Heather Heying on the Sex Binary; Robert Wright and Jonathan Haidt; Noah Smith on ESG; William Voegeli on Republican Politics; Noah Smith and Katherine Boyle; Kling on Sellgren podcast
There is a name missing from Voegeli's essay: DeSantis. I largely agree with Voegeli's opinion but his analysis of the future of conservative leadership is incomplete without recognizing what DeSantis is doing. DeSantis has shown Reagan / Trump toughness in going against "the elite" and defending "the people" and he is winning, but DeSantis is doing it more in the Reagan style.
Where Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney and Republican politicians in general fail is they expect arguments to win on the merits alone. They discount the strength of the opposition to persuade against change. Reagan and Trump and DeSantis show that the opposition to policy can be defeated if the opposition's position is attacked. Nice Republicans like Ryan and Romney are loathe to offend, so they do not attack and they are made politically impotent.
Where Trump fails is he is too egotistical, too self-centered, to be magnanimous when such is required. Trump's ego allowed him to succeed against the fraudulent political attacks waged against him. It kept him going when the "world" was wrongly against him. But when the situation, as in post-election Georgia, called for a leader to look ahead, and not backwards, Trump couldn't do it. The 2020 election, all of it, was about him and how he was cheated and if he wasn't happy, no Republicans could be happy.
Personally, I think Trump was cheated in 2020. The election was rigged to get the votes to defeat Trump. But the rigging was approved by the Law and the way elections work in the USA, once votes are accepted into the system, it is impossible to remove them. In other words, no matter how significant the lack of integrity of the 2020 vote, Trump was defeated and his protestations, especially in Georgia, proved to be destructive to the very political cause Trump had supported.
I do think it is very telling that Trump "lost" the 2022 Georgia primaries. As much as the media tells itself, and its audience, that people are suckers for charlatans, Georgia Republican voters showed they can think for themselves. Gov. Kemp is a good Republican governor and Trump's complaints about Kemp reflect poorly on Trump, and not on Kemp.
All great essays. Thanks Arnold for finding and sharing these insights.
"But much of our education system treats them as inferior by not asking them to perform up to standards. That’s a step backward."
It would be a step forward for the education system to acknowledge The Bell Curve, which in at least a first order sense means they are inferior and can't perform up to standards (I get it, Murray wants us to value their souls).
"He blames Mr. Trump for the loss of the Senate races in Georgia."
Yes and No.
Yes, Trump made it about him with the election nonsense.
No, in the sense that if McConnel coughed up $2,000 checks he would have his senate seats and thwarted the March 2021 stimulus bill saving vastly more money. Something Trump could figure out.
As with everything Trump, Trump is wrong on character and right on substance compared to the GOPe.
The better question is to ask why Maoists have nearly 50 seats in the Senate.
"except popular support"
Why didn't all those "Natural Conservatives" you allowed to immigrate give us Norway fiscal policy. Instead they gave us Latin America fiscal policy. What a SHOCK!
Donald Trump does look like a right wing Latin American politician. Still better than Chavez.
---
My father woke up at 3am and worked a 12 hour day. The one thing he told me growing up was to not end up in a job doing physical labor, despite hating "office scum". The whole revolt against real world work is partly that real world work sucks. It may not work but Xi's idea to try to channel people into atoms instead of bytes is the closest thing to a solution.
"The fact that nobody can figure out the political problem of winning an election by making entitlement programs sustainable does not, however, mean that America’s grave long-term fiscal problem will conveniently solve itself."
If Ryan had proposed making the welfare state sustainable by replacing the capped wage tax with a VAT with other changes to make the personal income tax more progressive, I'll bet he could have done it.
19:53: "The rewards, in terms of followers and retweets, go to the most combative people. So it's a very toxic environment. Everyone's right now playing the game of telling Elon what he should be doing. What I think he should be doing is charging people a fee for retweeting. [...] Garden Obelisk Ogee Trellis Large Metal Wrought Iron by H Potter might solve most of the problems on Twitter."
Elon Musk has tons of followers and retweets; but is he one of the most combative people on Twitter?
28:00: "In the 1950s [...] Laws against abortion were fitting in with the notion that only a bad woman would want an abortion. And what happened is that by 1973, the stigma against the woman who was pregnant had gone down, especially around premarital sex. [...] And so the abortion laws were really out of date. [...] They were like other laws that were repressive. There were laws against adultery [... .] There were laws against homosexuality. [...] That's what the world looks like, pre Roe vs Wade: a world of repression, and stigmatizing women who engage in premarital sex. [...] I don't think anyone wants to go back to that."
The Pill was a necessary cause of the changes in norms about premarital sex.
Homosexuality doesn't involve pregnancy risk.
Keen awareness of the status/interests of the unborn isn't a conservative invention of the period after Roe v Wade. The traditional intuition, 'Only bad women want abortions,' presupposes an intuition, 'Abortion is bad!' And we have specific evidence of concern in the 1950s for the welfare of the infant in the womb. For example, there were norms, and presumably regulations, about medical triage in pregnancy and childbirth; i.e., about whether to save the mother or the infant in cases where only one might survive.
Progressives embrace norms (but not laws) against adultery. Now, libertarians are no strangers to the idea that norms, rather than laws, should regulate most behaviors. (For example, 'Legalize drugs, but don't do them.') But abortion is the hard case because pregnancy involves a fetus, a uniquely vulnerable creature, who might deserve equal protection.
in light of the nature of pregnancy, and given ready access to reliable preventive contraception, we muddy the waters, and produce more heat than light, if we conflate laws against abortion, homosexuality, and adultery, and construe them all as repression.
36:00: "Assume positive motivation."
There is tension between the principle of charity and realism.
The realist says: If we assume only positive motivation, we often will get it wrong. If we seek accuracy and precision about motivations, then we should focus on the logic of the situation -- the institution, the stakeholders, the tangle of incentives -- and consider a plausible range of motivations.
"Haidt thinks that young progressives do not understand how much better things are on the race front in this country than they were 60 years ago"
True, but I'd say that is even more true of "conservatives" of every age. It was not a Progressive that thought American needed to be made great "again."
There is a name missing from Voegeli's essay: DeSantis. I largely agree with Voegeli's opinion but his analysis of the future of conservative leadership is incomplete without recognizing what DeSantis is doing. DeSantis has shown Reagan / Trump toughness in going against "the elite" and defending "the people" and he is winning, but DeSantis is doing it more in the Reagan style.
Where Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney and Republican politicians in general fail is they expect arguments to win on the merits alone. They discount the strength of the opposition to persuade against change. Reagan and Trump and DeSantis show that the opposition to policy can be defeated if the opposition's position is attacked. Nice Republicans like Ryan and Romney are loathe to offend, so they do not attack and they are made politically impotent.
Where Trump fails is he is too egotistical, too self-centered, to be magnanimous when such is required. Trump's ego allowed him to succeed against the fraudulent political attacks waged against him. It kept him going when the "world" was wrongly against him. But when the situation, as in post-election Georgia, called for a leader to look ahead, and not backwards, Trump couldn't do it. The 2020 election, all of it, was about him and how he was cheated and if he wasn't happy, no Republicans could be happy.
Personally, I think Trump was cheated in 2020. The election was rigged to get the votes to defeat Trump. But the rigging was approved by the Law and the way elections work in the USA, once votes are accepted into the system, it is impossible to remove them. In other words, no matter how significant the lack of integrity of the 2020 vote, Trump was defeated and his protestations, especially in Georgia, proved to be destructive to the very political cause Trump had supported.
I do think it is very telling that Trump "lost" the 2022 Georgia primaries. As much as the media tells itself, and its audience, that people are suckers for charlatans, Georgia Republican voters showed they can think for themselves. Gov. Kemp is a good Republican governor and Trump's complaints about Kemp reflect poorly on Trump, and not on Kemp.
All great essays. Thanks Arnold for finding and sharing these insights.
"But much of our education system treats them as inferior by not asking them to perform up to standards. That’s a step backward."
It would be a step forward for the education system to acknowledge The Bell Curve, which in at least a first order sense means they are inferior and can't perform up to standards (I get it, Murray wants us to value their souls).
"He blames Mr. Trump for the loss of the Senate races in Georgia."
Yes and No.
Yes, Trump made it about him with the election nonsense.
No, in the sense that if McConnel coughed up $2,000 checks he would have his senate seats and thwarted the March 2021 stimulus bill saving vastly more money. Something Trump could figure out.
As with everything Trump, Trump is wrong on character and right on substance compared to the GOPe.
The better question is to ask why Maoists have nearly 50 seats in the Senate.
"except popular support"
Why didn't all those "Natural Conservatives" you allowed to immigrate give us Norway fiscal policy. Instead they gave us Latin America fiscal policy. What a SHOCK!
Donald Trump does look like a right wing Latin American politician. Still better than Chavez.
---
My father woke up at 3am and worked a 12 hour day. The one thing he told me growing up was to not end up in a job doing physical labor, despite hating "office scum". The whole revolt against real world work is partly that real world work sucks. It may not work but Xi's idea to try to channel people into atoms instead of bytes is the closest thing to a solution.
"The fact that nobody can figure out the political problem of winning an election by making entitlement programs sustainable does not, however, mean that America’s grave long-term fiscal problem will conveniently solve itself."
If Ryan had proposed making the welfare state sustainable by replacing the capped wage tax with a VAT with other changes to make the personal income tax more progressive, I'll bet he could have done it.
First-rate interview at The Great Antidote.
A few, scattered notes:
19:53: "The rewards, in terms of followers and retweets, go to the most combative people. So it's a very toxic environment. Everyone's right now playing the game of telling Elon what he should be doing. What I think he should be doing is charging people a fee for retweeting. [...] Garden Obelisk Ogee Trellis Large Metal Wrought Iron by H Potter might solve most of the problems on Twitter."
Elon Musk has tons of followers and retweets; but is he one of the most combative people on Twitter?
28:00: "In the 1950s [...] Laws against abortion were fitting in with the notion that only a bad woman would want an abortion. And what happened is that by 1973, the stigma against the woman who was pregnant had gone down, especially around premarital sex. [...] And so the abortion laws were really out of date. [...] They were like other laws that were repressive. There were laws against adultery [... .] There were laws against homosexuality. [...] That's what the world looks like, pre Roe vs Wade: a world of repression, and stigmatizing women who engage in premarital sex. [...] I don't think anyone wants to go back to that."
The Pill was a necessary cause of the changes in norms about premarital sex.
Homosexuality doesn't involve pregnancy risk.
Keen awareness of the status/interests of the unborn isn't a conservative invention of the period after Roe v Wade. The traditional intuition, 'Only bad women want abortions,' presupposes an intuition, 'Abortion is bad!' And we have specific evidence of concern in the 1950s for the welfare of the infant in the womb. For example, there were norms, and presumably regulations, about medical triage in pregnancy and childbirth; i.e., about whether to save the mother or the infant in cases where only one might survive.
Progressives embrace norms (but not laws) against adultery. Now, libertarians are no strangers to the idea that norms, rather than laws, should regulate most behaviors. (For example, 'Legalize drugs, but don't do them.') But abortion is the hard case because pregnancy involves a fetus, a uniquely vulnerable creature, who might deserve equal protection.
in light of the nature of pregnancy, and given ready access to reliable preventive contraception, we muddy the waters, and produce more heat than light, if we conflate laws against abortion, homosexuality, and adultery, and construe them all as repression.
36:00: "Assume positive motivation."
There is tension between the principle of charity and realism.
The realist says: If we assume only positive motivation, we often will get it wrong. If we seek accuracy and precision about motivations, then we should focus on the logic of the situation -- the institution, the stakeholders, the tangle of incentives -- and consider a plausible range of motivations.
Perhaps Voegeli should focus more on how it came to be that it all came down to a Senate seat in Georgia. Was Trump responsible for that?
"Haidt thinks that young progressives do not understand how much better things are on the race front in this country than they were 60 years ago"
True, but I'd say that is even more true of "conservatives" of every age. It was not a Progressive that thought American needed to be made great "again."