Rory Stewart on Success in Politics; Rob Henderson on the sexual revolution's effects on children; Matt Continetti on the New Right; John Bailey on self-driving cars
Continetti's confusion perhaps comes from the breakdown of the Reagan->Gingrich->Bush coalition government. These kinds of things would be easier to observe in a parliamentary democracy than in our system. I am not even that old, also, and I must have observed at least a half-dozen new definitions of the "New Right" over the last dozen years with many more purported progenitors of it belonging to various nationalities and ideologies.
When I speak to ordinary republican hillbillies about politics where I live in New Hampshire, I rarely encounter anything like ideological coherence. It is sentiment all the way down -- talking primarily about men around twice my age, some educated and some not. The Republican party is responding to this population of likely voters that has no ideology whatsoever but has a bundle of feelings and a small list of interests, many of which contradict each other. AEI by contrast is responsive to donors. Generally the candidates seek to please enough donors to enable them to say whatever stupid nonsense voters respond to, after which they will pivot back to doing the bidding of their paymasters in between fits of pique (see Trump, Donald). However, AEI is not really a bastion of consistency either.
I remember 2007-08 and the fatal self-wounding of mainstream free market politics by the widespread support of the bailouts. The rise of perma-QE and bailout capitalism destroyed the credibility of free marketers in politics, casting all of us to the permanent outer darkness, greatly limiting any possible influence that we have on policy. In light of such capitulation, marginal positive changes on policy are nearly impossible because people understand that there is one set of rules (a sort of pre-enlightenment aristocratic capitalism in which the crown bails out its friends) for some and another set of rules for another. In this constrained environment, the Purple Right appears to have more integrity than institutions of the legacy right. Free marketers cannot pound the table about equality of opportunity and the nobility of risk-taking and losses in such an environment.
TBTF and the Bush-Obama bailouts were a clear rigging of the economy to privatize risky profits to the rich, but socialize the costs of failures to the middle class. The 25 or so big banks should have all been allowed to go bankrupt with money printing to help normal folk pay for their mortgages on overpriced homes to keep foreclosures down to some reasonable, politically agreed to, level.
Right, failure to take the lumps (come what may) fatally undermined the cause of economic liberty for the recent past and for the indeterminate future.
British politics is a stodgy mess of cultural surrender that Americans with their culture war would find hard to comprehend. It needs a lot of things but even more woolly-mindedness isn't one of them: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/carry-on-governing
I really didn't get that one. You know women used to skin animals and men milked cows all the time, right? There's no reason for those jobs to be gendered. Unless they don't trust women to handle knives?
"If the U.S. had the same level of family stability today as 1960, the country would have 750,000 fewer children repeating grades, 500,000 fewer acts of teenage delinquency, 600,000 fewer kids receiving therapy, 70,000 fewer suicide attempts every year."
This is Correlation proves Causation with the intercept set to zero. :)
Rory Stewart made a great list of mistakes (of liberalism; I've added #s):
"the flaws were, I think, cruelly exposed in five different ways. We have to deal with the fact that we've lost five fundamental faiths. (1) We used to operate in a system where we believed that the best way to achieve economic growth was through a particular vision of free markets and global trade. (2) We used to believe that economic growth and prosperity would necessarily lead to democracy. (3) We used to believe that our forms of Western democracy were deeply legitimate and just. (4) We used to forcefully believe that they would contribute to a liberal global order that we could describe and which would embody, internationally, all this stuff about democracy and markets. And finally, (5) that all of this would exist in a consensus, that the votes were in the center ground, public opinion was a sort of bell jar, with very few votes at the extremes. "
On these 5 failures he's right, but then he fumbles about what a new conservatism should be: "I think that the first thing is that it's a politics that needs to be rooted in an explicit sense of shame, "to acknowledge the many ways in which we're failing are own citizens, that our institutions are much shabbier, our prisons are filthy; that poverty in our countries is completely unacceptable; that many people feel in a very precarious state, that they they're clinging on and their lives are not fulfilling; that they did not get what they were promised."
That sounds like it should be a huge indictment against the ruling elites, but neither he nor Mounk correctly blame the (leftist indoctrinated) elites, but rather vaguely the conservatives ... who failed to conserve the good. Those GOPe that Kling supports far more than the New Right which does see the failure and wants a change.
Stewart does mention two important issues, tho in denigration, immigration & nationalism. All "liberals" who support "rule of law" need to support enforcement of the laws - ending illegal immigration. There is a small (er) faction of Republicans who oppose all immigration, but most all oppose the illegal immigration the Dems have been supporting. Relatedly, most good people have good feelings about their own country, and even want to love it. Being patriotic to support your own country is good - tho it can be used as justification for bad aggression. It's the aggression against others that is bad, not the nationalism.
'I insist that if the human-driven car were only invented after today’s state-of-the-art self-driving car, it would be the human-driven car that is banned.'
Again I insist that these comparisons are not apples to apples. Driverless car miles are not average miles, most of them are being tested in much easier conditions than average, and most bad accidents occur in worse than average conditions. We are not being fed honest statistics.
The AEI piece by John Bailey reads like paid propaganda designed to persuade the public that self-driving cars are safer than human-driven cars. Who are the donors behind AEI, and who financed the studies of AV safety cited in Bailey's article? I have no more trust in these articles and studies than those about, for example, the safety and efficacy of masks and mRNA 'vaccines' for Covid. Kling believes these studies and articles because he wants to believe them. I don't like driving myself, and would like to believe AVs offer a viable alternative, but I've gotten to the point that I don't believe anything put out by mainstream sources anymore.
I listened to an interview of Boris Johnson once and thought he seemed pretty sharp and aware, even if he is a bit of a free spirit not tied to rigid standards. Anyway, is he significantly different than Trump or did the interview mislead me? Or is he only like Trump in one very particular way?
I can never remember their titles but I've read a few memoirs by people whose parents were definitely in the vanguard of the sexual revolution (and usually the vanguard of drug use, itinerant and unconventional housing arrangements, attitudes toward paid work, etc.). Sometimes these books are pretty gripping but I notice they do not attract much attention.
The literati prefer a colorful white trash, particularly Southern-inflected, dysfunctional family drama.
"Most New Right writers shy away from explicit racism and anti-Semitism. Some are more interested in foreign policy, while others focus on economics and trade. All of them, however, share one quality: They sound more like left-wing progressives than actual conservatives." - Mathew Continetti
On foreign policy, I don't know. What are all those CATO Institute people like Christopher Preble and Doug Bandow, chopped liver?
Off topic: In legal cases, under what conditions does the government go under the name of "Commonwealth" as opposed to "The King" or "The Crown" or just having the relevant minister under his own name? Is it also sometimes "Rex/Regina" or am imagining things?
Continetti's confusion perhaps comes from the breakdown of the Reagan->Gingrich->Bush coalition government. These kinds of things would be easier to observe in a parliamentary democracy than in our system. I am not even that old, also, and I must have observed at least a half-dozen new definitions of the "New Right" over the last dozen years with many more purported progenitors of it belonging to various nationalities and ideologies.
When I speak to ordinary republican hillbillies about politics where I live in New Hampshire, I rarely encounter anything like ideological coherence. It is sentiment all the way down -- talking primarily about men around twice my age, some educated and some not. The Republican party is responding to this population of likely voters that has no ideology whatsoever but has a bundle of feelings and a small list of interests, many of which contradict each other. AEI by contrast is responsive to donors. Generally the candidates seek to please enough donors to enable them to say whatever stupid nonsense voters respond to, after which they will pivot back to doing the bidding of their paymasters in between fits of pique (see Trump, Donald). However, AEI is not really a bastion of consistency either.
I remember 2007-08 and the fatal self-wounding of mainstream free market politics by the widespread support of the bailouts. The rise of perma-QE and bailout capitalism destroyed the credibility of free marketers in politics, casting all of us to the permanent outer darkness, greatly limiting any possible influence that we have on policy. In light of such capitulation, marginal positive changes on policy are nearly impossible because people understand that there is one set of rules (a sort of pre-enlightenment aristocratic capitalism in which the crown bails out its friends) for some and another set of rules for another. In this constrained environment, the Purple Right appears to have more integrity than institutions of the legacy right. Free marketers cannot pound the table about equality of opportunity and the nobility of risk-taking and losses in such an environment.
That last paragraph is a nice observation. Thanks.
TBTF and the Bush-Obama bailouts were a clear rigging of the economy to privatize risky profits to the rich, but socialize the costs of failures to the middle class. The 25 or so big banks should have all been allowed to go bankrupt with money printing to help normal folk pay for their mortgages on overpriced homes to keep foreclosures down to some reasonable, politically agreed to, level.
Right, failure to take the lumps (come what may) fatally undermined the cause of economic liberty for the recent past and for the indeterminate future.
That last paragraph is a nice observation. Thanks.
A good idea to read Will Lloyd's review in the New Statesman before getting too seduced by Rory Stewart's schtick: https://www.newstatesman.com/long-reads/2023/09/rory-stewart-interview-book-views-career. Whatever else he is, he reeks of frustrated Me Me-type careerism.
British politics is a stodgy mess of cultural surrender that Americans with their culture war would find hard to comprehend. It needs a lot of things but even more woolly-mindedness isn't one of them: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/carry-on-governing
The first thing to say about the New Right is that it can get weird ["CAN get?"]
... Every male student could learn to skin an animal."
At my Centrist house my wife skins the chicken. :)
I really didn't get that one. You know women used to skin animals and men milked cows all the time, right? There's no reason for those jobs to be gendered. Unless they don't trust women to handle knives?
"If the U.S. had the same level of family stability today as 1960, the country would have 750,000 fewer children repeating grades, 500,000 fewer acts of teenage delinquency, 600,000 fewer kids receiving therapy, 70,000 fewer suicide attempts every year."
This is Correlation proves Causation with the intercept set to zero. :)
Rory Stewart made a great list of mistakes (of liberalism; I've added #s):
"the flaws were, I think, cruelly exposed in five different ways. We have to deal with the fact that we've lost five fundamental faiths. (1) We used to operate in a system where we believed that the best way to achieve economic growth was through a particular vision of free markets and global trade. (2) We used to believe that economic growth and prosperity would necessarily lead to democracy. (3) We used to believe that our forms of Western democracy were deeply legitimate and just. (4) We used to forcefully believe that they would contribute to a liberal global order that we could describe and which would embody, internationally, all this stuff about democracy and markets. And finally, (5) that all of this would exist in a consensus, that the votes were in the center ground, public opinion was a sort of bell jar, with very few votes at the extremes. "
On these 5 failures he's right, but then he fumbles about what a new conservatism should be: "I think that the first thing is that it's a politics that needs to be rooted in an explicit sense of shame, "to acknowledge the many ways in which we're failing are own citizens, that our institutions are much shabbier, our prisons are filthy; that poverty in our countries is completely unacceptable; that many people feel in a very precarious state, that they they're clinging on and their lives are not fulfilling; that they did not get what they were promised."
That sounds like it should be a huge indictment against the ruling elites, but neither he nor Mounk correctly blame the (leftist indoctrinated) elites, but rather vaguely the conservatives ... who failed to conserve the good. Those GOPe that Kling supports far more than the New Right which does see the failure and wants a change.
Stewart does mention two important issues, tho in denigration, immigration & nationalism. All "liberals" who support "rule of law" need to support enforcement of the laws - ending illegal immigration. There is a small (er) faction of Republicans who oppose all immigration, but most all oppose the illegal immigration the Dems have been supporting. Relatedly, most good people have good feelings about their own country, and even want to love it. Being patriotic to support your own country is good - tho it can be used as justification for bad aggression. It's the aggression against others that is bad, not the nationalism.
'I insist that if the human-driven car were only invented after today’s state-of-the-art self-driving car, it would be the human-driven car that is banned.'
Again I insist that these comparisons are not apples to apples. Driverless car miles are not average miles, most of them are being tested in much easier conditions than average, and most bad accidents occur in worse than average conditions. We are not being fed honest statistics.
The AEI piece by John Bailey reads like paid propaganda designed to persuade the public that self-driving cars are safer than human-driven cars. Who are the donors behind AEI, and who financed the studies of AV safety cited in Bailey's article? I have no more trust in these articles and studies than those about, for example, the safety and efficacy of masks and mRNA 'vaccines' for Covid. Kling believes these studies and articles because he wants to believe them. I don't like driving myself, and would like to believe AVs offer a viable alternative, but I've gotten to the point that I don't believe anything put out by mainstream sources anymore.
I listened to an interview of Boris Johnson once and thought he seemed pretty sharp and aware, even if he is a bit of a free spirit not tied to rigid standards. Anyway, is he significantly different than Trump or did the interview mislead me? Or is he only like Trump in one very particular way?
I can never remember their titles but I've read a few memoirs by people whose parents were definitely in the vanguard of the sexual revolution (and usually the vanguard of drug use, itinerant and unconventional housing arrangements, attitudes toward paid work, etc.). Sometimes these books are pretty gripping but I notice they do not attract much attention.
The literati prefer a colorful white trash, particularly Southern-inflected, dysfunctional family drama.
"Most New Right writers shy away from explicit racism and anti-Semitism. Some are more interested in foreign policy, while others focus on economics and trade. All of them, however, share one quality: They sound more like left-wing progressives than actual conservatives." - Mathew Continetti
On foreign policy, I don't know. What are all those CATO Institute people like Christopher Preble and Doug Bandow, chopped liver?
Off topic: In legal cases, under what conditions does the government go under the name of "Commonwealth" as opposed to "The King" or "The Crown" or just having the relevant minister under his own name? Is it also sometimes "Rex/Regina" or am imagining things?