If there weren't a Chris Rufo, where would we be this morning? You don't go to war with the army you wish you had- you go to war with the army you do have. My only disagreement is that I want these institutions burned to the ground- I don't want to run them, and haven't wanted to for at least a decade now.
I think there is a lot to say about burning down the institutions. Not out of spite, but because the institutions have deep design flaws that lead to the outcomes we are seeing. Universities, for example, are designed to be rent seeking parasites, even without government funding. Adam Smith wrote about this regarding his experiences in Oxford vs Glasgow, how the former had teachers pied by the school who largely ignored students, and passed/failed students based on their own tests (I am going to teach you then test you on how well I taught you) vs Glasgow where students had to pass tests and chose and paid teachers to prepare them for those tests. The Oxford system is what we adopted here, with the predictable result that nothing useful is taught, and generally students are just passed through, while all the professorial effort is put towards getting money from the school, and more money to the school to be distributed to the employees. You can't fix that sort of system long term because the incentives just do not align.
I'm with Yarvin. I'd rather Rufo had been denied a pointless scalp and Gay still be President and indeed remain so for life, so that it's plain to everybody and undeniable without embarrassing oneself that Harvard is the kind of place that is led - and chooses to be led - by an incompetent mediocrity nobody only because she checks the right identity group boxes. Here, world, is DEI in action, see how it makes everything stupid and evil. Is this what you want? If not, you don't have to live this way.
Harvard got rid of her precisely because they accurately perceived that her remaining in that prominent role would eventually settle in public consciousness as a perpetual reputation drag, but they had a small window of opportunity to make it only a temporary blip and the quicker the purge the more likely people would just move on to the next distraction of the day and kind of forget about it, and Harvard's prestige would remain more or less intact. So long as Gay remained there, there remained a chance that Jews especially but also other groups would wake up to now being permanently 'unwelcome', as they say, and to perhaps settle into a long-term disengagement with the institution, and this too would have been a positive development.
So overalI I think Rufo's efforts here were a big mistake. It'd have been smarter and better to just let Harvard make it's own unforced error in public and then to refrain for a time from calling them out on it so that they can't walk it back later on when they realize that stink is now sticking to them forever.
Rufo: "What it needs is a spirited new activism with the courage and resolve to win back the language, recapture institutions, and reorient the state toward rightful ends. "
Now, I know nothing about this person, this college, these things. Perhaps he might have "played the game" better. I do know that English professors as a rule tend to be an arrested-at-adolescence lot. And I've read "Pictures from an Institution" and one or two other faculty novels.
But the stuff described therein is ludicrous, even by the low standards of the typical English dept. And - an awful long way from Harvard. And yet not far at all, obviously. It is all Harvard, all the way down.
There's nothing to recapture, from K-12 on up. It all has to be abolished.
Which is a roundabout way of saying, if there are any links about ChatGPT saving education, I'm not going to click on them.
As to link-reading: in general, I may not click because you are the filter that is meant to keep me a degree away from the crazy. If I should ever unsubscribe, it will be because I am trying a different filter, and I will likely be back.
As you see, I removed the filter the other day, unwisely, and read the above substack and thus got too near the flame of the crazy.
I should undoubtedly get rid of the internet all together, but I haven't the strength of mind.
Using Arnold as a filter is excellent, tho it’s not quite his own desire. I do click & read most links since I’m retired. For news filter I like Instapundit with lots of links I don’t click thru, and big Trump fan Don Surber who reads lots of papers (so I don’t have to).
I disagree on Rufo. I see him as saying these dominance hierarchies already exist, and they shouldn't, and they need to be resisted, but you can't do that without some institutional influence/power. I think your "elites turn to intimidation when their prestige is in trouble" is a bit too simplistic. Was, say, anthropology as a field under threat before it decided to seal itself off from anyone who was independent minded? I kinda doubt it. I think you're discounting good old fashion opportunism and cynicism, along with just the emergent property of groupthink and a process that selects for conformity, timidity, and so on.
Regarding your comment on what would happen if Trump wins in November, it would not just be the young people on the left who try to bring the country to a standstill. It would be almost everybody on the left. And if the Democrats get a majoirty in the House, impeachment proceedings would start almost immediately.
Arnold, what the Right wants to do is instill a set of values which in your terms would constitute a prestige hierarchy and replace the Left's dominance hierarchy.
The Democrats have a Fake Prestige hierarchy, which is really a dominance one that they don’t want admit is dominance. Making abortion legal or making gay marriage legal, or even making discrimination illegal, thru the courts, are all domination moves.
Every culture war change thru the courts, like overturning Roe, is also a dominance move. It’s illegal to commit perjury, but in Clinton’s impeachment the Democrats decided a top Dem was not to be punished for perjury. That was dominance.
To counter dominance requires opposition, and for that opposition to achieve decisive dominance.
Overturning Roe was not an unjustified dominance move, but rather a return to a proper understanding of the Constitution in response to a prior dominance move from the Left. Judicial reading of abortion and gay marriage into the Constitution were unjustified by anything in that document, therefore, pure dominance moves.
“Christopher Rufo has allowed the social justice activists to console themselves with a narrative in which Claudine Gay was railroaded out by the Right. He himself revels in that narrative.”
Rufo’s incentive to promote that narrative is clear: it portrays him as a dragon slayer. Harvard seems to be pushing the same story as well, but their motivation is less clear. Do they really want people to believe that they threw an outstanding, blameless scholar and administrator under the bus because they were cowed by a few right wing muckrakers?
Well, Harvard might if the alternative is they installed a deeply mediocre and possibly fraudulent scholar and administrator to their top position because of her color and chromosomes. They don't have a great set of choices there, because academia can't outright admit that their hierarchy is based on color and sex as much or more than scholarly rigor. Academia needs the illusion of prestige and production to continue to exist as it is, and admitting they are a largely a dominance/politics hierarchy driven ideological cult is going to go poorly.
So it really might be better for Harvard to say "Look what those mean right wingers made us do! We didn't want to throw out this perfect gem, but they threatened to shut us down! If only we had a perpetual source of money so we didn't need to bow to their demands! Oh, will no one vote us more funding?" The alternative is admitting that the emperor has no cloths.
Yes, I’d wager that is what they consider the safest bet. There is rarely much reward for not bowing to pressure, and since Gay’s unsuitability is increasingly obvious defending her is only likely to make them look worse, both for defending the indefensible and for putting her into the position in the first place. Better to or text that error without admitting it was an error, while calling those who are calling it out big meanie bullies.
Not better in a virtue sense, but in a political bureaucratic sense, you understand.
Do we really understand Chris Rufo’s strategy based on his Manifesto for the Counterrevolution? It’s pretty abstract.
Arnold, can you provide examples in which Rufo has said or done something that you find in poor taste, unhelpful, damaging, etc? Or are you just not on board?
Yesterday he held a Q and A for paid subscribers. He seems to be advocating for bread-and-butter political activism, but maybe his strategy is more innovative than I currently understand. I found his Q and A to be productive, positive and respectful. His strategy is going work for some people, and for others it’s not a good fit. It’s also okay not to be on board, and neither be against it or support it.
In his own words, here are his responses to some of his subscriber’s questions.
"Local politics is the key. Publish letters to the editor in your local paper. Get involved in local races for mayor, city council, and school boards. Connect with other conservatives in your area. All of it matters."
“Yes, publish letters to the editor. Get involved in local races. Take a class at Leadership Institute. All of this helps a lot!”
“Yes, I think local elections will have the highest bang for your buck. A $5,000 donation to a city council candidate or a school board candidate can make a huge difference. For people who do not have millions of dollars of disposable income, that is probably the best investment.”
“Yes, this is one way. The other way is to ban public-sector unions altogether, which I support.”
“There are two approaches that state legislatures and governors can take: (1) abolish the teachers union, which would be great, but is very difficult; (2) pass universal school choice, so that parents can opt-out of teachers union-controlled schools, which is much easier and, in the long term, will be much better for our country.”
“You need new, relevant, shocking information. That's the currency of the media. If you find some corruption or outrage, the media will cover it.”
“Activism for the Right is the subject of my next book, which I'm researching now! I hope to write more about this over the coming year.”
“Get into the office around 8a and handle emails, calls, social media, and press interviews for 60-90 minutes. I try to limit myself to one meeting, call, or press appearance per day, as they devour a lot of time; my approach is to be very selective and only agree to appearances that will move the needle. Then I burrow down into serious writing, either a journalistic piece or a book, until 12:30p, when I break for a 15-minute lunch. Then I get back into the work-reading, writing, social, activism-until about 4:30p. After doing the nighttime routine with my family, I try to do some research and reading for my book projects.”
“Mac Donald and Goldfarb are right on the facts. That's why the Left cannot tolerate them.”
“The dirty secret about school spending is that it's skyrocketed over the past five decades, but test scores (academic achievement) has not moved at all. It's a scandal and we should allow parents to take their education dollars to any school of their choice.”
“Get connected with the great civics groups, such as National Association of Scholars, who are developing curricula for K-12 schools.”
“I think we're already doing so. We're steadily driving up public awareness of DEl and shifting public opinion against it.
Still more to do, but we're on our way.”
“Ultimately, we need lawsuits—a lot of lawsuits.”
“Medical is going to be difficult, but Do No Harm is doing great work on this.”
“Yes, I spent two years focusing on CRT, trans, and DEl in K-12 schools. My work helped build support for universal school choice legislation, which I believe is now the law in 6 or 7 states. I haven't done as much work in that domain lately, as I've passed it on to others.”
“Right. Language is the key to politics. We need to upgrade our linguistic weapons immediately. And the best part: developing words is free. You don't need millions of dollars to start changing the terms of debate.”
“My sense is that it's only a matter of time before the athletic organizations change their policies. It's untenable to allow men to compete against women.”
“I'm running a new program called the Logos Fellowship and we have a few fellows who will be working on
immigration and studying my strategies and tactics. I'm optimistic that they will have an impact.”
"Intellectual elites turn to intimidation when their prestige is in trouble."
No - they use domination and prestige to assert their superiority, with test based intellectual superiority and excellent rationalizations to assert moral superiority.
Moral superiority is the prestige based hierarchy. But it's always a hierarchy - somebody on top. Those who make the decisions that others must follow inevitably dominate.
The desire to make the gaining of prestige a competition of merit is admirable, and I share with Arnold the preference of deferring to authority out of respect, rather than fear. But those few decades from WW II thru to the ... '65 Watts Riots? Protests? Loss of Saigon in '75? Roe v Wade in '72? When
The elites have been fighting a Woke/PC culture war since the 60s. "Rule of Law" and court decisions has been the weapon of domination since LBJ's CRA in 1964. Court decisions, enforced by police power, is Domination, not Prestige.
The culture losers want to fight back against crybullies, PC-nazis, femi-nazis. I wouldn't be surprised if Arnold has never been punched in the face (see Rob's lessons, linked!) nor most non-Woke intellectuals who don't like Trump. If one doesn't stand up to a bully, the bully keeps bullying. Domination, not prestige. The Woke NYT and media needs to be fought.
Trump fights. Like Grant, the drunk victorious US Civil War general, who fought.
It's a culture war; one side will dominate, and the winning side will control prestige.
You may under estimate how much readers of your stack also read others you reference? I read Rufo, Free Press, Persuasion. I love coming here to get your take on things I’ve already read, as well as following your links to new ideas.
This quote from Virginia Postrel makes a lovely point: "Then, in December 2015, I wrote a Bloomberg Opinion column on The Revolt of the Public. I’m sure many people read the column, but only one of them mattered to the book’s public profile: Arnold Kling, who wrote about it on his blog in January 2016. The timing was perfect and Arnold proved an effective, well-connected evangelist."
My paraphrase: Arnold is a person people who write, read, and is read by people who read widely/deeply. Arnold's subscriber count is much less than other stacks, but much more likely to be populated by people with actual influence, and also those who read a lot.
I'm going to frame Chris Rufo's statements somewhat differently, in that I think it depends on what one means by "agressive". There is an ambuhuous line between one being agressive in terms of dominating others, versus simply getting out into the wider world and being "agressive" in the advocacy of your views. A good example of someone who straddles this line effectively is Tyler Cowen. I've sometimes, but not often heard pundits describe Cowen as "confrontational" which I interpret as some mild form of "dominant". Through a combination of his skills and reputation, Cowen is effective. The key lies in blending prestige and some mild form of dominance. Rare is a person who can advocate through pure prestige.
1) I'm trying to imagine a world without Chris Rufo and people like him, and its the image of Claudine Gay's boot stamping on your face, forever.
2) Saying “all lives matter” implies that blacks don't deserve SPECIAL SYMPATHY above and beyond anyone else. If you find that idea offensive, then the problem is with you.
3) What would "losing Cold War II" look like?
A) It seems to me that it doesn't end with China marching through Washington and imposing the Chinese system on us.
B) I doubt that China would even want to stop trading with us long term.
C) It doesn't necessarily imply China expanding territorially. We could of course use nukes to prevent that if we wanted, even if they sunk aircraft carriers. You could glass all of Taiwan to prevent them from having it, if somehow that mattered to you. The same way we were planning to glass West Germany if the Soviets got through the Fulda Gap.
D) So it seems to me that there really isn't anything direct about "losing Cold War II" that affects us.
Unless of course we lose it in the way the Soviets lost it...through our citizens deciding that the other side has a superior philosophy and deciding to adopt it. It's hard for me to see what that looks like because I don't see democracy voting to get rid of democracy and the Chinese basically have a mixed market economic system like us.
I think we'd get a lot of people blaming each other for the loss and then trying to implement whatever pet solution they have to fix it. This, not the loss of some aircraft carriers, would do the damage.
P.S. The Soviets had lost Cold War I by the 1970s, it wasn't even close. The Cold War, given that nuclear weapons made conquest impossible, was about convincing the other sides population to adopt your system. By the 1970s the Soviets had run out of urbanization and copying western products. Economic growth was to come from the consumer economy and not heavy manufacturing. The Soviet economy completely stalled at that point, it had nothing to offer.
Having actually lived through the 1970s, I'm going to vehemently disagree with you. The post-Vietnam US had serious problems standing up to the Soviets. Yes, the Soviets had production problems, which is why they failed in the late 80s. But in the 70s, a substantial fraction of the US elites wanted to surrender.
I mean that the US elites would not resist any Soviet propaganda, and, indeed, had largely started to parrot the Soviet lines themselves.
The resistance to the Pershing missiles being placed to counter the Soviet SS-20 deployment in the early 80s was incredibly fierce. The deployment wouldn't even have started under Ford or Carter (the primary years I'm talking about), and that resistance was primarily Soviet funded.
I mean, Paul Samuelson's _Economics_, pretty much the standard economics textbook from the 1960s through the late 1980s, consistently claimed that the Soviet economic production was due to outgrow the West "within the next decade".
So if these Pershing missiles were not deployed, the soviets would have tried to tank rush the Fulda gap? Would that have been successful?
Seems to me the strategic situation wouldn’t change at all. If they somehow broke through we had enough nukes to stop them, assuming they even could break through which seems doubtful.
I’m not sure some “elites” sympathizing with the SU is enough for a communist revolution to take hold in America.
What I’m asking for here is some perspective. None of this Cold War stuff mattered. Nobody was conquering anyone with MAD, and there was never going to be a communist revolution in America.
The most dangerous period was after ww2, when the world was so in flux communist revolutions could happen anywhere and MAD wasn’t established yet. Risk only went down over time.
According to my tank commander friend and quite a few quadrennial defense reviews of the era, yes, the Soviets could have forced the Fulda Gap in the early 70s.
There were several Soviet military doctrine books smuggled out that showed that the Soviet military believed the correlation of forces was moving in their direction.
Yeah, I've seen the same. Though Soviet capabilities probably deteriorated by the 1980s.
Those same manuals called for us to nuke the Soviets if they got through.
The Soviets were never going to conquer Western Europe once we had enough nukes for MAD (and we were always ahead of them). Best case for them was an irradiated Europe not worth conquering, which is why they never tried.
When say the Germans had an inferior system, they could at least dream of forcing it on others are the point of a bayonet. Once the atom was split and scaled to a high enough level, this was never going to happen again. The only way to defeat your enemy was to have a superior system which caused your enemies people to capitulate of their own free will in order to emulate you.
Lobsters have a physical dominance hierarchy. Academics follow a prestige hierarchy. Evolved over centuries to mimic female conflict methods. Reputation destruction first among those.
Physical dominance is not within the academy's reach. A competence hierarchy has become beyond their reach.
The vaporous, arcane, internecine prestige of the academy is threatened by a competence hierarchy.
Competence and merit must be be vilified as colonialist, sexist, racist, white privileged, settler, xyz-phobic... systemically oppressive.
"For me, a major issue is the difference between a dominance hierarchy and a prestige hierarchy. In a dominance hierarchy, you defer to those above you out of fear. In a prestige hierarchy, you defer to those above you out of respect."
The trouble is "prestige-laundering" or "prestige-washing" (like green-washing, pink-washing, and so forth.) People are very sensitive to instances of overt and explicit domination, but they are easily fooled or otherwise tend to go along with the rationalizations offered by prestigious people performing dominating moves in social games but behind the cover story of a prestige-based system.
When it is hard for laymen or outsiders to evaluate relative prestige within any particular prestige system, then outsiders have little choice but to rely on reported judgments from insiders, and to the indicators, signals, and credentials they are told correlate with excellence and achievement in the field.
The trouble is that the prestigious insiders of any prestige system tend to control who gets to accumulate these signals and for what reasons, and it is very easy to launder dominating social moves in these decisions which have little to do with any objective standard of excellence in the field.
This creates an obvious self-perpetuating failure mode of mutual admiration societies or corrupt logrolling cliques of incumbents who are always able to excuse and rationalize every distortionary selection or exclusion decision in the name of a prestige system merely performing its functions accurately, but which in fact simply ensure that the highest levels of prestige in the field exclude all but like-minded allies, which in turn makes them increasingly insulated from new or external sources of competition and criticism.
It seems to me that by this late date most of the traditional or legacy academic prestige systems in any "hard for outsiders to evaluate, criticize, or falsify" fields are presumptively suspect of having been utterly corrupted and gamed in this regard, and there is no point whatsoever trying to "win them back" or salvage them in their present form. They simply have to be replaced with new systems and new institutions that are inherently harder for insiders to conceal unjust dominating moves, and to capture, distort, and game in this way.
If there weren't a Chris Rufo, where would we be this morning? You don't go to war with the army you wish you had- you go to war with the army you do have. My only disagreement is that I want these institutions burned to the ground- I don't want to run them, and haven't wanted to for at least a decade now.
I think there is a lot to say about burning down the institutions. Not out of spite, but because the institutions have deep design flaws that lead to the outcomes we are seeing. Universities, for example, are designed to be rent seeking parasites, even without government funding. Adam Smith wrote about this regarding his experiences in Oxford vs Glasgow, how the former had teachers pied by the school who largely ignored students, and passed/failed students based on their own tests (I am going to teach you then test you on how well I taught you) vs Glasgow where students had to pass tests and chose and paid teachers to prepare them for those tests. The Oxford system is what we adopted here, with the predictable result that nothing useful is taught, and generally students are just passed through, while all the professorial effort is put towards getting money from the school, and more money to the school to be distributed to the employees. You can't fix that sort of system long term because the incentives just do not align.
I'm with Yarvin. I'd rather Rufo had been denied a pointless scalp and Gay still be President and indeed remain so for life, so that it's plain to everybody and undeniable without embarrassing oneself that Harvard is the kind of place that is led - and chooses to be led - by an incompetent mediocrity nobody only because she checks the right identity group boxes. Here, world, is DEI in action, see how it makes everything stupid and evil. Is this what you want? If not, you don't have to live this way.
Harvard got rid of her precisely because they accurately perceived that her remaining in that prominent role would eventually settle in public consciousness as a perpetual reputation drag, but they had a small window of opportunity to make it only a temporary blip and the quicker the purge the more likely people would just move on to the next distraction of the day and kind of forget about it, and Harvard's prestige would remain more or less intact. So long as Gay remained there, there remained a chance that Jews especially but also other groups would wake up to now being permanently 'unwelcome', as they say, and to perhaps settle into a long-term disengagement with the institution, and this too would have been a positive development.
So overalI I think Rufo's efforts here were a big mistake. It'd have been smarter and better to just let Harvard make it's own unforced error in public and then to refrain for a time from calling them out on it so that they can't walk it back later on when they realize that stink is now sticking to them forever.
Rufo: "What it needs is a spirited new activism with the courage and resolve to win back the language, recapture institutions, and reorient the state toward rightful ends. "
Okay, AK, I have a series of links for you:
https://weirdatmyschool.substack.com/
Now, I know nothing about this person, this college, these things. Perhaps he might have "played the game" better. I do know that English professors as a rule tend to be an arrested-at-adolescence lot. And I've read "Pictures from an Institution" and one or two other faculty novels.
But the stuff described therein is ludicrous, even by the low standards of the typical English dept. And - an awful long way from Harvard. And yet not far at all, obviously. It is all Harvard, all the way down.
There's nothing to recapture, from K-12 on up. It all has to be abolished.
Which is a roundabout way of saying, if there are any links about ChatGPT saving education, I'm not going to click on them.
As to link-reading: in general, I may not click because you are the filter that is meant to keep me a degree away from the crazy. If I should ever unsubscribe, it will be because I am trying a different filter, and I will likely be back.
As you see, I removed the filter the other day, unwisely, and read the above substack and thus got too near the flame of the crazy.
I should undoubtedly get rid of the internet all together, but I haven't the strength of mind.
Using Arnold as a filter is excellent, tho it’s not quite his own desire. I do click & read most links since I’m retired. For news filter I like Instapundit with lots of links I don’t click thru, and big Trump fan Don Surber who reads lots of papers (so I don’t have to).
He's a very measured individual, and not interested in scoring points. I like these qualities even though they're not native to me.
I disagree on Rufo. I see him as saying these dominance hierarchies already exist, and they shouldn't, and they need to be resisted, but you can't do that without some institutional influence/power. I think your "elites turn to intimidation when their prestige is in trouble" is a bit too simplistic. Was, say, anthropology as a field under threat before it decided to seal itself off from anyone who was independent minded? I kinda doubt it. I think you're discounting good old fashion opportunism and cynicism, along with just the emergent property of groupthink and a process that selects for conformity, timidity, and so on.
Regarding your comment on what would happen if Trump wins in November, it would not just be the young people on the left who try to bring the country to a standstill. It would be almost everybody on the left. And if the Democrats get a majoirty in the House, impeachment proceedings would start almost immediately.
Arnold, what the Right wants to do is instill a set of values which in your terms would constitute a prestige hierarchy and replace the Left's dominance hierarchy.
The Democrats have a Fake Prestige hierarchy, which is really a dominance one that they don’t want admit is dominance. Making abortion legal or making gay marriage legal, or even making discrimination illegal, thru the courts, are all domination moves.
Every culture war change thru the courts, like overturning Roe, is also a dominance move. It’s illegal to commit perjury, but in Clinton’s impeachment the Democrats decided a top Dem was not to be punished for perjury. That was dominance.
To counter dominance requires opposition, and for that opposition to achieve decisive dominance.
Overturning Roe was not an unjustified dominance move, but rather a return to a proper understanding of the Constitution in response to a prior dominance move from the Left. Judicial reading of abortion and gay marriage into the Constitution were unjustified by anything in that document, therefore, pure dominance moves.
“Christopher Rufo has allowed the social justice activists to console themselves with a narrative in which Claudine Gay was railroaded out by the Right. He himself revels in that narrative.”
Rufo’s incentive to promote that narrative is clear: it portrays him as a dragon slayer. Harvard seems to be pushing the same story as well, but their motivation is less clear. Do they really want people to believe that they threw an outstanding, blameless scholar and administrator under the bus because they were cowed by a few right wing muckrakers?
Well, Harvard might if the alternative is they installed a deeply mediocre and possibly fraudulent scholar and administrator to their top position because of her color and chromosomes. They don't have a great set of choices there, because academia can't outright admit that their hierarchy is based on color and sex as much or more than scholarly rigor. Academia needs the illusion of prestige and production to continue to exist as it is, and admitting they are a largely a dominance/politics hierarchy driven ideological cult is going to go poorly.
So it really might be better for Harvard to say "Look what those mean right wingers made us do! We didn't want to throw out this perfect gem, but they threatened to shut us down! If only we had a perpetual source of money so we didn't need to bow to their demands! Oh, will no one vote us more funding?" The alternative is admitting that the emperor has no cloths.
So, their message is, “We’re not racists, we’re cowards!”
Why not both?
Yes, I’d wager that is what they consider the safest bet. There is rarely much reward for not bowing to pressure, and since Gay’s unsuitability is increasingly obvious defending her is only likely to make them look worse, both for defending the indefensible and for putting her into the position in the first place. Better to or text that error without admitting it was an error, while calling those who are calling it out big meanie bullies.
Not better in a virtue sense, but in a political bureaucratic sense, you understand.
“Or text that error “ should be “correct that error”, sorry.
Mr Kling,
I suppose many of us already subscribe to these links and prefer to read your commentary first. That is what I do. Take it as a compliment.
Do we really understand Chris Rufo’s strategy based on his Manifesto for the Counterrevolution? It’s pretty abstract.
Arnold, can you provide examples in which Rufo has said or done something that you find in poor taste, unhelpful, damaging, etc? Or are you just not on board?
Yesterday he held a Q and A for paid subscribers. He seems to be advocating for bread-and-butter political activism, but maybe his strategy is more innovative than I currently understand. I found his Q and A to be productive, positive and respectful. His strategy is going work for some people, and for others it’s not a good fit. It’s also okay not to be on board, and neither be against it or support it.
In his own words, here are his responses to some of his subscriber’s questions.
"Local politics is the key. Publish letters to the editor in your local paper. Get involved in local races for mayor, city council, and school boards. Connect with other conservatives in your area. All of it matters."
“Yes, publish letters to the editor. Get involved in local races. Take a class at Leadership Institute. All of this helps a lot!”
“Yes, I think local elections will have the highest bang for your buck. A $5,000 donation to a city council candidate or a school board candidate can make a huge difference. For people who do not have millions of dollars of disposable income, that is probably the best investment.”
“Yes, this is one way. The other way is to ban public-sector unions altogether, which I support.”
“There are two approaches that state legislatures and governors can take: (1) abolish the teachers union, which would be great, but is very difficult; (2) pass universal school choice, so that parents can opt-out of teachers union-controlled schools, which is much easier and, in the long term, will be much better for our country.”
“You need new, relevant, shocking information. That's the currency of the media. If you find some corruption or outrage, the media will cover it.”
“Activism for the Right is the subject of my next book, which I'm researching now! I hope to write more about this over the coming year.”
“Get into the office around 8a and handle emails, calls, social media, and press interviews for 60-90 minutes. I try to limit myself to one meeting, call, or press appearance per day, as they devour a lot of time; my approach is to be very selective and only agree to appearances that will move the needle. Then I burrow down into serious writing, either a journalistic piece or a book, until 12:30p, when I break for a 15-minute lunch. Then I get back into the work-reading, writing, social, activism-until about 4:30p. After doing the nighttime routine with my family, I try to do some research and reading for my book projects.”
“Mac Donald and Goldfarb are right on the facts. That's why the Left cannot tolerate them.”
“The dirty secret about school spending is that it's skyrocketed over the past five decades, but test scores (academic achievement) has not moved at all. It's a scandal and we should allow parents to take their education dollars to any school of their choice.”
“Get connected with the great civics groups, such as National Association of Scholars, who are developing curricula for K-12 schools.”
“I think we're already doing so. We're steadily driving up public awareness of DEl and shifting public opinion against it.
Still more to do, but we're on our way.”
“Ultimately, we need lawsuits—a lot of lawsuits.”
“Medical is going to be difficult, but Do No Harm is doing great work on this.”
“Yes, I spent two years focusing on CRT, trans, and DEl in K-12 schools. My work helped build support for universal school choice legislation, which I believe is now the law in 6 or 7 states. I haven't done as much work in that domain lately, as I've passed it on to others.”
“Right. Language is the key to politics. We need to upgrade our linguistic weapons immediately. And the best part: developing words is free. You don't need millions of dollars to start changing the terms of debate.”
“My sense is that it's only a matter of time before the athletic organizations change their policies. It's untenable to allow men to compete against women.”
“I'm running a new program called the Logos Fellowship and we have a few fellows who will be working on
immigration and studying my strategies and tactics. I'm optimistic that they will have an impact.”
"Intellectual elites turn to intimidation when their prestige is in trouble."
No - they use domination and prestige to assert their superiority, with test based intellectual superiority and excellent rationalizations to assert moral superiority.
Moral superiority is the prestige based hierarchy. But it's always a hierarchy - somebody on top. Those who make the decisions that others must follow inevitably dominate.
The desire to make the gaining of prestige a competition of merit is admirable, and I share with Arnold the preference of deferring to authority out of respect, rather than fear. But those few decades from WW II thru to the ... '65 Watts Riots? Protests? Loss of Saigon in '75? Roe v Wade in '72? When
The elites have been fighting a Woke/PC culture war since the 60s. "Rule of Law" and court decisions has been the weapon of domination since LBJ's CRA in 1964. Court decisions, enforced by police power, is Domination, not Prestige.
The culture losers want to fight back against crybullies, PC-nazis, femi-nazis. I wouldn't be surprised if Arnold has never been punched in the face (see Rob's lessons, linked!) nor most non-Woke intellectuals who don't like Trump. If one doesn't stand up to a bully, the bully keeps bullying. Domination, not prestige. The Woke NYT and media needs to be fought.
Trump fights. Like Grant, the drunk victorious US Civil War general, who fought.
It's a culture war; one side will dominate, and the winning side will control prestige.
Who's side are you on?
You may under estimate how much readers of your stack also read others you reference? I read Rufo, Free Press, Persuasion. I love coming here to get your take on things I’ve already read, as well as following your links to new ideas.
This quote from Virginia Postrel makes a lovely point: "Then, in December 2015, I wrote a Bloomberg Opinion column on The Revolt of the Public. I’m sure many people read the column, but only one of them mattered to the book’s public profile: Arnold Kling, who wrote about it on his blog in January 2016. The timing was perfect and Arnold proved an effective, well-connected evangelist."
My paraphrase: Arnold is a person people who write, read, and is read by people who read widely/deeply. Arnold's subscriber count is much less than other stacks, but much more likely to be populated by people with actual influence, and also those who read a lot.
I'm going to frame Chris Rufo's statements somewhat differently, in that I think it depends on what one means by "agressive". There is an ambuhuous line between one being agressive in terms of dominating others, versus simply getting out into the wider world and being "agressive" in the advocacy of your views. A good example of someone who straddles this line effectively is Tyler Cowen. I've sometimes, but not often heard pundits describe Cowen as "confrontational" which I interpret as some mild form of "dominant". Through a combination of his skills and reputation, Cowen is effective. The key lies in blending prestige and some mild form of dominance. Rare is a person who can advocate through pure prestige.
1) I'm trying to imagine a world without Chris Rufo and people like him, and its the image of Claudine Gay's boot stamping on your face, forever.
2) Saying “all lives matter” implies that blacks don't deserve SPECIAL SYMPATHY above and beyond anyone else. If you find that idea offensive, then the problem is with you.
3) What would "losing Cold War II" look like?
A) It seems to me that it doesn't end with China marching through Washington and imposing the Chinese system on us.
B) I doubt that China would even want to stop trading with us long term.
C) It doesn't necessarily imply China expanding territorially. We could of course use nukes to prevent that if we wanted, even if they sunk aircraft carriers. You could glass all of Taiwan to prevent them from having it, if somehow that mattered to you. The same way we were planning to glass West Germany if the Soviets got through the Fulda Gap.
D) So it seems to me that there really isn't anything direct about "losing Cold War II" that affects us.
Unless of course we lose it in the way the Soviets lost it...through our citizens deciding that the other side has a superior philosophy and deciding to adopt it. It's hard for me to see what that looks like because I don't see democracy voting to get rid of democracy and the Chinese basically have a mixed market economic system like us.
I think we'd get a lot of people blaming each other for the loss and then trying to implement whatever pet solution they have to fix it. This, not the loss of some aircraft carriers, would do the damage.
P.S. The Soviets had lost Cold War I by the 1970s, it wasn't even close. The Cold War, given that nuclear weapons made conquest impossible, was about convincing the other sides population to adopt your system. By the 1970s the Soviets had run out of urbanization and copying western products. Economic growth was to come from the consumer economy and not heavy manufacturing. The Soviet economy completely stalled at that point, it had nothing to offer.
Having actually lived through the 1970s, I'm going to vehemently disagree with you. The post-Vietnam US had serious problems standing up to the Soviets. Yes, the Soviets had production problems, which is why they failed in the late 80s. But in the 70s, a substantial fraction of the US elites wanted to surrender.
"Surrender"?
In what way? Was a treaty to be signed? What were the terms?
Were Soviet troops going to enter Washington and the Kremlin re-write our constitution along Marxist-Leninist lines?
"The post-Vietnam US had serious problems standing up to the Soviets."
Over what?
I mean that the US elites would not resist any Soviet propaganda, and, indeed, had largely started to parrot the Soviet lines themselves.
The resistance to the Pershing missiles being placed to counter the Soviet SS-20 deployment in the early 80s was incredibly fierce. The deployment wouldn't even have started under Ford or Carter (the primary years I'm talking about), and that resistance was primarily Soviet funded.
I mean, Paul Samuelson's _Economics_, pretty much the standard economics textbook from the 1960s through the late 1980s, consistently claimed that the Soviet economic production was due to outgrow the West "within the next decade".
So if these Pershing missiles were not deployed, the soviets would have tried to tank rush the Fulda gap? Would that have been successful?
Seems to me the strategic situation wouldn’t change at all. If they somehow broke through we had enough nukes to stop them, assuming they even could break through which seems doubtful.
I’m not sure some “elites” sympathizing with the SU is enough for a communist revolution to take hold in America.
What I’m asking for here is some perspective. None of this Cold War stuff mattered. Nobody was conquering anyone with MAD, and there was never going to be a communist revolution in America.
The most dangerous period was after ww2, when the world was so in flux communist revolutions could happen anywhere and MAD wasn’t established yet. Risk only went down over time.
According to my tank commander friend and quite a few quadrennial defense reviews of the era, yes, the Soviets could have forced the Fulda Gap in the early 70s.
There were several Soviet military doctrine books smuggled out that showed that the Soviet military believed the correlation of forces was moving in their direction.
Yes, we won. No, it wasn’t obvious in the 70s.
Yeah, I've seen the same. Though Soviet capabilities probably deteriorated by the 1980s.
Those same manuals called for us to nuke the Soviets if they got through.
The Soviets were never going to conquer Western Europe once we had enough nukes for MAD (and we were always ahead of them). Best case for them was an irradiated Europe not worth conquering, which is why they never tried.
When say the Germans had an inferior system, they could at least dream of forcing it on others are the point of a bayonet. Once the atom was split and scaled to a high enough level, this was never going to happen again. The only way to defeat your enemy was to have a superior system which caused your enemies people to capitulate of their own free will in order to emulate you.
Lobsters have a physical dominance hierarchy. Academics follow a prestige hierarchy. Evolved over centuries to mimic female conflict methods. Reputation destruction first among those.
Physical dominance is not within the academy's reach. A competence hierarchy has become beyond their reach.
The vaporous, arcane, internecine prestige of the academy is threatened by a competence hierarchy.
Competence and merit must be be vilified as colonialist, sexist, racist, white privileged, settler, xyz-phobic... systemically oppressive.
Yes. Yes!
These "Links to Consider" are very valuable. These are important posts.
Your thoughtful, insightful curation is half the reason I subscribe.
"For me, a major issue is the difference between a dominance hierarchy and a prestige hierarchy. In a dominance hierarchy, you defer to those above you out of fear. In a prestige hierarchy, you defer to those above you out of respect."
The trouble is "prestige-laundering" or "prestige-washing" (like green-washing, pink-washing, and so forth.) People are very sensitive to instances of overt and explicit domination, but they are easily fooled or otherwise tend to go along with the rationalizations offered by prestigious people performing dominating moves in social games but behind the cover story of a prestige-based system.
When it is hard for laymen or outsiders to evaluate relative prestige within any particular prestige system, then outsiders have little choice but to rely on reported judgments from insiders, and to the indicators, signals, and credentials they are told correlate with excellence and achievement in the field.
The trouble is that the prestigious insiders of any prestige system tend to control who gets to accumulate these signals and for what reasons, and it is very easy to launder dominating social moves in these decisions which have little to do with any objective standard of excellence in the field.
This creates an obvious self-perpetuating failure mode of mutual admiration societies or corrupt logrolling cliques of incumbents who are always able to excuse and rationalize every distortionary selection or exclusion decision in the name of a prestige system merely performing its functions accurately, but which in fact simply ensure that the highest levels of prestige in the field exclude all but like-minded allies, which in turn makes them increasingly insulated from new or external sources of competition and criticism.
It seems to me that by this late date most of the traditional or legacy academic prestige systems in any "hard for outsiders to evaluate, criticize, or falsify" fields are presumptively suspect of having been utterly corrupted and gamed in this regard, and there is no point whatsoever trying to "win them back" or salvage them in their present form. They simply have to be replaced with new systems and new institutions that are inherently harder for insiders to conceal unjust dominating moves, and to capture, distort, and game in this way.
Compare the Niall Ferguson musings to Peter Zeihan’s recent observations on the Chinese military.