the country into massive debt, well, that changed things. Between D FDR, D JFK, and D Johnson, the D party has a lock on federal workers and administrators. Civil service unions are D party machines.
This helps Moloch swim left!
Depends what you mean. Employees are fairly evenly split (see e.g. https://www.govexec.com/oversight/2015/08/there-are-more-republicans-federal-government-you-might-think/119138/) but unions tend to donate to Democrats more than Republicans (see e.g. https://www.fedsmith.com/2019/03/13/federal-unions-politics-follow-money/). Now, this makes sense, as Democrats tend to support pay raises for federal employees, while Republicans tend to attack federal employees as overpaid, but it's hard to know causality flow here.
I'd say the causality flow from D FDR, D JFK, D Johnson -none of them models of bipartisan amity- is clear.
is this just confusing electoral parity with 'approximately equal numbers of Trump voters and Biden'
Can you explain what you mean by "electoral parity" here?
The control of government, across the three elected bodies (president, house, senate) tends to be about even between Republicans and Democrats over time. However, since those aren't elected by pure numbers, the actual number of voters for each party doesn't not tend to be 50/50. Democrats have won the popular presidential vote each year since 1988 (except 2004, with the effect of 9/11) and usually by a sizable majority, but the Republican party has had about equal control over the government.
A plurality is not a majority, and in most of those elections there was either no majority or a very narrow majority, even if there was often a significant plurality.
Here's the popular vote plurality winner and their vote percentage for each election:
1992: Dem, 43.0%
1996: Dem, 49.6%
2000: Dem, 48.4%
2004: Rep, 50.7%
2008: Dem, 52.9%
2012: Dem, 51.1%
2016: Dem, 48.2%
2020: Dem, 51.3%
To me, that looks like the Democrats have a fairly consistent edge in recent years in the national presidential popular vote, but a narrow one that often falls short of 50% and never exceeds it by much.
It's been a long time since we've seen blowout Presidential winners with around 60% of the popular vote like in 1984, 1972, 1964, 1956, 1936, 1932, 1928, and 1920. Characterizing the current political alignment as a 50/50 split is a misleading oversimplification, but it's got some truth in that we're more like a 50/50 nation than like the 60/40 nation we often were for much of the 20th century.
Ah sorry, I misspoke there. I meant a plurality, not a majority. I definitely agree that it's closer to 50/50 than before 1990, but the edge has been around 5% since then.
1992: Dem, 5.6%
1996: Dem, 9.5%
2000: Dem, 0.5%
2004: Rep, 2.4%
2008: Dem, 7.2%
2012: Dem, 3.9%
2016: Dem, 2.0%
2020: Dem, 4.4%
Average: Dem, 3.8%
Sliced another way, the average popular vote in US Presidential elections since 1992 is 49.1% Dem, 45.3%, and 5.6% third party candidates. The floors and ceilings in the same period seem to be:
Dem: 43.0% and 52.9%
Rep: 37.5% and 50.7%
Reform: 0% and 8.4%
Libertarian: 0.3% and 3.3%
Green: 0% and 1.1%
Again, looks to me that Dems has a consistent small edge in the two-party vote that falls short of a consistent majority, with the balance held by a motley assortment of third party candidates.
Replying to myself because I can't edit: ceiling for the Reform party should be 18.9% (1992), not 8.4% (1996).
meaning election results are approximately equal, but there are about 10% more biden voters than trump voters. so shouldn't the baseline be there are more biden donators?
I see what you're saying.
Do you think selecting 5% randomly and placing them on the right would overcome the 88% to 12% donor disparity shown when sampling employees who donated from the from top 100 companies' [the bubble chart]?
I'm skeptical. Then again, no one here is discussing how representative that sample of the population is...
No 88/12 is obviously way above the baseline. I must have gotten some chart fatigue by that point, as that seems to be one of the only parts were an absolute number like that is given... for so many charts, I really wish they were better charts.
What do you think of the thesis that this is all driven by Big-5 personality types, mainly Openness being correlated with both education and left-wing social views? The book Open vs. Closed makes a fairly compelling case.
https://www.amazon.com/Open-versus-Closed-Personality-Redistribution/dp/1107546427
That's my read of it too. In the 1950s the economic elite were owners of manufacturers like Ford. Those companies benefit from a standardization and strong manager-employee hierarchies to crank out units of production.
In the 2020s they are more likely to be Silicon Valley and Wall Street types who benefit from creativity and individuation.
I like this formulation. +1
I work in a left dominated institution in a left dominated metro area. Left wing people are not more open. This analysis of the big five is a post-facto justification of left wing people enforcing an oppressive monoculture.
My similar experience suggests the same, though I'm not ready to generalize it to the entire population. People on the left are almost certainly more avant-garde than the right. I don't know if that constitutes openness in the OCEAN sense though. There's a deep insight here relating to reference frames...
That is pretty close to correct. The Openness/Intellect domain has two sides - the Intellect one is mostly defined by a willingness to expend effort in thinking about things. One narrow construct within the Intellect sphere would be Need for Cognition: https://www.midss.org/sites/default/files/ncogscale.pdf
This does not mean intelligence, but intrinsic motivation to do autism. Even low-Intellect people do the effortful processing if they get rewarded for it. Habits more than capability.
The other part, called Openness to Experience, is related to an aesthetic sensitivity. One of its underpinnings is a mechanism called latent inhibition. This is a subconscious process which essentially judges whether some association is real or spurious nonsense. The higher the inhibition, the more concrete an association has to be for it to feel real and serious. The lower the inhibition, the more tenuous the kinds of associations that can be taken seriouly or that feel like they have a point to them. If you ever listen to a song and the lyrics tickle your brain like it feels like there's a point there, but then you look at the sentence and it's just nonsense, or see an analogy that's just pretentious fart-smelling artfaggotry, you're in part seeing the border of your latent inhibition.
If that sounds like too low latent inhibition could lead to delusions, that's absolutely correct, and high aesthetic Openness (which is correlated with low latent inhibition) is a risk factor for developing psychosis. There's a reason for the troubled artist stereotype, mental illness really does run in the family.
Some O/I measures, especially older ones are problematic in this respect though. They literally include items like "Vote for liberal political candidates" and "Vote for conservative political candidates"
More open IN COMPARISON, is the important bit I think.
I think we can all agree that framed in that light, the thesis holds pretty well.
I'd need some evidence to agree that. Both left and right wing people are generally open in my experience, with the problem being when one set of beliefs are locally common enough to allow them to become social norms. Then openness reduced rapidly on a social level, but this probably doesn't reflect the personality types of those involved so much as normal in-group/out-group dynamics.
This is ANECDOTAL AS FUCK, but an example of my experience has been: Working in an office with some conservatives, and some liberals.
We vote to share what music gets played.
The conservatives pick music that they already like. They prefer not to listen to anything new, and they strongly prefer not to listen to any new genre "Turn that shit off and play some stones!".
The liberals still prefer stuff they know they like, but If someone makes a case for a weird new Japanese jazz band, they say "What the fuck, lets try it!".
This seems to extend across all facets of life. Conservatives who haven't tried sushi for 50 years, who go to the same place every year on vacation, who have only ever owned ford trucks, etc.
This type of attitude seems much more prevalent among conservatives, AGAIN ANECTODE ALERT.
Again, yes, anecdotal, but this is my experience as well. Food/restaurant choices I think is a clear place where you see this as well.
I think openness, in terms of the Big 5, is perhaps a misnomer, and definitely is condescending to people who score low. Maybe a better way to think of it is a tendency towards novelty seeking and seeing the world in abstract terms, where people who score low tend to prefer stability and see the world more in terms of common sense and human nature. We can debate exactly what these terms mean, but people who score 1 way on personality tests tend to go to college, move to cities and hold left wing social views while people who score the other way tend to not go to college, live in rural areas and hold right-wing social views. The Big Sort is another great book on the subject.
Strong agree.
Novelty Seeking sounds why less pejorative, and is just as descriptive.
+1 yup, better way to phrase it for sure
What do we mean by conservative? It looks like JD Vance is running on a pro-natalist platform. Is pro-natalism liberal or conservative?
To me partisanship is about team red and team blue and has basically nothing to do with policy. Eh…I don’t know what to think.
Natalism is the 2020s version of "family values."
But is that conservative? All I know is it’s not libertarian.
Why is Natalism it never libertarian? Bryan Caplan is a natalist. Singapore has (not very sucessful) pro-Natalist policies.
You'll have to point me to Caplan's natalism. He seems very big on population growth but that's not natalism.
He wrote a book titled "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids". He says it's the book he's proudest of writing (despite being more ignored among intellectuals) because people have said it actually did inspire them to have more kids.
Here's a blog post by him titled "For Natalism":
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2013/09/for_natalism.html
(maybe his and your definitions of natalism differ)
“ Natalism promotes child-bearing and parenthood as desirable for social reasons and to ensure the continuance of humanity. Natalism in public policy typically seeks to create financial and social incentives for populations to reproduce, such as providing tax incentives that reward having and supporting children.”
So maybe public policy natalism would be more accurate? I’ve only heard the term natalism used to refer to financial and regulatory support to encourage more and larger families.
My understanding about jobs needing a college degree is that is a proxy for *something*. There are a whole bunch of questions you can't ask people in an interview, so instead of asking them, they simply require a college degree.
It's mostly not you can't ask questions without making people agree - there are a whole bunch of things that you can't reliably measure in a hurry.
In a fictional society where 50% of the population, chosen at random, spend 3 years going through a process that taught them nothing the other lot weren't also learning but which gave a moderately-reliable measure of their ability to focus on tasks that are a pretty good proxy for a lot of intellectually-challenging jobs, and the other 50% learned just as much but weren't graded reliably, you'd expect most of the most competitive jobs to go to the first lot.
And that's even before you factor in that a) colleges are selective, so the average college graduate was smarter than the average non-graduate even before college, and b) for a lot of jobs the skills taught in college are actually useful, and for many of the highest-status ones they're virtually essential.
One important factor here is the increasing salience of technology and tech companies, which are disproportionately young, and young people are disproportionately liberal.
I don't think there has ever been a situation where young people have been able to outearn their elders as what we have now. This applies only to a small minority of young people, but they have been able to sidestep all the gatekeeping set up by elders and gain access to warchests very early, on their own terms.
A small set of young people that control every sense making institution and the main mediums of communication* Most young people are economically screwed.
Not really sure what you mean. Libraries and universities dedicated to making young people learn stuff have existed for a bit now. The internet is transformative though yes
The claim Jack C is making is that libraries and universities didn't create a class of rich young people the way that tech startups (supposedly) have.
I misread him. That said, tech is in no way the first time one class (or just group) of new young people have upset the earning and power of another older group.
And it’s arguable that universities played a significant role in many of those changes
Yeah, I think the claim itself is likely not correct. Gold rushes would be a good example of another period in which a class of young people can get wealth and power independent of established old power interests - and in that case even independent of the universities.
I think during the 80s old people were more left-leaning, which was explained because they had come of age at a time when the Democratic party instilled a very strong sense of loyalty.
It was also before the collapse of the USSR, which blew a hole in the credibility of the socialist narrative. You still see the echos of that when 'classical' leftists complain that the modern left doesn't care about class distinctions anymore.
But why would young people be disproportionately that way? I certainly wasn't, although I was very naive.
Conservatism is associated with the past, and young people weren't around for it.
One point on this: one of the big divides for the Brexit vote was whether the voter had been around prior to the Common Market. Young people had never known the alternative.
I mean the Nazis were “young” and they were reactionary. So this doesn’t prove much necessarily
That's a case where you might want to distinguish them from conservatives.
Fascism is sometimes very distinct from conservatism, and sometimes it is less. People can love the past without being old though.
It's not quite the same thing as the past. These are not parties that have been around for ever, and their leaders weren't aristocrats though their countries typically had them. Among fascists of different countries the Phalangists were closer to being conservatives, and they themselves wrote that they weren't sure if they were fascist... because they were Catholic. The Greater East-Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere was not something that had existed in the past, nor were Hitler's plans to overthrow the Anglo-dominated world order and conquer eastern Europe all the way to Russia a return to the German past (particularly since Germany had only unified rather recently). The closest to a revival of the past among the Axis leaders was Mussolini thinking he could re-establish the Roman empire, and that was still somewhat like a modern wiccan thinking they have any continuity with actually existing paganism.
The Nazis were a left wing party. Academic historians and others love to try and hide this fact, but read their manifesto, or they're propaganda magazine produced for Western audiences, or simply compare their actions to that of the undoubtedly left wing USSR.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism
From the starting paragraphs -
Nazism (/ˈnɑːtsiɪzəm, ˈnæt-/ NA(H)T-see-iz-əm),[1] officially National Socialism (German: Nationalsozialismus [natsi̯oˈnaːlzotsi̯aˌlɪsmʊs]), is the ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP, or National Socialist German Workers' Party in English) in Nazi Germany. During Hitler's rise to power in 1930s Europe, it was frequently referred to as Hitlerism. The later related term "Neo-Nazism" is applied to other far-right groups with similar ideas which formed after the collapse of the Nazi regime.
Nazism is a form of fascism,[2][3][4][5] with disdain for liberal democracy and the parliamentary system. It incorporates fervent antisemitism, anti-communism, scientific racism, and the use of eugenics into its creed. Its extreme nationalism originated in pan-Germanism and the ethno-nationalist Völkisch movement which had been a prominent aspect of German nationalism since the late 19th century, and it was strongly influenced by the Freikorps paramilitary groups that emerged after Germany's defeat in World War I, from which came the party's underlying "cult of violence".[6] Nazism subscribed to pseudo-scientific theories of a racial hierarchy[7] and social Darwinism, identifying the Germans as a part of what the Nazis regarded as an Aryan or Nordic master race.[8] It aimed to overcome social divisions and create a homogeneous German society based on racial purity which represented a people's community (Volksgemeinschaft). The Nazis aimed to unite all Germans living in historically German territory, as well as gain additional lands for German expansion under the doctrine of Lebensraum and exclude those who they deemed either Community Aliens or "inferior" races.
The term "National Socialism" arose out of attempts to create a nationalist redefinition of socialism, as an alternative to both Marxist international socialism and free-market capitalism. Nazism rejected the Marxist concepts of class conflict and universal equality, opposed cosmopolitan internationalism, and sought to convince all parts of the new German society to subordinate their personal interests to the "common good", accepting political interests as the main priority of economic organisation,[9] which tended to match the general outlook of collectivism or communitarianism rather than economic socialism. The Nazi Party's precursor, the pan-German nationalist and antisemitic German Workers' Party (DAP), was founded on 5 January 1919. By the early 1920s, the party was renamed the National Socialist German Workers' Party to attract workers away from left-wing parties such as the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Communists (KPD), and Adolf Hitler assumed control of the organisation. The National Socialist Program, or "25 Points", was adopted in 1920 and called for a united Greater Germany that would deny citizenship to Jews or those of Jewish descent, while also supporting land reform and the nationalisation of some industries. In Mein Kampf, literally "My Struggle", published in 1925–1926, Hitler outlined the antisemitism and anti-communism at the heart of his political philosophy as well as his disdain for representative democracy and his belief in Germany's right to territorial expansion.[10]
The Sturmabteilung (SA) and the Schutzstaffel (SS) functioned as the paramilitary organisations of the Nazi Party. Using the SS for the task, Hitler purged the party's more socially and economically radical factions in the mid-1934 Night of the Long Knives, including the leadership of the SA. After the death of President Hindenburg, political power was concentrated in Hitler's hands and he became Germany's head of state as well as the head of the government, with the title of Führer, meaning "leader". From that point, Hitler was effectively the dictator of Nazi Germany – also known as the Third Reich – under which Jews, political opponents and other "undesirable" elements were marginalised, imprisoned or murdered. During World War II, many millions of people—including around two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe—were eventually exterminated in a genocide which became known as the Holocaust.
So let’s go over each point here.
Fascism - right wing m(reactionary, militarist, natural hierarchy, racialist, anti equality, anti democratic, dedication to the state) but we can skip that
“Disdain for liberal democracy” - certainly far right coded ... fascists disdain all democracy (like moldbug, although not enough for him). Leftists only criticize liberal democracy for not acktually being democratic, lol
“Antisemitism” - actual antisemitism, of the form of calling for the killing of the Jews, is - although it happens in Palestine, and Palestinians are allied with the left - a form of explicit racial inferiority claims, which is very much not left wing - and one of the criticisms of the left is that allying with Palestine is dumb when Palestinians are culturally far right
Anti communism is right wing and not left wing, as communism is a goal of far leftists and a good yet broken ideal for more center leftists
Ditto for scientific racism and eugenics. The left dislikes inferiority based racism and murdering the bad races much more so than the right - a common (reasonable) criticism of today’s left is that they are to obsessed with that to a disturbing extent and the detriment of anything else that’s worthwhile
“Extreme nationalism” - right wing, nationalism is considered right wing nowadays. Historically messy but whatever.
“Cult of violence” - right wing. Who loves the military, guns, power, strength, etc. it was right wing back then too. Not eating having a strong military or whatever is bad, but a cult of strength and violence is right wing.
> Nazism rejected the Marxist concepts of class conflict and universal equality, opposed cosmopolitan internationalism
Both right wing. Universal equality is an axiom of politics today, for good or not, and moving away from it is right wing. And being anti internationalist today is also ... right wing - immigration, free trade, globalist elite, etc. again not doing any moral judgement here, hitler was a good speaker and that doesn’t make being a good speaker evil, any coherent political system will end up agreeing with a lot of even bad evil peoples points, just going over point by point.
> sought to convince all parts of the new German society to subordinate their personal interests to the "common good"
Helloooo Patrick Deneen and sohrab ahmari! Liberal individualism vs ancient collective goodI think their programs are dull and pointless, but this is somewhat right wing, or generously neutral.
> which tended to match the general outlook of collectivism or communitarianism rather than economic socialism
This can be cast as left wing if you restrict yourself to the Cold War, but if we go farther back it is very mixed. Many left wingers were less collectivist than right wingers, and many more were more collectivist. It’s really a confusing term and idea. Regardless, even if we accept that as left, which we shouldn’t, that’s one of ten?
> attract workers away from left-wing parties such as the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Communists (KPD)
This was very common. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beefsteak_Nazi - but leftists were regularly purged. A successful party will obviously take many followers from other parties. And naziism did take a lot from socialism (as did conservatism and every other politics that exists since then or today). Wow trump sure must be left wing because he took a lot of past Democrat voters with him! The French Revolution was actually right wing as it was supported by past elite right wingers :o.
> political power was concentrated in Hitler's hands and he became Germany's head of state as well as the head of the government, with the title of Führer, meaning "leader". From that point, Hitler was effectively the dictator of Nazi Germany
Total dictatorship with power in the hands of one person tends to be a right wing ideal - when done by the left, it’s done “in the interests of workers, to be eventually dissolved for the communist state” while for the right the dictatorship is for the dictator and for them to make good decisions. (Were monarchies left wing? Ayatollahs left wing?) But we can call this neutral.
Overall, the nazis did draw a lot of inspiration from socialists. But so did everyone. On the whole, they’re quite right wing. I’ve read all sorts of nazi stuff, clearly right wing. I can go get excerpts from speeches if you want but that’d take even more time.
"The Nazis were a left wing party."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933
Ah, but they weren't always so.
When I joined Google, a couple years after their IPO, it had a distinctly libertarian bent, at least in the parts of the company I was in. I remember one year on April 1st some wag found a way to send email anonymously to engineering and used it to distribute a spoof poster advertising unionisation. Because back then the whole idea was literally a joke. My first manager was a former entrepreneur who had made back selling his company (not to Google), a Frenchman who held French business in contempt because it wasn't capitalist enough. The guy sent to train the team had moved country for tax reasons and was happy to tell everyone, lunchtime conversations were frequently on pro capitalist topics of various kinds. And of course the companies entire mission statement encoded libertarian values - make information universally accessible and good things will follow: by the way adverts are also information.
Let's not forget that Twitter was once "the free speech wing of the free speech party".
So what changed? In my view it was primarily caused by an addiction to needless hiring. The culture established there early on was a naive one based on the belief that the company would never run out of good ideas. This meant that hiring was always being described as everyone's top priority. After enough years of that, when the money never runs out, it becomes ingrained. But whilst the money never ran out, the pool of experienced candidates did, big time. The software industry just isn't that large and add a consequence these firms became heavily dependent on hiring new graduates because there simply weren't enough experienced engineers left on the market after the first 7-8 years of growth.
What happens if you start driving from a firehose of inexperienced grads who never worked at a normal company, and then put them in an environment that is basically budget free? You get a lot of very left wing employees and eventually they come to dominate the normal people who built the company, especially as more and more of the OGs retire early or check out in other ways.
Google's original culture was built on respect for the whole population. Modern Google is a different beast. Lesson learned: the cost of hiring is not merely in the comp package, and it was naive to think that a "hiring culture" would not one day cause problems.
Here's another way to break this cycle: get rid of first past the post voting. Remove the underlying structures that force us to exist in the current situation.
“When life (America) gives you lemons (crappy voting schemes), don't make lemonade (change party affiliation). Make life take the lemons back (abolish FPTP)! Get mad!"
More: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo
Because that's worked so well in other situations. I'm not particularly fond of having Italian or Israeli style politics.
Most European nations have different voting systems and plenty are doing alright. I don't think Israel is really a good comparison for anywhere given the other factors affecting the country
I used to be more of a fan of some sort of proportional representation, but then I saw struggles to form governments in Italy, Germany, Belgium, and probably a few others that I'm forgetting. I'm not opposed to more experimentation at the state and local level, but I don't think electoral reform is a magical fix for everything that's wrong in the US.
Speaking about Germany, these struggles are customary ways of balancing opposing interests and usually result in something functional. The appearance, though, has to be something dramatic, because each faction needs to signal internally that "That's the best we could get and we put up the hardest fight we were able to", and to externally actually advance as much as possible of their position without losing access to power because they could not become part of a coalition.
Also, the majorities in the Bundestag are most of the times counterbalanced by Bundesrat majorities, so no ruling coalition can feel safe from a retaliation.
This has so far kept a destructive polarization in check that would lead to dysfunctionalities.
However, this is part of the political culture, and would not work e.g. in Italy, imo. A functional democracy resides on fundaments it cannot produce itself out of nothing, as a common wisdom here goes.
Belgium has found out that they can have a functional state without a formal government a while ago. :)
I mean what parts of German or Israeli or whatever politics do we want in the US? What can they do or haven’t they done that we should or shouldn’t? Are they less dysfunctional or more efficient or innovative or representative or less disruptive?
They are less likely to hate the guy voting for the other party. Where I live I’ve voted nearly all parties. And for independents.
People get used to the system they have. It's true that proportional representation in a broad sense leads to more coalitions. But if you switched a FPTP country to PR or vice versa, there would be twenty years of government very far from the local equilibrium, until parties and voters adapted to the new system.
The UK also uses FPTP. But they have a parliamentary rather than presidential system, so smaller parties do pop up and aren't as irrelevant.
Doing alright? I guess it depends on your priorities. Italy hasn't had a leader who was actually elected for years. In some ways it doesn't deserve to be called a democracy at all. Other countries have also gone through long periods in which the entire government simply wasn't elected. They didn't collapse into anarchy but it seems unwise to consider this state of affairs fine.
A key aspect to preserve in any change is voting for individuals, not parties; that excludes many other systems (especially parliamentary ones).
Even if we went PR, David Shor and other have looked into this and we would get is something like this -
30 to 35% center-right party led by Romney types who would back suburban voters scared off by Trump
25 to 30% center-left party led by Biden types
15 to 20% right-wing nationalist party
10 to 15% Bernie Sanders/AOC party
5 to 10% Libertarian/Andrew Yang/Elon Musk-type party.
That looks lovely. I would like to go to there.
I mean, I actually think it would be a better system, but it would disappoint both the people who think there are a bunch of socialists or a bunch of "Real American" types.
Even in this system, the most important voter would still be...middle income non-college educated with moderate views. Now, they'd be slightly different voters because of no more Electoral College, but still the type of swing voters the Left & Right gets frustrated by would still rule.
RCV is a failed experiment. We need to move on to how primaries are conducted.
https://alaskapolicyforum.org/2020/10/failed-experiment-rcv/
Three points:
1. RCV is not just a synonym for instant runoff; Condorcet methods have better behaviors (specifically monotonicity). N.B., per Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, there's no perfect system. FPTP is strictly worse than both.
2. The interface is not the system. Just because initial attempts at designing RCV ballots led to confusion does not invalidate the math.
3. The expected effects on turnout, campaigning, &c. are long-run equilibria; evaluating them in the short term is in bad faith.
The end of the post feels a little weird to me, I honestly don't see a reason to try and salvage coalitions and turn them into something more positive. I think the far better option is to change our voting systems so that coalitions are less necessary, and less adversarial.
The catch-22 is that in order to effect those changes, you need a majority coalition first, especially for really huge things like constitutional amendments. But once you have a majority your priorities shift to maintaining the status quo that got you a majority in the first place.
I do not believe that anyone has ever implemented a political system in which coalitions did not have a decisive advantage over not-coalitions, and I am skeptical that such a thing is possible. As a proposal, it's right up there with "change our system of government so that it only does good things"; great, but really needs details.
Also, philosophically, conservatives believe gov has a smaller role and personal life should be more primary (the opposite of the ‘personal is political’). So being less active in gov, which you believe should be less pervasive in the lives of the polity, is consistent.
Libertarians believe that, and Republicans twenty years ago believed that, but I'm not sure it's extremely accurate today. The Trump-leaning side of the Republican party doesn't seem to be especially small government. On top of that, there are definitely issues, like abortion, where conservatives want government to have a larger role in controlling personal life.
So many internet right leaning libertarians left libertarianism to ... very far right ... stuff. anyway, the mainstream Republican Party is probably heading away from libertarianism towards where their internet compatriots went just like the Democrat party was a lagging version of internet lefties in many ways.
Not that the objectionable far right parts mean they don’t have many good points to go along with it.
As gbear said that’s what libertarians believe. And in the US those folks are more common on the right. Viktor Orban is very into a natalist welfare state for example.
Thats just not true anymore. The modern left is libertarianism + EEO laws taking to an extreme.
Economic libertarianism?
Modern left is incredibly pro free trade, open borders, and financial markets.
"Modern left is incredibly pro free trade"
Is it? Republicans were the party of free trade until the day before yesterday. When did that shift occur?
Trump's policies were definitely anti free trade compared to Biden's policies. To some extent Trump doesn't match with the Republican party as a whole, but Republican voters are also more against free trade compared to Democrat voters. As of 2018, 67% of Democrats said that free trade has been good for the US while only 43% of Republicans say the same. There was even a point in 2016 where 59% of Democrats were in favor of free trade compared to 29% of Republicans.
Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/05/10/americans-are-generally-positive-about-free-trade-agreements-more-critical-of-tariff-increases/
They were pro open borders until COVID. Not any more.
They are still for open borders. They also believe in the science of epidemiology. Those two things are not mutually exclusive.
The left still believes in the welfare state, environmental regulation, worker protections etc. Lots of things wealthier states can afford because there's an industry paying high taxes, but that a poorer state might not because it has less fiscal capacity and lower costs are one of the few ways it can compete.
I strongly disagree with this. Conservatives /say/ that they believe that government has a smaller role and personal life should be more primary, but if you look at the actual fault lines outside of economic issues - abortion, the war on drugs, gay rights, euthanasia, police powers and sentencing, etc - then again and again you see that it's actually conservatives who believe in the state exercising control over individuals' private lives, and liberals who stand up for letting people make their own choices (except when it comes to business and the economy, where it's the reverse).
A saw that characterises what people actually believe - as opposed to what they believe they believe - more accurately is that liberals believe politics belongs in the boardroom but not the bedroom, and conservatives are the reverse.
I disagree, in that I think the number of conservatives these days who want to put politics back in the bedroom is extremely small. There's no constituency for the re-criminalisation of sodomy.
Except for the fundamentalist Christians who would probably be all for re-criminalizing sodomy.
Do you have any polls on that? I'm not an American, and the Americans I hear from tend to be the very-online ones who I suspect are disproportionately unlikely to; I could easily believe anything from 3% to 30%
As of May, 18% of Americans believe that gay/lesbian relationships between consenting adults should not be legal.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1651/gay-lesbian-rights.aspx
I don't have any polls or statistics on hand (though gbear seems to have provided some). What I do have is experience growing up in a fundamentalist Christian school. A small school, to be sure, but considering how much I learned about how acceptance of homosexuality is a slippery slope to far worse things, I'm quite certain that there are still True Believers out there seeking to illegalize it.
And I should note that they weren't only against homosexuality, but against any casual sex. Sex, after all, is only for procreation. So anything that turns the "natural use" into the unnatural is a horrible sin.
No, but there are an awful lot of people on the right who, even if they don't any more, opposed things like legalising gay marriage and letting gay people serve openly in the armed forces (and who still oppose letting trans people do so).
I think that shows that "let people make their own choices in their private lives" wasn't actually a core value of the conservative movement 10 years ago, even though they were claiming it was. And I find it very unlikely that it's suddenly become so, especially given all the other examples above (I notice that I left of immigration and trans rights from my list, if you need more examples).
At every step over the past century, important non-economic individual freedoms from state control have been won by liberals in the face of opposition from the right; the reverse has hardly ever happened.
It's possible that things are changing slightly at the moment - I think that the strength of the correlation between "liberals/the left are for individual freedom, conservatives are against it (while pretending to be in favour of it)" over the past century has come from two things lining up and positively reinforcing.
The first is that there are genuine strands of "let people make their own choices" as a core liberal value and "coercively impose cultural homogeneity" as a conservative value.
The second is that "the state should use its power to stop people doing bad things" looks much more tempting when you're socially dominant and defining "bad things", and "people should be allowed to make their own choices" looks much more tempting when you're weak, and the imposed choices aren't the ones you prefer, and up until the 20th century the right was clearly socially dominant.
Now, as this thread points out, that's changing, the two trends are interacting negatively rather than positively, and we're seeing the rise of post-liberal leftists who are seeing the temptation of banning things they think are bad, while the people who wanted to ban flag-burning are suddenly seeing freedom of speech in a very different light when it comes to baking cakes for gay weddings.
But in general, at the moment, outside the sphere of economics it's still more likely to be the left who either want to let you make your own choices or to limit the coercion applied to social pressure, and the right who support state control over people.
Letting people make their own choices is a central tenet of classical liberalism, or small-L libertarianism, in the libertarian-vs-authoritarian political compass sense.
Traditionally, this was aligned with the economic and cultural left. But more recently the left seems to have abandoned it and it's become aligned with the economic and cultural right.
This shift is more advanced in some places than others, so people talk past each other, with some assuming it's a right-wing value and always has been, and others still assuming it's a left-wing value.
> But in general, at the moment, outside the sphere of economics it's still more likely to be the left who either want to let you make your own choices or to limit the coercion applied to social pressure, and the right who support state control over people.
As I see it, these days, some of the most salient questions regarding social policy are about things like whether you are allowed to discriminate against gay people or not, whether organizations are required to increase the proportion of black people or women in various positions, whether you are allowed to "harass" members of various demographic groups at a workplace (which often seems to be interpreted as including saying anything that related to an underrepresented group that many members of that group find objectionable), or whether to criminalize hate speech.
So I argue that at this point the left is for more limits on most questions of both economic and social policy, with a few exceptions. (Some of the questions above could be classified as economic policy on the grounds that it's mostly businesses that the relevant laws directly affect, but then a large majority of the most controversial political questions are questions of economic policy.) Of course my assessment is affected by which policy areas I consider the most important (economic freedom, freedom of speech, and eliminating affirmative action).
I don't consider gay marriage a matter of people's private life. Marriage in part regulates the relationship of the two people and the state. And much of the part that regulates the two people's relationship to each other can be replicated by a regular contract. Likewise, the abortion debate is primarily about whether fetuses should be considered persons with rights, a question mostly orthogonal to questions of individual choice. (That is, most of us who want abortion to be legal want that because we don't think a fetus is a person in the relevant sense, not because we think the pregnant woman's choice should prevail even if it were.)
> At every step over the past century, important non-economic individual freedoms from state control have been won by liberals in the face of opposition from the right; the reverse has hardly ever happened.
For the most part, politics were moving in a progressive direction ("liberal" in the American sense). So it's natural that every (non-economic) freedom gained was gained by progressives, and every freedom lost was taken away by progressives.
> The second is that "the state should use its power to stop people doing bad things" looks much more tempting when you're socially dominant and defining "bad things", and "people should be allowed to make their own choices" looks much more tempting when you're weak, and the imposed choices aren't the ones you prefer, and up until the 20th century the right was clearly socially dominant.
Yes. There are a few people who support freedom as a terminal value, and many more people who use the rhetoric of freedom when the government is generally limiting freedom in favor of the other side, but they would be just as willing to limit freedom to achieve their goals.
As far as I understand, this is how the use of the label "liberal" evolved in some countries such as the US. People who sympathized with the poor and with disadvantaged demographic groups and poor people started calling themselves "liberal" back when the government limited freedom in favor of the rich (?), the majority ethnic group, men, heterosexuals, and they kept the label even when the state started limiting freedom in favor of the poor, minorities, women and gay people with their support—to the point where people who are still on the side of freedom had to invent a new label for themselves ("libertarian"). (I put a question mark next to "rich" because, while European governments intervened in favor of the nobility for a long time, and classical liberals challenged that, I'm not sure if the US government ever had a tendency to intervene in favor of the rich, outside of race relations. So I don't really know how it happened that the economic center-left started calling itself liberal in the US. Perhaps support for the poor was correlated with support for various non-ecomonic freedoms, and the label "liberal" got attached to it that way.)
And yes, while conservatives often use the rhetoric of freedom, they don't generally hold it as a fundamental principle (even as a matter of definition; those who do are better termed libertarians).
Of course the fact that all these labels have multiple and shifting meanings makes it difficult to discuss these matters in a clear way.
> It's possible that things are changing slightly at the moment - I think that the strength of the correlation between "liberals/the left are for individual freedom, conservatives are against it (while pretending to be in favour of it)" over the past century has come from two things lining up and positively reinforcing.
> The first is that there are genuine strands of "let people make their own choices" as a core liberal value and "coercively impose cultural homogeneity" as a conservative value.
This seems to assume that "liberal" and "conservative" still refer to the same values they did in the past, and will continue to do so into the future.
I'd put it like this: the historical correlation between liberalism and support for freedom comes from the fact that liberalism was originally *defined* as holding "let people make their own choices" as a core, but in the US it isn't anymore. As far as I can tell, at this point, in the US, the term "liberal" is associated firmly enough with support for the poor and for (historically) disadvantaged groups that it will mean that no matter how anti-correlated it becomes with support for freedom. Whether one sees liberalism as still being in favor of individual freedom depends on how much weight one assigns to the policy areas where liberals are still on the side of freedom; people who both hold freedom as an important value and call themselves liberal are people who assign a large weight to those issues.
Also, citation required. A google search turns up https://news.gallup.com/poll/1651/gay-lesbian-rights.aspx, which suggests that there is still a really large constituency for the re-criminalision sodomy, although obviously N=1.
Wow. Anti gay attitudes have taken a brutal
bearing. 36 just ten years ago to 18 now. I wonder if the 24->18 in last year is meaningful or noise (probably)
That was very much not the thing I found most startling about a poll showing that one American in six thinks that homosexuality should be illegal.
Well you should probably realize that most everyone hated homosexuality a few hundred years ago, and there’s been little but left wing success at bringing that down. That sixth is a threat to you in the same sense that a herd of cows, heads in gates, most of whom have already been bolt gunned to the head, are to the butcher. Not saying that there’s no threat of right wing resurgence, just that that sixth is nothing but a testament to how thorough the dissipation of anti homosexual sentiment has been.
Interesting, I wouldn't have guessed it was so high, I stand somewhat corrected.
Gun control would be an exception to the pattern you describe, and it is not really an economic issue. Opposition to the war on drugs has generally been a left-right coalition. Restrictions on home schooling I think tend to be from the left, although I'm not sure, and opposition to school choice pretty clearly is.
Neither party is in favor of free trade, but at the moment the Republicans are more against it than the Democrats. You will note that Biden hasn't moved to abolish Trump's trade restrictions.
I would argue that the for profit prison system is a right leaning institution and benefits from the war on drugs. I think that a majority of the opposition comes from the left.
"outside of economic issues" This is quite the qualifier! Economic issues are the vast majority of all political issues in a person's day-to-day life and it's not even close.
With respect to the other issues: Do you have public opinion polls to back this up?
I think you're conflating two things: (1) Conservatives believe that the government should be responsible for prosecuting things that are criminal, and (2) conservatives believe that people should be moral in their personal lives. This doesn't mean conservatives want to ban immoral behavior.
In contrast, it's progressives who want to criminalize "hate speech", firearm ownership or possession, insufficient insurance, etc.
And your examples aren't even that great:
Abortion: A form of murder, or at least a form of medical care, which is plainly within the government's role to regulate if not criminalize.
War on drugs: This ignores the bans smoking & cigarettes generally pursued by the left.
Gay rights: This is not really the divisive issue it previously was; and to the extent it is, conservatives are concerned about encouraging a strong family unit, and two-parent households (as opposed to one-parent), which is certainly beneficial by any conceivable metric.
Euthanasia: Consider: Should I be able to sell myself into slavery? If your answer is "No", consider the possibility you have more in common with conservatives than you think.
Police powers and sentencing: This is literally THE legitimate use of government according to conservatives. I mean, if we're not going to agree that we should convict people for violence and theft, why do we even have a government, again?
I was surprised to not see this in the actual article. The thesis that right wing voters care less about their country is shocking. I haven't looked at Hanania's data yet, but I imagine it's hard to disentangle "right wing voters care less" from "right wing voters want less". There's certainly exceptions (abortion, LGBT rights), but those seem like necessary stances for the party to galvanize its traditional contingent.
I'd love to see a deep-dive of this though. Has anyone seen one?
There's also "right wing voters expect less". I'm right wing and I want a while lot of things, but I know I'll never get them, because the right is too busy mounting desperate rear-guard actions against the left's latest desire to actually pursue goals of our own.
What do I want? Well for starters I want all taxes abolished and replaced with a "membership fee" that's the same amount for everyone, rich and poor. I want the people who can't afford to pay the fee to be resettled into whichever foreign country can be bribed into taking them.
So, this is what you would feel like when I start describing fully automated luxury gay space communism.
I'm very struck - but not surprised - by how fast we've gone from "Conservatives believe in small government and individual rights" to "The poor should be forcible expelled from their homeland".
People say that, but it doesn't seem to ever be true.
Conservatives are WAY more about regulating personal life than liberals in my experience, down to mandating styles of clothing and gender expression.
I haven't heard much about conservatives mandating styles of clothing; could you elaborate?
If this is just the trans-rights thing, saying "wearing a dress doesn't make you a woman" is not mandating a style of clothing; for that you'd need "...and because you're not a woman you're not allowed to wear a dress". Which I have not seen very much of.
I've seen guys people expelled from conservative private schools for wearing nail polish, and you gotta admit that looking down on people for being too fem/masc is pure conservative (At least, in the adult world). Think about all those Michelle Obama == Gorilla memes, showing up all the way from grandpas facebook to Fox news.
As an example, go into any conservative space, and try acting against traditional gender archetypes, and see what it gets you.
Not many leftists out there talking about how soy is destroying manliness.
If "looking down on people" counts as a mandate, then we have to throw in all the people who look down on anyone who wears a suit and tie, etc, and by the time we're done I think that "mandating" styles of clothing is something liberals do about as much as conservatives, they just have different preferred styles.
I don't know what to say here.
If you google this, or do any looking whatsoever, you're gonna find examples.
So, I guess if you care look and if you don't, don't.
Who’s looking down on wearing suits and ties??
Conservatives may believe the government *should* have a smaller role. But that doesn't explain why, if the government currently plays a way too big role, they don't work hard to reduce it.
Conservatives are well known to support initiatives to lower taxes, which would seem to be one of the most effective interventions for decreasing the size of the government. You can blue tribe and call this greed or you can red tribe and call it "effective capital allocation".
How would you advocate for a smaller government?
By making laws to restrict the spheres that government could act in, perhaps when conservatives controlled the house, senate, presidency, and supreme court for 2 years.
That was their chance to show us what they really wanted. What did they do?
This doesn't work, given that the government is spending tons of money regardless of the tax level, and the difference just goes to deficits. (There's a debt ceiling but it doesn't constrain anything, they just raise it every time.) I have heard a theory that the "starve the beast" strategy is bad from an anti-government perspective, because it gives the public the impression that government spending is really efficient and pays for lots of services compared to what's on their tax bills.
One possible explanation of what happened might be the march through the institutions, that the left somehow captured the universities, and, now that a large minority of the population goes to university, that gave the basis for a left coalition of the educated.
Nozick has an interesting explanation for why academics tend to be left. Through high school, kids are facing two different status systems, an informal decentralized one of social status, a formal, centralized, one of academic status. Kids who do well on grades, not so well on social status, naturally come to prefer the formal, centralized model, go on to become academics. That could give a general tendency for academics to be left, which matters more when such a large fraction of the population has spent four formative years in academia.
People on the left support holistic admissions to keep Asians from dominating the meritocracy. Not because they support decentralized systems.
Scott actually has a good article on this about how Harvard implemented such "holistic" standards to basically curb jewish domination.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/15/increasingly-competitive-college-admissions-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
This explanation seems to have an implied premise that left-leaning people are more likely than right-leaning people to have good grades and poor social status, *before* they become academics?
I think the causal direction is that kids with good grades and low status are attracted to left-wing ideas.
Of course these days, kids with good grades and low social status have another obvious career path, software engineering. That, I think, explains a lot about the politics of Silicon Valley, and how earning $600K a year doesn't seem to make people join the party that supports lowering taxes on the upper middle class.
I'm not a left-winger, but if I could steel-man the overall left-wing memeplex I think it comes from sympathy (unsteelman: excessive and irrational sympathy) for the downtrodden. And the downtrodden come in two flavours: the genuinely downtrodden, and unpopular high school kids.
Yes. I don't know if Nozick had data on that or not.
Chris Arnade calls this the distinction between "front row" and "back row" Americans. People raised I the front row expect things to be fair, legible, explicate, etc., whereas people raised in the back row are used to being looked down on and coerced.
I think there's also a major self-reinforcing aspect if certain issues get the ball rolling. Once a coalition is more closely affiliated with academia, it's more likely to listen to the academia / higher-education demographics and take policy positions that are attractive to those voters. Spending decades denying global warming etc. makes a party less attractive to educated voters, which makes them less likely to take attractive positions in the future since those groups are now smaller parts of their base.
Not to be blunt, but it could also be because the right has, in recent memory, denied climate change, fought against masks and vaccines, claimed the existence of massive voter fraud, etc. etc.?
Like, I won't deny that democrats have done some anti-science stuff in the past, or that there aren't more fringe-left people saying really stupid stuff. But if you just look at mainstream political figures on the left and right and say 'which one is saying things that actual domain experts would agree with more often' I think Democrats are way ahead at the moment. So I'd expect actual domain experts - academics - to side with them heavily.
The disagreement here is not being "pro" or "anti" science, it's that people on the left reflexively assume that academics are domain experts, whereas people in the right do not. Go look at some climatology sceptic blogs. They aren't railing against science. Their arguments are all science based and usually of the form, "why aren't these bloody academics doing science properly". Whereas the left generally just assume that to be academic is the same thing as being correct, without deeply checking their work.
The voter fraud question isn't really a science question, at least in anything like the normal sense. And the masks and vaccines thing will surely have some element of a values conflict (like, sure, there are some nutters claiming the vaccine is Bill Gates' plan to insert an ID chip into everyone, but there are others for whom it's simply intolerable that the government should have the power to force you to take any medical treatment on pain of being denied the right to travel, participate in commerce etc., which is a position that reasonable people can disagree with, but not an obviously anti-science one).
On the other side we have the current sex and gender hysteria, and indeed the cognitive creationism hysteria, which are overwhelmingly coming from the blue team (I just spent a while looking for the meme that is just a screenshot of this slide of Jonathan Haidt's lecture - https://youtu.be/b86dzTFJbkc?t=3316 - but my google-fu is apparently not up to the tastk), and which do involve a fair bit of science denialism.
Obviously the red team does have its equivalent irrationalities, but at the current moment the blue team is more obviously the team of science-as-attire than the team of actual science.
Part of what is going on with the voter fraud question is that a lot of people, especially Trump supporters, have correctly concluded that the dominant sources of public information cannot be trusted. Since the fact that the NYT says Trump lost isn't evidence that Trump lost, nor is there other evidence from sources they trust, they choose instead to believe what they want to believe, that he won and Biden stole the election.
I think you have incorrectly assumed how many people in the blue team fervently support the “gender hysteria” stuff versus how many people on red team oppose basic epidemiology. I would add that trans rights have very little effect on the average American, bar female athletes etc. However, the red team refusal to take personal measures against the pandemic greatly effects the average American, as is seen by recent covid numbers in red states (eg Florida). It also increases the risk of a further variant, which I think gives credit to the point made that Republicans just don’t care. They can’t even look one year into the future where we might have to take drastic measures again to prevent the spread of a new variant, let alone 50 years down the road for the impact of climate change.
..."how many people on red team oppose basic epidemiology".
There's a lot of nonsense there, no doubt ... but there's a lot of nonsense on the blue team too - given all we know about how hard the virus is to spread outdoors, anyone who is in favour of people being required to mask up outdoors, or who will personally berate people for going unmasked outdoors (as opposed to just keeping enough interpersonal distance to not be breathing into each other's lungs) is also guilty of opposing... I guess we'd need to call it *applied* epidemiology in this case, since we're talking about this particular virus, but still...
Plus the degree of 'trust the science'-ing and support for the official channels coming from the blue team even after the utter clownshow that was their response to the pandemic is (see https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2021/08/12/things-the-establishment-got-wrong-about-wuhan-coof/ for a round-up) ... well, let's just say that even on areas where I think the establishment is now correct, I find it very hard to begrudge a low-to-moderate-information normie on the red team if he has a skeptical attitude.
That's not to say that the blue team are necessarily *worse* in terms of being anti-science at the moment, just that I'm not convinced that they are obviously far-and-away doing better than the red team.
Regarding variants, either we plan to drive the virus to extinction (which is still what Bret Weinstein thinks we should be aiming for, but he seems to be a lonely voice on that), or we don't, in which case herd immunity and regular new vaccines for vulnerable populations, like we currently aim for with the flu, is the best we can hope for. There's a difference between 'we don't care' and 'the chances of driving this thing to extinction are so low that we don't think it's worth the draconian restrictions it would require for us to even have a chance, so let's just accept things and get back to as close to normal as we can'.
I disagree with the comparison that asking/forcing people to wear masks outside is as bad as refusing to do wear them. People are dying because of one and not the other. I forget how the saying goes exactly, “your freedom ends where mine begins”. I think a majority of the anti mask population would not give such a well thought out retort re your last sentence. I would rather anticipate some vitriol a la Fox News. You also mentioned the clown show that was blue teams response to the pandemic yet it was the red team in charge when it started so I’m not sure I get your point there. Claiming that wearing masks is a draconian restriction is a hyperbole by any stretch of the imagination. I believe that both sides want it to end just as badly but there’s one side saying fuck it who care who dies and the other side trying to avoid that as much as possible. Which is quite ironic given we know which side is pro-life.
Furthermore, The denial of science goes far beyond just the pandemic and it is rather unique to the US, which is after all the country with the most adults that believe angels are real.
"I think a majority of the anti mask population would not give such a well thought out retort re your last sentence."
The majority of anyone would not answer with a thought out sentence about a highly partisan public policy spat. The vast majority of everyone mostly regurgitates inane slogans.
All of the trends under discussion were solidly established before those issues entered the public consciousness. If there's a causal relationship, it almost certainly points the other way - low-education voters skew Republican, therefore Republican politicians are more likely to adopt positions that educated people would disagree with. And there may not be a causal relationship.
You are offering a very recent cause as an explanation for a much earlier effect.
If we go back pre-Trump, the left was unwilling to look at evidence with regard to IQ issues, where both heritability and correlation with real world outcomes were well established. The left argued for legalized abortion and easily available contraception in large part as ways of reducing the number of children born to unmarried mothers. What actually happened was the precise opposite of their prediction, and yet that had no visible effect on their views.
The left, although not only the left, treated population increase in the sixties and seventies the way climate change is treated now, the looming catastrophe that required immediate drastic action. Outside of China there was no immediate drastic action, and the poor countries that were supposed to be doomed by population growth got both population growth and a sizable increase in income and nutrition. I haven't noticed anyone publicly apologizing for the error, and Ehrlich in particular, who predicted unstoppable mass famine for the 1970's, has never even said that his argument was wrong.
Climate change is an issue where, as far as I can tell, people on both sides hold views not supported by the evidence, with the catastrophist position farther from what the evidence supports than the "no problem" position. But that would be a long argument.
I think both sides accept science when they like its implications, deny it when they don't. One pretty clear example would be the left attributing all differences in outcomes by either race or sex to discrimination, implicitly assuming that there is no difference in the distribution of relevant characteristics. In the case of sex, that pretty much requires that one not believe in evolution, since Darwinian evolutions selects for reproductive success, males and females differ precisely in their role in evolution, and while it is logically possible that the same distribution of characteristics is optimal for both roles, it's not likely, certainly not what one should assume without evidence — and such evidence as we have goes the other way (tighter IQ distribution for woman than men).
On the other hand, climate change provides an argument for doing things the left wants to do anyway [http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/11/a-revealing-cartoon.html], so not only do they believe in it they massively exaggerate its implication — flooding large parts of the world with sea level rise (by the end of the century on the high emission scenario) equal to about half the distance from low tide to high tide.
Not sure if you've seen this, but *heavy* recommendation for this piece (and various other writings by the author) https://cameronharwick.com/blog/professional-culture-and-market-power/
"We do not see predatory pricing, collusion, or cartelization among the tech giants. What we do see are those giants acting as vehicles for the ideological rents being sought and extracted by the specialized labor cultures they employ."
Left-wingers tend to care more about politics because neuroticism/hysterics is far more associated with both left-wing politics and increased activism.
Source = https://www.psypost.org/2017/09/study-suggests-lower-levels-neuroticism-explain-conservative-states-happier-49627
Addendum - As mental illness rises left wing viewpoints inevitably rise.
I think a lot of the increase in "mental illness" is concept creep.
From AP news on Census: “The figures show continued migration to the South and West at the expense of counties in the Midwest and Northeast. The share of the white population fell from 63.7% in 2010 to 57.8% in 2020.”
Conservative regimes have been less and less about governing and diverse opinions. Cleek’s Law of Republican’s opposing whatever Democrats want, updated daily, is not a long term strategy. It’s just flailing reactionism, chasing the laser pointer. A slow trend towards populism for a shrinking majority does not incubate competency and we’re fortunate for that (until a really smart populist who knows the levers of power comes along).
It’s taken 50 years to take back the Supreme Court and a bit of that was random luck. We’ll see that kneecap and slow some progression but we won’t see conservatives get any better with the hard logistical requirements of revanchism.
If people are migrating to the south & west, what does that say about the conservative vs liberal coalitions?
That the invention of air conditioning and airplanes has taken several generations to be reflected in the geographic location of people. Rural areas have continued to decline in population while urban areas have continued to grow (even if the pandemic briefly deflected urban growth to further continuation of suburban growth).
I thought as well, until recently when I read that population movement from rural areas is offset by their higher birthrates so that they basically stay at their (low) levels. Although I think much of our population growth is in suburban areas, where it's still legal to build.
Rural counties have actually been *losing* population over the past decade, so their birthrates haven't made up for population movement: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/08/more-than-half-of-united-states-counties-were-smaller-in-2020-than-in-2010.html
The left might be winning on symbolic issues like "wokeness", but when it comes to actually important stuff like foreign policy the dominant forces are right-wing or centrist.
I think many people, particularly on the right wing, vastly overestimate the power of the left because they see centrists like Biden and Harris as left-wingers. If anything, they lean right. The centrist wing of the Democratic Party often seems to prefer Trump to Sanders, and I have no doubt that they would've jumped ship to the Republicans in a hypothetical Jeb Bush vs Bernie Sanders 2016.
Centrism, incidentally, appeals to both financial and educational elites.
Did Trump get his way on foreign policy?
He got his way on some foreign policy issues, but partly I'm not sure he really had a foreign policy. The Republican party as an entity tends to though.
Biden seems to be continuing a lot of Trump's anti-foreigner foreign policy, both in tariffs and immigration restrictions.
Is he? He’s reduced the tarrifs with China and the border is more open.
He hasn't reduced the tariffs to anything like the standard Washington Consensus level of 1990-2016.
And is it accurate to say the border is "more open" when non-US citizens still can't legally cross any land border without "essential business", and Europeans aren't allowed to enter for any reason unless they've spent 14 days elsewhere? I believe that after an initial statement that Biden would keep refugee numbers at the level Trump set, he eventually relented a bit, but still hasn't brought them up to the previous standard.
There's been a lot of moderation in rhetoric, but actual policy is still far more restrictive than at any point from the end of the Cold War until the beginning of Trump.
I mean surely you believe that there should be covid restrictions, right? Neither side can be open borders right now.
Biden probably isn’t going to go back to the old system of tariffs for many reasons, not least because it hasn’t been a huge success for the US/China strategy - the idea that they will magically become democratic when they are rich, and it hasn’t been great for US workers either. And in a era of environmental catastrophe globalism has to take a backseat.
No, all COVID restrictions should have been lifted once vaccines was available to every adult. That's hardly a left-wing position in America of course.
But even regardless of that, a lot of COVID-related border restrictions, by America and many other countries, have made little sense, such as restrictions towards countries with similar or lower case counts than the destination country. E.g. America has banned Europeans even at times when case counts were far lower in Europe.
I guess travel bans are a common ground between the left and the right, as the left is more in favor of COVID-related restrictions in general, while the right likes the nationalist angle.
Nice shifting gears there. You say, "He’s reduced the tariffs with China and the border is more open." He says essentially, "no he really hasn't." To which you reply, "Yeah but for good reason!"
Why would you want restrictions in people coming from countries with a lower infection rate than ours, which I think is true of all the EU and a good deal of the rest of the world at present? Their presence lowers the average infection rate, hence the chance that a random encounter will lead to transmission of the virus. The argument is still weaker if you require a negative Covid test before entry, which is easy to do.
The argument for free trade didn't depend on the effect on the politics of trading partners but on the benefit to us of trade. That hasn't changed.
Did he not? He started a trade war, were there any other foreign policies he cared about?
Pulling out the troops.
I feel like the last 3 presidents have promised that, but they're not actually all that interested in it.
Did someone explicitly stop him from recalling the troops, or he just didn't go for it ever? I admit to not remembering much about this topic.
He was terrible at staffing the government with people who actually shared his foreign policy views, so the Blob won.
Did it. I read an article about the final pullout from Afghanistan that suggested that Trump tied Biden's hands there.
. . . I haven't checked the news today. We're still pulling out, right?
Yes, almost by definition.
Yes, the conflation of centrists (or ‘liberals’) with the left is a very widespread piece of imprecision. It often turns an otherwise interesting article into a frustrating useless mess. They are fundamentally distinct groups, albeit that they sometimes act together.
That's a matter of where one draws the boundary. Liberals (in the American sense) are left-of-center on the American political spectrum, so considering them left-wing isn't an unreasonable definition.
I see where you’re coming from, and you are of course correct about the way a lot of Americans use the term, but I don’t find that approach helps me. To explain:
Imagine you are trying to build an accurate and useful model of the interacting agents: you need to know (a) what they actually believe and (b) where they actually sit in relation to other ideologies. Anything that obscures meaningful distinctions just leaves you blind to what is actually going on.
The ‘centre’ shifts over time, differs (as you say) from country to country and it often serves the interests of liberal and conservatives to pretend that the left doesn’t exist at all. Starving a set of ideas of airtime because it serves the interests of Brahmin and Merchant elites to pretend they don’t exist at all (or only addressing them in strawman forms) is something anyone actually left is wearily familiar with.
Calling everyone ‘left wing’ who falls left of where a particular part of a particular political culture feels is the centre is at this particular moment doesn’t help me build an accurate picture of what is actually happening.
Agreed.
But I think there's an even more fundamental reason not to call centrists leftists: centrists hate leftism, and are determined to prevent it from gaining power. Leftists return the hatred, and would return the suppression if they got the chance.
If one faction is trying to keep another faction away from power, then they're not the same faction. Really, that's the basic definition of separateness with regard to political factions.
Good point.
A Bush v. Sanders election would resemble Corbyn v. Johnson. Also, wildness is not a "symbolic issue"; it will decide whether the US of 2100 is majority Black or not.
"Probably solving racism would help shake up political coalitions, so somebody should do that too."
I would appreciate more specificity here. Is the point that the democrats are more successful with minorities because racism exists and a decisive portion of minorities care about the issue enough and think the democrats care about it enough to swing them democrat?
But also, what would solving racism mean? Equality of outcomes across every race? Nobody says anything racist anymore?
Right. But it's such a simplistically righteous line that it seems beneath Scott and more appropriate for say Teen Vogue. It should have been either expanded on or excluded IMO..
Pro tip: if scott says something that's simplistic and righteous and that doesn't really make sense, he's joking.
Maybe, but covid passports for example will cause a lot of collateral damage for some minorities. Likewise if you're conservatively inclined you might argue that democratic policies and rhetoric cause corrosive collateral damage to minorities through agency-denying infantilization -- everything that doesn't work out for you can be blamed on racism.
"That’s different from being targeted because of being (or being seen as) Muslim after 9-11; you can’t do anything about that."
You can certainly do something about being a Muslim.
You can't do something about being seen as a Muslim though, and much of the post-9/11 targeting was based on appearances. Sikh believers aren't Muslim but were often targeted by people mistakenly thinking that they were.
Depending on how you dress and shave, yes you can. Sikhs *could* dress differently, not that they should have to.
Was there actually all that much "post-9/11 targeting", or are we talking a few dozen instances in a country of 300 million people that happened to get a lot of media coverage because it fit a preferred narrative?
If voter ID is racist, covid passports are super-duper racist, because being able to go places is worth about 10^8 times more than a 10^-8 chance of influencing an election, and the difficulty of obtaining ID is about the same as the difficulty of getting vaccinated (and I had to show ID to get vaccinated).
Getting ID as an adult if your family is dysfunctional is way way harder than getting vaccinated. Getting ID is a simple process if (and only if) step 1 is "you ask your parents to give you your birth certificate and social security cards, and they do have them and hand them over promptly" and also there is an appropriate office with reasonable hours that you can get to with the transportation you have during hours when you're not needed at work.
If you have to actually figure out how to get your primary documents, or if your county offices are sufficiently kafkaesque, it can get surprisingly challenging.
Do you think the Democrats are solving any racisms? What incentive do they have to solve a racism? If they solved racism, black people would vote more like the mainstream instead of massively for democrats. If anything, you have a vested interest in hyping the racism and race difference if the minority is in your community while providing symbolic patronage but not enough to actually solve the problem.
Well for one I'd like to define the problem first. Racism had become so amorphous that it's almost useless these days to pinpoint meaning.
I agree with you that the Democrats attempt to benefit from creating a demand for racism, amorphously defined as it is, that seems to exceed the supply.
It should be outside the Overton window for me to have a grievance against you because of what your ancestors did to my ancestors. Let bygones be bygones.
(and the impression that Europeans in 1600-1914 were especially evil is based a distortion of history. If anything their moral norms were a little better than their contemporaries elsewhere [e.g, no cannibalism, no scalping, no human sacrifice, being early to abolish slavery] , but they had more might with which to pursue the universal objectives of territory, resources, and prestige and were pretty successful at it. So now the descendants of the losers have grievances against the descendants of the winners even though if the Balance of Power were reversed the losers' ancestors would have done the same or worse.)
It can only be outside the Overton window when you are no longer economically effected by what your ancestors did to my ancestors. As long as wealth is intergenerational, the person whose ancestors were hurt will be worse off. If your grandfather took money from my grandfather and gave that money to you, it's perfectly reasonable for me to want their money back.
The issue would be helped massively if we had a 100% inheritance tax and peoples education (and credentials!) couldn't be influenced by the wealth of their parents.
The state definitely *could* do it, at gunpoint, but I don't think that would be a good idea. Hopefully there's some middle ground that is both helpful but not too tyrannical.
Georgia ran lottery to randomly give away huge tracts of land. There was a 50 year follow-up study:
"Sons of winners have no better adult outcomes (wealth, income, literacy) than the sons of non-winners, and winners’ grandchildren do not have higher literacy or school attendance than non-winners’ grandchildren."
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w19348/w19348.pdf
In another study, adoptive parent SES didn't correlate at all with adoptive child SES as an adult. (can't find the link)
In another study, intergenerational correlations in income were shown to be mediated by eduPGS to a large degree (can't find the link)
I'm kind of surprised that even in 1832 it had no long-term effect.
Land is hard to destroy, so I don't think the destruction of assets during the civil war applies so much to yeoman farmers whose main asset was land.
I think that's an interesting study, but I am very sceptical about generalising from land grants in the 1830s to the effects of other forms of wealth in other times and cultures.
I don't think that's right: after all African Americans are much better off economically than sub-Saharan Africans. So if we can judge people based on the long term economical effects of the actions my ancestors took towards yours, then black people would owe white people a debt of gratitude. I don't think they do. I don't think they owe white people anything.
Sub-Saharan Africans were also hurt by actions taken by Europeans, so it's not an equal comparison. It's hard to say exactly how it would've ended up in the counterfactual where Europe never affected sub-Saharan African, but the countries that were relatively less exploited by Europeans in the 1800s (eg. Japan, Korea) tend to be better off today. Some countries in the middle-east was less exploited and were doing fairly well prior to oil.
within Africa, the duration of colonization is positively correlated to GDP per capita now, so that's a strike against "poor because exploited".
Also within Africa, GDP per capita rankings relative to the rest of the world were higher pre-decolonization than they are now. That's strike two against "poor because exploited".
Rome certainly exploited the Gauls, but I don't think the Gauls' descendents ended up worse off because of it. Quite the contrary. They got a lot of new technology and ideas and written language which eventually made them better off.
GDP per capita during colonization is meaningless since the economy is forced to produce economic goods at the cost of social welfare. The US could temporarily increase its GDP by forcing all teachers to instead be construction workers and making children work in factories, but that doesn't mean that the US is better off doing so.
And you would also expect colonization to be correlated with GDP per capita since the countries that were colonized first are the countries that were the easiest and most rewarding to extract resources from. Mines are valuable both today and in the 19th century. Countries that were relatively difficult to develop for geographic reasons are still relatively difficult to develop. That doesn't mean that exploitation causes economic growth.
in the second paragraph I'm referring to this graph: https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth#which-countries-achieved-economic-growth-and-why-does-it-matter
The vast majority of the countries in Africa are below the global average growth line, and the exceptions are interesting:
Equatorial Guinea: major exporter of oil
Botswana: major exporter of diamonds
Mauritius: less than half black
> Sub-Saharan Africans were also hurt by actions taken by Europeans
Were they? Where's the evidence for that?
Even the poorest African countries these days have, in some places, things like running water, electricity, toilets, modern(ish) hospitals and agricultural practices... none of which they would be likely to have come up with on their own without European contact. Sub-Saharan African countries are poor by the standards of the rest of the world, but not by the standards that they had in circa 1500.
Certainly at a basic level sub-Saharan African was exploited in the past by Europeans, just look at what Belgium did in the Congo. Theoretically that could have had limited effect on today. However consider that Japan also has those things today and would not have developed (most) them without European contact. But Japan wasn't ruthlessly exploited by Europeans and is much better off today because of it.
"the countries that were relatively less exploited by Europeans in the 1800s (eg. Japan, Korea) tend to be better off today. "
And why weren't they colonized? Sub-Saharan climate and pathogens was not favorable to Europeans, why didn't Europeans colonize Korea and Japan with their temperate climates instead? Maybe because those were already the most developed non-western countries and so are not a fair-comparison group? Liberia and Ethiopia would tell you more.
To be fair, Japan when Commodore Perry arrived was pretty technologically backward, having sat in isolated stagnation for a good 200 years. And at the end of WWII South Korea was a rural and agricultural backwater, poorer than the Philippines.
Korea and Japan didn't have the raw resources of sub-Saharan Africa, the base number of people (useful as soldiers and working in the extractive institutions), and were just a lot further away from Europe.
Lets take at face value that Sub-Saharan Africa would be richer and more prosperous today if they had not been hurt by the actions of Europeans. Doesn't that mean African-Americans owe White Americans an even greater debt of gratitude? If we hadn't bought them and put them to work in America they would have been exploited by European Colonization. Thanks to us, they now enjoy much greater economic success! They should be paying us back! /s
Of course, this is nonsense.
Korea was colonized by Japan.
Yes, but for a shorter amount of time and in a way, from my understanding, that was less about resource extraction. I'm only vaguely familiar with it though, so I could be mistaken.
After two or three generations in the United States (or most any other modern liberal democracy), it is highly unlikely that you are being economically affected by what anyone's ancestors did to your ancestors. We can see that from the many waves of immigrants whose ancestors were screwed out of everything but the clothes on their backs by someone else's foreign ancestors, and then subject to a generation of nativist bigotry by the ancestors of contemporary middle-class Americans, but within a generation or two are solidly middle-class Americans.
Multi-generational poverty, whether among inner-city blacks or Appalachian whites, isn't the permanently-entrenched result of someone screwing over someone else's ancestors. I'll leave it to you to figure out what does cause it.
>>After two or three generations in the United States (or most any other modern liberal democracy), it is highly unlikely that you are being economically affected by what anyone's ancestors did to your ancestors.
Do you have a source for this? You seem to be citing evidence for the proposition "social mobility is not 0%" in support of the proposition "social mobility is 100%" and hoping no-one notices. But actually, we know that while rags-to-riches absolutely does sometimes happen, children of poor parents are much more likely to grow up to be poor than children of rich parents.
And if someone screws over not just your ancestors as individuals, but the entire culture and community that they're part of, I'd expect that to be much more likely to have effects lasting over multiple generations.
This should do for a start.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/11/1/20942642/study-paper-american-dream-economic-mobility-immigrant-income-boustan-abramitzky-jacome-perez
Also, https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/31186/1001162-immigration-and-economic-mobility.pdf
Intergenerational social mobility for immigrants has always been high, even when the original immigrants were "screwed out of everything" by the process of immigration and/or by whatever they were trying to escape. Intergenerational social mobility for immigrants has always been high, even when the immigrants and their children and their children's children have been of a visibly different race and subject to both racist and nativist bigotry to the extent such things exist. Intergenerational social mobility for immigrants has always been high even when the immigrants are blacker than the average American Descendent of Slavery and Jim Crow.
There are demographic groups for which intergenerational social mobility is low, but there is plenty of contrary evidence for the theories, "it's because their ancestors were screwed over by someone else's ancestors" and "because racism". Have you *considered* looking for other theories?
>It should be outside the Overton window for me to have a grievance against you because of what your ancestors did to my ancestors. Let bygones be bygones.
Cool, so you're ok if I throw you and your family out of your house at gunpoint, move my family in, shoot you, then kill myself? You feel my family should keep the house, and yours should be homeless, at that point?
Lots of poor fathers might be willing to take that deal if it means their family gets to live in a mansion after they're gone. There are lots of despair suicides among the poor already, this seems like an amazing deal for some of them.
In the real world, theft and exploitation explain almost none of the wealth of the wealthy and almost none of the poverty of the poor.
What?
You think Native American incomes being 44% lower than white incomes has nothing to do with having all their wealth confiscated and being put on reservations for centuries? You think black incomes being 56% lower than white incomes has nothing to do with it *their living grandparents* living under Jim Crow and their earlier ancestors being literal slaves unable to own property or be educated?
Take all American politics out of the equation - if I told you about a fantasy setting where half-orcs were enslaved for hundreds of years and then denied civil rights and excluded from institutions until 2 generations ago, you would expect them to still be an economic underclass in that setting. You just can't escape the effects of history that quickly
"You just can't escape the effects of history that quickly"
1. South Korea did, a few decades after Japanese imperialists and communist invaders were kicked out.
2. Jews did, only a couple of decades after the holocaust.
3. Japanese-Americans did, only a couple of decades after FDR had them stripped of property and sent to internment camps.
4. Irish-Americans did, only a few decades after the potato famine forced them to leave Ireland with nothing.
5. Vietnamese-Americans did, only a couple decades after being dirt-poor in Vietnam and oppressed by a communist dictator.
Intergenerational wealth is barely even a thing. Prodigal sons spend it and lose it on bad investments. New people make new fortunes. There was a 60% turnover rate on the Forbes 400 over just 12 years.
For me it's not about ancestors - it's about how racial discrimination operates in our society, today. My ancestors weren't even in the US until the 20th century and had nothing to do with slavery. So I'll start with a personal example of racial discrimination.
Many years ago I worked at a community theatre and we were doing some renovations. I went home very late one night after a late show and afterparty - it must have been around 4am, when the buses stopped running, so I was walking down the street in Ridgewood, Queens from the L train to my home, which was about 3km. My clothes were covered in paint spatters and gypsum dust. A black man was walking the other way down the street and when we approached each other he asked if I could spare some change for the subway fare. For context, he didn't look homeless or disheveled - his clothes were certainly cleaner than mine. I gave the guy subway fare and by chance we ended up in conversation. After about a minute, an unmarked car pulled up and flashed police lights at us. Four plainclothes officers emerged - one from each door, simultaneously - it was all very dramatic. The officers walked up to us and one of them addressed me with the following words:
"Excuse me, sir: is this guy bothering you?"
"No," I said. "We're just having a conversation."
The police officer apparently felt the need to justify his suspicions to me, because he explained: "Cause you know, when you see a White guy and a Black guy out on a street corner at night, you have to think it's either a drug deal or some kind of problem."
"Ah. No problem. Just a couple of neighbors talking."
The officer then asked if I was carrying anything - drugs, weapons, etc. I admitted that I was carrying a utility knife, which I had been using to cut sheet rock all day. The officer asked to see it and I handed it over. He inspected it and then suggested that in the future I should leave it in a locker at work rather than carry it around. By the way, I know the law in New York City, and you are definitely allowed to carry a utility knife home from work. Then they sent me on my way.
As I walked away, I turned and saw that the Black guy was being held up against the hood of the police car and frisked. I'm not sure how much you know about stop and frisk in New York City (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop-and-frisk_in_New_York_City) but there is ample data. I am just telling you this story because it was so unambiguously and explicitly racist, with the officer in charge openly mentioning race in his explanation for the stop. I, a dusty, paint-splattered, disheveled White guy with a knife was not frisked. He, a Black guy, clean, non-threatening, and vouched for by me, was frisked. I know there are explanations for the disparate racial impacts of stop-and-frisk - data showing that stops correspond with neighborhoods with high crime rates which happen to be where Black people live, or that they correspond with higher rates of crime committed by Black people. This wasn't that. We were in the same neighborhood, on the same corner, involved in the same activity. We were racially profiled and I was judged as not a candidate for frisking, and he as a candidate for frisking, solely because of our respective races.
I have Black friends, Black relatives, Black neighbors (well, I did when I lived in the US), and I know for a fact that they experience racism right now, in today's America. I've witnessed it personally, on more than one occasion. So that would be one thing to work on fixing.
In terms of the politics, I definitely think that if police departments took steps to address police racism, Black Americans would be more likely to support pro-police political candidates (who in many cases are Republicans). I think if Republicans weren't transparently attempting to sabotage Black voting rights, many more Black Americans would support Republican candidates. I think there are a lot of socially-conservative, fiscally-conservative, religious, pro-police Black Americans who would gladly vote for conservative candidates if those candidates weren't either openly racist or proponents of openly racist policies and institutions.
But don't make the mistake of thinking that racism is an issue of ancestors or bygones. It's not even close.
That sucks that that happened to that guy, but we're talking about an n=1 anecdote of a one minute add-on to the inconvenience of getting stopped by police.
Here in Las Vegas I see obvious drug dealers all over the place. Often someone will try to sell me drugs within 10 feet outside the door as I exit a casino. Tourists are passed out on the sidewalk from taking too much heroin, or hallucinating and talking to themselves from taking too much of whatever. If the police just opened their eyes and frisked a few obvious drug dealers, they could find a lot of drugs (and illegal firearms) But they don't, because they're too afraid of false positives and seeming racist.
The utilitarian cost-benefit analysis should ask: how many false positives does it take to be bad enough to cancel out the benefit of a true positive? If the ratio is better than that, frisking is worth it. But maybe they can also get better at targeting it instead of just sliding a giant lever from "less" to "more" frisking.
BTW it was kind of funny when, at the peak of the lockdown in 2020, when the whole strip was closed for almost three months, the career drug dealers of Las Vegas adapted to it by loitering in front of every grocery store and major intersection in Summerlin. It was kind of ridiculous, because there were so many of them fighting for so few customers, and because they were so obvious. After the casinos reopened, they went back to the strip and downtown.
They might as well just legalize all drugs and tax and regulate them, instead of having this weird system of de facto looking the other way 99% of the time, but occasionally throwing some random unlucky person into jail for a long time.
"They might as well just legalize all drugs and tax and regulate them"
Agreed, and I'd add provisions for treating addiction as a health care problem, using Portugal as a model.
You only need one "anecdote" to prove that something exists. My comment was a response to your implication that solving racism was about addressing the crimes of our ancestors. I simply provided a counterexample: racism is not limited to ancestors. I, a White American whose ancestors had nothing to do with slavery and weren't even in the same hemisphere at the time, received the privilege of being treated with deference and respect by officers of the law. My neighbor, a Black American, did not receive that privilege. I see that as a problem which needs to be solved, and again, it has nothing to do with our ancestors.
But just to be clear, is it your contention that this particular instance of racism was the only instance of racism to occur in the United States in the last two decades, and I just happened to be lucky to have witnessed it? Or do you acknowledge that this is the sort of thing that Black people are talking about when they talk about police racism?
"Here in Las Vegas I see obvious drug dealers all over the place."
I'm not sure what this has to do with the question of racism unless it is your contention that Blackness is a constituent element of being an "obvious drug dealer". (I also don't agree that recreational drug use should be a matter which merits police intervention, but let's put that aside.) If you are arguing in favor of racial profiling by police, then you aren't arguing that racism doesn't exist - you are arguing instead that we should consider the benefits of racism.
But perhaps what you meant to say is that police are engaging in "reverse" racial profiling - declining to stop Black "obvious drug dealers" for fear of being called racist? That does not seem to comport with statistics which show that Black Americans are disproportionately subject to stop-and-frisk but I haven't specifically looked at data from Las Vegas, so you may be right and I'd be open to being convinced.
In any case, I would note that the solution to police being afraid to be called racist for frisking a Black person would be for police to take measures to alter the public perception that they are racist - in other words, solving the problem I've identified also has the benefit of solving the problem you've identified.
I wasn't saying that the ancestral-grievances thing is the only race-related thing that needs to be solved, so it was a "counterexample" to something I didn't say.
My profile of an obvious drug dealer is someone of any race who loiters at the entrance to an establishment for a long time, isn't on their phone, has bulging pockets, makes eye-contact with a lot of random strangers passing by, and occasionally says something to them like "hey bro, you need anything"?
The police could probably catch a lot of obvious drug dealers if they paid attention and were willing to risk a 40% false positive rate and a news story about a false positive who happened to be black. Seems like the pendulum here has swung all the way to the "less frisking" side so much so that even obvious drug dealers have free reign and this is a problem in terms of tourists ODing on adulturated street drugs that they ought to be able to buy in safer legal dispensaries instead.
Back to the main topic, if you look closely at the US statistics, evidence of a net-average police bias against black people is not there. Blacks are a smaller percentage of violent crime arrests than violent crime offenders on the national crime victimization survey (a government survey that asks a large representative sample of Americans about their victimization by crime). Blacks are also shot less by cops relative to their violent crime rates and cop-killing rates.
Relevant graphs to back up all the claims in the preceding paragraph, with sources inline:
https://imgur.com/a/EEpmWIU
Link to a blog post with much more than you ever wanted to know about data pertaining to alleged police biases: https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2019/08/10/on-racial-bias-in-police-shootings/
"I wasn't saying that the ancestral-grievances thing is the only race-related thing that needs to be solved, so it was a "counterexample" to something I didn't say."
I don't know of any way to interpret your comment other than in the context of what it was a reply to, but if this is not what you meant, then what point, if any, were you trying to make by bringing up the idea of ancestral grievances?
"evidence of a net-average police bias against black people is not there"
Again, I'm not talking about a net-average police bias - I'm talking about the impact of individual instances of police bias on the ability of conservatives to attract Black voters into a coalition. If 9 out of 10 Black voters know someone who has been (or believes they have been) discriminated against by police then the party that talks about addressing police bias is going to get more traction than the party that dismisses those concerns.
That said, we could presumably spend years exchanging studies which prove or disprove police racism in the US. I could give you this list - https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/opinions/systemic-racism-police-evidence-criminal-justice-system/ - and you could give me this list - https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2020/06/03/american-racism-and-the-anti-white-left/ - and we could debate each study in each list, and other studies from other lists, to try to arrive at a reasonable interpretation, and finally at the end of the process perhaps we would have reached some shared understanding or perhaps we would have concluded that we have incompatible values or evidentiary standards. But your claim that evidence of "net-average" racism "isn't there" is mistaken - there's tons of evidence from hundreds of studies - we just, presumably, at present don't agree on the interpretation of that evidence.
And for the many people who interpret that evidence as supporting the conclusion that there is net racism amongst American police, that conclusion provides a barrier to cooperation on other potential issues of agreement.
You sound opposed to the drug war, yet also strangely convinced that it works. It doesn't. Stricter enforcement has been tried. It does not have a noticeable impact on drug use or overdose deaths. People end up getting their drugs one way or another. If you arrest a dealer, another one will be hungry enough to fill the job in no time. Cops know this at this point. Going buck wild arresting every drug dealer just fills up the courts and prisons and requires administrative work, all for no actual reduction in drug use or deaths. It's primarily useful as a tool for easily arresting people responsible for more serious crimes.
I interpreted Scott's statement as a joke. Fruitful discussion can still come from this topic of course.
Well Scott is being a little glib, I do think the most dangerous thing for the Left, and I say this as a member of the Left, is if there was a conservative movement, that could appeal to larger swaths of the minority vote. The issue is, many of those socially conservative minority voters are more liberal on the questions that the socially conservative base cares about right now, aka, immigration and police reform.
Plus, to be blunt, your average conservative black voter cares less about something like trans issues than your average conservative white voter.
Tim Scott, 2024. Mark it down.
Getting to equality in terms of things like wealth, income, geographic spread, homeownership, representation in positions of power, etc. etc. etc., so that minorities no longer have divergent interests from white people.
Simple experiment: would a neutral company that takes a conservative position benefit economically or be hurt economically? The former would back Scott’s theory (they would benefit but just don’t because they’re led by all progressives), the latter would back Richards (they would be hurt because progressives care more and would cause a big stink).
I think the company being relatively neutral (ie not Chick Fil A) is important here.
My own experience working in corporate finance and dealing with multi-billion dollar CEOs makes me lean toward Richard’s explanation. Most C-level don’t really care about wokeness and largely think it’s silly - but they’re relatively ambivalent and just don’t want to deal with the headache.
Also an important piece that I think is missing: yes most educated financial and biz elite (including C level execs I work with) are prob Democrats - but the type of people that control institutions are *WAY* to the left of them. Current American elite institutions aren’t just unrepresentative of the median American, they’re unrepresentative of the median *Democratic voter*.
Josh Barro had an economic argument about corporations being "woke" because young potential new customers & employees are: https://www.businessinsider.com/nike-colin-kaepernick-ad-brands-more-liberal-2018-9?op=1
I don't think that explains the extent though. Young potential customers/employees are "woke" - but they're also fiercly intolerant to anything that isn't also "woke".
It's also not that a majority of employees are "woke", but a vocal minority are, and the rest of us have learned to shut up if we want to keep our jobs.
Preach. We shouldn’t anthropomorphize Corporations. Management responds to incentives and there’s an incentive to be woke right now. 10 years ago it was “thank you for your service”.
You don’t get to run large organizations by being ideologically fussy.
The existence of ESG bonds, which provide financing at a lower interest rates for companies that promote left wing ideals, quantifies this.
Trust busting…conservative of liberal?
Depends on the industry & company.
I think anti trust lives more on the Establishment vs Anti Establishment axis right now.
I take issue with the idea that "liberals dominate" - domination implies some kind of set of tangible victories, of which we see hardly any. Gay marriage I guess? Healthcare exchanges? Corporations are as powerful as ever, the military is as big as ever, the welfare state hasn't blown up, there hasn't been significant progress on climate change, etc. Culture war narratives simply perpetuate the status quo, which academia/corporations/media/politicians all find useful for different reasons. If liberalism is supposedly so powerful, why does everything look so illiberal in practice?
Corporations have a massive amount of power. You can get kicked off Twitter, Facebook, etc. Try to start a competitor to those? Amazon Web Services might not host you. Or Paypal, banks, etc. won't allow you into the financial system. Write a book that Amazon won't sell? Good luck getting anyone to publish it. Corporations can't jail you, but they can keep you from using your assets and ban you from plenty of activities. Corporations have also been threatening legislatures and voters for years (MLB moving the all-star game out of Georgia, pressure from various companies on Indiana and NC for laws seen as anti-gay or anti-trans).
>You can get kicked off Twitter, Facebook, etc.
No I can't, because I don't use them.
Corporations do have a lot of power over people's lives though to the degree that their lobbyists are immensely influential in terms of actually shaping the law. Much of the soft power which corporations exert is exerted *on* the government.
Academia has no power over us? I must have been imagining it when I was confined to my home despite not being sick, purely on the "advice" of academics? I guess it wasn't academics who came up with any of the other policies that have dominated our lives in the past year and a half. And I guess government policies on energy and climate don't come from academics either.
Please. Our society is run by academics. That's part of the problem with it!
>>Academia has no power over your life once you graduate.
That strikes me as an odd way of framing it.
1. Academic institutions control access to most desirable careers, both through the formal credentialing function and in the more informal sense of conferring social and cultural capital necessary to advance in many professions.
2. Most societies expend a lot of energy on inculcating a particular set of beliefs and dispositions in the young. The implicit assumption is that influencing people at a malleable age gives leverage over how they'll think and behave throughout the life-cycle. It'd be very surprising if that assumption were totally wrong.
3. Even if all we care about is academia's supervisory authority over people during the time they're enrolled as students, that period has greatly expanded in absolute terms. People who used to exit the system after high school now routinely go on to 5-6 years of postsecondary study. In the aggregate, that's a lot more time for whoever's running academia to run your life before you get to "once you graduate."
4. On the subject of government coercion... Like most people, I've never been to jail. So my experience of agents of the state exercising direct physical control over my person basically consists of (a) being patted down by TSA a handful of times a year, and (b) my entire time in K-12 public school. Which strikes you as a more significant exercise of power?
"1. Academic institutions control access to most desirable careers, both through the formal credentialing function and in the more informal sense of conferring social and cultural capital necessary to advance in many professions."
This seems a bit like, "Windows control access to the most important and life giving air. Thus they hold the most power."
I mean, a window is just a commonplace object with no agency of its own. But if there were a group of people sitting around deciding for everybody else who gets to have air to breathe and who doesn't, then yeah, I guess I'd call that a position of power.
So are you making a fully general counterargument against controlling access to things of value ever being a form of power? Or is the claim that the way in which academia gatekeeps is more passive and window-like as opposed to, say, the way a Bond villain might control access to air?
I am pointing out that for the most part academic gatekeeping is like a window. If you have the grades and you can pass a test you can get into a university. You might have to write an essay.
And whether you are Liberal or Conservative you probably ought to write the essay as if you are capable of pretending to fit in with the people who are likely to be your classmates.
>But if there were a group of people sitting around deciding for everybody else who gets to have air to breathe and who doesn't, then yeah, I guess I'd call that a position of power.
That would depend on how much discretion they have in making that decision, and how much information they have with which to exercise that discretion. Trying to discern someone's sociopolitical views from their high school transcript, SAT score, and the essay they wrote in a conscious attempt to game the system, doesn't give you all that much to work with.
Realistically, I do not believe that "academic institutions" have the power to lock anyone who would likely learn to be a competent engineer or accountant with a decent education, out of a desirable career in engineering or accounting. *Maybe* your engineering career starts out half a rung lower on the ladder because MIT was trying to fill an informal quota of woke minority candidates that year and you had to go to State instead. But the idea that you have to be or pose as woke or progressive or even just liberal to enter and advance in a wide range of desirable careers, does not pass the giggle test with me.
There are probably *some* careers where that is the case, and they may be particularly influential ones in shaping public discourse (e.g. journalism). But that's a much narrower claim, and if that's all there is to it we'd expect to still see plenty of well-paid engineers, accountants, etc, donating to the GOP. So we're looking for something different here.
In trying to understand the force of the "window" analogy -- which I grasp better now, thanks to Robert for clarifying -- I may have given a misleading impression about what I was originally arguing.
I never said anything about politicizing admissions decisions or anybody needing to "pose" to avoid being locked out. My claim was that academia's gatekeeper function gave it a certain kind of social power. I didn't say that power was easily instrumentalized in the service of narrowly political ends.
I think we probably have some minor differences about how much to be interested in the picking-winners-and-losers aspect of the gatekeeping. Sometimes this looks like, you're good at math, you always do well on the Big Math Test, you get waitlisted at MIT and go to State and come out with the same great career as an actuary you would've had in any case, and it's not obvious that the institution's internal culture made any difference to that outcome. Sometimes it looks like people driven to distraction parsing the nuances of what sort of cheese plate to bring to Amy Chua's house because she has a direct line to all the best federal clerkships and will reward your mastery of bizarre subtleties of Yale-local-culture etiquette.
But that's not really my point. I think you can abstract away from the question of institutions' discretion to advance or obstruct individual careers and still see how the gatekeeping role positions them to exert social influence in important ways.
It's like, imagine there's one bridge crossing the river into the big city, and you have a billboard next to the bridge. Anybody who pays the toll can use the bridge, but everybody has to cross at this one place and it usually takes a while for the traffic to clear. That'd be a pretty valuable place to own a billboard, right?
In other words, whenever a society decides, "our entire leadership class will be processed in their formative years through this one institution," that institution acquires an outsized ability to shape the character of society as a whole. In many historical societies, and some still today, that institution has been the military. In the US over the past couple generations, it's the university.
So if I were to tell you, like some fairy godmother, "John, I'm going to send you every single person who might someday become a leader of your society. You'll never get to choose who I give you, and you may never tell anyone which of the ones I send you like best. But you can decide everything about the context in which they first become inspired by ideas, acquire a worldview, fall in and out of love, make lifelong friends, take on adult responsibilities and acquire basic notions about fairness, duty, empathy, profit and honor, gain and loss. You decide what stories are venerated there, which words are sacred, what conduct is forgivable, which institutional forms become the template for future expectations. You may never penalize a student for rejecting your teaching. But I will guarantee that *nobody* attains a position of social prominence without passing through your school first."
Have I offered you a kind of power, or not?
Fish can't see water, I guess.
This.
Maybe its because liberalism is actually an engine of illiberalism?
As we become wealthier as a society, wealth becomes less salient. Basic needs are more likely to be met - and they are indeed better met now despite yawning inequality - so people's needs move up Maslow's pyramid. Today people not only want material security, they also want emotional security. That means demanding not only that you don't starve, but that society looks the way you want it to look. With the latter demand in mind, liberals are winning it in a walk.
Totally agree. Liberals are losing on all the consequential goals they've had for the past 20 years. Universal healthcare, wealth distribution via taxation, foreign policy, climate policy, gun control, pro-union legislation, constitutional reforms, voting reforms. Criminal justice and ending the drug war seems to be moving in the right direction, but *far* slower than should be the case. Gay marriage is the one big exception, and I would hardly consider it as consequential as the other categories I named.
I'm not surprised that two conservatives agree that the liberals are dominating, however. Conservatives also are achieving nothing of substance (maybe because the whole purpose of the party representing them seems to be to prevent anything substantive from happening?...) except for filling the courts with Federalist Society picks. Meanwhile they find themselves surrounded by more and more people espousing liberal opinions as public perception (and with it popular culture) generally shifts more and more to the left.
Another problem I have with this whole analysis is that it seems to conceive of liberalism purely as "wokism", whereas I consider wokism to just be an annoying, distracting sideshow from genuinely worthwhile liberal (left) policies. Scott has a tendency to focus too much on the woke aspects of the left, which is horribly unproductive in my view.
Yet another problem I have with the analysis is that it ignores a major and obvious interpretation of what we're seeing - that more educated people lean more liberal because the more you learn, the more you find liberal arguments more convincing...as in the facts are, in fact, on the side of the left. I'm not dismissing other explanations, but it kinda seems like this interpretation should be the default.
One final note: I generally prefer to distinguish between "liberals" and "the left" and "progressives", but they seemed to use the terms more or less interchangeably here to mean the broader left-of-center, democratic-voting coalition, so I did as well.
So the argument here would be that in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, the facts were on the side of the right-wing parties?
That would be the default assumption to start from, yes. I don't know enough about right-wing parties from the time to provide a thorough analysis or anything though. From what I do know about the 70s and 80s at least, I could offer different explanations that might override that default assumption.
From the 1950s graph, it looks like the income effect could be part of an alternate explanation.
What seems difficult, though, is that it seems hard to imagine both that the right wing parties were right on the facts in the 50s-80s and the left wing are right in the 90s-10s. Not impossible to believe, of course, but ... tricky.
I'm certainly oversimplifying (so possibly not helpful), but it would seem odd to say, "to be the most correct, you have to believe what the right-wing parties believed in 1960 and what the left-wing parties believe in 2020".
Yes, it would seem odd to say that. There's no need to come to such a reductive explanation. There are certainly lots of factors at play here. There's a fair amount of overlap between what would be considered left vs right viewpoints now and then, not to mention the world changed enormously throughout that time and probably made views which were appropriate and justified in 1960 less appropriate and justified in 2020.
It just seems odd to me to entirely ignore the (partial) explanation "being educated makes you know more, and knowing more makes you end up more liberal in recent decades".
In the eighties Democratic senator Daniel Moynihan called the GOP "the party of ideas." Would anyone say that today?
In that (somewhat famous) quote about the stupid party and the evil party, aren't the Republicans the stupid one? Though I don't know the date on the quote, so maybe it was after the shift ...
Literally no
The Affordable Care Act might not have achieved universal healthcare, but it got pretty close. Losing on healthcare would be like "Republicans are slowly gutting Medicare by cutting reimbursement rates and shrinking the scope of services it covers," and that hasn't been the case at all. Instead the trend is toward expanded coverage via state level Medicaid programs and health insurance exchanges. Let's not forget that the Bush Administration oversaw a large expansion of Medicare ~15 years ago, too. Maybe progressives haven't gotten everything they wanted in this regard, but they've gotten....say 60% of it, maybe?
Yeah this is a fair response. Part of the issue here is that I said "universal healthcare" when I really specifically meant single-payer, government-run healthcare. Call it Medicare for All, if you want. From most progressive perspectives (I'm making a distinction here from mere democrats), the ACA was never going to "fix" the healthcare system, and it predictably hasn't brought our costs down substantially. It's categorically different from Medicare for All, which is the real goal of most progressives. I can see how you'd say we've gotten 60% of our goal there, but from my perspective it's closer to 25%. Still nice, but far slower than I would have hoped for us to progress on that issue.
The thing is, most people want progressive change, but the sizable minority of conservatives prevents that from happening, or slows it down. So it's like the "wins" are lagging behind public support, which can make the so-far-unattained-wins feel like losses.
Put me in the "fish can't see water" camp here.
Why is it that right-wingers are "conservatives" anyway? Why don't we live in a society where it's the left-wingers who are "conservative" and the right-wingers are perpetually pushing society further and further towards their right-wing utopia while the left-wingers attempt to stand athwart history crying "Stop!"
The standard explanation is the same as the one that many physicists give for the direction of the second law of thermodynamics. The initial state of the universe/the political system was a state of extremely low entropy (big bang)/extreme right-wingery (absolute monarchy with an established religion). Drift should be expected to move towards the center of the mass of possible states, which is away from that initial state.
I guess that makes sense in a world view where "Left" and "Right" are really two sides of some sort of political spectrum.
My world view looks more like this: a vast multi-dimensional political space, where "Left" is a small region of possibility space and everything else is labelled "Right" by default. (This explains why theocracy, big-business Romneyism, fascism and libertarianism are all labelled "Right" despite having nothing in common while "Left" positions differ only in exactly how much practicality you're willing to season your Marxism with.) In this world view, the question is why people keep wanting to drag us one-dimensionally back and forth from the very specific "Right" point where we started (divine right of kings etc) to the small region labelled "Left" instead of exploring all the other possible regions of political solution space.
I agree that it's better to think of the space as highly dimensional.
I disagree that the "Right" is more diverse than the "Left". Woke YIMBY technocrats, anti-woke Marxists, anarcho-communists, and Millian liberals all count as "Left" in the same way as the four examples you give count as "Right".
Absolute monarchy was a 17th c. innovation.
Isn't it all because of the National Assembly during the French Revolution? Folks that wanted a liberal republic (Robespierre et all) sat on the left while the folks that wanted a constitutional monarchy(/some royalists) sat on the right (until they got purged). In the context of 1790s France, that split works. Unfortunately, it is no longer the 1790s and most of the world isn't in France so the whole left-wing/progressive and right-wing/conservative terminology no longer makes sense, but that's what we're stuck with.
On some issues, that's exactly what's happening. But conservatives are still called conservatives, regardless. Names are weird like that.
Reagan, patron saint of modern American conservatism, changed a lot of stuff. But that didn't make the people who wanted to preserve the previous status quo against his changes into conservatives. The nomenclature remains the same, even when the conservatives are trying to make progress and the progressives are trying to conserve things.
Affirmative action continues to exist. (And it's expanding at least rhetorically—I don't know if it's actual effect is increasing.)
Whoo-de-doo. Is that seriously your definition of liberals "dominating"? Pathetic.
I'm not sure I understand the nature of the objection being raised here. Nobody's claiming that the list of institutions dominated by liberals includes Congress, or state legislatures, or the federal judiciary. If you're just asking, why doesn't control of various nongovernmental bodies (universities, media, tech companies) translate more consistently into leverage over the political system, I agree that that is a very good and interesting question!
But this came across more as acting like liberals' inability to control the political process counts somehow as evidence against liberals controlling all sorts of other institutions that are influential in their own right.
I would like to separate out two phenomena: self-interest and ideology/religion. From a pure self-interest perspective, rich people's self-interest tends to align them with the right and poor people's self-interest tends to align them with the left. However religion/ideology is much more important than self-interest. Also, on the margin, poor people will tend to vote more according to self-interest (for obvious reasons) while rich people can better "afford" to vote according to religion or conscience. I think that in the 50's there was one dominant religion in the US, namely Christianity, which was right-wing affiliated. In 2010, there were two religions, namely, Christianity/traditionalism and leftism/humanism, which were strongly correlated with education (and thus also income). People in 2010 were also much richer in real terms than people in the 50's, and thus could afford to vote their conscience more. I think this explains the large-scale phenomenon of elites going to the left. There is a separate and probably at least partially internet-driven phenomenon of hyperpolarization (that creates things like the blue bubble diagram of institutions), where a "critical mass" of a particular ideology in a particular environment creates a purity spiral, like what happened with Christianity in the late Roman empire or revolutionary radicalism in the French revolution.
This is also important - in 1910, children were being sent to work where their appendanges were being ripped off, and very rich men were shrugging at it.
OTOH, and I say this as a social democrat who supports a larger welfare state, life isn't that bad for even many poor people in the US, who are housed in decent housing, have access to thousands of hours of entertainment, and cheap, calorie dense food.
> in 1910, children were being sent to work where their appendanges were being ripped off, and very rich men were shrugging at it.
I mean, they still are, and we still are, it's just that we've outsourced all the horrendous labour conditions to China where we don't have to see it or think about it, and we can get our cheap plastic shit even cheaper.
"From a pure self-interest perspective, rich people's self-interest tends to align them with the right and poor people's self-interest tends to align them with the left"
Not true in general. Rich people who are rich through political influence, such as LBJ, find increases in government power to be in their self-interest. Poor people who are prevented from working by a minimum wage law that prices them off the market or from being barbers by licensing laws or from housing they can afford by restrictions on what housing it is legal to provide pushed from the left find their interest aligned with parts of the right.
I'm talking about trends, rather than particulars here, and even more specifically trends in perception rather than the reliability of those perceptions. In particular, people like LBJ are a very small minority and most rich people believe that they would be better off financially if right-wing politicians came to power. To say what I mean more clearly here's an example: I think if you polled people over 100k income whether they are Republican or Democrat then the split would be close to 50/50. But if you polled them whether they would do better financially under a Republican or Democratic president, >60% would say under a Republican president (and pre-Trump, I'd give the number as >70%). I also think that if you could somehow control for ideology (for example, if you polled people with similar views on moral issues) then poorer people would be more in support of welfare policies than rich people.
"People in 2010 were also much richer in real terms than people in the 50's, and thus could afford to vote their conscience more. "
Your vote has essentially zero chance of changing the outcome in a large population polity. The relevant self-interest consideration isn't how the policies you vote for would affect you but how your political position affects your interaction with those around you.
I think you're right that most people's "conscience" is far from some kind of Kantian ideal of consequentialist/independently articulated belief system. It is deeply embedded in social context and dependent on how what they believe would affect them. This is why I am calling it a religion or ideology vs. a clearly formalizable set of core principles, so we're in agreement here
This is technically true, but I think you're making the mistake of confusing humans with rational self-interested agents.
In fact, I think that perceived self-interest with respect to the parties' platforms does have a non-trivial impact on how many people vote, even though, as you say, the chance of actually changing the outcome is neglibible.
I know this is opening a can of worms, but I didn't see it mentioned anywhere else in the article or comments. In the long term, traditional religion is diminishing as a force in society. And traditional religion is part of the right-wing coalition and has been so since the left-right divide existed. In fact it was one of the fulcrum issues that caused the left to splinter off from traditional societies, which are closer to conservative positions. I predict conservatives will be unable to conserve traditional religion, which has historically been their number one duty. (Conservation of wealth is a more recent addition to their roster of duties.)
Now I make a distinction between traditional religion in particular and religion in general, because I see religion in general as a stickier phenomenon. Religion in general need not concern itself with a god, as long as it serves its main purpose of creating and sustaining myths that unify society. I already see the sprouts of a new kind of religion that moves beyond theology but nonetheless offers a totalizing worldview that outstrips the evidence in support of it.
When you make the distinction between "traditional religion" and "religion in general", would that divide things like Catholicism and Conservative Judaism from things like prosperity gospel megachurches?
No, I'm defining traditional religion as god-centered, so I would define all of those as traditional religions. While religion in general, as I am using the term, performs the function of being a shared myth that organizes a community and sets its norms. This could include Catholicism or Islam, but it could also include environmentalism, the Marxian dialectic, the Washington Consensus, etc. I know a lot of people like to require a deity for religion status, but I consider any system of received wisdom believed in because of community norms, and not because of personal reflection or investigation, to be of a religious nature. There are degrees and there's no hard cutoff, but a telltale sign is when common sense and conflicting experiences are dismissed in favor of an essentially deductive approach using an axiomatic framework.
I see this generalized form of religion as a necessity for social functioning, because not everyone has enough time to come up with their own epistemology, and getting everyone, or at least a lot of people, on the same page lubricates society. That's why it's sticky; as the traditional god religions diminish, they will be replaced by newer religions that are not god-centered but nonetheless build consensus via myth.
That sounds like Clifford Geertz's definition of religion (which I also happen to subscribe to)...
"Religion is a system of symbols which establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic."
And I think you're very correct about people being unable or unwilling to "come up with their own epistemology" — which I take to mean an unwillingness to question their assumptions and to examine their world in detail to test their assumptions.
My political outlook tests out as radical left and very non-authoritarian on the left/right authoritarian/non-authoritarian political compass — but I consider myself to be a utilitarian leftist and not an ideological leftist. And I've come to the conclusion that the reason righties, at least most Christianist righties, are generally so anti-science is that they consider science to be a competing religion. And in a certain way they're right, because most lefties embrace science as if it were a received religion — i.e without understanding how it works or its limitations. An unwavering trust in science without understanding I would call Scientism. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has made this very clear to me. My lefty friends say, "Trust the Science!" even though the science of the epidemic was still being worked out (and it's still is being worked out). But I find the right's suspicion of science more unsettling than the left's unqualified embracement of science, because at least the lefties (with a few exceptions) will let scientist do their research without interference. While the righties want to shut down scientific inquiry if i offends their sensibilities.
Clifford Geertz's definition is a better description than my own, but I think we're describing the same thing.
And yes, not all religions, according to this definition, are created equal. Some are better at describing the world accurately, or being humane, etc. I don't consider it good or even possible to excise religion from public life. The best we can hope for is a benign, accurate religion.
And I also agree, that for many and maybe even most people, science is a competing religion with Christianity et al. One reason the right is hobbled, perhaps permanently, is because its foundational belief system is on the wrong side of the evidence. And once that goes out the window, the edifice it leaves behind is pretty rickety. Lots of conservative (in the west) beliefs sprang from attitudes and beliefs grounded in Christianity. Foremost among them is an essentially top-down view of life (god created everything), rather than the bottom-up view that science has evidence for (everything began as plasma and differentiated into more complex arrangements). This top-down view of life is, at root, at odds with observed reality, and it's also the root of the authoritarian tendency on the right. (The left also has an authoritarian tendency, but it is justified differently.)
Re increased diversity, non-Hispanic whites are only about 60% of the US population. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/IPE120219
Scott wrote: "I think I would go with the same recommendations ... try to decrease the salience of college in society, so that not every smart person needs to get a college degree, and not every important job is degree-gated."
I don't think that would be possible with the way corporations need to be free to higher and fire their workforce to deal with economic positive and negative economic stresses. Charlie Stross discusses the rise of credentialism from a British perspective, but there's a lot similarities between what went down in the UK and the US during the 1980s...
"Consequences of Thatcher revolution include: emphasis on credentialism — if you don't have a job for life, you need proof (on paper) of skills that were formerly acquired in the workplace — combined with deprecation of apprenticeship system (where's the incentive to provide a 5 year apprenticeship for a trainee if they then turn round and go find a job elsewhere?). Demand for pieces of paper as proof of fitness for employment goes through the roof."
... and thus the increased salience of college education in today's "knowledge" society.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/10/sheepskin.html
I mean hire and not higher.
We all knew that. I know how that feels to see my own embarrassing typo though. Kinda sucks.
Generally nodding along with this post, while getting increasingly uncomfortable as more of the elephant comes into view and you don’t notice, and then it ends with a big fuck-you.
Scott, it’s simpler than you think, in the American context. There is an oligarchy dominating both parties, and many of the differences between them are fake, but the PEOPLE in the two parties have been sorted to be quite different and at odds, which suits the oligarchy. Also, one party is more reformable than the other.
From the right, it is obvious that the concept you are missing is “left entryism”—the left loves to infiltrate respected institutions and gut them, sometimes wearing the corpse as a skin suit to demand the respect it used to deserve. The right isn’t this devious, they prefer to simply avoid institutions they regard as bad rather than plunging in and remaking them. That does NOT MEAN THEY CARE LESS. It only means they’re stupid to have allowed themselves to ignore the entryist dynamic until the institutions were too far gone to defend.
I think entryism (at least as defined on wikipedia: "a political strategy in which an organisation or state encourages its members or supporters to join another, usually larger, organization") is attributing too much to top-down strategy something that can already be adequately explained by emergent phenomena. Once a party spends a couple decades denying global warming, it loses more of academia (and sympathetic individuals / organizations), which makes it *even less* likely to take positions that attract them in the future, since they are now an even narrower portion of their base.
Where this gets tricky is the elites in either faction have some ability to change the opinions and direct the attention of their base. If you went purely by public opinion surveys shortly before the Iraq war, you might come to the conclusion that Bush was a populist responding to some sort of grass-roots movement to invade Iraq.
Same thing with the (now waning) global-warming-denial movement, I don't think that either was responding to some strong, grass-roots opinion on climate science.
I think where the Republican party went wrong is that some time ago they were taken over by a narrower group of elites within the party when it used to contain a much wider group (Charles Murray basically is/was a member of the winning faction and describes the timeline in one of his books), which of course distances the party from the elites in society as a whole.
It looks like the current establishment is starting to lose control of the party, but I'd put decent odds for them holding on since they control most of (their faction's) media and it's easy enough for candidates to copy whatever rhetoric is popular right now. Long term there are demographic problems if you maintain democracy but I think the base is getting more sympathetic to alternatives (didn't Tucker recently spend a week promoting Orban?) so it could go either way really.
Name a few such organizations?
I think you have a good description of what the right did to the NRA, and is currently doing to the courts. IMO, the Supreme Court is there now.
Speaking of an Orban like natalist welfare state. Hungary's birth rate is down to 1.55 births per woman. With very little immigration the right in that country is all about the government doing whatever it can to get that number up. Would a continued fall in the US birth rate (and a clamp down on immigration) also push the right in the US toward a more statist/natalist welfare state direction?
Is there evidence that welfare states can improve fertility? Intuitively it seems like it would but last time I checked European countries have lower fertility than the United States. I could be wrong about this though.
France 1.88 births per woman. US 1.77.
Though if you exclude immigrant women from the French data it's also 1.77 https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_POPSOC_568_0001--french-fertility-is-the-highest-in.htm
And if we removed our immigrants the number would be?
Excluded I mean
It's been noted in many studies over the past fifty years that fertility goes down as the standard of living and/or economic security increases. Therefore, a welfare state that provided an optimal economic safety net for its citizens should have lower fertility rates than societies without any economic security. India and the various Southeast Asian countries have shown this pattern as the standard of living has increased. However, it's also been shown that command-and-control economies — which may provide a strong social safety net without economic opportunities — disincentivize procreation even further.
For instance, the fertility rate in the GDR dropped so dramatically in the late 1950s that the Government lowered the age of consent to 14 and actively encouraged teens to explore their sexuality (only heterosexual sexuality, though). I can't find them on Youtube anymore, but the GDR produced some very "frank" educational films to teach kids how to masturbate (without being visually explicit) and to teach kids about the stages of sexual arousal in males and females. These weren't very explicit either, but they did show how teens should make out (including heavy petting). Basically, it was, "You're sexually mature now, go out and have fun!" with the subtext of "make babies for the GDR."
https://osu.libguides.com/c.php?g=110269&p=713582
Rough outline of a theory:
1. values of a society are an adaptation to subsistence strategies
2. technological change drives changes in values, with conservatives trying to maintain values they learned from their parents/when they were kids, liberals trying to adapt to new circumstances
3. technological change is happening faster, so the division between liberals and conservatives is widening
4. in this context, liberals will tend to thrive as they are by definition the ones who are attempting to adapt to new technologies, and 4.a. the specific form of this thriving will be in education and tech
Again this is post-facto moralization of power politics by arguing your side is deriving the benefits through increased virtue as opposed to institutional capture.
It's not a moralization and I didn't say anything about virtue. I am not stating that one side has the "right" values and one has the "wrong" values. I am saying that one side makes a deliberate attempt to maintain received values while the other side makes a deliberate attempt to alter values in response to changes in circumstance. The latter strategy explains liberal domination of education and tech, without any requirement that the changed values are in any way "better" or more moral or virtuous.
I think the overall level of technological change is a bit slower now than it was 100 years ago, but one particular technology (social media) radically altered the habitat of memes by creating niche filter bubbles, and that's the source of most of the polarization. Essentially ethnogenesis induced by people splitting off into their own communities which reinforce whatever prior tendencies they had.
Maybe a downside of Archipelago is potentially creating a bunch of radically different cultures that hate each other. The internet is already sort of like Archipelago.
I'm more talking about how technology affects how we make a living. For example, we've had this transition to a knowledge and service economy. Arguably mental health/well-being is more important for knowledge/service workers compared to factory workers - service workers need to be able to deliver service with a smile, whereas factory workers presumably rarely had their moods policed on the factory floor. So modern liberals place a great deal of emphasis on mental health/"self-care" and have invented concepts like "emotional labor". Or perhaps you see these trends as self-involvement brought on by decadence, but if so, the decadence is still enabled by this transition from an economy of material production to an economy where productivity gains from technology have made it so most people don't have to be involved in material production.
And so maybe it's the case that adopting an ethic where taking care of your mind is of great importance and working with your hands is a secondary concern, if it is a concern at all, just ended up being a better fit for academia than the traditional/conservative "Protestant" work ethic (which is not to say that it is "objectively" better - just more adaptive to this context) and maybe that's why as the knowledge/service/gig economy grows, so too does liberal domination of academia. I don't know, it's just a vague theory.
It strikes me that technological change from 1950 to 2000 or so was slower than in the previous 50 years, but it's not clear that technological change since 2000 has been as slow. The smartphone and social media revolutions have made some very big changes in how people live, even if still not as big as the washing machine or the gas/electric oven.
Is having one side canceled from using the new technology an adaptation to the technology or a refusal to adapt to the technology?
Interesting question.
To begin to try to answer it, I suppose we should look at who is preventing people from using the internet? Worldwide, unsurprisingly it is authoritarian (that is, illiberal) regimes - overwhelmingly religious or ethnic nationalist and traditionalist - which engage in anything like mass cancellation from using the new technology. Here's a map of internet shutdowns in 2021 - https://www.accessnow.org/who-is-shutting-down-the-internet-in-2021/ - and I think the trend is clear.
Of course China is an interesting case because the traditionalists are left-wing rather than right-wing and so the main political division is between the liberals and the left. It will be interesting to see if US politics goes that way - e.g. if libertarians stage a takeover of the Republican party and illiberal progressives takeover the Democratic party - although I personally don't think either of those outcomes are likely. In any case it's instructive to note that you can't necessarily conflate liberalism with leftism for the purposes of answering this question.
I think it bears mentioning that authoritarian-leaning figures like Erdogan have resorted to internet blackouts to quell resistance and prevent anti-regime organization, so this map isn't necessarily comprehensive - it's only for 2021.
So I think I would say that attempts to prevent people from using a new technology would be more associated with authoritarianism and attempts to maintain the status quo.
Your use of the term "canceled" implies that you are referring specifically to American progressive activities, but most cancelations that I could find by google did not involve social media bans, and I've never heard of a cancelation which involved anything like a blanket internet ban. I was able to find two prominent examples of conservatives being shut out of individual internet services - AWS canceling parler, and twitter canceling Trump. Both of these were associated with the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
In the interests of utter fairness I think we need to explicitly compare these examples to authoritarian internet shutdowns to see if they are indeed the same sort of thing. After all, if it's fair for AWS to refuse to host parler after an "insurrection", isn't it fair for Erdogan to shut down access to facebook, twitter, and youtube during an ongoing coup attempt?
I have a slight libertarian inclination towards drawing a very sharp distinction between the actions of a private corporation and the actions of a state authority backed by a police force and a military, so it seems to me that these are not the same sort of thing at all. But I have also previously argued that the state should get involved in regulating whether, and under which circumstances, private corporations (like AWS or twitter) can unilaterally deplatform someone (like parler or Trump) for ideological reasons. Perhaps if you believe that a bakery should not be allowed to refuse service to a gay couple for ideological reasons, that implies that a social media company should not be allowed to refuse service to a conservative for ideological reasons. But is it liberal or illiberal for the government to ban ideological deplatforming? It seems like it's both, which is why the libertarian distinction may not be the most useful lens through which to regard the issue. If you regard both the government and private corporations as subject to social and political rules, then a "liberal" social and political system would have something like a First Amendment for corporations - protecting free speech from corporate censorship just as it currently protects free speech from government censorship. Of course the last time I suggested the government might get involved in regulating when and how social media companies are allowed to censor speech or deplatform individuals and organizations, the suggestion was met with disdain and derision here - so I think the consensus on this site is that the government should allow deplatforming in the name of "liberalism", but perhaps there was some misunderstanding there.
So then I would just note (as I did in the last debate) that the First Amendment already has exceptions for things like inciting violence, planning crimes, and organizing treason, and so even if there were some general ban on deplatforming it arguably wouldn't have protected parler (which Amazon said was being used to make death threats and plan anti-government violence) or Trump (who twitter claimed was attempting to organize a second coup attempt). But again, Erdogan might use the same argument - people were using social media to organize treason - and so you would need some set of principles to decide when deplatforming is allowed and when it isn't.
Courts often decide such cases based on whether the restriction of liberty is narrowly tailored or overbroad. I think it's clear that closing down access to all of fb, twitter, and youtube is overbroad, whereas closing down a single twitter account which has violated the law is narrowly tailored. The parler case is trickier but I think a court might have said it was overbroad. Courts also establish rules on what counts as protected speech and what doesn't - in this case, Trump's speech is debatably protected, whereas the death threats and such on parler were certainly not. So I think reasonable people can debate whether these cancelations would violate some kind of theoretical First Amendment but for private corporations, but I don't think it's debatable at all that the First Amendment would prevent the US government from entirely shutting down three major social media networks to stifle dissent, as Erdogan did. Therefore I would argue that the parler and Trump cancelations were not really comparable to the actions of an authoritarian regime in widespread suppression of social media.
To round out the analysis - every generation decides what sorts of speech will be tolerated and what sorts of speech will not be tolerated. I would argue that the advent of the printing press ushered in a democratization of religion which put pressure on societies to relax blasphemy laws, as it became impractical to suppress unorthodox opinions when anyone could just pick up a copy of their religious text and make their own analysis of it. This arguably increased religious pluralism and contributed to the innovation by liberal institutions that the government shouldn't take sides in religious debates or mandate religious practices at all. But at the same time, once anyone could publish a broadside or a pamphlet, suddenly making and enforcing laws against libel became important. When mail came along we needed to make laws about mail fraud. When telecommunications came along we added laws about wire fraud. So I think it's reasonable to expect this generation to try to figure out which rules and laws should apply to social media, and how, and if any new rules and laws are needed. I think it's reasonable to expect that in some cases attempts to regulate new media will overreach until the society settles on a consensus regarding what is and isn't allowed in the new media. But that consensus takes time to build - it might take decades, even - whereas modern social media undergoes changes every few years. So again, that's why I think we see this very wide gulf between people who are trying to figure out how to adapt to social media environments and people who are trying to apply traditional norms and standards to the new media.
I don't have much in response to this. Just wanted to say thanks for a good, thoughtful response. I too lean libertarian and wrestle with how to deal with platforms kicking people off. I think I would lean toward letting them use their own discretion to kick off whoever they wanted, but I would want to curtail any such actions that were done at the urging of a state actor.
Thanks for the feedback!
I think I am leaning a bit in the other direction - although not fully convinced - but I think that in terms of maximizing freedom of speech, given the choice between maximizing facebook's liberty at the expense of its users, and maximizing users' liberty at the expense of facebook's, I might lean towards maximizing users' liberty.
After all, if the point of liberal free speech in a Millian sense is to increase ideological diversity, exercise individual reasoning faculties, and allow unpopular but true opinions to compete in a marketplace of ideas, then allowing facebook to stifle ideas at its own discretion not only decreases liberty, on net, but it also strips us of some of the other benefits of free speech.
Important to note, though, that even Mill himself advocated using a "harm principle" to determine the limits of protected speech and used incitement to violence as an example of speech which should not be allowed.
In any case I think in general I am more in favor of personal individual liberty than I am in favor of liberty for corporations. I think it would be legitimate for the government to set rules limiting e.g. ideological discrimination by a social media company.
I'm also on record here saying that social media companies were overzealous in censoring information about the pandemic - in particular, getting lab leak wrong - and that it might be preferable to have the government set limits on how much influence social media companies can be allowed to have on what information the public gets. As a mask early adopter, I'm imagining how much danger my family might have been in if we lived in an alternative universe where I'd only had access to the official CDC line on masks because Scott's post on the subject had been flagged as "misinformation" for contradicting the official narrative. I don't think social media companies or ISPs should be allowed to restrict access to potentially life-saving information.
Still, if you're operating as a deontological libertarian reasoning from the NAP it's totally counterintuitive to say that an ISP should required to carry Scott's mask post in the name of freedom of speech. But I think I lean more towards the Millian utilitarian liberalism, where the point of having freedom of speech is to secure the benefits of free speech - not because every entity (including non-human entities, like facebook) is a priori morally entitled to non-interference.
Neal, I think all of these are legitimate points. In a perfect world, I would probably agree. But I personally don't trust the government enough to regulate this in a sensible way that yields a net benefit to society. (But I also don't trust the government to do much of anything, so take this with a grain of salt.)
It looks like the EU commission is going to get there first anyway - https://www.npr.org/2021/05/26/1000390936/europe-wants-social-media-giants-to-do-more-to-stop-disinformation
In my experience - for example, with their damnable cookie notification law (do you guys get those in the US?) - the EU tends to be overzealous and trample all over user experience, so I don't expect them to do a very good job with this. Personally I've just stopped using facebook entirely. But I think the global trend is pointing towards a less free internet in general (look at the latest from Apple on scanning everyone's iPhones) and there seems to be a general government-corporate alignment on depriving us all of freedom and privacy. In a sense we have the worst of both worlds, with corporations stepping up to do things the First Amendment prevents the US government from doing. So maybe it would be good to have some kind of codified protection in law.
>Your use of the term "canceled" implies that you are referring specifically to American progressive activities, but most cancelations that I could find by google did not involve social media bans, and I've never heard of a cancelation which involved anything like a blanket internet ban
There's a selection ban in that a "cancellation" that involves someone being fired from their job and/or subject to a torrent of hate mail including death threats, is far more newsworthy and googleable than someone "just" being banned from Facebook or Twitter.
As for "blanket internet ban", no, but some internets are more equal than other. If (outspoken leaders / proponents of) one political faction are limited to the pre-2011 internet and the other faction gets to use the 2021 internet, that's a pretty big tilt. Particularly as the pre-2011 internet atrophies; most of the old blogs are gone and there aren't many new ones to replace them, the discussion has moved on to "social media" from which one can be banned.
OTOH there is Substack; too early to tell how that will play out going forward.
Both Hanania and yourself (Astral Codex) are trying too hard to avoid a much more simpler explanation: oligarchy. A class of people dominated by government and PMCs that is self perpetuating and self-promoting.
One clue: look at the shift in income demographics around Washington DC over the past 3 decades. It used to be middle class, now it is upper class.
It's weird that DC was ever middle class - why would the capital city of a world power be a mid-sized, low-rise, middle class place? That seems to need explanation more so than the ongoing transition to being larger and wealthier.
There was a time where being a government employee meant lower pay and benefits.
Clearly that time is in the far past.
My mom has a nice pension from being a high level bureaucrat for 30 years but she's not exactly rolling in dough. I made the same in my first year after college at Google as she was making while managing 300 people.
I just looked up more recent numbers and even now GS-15s make about the same as entry-level programmers in silicon valley. That's the highest rung on the general schedule, and to make more than that in a government job you'd have to be in the Senior Executive Service working 80 hours a week. And even that is capped below 200k.
So if you're an honest lifer at a government agency, you're not getting rich. The real money is in lobbying and in the revolving door between regulatory agencies and the private companies they regulate.
Entry level programmers don't get lifetime pensions.
For that matter, SV employees of any kind don't get pensions.
What about health care? Government employees get a fantastic health care program for life. Does the private sector?
Nor am I particularly convinced that comps vs. Google compensation is indicative of the real world.
24k/year of 401k-matching starting at age 26 is just as good IMO. The health plan was solid too.
Yeah, it is clear you are young and not financially savvy.
You can buy the equivalents of those pensions and health care programs for money. So the real question is "how large is the differential in compensation", and it's more than large enough to offset the theoretical purchase price of those benefits. Any halfway decent engineer working in the SV tech sphere (or similar) while spending non-zero effort optimizing for compensation would have no trouble retiring at 45 (in the FIRE sense).
So tell me how much lump sum cash is required to purchase an unlimited duration health care and open ended pension annuity for say, $90K (mid-range GS13).
As with Will previously - I also don't see SV programmers as being equivalent to the real world. Why don't we comp vs. Goldman Sachs bankers while we're at it?
A software engineer making 200-300K year also absolutely has a fantastic health care plan to go with it. They also have a 401k with employers matching up to 3-5% of contributions. And it is not just Google and the other FAANGS paying those salaries now either. And you can make that much by your mid-30s, with equity to boot that could be worth millions on top of that (and again, not just talking about startup equity "lottery tickets" but equity comp in established, highly lucrative businesses).
Of course if is only a smallish subset of software engineers who do that well but even a "middle of the road" SE is probably going to do better than whatever civil service job they would be doing as an alternative.
But is it lifetime? Given the top 10 tech companies in SV have average employee tenures of under 2 years...
It is also clear that you don't really understand the difference between a lifetime guaranteed pension and a 401K.
Your homework assignment: How much lump sum is required to receive an open ended $90K a year annuity? (mid range GS13 per original comment)
Government employees get decent middle class salaries and pretty good benefits, but nothing that would make them rich. $200K and good benefits is very nice but it isn't "rich" and it doesn't explain all the fancy mansions in the DC suburbs.
There's definitely people getting rich in Washington DC, but it's not government employes.
I do understand what you are trying to say, although you are also understating the value of guaranteed employment plus lifetime pension and health care.
But GS scales aren't the only way which people get paid by the US government: think tanks, NGOs, lobbyists, consultants, contractors are just a few of the categories which GS scales don't apply. There are also the appointed special committee heads, the Cabinet and immediate management under them, etc etc.
It still does. The money in DC flows to lobbyists and defense contractors, not employees. Though starting as an employee is a good stepping stone.
I would only note that it isn't quite so black and white.
There are increasingly large numbers of appointees, think tanks, government appendage NGOs and what not which also net high paying jobs. These aren't exactly lobbyists or defense contractors. I'd also note that "low government pay" isn't exactly true either for heads and upper management in government.
The data seems to agree: https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/federal-worker-pay
I shamefully admit spending time in the federal government. There’s no better place for no talent ass clowns to do nothing. The compensation:work ratio is off the charts.
The relative wages are what I was referring to. Note your link source doesn't even count the huge differential from pension/health care benefits.
As for your other commentary: I'm sure there are dead weight government employees much as there are dead weight private sector employees.
Figure 2 is all in comp. The feds are crazy overpaid whichever way you slice it. I don’t know what that kid from Google is talking about.
There’s no comparison in the sheer amount of deadweight. I don’t know what data I could produce to prove that besides my >7 years in the federal government. There are >1000 person organizations that literally just do make work.
You're right - I had only looked at the first graph which was wages. There's a 2nd graph later which includes benefits.
Doesn't change the core message: the government pays far better than the private sector overall.
In fact, I read somewhere that one of the reasons for red state/rural distrust of government is that the teachers and government workers in those areas are relatively well paid and infinitely more job secure than anyone else. If you're in a coal mining town or factory town that is shutting down/shut down, the teacher and postal workers is doing really damn well.
The "low-rise" part is specifically because of height limits in the building code.
https://www.ncpc.gov/about/authorities/hoba/
Why wouldn't it be middle class? Government employees largely were middle class through most of the post-spoils system era. DC also sucks as a place to live, that is why Maryland gave up the land. No one would choose to live their before widespread AC became available, so say 1980 or so.
It does seem inevitable that it would grow into a wealthy cosmopolitan city, but I believe the decision to create a capital de novo (instead of just use an existing large city as the capital rich as NYC or Philly) was intentional. To physically separate the seat of government from the economic elites. That is the story anyway, there is probably a less high-minded explanation.
There were many reasons, but for most of the founders the primary reason was that they feared undue local control over the federal government. If Philly/New York/Baltimore was the capital city they feared that the state government would have a lot of pressure they could put on the feds. For instance, cutting off water, or selective policing.
This is also why DC had no voting rights at all, and no representative. It was presumed (I think correctly) that the views of the capital would be over-represented even without a rep in congress. This I think has proven out in modern times.
The inevitability required over 200 years to happen, since this occurrence only started about a generation ago.
In a democracy, civil servants or even elected officials collecting rich-people pay looks too much like corruption, and granting them particularly lofty non-financial status looks too much like aristocracy, so most of the people who run the government are going to be middle-class. And each of them supports at least half a dozen middle- and working-class baristas, nannys, plumbers, small business owners, etc.
If I see a capital city with a conspicuously upper-class population (by local standards), I'm guessing kleptocracy or oligarchy.
The other man clue is that when you ignore elections and look only at what policies actually become law, Conservatives always lose ground over culture, and Leftists always lose ground over finance. Often this is transparently because the powerful are manufacturing cultural problems and then making grandiose concessions, in exchange for consolidating their power.
I understand where you are coming from, but I'm not sure I agree.
Deregulation was something which both Clinton (i.e. modern) Democrats and Reagan Republicans seemed to agree on. Deregulation is, to me at least, clearly about culture and not about finance.
Jimmy Carter was big on deregulation too.
I don't really think it matters to the powerful exactly how they get what they want. We simply observe in your example case that, yet again, they got it.
One other factor in team red team blue partisanship is that policy positions become divorced from the brand. You'll see that often in comment sections - someone very partisan will be convinced that everything they personally believe their party also believes. And is many cases they don't or in fact they believe the complete opposite.
I think it was the case going back to Converse that the general public didn't seem to know what different ideologies entailed.
This is actually less true than it was in the past - millions of people regularly voted, until very recently, for conservative Republican's for President, then fairly liberal Democrat's for Senate, and this wasn't a case of two moderates, but rather completely conflicting views on many issues - it's just that those issues weren't centered, and there wasn't national cable news talking about cultural issues a lot of the day, and more importantly, you didn't really know how your Senator voted, unless it was something super major, like the Civil Rights Act.
A good example is George McGovern - he fought for farmers, and he bombed the Axis in World War II, so that was enough for South Dakota to send him to the Senate multiple times, but he then lost his seat two years after being the Democratic nominee, because South Dakotans were now aware he was on the same side as the feminists, civil rights extremists, cut and runners, etc.
Hell, there are a decent amount of rural fairly conservative Democrat's in state legislature who survived Reagan, the 90's Republican Revolution, and even John Kerry, but they couldn't survive being put beside Obama in a flyer, because until then, many of their voters literally didn't connect them w/ the Democratic Party they hated.
Now, outside of New England, ticket splitting is basically dead, since everybody knows which Other you're allied with - whether that Other is feminists, illegal immigrants, or BLM rioters for the Right, or bigoted, racist, sexist rurals for the Left.
It would be interesting to see the liberal/conservative breakdown by major or field of study. I'm guessing that the people majoring in agricultural or mechanical engineering lean a lot more conservative than the people majoring in journalism or gender studies.
So maybe the rise of the tech/knowledge of economy has changed the types of institutions (or the types of people within institutions) that gain power, from those that leaned conservative to those that lean liberal.
Now, why certain fields of study might select for political ideology is a different question.
I agree, and this is an interesting question.
My first thought is to use a sort of material analysis - just look at raw economic interests. Is there some reason why highly-educated people - especially in more theoretical rather than practical fields - might find their economic interests aligned with a liberal/left policy platform?
I think the economy isn't really great for knowledge workers, which is what you probably aspire to be if you are studying journalism or gender studies. On the contrary if you study mechanical engineering you are entering a career path where you will be able to make a good living. So maybe it's as simple as saying that the economy doesn't really need more farmers, so there are a lot of people whose labor isn't strictly speaking necessary for society's subsistence, so those people gravitate towards a system of politics which values people independently of their labor or productivity, which provides a strong social safety net, and which assigns status and possibly some kind of financial benefits to knowledge workers, service workers, and others who are in jobs that are not associated with the production of material goods.
This is kind of what I meant in my other comment when I said that our values are related to an attempt to adapt to our society's subsistence strategies.
So to go a little bit Marxist here - you might assume that people who expect to benefit from the traditional arrangement of labor and capital will support more traditional values, while people who expect to be excluded from those benefits - or who want to completely disrupt the traditional arrangement - will support more radical values.
The only engineering discipline with more red than blue graduates is petrolium engineering, for what I hope are obvious reasons. Ten or twenty years ago engineering was far more consdervative than it is today.
Scott, it's been said before but your imagination of the '1950's' is a cardboard cut-out.
Consider, which party had complete control of the USG during the Depression and WWII, at a time when government power at home and abroad increased as never before?
What was the basic ideology/polarity of FDR and his advisers? Did the 'Republican' Eisenhauer administration manage to meaningfully role back much of the New Deal, or recreate the old right-wing foreign policy ideal of American isolationism?
I think you could improve your historical thinking by thinking less about the '50s' (fake) and more about USG in the 30/40s (real, scary, and still with us).
You have a point, but the Depression & WW2 are 30s & 40s, not 50s.
The conservative movement, as we know it now, began in the 1950s when traditionalists felt beleaguered and liberal society seemed unassailable. The traditional part of the 50s was the culture, otherwise you're looking at historically high rates of union membership and compressing inequality. As the old saw goes, liberals want to work in 50s and conservatives want to live in the 50s.
That 50s conservatism was a reinvention of RIght politics after old-style laissez-faire was annihilated by FDR.
Of course.
In my opinion Scott has a weird vision of American History which begins in an idealized conservative1950s, and leaves out the very Leftist 30s/40s.
Regarding the questions you raise about focusing on decreasing partisanship and the observation that there seemed to be less partisanship in the 1950s, I would strongly recommend reading Lee Drutman's book "Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop" for an analysis that sheds some light on why partisanship was less of an obstacle in that era.
Essentially he argues that we had a hidden four-party system at the time where there was a "party" of fiscally conservative urban voters within the Republican party and a "party" of fiscally liberal rural voters within the Democratic party. This both made it easier to identify with and understand some members of the other party, and allowed the main difference between the parties to be on an economic axis, rather than an identity axis, making compromise easier.
Starting from the civil rights movement and finishing in the 90s and 2000s, these groups started to re-align based more on identity issues, which is more difficult to compromise across, and has led to a more complete split between the parties, increasing partisanship. This also fits well with the graphs you're considering here, as it offers an explanation for why high-income is no longer strongly predictive of party preference.
There's a great old Hayek paper (possibly intellectuals and socialism) about self-selection driving this sort of thing, especially around the dimension of focusing on making money/business/trade VS focusing on reading/writing/intellectual pursuits. Intellectuals are generally always far more likely to be liberal (this has been true for a long time).
A big difference recently, in the US at least (can't speak to any other country) might be that "intellectuals" have ended up being a much larger proportion of wealthy elites than they used to be. Highly educated types are increasingly rich types as well - the economy increasingly rewards high intelligence/education (and offers a lot more interesting work to those with such things), which pulls intellectuals into the corporate world and blurs the selection boundary between people who like trade and money and people who like intellectual pursuits. Think tech start-ups dominating the business landscape rather than manufacturing companies. They're run by radically different types of people. The latter are far more likely to be Hayekian intellectuals (they come from universities, they like other highly educated/intelligent people, etc.).
Anyways, speculative, but I suspect this is driving at least a sizable chunk of things.
"The Labour Party managed to change its ways - all we can do is hope the Republicans can too."
Not as reassuring as you intend it to be; Maynard Keynes might have longed for the "intellectuals" to run things, but the problem was that the intellectuals in Labour *did* start running things in the 60s and 70s, and you got the rise of the "champagne socialists" and college students arguing Marxist dialectic and one sub-group sniping at another sub-group over its lack of ideological purity. The party moved from the old blue-collar working-class base to the middle-class college graduates - the rise of New Labour in Britain (and Ireland), where - to take an example from my own country - someone who had the nickname "Ho Chi Quinn" as a student radical getting involved in politics and rising up the ranks, while also gradually transitioning from the radical roots to the business-friendly model popular today (and from a solidly middle-class background, with family members the kind of comfortable capitalists his student self would have excoriated): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruairi_Quinn
The trouble is not that Labour didn't get run by the intellectuals, the trouble was that in the end it did, and they so remoulded it that now you have the kind of divide this post describes: how is it that an elite on one side is rivalled by an elite on the other, where they should naturally be the elite versus the commoners, and that the financial elite are happy to divide along the same lines?
"try to decrease the salience of college in society, so that not every smart person needs to get a college degree, and not every important job is degree-gated"
That horse has bolted and the stables has been razed to the ground and a shiny new technology park built where it used to stand.
Indeed. The labor party's intellectuals successfully tanking the British economy while also ruining its rail infrastructure isn't something I'd aspire to.
Deiseach, I have a question for you or any other Catholics. One of my family members has gone completely off the deep end. They think among other things, that Pope Francis is the antipope who will pave the way for the Anti-Christ. That all COVID vaccines are the mark of the beast and that anyone who receives, administers or encourages others to get vaccinated will go to Hell. Also, that the world will end within 3 years. I have no idea what to say to them.
I'm sorry to hear this. Yes, sometimes people go off the deep end when they worry too much about the end of the world. There's not much advice I can give you, save a few basic statements.
(1) Are they talking about Garabandal or other alleged revelations? Often there is a Marian element to the loopiness.
(2) There seems to be a persistent belief about the Three Days of Darkness, and because one at least of the visionaries has been beatified, that acts as "proof" for some people that everything they reported would come true in a specific way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Days_of_Darkness
(3) The only cure for that is to remind them of the doctrine on private revelations. There is no new prophetic inspiration by the Holy Spirit ,no 'continuing revelation' since the time of the Apostles. Whatever someone alleges they have seen or has been communicated to them, must *always* be checked against Scripture and the Magisterium. Even if a saint has said it, it does not mean that this has to be believed by everyone.
(4) The Gospels say "You know not the day nor the hour" and that people will seek signs and wonders, and try to interpret the signs of the times. Nobody can say that "within three years it will be the end of the world", Christ Himself has said "“But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only". It will come upon us unawares, we will be living our ordinary lives as in the days of Noah and the Deluge. So anyone prophesying a definite date out of their own or another person's knowledge is wrong. If they are contradicting the Gospel and the words of Jesus, you should believe Jesus Christ and not a mortal.
(5) Antipopes - look, I'm not a huge fan of Francis. He's done some ill-considered things. BUT he is the Pope, and we owe him filial obedience. He hasn't given any signs of being an antipope, but even if he is - so what? We've had a long list of antipopes already, and we've survived them! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipope
Who the Antichrist will be and when he will come and who will precede him - that is all part of the end times, where we've already established "you know not the day nor the hour".
(6) Vaccines - this is probably the "mark of the beast" thing, yes? This sounds heavily influenced by American Protestant Millenarianism, where they are always trying to figure out when will the Tribulation come and the fine divisions. If you're Catholic, we're amillennialists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amillennialism
The mandatory vaccines are NOT the mark of the Beast, no-one is damned to Hell by getting vaccinated, requiring others to be vaccinated, or administering the vaccines. Otherwise every single person since the chickenpox inoculations would be in Hell. If you get Covid and die you may or may not go to Hell depending on the state of your soul, but the only thing that has to do with the vaccines is "didn't get vaccinated, got sick, died".
Again, NOBODY
Again, NOBODY can say that anyone is definitely and definitively going to Hell. The worst, most outrageous sinner can yet be saved, the most virtuous person can yet stumble. Despair and presumption are equally sins.
When someone is this obsessed with End Times stuff, it's hard to dig them out. All you can do is stand on the basic Scripture readings and the Catechism, and if they insist on "it definitely will happen like this" then don't argue with them. Just remind them do they think with the mind of the Church or not on this? If they prefer their own individual opinion, then they are veering near heresy.
Just be patient with them, don't get into arguments, and pray for them (if you engage in prayer). Good luck and God help your relative to be restored to peace of mind and trust in the Lord.
Thanks for the advice, this was helpful even though I doubt I can dissuade them.
>>Maybe this is the wrong axis and we need to focus on decreasing partisanship somehow?<<
My money is on this one. I don't know that I'm particularly optimistic about it decreasing, but I think the core problem is hyperpartisanship. We need to make party-affiliation a less salient aspect of one's identity.
I wonder to what extent this is driven by an increase in meritocratic sorting in institutions.
In a toy model of the 50s-70s, rich and well-connected people would be selected for the Ivy League -> Government/Wall Street pipeline solely on the basis of their class, so there was no sorting effect, and the institutional ideological distribution would look like that of the upper-class as a whole. As each of those pipeline steps has become more dominated by performance and merit, it's more selecting for a certain type of person (eg, high conscientious correlates with liberals as well as people who are willing to follow steps that look good to admissions committees).
In the 1950 compared to today, a person born to parents in the bottom quarter of the income distribution was more likely to reach the top quarter by the time they reached their parents age. Also vise versa where the person born to top quarter parents falls to bottom quarter.
In the 1950 compared to today, a college educated parent was more likely to have a non-college educated child.
In the 1950 compared to today, a hyper-wealthy person was most likely to have inherited their wealth. Today, the most likely founded a tech company.
Only one of those sounds like meriticractic sorting to me, and its the very very rare one.
Wealth != membership in elite institutions. A main point here is that it's education, not wealth, that's become more predictive.
Ok, so lets take your ivy league example. The % of ivy league students today with parents who attended any ivy league insitution is higher than it was back then as well.
My own observation is that the elite institutions are less of a meritocracy now than they were a few decades ago. I attended an elite technical school, worked at NASA, and have worked elite legal and technical instutions full of ivy league grads my life, and had a number of coversations with my sibling who has worked in the White House and is on a UN advisory councel. We've both noticed the absolute lack of other people with our background (growing up dirt poor in a destitutue rural community). Maybe we've just got big egos, but I know I was very, very luck to have the life trajectory I got and basically never run into other people with similar backgrounds.
I didn't say legacy though. It was any ivy league college. On mobile so can't go searching for the cite though. You can choose not to believe me if you like.
Are you claiming that there's a meaningful % of students whose parents attended a _different_ Ivy? Again, do you have any data to support this?
To expand on this for just a moment, maybe we are arguing about different things. I think that the doorway to get into the elite institutions are less meritacratic than any time before in my academic or profesional career. Once through the door, these insitutions are more or less meritocratic depending on how close they are to rubber-hitting-the-road. NASA struck me as very, very, not meritocratic even amoung the non-partisan lifetime civil servant areas. Ditto academia. OTOH, elite legal firms are incredibly meritocratic (along particular dimensions) because the billable hour and the litigation or transaction outcome are both incredibly rubber-on-the-road.
So maybe I'm saying the gate is not meritocratic, and you see everyone past the gate getting sorted, and may be we are pointing to different parts. And front to back, bottom to top, every part of me wishes the world was far, far more meritocratic than it is.
I think you have it backwards - the door to get in is more meritocratic than it was, but once in, it's less so. Nobody fails out of the Ivy League and all that.
Not discounting your personal experience, but I don't think NASA is an elite institution in the way that either Scott or Hanania mean - do social circles at NASA control the political agenda in any meaningful sense?
Do you have any data to support your claim?
Difficult to say. In a functioning meritocratic society you shouldn't expect to see much in the way of income mobility between generations, because merit is highly heritable. Smart people make good money, marry other smart people, and have smart kids, who grow up to make good money. Dumb people make little money, marry other dumb people, and have dumb kids, who grow up to make little money.
Moving from the lowest to the highest band is something that happens mostly to smart-but-poor immigrant families from poor countries. If it happens frequently to native-born people then it should actually be an indication that your society is rather non-meritocratic, because it implies that financial success is being accrued by something less heritable than merit.
I'm dubious of your claim that in 2016 the political valence of wealth had reversed, rather than merely weakening - https://www.statista.com/statistics/631244/voter-turnout-of-the-exit-polls-of-the-2016-elections-by-income/, https://www.washingtonpost.com/gdpr-consent/?next_url=https%3a%2f%2fwww.washingtonpost.com%2fnews%2fpolitics%2fwp%2f2017%2f12%2f29%2fplaces-that-backed-trump-skewed-poor-voters-who-backed-trump-skewed-wealthier%2f , https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/09/white-voters-victory-donald-trump-exit-polls etc all state that in 2016 the Democrats (narrowly) won among poorer Americans and the Republicans (narrowly) won among richer ones.
And a quick google also shows the same thing happening in 2020.
So I think that strand of your thesis is probably mistaken - like the US, America is now in the top-left quadrant, with the rich leaning (weakly) right-wing while the educated lean (strongly) left-wing.
That means that if you adjust for education (which the wealthy tend to have a lot of), the wealthy would lean strongly right-wing. I'm not sure that the uneducated wealthy population has a significant pull though since there are relatively few of them.
I wish I could post pictures here.
I think what is going on is that if you were to scatter-plot voters by wealth and education, and then colour the right-wing voters blue and the left-wing voters red (N.B. European rather than American convention, for consistency with the graphs above), you'd see a long, thin, diagonal oval running from the rich/educated corner to the poor/uneducated corner, divided along its long axis with most of one side of the oval being red and most of the other side being blue.
So if you change your coordinates by 45 degrees then the really predictive thing is wealth-education, but that has a low standard deviation, whereas wealth+education, which varies a lot, is still not very predictive.
An aspect of this I've thought about: as educational achievement predicts liberal politics more and more strongly, the arguments conservatives make become at least worse from the perspective of educated people and at most simply worse in some semi-absolute sense because there are a lot fewer educated people working on them.
I don't see the most domininat progressive arguments being the most persuasive, just the ones made by the people with the power to ruin me personally by taking away my job, blacklisting me in my industry, etc. I find the most persuasive arguments for progressivism to be quite out of vogue.
I can't really find, for example, postmodern critiques of power relationships better in an absolute sense than the more historical liberal appeals to individual dignity.
so many words, and no string of three fo them are "urban/rural divide."
Instead of any coalition system, how about instituting voting methods that don't have a vote-splitting system so that giant coalitions don't need to form at all? :P (Yeah, OK, there would still be other forces pushing towards big coalitions, but it would be nice to lessen it...)
You still need coalitions at some point. The key difference is that in two party democracies, the coalitions form before the election, while multiparty democracies form coalitions after the election.
I'm not convinced it has to be that way. It's true in *existing* multiparty democracies, but those all work roughly the same way. If you could make things more granular, and do more to eliminate vote-splitting *even within the government*, I think you could do more to reduce the need for it.
For instance, what if instead of having *amendments* to bills, you had *variants*? And instead of voting on amendments followed by voting on the bill, you just accumulated variants, and then had one big vote at the end on all the variants, along with "none of these", done via an approval vote?
...OK admittedly in parliamentary democracies you have to "form a government"; that seems like the biggest obstacle to this idea, the thing that would most require a coalition. Still, eliminating vote-splitting doesn't just have to be for elections, and it's not clear to me that the problem is unsolvable.
You don't *need* coalitions, it's just that typical government systems involve them. It's easy to design a system that doesn't need them. For example:
First, start with a multi-party parliamentary system in which the ballot lets voters *rank the parties*. Use a good Condorcet system (e.g. Ranked Pairs) to find the most-preferred party. Award that party 50%+1 of the seats in the parliament. Award the remaining seats proportionally to the *other* parties based on voters' first-rank preferences. This guarantees a single party a bare majority in the parliament, preventing any minor parties from playing kingmaker and gaining outsized power in a coalition. That party would be guaranteed enough power to do just the things they all agree on. So parties that wanted to *win* would be incentivized to produce a manifesto that was compelling to the median voter and that had full support within the party.
Second (similar to Sniffnoy's comment), within the parliament, require that votes for bills *also* use a good Condorcet system, where all MPs can contribute their own version of the bill under discussion and MPs are required to rank all the bills. This ensures that the minority parties still get a hearing and an official vote for their concerns and have a reasonable chance of finding compromises that are acceptable to the majority. And in turn that would incentivize minor parties to exist and compete for votes of ideologically motivated demographics.
The question isn't whether you can design a system of government that doesn't "need" coalitions. The question is whether you can design a system of government where coalitions won't have an overwhelming advantage over non-coalition actors. None of your proposals accomplish that.
On the contrary, in the given example, a coalition offers no advantage. The majority party has nothing to gain from coalition, as it already has a sufficient majority to implement its will, and the minority parties also have nothing to gain from coalition, as they cannot overtake the majority.
The majority party *is* a coalition. As the majority party, it's the giantest of coalitions. Probably a particularly stable one as well, though that's not guaranteed. But that's what parties are; political coalitions intended to endure across many electoral cycles, which gives them an advantage over coalitions established for a specific and transient purpose.
Well, OK, *theoretically* you could have a party that is one particularly charismatic politician and a bunch of hirelings designated to accept the leftover votes in a proportional-representation scheme, then take their seats and vote the way their boss tells them to. But in practice, parties are coalitions between many politicians with interests sufficiently aligned that they'd rather have the advantage of committed allies than the flexibility of allies you have to negotiate every issue with.
That's changing the goalposts. The topic under discussion was about coalition governments as in political science, not the semantic argument about whether we should call a single party a coalition. Coalition governments are common in systems with proportional representation and are frequently considered a downside of PR compared to First Past the Post.
I think you can find a lot of parallels to the education split today with Marx's writing.
Marx was right that the two revolutionary classes were the bourgeoisie and the urban proletariat. The proletariat--urban, industrial workers--at the time were something completely new (so new, in fact, they were really only a thing in the UK at the time of Marx's writing). We typically just think proletariat=poor or proletariat=workers, but the people Marx wrote about also had some socio/psychological characteristics that united them as much as they were united by their economic situation. This was a mass of people who had left the countryside trying to find a better life. These are strivers who were willing to leave their family, friends, and community behind. One would imagine if you gave them a big five personality test, they would score "high openness to experience" and "low consciousness." So they came to the factories in the cities to find a better life, and instead they were being ground into the dirt. You have ambitious people, those who are the least tied to traditional ways of life, and they've been stymied by a bad system.
The bourgeoisie were also something completely new--wealthy people outside of the noble classes. Again, this is a class of people who are strivers, who started businesses, took risks, and amassed wealth. But within the old feudal systems, they lacked the ability to influence government. Again, ambitious people, not tied to the old ways, stymied by a bad system.
So the first revolution (per Marx) would be a bourgeois revolution focused on individual rights (American Revolution, French Revolution, Revolutions of 1848, Russian Revolution of 1905, etc.) and the second would be the revolution of the proletariat.
I think what Marx got right here is that the *left wing* of a society will always be most strongly backed by ambitious strivers who separate themselves from traditional modes of life and who are in some way held back by the system (or at least view themselves that way). In a feudal society, that's the bourgeoisie. In an early capitalist society, it's the urban proletariat.
So where will you find ambitious people today who feel held down by the system? That would be liberal arts grads with 60k in student debt living in expensive urban areas. That's the "proletariat" of our day.
Burke's Reflections discusses how men of "ability" will be at odds with men of "property" (inherited property, in that case), and he regarded it as the duty of wise governance to preserve said property.
This is a fascinating observation.
There's another piece-- these days, it's a default that the left cares about the poorest people.
As I understand it, Marx wasn't interested in the "lumpenproletariat", the people who were doing odd jobs and barely surviving.
Yes, I think it's with the New Left that you start seeing groups like the Black Panthers proclaiming that the lumpenproletariat are the actually revolutionary class rather than the "labor aristocracy" in the labor unions.
Related to this:
"there is now no group in advanced industrial society which unites the four characteristics of: (1) being the producers on whom society depends, (2) being exploited, (3) being (with their families) the majority of society, and (4) being in dire need":
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2011/05/23/the-good-old-days/
The best analysis of the difference between liberals and conservatives that I've seen comes from <a href=https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/elite-underproduction-why-we-cant-solve-hard-problems-anymore>Conrad Bastable</a>
In his model, conservatives are motivated by a fear of what he calls feudalism, what I'd call endemic warfare, and what Hobbes calls "the war of all against all". In other words, they fear that society could break down, like <a href=https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-57835756>South Africa just did</a>. Conservatives want institutions that are strong enough to protect us from the chaos that is always at the gates.
Conversely, liberals are motivated by intolerance of injustice. They abhor the intrinsic unfairness of existing institutions and try to erase the stains of the past. Unfortunately, the deeper they look the more injustice they find, and frequently they feel the need to dismantle the whole system (at which point endemic warfare comes back and systematic oppression is replaced with poverty and random violence).
In his model, conservatives build institutions to protect people from chaos. Liberal spend the strength of the institutions on a fairer and more just society. When the institutions are spent, the chaos comes back and it's time to try again.
But you don’t even know what the rules that make complex societies *are*.
That's the whole idea behind Chesterton's Fence. If you don't know what works and what doesn't, don't monkey with it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_fence
To the extent that I have rightist leanings it is basically: nature is chaos, the default state of things is not to work, turning nothing into something is important and honorable, it is not some travesty that people who are successful at doing that in a big way get more respect or more material comfort than those who aren’t.
Whereas it seems like the left position is that technology is inevitable, productivity growth falls out of the sky, all we do is allocate its fruits. If I believed that then I would be righteously indignant about income inequality too.
So I think there’s something to this.
That might be the Twitter leftist position, but it’s not the position of the Democratic Party.
As Leftists are fond of pointing out, the Democratic Party is not Leftist.
That's my thinking. Bastable does far more justice that my summary did to the liberal case, though.
Uh… then why are there so many liberal people *building and maintaining* the strong institutions?
I haven't been seeing much of that. Do you have examples?
I think a key difference here is a background change in definition. With Picketty you bring in the point about how 'college educated' now means 32% of people instead of 6% of people.
I'd also point out the definition, goals, and actual reality and actions of the parties have changed. The US probably looks strange in the data to a degree because the 'Liberals' are not liberal at all. The Democrats are akin to a group of rich people concerned with a managing the poor to avoid riots and revolution while maintaining their power. While the Republicans are a group of wealthy people more in the 'let them eat cake' group of getting richer no matter what.
The US has no liberal party and the Dems are a middle right wing party while the Republicans are a far right wing party.
How else to explain a total lack of delivery on every single lower class concern since Carter, maybe since FDR? That's 50+ years of Democratic party demonstration of right wing goals as they gave money to the rich, failed to provide the healthcare of the developed nations, actively scheme with Wall Street and under Clinton deregulated/make crimes legal several activities which led to financial speculation and the GFC.
Clinton also oversaw the full blown use of massive inflation manipulation to reduce 'entitlements' to starve out teh minimum wage and benefits from the poor while entitlements/welfare/subsidies/cash handouts for funnsies to the wealthy expanded.
I think a key factor here is the total divorce of the Unions from the Democrats in the US. There has never been a Labour party in the US while there has been in every other Western nation.
If you look at the increasingly right wing Dems, the lack of union power overall or political power on the left to get anything workers actually want, and the changing demographics of who votes with fewer people voting and many convict non-voters amongst poor males....then the 'change' we are seeing is more of an illusion.
To me it is no wonder that an increasingly wealthy and increasingly diverse group of elites are looking to feel good about themselves and their massive wealth inequality. The message of 'take it all, guns and god' from the republicans is simply not an enticing message for newly rich gay black men or similar demographic who are less religious, more urban, and more wealthy who have no relationship with anything like a factory or a union.
So the Dems offer a highly woke, and highly status quo of the rich getting richer and no one doing anything about it. Have your rainbows and gay marriage and vague armchair concern around BLM and the 'problem' of wealth inequality. But with that cultural veneer aside, which is no more than branding, the wealth pipeline to the top 20% or people keeps flowing while the bottom 80% can have their entire wealth surpassed by a few hundred billionaires.
Being an elite who supports the Dems/'Liberals' who gets massive corporate handouts vs being a Republican elite supporter is simply a matter of taste, presentation, and wanting to avoid pitchforks. They can claim they are for all these things for the poor...which they never do. Instead of being open about not caring or wanting those things - every dollar given to a poor person is a dollar that could be given to a rich person. Namely, themselves.
They'll 'feel for the poor', but have to recognise the reality that we have limited resources after the latest round of tax cuts which mostly went into their own pockets. How about a charity gala dinner for the wealthy to 'give back'?
Bill Gates (can we even mention him or is he a total mind killer at this point?) is giving away 90% of his wealth...please ignore that he's multiple times richer now than he was back when he said that! He's a 'Liberal'! in this new definition of right wing elite businessmen who claim to enjoy other people looking at rainbows.
I'm not trying to break the rules or be overly partisan here. But any non-US perspective can see that all of the major things working people want from a 'Liberal' party are simply not on the table anywhere in US politics. So the idea of the elite becoming more 'liberal' is an illusion. I'd say the 'liberal' terminology has changed in definition.
How else to describe it when the so called liberals in California or right now in DC fail to pass into law a single significant change which would benefit the bottom 80% or in any way change anything about 'the game'. No healthcare, no unions, no increased minimum wage...but plenty of corporate handouts and ultra wealthy donors getting what they want.
If the head of the Dems was the same person who was the head of the AFL-CIO....do you think they'd be taking money from Wall Street or Big Tech? In most other nations the Unions/workers at least have an actual seat at the table in their so called 'liberal' political parties.
"The US has no liberal party and the Dems are a middle right wing party while the Republicans are a far right wing party."
I've heard this claim repeatedly from people on the far left. I've always found it rather ridiculous. But perhaps I'm wrong. I'd like to understand it better since it's an increasingly popular talking point.
Do you have any evidence for any of the following:
1.) The US is significantly more right wing than the world generally. Please do not exclude the third world or used weasel words like "any ADVANCED nation" unless you are willing to admit the US is more left wing than 80% of the world.
2.) The US is significantly more right wing than the OECD norm. Keep in mind the OECD includes Mexico, Korea, Chile, and Japan. If you can only point to a few countries in Western Europe countries please proceed to point 3...
3.) You are now down to maybe 10 countries out of about 200. As with the headline I read yesterday that the US ranks 11th out of 11 countries. At this point we're down to a few specific party platforms. What features do you specifically feel exist in these systems that don't exist in the US? All these countries have vigorous conservative movements. How do you feel they're different than American conservatives?
I would also add - make sure to include policy around immigration and citizenship in the discussion, and not just policy around taxation and health insurance.
> All these countries have vigorous conservative movements.
Okay but how do these vigorous conservative movements feel about vaccines and viruses
I assume they oppose viruses. They certainly opposed lockdowns more vigorously including liberal darlings like Sweden.
The Republicans are unusually accepting of vaccines as far as first world conservative movements go. 40% of Republicans intend to never get the vaccine vs 25% of the general public and 10% of Democrats. In France the general population is at 40% and a majority of conservatives are anti-vaccine. And those numbers are fairly typical.
I assume you (like me) would prefer vaccine skepticism was lower. And while Republicans are the problem there, they're less of a problem than those vigorous European conservative movements.
> as far as first world conservative movements go.
Why are you saying "first world" here? You wanted anyone arguing with you to consider the world as a whole, rather than try to draw distinctions between "first world" and "third world".
Because you quoted a statement specifically about Western Europe. "All these countries" meant Western European countries as you can see in the initial statement. I wouldn't have made the statement, because I do not think, every country has a vigorous conservative movement. But western democracies mostly do.
To be frank, it seems like you're trying to change the frame of reference to wriggle out of the fact you thought the Republicans were unique in vaccine skepticism and the US was unusually vaccine-phobic.
Ah, I see now.
I am aware of France's vaccine hesitancy in the general population, though I believe vaccine hesitancy is not politicized along liberal/conservative lines in France. There is a confounding factor here - for a long time, the only vaccine you could get in France was the AstraZeneca vaccine, which correlated with six very high-profile cases of blood clots in its initial rollout.
I am not aware to what extent vaccine hesitancy is aligned with the liberal/conservative spectrum in Western Europe. I'll try to find more information on this, but for now my thesis is still that the US Republican Party is driving US vaccine hesitancy, while in Western Europe, political party does a much worse job of predicting vaccine hesitancy.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. The US does not have a liberal party and a conservative party. It has a party that claims to be liberal but is actually conservative, and a party that claims to be conservative but is actually batshit insane.
Could you please respond to what I posted just above this? I'm really curious about this claim since it seems to be popping up more and more.
You reside in a fantasy world where unions aren't "woke".
It's not really that complicated - corporations are 'woke' because 50 year olds in rural Wisconsin made up a larger percentage of Nike's pie in 1990 than they did in 2020, and education is even more liberal, because a lot of those Republican professors were Rockefeller Republican types. Actual right-wing professors were always basically non-existent, by the standards of the time. Plus, conservative spent forty years telling their kids, "go get an MBA, then open up a small business, and buy a nice house in the suburbs," while liberals went, "do what you love and fight for people, even if it doesn't make you rich."
People want really complicated explanations. Sometimes, stuff is simple.
I'm not sure that is actually an explanation though. Young people are definitely more into consumer culture so it might explain why Nike is more left-wing (at least in their branding) but in general older people are wealthier so it seems a bit odd that Goldman Sachs would be more left wing in their branding. Maybe it is to attract talent (who are going to be younger) but still you would think that would be more than balanced out by their client base being (on average) more conservative.
But even if we grant all that then why is it exactly that young people are so much farther to the left now? And for that matter WHY are there no Republicans/conservatives in academia? Pointing to the fact that it was true even in the 1950s makes it even more perplexing (to me at least). In 2021 you could tell a plausible story about more conservative people who have the talent and work ethic to get a tenure track position in academia are more likely to be interested in pushing a more lucrative career in the business world but I think that would be somewhat less true in the 1950s when there was less income inequality and the relative wealth difference between a college professor and corporate executive was smaller.
At some level the (apparent) fact that left wing people seem to care more about politics has to be explained.
1.) People are more liberal because we live in a globalized world, where it's harder to "keep them on the farm," even when they're literally on the farm. A 16 year old teenager can go on the Internet and learn about how most of other rich countries have free health care or watch makeup tutorials from somebody who will pepper in talk about how being gay is totally normal.
2.) Kids aren't *that* left-wing. It's just the GOP is so in-hock to their current older base, they can't make the moves to peel off a decent chunk of pro-LGBT, pro-immigrant kids who also don't care about taxes or large social programs. Right now, the GOP is doing the equivalent of the Right still running against interracial marriage in 1975.
3.) Most customers of Goldman Sachs don't care how 'woke' the junior associate is, as long as their account goes up at the end of the day. So, if it means being pro-LGBT to get the smart kid from Yale, instead of him going over to Citibank, that's what you do.
4.) Caring about knowledge and such has always been left-coded to a degree while caring about creating a business has always been right-coded to a degree. I'm not saying this a a slam on right-leaning people, but as the truth.
> Maybe there’s a natural tendency for some of these organizations to lean left wing (eg colleges are heavily exposed to the opinions of young people, who lean left)
I think there is some tendency here. I'm a big believer of the Moral Foundations Theory that Jonathan Haidt talks about in his book The Righteous Mind. A liberal/progressive/leftist is someone who consistently care about care vs harm more than the other morals. Institutions that are about providing care to people should have a tendency to lean left. I think education would be one of those institutions.
I think the causation wrt young people goes the other way. They tend to lean left as they spend half their day in an institution where left leaning adults are over-represented.
The leftward turn of the youth didn't really start until '04 (Bush & Gore basically split them w/ 5 points going to Nader), and Reagan even won the youth vote. I do actually doubt the teachers of the early-to-mid 90's were that more liberal than the teachers of the late 70's.
> Institutions that are about providing care to people should have a tendency to lean left. I think education would be one of those institutions.
Seeing educational institutions as being about "providing care to people" seems a fairly left-wing viewpoint to begin with. A more right-wing viewpoint of the purpose of education would see it as something along the lines of "teach young people useful facts and skills so they can succeed in the world and carry on the torch of civilisation" or something along those lines, it's not about care and cuddling.
Let me suggest an alternative (or a different slant on) "liberals care more", namely "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Mob".
Although the phrase Great Awokening is occasionally used, few of those users look at the issue at a deeper level than the obvious historical parallels. But to me the current US' versions of the great -ism's look like nothing so much as a resurrection of Calvinism, call it KKKalvinism. Recall that the defining trait of Calvinism is that man is born sinful, and that this stain cannot be removed from his soul no matter how he tries.
Now replace sin with racism/sexism... Replace Augustine with Implicit Association Tests as the proof that we're all racists/sexists... Replace the obsession with outward forms as ways to try to prove (to ourselves and our friends) that we're of the elect with, well, the obsession with outward forms as ways to try to prove (to ourselves and our friends) that we're of the elect...
Puritanism (ie Calvinism) in America never totally dies; it's reborn every few generations in a new round of youth utterly ignorant of history while just as utterly convinced they understand humanity's master plan.
ie this round of "liberalism", ie KKKalvinism, carries the whip for basically the same reasons that it did in Geneva in 1550, or in Moscow in 1930, or in or in Shanghai in 1970, or in Teheran in 1990; because there's a large (never a majority, but a large enough minority) fraction of people, especially among the youth, who thrill to the idea that they can bring about utopia and, at the same time as carrying out the divine plan, also punish their enemies.
And it takes the exact form it does today in America purely for contingent reasons, just as it took the form it did in Geneva, in Moscow, in Shanghai, in Tehran. You won't understand the movement by obsessing over these contingent "America in the 2000s" details.
As our host has said elsewhere: the ideology is not the movement. In every one of these cases, the ideology is merely a cudgel with which to beat up the opposition; the movement is based on the emotions of "you mean I can punish other people [like my parents]? and make the world a better place? and impress girls? Sign me up!"
If that's the sort of thing you are after, KKKalvinism is, today, the primary game in town. Sure you could join a few other variants playing the same game, but genuine revolution ala The Weathermen seems way too dangerous, and the White Power crowd not only listen to different music and follow different customs, they're unlikely to ever be on the winning side --- those are for actual ideologues, not for posers and chancers who're just in it for the signaling and the chance to tell other people what to do.
I have to argue for decades of censorship creating a humanities universe which contains almost nothing except left-liberalism and a few conservative caricatures. People are thinking they are leftists when they have seen nothing else. The smarminess and self-dealing of university humanities over the past 50 years has been significant. It’s not that thinkers are inherently left; it’s that the only people not shamed out the door of the vestibule of intellectuality are the next generation of left-liberal acolytes. If personal=political, personality is political, then certain politics requires a certain personality. That’s been happening at least since the 80s which I’ve seen and probably longer.
Academia was not a rich and powerful club until the research-industrial complex grew in it. It is now though and a middle-class obedience mindset has been catapulted into the upper class, where, power joined to inflexible, parroted, gate-keeping left vocabulary words, we have the nightmare of the hungover philosophy PhD, in which soooo many people are discussing theory, but it’s slowly going to hell.
I like to think rich people, if they are aware they are rich, become acquainted with trade offs and management decisions; newly empowered middle class, not thinking of how to wield power responsibly, carry out each treasured vengeance instead.
Tech created class churn like nothing else. The idea-ocracy may become a disaster; there’s more to leadership than ideas, but the bucket of ideas to draw from has been very restricted.
As for dictatorship apologia: I remember a lot of Democrats talking about how democracy is failing or the US is no longer a democracy and we need some kind of auto-coup to remove Trump in 2016. One person, I believe a Twitter exec, wrote a piece about how the right needs to be completely excluded from power for a generation. The trending tweet at one point was by a former member of the Clinton administration about how Republicans need to be outright banned from holding any position of responsibility. I think the new phenomenon is that the losing side is less likely to accept it. Both for the presidency and lesser offices. If they accept they just lose power while if they maintain THEY are the rightly elected person they get rewarded by their own side. Which is ominous in of itself!
This is, as far as I can tell, the sophisticated anti-democrat's (little d) case. We're heading for a dictatorship so you should make sure it's left-wing/right-wing. That's not new: dictatorial movements generally make the case there's no alternative. The enemy and siege mentality are a common feature of such regimes.
Personally, I see the modern period as a replay of the 19th century in the US or the 17th century in Britain. Both of which led to violence and even civil wars. There's a lot of similarities even down to some very specific points. Though neither ended democracy such as it existed at the time over the long term.
Both those conflicts usually get sociologically described as a conflict caused by economic/technological changes creating a new rising middle class elite. This elite leveraged a power base in the middle class against a more traditional elite whose power came from institutions and whose popular support lay in the lower classes and various minorities. And that's broadly what I think is happening now. My impression is the Democrats represent both the very elite of society and the lower classes plus minorities while the Republicans represent the broad middle. If so, the faction more equivalent to the Republicans won both times in Britain/the US. But not everywhere. Other countries followed different paths and a few didn't even have a decisive winner.
A bunch of clowns on Twitter isn’t a prelude to war. We’ll keep having elections. They’ll keep being peaceful. People will keep being butt hurt that their people didn’t win. Then we’ll do it all again.
No one actually wants violence (the real kind; not the “hurting my feelings is violence” kind)
I hope so.
Trying to think of something conservative that was celebrated fifty years ago and drawing a blank. Columbus Day? That has its roots in big city Democrat machine politics.
In fifth grade I did get a portable New Testament from a local Christisn evangelical organization.
For an underlying explanatory mechanism see
https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-density-divide-urbanization-polarization-and-populist-backlash/
The greater the population density the more likely it is that voters tilt liberal. At around 900 people per square mile in the US, populations move from mostly D to mostly R. The liberal enclaves in Red states are all in their larger cities.
The paper proposes a few causal mechanisms for the divide and its growth over time.
One major cause explained in the paper is the Big 5 "Openness to experience" trait. People higher in this trait are more likely to value education, which makes it more likely they go to college. Colleges are in areas where the population density exceeds the threshold (even in mainly rural states the college itself is a locus of higher density.) People with higher Openness are more likely to be liberal. So even you are surrounded by people who are liberal, which is likely to move you in that direction if you are already oriented that way (and especially if you are high in Agreeableness)
College education increases the likelihood you will not go home and pursue a career in a mainly rural profession but instead migrate to an urban center where there are more career opportunities for the educated. And there you are surrounded by more people who tilt that way.
And institutions? Institutions are density-centric. You find most institutions in larger cities more than smaller cities and the exurbs. So people who are inclined (or socialized) to be liberal will go to the places where the institutions live
As we continue to move from an economy where there's a lot of wealth created in low-density areas--farming and resource extraction--to an economy where increasing amounts of wealth are created (and captured) in high-density areas, the power tile inevitably moves in that direction
The density divide is robust across all 50 states and several countries where it has been studied
In terms of more employees donating to the democrats, it seems to me that two very good and simple explanations are:
1. Given that partisanship goes by age so much these days, liberals are much more likely to be working age.
2. Conservatives are more likely to be self employed or small business owners (petit bourgeoise in the old language)
"Conservatives did dominate institutions somewhat in the 1950s, though there were still a lot of socialist professors and newspapers."
Academia and media were far less monolithic back then, so there was much more of a mix among independent institutions. Hollywood *was* monolithic, though--and sure enough, communists were being purged at least as ruthlessly as conservatives are today.
The two big tribes/coalitions have evolved a lot since then, of course. The PMC grew in numbers and status to the point where it could take over the "blue" coalition, evict the working class and replace it with the poor and minority groups. (That was the upheaval of the 1960s.) The working class responded by joining the previously business-focused "red" coalition. (That was the "Reagan revolution".) The 1990s boom enriched the PMC to the point where their interests started converging with those of the formerly-red "investor class", creating the bipartisan crony capitalism of the Bush-Obama years, and now "woke capital". And the red coalition, reduced to a white working-class (T)rump coalition, is now responding by trying to lure more of the previously-blue minority groups left behind by the PMC-business alliance that controls the blue coalition.
But I don't see any fixed rule or order to this evolution--rather, the shared interests that form the coalitions' foundations gradually shift tectonically, producing occasional earthquakes that realign them along new fault lines. In particular, when there's an imbalance of power between them, then the least well-aligned constituencies within the stronger one stand to gain by defecting to the weaker one, until balance is re-established.
The Republicans are facing a demographic time bomb of their own making. The Democrats have bet the farm on corralling all the non-white voters, plus much of the white population disgusted with Trump's emphasis on whiteness. The Republicans just need to undertake a slight marketing switch to totally derail this strategy. Instead of being anti-minority, they need to become pro-meritocracy again. Latinos and Asians were planning on following in the footsteps of the Germans, Irish, Jews, Italians and Poles, working hard and earning their move up in American society on the merits. Instead Republicans decided to focus on being pro-white, which explicitly excludes them. And the whites are split down the middle depending on whether they are attracted or repelled by the pro-white message. Only Blacks are the logical core of the Democratic Party, and even there of course there is a good sized subgroup of middle and upper income Blacks who stay Democrats because the Republicans don't want them. Republicans need to accept amnesty for all Latinos currently living in the US, enforce a strong border preventing further illegal immigration, and focus on the traditional low tax low regulation regime that boosts economic outcomes for all regardless of ethnicity. The Democrats can only offer more taxes, unpopular affirmative action programs that mostly benefit Blacks at the expense of Latinos and Asians, and calling their remaining white elite supporters racist just because they're white. It just seems so obvious and yet it's obviously not or it would already be happening.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. The political skews of the various ethnic groups are well known, and I don't think I'm contradicting any of it.
Nope. My comment was about the Republican and Democratic political coalitions. It's indisputable that the Republican coalition consists of white people and the Democratic coalition consists of everyone else plus white elites. Your graphs just show this, and the fact that Trump did marginally better with some minority groups in 2020 is common knowledge.
I'm not sure why *stopping* the Piketty ferris wheel would be a way to end this perceived control of certain institutions by one party. Rather, you'd want to *speed up* the ferris wheel, so that the other party cycles in sooner, rather than the party currently in control remaining there.
People sometimes like to point out the similarity (with opposite colors) between the 1892 presidential election and the 2012 one to show the half orbit of the ferris wheel.
https://www.270towin.com/historical-presidential-elections/timeline/
I think the truth is a bit more complex - it's true that the urban/rural divide (surprisingly not mentioned in this post!) has basically perfectly reversed since 1892, but business has been on the side of the Republican party all the way since 1852, with 2020 being really the closest we've come to that not being the case.
>note that Hanania himself is conservative, so this isn't a cheap attack
Downplaying your own side's strengths to make it look like you're the underdog fighting against powerful institutions can indeed be a cheap trick. You see it all the time on both sides - the equivalent on the left would be "Democrats are spineless cowards who give Republicans everything they want in the name of bipartisanship."
I'm also doubting if some of these "left-leaning institutions" actually have any meaningful support for the left. Raytheon and Lockheed Martin (major defense companies) show up as slightly left-leaning on the chart, but I don't think most people would say the military-industrial complex serves left-wing interests.
If liberals donate more than conservatives in general, as Hanania says, then an industry that's right in the center politically would show up as "liberal" on the chart even though it's not "captured" in any meaningful sense.
> Downplaying your own side's strengths to make it look like you're the underdog fighting against powerful institutions can indeed be a cheap trick
It can be an intentional cheap trick, and I expect it's often deployed maliciously in fundraising appeals and the like. But from an individual perspective, it can be sincerely believed and (paradoxically) even true to an extent across the political spectrum.
As a cognitive illusion, your side's weakness looks larger than it really is because many of your side's victories, especially defensive victories, are easy to overlook or dismiss as things merely working as they "should". But the other sides victories stand out as dire and outrageous.
As a real phenomenon, remember that the parties are coalitions, not ideological monoliths. From an individual perspective, typically there's at most one faction within a party coalition that's consistently on your side. The rest of the party are unreliable allies, or even the kinds of friends who make you prefer your enemies. So every 10-20% slice of the ideological spectrum can reasonable view 80-90% as being as least partially again them.
Could there be a connection between the Political Party Ferris Wheel and the Style Barber Pole? Something about counter-culture generational rebellion spawning political movements?
>Liberals express more willingness to shun people for being conservative than vice versa.
Anecdotally as a male in a purple city in a red state I see far, far, more "don't swipe right if you voted for Trump" than "swipe the way you voted"
(From an Australian author several decades ago). O’Sullivan’s First Law: “All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.”
If this is a First Law, I would like to propose a few others.
Second Law. "All organizations that are centre-left will over time become implicitly, and complicitly, Marxist in character.”
Third Law. "Any organisation, campaign or regime that is explicitly anti-West, regardless of whether it is far-left, ultra-conservative, racist or fascistic, will be supported by the far-left.”
Fourth Law. “All entities in Law 3, seemingly of the opposite political beliefs to the far-left, will have a term of opprobrium invented on their behalf, to be used against political opponents in the west, in order to allow overt far-left support.”
Fifth Law. “All western institutions will become increasing anti-western over time.”
Sixth Law. “All centre-leftist organisations who express some sort of support for a far-left campaign will be set increasingly difficult and absurd hurdles to overcome, until inevitable failure allows a far-left takeover and the Second Law to come to pass”.
Seems a straw man. The Dem party has no anti imperialists, and anti imperialism is not at all common in the US.
I've seen the first law above attributed to Robert Conquest, as Conquest's Second Law.
Conquest's First Law is "Everyone is conservative about what he knows best."
Conquest's Third Law is "The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies."
But Scott, what have they actually WON?
Your final paragraph says it. From the Scopes Monkey Trial to the last 40 years of climate denialism, too much of American conservativism has been hostile to science for over a century, and it shouldn't come as a huge surprise that it lost academics. When right-leaning politicians push things like low taxes, stronger borders, and activist foreign policy, they've had plenty of broad support. I don't pretend to fully understand why the GOP felt it had to get in bed with the American equivalent of the Taliban to get a large enough coalition to win national elections, but it did and it lost a whole lot of people who are not naturally left-leaning in any meaningful general way. This perception that "woke" causes are winning some broad culture war just feels like you guys are in a bubble because you spend too much of your time on Twitter. If I asked my dad, a dark-skinned Mexican, life-long union man, Democrat to the bone, how he felt about trans athletes competing in the Olympics, I'm reasonably sure he'd stare blankly back at me and have no clue what I was talking about. These causes don't have any broad support, and if they end up becoming platform-core issues for the Democratic party rather than things people actually care about, we're going to be asking the exact opposite set of questions in 2120. It's not like the left has some permanent monopoly on evidence-based beliefs. But it's probably fair to say after the 1980-2020 dominance of moral majority and fossil fuel extraction politics, "reality has a liberal bias" is a common perception among educated people even if it isn't broadly true.
I came here to say this. (Not a US citizen). Consider the fact that some of the ideas upheld by prominent corrent republicans are just objectively wrong. (Denial of evolution, global warming, vaccines). If I was American any of this would be a deal breaker regardless of taxation, foreing policy, health care reforms...
Might this explain why the effect discussed is somewhat less in Europe?
I think it does. European right-wing parties are just plain old-fashioned nationalists, and nationalism has plenty of broad support. It also explains Donald Trump's success. He threw enough dog whistles at religious fundamentalists not to lose them, and they had no plausible alternative anyway, but those in the center and on the left willing to vote for him with their noses held knew from the entire history of his public life that he wasn't actually religious and didn't believe any of that nonsense.
The reality of two-party politics is when you only have two parties but a huge diversity of interest groups they need to appeal to, both parties have no choice but to make concessions to the extremer sides of their parties. In the 30s and 40s for the Democrats, that was socialists, and thanks to the Cold War and the global track record of intercom, that didn't go so well. But then for the Republicans, that became tent revival televangelists and the John Birch Society, and that is presently not going so well. I'm sure it'll swing back the other way eventually.
Incidentally, this is the part of the culture war conservatives really are losing. The United States may be a century behind western Europe in shedding biblical literalism and scripture-based oppression of sexually queer people, but it is happening and won't reverse. This will happen to the real Taliban eventually, too, though they may be a century behind the United States.
Meanwhile, authoritarian regimes like China and the Phillippines might have some plausible shot at long-run success since they are not based in reality-denial, as long as they don't make the mistakes of the Nazis and the Japanese in trying to conquer parts of the world with stronger militaries than their own.
"some of the ideas upheld by prominent corrent republicans are just objectively wrong. (Denial of evolution,"
I'd like to see more on this! Have we any names of "prominent current Republicans" who have made public statements about evolution? That's something that is a little nit-picky, but there's the whole "no evolution at all" and "yes evolution for animals, no evolution for humans" positions which are not quite identical.
So let's take the list of 2016 presidential candidates:
Ben Carson: seemingly he's a Seventh Day Adventist, Biblical literalist, and annihilationist (does not believe in Hell) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Carson#Religion So if he's a "literal six-day creation" type then okay, probably not a believer in human evolution?
John Kasich: raised Catholic, drifted away, became an Episcopalian, stayed with a conservative Episcopal church during The Anglican Wars, so probably okay with evolution every way, may or may not be liberal on some social issues
Ted Cruz: Southern Baptist, You might think you'd know his position, but there's some nuance about it: https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/religious-denomination/southern-baptist-convention/views-about-human-evolution/
https://biologos.org/series/southern-baptist-voices/articles/southern-baptist-voices-expressing-our-concerns
So unless/until he directly states yes no or maybe, we don't know if he's anti-human
evolution.
Marco Rubio: He's Catholic, we're theistic evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theistic_evolution
Jeb Bush: Raised Episcopalian, converted to Catholicism - see Rubio and Kasich above for likely positions
Jim Gilmore: United Methodist, just like Hillary Clinton! Official church stance is probably theistic evolution, his own personal opinion? No idea.
Chris Christie: Raised Catholic. Honestly, you should be more worried about his abuse of power to cause traffic jams in petty pissing contests than his views on evolution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Lee_lane_closure_scandal
Carly Fiorina: Raised Episcopalian.
Rick Santorum: Catholic. Does actually have his very own, shiny opinion on this! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santorum_Amendment
Me, I'd make him take it up with the Dominicans if he wants to be writing his own legislation on this instead of accepting current Church teaching, they're happily arguing over "is Thomism evolution-compatible?" https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2018/03/20975/
Rand Paul: Raised Episcopalian, is he still practicing? No definite news there. Opinions? No idea either.
Mike Huckabee: Baptist, I think Southern Baptist - he has been ordained a minister. So probably more on the anti-human evolution side.
But Salon magazine seems to have thought it knew the score for them all: https://www.salon.com/2015/02/11/evolution_and_the_gops_2016_candidates_a_complet_guide/
Regarding climate change and so on, again there seems to be a range of views there from "yes and it's serious" to "qualified yes" to "no and here's why" to "don't know, don't care".
The position on science is not as simple as "Democrats believe in science, Republicans don't" but it's become a very handy and convenient label to slap on, for the media and for others.
Thank you for the detailed evidence! I must agree that the views among elite Republicans on these issues diverge from the stereotypes, and the same is probably true among most Republican voters.
But at the same time it's unfortunately true the partisan association is still real. The groups arguing for creationism in public schools and against action informed by climate science have done that work within the Republican party, and the groups arguing against creationism in public schools and for action informed by climate science have done that work within the Democratic party. The 2-party system is dreadful.
You absolutely can NOT infer the issue position of a politician, especially a national politician, from their nominal religion. (And even less so on culture-war stuff.) The official Catholic position on capital punishment is "no", but how many Republican Catholic politicians declare that? And of course the current US President is a pro-choice Catholic.
On climate change, how many prominent Republican politicians say it isn't happening, how many say it isn't the looming catastrophe it is commonly represented as? It's pretty easy to misrepresent the second position as the first.
Going outside the U.S., my reading of Putin is that he knows perfectly well that climate change is happening, but he can read a map and conclude that an increase in average global temperature will be a benefit for Russia, much of which is cold.
"From the Scopes Monkey Trial to the last 40 years of climate denialism, too much of American conservativism has been hostile to science for over a century, and it shouldn't come as a huge surprise that it lost academics."
Y'know, next to The Galileo Affair, the other case that causes me to lose my mind is the Scopes Monkey Trial.
Not being American, I heard a lot about this but didn't know anything, so I went to look it up. And like a lot of similar cases, it was one where the people and activists who wanted to have a law overturned deliberately provoked a case so they could go to trial over it (see the Lawrence versus Texas and of course Roe versus Wade).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopes_Trial
"The Scopes Trial, formally known as The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes and commonly referred to as the Scopes Monkey Trial, was an American legal case in July 1925 in which a high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which had made it unlawful to teach human evolution in any state-funded school. The trial was deliberately staged in order to attract publicity to the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, where it was held. Scopes was unsure whether he had ever actually taught evolution, but he incriminated himself deliberately so the case could have a defendant.
Scopes was found guilty and fined $100 (equivalent to $1,500 in 2020), but the verdict was overturned on a technicality. The trial served its purpose of drawing intense national publicity, as national reporters flocked to Dayton to cover the big-name lawyers who had agreed to represent each side. William Jennings Bryan, three-time presidential candidate and former Secretary of State, argued for the prosecution, while Clarence Darrow served as the defense attorney for Scopes. The trial publicized the Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy, which set Modernists, who said evolution was not inconsistent with religion,against Fundamentalists, who said the Word of God as revealed in the Bible took priority over all human knowledge. The case was thus seen both as a theological contest and as a trial on whether modern science should be taught in schools."
So a law that arose out of an intra-denominational squabble and was passed as much for partisan political advantage as out of true conviction, a law which would probably have quietly died on the vine in time, was made to dance and jiggle its bones in public for the sake of some activists who wanted to push ahead with how progressive they were, and the end result was that attitudes were entrenched and people started pushing ahead aggressively with demonstrating that "I choose the Bible and the Word of God!", and so you got the mess in American public schools over the teaching of evolution.
Meanwhile, here in priest-ridden Catholic Ireland, my secondary school biology teacher was a nun, there were no problems or controversy over teaching evolution in my convent school science classes, and we never had those particular kinds of big splashy trials.
Yes, which is related to the notion that conservatives, at least with respect to religion, are not nearly so batshit in Europe compared to the US. Catholicism has been pretty reasonable for a long time, and incidentally, many of the most religious US ethnic minorities are Catholic. I think it would be a lot more intellectually acceptable for a university professor to be Catholic and vote for Catholics compared to becoming and voting for Southern Baptists. Heck, Biden is Catholic.
Gosh, how dare those liberals start a controversy over something so harmless as... *checks notes* a law that prevents science teachers from teaching science. It's obvious that they simply wanted to signal virtue, because why would anyone ever care what their children are being taught in school?
And what do you mean by "it would have naturally died on the vine"? Scopes lost his case, and the law stayed on the books for 45 years. That's a pretty long time to wait for a "natural" death.
And I 100% don't accept the argument that creating a test case is in some way wrong because you're "stirring up controversy." Test cases are a necessary part of US activism, since you can't challenge something unconstitutional without an actual court case.
(A lot of famous civil rights cases came about as a result of the NAACP finding people who would look sympathetic when getting arrested and then using that to publicize the injustices of Jim Crow. But I suppose that Rosa Parks should have just stayed at the back of the bus and waited for those laws to naturally wither away, rather than sparking the dreaded controversy?)
"It's not time for a change yet" is a vacuous argument, one that can be brought out against literally any sort of activism, because nothing ever changes without people first speaking about the need for change.
Here we go again. Once more for the people in the back;
The mythology of the Scopes Monkey Trial: In 1925 down in some nowhere town in Tennessee, where we are already deep in knuckle-dragging redneck territory, a mild-mannered high school teacher is dragged into court by the Bible-bashers for the heinous crime of teaching SCIENTIFIC TRUTH. Unhappily, the Bible-bashers win the epic trial of "Science versus Religion" and our hero is fined for being guilty of the offence of not being a knuckle-dragging redneck. Happily, in the long run, SCIENCE! wins.
https://famous-trials.com/scopesmonkey/2127-home
The truth: In 1925 in Tennessee, some local bloviator politician gets a law passed that pretty much everyone thinks is dumb, but because fighting it at this time is like fighting against Mom and apple-pie and Truth, Justice and the American Way, it gets passed and then ignored. It is not being enforced. In fact, the school textbooks used to teach science are technically in violation of the law, but nobody cares.
Meanwhile, in some nowhere town in Tennessee, a confluence is about to occur: the ACLU is spoiling for a fight on this and similar laws and is looking for a test case. A blow-in from New York who is a Methodist (and from the start, the "Science versus Religion" narrative is undercut) and thinks this law is phooey, tells a few local big-wigs that this is the perfect chance to get their little town, which is dying on its feet and badly needs *something* to revitalise it, into national news. They agree that a show trial is just the thing - and one of them being a School Superintendent, he calls on a local highschool teacher. "Ever teach evolution in class?" our hero (for this is the role he is being cast in) is asked. "Can't remember, but I'm willing to say I did. I'm your man!" replies our hero.
Rubbing hands with glee, everyone on both sides of this farce start piling on the melodrama. The defence first try to get H.G. Wells (!) involved and when he is smart enough to smell a rat, Clarence Darrow jumps aboard. For the prosecution, William Jennings Bryant steps up - God alone knows why, various motives have been attributed to him. What is important is that there is a heck of a lot more going on here than merely "Science versus Religion" for everyone involved: the religious types want to challenge fundamentalist, literalist Bible interpretation so the Modernists versus the Fundamentalists line up. The agnostics/atheists/freethinkers want to give *all* religion, moderate or not, a poke in the eye, so Darrow and H.L. Mencken jump in - Mencken sniffs out the opportunity for a good story, and if it's not already one he'll make it so, so his reporting on the case is tuned for maximum provocation.
This is the heyday of Social Darwinism and the budding Eugenicist movement, so people concerned about *that* also stick their oars in - if it's anti-science and anti-progress to be anti-eugenics, then so be it!
And the circus comes to town.
Since the defence *want* maximum publicity, Darrow asks the jury for a guilty verdict so they can appeal to a higher court. This is done. Eventually the Tennessee Supreme Court throws it out on a technicality, to the disappointment at least of Darrow who wanted a Constitutional decision on this (if he'd been around for Roe versus Wade. he'd have gotten his penumbras of emanation).
And so a dumb law that was being ignored and that would have died quietly was fanned into a blaze by people using it for manifold reasons, it went down into pop culture as "Science versus Religion" and resulted in a polarised battleground where people felt they were being forced to choose between God and Science, and they picked God, and so the teaching of science in American schools continues to be a hot-button topic *to this present day*.
More than that, attitudes on Biblical literalism - the Fundamentalists versus the Modernists - were hardened as now one side felt it had to defend religious belief itself from being watered-down and rendered irrelevant.
I don't think anybody came out of that trial having won very much of anything.
But sure! I am of course only ranting about nice people who only wanted to teach science - and certainly had no ulterior motives, be it "get our small town hopping once more", "I can make this a publicity stunt to get my anti-religion views before a wider audience", "we must fight to protect the Bible" and "this is going to sell *so* many newspapers!"
Rosa Parks didn't "just happen" to be sitting on that seat on that day, as has been recorded.
https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/rosa-parks
Now imagine if the Parks case resulted in the worst of all worlds: the appeal on her case finally gets to the Supreme Court and instead of a decision about constitutionality, it gets thrown out on the technicality that she was not, in fact, sitting in the 'whites only' section, and so even today there are rows about segregated buses which continue to ply their trade.
The Civil Rights movement happened in the middle of a lively and actual situation. The Scopes trial created the very problem it set out to solve. That's the difference here.
Errata: "Liberal protests attract orders of magnitude more protests than conservative ones"
Perhaps you want to replace the first protests with causes or the second protests with people?
One thing I find exhasperating is how lousy people on the right (like me) have been at building alternative institutions. The network of think tanks built, I think, mostly during the Reagan era were something of an achievement, but that's now 30 years in the rear view mirror. If you think of right wing media outlets, they're too unscrupulous to do more than preach to the choir, mostly, and too many media figures they produce are people like Sean Hannity and Mark Levin, ie, long on bombast, short on integrity. Universities: mostly nada.
I have a couple pet theories on this:
1. If you think of conservatives as people motivated to defend a traditional American strand of individualism, the result is these people are just less motivated to do stuff where the benefits mostly accrue to the group rather than to them personally, like becoming an activist or starting a non-profit.
2. Advocating for still more government spending and programs creates more opportunities for personal profit and career advancement for folks on the left, because hey, maybe some of those new appropriations find their way into your pocket, one way or another, or maybe there's a cushy job waiting for you at that new agency being created, and so the supply of people willing to go in for this is simply a lot higher. This is particularly true in our current post-industrial economy, where government employment, contracting, and the like makes up a greater share of the opportunities available to educated workers.
I'm not wedded to either of these, just putting them out there.
Great comment. It really is telling that there isn't much in the way of a journalistically strong, non-cheerleader conservative media outlet (maybe the WSJ, but see below). Things like the Daily Wire quickly went in the cheerleader direction and National Review isn't exactly known for its hard-hitting original reporting. The Free Beacon and the Examiner occasionally make noises about getting more journalistic, but since they're basically vanity projects by R donors they don't end up going there. City Journal has potential, but their shameful treatment of Sol Stern for questioning right-wing doctrine on school choice again underscores that there's plenty of ideological conformity to go around on the right too (Reason's had issues with that as well).
Conservative universities have similar issues. There are still some clearly right-leaning colleges out there, but they usually have some kind of explicit religious litmus test (which, as bad as "Statements of Commitment to DEI" are these days, is not the same as requiring allegiance to specific statements). Even if you created a non-religious new conservative super-university from scratch, there are all kinds of gatekeeping issues. What would happen if a professor hired at a conservative university changed their mind and moved left? Would liberals be hired as professors or allowed to enter as students? What kind of student would want to come to a school that would give them a "scarlet letter" degree? And of course, the wealthy donors who created such an institution would probably want some kind of voice/veto that, like with previous donations by the Kochs, would raise questions around academic freedom.
It seems like the ideal here would be to establish not necessarily explicitly conservative institutions, but rather institutions that are not hostile to conservatives and which actually embrace free speech and a marketplace of ideas. It would be great if some of the conservative super-donors would be more like Bezos with the WashPost and hands-off with any institutions that they run. That said, I do wonder if over time such institutions would drift leftward as well due to some of the ideas discussed in Hanania's piece. The WSJ's news division for instance has definitely been getting more liberal in its tone and coverage in recent years even as the opinion section has been split between red meat cheerleaders/hackish PR people and some legitimately good conservative writers and thinkers. It's a challenge to keep more highbrow conservative institutions afloat anyways as more college-educated people move leftward, so there's not much in the way of a market for that (ironically).
Yup, the Daily Caller explicitly said in their initial announcement, "we want to be the New York Times of the right."
That didn't work out, and they quickly became a tabloid 'own the libs' site.
The reality is the type of overlap of an audience that enjoys say, a woke take on comic book movies + an article about the child tax credit, but the opposite doesn't really exist on the conservative side, for whatever reason, so Vox is successful, and there is no right-wing version of Vox.
As I've said before, the closest thing is Reason, but the issue is, while they do put out the occasional culture war piece about how free speech is doomed or whatever, they, unfortunately, for the sake of their own power within the right-leaning coalition, continue to also point out immigration is good and cops are not great.
Yep. In general, there are too many lukewarm "takes" among the conservative intelligentsia and not nearly enough shoe-leather reporting or intelligent cultural criticism. The near-complete lack of 538-style data journalism, for instance, on the right is striking. The Dispatch is kind of doing a more "reported opinion" approach, but they're generally pretty anchored to the old Weekly Standard perspective and sometimes lapse into being a platform for AEI opeds that couldn't get placed elsewhere. I really hope they succeed though since they seem best-positioned to do things outside the standard highbrow conservative publication mold.
There's also nothing like "The Weeds" on the right that really digs into policy details in an accessible, listenable format. All the conservative group podcasts from NRO, Commentary, the Examiner, and even The Dispatch kind of blend together as a sea of mostly surface-level zombie Reaganism policy and uneven commentary on current news from nice-enough DC/NYC suburbanites. There are a few with smart guests that can occasionally go well, but the left really seems to have much more interest in talking through policy details as opposed to more surface-level stuff. The median mainstream R podcast, of course, seems to be far more populist/Trumpy talk radio stuff.
I do wonder if this affects partisan sorting. If you're a young person interested in government and the details of how it runs and such, there's not much for you to consume within the media environment on the right. You can read Buckley and Burke and such, which might explain why there are at least a decent number of conservative political theorists, but there's no Vox explainer to dig into about a policy topic. And from a pop culture perspective, there's no right-wing "West Wing" that glorifies government service. I know there *are* plenty of right-wing wonks and policy hands out there, but they seem far less visible than TV celebrities/sometimes outright grifters within the right-wing media environment compared to the left (which, of course, has their share as well).
I think #2 is mostly true, though it operates more in the mysterious subterranean way class self-interest often does rather than being how liberals explicitly think. If you tend to see the administrative state in that sort of disenchanted, purely transactional light, you're probably a conservative to begin with.
I'm more skeptical about #1. It does describe part of the current situation, but in a longer perspective I'm not sure it holds up very well. E.g., for most of my lifetime the stereotype of the two US parties that I'd hear from political people was that the Republicans were the disciplined army able to submerge disagreement for the good of the cause, and the Democrats were the fractious coalition of subgroups motivated by their own peculiar interests. And conservatives being generally the more "groupy" tribe obviously fits with the sort of Haidt-style paradigm of authority/loyalty/etc as moral foundations.
Conservatives also have a long and conspicuous history of being motivated to do stuff where the immediate benefits accrue more to the group than to the individual, when that stuff is called "church."
So on balance I still lean toward the sense that something's happened to institutions in our particular historical moment that's made them much more congenial to one political tribe, rather than the current divide in attitudes to institutions being something that just flows naturally from ideological first principles.
Speculation: The current divide is between large families on the right and small families on the left. Family size is currently correlated with income and anti-correlated with education.
"The Labour Party managed to change its ways "
The Labour party is now the party of media, finance, and education, and they have driven away their working class base.
The trouble with this analysis is it implies the causal direction is like: educational elite flips to Dems --> institutions turn left. But that doesn't really fit the chronology suggested by the graphs.
The highly educated don't start tilting Democratic until the 1990s. But the decisive period in the capture of "institutions" (meaning primarily: higher ed and NGO's, maybe also prestige media though my grasp of the history there isn't so firm) by the left is generally agreed to be the late 1960s.
That's more consistent with the reverse causal path: institutions turn left, at a time when left-leaning people are still a minority among the highly educated --> people formed by those institutions, or wanting to advance within them, increasingly come to identify with the Democratic Party, eventually reshaping that party in their own image.
And also prima facie more consistent with the Hanania approach. Because it suggests that institutional capture isn't an organic outcome of coalitional shifting, but might instead be a kind of exogenous shock that arises for idiosyncratic reasons and resets coalitions in unpredictable ways.
That's the answer to the question posed in the piece: what happened between the 50s and now?
The 60s happened. Post-Second World War, the economies were generally booming, there was more money available to larger sections of the population, and college became something that went from "is only for our betters" to "I work on an assembly line but I want more for my kids" and became affordable for the higher levels of the working class.
And as we saw with the student protests of May 68 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_68, college students became radicalised in various wars, some to do with the Vietnam War, others to do with the whole counter-culture thing. And the universities resisted at first, then capitulated.
And the next generation of academics, journalists and the like were the ones who had been the student protesters. In time, they became part of the Establishment but they continued to think of themselves as the protesters sticking it to The Man. Their kids went the same way.
And here we are today.
Bingo.
It would be interesting to see data on college attendance by political affiliation. I would bet that, controlling for IQ, liberals are more likely than conservatives to go to college and also more likely to go to elite colleges. And that this is due less to anti-conservative attitudes in the admissions offices than to liberals' higher motivation for elite degrees.
If there is actually a difference of this kind, then education doesn't really explain anything. Saying "journalists are liberal because they're Ivy Leaguers" is sort of like saying "journalists are liberal because they're liberal".
I grew up in a very conservative subculture. Hanania is on to something, but I don't think "liberals care more" is the best way to explain it. Conservatives and liberals have very different strategies for dealing with hostile institutions. The liberal tendency is Infiltrate--->Take Over--->Purge, but the conservative tendency is Withdraw--->Recreate.
Previous generations of conservatives grew uncomfortable with the increasing liberalism of the public schools, so they put their kids into private schools. Now the private schools have gotten more liberal, so there's been a huge upswing in conservative homeschooling.
This is not the behavior of people who "don't care much". These alternative approaches to schooling are a LOT more difficult for middle class people. Private schools cost a lot of money, and parents often spend more than an hour a day just driving their kids there and back. Homeschooling is effectively a job. Public schooling seems laughably easy by contrast- it's free, and they literally pick up your kid at your front door.
Ultimately, I think conservatives are the spiritual descendants of the people who settled the United States-people who dealt with conflict by striking out for the colonies, and then for the frontier, and building new communities with immense effort from scratch. Now we have no frontier and no escape.
> Does this explain why so many institutions are so liberal? Because they draw from mostly educated people, and educated = liberal these days?
I think this is pretty straight forward obvious. Liberals have dominated education for decades. Especially higher education, just look at your own graph. Professors and educators are the most likely to donate to democrats. Once you control education, it's becomes possible to route every other institution. Everyone who goes through your education pipeline has their opinions shifted more liberal. They then go into every other institution and drive out everyone who's not part of their coalition. If your HR department is filled with liberals, then you can drive out any other conservatives. So now you control companies. You can then use those institutions to apply pressure to other institutions who don't sufficiently share your ideological makeup. For example, threatening to pull your advertisement spending, denying access to payment processing services, deplatforming, etc....
I guess you could call it the long march through the institutions.
My bid for a solution is 'Get the Republican party to adopt positions that educated people find less distasteful,' but some people may claim that the causal arrow points the other way there. I think you could make a good case that the Republicans actually held positions educated people would like more in the past, and don't now - I would offer 'democrats ate their lunch by becoming pro-market economic conservatives' as a primary factor - and this could be a genuine change that explains why the educated affiliation has flipped.
I also wonder how much rural vs urban divide matters here. Urban people are 73% more likely to get a college degree than rural people, so 'educated' is a pretty good proxy measure for 'urban vs rural'. If the real issue is just that urban areas are democratic, and urban areas are where all national institutions are headquartered, that's also a simple explanation.
"My bid for a solution is 'Get the Republican party to adopt positions that educated people find less distasteful'"
In other words, "make the Republican Party the same on socially liberal positions as the Democratic Party".
This still doesn't mean things get better; our two major parties are now happily in coalition with each other, where once that would have been a "has Hell frozen over?" situation as they arose literally shooting at each other in our Civil War. One of them, Fine Gael, has gone from being the party of Oliver J. Flanagan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_J._Flanagan to "yay us, we legalised gay marriage!"
But even in our happy current days of "Tweedle-dee is the same as Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dum is the same as Tweedle-dee", there are still scandals and public disapproval:
(1) Zapponegate A, the "jobs for the girls" mini-scandal over "hey, how come a reliable liberal former government minister was able to arrange a cosy sinecure for herself aboard the UN gravy train without others, even in the cabinet, knowing about this?" https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/politics/we-look-like-fools-tds-upset-at-how-katherine-zappone-was-given-job-as-free-speech-envoy-40699810.html
(2) Zapponegate B, the "one law for the rich, another for the poor" mini-scandal over "hey, how come those in power who are forbidding us from having First Communion and Confirmation ceremonies are attending outdoor gatherings that break the regulations they themselves put in place?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrion_Hotel_controversy
The lady herself who arranged the lobbying party and has now decided not to take up the position specially created for her: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Zappone
First of all, if the two parties moved to agreement on following experts or w/e, they would still find new areas to disagree about - that's pretty much definitional in a two-party system. But, they might end up disagreeing about meaningful things, instead of stupid things.
Second, what is your point regarding individual scandals? How is that relevant to this topic? I don't see the connection.
I took the point to be that partisan animus operates somewhat independently of actual ideological disagreement. So you could have the two parties adopt the same positions on everything, but partisan media would just shift to attacking the other side over highly personalized instances of hypocrisy or venality.
I think Hanania is right that the Blue Tribe cares more about defeating the Red Tribe than the Red Tribe does about defeating the Blue Tribe, and that this is relevant to Blue takeover of institutions (Blue purges Red more effectively than Red purges Blue).
What he leaves out is *why*. I don't think Red is especially incapable of worrying about things, but while Blue is a nearly-pure counterculture, Red's primary focus is external threats. The threat of Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe was something that held Red together and allowed Red-based ideological purges (e.g. McCarthy), but there was no threat for a while and the alarm bells around the PRC don't seem to be ringing as loudly (at least, in the USA - in Australia we're plenty scared).
"I think Hanania is right that the Blue Tribe cares more about defeating the Red Tribe than the Red Tribe does about defeating the Blue Tribe"
I think that there is a difference, but that it's almost precisely /not/ that. The Blue Tribe has a long policy shopping list, which defeating the Red Tribe will be necessary to achieve; the Red Tribe cares passionately about defeating the Blue Tribe to the point where that, rather than a positive alternative program, has become its driving force.
I think the word "reactionary" is a relevant one here.
And I think that may be part of why the Blue Tribe comes across as caring more - it's not that they actually /do/ care more, its that it's easier to manifest caring when what you care about is policy programme rather than a tribal feud.
>the Red Tribe cares passionately about defeating the Blue Tribe to the point where
Not what Hanania's statistics show. The "hard to be friends with" graphic is from Cato, but the "would not date" is from Pew.
Here are the links, if you want to look:
https://www.cato.org/survey-reports/state-free-speech-tolerance-america
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/24/most-democrats-who-are-looking-for-a-relationship-would-not-consider-dating-a-trump-voter/
>>The Labour Party managed to change its ways - all we can do is hope the Republicans can too.
I feel fairly confident on reading this that you do not know very much about the Labour Party leader who fought the last two elections, Jeremy Corbyn.
I wanted to ask "How can a discussion of woke companies be complete without a mention of 'harassment law', 'hostile workplace environment', 'anti-discrimination' or 'civil rights act'?" but one of Hanania's followups discusses just that.
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rights
Companies are woke because hostile workplace environment laws and guilt-presuming anti-discrimination laws make it too risky to hire a manager who is outspokenly right-wing about race, sex, sexual orientation or gender identity. It's not that laws require companies to celebrate gay pride, but when every manager is either a SJW or keeps quiet about politics, the SJWs can push the stuff well beyond what the law or even the company's interests require, without pushback.
Programmers aren't uniformly progressive. As far as I can tell, conservatives are uncommon, but libertarians are common. E.g. according to polls 56% of Google employees didn't think Damore should have been fired, and IIRC 40% agreed with him (though I can't find the source for the latter). That suggest a pretty even split. It's the management that uniformly takes the progressive side—while commentators as well as the EEOC argued that Google would have risked harassment lawsuits if it doesn't fire him.
I don't follow Hanania's argument though that it's civil rights laws that make conservatives care less about politics even in ways that aren't regulated by those laws, such as going to protests.
I managed to find a source for the Google internal polls: 36.3% agreed with Damore and 48.5% disagreed; 30.3% thought the document was harmful and shouldn't have been shared and 57.4% disagreed.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170815222234if_/https://twitter.com/sonyaellenmann/status/894756561087746049
The source that 56% didn't think he should have been fired: https://www.bandt.com.au/poll-56-google-employees-dont-believe-james-damore-shouldve-sacked/
One factor is probably related to how, in a non-authoritarian system, it takes much more time and effort to synchronize conservative action (i.e., to restrain new projects) than to make “noise” or new pilot initiatives of a new/liberal type.
Here’s a small scale, slightly obscure, but real life example:
- portuguese academic “Praxe”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxe
Essentially, Portuguese Praxe consists of initiation rituals that last your whole degree, in many ways similar to American fraternities and sororities, although usually with no common housing.
In Portugal, a university course in which there is no Praxe is in a state of unstable equilibrium. Any given year, 2 or 3 students can simply decide to start doing initiation rituals to consensual 1st year students. In a non-authoritarian system, what can the conservative do to refrain this voluntary action to stop from happening? Other “conservative” students would have to spend much time *convincing* people not to join this initiative. in practice, every year the ritual easily grows in numbers.
In essence, there’s a bias in the system to make it easy for social “innovation” and pilot projects of volunteers. (And in the case of Praxe, several mechanisms exist to perpetuate the practice).
This could probably be solved if the existence of Praxe was voted on every year. But as it is initially proposed, it is not a mandatory action, so why not.
This effect might be specially true in countries whose identity is so attached to individual freedom. Same-sex marriage was always going to become legal in the US, since it is something that does not really affect other people. Of course, secret voting delays the passing of the law.
My intuition is that, when X correlates with Y, but X and Y have opposite correlations with A, that there is very likely some fourth factor B strongly at play that correlates the other way round with X and Y than does A.
Here, surely B must be age? Even though education correlates a lot with wealth, there's also this huge age effect where older people are richer just due to building up wealth over time, getting promoted through organisations, gaining skills and seniority, etc., but they're also a lot less well educated because they had their formal education back when any given person at some given point on the intelligence spectrum generally got a lot less schooling than they do now.
So these poor educated people voting left are going to disproportionately the young educated people, with the older educated people being more right wing, and then those older educated right-wing people are also rich, and then the uneducated rich people are also old, and they're right-wing too, and then the old uneducated people generally left wing and poor.
I've tried to write that sentence a bunch of times but basically any four-dimensional system like that is ass to explain, and I'd want it all drawn out on a 3D graph of voters in one of the countries that exemplifies this new alignment (say, UK) with income and education on the X and Y as here, but then age on a Z direction, and colour to represent the parties as here, and I think you'd essentially see a very nice graph of with eight 'boxes' of which four would be mostly empty, and you would see all the correlations that way, and how you end up with income and wealth correlating with each other, but correlating opposite ways with both age and vote. You could even do a before/after shift showing a transition between the one where everything lines up, and the one where it all splits off in different directions.
Doing that would provide the sort of intuitive grasp of what I'm trying to say that I have in my head but can't remotely explain in words. This is why data visualisation is an important skill - it's much easier to see this than read someone ham-handedly try to explain it.
If you're analyzing the "modern" US political alignments, I don't think you can skip noting the *absolute dominance* of the Democratic Party of Congress from 1933 through 1995 - the Dems held the majority in both houses for most of that period, and an *unbroken* 40 year run of control of the House from 1955 to 1995.
Now, the wider ideological intra-party diversity of this period makes this a *little* less interesting (at their centrist ends, the parties' memberships in Congress overlapped significantly, the rightmost Dem was well to the right of the leftmost Republican - this overlap has pretty much disappeared in my lifetime).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_divisions_of_United_States_Congresses#/media/File:Combined--Control_of_the_U.S._House_of_Representatives_-_Control_of_the_U.S._Senate.png
There's a lot of complications in the details, but the broad outline of the story is that the old alignment was anti-democratic. The Dixiecrats ran one-party states in the South for much of the 20th century, effectively taking their Congressional seats out of competition. Outside the South, the two parties competed for the remaining seats, and split them relatively evenly. That meant the coalition of white supremacist Dixiecrats + labor-associated Democrats was unfairly larger than the population it represented, and the education-and-business-associated Republicans unfairly smaller. When there's a dominant party, it pays politically for minority party representatives to make compromises and bring porkbarrel spending home. Our current national polarization is largely a result of the Civil Rights movement's victories putting more Congressional seats into the national competition and making it more politically expedient to refuse to compromise.
For basically my entire lifetime, "reformers" have been tearing down the systemic tools that encouraged intra- and inter-coalition compromises; with the (entirely, if technically, correct) observation that, in practice, these result in corrupt bargains, pork, and distorts the political landscape.
But with the House now being entirely responsible to their districts and almost not at all to the national parties, the seats are *still* not in contention (because the representatives are still reflective of their constituents without the pressure of the rest of the national parties) and they're less willing OR able to compromise to the national pressures.
I think most political disagreements come down to factual disagreements rather than value disagreements. Imagine a world where one party was dominated by a philosophy that was largely correct and the other was dominated by a philosophy that was popular and intuitive but fundamentally flawed. The 'correct' party would gain more support among educated and intellectual elites (because these people are better at telling truth from lies). The 'mistaken' party would gain support among those who benefit from the realisation of its philosophy. If they had the means, these people would then persuade other groups that the mistaken philosophy was good. This could be through religion, divide-and-rule tactics, personal charisma, targeted advertising, and many other methods.
You'd get a contradiction if educated and intelligent people also tended to fall into the group who benefit from the mistaken philosophy, because then they have incentives in both directions. Possibly gradual improvements in education over the course of decades cause them to vote more with what they think is correct and less with what benefits them personally. Perhaps economic growth makes them less worried about their personal wealth and gives them the freedom to vote for what they think is correct. Perhaps some other factor.
"Probably solving racism would help shake up political coalitions, so somebody should do that too."
The elites are pushing the racism stuff the hardest.
"Racial conflicts make it hard to keep poor whites and poor minorities together in a "grand coalition of the poor". "
Divide and conquer.
Bingo. The reason you see "woke capital" supporting Pride Month is because they know it's the better PR move than the alternative, and they'd rather have people arguing about race than arguing about things that could actually threaten their power, like class and our economic system.
Also their employees are gay and they want gay employees
Sure, that too. It's just overall in their interest to be supportive now that enough of the country is. A few decades ago they would risk paying a price with consumers for supporting queer people.
"Piketty thinks the same process might be happening in other countries with eg Muslim immigrants"
Can partially confirm this for Sweden. The Social Democratic party has essentially monopolized the muslim vote through extremely close relationships with muslim organizations, but in the process lost a large chunk of uneducated, especially rural, especially male, whites to the anti-immigrant populist Sweden Democrats. For the first time ever, the Social Democrats have to fight tooth and nail to maintain control over the unions against a challenge from the right.
Sorry if someone else has made this comment, but I feel obliged to make it in all discussions of this type: 95% (or maybe 99%) of the answer is everything isn’t woke, it’s just that you live in a very particular media bubble. The remaining few percent of the answer is just that we are still engaged in the long, long process of offering real equality to people who are a bit different. The law is still more radical than most people.
Yeah but that media bubble is made of the media bubbles that high level administration staffers and powerful journalists and political appointees and high level lawyers and powerful people in tech companies are in. The lower classes being illiterate Christians did not stop the enlightenment.
And what “real equality” is not had?
The good old fashioned kinds of equality: equality by race, sex, and sexual orientation. Racism and sexism didn’t disappear in the 1960s; hetero discrimination didn’t end with the legal victories for gays (that only came 10 years ago!). There may be class discrimination in there, too.
I mean “no discrimination” and “equality” aren’t synonyms necessarily. I was thinking “equality before the law”. I fail to see much relevant sex or sex orientation discrimination (there is some, sure, but there’s also some pro gay and woman discrimination!) in most aspects of society, especially the emerging frontiers like tech, and race ... probably not worth getting into, but plenty of POCs like Indians have done quite well in aggregate (highest average income for any ethnic group (except Jews maybe I forget lol) in the US at double the average - 120k household) despite being brown
If you honestly believe that there is no distorting discrimination left in America, then I disagree, but my argument doesn't even rely on that. Suppose that you're right, and there is no damaging sexism or racism in America in 2021. Just by looking at the law, we know that there definitely was damaging sexism and racism in America within the lifetimes of many of the people alive today. People of my mother's generation, for example (baby boomers) weren't given the same opportunities if they were women. So their situation will never be fair, and the distortions that that created ripple on (e.g. through lack of women in leadership positions) for at least a generation. Similarly, the gay people who were disowned by their families, and so don't get to inherit houses, end up at a disadvantage in insane housing markets.
With sustained fairness, eventually these problems will disappear into random noise. But those massive injustices don't just disappear overnight when the law changes.
There’s obviously discrimination in America, I just object to the idea that that discrimination is *evil* or even particularly bad. There is “terrible” ageism and ableism and lookism and nepotism everywhere. But that’s just kinda normal. I don’t think women in leadership positions is a sexism issue, women just are way less commandingly aggressive and nasty on average as well as willing to build their own thing and tend to follow the “pack” or gestalt more, even (and, honestly, especially - women in supposedly sexist cultures often do hard sciences more and are more assertive when need be, although that could be for other reasons) when raised in equal western cultures. And yeah people who get disowned have less money and even if they had money the lack of connections would be bad, but what on earth should one do about that? Women outnumber men in college already, and plenty of people get disowned from society or family for being racist. If one adds the discriminations all up for the new generation, women and minorities get much more “unfair” due than the reverse at this time. Someone I know knows someone who “was told
by his lawyers he had to hire some racial minorities for anti discrimination law protection, looked around the specialized technical talent pool for his particular area, couldn’t find any, so made up some useless communications and diversity positions and gave those to people”. My essential argument is that nothing is exactly fair, and that the current state of play is as fair to women or gays as it is to several dozen other classes.
This might be too CWey actually I’ll delete if someone says ro
Please don't delete. I'll need this as useful evidence when someone says, "no-one is that crazy". But here you are literally telling me that the discrimination suffered by racists is just as bad as the discrimination suffered by gay people.
The elites weren't right-wing during the 1950s-1970s; they were right-wing in the 1920s.
One very important aspect that is neglected in this post (but brought up in the comments) is the rural-urban divide. Living in cities is one of the most predictive factors for voting Democratic, and most of today's elites (for a variety of reasons) live in cities. Likewise, most of today's important institutions are run from medium-to-large cities. That alone could account for much of this disparity.
I do think Hanania's hypothesis is a little bit conspiratorial. For example, professors in all disciplines lean left pretty severely (depending on the field, professors identifying as Democrats outnumber professors identifying as Republicans by between 3:1 to 10:1). However, I think that the number of, for example, physics professors who chose to become professors (rather than, say, hedge fund managers) *in order to exert political influence* is minuscule. I know a decent number of STEM professors, and not a single one has ever indicated that weilding political influence was even a small factor in going into academia (anecdotal, yes, but telling nonetheless).
Today's "elite" also includes things such as FAANG tech workers. These tech workers also tilt heavily to the left. But it's pretty evident that most tech workers choose those jobs not out of political ideology, but rather because the compensation is good, the conditions are comfortable, and the work is interesting. Perhaps you could argue that the left-leaning tech workers are more vocal than the right-leaning tech workers, but you would *also* need to explain why there are just so many more left-leaning tech workers to begin with, and Hanania fails to do that.
Finally, I think people here are *vastly* overstating the effect that teachers and professors have on political discourse and society at large. I have spent many years in academia and in academia-adjacent areas, and generally speaking, professors are delighted if they can even convince their students to do the readings and hand in assignments on time, never mind permanently change their political ideology. Furthermore, while perhaps some parts of the humanities have large political components, the vast majority of disciplines are not really related to politics. I studied a STEM field in undergrad and graduate school, and political topics were basically never discussed with professors. Students' political views are much more likely to be affected by the views of their (overwhelming left-leaning) peers rather than by professors.
The commenters who have proposed explanations such as "academia was captured by the left" or "the great march through the institutions" seem to be missing the big picture. Academia, universities, and teachers *worldwide* lean left. Institutional capture could potentially explain why some American universities are left-leaning, but it doesn't explain why university professors throughout almost all of the Western world are left-leaning (unless you posit some sort of "global institutional capture", which I think strains credulity).
A much more credible explanation is that significant planks of the modern right's platform are off-putting to (or even incompatible with) academics and intellectuals. I don't think it's controversial that there is a very strong anti-intellectual strain in today's GOP (such thinking also exists in the Democratic party, but it's better kept in check). Ignoring policy, is it not clear that Barack Obama's style of communication is more appealing to academics than Donald Trump's? The right has a fairly large faction that is extremely skeptical of "expert opinion", and academics are (some of) those who determine expert opinion: the conflict between these things is evident. Politicians on the right are much more likely to "go with their gut". Going with your gut doesn't cut it in academia. Religiosity is another big factor here.
In short, is it really so surprising that the political ideology that has elevated being anti-elite, anti-academic, anti-intellectual and anti-expert finds itself out of favor with the elites, academics, intellectuals, and experts?
> Finally, I think people here are *vastly* overstating the effect that teachers and professors have on political discourse and society at large
Professors isn’t the same as your local college English teacher. Lots of people with very important political influence are also professors of political science, economics, business, foreign policy, law, etc. the professors at top colleges very much mingle with and feed people to political influence.
Except various studies have shown that college actually moves left-wing students toward the center. College is a machine to create center-left liberals, not left-wing Marxists. Now, if you're a social conservative, OK, that's a problem, but that's a different argument than the "Marxist professors are creating woke culture via English 101 lectures about white privilege."
I’m not talking about leftism or ideology here. I’m just saying that at many colleges professors there do have an outsized influence on society at large, and you can tell because of how many political positions and political appointments and political influence and friendships with important politicians and judge positions and all sorts of things they have
This has had many different impacts, many leftwards and some less leftwards
Also, for every study showing that “college moves left students center”, I can get you a literal thousand studies showing that Chinese traditional medicine or homeopathy or priming or racial bias or whatever. Anecdotal claims of studies are as useless as, and IMO worse, than actual anecdotes (well it depends on the field and topic)
>In short, is it really so surprising that the political ideology that has elevated being anti-elite, anti-academic, anti-intellectual and anti-expert finds itself out of favor with the elites, academics, intellectuals, and experts?
I think you're three quarters right and one quarter... not necessarily wrong, but not exactly right, either... with the one quarter being "anti-elite".
"Academics", "intellectuals" and "experts" are all fairly well-defined groups that do indeed have a political valence. "Elites" is a fairly meaningless political slogan; left and right both claim to be anti-elite, and mean very different things by it (respectively "against the economic interests of the rich and big business" and "against academics, intellectuals and experts") by it. I think pretty much /any/ political movement /has/ to claim to be against "the elite" and on the side of "ordinary people", and can then interpret that to cover pretty much anything it wants to do.
I think Red's problem is that it *has* to oppose the chunks of academia that engage with politics the most (e.g. social psychologists attempting to pathologise being Red), and it's quite a lot of bandwidth to say "a large chunk of academia is effectively a propaganda factory that should be ignored, but this other bit is fine".
(The other bit is that the cards on global warming - hippies being for it, loadsamoney being against it - fell in a way that turned it into a political issue. That one's an own-goal for the LPA and the Republicans, straight up.)
Best post in this entire comment section tbh. I think people here tend to over emphasize novel and contrarian solutions over obvious ones.
So I've been trying to draw a bead on the motivation and mindset of the rationalist community for a while now. My current take is that they are trying eliminate emotion and are skeptical of any and all preconceived notions. They want to work from first principles so to speak with high value for hard numbers, especially reproducible hard numbers.
If you will forgive me a little skepticism of my own there also seems to be sort of inordinate fondness for Bayes Theorem. At times this seems like the sort of fondness for beetles and stars that J.B.S. Haldane ascribed to The Creator. I do get its importance. I think. At times it does seem overdone here.
I'm curious though if there is any room at all for noetic knowledge with rationalists. The sort of insight that comes through mediation or prayer or fasting or ingestion of entheogens. I see that taken at literal face value a rationalist would reject this out of hand. I'm just probing for any wiggle room that a rationalist might be open to.
None of this was accurate even at the start of the rationalist community, and is even less so in the last few years. There has been a large amount of discussion on Less Wrong about integration of what you call 'noetic knowledge'. See for example https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/tMhEv28KJYWsu6Wdo/kensh , https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/mELQFMi9egPn5EAjK/my-attempt-to-explain-looking-insight-meditation-and , https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/NYPmCBfrDfXfhwBog/a-rationalist-s-guide-to-psychoactive-drugs, and Scott's own writings on psychedelia.
Okay, thanks. I am still fairly new to this. I had read Scotts old blog off and on for about 2 years.
I wonder whether the fundamental reason isn't simply that the left has always assigned a lot of importance to intellectuals, whether as skilled technocrats or as a liberal vanguard whose superior education allows them to transcend the prejudices of the conservative masses. People naturally like being told they're important, so it's not really surprising that intellectuals should be attracted to the set of ideologies that makes them the stars of the show.
I haven't finished the post yet, and so not even tackled the replies. But this may be my fav. post since 'a modest proposal for republicans'.
1.) I keep thinking have you read "Coming Apart" by C. Murray. You don't have to agree with his bias, but his idea's should be considered. We have made the costal elite. The best people from, say, my home town Buffalo, have gone to good colleges on one of the coasts, and the best of those have stayed there... making more kids together.
2.) As far as a Caesar: (voting in a dictator) have you listened to Dan Carlin's "Death throes of the Republic" about Rome? I think we pick a dictator, when we get sick of the two party political system not working. Where you lean politically has little to do with your disgust with the current system.
Does the multi-elite party theory fit in with Turchin's ideas of elite surplus? When the elites are few in number they share a common destiny and naturally congregate in one party, but when there are so many that they can't all be on top, they have to segregate so they can jockey for position.
Maybe a Just So story -- I haven't explained why they can't jockey for position within one party.
I think the fundamental problem that we are working with is that the basic cleave that separates the parties and Americans, is who counts as an American. This is not something that can be negotiated. Either someone is an American with the full rights and privilege that that gives or they are not. People in institutions and those who run them tend to believe that we need to include people because that gives the most possibility to getting the correct people and the fact that lots of different people already are there.
The American public are policy liberal, in general they want the government to do more to help folks. But people vote based on their identity. So some people will define themselves by how much they don't like black people and how much they don't like gay people and how much they don't like trans people and so on. No matter how much you want the government to do things if you don't like your fellow Americans and believe that they should not be part of the body politic then you will not vote for Democrats. Not all republicans think this way. But all of the people who believe this tend to vote republican.
All of these institutions have a law based duty to have diversity. They don't quite succeed but if you run one of these institutions you need to try and if you are going to try then you need to believe and not have a dislike of your fellow Americans. If you want to join these institutions then you know you are going into a rather diverse place and need to not care about that. So when this basic issue interacts with politics all of these institutions look liberal and democratic because people who have problems with diversity won't be there.
Looking at Pew Research's numbers the total number of undocumented immigrants in the US as of 2021 was around 10.5 million people. Total population of the US is 328 million. Mexicans are no longer the largest group of unauthorized immigrants.
Of the around 47 million foreign born immigrants in the US 20 million are naturalized citizens. The US foreign born population is around 13.7 percent. Now it will seem larger than that because this has been going on for a while and people replace themselves with kids. So there is a lot more than 13.7 percent of the population that does not look like what are tv's did in the 1950's.
Trump and the Republicans may have screamed loudest about unauthorized immigration, but they also worked hard to reduce legal immigration. In some cases ICE deported legal residents and citizens. I'm sure that was not exactly frowned against by the top.
But the funny thing about all that is roiling the US, is that we are again become like we were in the past. The 1940's to the 1970's was one of the weirdest times in American history. People got married younger, the political parties got along, immigrants were only 5 percent of the US population. For a long time in the US from the 1860's to the 1930's, US foreign born population hovered between 10 percent and 15 percent, the parties hated each other, and people got married in their mid to late twenties or not at all.
Hell we didn't even have any immigration laws until the Chinese exclusion acts in the 1880's.
But this is the same stupid freakout that happened in the teens. All of a sudden the folks coming over weren't western europeans like germans and such, instead it was eastern europeans who were jewish or catholic and the italians who were swarthy and catholic and the people who thought they were anglo saxon's went we can't have that restricted immigration.
I mean, every group of America has been *replaced*
The initial old stock WASP's were replaced by the initial wave of German, Scandinavian, etc. immigrants..
That wave was replaced by Irish and Italians
That wave was replaced by Polish and other Eastern Europeans, along with some Chinese til we shut the doors.
Then, all those groups were replaced by Latino's and other Asian immigrants.
Hell, Ben Franklin was warning the citizenry about the swarthy...Swedes during the colonial era.
The history of America is demographic replacement, and future generations trying to protect their status by using the arguments that were thrown at them, to attack the newcomers.
Maybe the dot-com boom had something to do with it ? All of a sudden, you could jump from "educated" to "rich" without going through the traditional corporate/finance hierarchy. Thus, liberals remained as liberal as they were even after their transition to elite status.
I don't see much in the discussion yet about the recruitment of intelligent working class people into the ranks of the better paid intelligentsia via free and subsidised education, and I think that's a key part of the puzzle. Prior to WWII there isn't much of a path to rise in socio-economic class via education (at least in the systems I'm most familiar with - AU/UK/US). The university elites were the children of the wealthy - inasmuch as the wealthy were right wing supporters, that would be perpetuated into the next generation.
However, after WWII you get:
US (40s) - GI bill which allows the expansion of education opportunities to a wide cross section of men
UK (60s) - Education grants supporting any students of whatever financial means to go to university
AU (70s) - Start of free tertiary education
And I'm sure there are similar examples in other systems that I'm less familiar with.
So working class kids who grew up in left wing social circumstances became more educated, got good jobs, got paid well but retained their left wing affiliation, therefore moving the left-wing support average towards the "more educated" side. The education helped them get more well-paying jobs which moved their income up somewhat - the main graph shows income effects coming after education effects which is exactly what I'd expect under this model. The apparent relative movement of the right is probably just a reflection of the fact that what's considered "right" and "left" changes over time - conservatives have stayed pretty much the same, but society moved right.
The next phase appears to be that when you have a clump of left-wing support among those who are personally well off, they gradually cease to care about the economic equality side of left wing politics and start focusing more on the "identity" side. And although society has move socially left pretty continuously since ... hmmm ... I'd say about the early nineteenth century, economic leftness seems to have peaked in the 60s with high wages, 90% tax rates and the building of welfare states in various nations, which has gradually been walked back since then.
The marriage of social left/right with economic left/right is honestly a bit odd because they're opposed on the "should governments intervene in this?" metric. There seems to be no a priori reason why those particular pairings should stay linked apart from "this is what we're familiar with so we predict it will continue"
"Prior to WWII there isn't much of a path to rise in socio-economic class via education (at least in the systems I'm most familiar with - AU/UK/US). The university elites were the children of the wealthy - inasmuch as the wealthy were right wing supporters, that would be perpetuated into the next generation."
My father and uncle were born more than a century ago, the children of East European immigrants, and ended up as University of Chicago professors. The father of one of my high school friends fought on the losing side of the Russian civil war as a teenager, walked out through China, made it to the U.S., and also ended up as a U of C professor.
Not children of the wealthy.
How much was this mobility enabled by the existence of a university scholarship and how large a pool of such scholarships were available? If we were to look at the entire cohort of students of that generation what would the parental class breakdown look like?
I did a quick search to see if anyone mentioned it, but Stephen Davies has been doing work on this type of realignment for ages. He has a whole book about how it applies to the most recent shift in the UK. Here's a quick link from Cato. https://www.cato-unbound.org/2018/12/10/stephen-davies/great-realignment-understanding-politics-today
The gist of it is that shifting alliances happen because diving questions become exhausted, or rather the debate around them does. Once it's no longer a really big deal whether or not the state legalizes gay marriage, the coalitions that formed on either side of that issue look at those they are allied with and realize they don't really agree on much.
What I think is likely in this case is we'll see a split among the Democratic party. Each side will ally with various elements in the Republican party and you won't have the same level of institutional monopoly.
I think Bernie Sanders would have upended this system and changed the whole political landscape, if he had won the nomination in 2016.
Elections are a contest of ideas (yes, yes, I'll pause while you laugh, I'm serious though) and over the past few decades there has been very little difference between the major currents of the left and the right parties.
Eventually a new type of socialism will emerge and then liberalism will be on the back foot, it will be the conservative poor versus the educated rich liberals once again.
One thing that's consistent, and consistently annoying, both in the comments section and in Scott's writing, is what should be called just old fashioned ignorance and bias on what the Tribes actually think in relation to the Tribal leaders. In a strict sense.
It's come up multiple times in the comments already that the woke nonsense is a product of a bubble, normal Blue Tribe people don't know or care or agree about any of this. This is almost certainly true.
However this assumption is not carried over to the Red Tribe. People are still talking about stuff like evolution denial and gay marriage or whatever Obviously Wrong (TM) idea as if they were just massively popular with the Tribal Leaders, and that Tribe Members and prospective Tribe Members all accurately gauge this significant popularity.
Consider that these opinions are the woke opinions of the Red Tribe. Treat evidence for it exactly as you'd treat evidence in favour of "Blue Tribe holds woke beliefs."
I wish the natural conclusion from thinking "this 2-party system has given the opposite tribe too much power" was "we should break up the 2-party system and devolve power" instead of flirting with dictatorship. Especially since our main political cleavage is rural versus urban, it should be really easy in theory to divide up so that local control keeps the large majority of people happy.
Hanania's case also feels weak to me because I always thought that Republicans cared more about their politics than Democrats.
For instance, it was explained to me that the reason why Trump wanted mail-in voting to be banned was that only Republicans would care about to line up in front of the polling booths in the middle of a pandemic, whilst the Democrats would be too lazy/unwilling to do anything but send in a mail-in vote
Both can be true, especially as the Democrat coalition combines both black voters and upper(-middle) class leftists, who are quite different.
It seems to me that those that attend college and expose themselves to serious inquiry of historical events in human history, Piketty-style analysis - which is about an honest exploration of data as you can get - as well as reading deeply and often - are going to skew LEFT in the current U.S. political environment, simply because of the way in which the two parties, right now, approach the very real problems that we as humans and our planet faces. There are significant differences.
Let's say you are 23 or 24 and you have finished your Bacc. studies and you turn on Fox News, listen for awhile, and then turn on MSNBC, and listen for awhile. Which is going to ring truer? Or you listen to Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene and then listen to AOC or Brian Tyler Cohen? Which actually makes more sense to a 23 or 24-year old who just went through four years on campus?
Or, more likely, they look at the their phones and sweep down the algorithmic highway on whatever social media channel(s) they subscribe to -- I just don't think people of that age group that have been through four or five years of college are going to buy the right-wing narrative. At least not the way it is currently fed to the algos.
I agree with the comment regarding an apology for dictatorship. Those who have been exposed to fascist ideology (through ready history) from last century and even more recently in Europe and the results, and who also happen to live in a demographically changing country are going to feel pretty uncomfortable with the rhetoric espoused by the U.S. Right. If one side is willing to throw the system out with the bathwater rather than relinquish political power for a cycle or two, this will make educated people pretty nervous. And honestly, calling "Cancel Culture" or "Mask Mandates" a new type of fascism is just a little too silly to be taken seriously.
Having said that, all of this right/left polarity is disheartening and counter-productive. Two of the most serious problems - real problems - that we face are : 1)Economic inequality, which has been very well documented by Piketty himself, and 2) A rapidly-changing climate that we all selfishly thought might have been our kids' and grandkids' problem, and which is now very much OUR problem.
I believe the only way we can seriously face these very real issues is to stop with the political bickering over emotional, hot-button political issues like, say, gun control, abortion, cancel-culture, etc. We might have had the luxury to engage issues like this in during the last generation, but we simply no longer have that luxury - the luxury of division. There are important things to be done and we must do them together.
Will true existential threat erase these mundane arguments? Or will we, as a country, go down in flames from above while fighting each other over issues that are artificially delivered to us and embraced as important?
I think the main point of the Keyes quote is that any party in which the elites are not taking the lead is really not fit to govern. Functional government is always government by elites. Thucydides (referencing Pericles) said that democracy works best when the masses ("the many") leave policy making to the elites ("the few") and limit their participation to choosing between the options crafted by the elites, usually by voting for the particular elite person with the policy positions they most agree with. This goes off the rails when the masses don't like any of the options that the elites crafted, so they start to insist on policies of their own crafting. The big one in the last decade was immigration. A bipartisan group of Senators crafted some workable immigration reforms, but the right wing masses rejected it not because it would not work, but because it did not inflict pain past illegal immigrants and it did not inflict pain on the Democrats. Many pundits conclude that this shows that right wing populism is driven by pure mean-spiritedness. There probably is a good dose of that in there, but I think mostly Populists don't have the mental tools or discipline to analyze policy on its merits, so they rely on the heuristic that they like any policy if it is liked by people they like and hated by people they hate. They have a mindset that everything in life is zero sum - one side wins, the other side loses. They don't believe in win-win solutions. If the other side is not crying in pain, then you are probably the loser and should start howling. Trump did not do much on delivering effective policy if one looks at it objectively, but he made the Democrats howl in pain, so the right wing populists figure he must have been doing something right. That is why they love him so much.
When we look at the US political system from the distance and see two movements with nearly equal numbers but somehow one is winning the culture this may look weird, especially if 50 years ago it was the other way around. But when we look closer, the mystery disolves quickly.
Our null hypothesis is that's some part of a global trend. And indeed liberalism seems to be winning over concervativism in general. But why?
Huge part of the liberal ideology is niceness. In this case it's not even fair to call this ideology. We do not need complex narrative not to harass people around us - it's the default mode. Being mean and justifying it, on the other hand, requires an ideology. The question is now reframed: How comes societies become nicer with time? This is much less mysterious question. Scientific progress is an obvious part of an answer.
But there is even more obvious problem with conservatism. It's trying to stand still in the world which is constantly moving. It worked in the middle ages when the progress was slow, but not now. Why is the world moving faster and faster? Once again we can obviously blame the science.
There also was an important philosophical shift which left conservatism out of fuel. We used to have no real alternative to religious point of view and "banishment from heaven" narrative. Now we do. Making world a better place is such an blatantly obvious idea that people are made fun of for even mentioning it aloud. But that's because everyone shares it. Fashism tried to restore the former narrative but fashism failed hard. Religion became less of a political drive and more of a personal choice. Whatever memetic adoptations of separate magisterium people installed in their minds to preserve their religion, it predictably decreased their ability to act on their religious beliefs.
One more thing. It's kind of weird to mention it, but conservatism is plainly falser than liberalism. It's not a huge surprise as conservative narrative is built upon religious one. Additionally as conservatism requires more justification of meanness it's more complex therefore more likely to be false. And when some part of the narrative is revealed to be false it affects it perspective of memetic spread.
Could it be that there's really no shift in people's political affiliations/engagement levels based on education/affluence, but rather a general changing trend in who gets a higher education or makes money which happens to be letting more left-leaning people into elite groups?
I think this would fit best with a more "hereditary" model of political attitudes, which feels more in line with my personal experiences and observations...
It's The State Stupid
Left wing ideology legitimize state power as a moral good
therefore people with left wing pov are more likely to go into government and far more likely to use that power to both impose their pov AND expand the power of the state
this expands to all sectors of the public that are dependent on the state like finance or the law
also a side note on "education"
a 50's BA is NOT the same as a 2020's BA
any attempt to explain political changes that doesn't take that into account is BS
neither Hanania nor Piketty nor SA seem to acknowledge that
Hanania claimed that liberals chose careers in order to get more power so he does take this into account, doesn't he?
I've heard that "left=statist" is popular conservative talking point but isn't it just a bad faith "argument from my opponent believes something"? https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/13/arguments-from-my-opponent-believes-something/
It's easy to cherry pick examples when left narrative favours goverment involment, but just as easy to point at counter examples like defunding the police. It would be very consistent for a truly statist movement to both oppose individual gun ownership and celebrate goverment policing, but it's not what we see in the US democratic party. Seems that their true values lies elsewhere.
Again I've already pointed that simple appealing to the consequences of an action as it's true cause can lead us astray. By this logic all conservatives are indeed racists as they continiously support policies which disproportianally harm racial minorities. I'm not even sure there are as good counterexamples here as with defunding the police.
There’s an alternative hypothesis to both of these convoluted explanations about the power of liberalism, and it rhymes with Schmurtis Schmarvin. The three of you should get on a podcast together.
I kind of think Hania and Scott are both wrong, but I’m not really confident that I have the “right” answer. I work for an investment bank, and I can tell you that (1) my employer has become annoyingly woke, (2) I’m fairly confident that most of the actual bankers are not personally woke. As examples of the atmosphere, I have been invited to attend “conversations” with the white fragility lady and some expert on “the power of allyship”, and now when we hire someone we have to report statistics and receive permission based on the % of candidates who were “diverse” (this hasn’t been defined for me but I think it means anyone who isn’t a white male, though I’m unsure of the status of white females).
As far as I can tell an overwhelming majority of employees think it’s all awkward at best. Why are we doing it? My best guess is that management feels that we will look bad and open ourselves to criticism if we don’t. What causes this dynamic? Again, I’m guessing, but I think historically the conservative position has often been proven not only wrong but bigoted. At various times in the past, the conservative position would have been (1) don’t hire blacks and don’t let them vote, (2) don’t hire women, (3) gays are maybe ok as long as they stay in the closet, but they certainly can’t get married. These are all very embarrassing positions in retrospect.
Today, the conservative position might include things like: (1) we shouldn’t have explicit racial quotas and certainly shouldn’t be required to hire unqualified candidates just because of their ethnicity, (2) colleges should stop pretending that Asian students have bad personalities in their “holistic review” to justify massive explicit racial discrimination, (3) biological sex is a thing that actually exists, and I don’t need to tell you my pronouns.
In 30 years, will all of these positions seem like the moral equivalent of denying blacks the right to vote? I don’t know, but I suspect a lot of organizations have essentially internalized the policy “the conservative position will always be proven obviously morally wrong in retrospect, so always take the other side.”
When class is defined by education level that creates a dangerous dynamic whereby the sectional interests of the educated (e.g openness, globalization, financialization, foreign intervention, high volume migration, subsidies for higher education, etc) face no articulate or institutional opposition. The core self-representational systems of society (media, politics, education) are coded by the highly educated and there are no institutional islands which can speak from outside that monopoly.
I would argue this is not just a platitude - because historically it is highly unusual that 'the highly educated' are also the core of the ruling class of any society - as opposed to just their loyal attendants, advisors, ritual specialists, administrators or socially distant bankers. Historically, there were always landed aristocrats, the military, guilds, trades unions, caste organizations, etc whose institutional power was not based on educational status. Educational meritocracy has homogenized the ruling institutions to a very unusual degree.
With great and unopposed power comes hubris, followed by collapse, or an anarchic backlash - with Jan 6th as a very small foreshadowing perhaps.
Eric Hammer on August 17, 2021 at 1:47 pm said:
I think the big things missing in both Hanania and Alexander are why the left cares so much about politics, and why so many educated people lean so hard left. I try to answer both in this post here https://dochammer.substack.com/p/contra-hanania-and-alexander-on-partisanship , but the short version is:
1: Leftism is all about using power to make people be the way you want them to be. That’s why the politics of expert rulers appeals so much: it is the way modern Americans can legitimately force people to fit a certain mold.
2a: Experts must be educated, by definition, so if you are leftist you are going to want as much education as possible.
2b: The public schools have long been indoctrination centers extolling the use of power in the hands of experts. The longer anyone stays in the schools, the more that rubs off onto them.
The recipe for preventing the institutional capture by educated elites (be they left-leaning or otherwise) is the exact opposite of dictatorship. It's direct democracy of the Athenian type.
When all major policy questions are decided in referendums and all office holders and public servants are chosen by sortition, institutions can't be captured by any particular group.
Could this be a weird effect created by how they defined top educated?
They defined highly educated as 10% vs bottom 90%. In the 50s, you point out that 6% of people had degrees. So the top ten captures the elite.
Now, with a third having college degree, the top ten % essentially captures professionals, pHDs and whomever got a masters after not getting a job post undergrad. It’s not capturing the same group of people…
For example, Mr Silver spoon that got a ba to then take over his fathers business is the top ten % in 1950, but not now.
Weirdly enough, most of Silicon Valley (with all that income), might not hit the top 10% now as coders and the start up crowd tend to not to have much more than a bachelors.
I get the underlying point that more educated people seem to be very left these days, but this “creative class” barely existed in the 50s, and, as you mention, the rump of it that existed back then (journalists, profs etc) was as left wing as they are now no?
"*not every important job is degree-gated*"
I'm all in favor of that, but this would require Griggs v. Duke Power to be overturned. Think there's any chance of that happening?
Regarding your closing paragraph--sure it's easy to see that R decisions are dominated by "those who do not know at all what they are talking about", but good grief why single out the R's?