Links to Consider, 6/11

Razib Khan on Biden; Rod Dreher on elite guilt; Andrew Sullivan on the far right; Ruxadra Teslo on geniuses who don't fit in

Razib Khan writes,

Candidly, I think one of Biden’s problems is that he is not as intellectually self-assured or talented as Clinton or Obama, so I believe he favors more mediocre advisors and officials to match his own cognitive capacity (which was always lower than his Democratic predecessors, even before senility). Is Biden our midwit in chief?

Ideally, a President would have the ability to recognize and hire smart advisers along while maintaining a clear perspective on their limitations.

Rod Dreher writes,

I discerned many years ago that so many whites — not only progressives — embrace progressive policies as a way of resolving their intense guilt over their own privilege. Within institutions — I’m thinking about newspapers and magazines, but I believe this is general — they are willing to objectively harm their organizations and its function, all for the sake of instituting these moralistic therapeutic policies. In journalism, I have seen with my own eyes how managerial elites — almost all whites — hire racial minorities who are clearly not capable of doing their jobs. These elites either deny it, and when it becomes undeniable, the elites claim that “diversity” is a component of quality. This is how they make the injustice and illogic of their racist decisions unfalsifiable.

…Elites are the most “normophobic” demographic in our society. They use their immense power — political, economic, institutional — to undermine or even destroy norms, for the sake of progress, of their idea of justice. Bottom line: elites cannot accept traditional norms, based in human nature and long human experience, and work to refute and replace them.

Later, Dreher reposts an essay on why he is a conservative. He then asks,

what’s your story? Remember to keep this at a philosophical level. Don’t say something like, “I’m a conservative because I believe in free markets.” Go deeper. It doesn’t tell us much to say you are a conservative (or a liberal) because you agree with policies and laws that are associated with the Right or the Left. I’m interested in why politics of the Right or the Left strike you are preferable.

My answer might be the following:

I am a conservative libertarian. I am libertarian because I believe that government officials are fallible as individuals and operate within a system where the incentives are to exaggerate both the dangers of problems and the promise of government solutions. I am conservative because I believe that social change is better when it is gradual, tentative, experimental, and voluntary than when it is imposed by a radical vanguard.

Andrew Sullivan writes,

In response to a volatile public mood, Western elites actually intensified their policy of importing millions of people from the developing world to replace their insufficiently diverse and declining domestic populations.

The recent figures from the US, UK and Canada are mind-blowing. The graphs all look like a hockey stick, with a massive spike in the last three years alone. Under Trump, the average number of illegal crossings a year was around 500,000; under Biden, that has quadrupled to two million a year — from a much more diverse group, from Africa, China and India. To add insult to injury, Biden has also all but shut down immigration enforcement in the interior; and abused his parole power to usher in nearly 1.3 million illegal migrants in 2023 alone. The number of undetained illegal migrants living in the US has thereby ballooned under Biden: from 3.7 million in 2021 to 6.2 million in 2023, according to ICE. If a fraction of those millions turns up for asylum hearings, I’ll be gob-smacked.

…If you want to understand why Biden keeps trailing in the swing states, why the Tories are about to be wiped out in a historic collapse, and why Trudeau is at all-time low in approval at 28 percent, this seems to me to be key.

The inside-the-Beltway “centrists” and their equivalent in other countries just cannot seem to be able to connect the dots between this and the rise of the “far right.” Just because you’re elite doesn’t mean you’re smart.

Ruxandra Teslo writes,

Now, one could argue that Karikó and Weird Nerds should just learn to be strategic and suck it up, like most people do. I sensed quite a bit of schadenfreude from people suggesting we should be making people like her suffer through the same arduous processes as everyone else. Of course, if I was Katalin Karikó ’s friend, I would advise her to try and play the political game if that’s what’s needed. Maybe it would have been better for her in the moment. But it might be the case that if she did listen to such advice, she would have been so drained of energy that less time would have been spent pursuing her interests. Or she would have just switched research fields to work on something more popular.

For some of us, sucking up takes a lot of work. It goes too much against our nature.

Substacks referenced above: @

The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

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https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/how-elites-have-empowered-the-far-bb3

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David Brooks On Elite Dysfunction

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RKUL: Time Well Spent 06/06/2024