Rita Range on Neuroaffirmation; Moses Sternstein on the Taylor Rule; Principles of Freedom Conservatism; Alice Evans and Rob Henderson on exit and voice;
Right. Likewise, the race essentialism of The Confederacy would also have gone away faster without a Vicksburg Campaign-style assault on it. That's why we remember Lincoln and Grant as having made catastrophic unforced errors that unnecessarily extended the war another two years.
I would suggest reversing your arrow of causality, as both Rufo and Hanania's new books show, the race essentialism of the American progressive left goes back to long before either of them were born, and never showed any signs of fading away during any lull or waning of opposition, indeed, quite the contrary.
"Nearly all American citizens descend from someone who came here from somewhere else"
Uh, no. EVERYONE here descends from someone who came here from somewhere else. As does everyone in Australia or China or England or, well, everywhere but some part of Africa. And given all the expulsions and exterminations going back in human history, maybe not even there.
Leftism assumes that equal outcomes would flow from societal fairness. Since we don't see equal outcomes, it assumes that society must be unfair. Since we don't see any closing of the gaps (between classes, races, identities, etc) then there is no progress.
Of course leftism can always invent new identities and equality metrics of ever more impossibility to meet, but even the existing ones (say, black/white) are good enough.
I would view the radicalism of woke as an inevitable response to the failure of incremental technocratic liberalism to bring about the equality of outcome that blank slate assumes would flow from a just society.
In this sense only the essentially conservative view (that people and groups are not equal, and we should not expect equal outcomes even if the playing field is fair) is the only thing that can get at truth.
"I would view the radicalism of woke as an inevitable response to the failure of incremental technocratic liberalism to bring about the equality of outcome that blank slate assumes would flow from a just society."
Yes, yes, yes. If you are a caring person and you assume blank slate equality of potential--and you can't bring yourself to "blame the victim", e.g. saying black kids growing up without a father is one reason for poor life results--you are forced, truly, truly forced, to be some kind of woke.
re: "I wonder whether the race/gender essentialism of the left would go away even faster without a Christopher Rufo style assault on it."
Good question. Any faction can generate cohesion by pointing out the threat posed by a rival or enemy repeatedly. I think there are more things behind it: race and gender magic are a big sources of revenue and legitimation for leftist organizations. Consider also that new doctrines require a lot of new media and new curricula. Retreading traditional material does not require paying lots of people to come up with new stuff. Perhaps the way to start answering the question is to look at places without a real opposition party and look at the direction of social policy there. For example, Chicago, San Francisco, and New York do not seem to be moving away from this direction despite the only meaningful opposition existing in faraway swamps where they refuse to teach the sacred sexual texts to children who are supposed to undergo the special consecration.
"I wonder whether the race/gender essentialism of the left would go away even faster without a Christopher Rufo style assault on it."
"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you." I appreciate the Nietzchean pondering of removing the "other" monster from the deep lefts view leading to moderation, but as Martin Gurri said "The web is many things, but it is always the mirror of Narcissus. The content of the web, like that of art, is the human comedy. To achieve the intended effect of the online life, the user must strike attitudes about real life as refracted through the digital prism." The digital mirror of narcissus is the abyss and does consist of a construal level change of near and far mode that has a new monster around every digital corner. The construal level change in psychological distance also either changes the sacred or how people bring the sacred to bear on the concrete portions of the world. I believe with sufficiently large enough groups the number of something as amorphous as racists in each group will more or less be equal, but the differences between the groups will change the manifestation of the racism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev373c7wSRg
<i>*I don’t wish to overgeneralize here. For example, one exception to the trend toward “any sexual preference is ok” is the movement to condemn groping.</i>
Like other tenets of wokism, anything that "oppressors" (in this case cisgender males) do is exempt from tolerance. Thus groping does not count as a sexual preference if we do it. Let a woman or one of the alphabet people do it, then it's probably OK with the woke.
Hirschman's work on exit and voice issue remains hugely important, and the Alice Evans charts on Carneiro's ‘circumscription theory’ are indeed surprising in showing how the difficulty of exit was so important an influence on the development of a state - which is needed in order for people to live in relative peace with others (who often have different opinions about what is good).
Rob's post on Hirschman includes many notes about how a brain drain (exit) from one community weakens those remaining. He could explicitly apply this to successful US Blacks who, with AA, often leave the ghetto/ poor area they are raised in to live in a more integrated, lower-crime area. Without staying and improving the "community" they've left behind.
With respect to media & business, it confirms my new-ish bias against allowing Facebook to buy Instagram or other social media sites -- the "exit" one makes from FB is much smaller when they go to an FB owned Instagram rather than a competing, independent Instagram. This is also true of all Big Banks, but also Big Military (Lockheed Martin [Marietta] ) Big Pharma and the other Big Tech. It's far too easy for gov't regulators to influence the CEOs of any Big Company, where the customers have little exit opportunity.
The US system is more circumscribed, where political decision making is scarce.
Alice: "Robert Carneiro proposed ‘circumscription theory’. Groups battle for control over scarce arable lands, then the losers are compelled to submit because the ecological alternatives are too bleak. "
3rd Party Political chances are too bleak - but that makes the US generally more stable.
Neiman's Left has always favored marginalized tribes over the white, male, healthy, successful.
The female "tribe" over male. The non-white tribe over the whites. Those whose physical or mental health is problematic over those who are in the healthy tribe. Those who are in the victim tribe. Her claim for Left universalism is false - but she is deluding herself about it.
The issue of justice vs power fails to properly address the differences between cosmic unfairness (life is not fair) vs some injustice visited upon a victim by an unjust action. There is no just way to make life fair for those unfairly disadvantaged. In the too frequent case of an innocent kid being raised by a single mother - the mother and unmarried & irresponsible father are being unjust to the kid. Also unkind. From the kid's view, life is unfair. What should the non-parents do?
Society needs to differentiate "justice" from "fairness", insofar as any justice system can only deal with injustices committed by human action. God's (/reality's) unfairness is not correctable by any human justice system.
Each justice system has false positive (innocents punished) and false negative (guilty unpunished). Neiman agrees with cases Mounk gives on how society SHOULD be: blacks walk on streets w/o fear of police; women on subways w/o harassment or assault; gays in bars w/o being beaten up.
Yet in Democratic controlled areas, far more than Republican areas, blacks are killed by the hundreds, women are harassed & assaulted. (Gays are no more likely to be beaten up than non-gays in bars.) Neiman's "empathy" is to protect the victimizer from punishment, not to provide punishment justice to the victim. The error ratio is more like 1 : 100 of wrong punishment vs wrongs non-punishment.
Insofar as a good "justice system" protects the innocents, those who do NOT commit crimes against others, the Left and the Woke both accept massive crime, and criminal injustice, so as to avoid the justice system (police & courts) from wrongly punishing a non-criminal.
Their justice delusion is that "cosmic justice" is possible to rectify life's unfairness, rather than honestly talk about how much our rich society should give to those unluckily & unfairly born disadvantaged.
"I wonder whether the race/gender essentialism of the left would go away even faster without a Christopher Rufo style assault on it."
That seems to assume that the left woke belief system hasn't evolved into a religion where connections with reality and logic are irrelevant.
Right. Likewise, the race essentialism of The Confederacy would also have gone away faster without a Vicksburg Campaign-style assault on it. That's why we remember Lincoln and Grant as having made catastrophic unforced errors that unnecessarily extended the war another two years.
I would suggest reversing your arrow of causality, as both Rufo and Hanania's new books show, the race essentialism of the American progressive left goes back to long before either of them were born, and never showed any signs of fading away during any lull or waning of opposition, indeed, quite the contrary.
"Nearly all American citizens descend from someone who came here from somewhere else"
Uh, no. EVERYONE here descends from someone who came here from somewhere else. As does everyone in Australia or China or England or, well, everywhere but some part of Africa. And given all the expulsions and exterminations going back in human history, maybe not even there.
The claim that the left has always been on the side of universalism is a strange one, given the decades of tribalism amongst the left.
Left vs liberal, I assume he meant classic liberal
Yes, the writer tied himself up into knots trying to salvage the word "liberal".
Based on the context of the comment, I don't think that is the intended meaning.
Leftism assumes that equal outcomes would flow from societal fairness. Since we don't see equal outcomes, it assumes that society must be unfair. Since we don't see any closing of the gaps (between classes, races, identities, etc) then there is no progress.
Of course leftism can always invent new identities and equality metrics of ever more impossibility to meet, but even the existing ones (say, black/white) are good enough.
I would view the radicalism of woke as an inevitable response to the failure of incremental technocratic liberalism to bring about the equality of outcome that blank slate assumes would flow from a just society.
In this sense only the essentially conservative view (that people and groups are not equal, and we should not expect equal outcomes even if the playing field is fair) is the only thing that can get at truth.
"I would view the radicalism of woke as an inevitable response to the failure of incremental technocratic liberalism to bring about the equality of outcome that blank slate assumes would flow from a just society."
Yes, yes, yes. If you are a caring person and you assume blank slate equality of potential--and you can't bring yourself to "blame the victim", e.g. saying black kids growing up without a father is one reason for poor life results--you are forced, truly, truly forced, to be some kind of woke.
re: "I wonder whether the race/gender essentialism of the left would go away even faster without a Christopher Rufo style assault on it."
Good question. Any faction can generate cohesion by pointing out the threat posed by a rival or enemy repeatedly. I think there are more things behind it: race and gender magic are a big sources of revenue and legitimation for leftist organizations. Consider also that new doctrines require a lot of new media and new curricula. Retreading traditional material does not require paying lots of people to come up with new stuff. Perhaps the way to start answering the question is to look at places without a real opposition party and look at the direction of social policy there. For example, Chicago, San Francisco, and New York do not seem to be moving away from this direction despite the only meaningful opposition existing in faraway swamps where they refuse to teach the sacred sexual texts to children who are supposed to undergo the special consecration.
"I wonder whether the race/gender essentialism of the left would go away even faster without a Christopher Rufo style assault on it."
"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you." I appreciate the Nietzchean pondering of removing the "other" monster from the deep lefts view leading to moderation, but as Martin Gurri said "The web is many things, but it is always the mirror of Narcissus. The content of the web, like that of art, is the human comedy. To achieve the intended effect of the online life, the user must strike attitudes about real life as refracted through the digital prism." The digital mirror of narcissus is the abyss and does consist of a construal level change of near and far mode that has a new monster around every digital corner. The construal level change in psychological distance also either changes the sacred or how people bring the sacred to bear on the concrete portions of the world. I believe with sufficiently large enough groups the number of something as amorphous as racists in each group will more or less be equal, but the differences between the groups will change the manifestation of the racism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev373c7wSRg
My armature bet is that think like the Taylor rule or the Philips curve are observed correlations, not structural parameters.
<i>*I don’t wish to overgeneralize here. For example, one exception to the trend toward “any sexual preference is ok” is the movement to condemn groping.</i>
Like other tenets of wokism, anything that "oppressors" (in this case cisgender males) do is exempt from tolerance. Thus groping does not count as a sexual preference if we do it. Let a woman or one of the alphabet people do it, then it's probably OK with the woke.
Hirschman's work on exit and voice issue remains hugely important, and the Alice Evans charts on Carneiro's ‘circumscription theory’ are indeed surprising in showing how the difficulty of exit was so important an influence on the development of a state - which is needed in order for people to live in relative peace with others (who often have different opinions about what is good).
Rob's post on Hirschman includes many notes about how a brain drain (exit) from one community weakens those remaining. He could explicitly apply this to successful US Blacks who, with AA, often leave the ghetto/ poor area they are raised in to live in a more integrated, lower-crime area. Without staying and improving the "community" they've left behind.
With respect to media & business, it confirms my new-ish bias against allowing Facebook to buy Instagram or other social media sites -- the "exit" one makes from FB is much smaller when they go to an FB owned Instagram rather than a competing, independent Instagram. This is also true of all Big Banks, but also Big Military (Lockheed Martin [Marietta] ) Big Pharma and the other Big Tech. It's far too easy for gov't regulators to influence the CEOs of any Big Company, where the customers have little exit opportunity.
Not mentioned in Exit is ... suicide. See https://maggiemcneill.com/2023/08/07/r-i-p-jim-larkin/ ; where the Honest Courtesan (whom I disagree with but mostly believe is honest) notes the gov't was persecuting Jim.
In comparing the unofficial 2-party US system with proportional rep systems, the requirement for a faction to stay in one of the two Big Parties means more compromises. Freddie D. explicitly decries this in his AOC critique https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/07/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-is-just-a-regular-old-democrat-now.html
The US system is more circumscribed, where political decision making is scarce.
Alice: "Robert Carneiro proposed ‘circumscription theory’. Groups battle for control over scarce arable lands, then the losers are compelled to submit because the ecological alternatives are too bleak. "
3rd Party Political chances are too bleak - but that makes the US generally more stable.
Neiman's Left has always favored marginalized tribes over the white, male, healthy, successful.
The female "tribe" over male. The non-white tribe over the whites. Those whose physical or mental health is problematic over those who are in the healthy tribe. Those who are in the victim tribe. Her claim for Left universalism is false - but she is deluding herself about it.
The issue of justice vs power fails to properly address the differences between cosmic unfairness (life is not fair) vs some injustice visited upon a victim by an unjust action. There is no just way to make life fair for those unfairly disadvantaged. In the too frequent case of an innocent kid being raised by a single mother - the mother and unmarried & irresponsible father are being unjust to the kid. Also unkind. From the kid's view, life is unfair. What should the non-parents do?
Society needs to differentiate "justice" from "fairness", insofar as any justice system can only deal with injustices committed by human action. God's (/reality's) unfairness is not correctable by any human justice system.
Each justice system has false positive (innocents punished) and false negative (guilty unpunished). Neiman agrees with cases Mounk gives on how society SHOULD be: blacks walk on streets w/o fear of police; women on subways w/o harassment or assault; gays in bars w/o being beaten up.
Yet in Democratic controlled areas, far more than Republican areas, blacks are killed by the hundreds, women are harassed & assaulted. (Gays are no more likely to be beaten up than non-gays in bars.) Neiman's "empathy" is to protect the victimizer from punishment, not to provide punishment justice to the victim. The error ratio is more like 1 : 100 of wrong punishment vs wrongs non-punishment.
Insofar as a good "justice system" protects the innocents, those who do NOT commit crimes against others, the Left and the Woke both accept massive crime, and criminal injustice, so as to avoid the justice system (police & courts) from wrongly punishing a non-criminal.
Their justice delusion is that "cosmic justice" is possible to rectify life's unfairness, rather than honestly talk about how much our rich society should give to those unluckily & unfairly born disadvantaged.