Jeb Bush might be a "genuine human being," and like his brother blandly likable, but there is nothing to indicate he would have done any better as president. President Trump too is clearly a "genuine human being," just one whose style is unappealing or even aversive to some, but very appealing to others, which the former can't seem to understand. We would do better to focus on policy choices than personalities.
Noah Smith only speaks about the negative aspects of social media and posits that "Liberal societies are paralyzed with division and hatred, because they spend all day mainlining the output of the petty Lenins." He is no doubt unhappy that the collective pursuit of dubious Progressive projects is hampered by the free expression of public criticism, but this can have its positive aspects.
Re Chau and Schmitt: people love quoting Schmitt because his work is an endless fountain of banger quotes (and profound understanding), but these bangers are usually misapplied to the gray slurry of American jurisprudence. Art. II, Sec. 3 of the Constitution requires that the president "take care that the laws are faithfully executed;" and Sec. 1 Cl. 8 requires that he take a solemn oath to "faithfully execute" the "Office." But Sec. 2. Cl. 1 also gives the president only marginally limited authority to grant "Pardons and Reprieves" for violations of federal law, but there are arguments about the limitations of this.
There is not a weird loophole that permits the president to defund and ignore large sections of administrative law. If you just break the law you can stymie its functions. The oath of office, if it carries no superstitious power, cannot really bind a person bound on exercising their will.
So for example Biden on the border simply adopted an absurd, Insane Clown Posse construction of "asylum" and then implemented it. This was not an exercise of sovereignty but just a political official making an absurd claim, acting as if it were true, and daring the consequences. The Schmittian argument about the emergency state is something that US law has contained by creating especially delineated, specified, and limited emergency states, and sharply limited the traditional defense of governmental necessity. For Biden to have presented this in Schmittian terms, he would have had to define the current situation as a temporary state of emergency that could be restored to normalcy with the use of exceptional powers. That never happened; when you make the "emergency" a permanent state that cannot be fixed (like "climate emergency") it has no such force. Similarly, the US was embarrassed with the COVID emergency: the state claimed that it could, through technology and science, restore the pre-COVID norm. It couldn't; the disease is endemic, and the result of the many lawbreaking exercises of authority was just an epic looting campaign that drained the legitimacy of all layers of government.
Schmitt derives this concept from the Roman Republican constitution in which the authority of the two consuls could be vested in a temporary dictator, who would lead the mobilized military for a limited term subject to renewal. Once Hannibal or the Gauls or what have you have been defeated, the emergency ends and Cincinnatus returns to his farm.
Schmitt greatly expands on this concept with his investigation into the concept of nomos, as a richer and deeper term than "norms," and how nomos emerges from the real history of a people in relation to the land where they live. The left generally believes that norms can be arbitrarily defined and promulgated, whereas the right tends to believe that norms must emerge from the nomos, else they're false and unstable. So, right, if you have no stable concept of what norms you are restoring through use of exceptional power, it's just the naked exercise of power without much in the way of sovereign legitimacy; you're forgetting to put on your velvet glove on your iron fist.
The American left and “right” converge on the usefulness, to their respective ideologies and priorities, of denying that America could ever be a place whose history is connected to “the land” and/or custom.
So very much depends on whom/what you deem exceptional, no? Surely all can agree Elon Musk is exceptional. And he’s been given exceptional treatment as a result: persecuted in places where he’s a threat to egalitarianism, given a pass in others where people are impressed by him. In the case of the Boca Chica pollution in the colony distant from the capitol, the exceptionalism tends in a direction the writer of the link would surely applaud, though he might be hard pressed to say why. National security, I suppose; or maintaining a technological edge *somewhere* during our twilight. There’s obviously no reason to go to Mars, the last place we ever can go, unless we build an orbiting “world”, so efficiency can’t be invoked there.
Diane Wilson, whom you will not have heard of, is similarly exceptional. Doing the math, with my state’s burgeoning population, I’d say she’s one in ten million. There was a norm, legal, administrative, custom, whatever you want to call it - and she took exception to it, with a tenacity that has absolutely no commonality with the people Noah Smith calls activists.
Things were better then, the times that produced a Diane Wilson, and a few others like her. But of course Noah Smith would not be able to acknowledge that.
His whole schtick is based on never looking at anything too closely, and never straying from dogma. No exceptions.
Also, I would be happy to hear an explanation of why this old Nazi’s ideas about the subversion of the law are profound. Otherwise I’m going to assume there’s a cool kid factor - like, if you’re an exceptional individual like Peter Thiel, you demonstrate this by having a pet Nazi, and maybe he’s the best you can come up with. I’ll be candid, I’m not going to have time to read that guy. Life is long, but my attention span is not.
I mean, what the guy wrote seems fairly unexceptionable - but what exactly does he do with it? Did he do with it lol?
Bari Weiss: How do you contain populist energies and harness them in a productive way without them running roughshod over minority groups?
Peter Thiel: Maybe that’s what you need to have in a technologically advanced society: You need experts...And so there are all kinds of ways that an advanced technological society—by its very nature—is far less populist or democratic than the U.S. was even in its eighteenth-century conception.
Me: Should we differentiate between experts in government and experts in a private organization or market? Perhaps this would be a good idea.
First, there's nothing wrong with experts or expertise. If I were free soloing El Capitan I would want to be an expert. Thiel is drawing contrast between preponderance of experts and bottom-up governance. This is not the right trade-off to consider. Do you agree?
Shouldn't he be drawing a contrast between technocratic experts and bottom-up governance?
Let's define bottom-up governance as a mixture of family-governance, constitutional republicanism, and market governance. This includes religious groups, schools and organizations.
Let's break this down. Larger populations leads to more trade and specialization. Rather than do-it-yourself, subcontract it out to someone with greater comparative advantage: an expert. All things equal, won't all advance technological societies have more experts? Yes.
So perhaps Thiel is confounding issues here. Can we simplify and just say that certain parts of the Constitution are being violated? And this leads to preponderance of experts within government? We want to move experts from government to private institutions with bottom-up governance. We want to move experts from government-subsidized higher education to universities that are truly private.
The Thiel interview starts out fantastic, but perhaps drifts into poor economic thinking when it comes to trade, tariffs, immigration and other Trumpy things. Should I add "statist things" to this list? Or perhaps I'm not nationalist enough? Anyway, I'm glad you linked to it, and I hope the econ specialists in your audience scrutinize Thiel's statements.
Jeb Bush might be a "genuine human being," and like his brother blandly likable, but there is nothing to indicate he would have done any better as president. President Trump too is clearly a "genuine human being," just one whose style is unappealing or even aversive to some, but very appealing to others, which the former can't seem to understand. We would do better to focus on policy choices than personalities.
Noah Smith only speaks about the negative aspects of social media and posits that "Liberal societies are paralyzed with division and hatred, because they spend all day mainlining the output of the petty Lenins." He is no doubt unhappy that the collective pursuit of dubious Progressive projects is hampered by the free expression of public criticism, but this can have its positive aspects.
Re Chau and Schmitt: people love quoting Schmitt because his work is an endless fountain of banger quotes (and profound understanding), but these bangers are usually misapplied to the gray slurry of American jurisprudence. Art. II, Sec. 3 of the Constitution requires that the president "take care that the laws are faithfully executed;" and Sec. 1 Cl. 8 requires that he take a solemn oath to "faithfully execute" the "Office." But Sec. 2. Cl. 1 also gives the president only marginally limited authority to grant "Pardons and Reprieves" for violations of federal law, but there are arguments about the limitations of this.
There is not a weird loophole that permits the president to defund and ignore large sections of administrative law. If you just break the law you can stymie its functions. The oath of office, if it carries no superstitious power, cannot really bind a person bound on exercising their will.
So for example Biden on the border simply adopted an absurd, Insane Clown Posse construction of "asylum" and then implemented it. This was not an exercise of sovereignty but just a political official making an absurd claim, acting as if it were true, and daring the consequences. The Schmittian argument about the emergency state is something that US law has contained by creating especially delineated, specified, and limited emergency states, and sharply limited the traditional defense of governmental necessity. For Biden to have presented this in Schmittian terms, he would have had to define the current situation as a temporary state of emergency that could be restored to normalcy with the use of exceptional powers. That never happened; when you make the "emergency" a permanent state that cannot be fixed (like "climate emergency") it has no such force. Similarly, the US was embarrassed with the COVID emergency: the state claimed that it could, through technology and science, restore the pre-COVID norm. It couldn't; the disease is endemic, and the result of the many lawbreaking exercises of authority was just an epic looting campaign that drained the legitimacy of all layers of government.
Schmitt derives this concept from the Roman Republican constitution in which the authority of the two consuls could be vested in a temporary dictator, who would lead the mobilized military for a limited term subject to renewal. Once Hannibal or the Gauls or what have you have been defeated, the emergency ends and Cincinnatus returns to his farm.
Schmitt greatly expands on this concept with his investigation into the concept of nomos, as a richer and deeper term than "norms," and how nomos emerges from the real history of a people in relation to the land where they live. The left generally believes that norms can be arbitrarily defined and promulgated, whereas the right tends to believe that norms must emerge from the nomos, else they're false and unstable. So, right, if you have no stable concept of what norms you are restoring through use of exceptional power, it's just the naked exercise of power without much in the way of sovereign legitimacy; you're forgetting to put on your velvet glove on your iron fist.
The American left and “right” converge on the usefulness, to their respective ideologies and priorities, of denying that America could ever be a place whose history is connected to “the land” and/or custom.
So very much depends on whom/what you deem exceptional, no? Surely all can agree Elon Musk is exceptional. And he’s been given exceptional treatment as a result: persecuted in places where he’s a threat to egalitarianism, given a pass in others where people are impressed by him. In the case of the Boca Chica pollution in the colony distant from the capitol, the exceptionalism tends in a direction the writer of the link would surely applaud, though he might be hard pressed to say why. National security, I suppose; or maintaining a technological edge *somewhere* during our twilight. There’s obviously no reason to go to Mars, the last place we ever can go, unless we build an orbiting “world”, so efficiency can’t be invoked there.
Diane Wilson, whom you will not have heard of, is similarly exceptional. Doing the math, with my state’s burgeoning population, I’d say she’s one in ten million. There was a norm, legal, administrative, custom, whatever you want to call it - and she took exception to it, with a tenacity that has absolutely no commonality with the people Noah Smith calls activists.
Things were better then, the times that produced a Diane Wilson, and a few others like her. But of course Noah Smith would not be able to acknowledge that.
His whole schtick is based on never looking at anything too closely, and never straying from dogma. No exceptions.
Also, I would be happy to hear an explanation of why this old Nazi’s ideas about the subversion of the law are profound. Otherwise I’m going to assume there’s a cool kid factor - like, if you’re an exceptional individual like Peter Thiel, you demonstrate this by having a pet Nazi, and maybe he’s the best you can come up with. I’ll be candid, I’m not going to have time to read that guy. Life is long, but my attention span is not.
I mean, what the guy wrote seems fairly unexceptionable - but what exactly does he do with it? Did he do with it lol?
The Peter Thiel point was made by Tyler Cowen in his 2020 presentation to Princeton’s Bendheim Center: https://economics.princeton.edu/events/tyler-cowen-on-the-future-social-and-political-implications-of-covid-19/
Bari Weiss: How do you contain populist energies and harness them in a productive way without them running roughshod over minority groups?
Peter Thiel: Maybe that’s what you need to have in a technologically advanced society: You need experts...And so there are all kinds of ways that an advanced technological society—by its very nature—is far less populist or democratic than the U.S. was even in its eighteenth-century conception.
Me: Should we differentiate between experts in government and experts in a private organization or market? Perhaps this would be a good idea.
First, there's nothing wrong with experts or expertise. If I were free soloing El Capitan I would want to be an expert. Thiel is drawing contrast between preponderance of experts and bottom-up governance. This is not the right trade-off to consider. Do you agree?
Shouldn't he be drawing a contrast between technocratic experts and bottom-up governance?
Let's define bottom-up governance as a mixture of family-governance, constitutional republicanism, and market governance. This includes religious groups, schools and organizations.
Let's break this down. Larger populations leads to more trade and specialization. Rather than do-it-yourself, subcontract it out to someone with greater comparative advantage: an expert. All things equal, won't all advance technological societies have more experts? Yes.
So perhaps Thiel is confounding issues here. Can we simplify and just say that certain parts of the Constitution are being violated? And this leads to preponderance of experts within government? We want to move experts from government to private institutions with bottom-up governance. We want to move experts from government-subsidized higher education to universities that are truly private.
Yes?
The Thiel interview starts out fantastic, but perhaps drifts into poor economic thinking when it comes to trade, tariffs, immigration and other Trumpy things. Should I add "statist things" to this list? Or perhaps I'm not nationalist enough? Anyway, I'm glad you linked to it, and I hope the econ specialists in your audience scrutinize Thiel's statements.