My Social Journey Toward the Right

How I decided to believe libertarians and conservatives

Dan Williams writes,

one of the most dramatic changes in my intellectual outlook in recent years has been becoming less left-wing.

…I have come to view a contemporary Western left-wing political outlook as a mostly arbitrary bundle of truths, falsehoods, simplistic narratives, exaggerations, and omissions, just like other popular ideologies. I have become less left-wing in coming to disagree with many ideas within this bundle, not in moving position on a single, well-defined ideological spectrum.

He proceeds to explain his intellectual journey. But the irony of this, coming from the person who coined the phrase “the marketplace of rationalizations,” is not lost on him.

…my description will be highly intellectualised, focusing on the role of new ideas and discoveries in changing my views rather than, say, incentives, emotions, or other non-rational factors, which—if my own published views about human psychology and belief are correct—have likely played a significant role.

The linked essay covers his first two justifications for becoming less left wing. One is his reading of evolution. The other is his reading of economics.

He argues that the theory of evolution reinforces a tragic vision of human life, including

competition and conflicts of interest are endemic to human social life. They are not the product of capitalism, objectionable institutions, or power structures. They are unavoidable. The only question is what form social competition takes and whether it is channelled into desirable or undesirable outcomes.

Like me, he buys into Thomas Sowell’s “constrained vision,” which I believe tends one toward conservatism.

Williams describes the influence of economics on his thinking:

most fundamentally, I have realised that economies and societies are highly complex and depend on forms of large-scale cooperation that are shockingly difficult to understand, let alone achieve.

Noble intentions and lofty rhetoric about justice and equality are not enough. The kinds of policies and interventions that benefit people often sound bad. Those that hurt people often sound good.

The entire essay resonates with me, and I cannot recommend it strongly enough.

My Social Journey

But having said that, I am fond of saying “We decide what to believe by deciding who to believe.” So I want to give a version of my intellectual movement away from the left that emphasizes social influences.

My high school, during my freshman year in 1968, held a Mock Republican Convention, and I was pledged to Ronald Reagan. Not by choice. Probably I was assigned to the delegation from California, where he was governor. I was no Reaganite, and neither were my schoolmates. Once the students began voting their personal preferences, liberal Nelson Rockefeller won decisively.

In the real world, Rockefeller was not competitive, and Richard Nixon came out on top. Also in the real world, my preferred candidate was the antiwar Democrat, Eugene McCarthy. When he knocked President Johnson out of the race and Robert Kennedy came in, even though both Kennedy and McCarthy were antiwar insurgents there was bad blood between McCarthy supporters and Kennedy supporters. We called Kennedy an “opportunist” and they called McCarthy “a lightweight.”

In short, I was on the left and idealistic, but still “working within the system,” as the more radical college students put it.

When I arrived at Swarthmore College in the fall of 1971, my friends were not political activists, and I was not pushed in a radical direction. I befriended none of the student radicals at Swarthmore. They were too much into drugs and/or whining about the college to appeal to me.

The most prominent radical group on campus was the National Caucus of Labor Committees, headed by a charismatic off-campus intellectual, Lyn Marcus. It turned out to be a pathetic cult. Years later, it still existed, but in a very different form. Lyn Marcus became Lyndon LaRouche.

My economics professor at Swarthmore, Bernie Saffran, was eclectic in his views, but quite sympathetic to Milton Friedman. My first encounter with serious conservative thought was in Bernie’s seminar on economic theory. Any inclination to see conservatives as mean people went away. There was no sweeter person than Bernie Saffran.

But my sympathies were still on the left when I entered graduate school at MIT in 1976. And my favorite professor there was Robert Solow, who was of course well to the left. I would say that in 1980 when I got my PhD from MIT, I was aligned with Team Technocrat.

Shortly after I got my degree from MIT, a young professor at Amherst gave me a job market interview, stole the idea of my dissertation, and got it published, with no credit to me. When I wrote to Solow about this, he took a “so what?” attitude. He called the plagiarist “wrong, of course,” but said I should do nothing about it. I was very hurt by this, and my trust in Solow and the whole MIT milieu took a nose dive.

Also in 1980, I married a woman I had been dating for a few years. I did not know her political posture. In those days, it was possible to consider that unimportant in a relationship. It turns out that she holds mostly conservative views, with some liberal opinions sprinkled in.

Our friends, too, are very conservative in how they live their lives. They go by “one spouse, one house.” Most of their kids are married, many with children of their own. We live in “Camp Mill.”

But they have no difficulty combining conservative lifestyles with liberal Democratic political positions. They are certain that Trump is Hitler and that conservatives who object to radical sex education in schools are book-banning troglodytes. I keep my disagreement silent, knowing that I can safely open up later to my sympathetic wife.

My first job out of grad school was working at the Fed in DC. This was during the Volcker years, and his mission to fight inflation was inspiring, even to a staff that was mostly on the left.

After six years, I took a job at Freddie Mac. This entity was transitioning away from being a subsidiary of a government agency to become a shareholder-owned corporation. The combination of profit-seeking (and, to be candid, rent-seeking) drew employees that were not nearly as left-leaning as the typical government professionals. I found my creativity and energy more welcome at Freddie than at the Fed. Still not welcome enough, but then came the Internet.

At a dinner for MIT alumni in 1993 or so, I heard Vint Cerf give a presentation that included some slides on how the Internet was governed. He said that when an issue arose, a committee of engineers would form. They would write up a proposed solution and put it out as a Request for Comment. The RFCs, once stabilized, would be implemented. Then the committee would go away.

I was captivated by this. Instead of a perpetual government agency to manage a problem, you would have a temporary organization to solve the problem. How clever!

I was on the road to becoming a libertarian. I started a web-based business in April of 1994, and for five years that kept me too busy to think much about politics. But I spent more time around people with the entrepreneurial mindset and less time around the typical Washington lawyer/bureaucrat. Nowadays, I refer to DC as “the culture of no,” and I encourage entrepreneurial types to go elsewhere.

In 2000, I started blogging about economics. Russ Roberts found the blog, and he persuaded me to move it to Liberty Fund, where it became EconLog. Liberty Fund in general, and Russ especially, put some formal libertarian shape to my views.

Summary

You decide what to believe by deciding who to believe. I believed Bernie Saffran enough to become an economist myself, and to be open to diverse points of view. I believed my wife enough to resist faddish liberalism. I believed a lot less in Robert Solow when he took a cavalier attitude toward the plagiarism of which I was a victim. I believed that most of my colleagues at the profit-seeking Freddie Mac were knowledgeable and well-meaning. I believed Vint Cerf that the Internet was an institutional innovation. I came to appreciate the entrepreneurial mindset when I tried my own Web-based start-up. And I believed Russ Roberts that market-friendly Austrian economists are not just a bunch of cranks.

I think that I was always more suited to business than to academia. I cannot picture myself comfortably ensconced in a university, talking shop with colleagues and batting around research ideas.

Given that I was destined to exit the academic track, there is no scenario in which I would have wound up inside the social justice activist bubble. But it took me a long time to find that the intellectuals who most resonate with me are on the right rather than on the left.

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On becoming less left-wing (Part 1)