What does it show? That the political system procedural rules are set up to not just allow but push towards the most extreme having the most control of each party? Why does the system have to be that way? Many alternate procedural rules would likely push more toward the middle.
Political parties are a reflection of ourselves, the enemy is us. While a commonly held one, the idea that minor tinkering with rules and procedures or primaries would produce big improvements in parties and politics is a total illusion. Another popularly wrong idea is that the parties tend to produce extremists. Actually, the parties have proven to be much more centrist than what large or important constituencies actually want them to fight for, and on the Republican side politicians and judges side with the Democrats as often as they do their own voters or nominators.
The extremism is coming from a recurrent big picture social phenomenon associated with leftist politics since the French Revolution at least. Politics is only a reflection of that.
When looking within the parties, maybe you are right. I doubt it but IDK.
The problem I see with your position is that Gallup says 41% don't identify with either party. I'm guessing but pretty sure the vast majority of those are more moderate than either party. (or at least switch sides depending on issue)
Yes! Let's channel all that passion into the urge to think carefully about tradeoffs. Bringing regulation into line with cost-benefit analysis is work for at least a generation of activists if not more. This would doom both parties.
Perhaps you are unaware that cost-benefit analysis has been a requirement for federal regulations for half a century, since Ford's Executive Order 11821, and thus there are literally zero people remaining in the business who remember when it wasn't. Reagan strengthened it in 1981 and the general trend has been expansion and lots of tinkering by every president ever since. Sunstein under Obama played a prominent role in rearranging things into the current framework. The army of people involved in these efforts has been standing for decades.
Which is why one only has to look to see how all government regulations have benefits which so obviously exceed their cost. Ha, quite the contrary.
The other general trend is an instance of a general category of recurring political tragedy. Libertarians often warn against expansions in power on the pragmatic basis that one won't always stay in power and one wouldn't want such power wielded, especially abusively, by one's opponents. Republicans repeatedly make this mistake with regard to (formerly) RedGov sectors like law enforcement, intelligence, and national security, and they now get to feel the burn of those tools and authorities directed by the progressives not at foreign adversaries but at themselves. Whoops!
An analagous, perhaps more forgivable thing, has happened every time a Republican become President and tries to take the reins of the team of stubborn mules that is a giant fifth column bureaucracy full of people who will do what they can to undermine policies they oppose, or to continue things they want to do and have been directed to stop doing.
The way Republicans have dealt with this problem is by consolidation and centralization in and supervision by the White House. "Agencies are making all kinds of terrible regs. Let's write rules they all have to follow, and then also make them submit them all to us for review and approval."
And you'll never guess what happens next. Which is that when a Democrat gets elected they immediately abuse this power to play around with the formulas and definitions of cost and benefit to make sure that what they don't want is forbidden and what they want is mandatory and all the manipulative power politics is effectively hidden from the chumps by those chumps repeatedly getting fooled the plausible deniability that it's all just """rational analysis""".
This gets to a larger implication that many people in the modern mindset and who have not experienced what trials are actually like find difficult to accept, which is that the legal formalists were right. The analysis of law and regulation should start and stop with the question of legally authorized exercise of power, whether or not it's a great or terrible idea, rational or irrational, etc.
The reason is that as soon as you have some other test, you are making the thing tested for a power-legitimizing factor. And there is no valve that ensures control flows from truth to power and not the other way around, quite the contrary. If you make it such that facts about reality need to line up right to permit people in power to do what they want, they will circumvent that obstacle like in trial by "battle of the experts", making sure the people responsible for certifying the facts say that they line up just right. This is called "epistemic corruption" and if one encounters any opposition, argument, pushback, etc., it is always possible to escalate and go another step upstream to where """experts""" are certified, disciplined, recruited, selected, trained, published, glorified or defamed, etc. and to make sure those voices eventually go away and are ignored if they don't and so forth.
It's a nice thing when truth isn't manipulated by politics and for these kind of social enforcement mechanisms to be kept small, weak, and rarely implemented as opposed to a mature phenomenon in total control of expressable ideas. What legal formalism does is help insulate truth and discourse about it by taking away some of the things that make them such important and appealing targets for political depredation.
So that's another "going against the crowd" one for me. We *shouldn't* justify with cost-benefit analysis, and we shouldn't scrutinize rules for a "rational basis".
Martin Luther wrote “Reason is the Devil’s greatest whore” and he was not rejecting rationality but recognizing that a man is always subject to motivated rationalization. If you populate government with commies you will get commie policy, with a shiny pile of Reasons why being a commie is a Great Idea
Doing cost/benefit analysis is a good process that most investors follow. However, investors have skin in the game and government bureaucrats don't. We need to tie future pay, pensions, and budgets of bureaucrats to their analysis. If they deliberately distort the analysis say by claiming something will cost X when it actually will cost 5X (eg. Calif bullet train) they should be subject to SEC type laws and go to jail.
No, that's totally unworkable. What investors face is the impersonal discipline and focal consideration of profit and loss, which provides the incentives necessary to get things right. The whole problem with regulatory cost benefit analysis is that nothing plays that role, and too many costs and benefits are not validly reducible to single, universal objective values, regardless of how the PhD economists try to pretend there is some meaningful relationship to GDP over a 70 year time horizon. Sure, some costs and estimates are more concrete and could be sent to prediction markets for a smell-test or whatever. But like I said, there is no sense trying to salvage this ship.
The reason is a combination of Gresham's Law and Hoffer's "every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."
If you need to and can raise money, you can grift, and inevitably, grift is all there is.
Just like bad money drives out the good, the potential for an institution to be used as a cover story for abuse of power will eventually drive out its justifiably legitimate functions until cover-storying is all it does.
There is some of that to be sure, but a lot of it works in much subtler ways than outright lying or Soviet-style corruption and intimidation. Just like a lot of teachers just naively but sincerely parrot back what they learned in education school madrassas, a lot of government-employed PhD economists are "just doing their job" and don't think about or appreciate the very sinister aspects of the role they play in "blessing off" on some policy by means of Holy Spreadsheet. The whole endeavor is intellectually bankrupt at root, but even if you look past that, at some point they have to research and plug in numbers they get from someone else, and they don't stop to ask whether those numbers make any sense or are accurate or reliable. Indeed, that's how power prefers things to be. You don't want your official sanctifiers to be actors intentionally lying. You want them to be naive but otherwise have reputations for integrity, talent, hard work, and scrupulousness, such that it is hard for anyone to attack the source of the sanctification. This is like have your money laundering go through a genuinely "clean hands" entity, that makes it hard to penetrate deeper to find the corruption at its true source.
A huge reduction in this problem will occur when Republicans ask every college professor:
1) is it legal to discriminate against hiring Republicans?
2) does your college discriminate against hiring Republicans?
3) what percentage of your professors are Republicans?
For Diversity and Inclusion purposes,
In order to maintain tax exempt status, colleges should need to prove they do not discriminate when less than 30% of their faculty publicly support Republicans or less than 30% publicly support Democrats.
You're a lot more optimistic than I am, Arnold. I think the issue is more that too many rural Republican voters are content with pwning the libs once in a while when they send someone to Washington, rather than setting any real goals or agendas. They prefer demagogues over ideologues. They can't conceptualize a strategy for achieving any sort of victory either in the short or long term, and aren't drawn to candidates who can or would, either, and thus we get the choice between bitter defeats and hollow victories. Politics: still not about policy.
The social justice activists control the government- that is all they really need to destroy all of us. Trump being in the presidency will matter exactly as much as it did the first time around.
I don’t have much to add here other than I’m optimistic about the future. The tell-tales are all trimmed up and our boat is moving along quickly. This is going to be fun.
Something he seriously fails to recognize is that tech is going to favor whoever doesn't get in its way and that's increasingly becoming the Republicans. He reads dissident right authors (the older variety. He mentions high-low which is a reference to Bertrand DeJouvenal) but repackages the information from a centrist-left (dominant ruling class) perspective which is pretty typical for those who are not ashamed to be flamboyant in their arrogance. The question remains, being a ruling party may have all the institutional favor now but as you mentioned, what happens when those institutions surrender to entropic forces (DEI is the basis for a competency crisis) or those same professionals that the left likes to flex are deemed redundant by technology. I think ppl like to be arrogant because that's the luxury of aligning with the current thing but the current thing is only the current thing until its not.
As for Republicans, a realignment away from the Ryan-Romney-McCain-Bush Axis is going to take a lot longer than just an election but it is underway. What ppl fail to realize is is that this coalition of the elected officials who are "dying off" are the free market variety, and the new crop do not possess the same aversions to using state power and securing sinecures through gov't funding distributions. The question is how quickly does this happen and will the Republicans manage to exercise the right amount of intelligence and temperance when the time calls.
I don’t know that I could accurately be accused of aligning with Current Thing. I’m not dissident-right, certainly, but I have always been open about disagreeing with progressives on a wide range of critical issues. I view my own coalition as almost entirely lacking serious organization and political activation as things stand—I view the ascendancy of progressives not as a triumph of my viewpoint but as a threat to be managed.
Interesting. You've almost made me feel optimistic.... which is no mean feat!
Also...... "Conservatives may also take heart from their reading of history that progress – real improvements in the quality of life of the average man or woman – mostly spring from man’s technological ingenuity rather than his ideological mind games." Conservative may also have taken note from their reading of history that progress – real improvements in the quality of life of the average man or woman – mostly spring from man’s technological ingenuity rather than his ideological mind games. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/are-we-making-progress
I hate to say admit it, but I think you are correct. In the era of "my truth", instead of "the truth" of science and logic of the enlightenment, it seems our institutions are rotting. At least I can still believe in the laws of thermodynamics even when our elite seem to believe that we can have a belief that perpetual motion machines and that will make them real.
Quick thought—8 years too late. The old, pre-Trump Republican Party was doomed, and the new Trump based Republican Party is the result.
What Republican workers have in common is the willingness and ability to work with atoms, IRL. What most college grads are expecting is a more digital/ knowledge based job, using bits, writing reports and presenting them. 50-80-90% of such desired reports will soon be done by a few key ai.bot using humans, in ever flattening orgs.
Most Somewhere nation-loving folk already do such observable work. Anywhere/ Cosmopolitan folk, like the Jew-hate friendly Woke Ivy+ presidents, who depend on PR more than atom visible work, will be under scrutiny and won’t look good.
"The expansion of “woke capital” that took place following the death of George Floyd has probably peaked."
LOL. Usually I am more optimistic than you. Not this time. I expect the chances it has peaked are near zero. Or maybe I was influenced too much by parts of the following. (Which says some of the same tings as your piece. Am I only giving weight to the parts that confirm my priors? lol.)
GenX was educated by "progressives" who believed the smartest people would lead society to peace and prosperity. This program was disrupted by the unsolvable racial disparities. The new progressivism set out to make all classes in society equal, with some more equal than others. This is otherwise known as the road to ruin as elevating mediocrity results in society unable to have nice things.
The pendulum will swing back. But will it swing back far enough?
An underrated factor here is that although people who run governing institutions are almost all college educated, that is probably not how they learn how to run those institutions, because skills and mechanisms of governance are sadly not taught in school these days. Daniel Golliher has a great rant about how political science programs don't teach governance skills: https://www.maximumnewyork.com/p/political-science-degrees
My guess is that people who do governance mostly learn through informal social networking, and so it is the skew of that network which produces skews in the population of administrators, rather than skews in university populations per se. Golliher is trying to fix it with an explicit course of instruction focused on NYC politics; I just learned about, and signed up for the waiting list for, a similar program for SF. These programs are both run in the service of what their leaders call "abundance politics" and what others might call neoliberal-flavored centrism. But you can easily imagine people of all political persuasions starting similar schools.
I interviewed TW along with Yassine Meskhout last year: https://youtu.be/JeWmP-WMvu8?si=0G5zrbHfFJe6tF8i
My fear is this is a negative sum game. The problems on the Left can help curb excesses of the Left but that doesn't fix the problems on the Right.
Exactly. Currently the two parties seem to be in a race to see which can implode first.
The political parties are a major source of America's malaise.
Don't blame the mirror for what it shows.
What does it show? That the political system procedural rules are set up to not just allow but push towards the most extreme having the most control of each party? Why does the system have to be that way? Many alternate procedural rules would likely push more toward the middle.
Political parties are a reflection of ourselves, the enemy is us. While a commonly held one, the idea that minor tinkering with rules and procedures or primaries would produce big improvements in parties and politics is a total illusion. Another popularly wrong idea is that the parties tend to produce extremists. Actually, the parties have proven to be much more centrist than what large or important constituencies actually want them to fight for, and on the Republican side politicians and judges side with the Democrats as often as they do their own voters or nominators.
The extremism is coming from a recurrent big picture social phenomenon associated with leftist politics since the French Revolution at least. Politics is only a reflection of that.
When looking within the parties, maybe you are right. I doubt it but IDK.
The problem I see with your position is that Gallup says 41% don't identify with either party. I'm guessing but pretty sure the vast majority of those are more moderate than either party. (or at least switch sides depending on issue)
Yes! Let's channel all that passion into the urge to think carefully about tradeoffs. Bringing regulation into line with cost-benefit analysis is work for at least a generation of activists if not more. This would doom both parties.
Perhaps you are unaware that cost-benefit analysis has been a requirement for federal regulations for half a century, since Ford's Executive Order 11821, and thus there are literally zero people remaining in the business who remember when it wasn't. Reagan strengthened it in 1981 and the general trend has been expansion and lots of tinkering by every president ever since. Sunstein under Obama played a prominent role in rearranging things into the current framework. The army of people involved in these efforts has been standing for decades.
Which is why one only has to look to see how all government regulations have benefits which so obviously exceed their cost. Ha, quite the contrary.
The other general trend is an instance of a general category of recurring political tragedy. Libertarians often warn against expansions in power on the pragmatic basis that one won't always stay in power and one wouldn't want such power wielded, especially abusively, by one's opponents. Republicans repeatedly make this mistake with regard to (formerly) RedGov sectors like law enforcement, intelligence, and national security, and they now get to feel the burn of those tools and authorities directed by the progressives not at foreign adversaries but at themselves. Whoops!
An analagous, perhaps more forgivable thing, has happened every time a Republican become President and tries to take the reins of the team of stubborn mules that is a giant fifth column bureaucracy full of people who will do what they can to undermine policies they oppose, or to continue things they want to do and have been directed to stop doing.
The way Republicans have dealt with this problem is by consolidation and centralization in and supervision by the White House. "Agencies are making all kinds of terrible regs. Let's write rules they all have to follow, and then also make them submit them all to us for review and approval."
And you'll never guess what happens next. Which is that when a Democrat gets elected they immediately abuse this power to play around with the formulas and definitions of cost and benefit to make sure that what they don't want is forbidden and what they want is mandatory and all the manipulative power politics is effectively hidden from the chumps by those chumps repeatedly getting fooled the plausible deniability that it's all just """rational analysis""".
This gets to a larger implication that many people in the modern mindset and who have not experienced what trials are actually like find difficult to accept, which is that the legal formalists were right. The analysis of law and regulation should start and stop with the question of legally authorized exercise of power, whether or not it's a great or terrible idea, rational or irrational, etc.
The reason is that as soon as you have some other test, you are making the thing tested for a power-legitimizing factor. And there is no valve that ensures control flows from truth to power and not the other way around, quite the contrary. If you make it such that facts about reality need to line up right to permit people in power to do what they want, they will circumvent that obstacle like in trial by "battle of the experts", making sure the people responsible for certifying the facts say that they line up just right. This is called "epistemic corruption" and if one encounters any opposition, argument, pushback, etc., it is always possible to escalate and go another step upstream to where """experts""" are certified, disciplined, recruited, selected, trained, published, glorified or defamed, etc. and to make sure those voices eventually go away and are ignored if they don't and so forth.
It's a nice thing when truth isn't manipulated by politics and for these kind of social enforcement mechanisms to be kept small, weak, and rarely implemented as opposed to a mature phenomenon in total control of expressable ideas. What legal formalism does is help insulate truth and discourse about it by taking away some of the things that make them such important and appealing targets for political depredation.
So that's another "going against the crowd" one for me. We *shouldn't* justify with cost-benefit analysis, and we shouldn't scrutinize rules for a "rational basis".
Martin Luther wrote “Reason is the Devil’s greatest whore” and he was not rejecting rationality but recognizing that a man is always subject to motivated rationalization. If you populate government with commies you will get commie policy, with a shiny pile of Reasons why being a commie is a Great Idea
Doing cost/benefit analysis is a good process that most investors follow. However, investors have skin in the game and government bureaucrats don't. We need to tie future pay, pensions, and budgets of bureaucrats to their analysis. If they deliberately distort the analysis say by claiming something will cost X when it actually will cost 5X (eg. Calif bullet train) they should be subject to SEC type laws and go to jail.
No, that's totally unworkable. What investors face is the impersonal discipline and focal consideration of profit and loss, which provides the incentives necessary to get things right. The whole problem with regulatory cost benefit analysis is that nothing plays that role, and too many costs and benefits are not validly reducible to single, universal objective values, regardless of how the PhD economists try to pretend there is some meaningful relationship to GDP over a 70 year time horizon. Sure, some costs and estimates are more concrete and could be sent to prediction markets for a smell-test or whatever. But like I said, there is no sense trying to salvage this ship.
The reason is a combination of Gresham's Law and Hoffer's "every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."
If you need to and can raise money, you can grift, and inevitably, grift is all there is.
Just like bad money drives out the good, the potential for an institution to be used as a cover story for abuse of power will eventually drive out its justifiably legitimate functions until cover-storying is all it does.
Government regulators tasked with determining whether government regulations are cost effective. No possible conflict of interests there.
There is some of that to be sure, but a lot of it works in much subtler ways than outright lying or Soviet-style corruption and intimidation. Just like a lot of teachers just naively but sincerely parrot back what they learned in education school madrassas, a lot of government-employed PhD economists are "just doing their job" and don't think about or appreciate the very sinister aspects of the role they play in "blessing off" on some policy by means of Holy Spreadsheet. The whole endeavor is intellectually bankrupt at root, but even if you look past that, at some point they have to research and plug in numbers they get from someone else, and they don't stop to ask whether those numbers make any sense or are accurate or reliable. Indeed, that's how power prefers things to be. You don't want your official sanctifiers to be actors intentionally lying. You want them to be naive but otherwise have reputations for integrity, talent, hard work, and scrupulousness, such that it is hard for anyone to attack the source of the sanctification. This is like have your money laundering go through a genuinely "clean hands" entity, that makes it hard to penetrate deeper to find the corruption at its true source.
A huge reduction in this problem will occur when Republicans ask every college professor:
1) is it legal to discriminate against hiring Republicans?
2) does your college discriminate against hiring Republicans?
3) what percentage of your professors are Republicans?
For Diversity and Inclusion purposes,
In order to maintain tax exempt status, colleges should need to prove they do not discriminate when less than 30% of their faculty publicly support Republicans or less than 30% publicly support Democrats.
I think none of the top 100 endowments qualify.
In every govt supported edu org.
You're a lot more optimistic than I am, Arnold. I think the issue is more that too many rural Republican voters are content with pwning the libs once in a while when they send someone to Washington, rather than setting any real goals or agendas. They prefer demagogues over ideologues. They can't conceptualize a strategy for achieving any sort of victory either in the short or long term, and aren't drawn to candidates who can or would, either, and thus we get the choice between bitter defeats and hollow victories. Politics: still not about policy.
The social justice activists control the government- that is all they really need to destroy all of us. Trump being in the presidency will matter exactly as much as it did the first time around.
I don’t have much to add here other than I’m optimistic about the future. The tell-tales are all trimmed up and our boat is moving along quickly. This is going to be fun.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell-tale_(sailing)
Something he seriously fails to recognize is that tech is going to favor whoever doesn't get in its way and that's increasingly becoming the Republicans. He reads dissident right authors (the older variety. He mentions high-low which is a reference to Bertrand DeJouvenal) but repackages the information from a centrist-left (dominant ruling class) perspective which is pretty typical for those who are not ashamed to be flamboyant in their arrogance. The question remains, being a ruling party may have all the institutional favor now but as you mentioned, what happens when those institutions surrender to entropic forces (DEI is the basis for a competency crisis) or those same professionals that the left likes to flex are deemed redundant by technology. I think ppl like to be arrogant because that's the luxury of aligning with the current thing but the current thing is only the current thing until its not.
As for Republicans, a realignment away from the Ryan-Romney-McCain-Bush Axis is going to take a lot longer than just an election but it is underway. What ppl fail to realize is is that this coalition of the elected officials who are "dying off" are the free market variety, and the new crop do not possess the same aversions to using state power and securing sinecures through gov't funding distributions. The question is how quickly does this happen and will the Republicans manage to exercise the right amount of intelligence and temperance when the time calls.
I don’t know that I could accurately be accused of aligning with Current Thing. I’m not dissident-right, certainly, but I have always been open about disagreeing with progressives on a wide range of critical issues. I view my own coalition as almost entirely lacking serious organization and political activation as things stand—I view the ascendancy of progressives not as a triumph of my viewpoint but as a threat to be managed.
Interesting. You've almost made me feel optimistic.... which is no mean feat!
Also...... "Conservatives may also take heart from their reading of history that progress – real improvements in the quality of life of the average man or woman – mostly spring from man’s technological ingenuity rather than his ideological mind games." Conservative may also have taken note from their reading of history that progress – real improvements in the quality of life of the average man or woman – mostly spring from man’s technological ingenuity rather than his ideological mind games. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/are-we-making-progress
Good.
https://sdbikecoup.substack.com/p/does-the-coalition-have-a-white-supremacy
https://principledbicycling.substack.com/p/follow-the-grift-people-for-bikes
I hate to say admit it, but I think you are correct. In the era of "my truth", instead of "the truth" of science and logic of the enlightenment, it seems our institutions are rotting. At least I can still believe in the laws of thermodynamics even when our elite seem to believe that we can have a belief that perpetual motion machines and that will make them real.
There's also a huge influx of Hispanic people who are practically Republican
Quick thought—8 years too late. The old, pre-Trump Republican Party was doomed, and the new Trump based Republican Party is the result.
What Republican workers have in common is the willingness and ability to work with atoms, IRL. What most college grads are expecting is a more digital/ knowledge based job, using bits, writing reports and presenting them. 50-80-90% of such desired reports will soon be done by a few key ai.bot using humans, in ever flattening orgs.
Most Somewhere nation-loving folk already do such observable work. Anywhere/ Cosmopolitan folk, like the Jew-hate friendly Woke Ivy+ presidents, who depend on PR more than atom visible work, will be under scrutiny and won’t look good.
"The expansion of “woke capital” that took place following the death of George Floyd has probably peaked."
LOL. Usually I am more optimistic than you. Not this time. I expect the chances it has peaked are near zero. Or maybe I was influenced too much by parts of the following. (Which says some of the same tings as your piece. Am I only giving weight to the parts that confirm my priors? lol.)
https://open.substack.com/pub/heterodoxacademy/p/is-dei-causing-the-crisis-of-free?r=1qx7je&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
GenX was educated by "progressives" who believed the smartest people would lead society to peace and prosperity. This program was disrupted by the unsolvable racial disparities. The new progressivism set out to make all classes in society equal, with some more equal than others. This is otherwise known as the road to ruin as elevating mediocrity results in society unable to have nice things.
The pendulum will swing back. But will it swing back far enough?
An underrated factor here is that although people who run governing institutions are almost all college educated, that is probably not how they learn how to run those institutions, because skills and mechanisms of governance are sadly not taught in school these days. Daniel Golliher has a great rant about how political science programs don't teach governance skills: https://www.maximumnewyork.com/p/political-science-degrees
My guess is that people who do governance mostly learn through informal social networking, and so it is the skew of that network which produces skews in the population of administrators, rather than skews in university populations per se. Golliher is trying to fix it with an explicit course of instruction focused on NYC politics; I just learned about, and signed up for the waiting list for, a similar program for SF. These programs are both run in the service of what their leaders call "abundance politics" and what others might call neoliberal-flavored centrism. But you can easily imagine people of all political persuasions starting similar schools.