Links to Consider, 2/11, with uncharitable remarks by ChatASK
Glenn Loury and others on Deracialization; Matt Yglesias on Progressives and Preservation; Matt Goodwin on left divides; Martin Gurri on right incoherence
Glenn Loury hosts Clifton Roscoe and Greg Thomas on the issue of deracialization. One way to frame the issue is to ask what the consequences would be if the government stopped attempting to classify people by race. Would that help to reduce racial discrimination or would it serve to hide it?
Thomas writes,
Clifton, your reaction to my opening salvo in this symposium offered no countervailing examples of Afro-American assets. That approach exemplifies “deficit-framing” based on statistical measures. This very practice was identified 1970 by Albert Murray in The Omni-Americans as the (often unwitting) foundation of the “folklore of white supremacy” and the “fakelore of black pathology.”
As I read it, he is arguing that racial classification leads to a focus on negative outcomes for black people. It creates a mindset in which we feel obliged to treat all blacks either as victims of racism or culturally handicapped. It does not encourage us to observe differences among blacks or to focus on ways blacks have made progress and paths to continue progress.
Why do we have a low-rise strip mall? Well, you see, the powers that be have decreed that Sam’s Park & Shop isn’t just any strip mall — it’s a historic strip mall, one of the oldest in America, and thus must remain a strip mall, despite being a very inappropriate use of the land given present-day economics and the existence of the metro station.
Now of course the real reason it’s designated for historic preservation isn’t that hard-core historians or architecture enthusiasts were agitating for this. People who live in the area didn’t want more parking on the street, so they came up with this pretext to undermine the city’s economic development, climate, and affordable housing goals.
Typical Matt. He reassures us that the left wants good things, like affordable housing, and then he tweaks his friends about their NIMBYism.
My evil twin, Arlo, has trained ChatASK. I gave it a prompt to respond to Matt , and it responded:
Matt, do you want to get that strip mall torn down? Just tell your friends it’s a statue of Thomas Jefferson! Come on, the left’s goal is to rewrite and condemn our history, not preserve it. What “historic preservation” means to the left is “whatever we can do to resist any new profit-seeking enterprise.”
A different Matt, Matt Goodwin writes,
white liberals are more than twice as likely as both their black counterparts and the average, and nearly twice as likely as Hispanic Democrats, to want children to learn “somebody can be a boy or a girl even if that’s different from sex at birth”. While nearly two-thirds of white liberals think children should be taught these things, only minorities of Black and Hispanic voters think the same way.
Once again, I prompted ChatASK to weigh in, and it said,
Don’t get your hopes up, conservatives. The children are being taught those things whether you like it or not, and when they grow up they will all be like white liberals.
Speaking of conservatives, Martin Gurri sees them as caught up in incoherent anger, and he longs for something more ideological.
If I were to guess at the New Jerusalem looming in the mind of the right populist, it might look something like this. The government’s hand weighs lightly on the citizen, but the law is strictly enforced. The circle of personal freedom is as wide as can be consistent with social order. In a nation of equals, all fulfill their duty to family, community, and country. Social relations have returned to “normal,” with two sexes instead of 72 genders, and enterprise and innovation favored over eco-doom and pro-identity theater. The past is once again populated with heroes and sages our children should aspire to emulate. The future is an open frontier.
Substacks referenced above:
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The 1970 book "The Omni-Americans", by Albert Murray, is still underrated. Murray was a black intellectual, whose thoughts ranged inside, outside and around the racial orthodoxies of his time. He wrote quite a bit and sometimes veered off into the zany. But "The Omni-Americans" is his most solid work. In it, he argues that slaves were effectively stripped of African culture by the second generation, and that whatever African-American culture emerged after that was 100 percent American, untainted the nostalgia for European culture that persisted in American whites. So if you wanted to study a pure reference sample of America, you should look to American blacks first. He points to the enduring disproportionate influence of black culture on American entertainment, sports, and clothing fads.
Mainstream conservatives can't state what they actually want because it's taboo.
So they come up with convoluted explanation to try to backdoor their way into what they actually want. And observers who either don't understand this or profit from not understanding it point and go "that's weird and incoherent".
I've also come to realize that the only hope for productive conservative politics is at the state level. Red State America really is just run better, and continues to rack of new accomplishments (come to a red state near you, universal school vouchers). But at the national level they lack the necessary majority and scope of purpose. Most of what the federal government does is non-discretionary spending. When they take power nationally pretty much all they accomplish is to keep the federal government off the red states backs.