Yuval Levin on political party irrationality; Pano Kanelos proposes a new university; Richard Hanania talks behavioral genetics with Robert Plomin; and Scott Alexander mentions a bank I know about
Levin always leaves me a bit cold, and wondering if he ever reads his own writing. Take, for example, this passage:
The Democrats don’t have the same kind of mass psychological breakdown [referring to Trump supporters] to overcome, but their political challenge is more daunting. They have no functional mechanisms for distinguishing good from bad ideas, and their elites are in the grip of a cultural reign of terror the forces them into saying and doing some really strange and damaging things.
It seems to me that symptoms 1: no functional mechanism to distinguish good from bad ideas
and 2: in the grip of terror that drives them to say and do strange and damaging things, those symptoms are actually literal psychosis in an individual. Why not say the have a similar problem, or an equal level of psychosis, or, I dunno, get over Trump's popularity and recognize the Republican party has divisions and factions like any other. It has the whiff of starting with the desired narrative and just shoehorning the facts in whether or not they support it.
I think that if one wants to explain why the Republicans and Democrats behave differently once in office, it is as useful to consider the fusion of Caplan and Kling (Hi!) style classifications of the left and right I do here https://dochammer.substack.com/p/perhaps-a-better-categorization-of . I think one explains the behaviors of the D&Rs better by combining the expected behavior of Elites with the underlying philosophical profiles of each party's constituents.
Yuval Levin link didn’t work for me—I think it is this (very good) piece:
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/can-either-party-set-priorities/
Levin always leaves me a bit cold, and wondering if he ever reads his own writing. Take, for example, this passage:
The Democrats don’t have the same kind of mass psychological breakdown [referring to Trump supporters] to overcome, but their political challenge is more daunting. They have no functional mechanisms for distinguishing good from bad ideas, and their elites are in the grip of a cultural reign of terror the forces them into saying and doing some really strange and damaging things.
It seems to me that symptoms 1: no functional mechanism to distinguish good from bad ideas
and 2: in the grip of terror that drives them to say and do strange and damaging things, those symptoms are actually literal psychosis in an individual. Why not say the have a similar problem, or an equal level of psychosis, or, I dunno, get over Trump's popularity and recognize the Republican party has divisions and factions like any other. It has the whiff of starting with the desired narrative and just shoehorning the facts in whether or not they support it.
I think that if one wants to explain why the Republicans and Democrats behave differently once in office, it is as useful to consider the fusion of Caplan and Kling (Hi!) style classifications of the left and right I do here https://dochammer.substack.com/p/perhaps-a-better-categorization-of . I think one explains the behaviors of the D&Rs better by combining the expected behavior of Elites with the underlying philosophical profiles of each party's constituents.