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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Thanks so much for linking to Martin Gurri’s excellent and insightful City Journal article on the right-populist agenda. It definitely repays multiple rereadings and right-populists could do much worse than to take it seriously to heart. And it is that rarity of political musings, a piece that does not dismiss right-populists ought of hand as nazis or worse as is the tendency amongst writers of the never-Republican elite establishment persuasion.
Nevertheless, shamefully, I will attempt to gild the lily a bit with some observations and suggestions for concrete policy proposals.
At the heart of Gurri’s essay is his exposition of three central principles: sovereignty, equality, and obligation. With the Philadelphia counter-revolution of 1787 that launched the illegitimate overthrow of state sovereignty under the Articles of Confederation and replaced them with a form of artistocracy more akin to the elected-by-the-nobility-monarchy of the Polish Commonwealth than to the ethereal English constitution, the sovereignty of the plebeian class in the US was largely crushed, the evidence for which is everywhere in the inability of the political system to achieve popular goals and outcomes. The insipid dismissal of the Articles of Confederation by the elite class is evidenced by the failure of nearly every policy advocated in the Federalist Papers. If one reads the Articles of Confederation side-by-side with the 1579 constitution of the Netherlands one can see remarkable similarity and overlap and one can easily imagine the prosperity and the 3 centuries of stability that the Dutch Republic achieved by the former colonies with their diverse constitutional approaches during the “inter-regnum.” The validity of this observation is underscored by the nearly instantaneous resort to sedition prosecutions of newspaper publishers under the new regime.
Gurri’s second principle, equality, is at the heart of the enduring conflict between the governing elite establishment and the plebeian classes. The central organizing principle of elite establishment is Burke’s thesis that:
“The occupation of a hairdresser or of a working tallow-chandler cannot be a matter of honour to any person—to say nothing of a number of other more servile employments. Such descriptions of men ought not to suffer oppression from the state; but the state suffers oppression if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule. In this you think you are combating prejudice, but you are at war with nature.”
Authentic subsidiarity is a partial answer to this ideology of condescension. And the principle of laws of general applicability, that is the principle that a law ought apply to every individual and every class of individuals equally, should be advocated for as well. Particularly with respect to taxation. Nowhere is the special pleading that Gurri mentions more powerful than in the tax code. Tax exemptions provide tax expenditure subsidies to the sock-puppet think-tanks of the elite establishment and their noise drowns out all popular grievance. End tax emptions now and replace with a gross receipts tax. Better yet, come out and disavow Lasalle’s Iron Law of Wages as an inspirational goal. Sure, the elite establishment Kochs, AEI, the WEF etc etc will come down on you like a ton of bricks, but with the country on the fast track to bankruptcy, we can no longer afford to use the tax code to penalize domestic industry to provide a comparative advantage to the slave labor of communist states. Replace the current tax farrago and fund the national government with an across-the-board VAT, no exemptions, that taxes foreign imports equally with domestic product.
Some might argue that a simple VAT would not provide progressive taxation, and the working class might have to pay more. That is static analyis, however, and brings us to Gurri’s third principle, obligation, which is really just another way of saying “behavior should have consequences.” When people vote for more government or to sustain the already out of control government under which we now suffer, they must realize something of the consequences financially. The salutory influence of consequences is perhaps most vividly illustrated by the recent comparisons of taxation and government dependency in New York versus Florida.
At any rate, take or leave any specific policy proposal, but consider whether Gurri’s three principles further imply decentralization, subsidiarity, and laws of general applicability. Doing so may help relieve some of the incoherence ascribed to the right populist movement.
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.