Putin’s asinine invasion of Ukraine has been great for working class Americans. Leave it to Scranton Joe to play this war optimally and get Europe to buy natural gas from Louisiana to replace Russian gas and keep American factories humming supplying equipment and munitions to NATO!
Putin invaded Ukraine after Biden supported the completion of NS2 which would have made Russia even wealthier…and Biden gently urged Zelensky to cut a deal with Putin to prevent bloodshed. But Putin’s a dumbass and he invaded a crappy country and Ukraine has every right to defend itself as a sovereign nation.
Ukraine has every right to defend itself. It doesn’t have a right to my money. Without outside assistance it will fold like there worthless garbage country it’s always been.
lol, nope! Biden was telling Ukraine that Putin was definitely invading. If Biden wanted to trick Ukraine into waging war you don’t tell Zelensky that Putin is definitely invading you tell Zelensky he has nothing to worry about.
Your elected representatives decide what to do with your money and giving Ukraine billions in lethal aid made in American factories to defend itself from Russia after we’ve spent trillions preparing for a war with Russia seems like the best defense spending we’ve had in over 20 years!!
It’s quite common knowledge at this point that the west ordered Ukraine to reject the peace offer Putin gave at the beginning of the war which Ukraine was going to accept.
I hope that the officials that made these decisions suffer for their actions. The world is imperfect, sometimes people get away with evil. We do what we can.
Immigration: Comprehensive reform to allow in people who will make a positive contribution to the US economy and society [and that a LARGE number] and humanely exclude others. It would be a rebuttable presumption that anyone who entered in contravention of the previous rules is making a positive contribution to the the US economy and society
Foreign policy: What's wrong with Westphalia? Defend, Ukraine, defend Taiwan, defend Israel (but not the Occupied Territories), meddle non-militarily to promote liberal policies in non-liberal polities.
I mostly blame the west for Ukraine, and I don't find it a particularly sympathetic country to want to defend. I would demand Ukraine agreed to conditions I felt reasonable, and if it didn't I would want it completely cut off.
Israel doesn't need defending, they are the stronger party. There are no occupied territories, Israel is the owner by right of conquest and can do as it wishes.
I would defend Taiwan but I prefer a nuclear first approach to defense as opposed to a massive increase in conventional military spending. I also don't believe in Cold War 2 with China, I don't see what they've done to provoke such hostility.
"meddle non-militarily to promote liberal policies in non-liberal polities."
Of all the things on this list, this is one I hate the most. When I see Swedish soldiers waving pride flags to celebrate joining NATO, my only thought it that we should leave NATO immediately.
Omg, NATO is great for America! Any country that starts a war in Europe will have a degraded military by the time they reach America. You don’t think Reagan and Bush sr and McStain and Romney knew a little bit about their jobs?? None of them are responsible for Bush jr’s asinine wars.
NATO’s purpose was to contain communism. It stoped having that purpose in 1991. Some people didn’t want to get new careers, so they kept trying to start a war with Russia.
After the fall of communism there was chaos in Europe…NATO was the proper tool to create stability in Europe. Wars in Europe end up impacting America…best to deal with them before they get out of control.
Russia voluntarily dissolved its empire and adopted our political system. They did nothing for decades as they desperately tried to be our friends.
We broke a promise to expand a hostile military alliance whose purpose is fundamentally hostile to Russia. We then organized a coup in a neighboring country and turned it into a cia base and filled it with our weapons.
Two quick theories I've had while hanging out near the young right-wing DC scene:
1) There is a selection effect at play for young professionals in specific sectors. If you've worked in a for-profit business or lots of other types of job sectors outside of academia and white collar media and policy jobs, you're way less likely to encounter outright coercive norms in favor of progressive social views. So the people most radicalized by that experience are going to select into national conservatism whereas people with conservative personal views in a wide range of other sectors don't have that experience. They aren't as strictly focused on that (real) problem to the exclusion of other problems relevant to mass politics. This is a sociological matter and I don't think it will easily change, especially in parts of academia that genuinely behave in McCarthyist ways towards conservative views.
2) Conservatives have successfully formed many non-profit and fellowship opportunities for smart and talented people with right of center social views, but have emphasized political theory way too much in proportion to social history or even electoral/legislative history. As a result, their formation for young professionals is terribly lopsided. In a forum I enjoy participating in, I have repeatedly suggested a discussion topic of a past presidency or past legislative decision that could make or break a political coalition. Many people in this forum work in Republican hill offices! But they brush this suggestion aside because they rightly believe few will have the knowledge to speak to such a topic at length. Political theory is prioritized instead. For young men with such hammers, there is an endless desire for such nails. This is a conservative non-profit choice, and as such, I believe can be much more easily resolved than my first observation.
I do feel like a lot of people in Washington either forget that state and local governments exist, or regard them as merely administrative arms of the federal government. But state and local governments can make a huge difference in the quality of life (or lack thereof) for their citizens, as we currently see in California and Chicago.
I've been debating whether to leave the NOVA area because of the vibe you discussed. When we originally settled here "better than Maryland" seemed like enough given all the other compelling personal reasons to stay in the DC area. This was all pre-2020 freakout.
Every single person is a government employee or a government contractor. Maybe they are a lawyer or investment person working for those people. And I don't live in like Alexandria, we are pretty far away from DC.
There are a lot of advantages to this area (and it's environmentally stunning), but I can't help but thinking that's our kids future if we stick around here. You become your peers over time.
5) Good Climate (this is a tough one because I don't like Florida's climate (humidity), but it's objectively desirable by most people and certainly better than some cold state). Probably the thing I like the most about my current location I the geography and climate.
Florida has a particular benefit in that my company is HQed there and I have spent a good deal of time in the state to know something about it.
In terms of specific local communities, that's a long list of specific things.
I've never been to Texas, so it's harder to say. I would probably visit before making any kind of decision, and I won't even consider it until they pass school vouchers. We have two families we know that moved to Dallas and we would probably check in on them.
It's hard to think of other places. Arizona has school vouchers but I don't want to move to Arizona. Everyplace else we are "too rich" to qualify even if they have vouchers and they all have income taxes.
I grew up in what they now call Silicon Valley, and now realize that I was lucky to have done so. I've never been to Florida, but I have lived in the DC area and Texas. The sunny, dry climate in Silicon Valley (though it did snow there once in my experience, believe it or not) spoils you for life, and I was never able to learn to tolerate humidity. The scenery in the SF Bay area and the typical CA vacation spots -- Tahoe, Yosemite, Sequoia National Park -- is also stunning. The outmigration of Californians to places like Texas and Florida tells you how bad things must have gotten there, and how evil the ruling class must be to have ruined the state.
All of the places with the best climate and geography know it and they seem to become as unbearable as people will stand on other metrics to be able live in such places.
Agreed, but SF was scenic and a nice place to visit (Fisherman's Wharf, Chinatown, Golden Gate Park, the Presidio), and places like Big Basin, Monterrey/Carmel and the Sonoma wine country were within easy driving distance. My family moved up there from LA, and although my parents feared that it was becoming 'Los Angeles-ized', it never did get that bad, if only for geographic reasons. When my family first moved there, there were still fruit orchards, and we had several old walnut trees in our back yard. The good old days.
This sub-thread between FP123 and GU reminds me so much of my own nearly 20 year residency in NOVA working as contractor for the federal blob, and the inertia which kept me there years after I was ready to leave.
On this substack there is much commentary about the lives of Somewheres versus Anywheres. There might be a third category of person I'd call a "Where Else'er" of which there are many around the DC area. I (and many of my peers) sort of fell into jobs in the DC area during the post 9/11 period but never intended to live there as long as we did (or still do). There simply wasn't/isn't enough of a "pull" factor tearing many of us away. Where else am I going to live? If you have certain job skills you might be pulled to Silicon Valley or Boston. Or if you come from a hometown that is a compelling place to live in its own right -- NY, LA, Chicago, etc. -- you might feel that pull as well. But there are loads of people around DC who can't answer the simple question "where else would I live?" and the corollary "what else would I do?" 95% of the jobs in my narrow specialty were in the DC area. I've had to completely switch career fields now that I've finally left, and it's a challenge every day.
I do think this can lead to despondency or mild despair of a type that no one like Robert Putnam will ever write a book about, but it is nevertheless real for many thousands of people who are comfortably stuck (to coin a phrase) in the federal blob.
Yeah, I'm more worried about my kids ending up in that situation then finding the situation completely intolerable at present. Our lives are pretty good.
The big change for us was the third kid. You switch more from "max earnings" mindset to "cost minimization mindset". When every cost is x3, you know it's not going to worth trying to earn your way out of the hole.
With the school vouchers being worth $130k per kid that's nearly $400k savings. The income taxes are probably worth even more. Once you start talking over $1M in savings from moving, even disruption to one of our careers is worth it.
There is no reason to rush these things. Moving a family is hard, it's probably a good idea to see if some of these things I like about Florida stick longer than a single governor. Our mortgage is ridiculously good. But yeah I think I would be disappointed if I woke up in ten years and we were still surrounded by the blob.
You're observing the strange selection effect of right wing politics. The actually competent people go into business to get rich. The others are sort of like off-brand democrats, the "democrat we have at home" in current day meme parlance. It helps to also explain the anti-free-market tone of a lot of contemporary conservatism: they're lawyers who never go into practice or go straight to government, politics, or media, or, even worse, academics. So they are these discount democrats who cannot ascend the progressive hierarchy through the normal way, so they demand a way to create a new off-brand hierarchy that will actually have them.
They do not want to go out into the jungle because it is scary.
Some of them are pretty good, so I don't mean to tar ALL of them with the same brush, but you get the feeling with some of them that you are just speaking to a progressive who was unwilling to embrace some specific part of the platform. They were on board for everything the progressives want for the world except for XYZ. In the same way that the medium is the message, a perma grad student will have the same outlook as every other perma grad student, which is that "experts" who read "papers" and are up-to-date with the "research" should make all the laws and tell everyone else what to do.
I think that, at least in principle, it could be a complementary relationship. In my own experience, the real-world-practical right-leaning folks who go into the scary jungle and "work for profits" or start or run the equivalent of their own businesses lack a lot of the intellectual foundation and conceptual framework to really grasp the depth of the problem they face. Sure, they have direct experience and intimate familiarity within their own field with the way government and/or progressive policies impede progress in a negative sum way or generate all kinds of absurd or bad outcomes. But when one probes them one often discovers little more than a surface-level complaints that are hollow shells with regards to why the difficulties come about and what would be necessary to do to actually successfully overcome them for the long term.
They tend to be -much- more sensitive to social desirability and what opinions one is required to express to remain respectably high status in upper middle class society, and this gives rise to all kinds of crimestop cognitive obstacles that prevent them from ever going deep enough into the analysis to get into a whole difficult terrain of realities it is intensely socially undesirable to believe. For them, many of the key questions are pejoratively, i.e., merely "academic".
But the academic answers should not be dismissed so flippantly, it turns out the insights that the symbolic-workers for political concepts discover and learn are indeed critically essential to catching one up to the real state of affairs and to having even a remotely unlikely chance of formulating any kind of successful plan to overcome the enormous headwinds in the path.
I think what remains is for some "academic" or at least right-wing political intellectual type to be commissioned with the grand project of hanging a lot of the real-world "practical men of action" examples on the abstract conceptual framework that had been gradually coming into being, mostly online, in the last the 20 years.
There also are embedded assumptions and status quo bias. I used to work in commercial real estate and own rental property. When I'm wearing my good government/fairness hat, I think the 1031 exchange and carried interest exception should be eliminated. But if I said something like that a real estate conference I would be run out of the room
It's hard for anyone to attack the idea of the government handing out unjust giveaways when almost everyone is the beneficiary of art least one unjust giveaway. The automatic creation of a kind of implicit anti-anti-giveaway alliance or movement functioned as a kind of proto-intersectionality which could even bring in the wealthy. Alinsky wrote about his vision of dangling just such lures to "organize" the broad middle class into something like a trade union, but then the oppressed identity group concepts took over and necessarily exclude mainstreamers.
I see a couple of barriers there. First thing is that for the average conservative in the street, academics in general has a bad rep right now. As they see it, it's the academics who make their neighborhoods unsafe, tax and regulate their businesses into the ground, and force genderqueer theory on their 7-year-old children. The second problem is more practical: they don't get paid to think about political theory, and there are only so many hours in a day. Then there's the communications-channel problem: for someone who does want to read up on it, where do you start? It's taken me years to identify a selection of sources that I consider trustworthy, and I probably spend more time reading up on it than the average non-academic.
Ive found that ordinary conservatives actually really like academics so long as they are "our guy" academics, producing scholarly output that supports, or otherwise advocating for, right wing positions. As a matter of fact, these academics are so rare that ordinary conservatives will converge on them in large numbers and tend to like them not just a little more than even the left likes academics, but far more, to the point of fawning over celebrity figures or potential "movement" leaders and sometimes that leads to embarrassing credulity and drop of healthy amounts of skepticism and scrutiny. Conservatives love to showcase these figures in a sense of relief, "See, smart people with impressive credentials have arguments for and evidence showing why we're right and how the leftist experts are lying or wrong." This feels like going from having to defend yourself at trial to getting an ace lawyer working pro Bono.
The trouble is these figures get the hatchet treatment from the progressives and that tends to select for those who aren't deterred by that prospect, which is not a typical set of personality types.
I think there is a lot of truth there. Too often the question is who get to have control, and what groups they get to benefit, and not whether or not control is proper.
Take the controversy over the administrative state as a good example of my thinking here. To be pithy, the typical RW-libertarian view is that the administrative state is bad, and decision making power should be returned more to Congress. The cynical Burnham or Bageshot view is that once a lawmaking body has given up the ghost of power, it is unlikely to regain it. The Bageshot example is that of the House of Lords giving up its power to the House of Commons. Burnham made a similar argument about the American Congress and the administrative state.
Let's imagine that Loper Bright inspires more precedent that kills the administrative state. We have returned the ghost of power to the shrunken undead shell of Congress. Yessss, no more collusion between big corporations and Washington Article II bureaucracies. Total RW-libertarian victory.
But what is this? The same big corporations are manipulating procedural outcomes by indirectly packing Article III of the government with their loyalists (ex-Biglaw partners), and Article I lobbying activity has intensified. The same processes that corrupt the Article II administrative state also lead to the continued corruption and abuse of power within the newly empowered Article I and Article III branches of government. A new movement arises... what if there were a more powerful executive branch that could restrain the immoderate overreaching of the other two branches?
"Instead, I would prefer to see someone become seasoned by working in business, K-12 education, the military, or some local government agency. In short, as I like to say about my daughters, “I wish that they would work for a profit.”"
This statement is rather strange, since three of the four occupations listed do not "work for a profit."
"Many of the other speakers heaped scorn on others within the broader conservative movement." A case of 'the narcissism of small differences' perhaps? Freud is out of favour these days but he made some very astute observations about what makes people tick.
I think that is part of it, along with misguided attempts to out the disloyal previous members. RINOs have long been a problem with the right, as small government types who get into government positions are under tremendous temptation. However most don’t seem to understand the epistemological foundations of differences, nor the distinction between those who speak A and do B and those who speak A and really mean A.
JD Vance served in the military and subsequently worked as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, but recently you expressed a strong preference for a 'moderate Republican' like Pompeo or Youngkin over Vance as Trump's vice president. I listened to Vance's NatCon speech this morning, and he poked fun at the WSJ editorial board for advocating that the US can and should project military power abroad (in Ukraine and elsewhere) while shipping its industrial base to strategic rival China. Maybe that's why you don't like him, but I agree with him that there is a fundamental contradiction between our foreign policy and domestic economic policy.
In the hallways, one of the prominent NatCons said that he thought that if Mr. Trump were to pick Youngkin, then Biden would not stand a chance. My problem with Vance is not so much where he stands on the issues. I sense that what he brings to the table is a big ego, which is not what Mr. Trump or the country can use.
Was his reasoning that swing/undecided voters would be more likely to vote for Trump with Youngkin on the ticket, or that the 'Deep State/Blob' would be more likely to 'let Trump win,' or perhaps a bit of both? Would a Trump/Youngkin ticket guarantee that a 2nd Trump administration would prove as disappointing as the first? And if Trump dies or is incapacitated in office, would you rather have Youngkin or Vance as the back-up? And at this point, it remains to be seen whether Trump will even be running against Biden, or (heaven forbid) Harris.
Trump for the most part governed like Jeb would have…and it wasn’t that bad other than a slightly too big tax cut and obviously Roe being overturned. That leads me to believe the problem with Bush/Cheney wasn’t the GOPe but Bush. Bush was wholly unfit to be president and the 9/11 rally ‘round the flag moment went to his head and he abused his power. I believe the correction to Bush was GOP senators refusing to confirm Miers even though that led to a more conservative justice…because it showed senators were taking their power back after relinquishing it after 9/11.
Don’t you get a little depressed when those positively oriented entrepreneurs tell you about their polycules? I share your outlook as someone who has straddled both worlds but I also get mad at people like Bill Gurley who criticize DC but don’t do anything about it. They seem to think just pointing out problems is enough. This is the world’s second oldest profession. Politics isn’t going away and hiving off our innovation centers from our policy center is tempting I know but it won’t work. The work of changing policy through politics is messy and dirty. I think we need more people who understand both worlds, like Dominic Cummings, to help us navigate the best path forward.
I have never met an academic of whom I am not immediately skeptical. In general I find that they have bad models for understanding the world, married to a lack of epistemic humility.
I believe that the NatCons are needlessly contemptuous of the Republican establishment.
Contemptuous for the wrong reasons, I'd say.
"Social conservatives, libertarians, and anti-Communist military hawks [coud have] played a [more] constructive role if they had been more friendly to long term growth with equity -- merit based immigration, progressive consumption taxes, near zero deficits, Pigou taxation of negative externalists like CO2 emissions and traffic congestion, VAT financing of the safety net. [Yes. I know. That would have made them "neoliberals" not "conservatives," but it's what they should have done.]
What you and everyone should oppose is Bushism—which is neoliberalism combined with neoconservatism. Oh, and you mention a VAT—we have one in America and it’s how we fund health insurance for those ages 18-65 and we just call it a budget expense for employers.
I'm happy enough to oppose Bush-ism. He is more responsible than another other one person for destroying the Clinton budget surplus with tax cuts and expanding Medicare w/o new taxes AND discrediting the idea of actively promoting more liberal/less repressive regimes abroad. [Personal confession. I was wrong, but I supported the Iraq invasion.]
No. the subsidies for employer "provided" health insurance are not an approximation to a VAT. They are closer to being a wage tax like SS/Medicare, but worse because they are are a flat dollar amount per employee tax that makes it relatively more expensive to hire a janitor than a CEO.
I didn’t say anything about the subsidy or tax advantages to employers for offering health insurance benefits—-I’m talking about the budget line item that pays for health care costs. So every product and good you purchase in America includes someone else’s health care costs…that is exactly like a VAT!
In America employers pick up around 80% of health care costs for their employees. So a company like Microsoft or a large law firm self funds health “insurance” and Humana simply manages their health care expenses and isn’t actually providing “insurance”.
"For me personally, the NatCons have pros and cons. I think that the main “pro” is their determination to speak their mind. They do not live by lies"
To sincerely believe an untruth is not a virtue. It is not for Progressives, why should it be for "conservatives?" Of course it is good when discussion with someone to acknowledge that they are arguing in good faith.
"Maybe it is sufficient to know what it is that they are against."
This is a pretty common description of conservatives. They have no real plan other than to resist change by liberals and especially progressives. Anything that looks somewhat like conservative action is almost always a reversion to some past state of being. This isn't a bad thing except when the opposition is based on denying Democrats a win instead of truly being against the change itself or the past state is something best left in the past.
"I found that the best thing about being at the conference was feeling surrounded by people who see clearly when radical progressives are telling lies and peddling moral absurdities." if they were not telling lies and peddling moral absurdities of their own.
Don't make me try to decide which "pole" is worse.
I don't know anything about these people, so will confine myself to parsing what you said about Biden:
"The NatCons have long been heavily invested in Mr. Trump.¹ After Mr. Biden’s faceplant in the debate, their mood should have been giddy. But many of the speakers did their pre-planned we-are-persecuted-because-we’re-white-male-Christians shtick. Whatever truth there is to that, this might have been a good time not to present themselves as soreheads."
Biden, not Trump, is exhibit A for their grievance. He was the last old Establishment white guy the left could run. He's *why Trump*. No one younger, remotely of his "ilk" - has been allowed to ascend in the Democratic party. The deck was cleared of such dudes (by Pelosi, by Schumer, etc.) so the rest of them could rise for racial or gender reasons. There was nothing organic about it. If there had been, they wouldn't have desperately flailed around in search of someone not purely ID-policy-grievance-oriented "who could plausibly run for sheriff" and landed on Joe Biden.
The irony - and the shortcomings - of this new-fledged group may lie with some of them having only their own superficial grievance, now, on this issue - and no understanding of the much more important things that underpin it.
Joe's cognitive challenges are the Dems (and the rest of us, in truth) finding we are utterly overdrawn on our account.
Do not imagine that conservatives will or would have always voted for Republicans, especially Establishment Republicans. We weigh two different baskets of goods. Sometimes they come out equally bad and we do not vote at all. I didn't vote in 2012, for instance.
Had the Dems taken a different tack, and future Old White Guy Bruce Babbitt been encouraged to continue to higher office - I would have voted for him in a heartbeat.
The Sam Rayburn quote is fun, but has the obvious corollary is that the practical, the hard-headed, the "good at runnning" don't always know best, either, what is to be done. This is the danger of populism, and a middle course is best.
It is too bad that Sam Rayburn didn't keep his great friend out of national politics, at least at the highest level.
#1 thing is that most of these people are mostly BSers. They can find lots of stuff to legitimately criticize. But their policies are either a) not truly popular, or b) would rely on people with legislative skills (including compromise) to pass.
Legislative skills are severely underrated. It's a common belief that congress should be made up of engineers and economists instead of lawyers. But legislative negotiation and compromise are time- and labor-intensive processes that play out over years, even decades, and it will always be that way. Engineers get frustrated with that. They seem to think you can magically remove the politics from politics.
The mainstream conservative movement has two big problems:
1) Immigration.
There is a fundamental difference on the most important issue today.
2) Foreign Policy.
There is a fundamental difference on pro/anti war, with Ukraine just the current disagreement but there will be other wars in the future.
I don't see how NatCons and GOPe reconcile these, especially the first.
"Comprehensive immigration reform" = make all these illegals into legals.
Putin’s asinine invasion of Ukraine has been great for working class Americans. Leave it to Scranton Joe to play this war optimally and get Europe to buy natural gas from Louisiana to replace Russian gas and keep American factories humming supplying equipment and munitions to NATO!
I don’t believe in the broken windows fallacy. Using taxpayer money to blow the world up doesn’t make anyone better off.
Putin invaded Ukraine after Biden supported the completion of NS2 which would have made Russia even wealthier…and Biden gently urged Zelensky to cut a deal with Putin to prevent bloodshed. But Putin’s a dumbass and he invaded a crappy country and Ukraine has every right to defend itself as a sovereign nation.
Biden forbid Ukraine from signing a peace deal.
Ukraine has every right to defend itself. It doesn’t have a right to my money. Without outside assistance it will fold like there worthless garbage country it’s always been.
lol, nope! Biden was telling Ukraine that Putin was definitely invading. If Biden wanted to trick Ukraine into waging war you don’t tell Zelensky that Putin is definitely invading you tell Zelensky he has nothing to worry about.
Your elected representatives decide what to do with your money and giving Ukraine billions in lethal aid made in American factories to defend itself from Russia after we’ve spent trillions preparing for a war with Russia seems like the best defense spending we’ve had in over 20 years!!
It’s quite common knowledge at this point that the west ordered Ukraine to reject the peace offer Putin gave at the beginning of the war which Ukraine was going to accept.
I hope that the officials that made these decisions suffer for their actions. The world is imperfect, sometimes people get away with evil. We do what we can.
Immigration: Comprehensive reform to allow in people who will make a positive contribution to the US economy and society [and that a LARGE number] and humanely exclude others. It would be a rebuttable presumption that anyone who entered in contravention of the previous rules is making a positive contribution to the the US economy and society
Foreign policy: What's wrong with Westphalia? Defend, Ukraine, defend Taiwan, defend Israel (but not the Occupied Territories), meddle non-militarily to promote liberal policies in non-liberal polities.
I mostly blame the west for Ukraine, and I don't find it a particularly sympathetic country to want to defend. I would demand Ukraine agreed to conditions I felt reasonable, and if it didn't I would want it completely cut off.
Israel doesn't need defending, they are the stronger party. There are no occupied territories, Israel is the owner by right of conquest and can do as it wishes.
I would defend Taiwan but I prefer a nuclear first approach to defense as opposed to a massive increase in conventional military spending. I also don't believe in Cold War 2 with China, I don't see what they've done to provoke such hostility.
"meddle non-militarily to promote liberal policies in non-liberal polities."
Of all the things on this list, this is one I hate the most. When I see Swedish soldiers waving pride flags to celebrate joining NATO, my only thought it that we should leave NATO immediately.
Omg, NATO is great for America! Any country that starts a war in Europe will have a degraded military by the time they reach America. You don’t think Reagan and Bush sr and McStain and Romney knew a little bit about their jobs?? None of them are responsible for Bush jr’s asinine wars.
NATO’s purpose was to contain communism. It stoped having that purpose in 1991. Some people didn’t want to get new careers, so they kept trying to start a war with Russia.
After the fall of communism there was chaos in Europe…NATO was the proper tool to create stability in Europe. Wars in Europe end up impacting America…best to deal with them before they get out of control.
What chaos?
Russia voluntarily dissolved its empire and adopted our political system. They did nothing for decades as they desperately tried to be our friends.
We broke a promise to expand a hostile military alliance whose purpose is fundamentally hostile to Russia. We then organized a coup in a neighboring country and turned it into a cia base and filled it with our weapons.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/25/world/europe/cia-ukraine-intelligence-russia-war.html
Russia did what we would have done in their shoes. If anything they tried much harder to be restrained.
Two quick theories I've had while hanging out near the young right-wing DC scene:
1) There is a selection effect at play for young professionals in specific sectors. If you've worked in a for-profit business or lots of other types of job sectors outside of academia and white collar media and policy jobs, you're way less likely to encounter outright coercive norms in favor of progressive social views. So the people most radicalized by that experience are going to select into national conservatism whereas people with conservative personal views in a wide range of other sectors don't have that experience. They aren't as strictly focused on that (real) problem to the exclusion of other problems relevant to mass politics. This is a sociological matter and I don't think it will easily change, especially in parts of academia that genuinely behave in McCarthyist ways towards conservative views.
2) Conservatives have successfully formed many non-profit and fellowship opportunities for smart and talented people with right of center social views, but have emphasized political theory way too much in proportion to social history or even electoral/legislative history. As a result, their formation for young professionals is terribly lopsided. In a forum I enjoy participating in, I have repeatedly suggested a discussion topic of a past presidency or past legislative decision that could make or break a political coalition. Many people in this forum work in Republican hill offices! But they brush this suggestion aside because they rightly believe few will have the knowledge to speak to such a topic at length. Political theory is prioritized instead. For young men with such hammers, there is an endless desire for such nails. This is a conservative non-profit choice, and as such, I believe can be much more easily resolved than my first observation.
I do feel like a lot of people in Washington either forget that state and local governments exist, or regard them as merely administrative arms of the federal government. But state and local governments can make a huge difference in the quality of life (or lack thereof) for their citizens, as we currently see in California and Chicago.
I've been debating whether to leave the NOVA area because of the vibe you discussed. When we originally settled here "better than Maryland" seemed like enough given all the other compelling personal reasons to stay in the DC area. This was all pre-2020 freakout.
Every single person is a government employee or a government contractor. Maybe they are a lawyer or investment person working for those people. And I don't live in like Alexandria, we are pretty far away from DC.
There are a lot of advantages to this area (and it's environmentally stunning), but I can't help but thinking that's our kids future if we stick around here. You become your peers over time.
Florida most likely, but its not imminent.
1) Universal School Vouchers
2) No Income Tax
3) Affordable
4) Growing
5) Good Climate (this is a tough one because I don't like Florida's climate (humidity), but it's objectively desirable by most people and certainly better than some cold state). Probably the thing I like the most about my current location I the geography and climate.
Florida has a particular benefit in that my company is HQed there and I have spent a good deal of time in the state to know something about it.
In terms of specific local communities, that's a long list of specific things.
I've never been to Texas, so it's harder to say. I would probably visit before making any kind of decision, and I won't even consider it until they pass school vouchers. We have two families we know that moved to Dallas and we would probably check in on them.
It's hard to think of other places. Arizona has school vouchers but I don't want to move to Arizona. Everyplace else we are "too rich" to qualify even if they have vouchers and they all have income taxes.
I grew up in what they now call Silicon Valley, and now realize that I was lucky to have done so. I've never been to Florida, but I have lived in the DC area and Texas. The sunny, dry climate in Silicon Valley (though it did snow there once in my experience, believe it or not) spoils you for life, and I was never able to learn to tolerate humidity. The scenery in the SF Bay area and the typical CA vacation spots -- Tahoe, Yosemite, Sequoia National Park -- is also stunning. The outmigration of Californians to places like Texas and Florida tells you how bad things must have gotten there, and how evil the ruling class must be to have ruined the state.
All of the places with the best climate and geography know it and they seem to become as unbearable as people will stand on other metrics to be able live in such places.
It is true that FL and TX have been growing fast but after three or so down years, CA grew in 2023.
Up 0.17% is not down.
Agreed, but SF was scenic and a nice place to visit (Fisherman's Wharf, Chinatown, Golden Gate Park, the Presidio), and places like Big Basin, Monterrey/Carmel and the Sonoma wine country were within easy driving distance. My family moved up there from LA, and although my parents feared that it was becoming 'Los Angeles-ized', it never did get that bad, if only for geographic reasons. When my family first moved there, there were still fruit orchards, and we had several old walnut trees in our back yard. The good old days.
Agreed on Silicon Valley of today but I suspect it was a bit better when Koshmap grew up.
New housing was going up all over the place, and it was unbelievably cheap. All you had to do was buy a house and sit on it.
I just read that population in my Texas region has increased “twelvefold since 1930” and is expected to double by 2080.
And you absolutely feel it, every time you leave your house.
This may sound like something you can readily live with, but I would give it a trial run first.
This sub-thread between FP123 and GU reminds me so much of my own nearly 20 year residency in NOVA working as contractor for the federal blob, and the inertia which kept me there years after I was ready to leave.
On this substack there is much commentary about the lives of Somewheres versus Anywheres. There might be a third category of person I'd call a "Where Else'er" of which there are many around the DC area. I (and many of my peers) sort of fell into jobs in the DC area during the post 9/11 period but never intended to live there as long as we did (or still do). There simply wasn't/isn't enough of a "pull" factor tearing many of us away. Where else am I going to live? If you have certain job skills you might be pulled to Silicon Valley or Boston. Or if you come from a hometown that is a compelling place to live in its own right -- NY, LA, Chicago, etc. -- you might feel that pull as well. But there are loads of people around DC who can't answer the simple question "where else would I live?" and the corollary "what else would I do?" 95% of the jobs in my narrow specialty were in the DC area. I've had to completely switch career fields now that I've finally left, and it's a challenge every day.
I do think this can lead to despondency or mild despair of a type that no one like Robert Putnam will ever write a book about, but it is nevertheless real for many thousands of people who are comfortably stuck (to coin a phrase) in the federal blob.
This comment hits close to home.
Yeah, I'm more worried about my kids ending up in that situation then finding the situation completely intolerable at present. Our lives are pretty good.
The big change for us was the third kid. You switch more from "max earnings" mindset to "cost minimization mindset". When every cost is x3, you know it's not going to worth trying to earn your way out of the hole.
With the school vouchers being worth $130k per kid that's nearly $400k savings. The income taxes are probably worth even more. Once you start talking over $1M in savings from moving, even disruption to one of our careers is worth it.
There is no reason to rush these things. Moving a family is hard, it's probably a good idea to see if some of these things I like about Florida stick longer than a single governor. Our mortgage is ridiculously good. But yeah I think I would be disappointed if I woke up in ten years and we were still surrounded by the blob.
You're not getting $130k vouchers. I'd review your math, to say nothing of your optimistic view of private school options outside blue world.
You're observing the strange selection effect of right wing politics. The actually competent people go into business to get rich. The others are sort of like off-brand democrats, the "democrat we have at home" in current day meme parlance. It helps to also explain the anti-free-market tone of a lot of contemporary conservatism: they're lawyers who never go into practice or go straight to government, politics, or media, or, even worse, academics. So they are these discount democrats who cannot ascend the progressive hierarchy through the normal way, so they demand a way to create a new off-brand hierarchy that will actually have them.
They do not want to go out into the jungle because it is scary.
Some of them are pretty good, so I don't mean to tar ALL of them with the same brush, but you get the feeling with some of them that you are just speaking to a progressive who was unwilling to embrace some specific part of the platform. They were on board for everything the progressives want for the world except for XYZ. In the same way that the medium is the message, a perma grad student will have the same outlook as every other perma grad student, which is that "experts" who read "papers" and are up-to-date with the "research" should make all the laws and tell everyone else what to do.
I think that, at least in principle, it could be a complementary relationship. In my own experience, the real-world-practical right-leaning folks who go into the scary jungle and "work for profits" or start or run the equivalent of their own businesses lack a lot of the intellectual foundation and conceptual framework to really grasp the depth of the problem they face. Sure, they have direct experience and intimate familiarity within their own field with the way government and/or progressive policies impede progress in a negative sum way or generate all kinds of absurd or bad outcomes. But when one probes them one often discovers little more than a surface-level complaints that are hollow shells with regards to why the difficulties come about and what would be necessary to do to actually successfully overcome them for the long term.
They tend to be -much- more sensitive to social desirability and what opinions one is required to express to remain respectably high status in upper middle class society, and this gives rise to all kinds of crimestop cognitive obstacles that prevent them from ever going deep enough into the analysis to get into a whole difficult terrain of realities it is intensely socially undesirable to believe. For them, many of the key questions are pejoratively, i.e., merely "academic".
But the academic answers should not be dismissed so flippantly, it turns out the insights that the symbolic-workers for political concepts discover and learn are indeed critically essential to catching one up to the real state of affairs and to having even a remotely unlikely chance of formulating any kind of successful plan to overcome the enormous headwinds in the path.
I think what remains is for some "academic" or at least right-wing political intellectual type to be commissioned with the grand project of hanging a lot of the real-world "practical men of action" examples on the abstract conceptual framework that had been gradually coming into being, mostly online, in the last the 20 years.
There also are embedded assumptions and status quo bias. I used to work in commercial real estate and own rental property. When I'm wearing my good government/fairness hat, I think the 1031 exchange and carried interest exception should be eliminated. But if I said something like that a real estate conference I would be run out of the room
It's hard for anyone to attack the idea of the government handing out unjust giveaways when almost everyone is the beneficiary of art least one unjust giveaway. The automatic creation of a kind of implicit anti-anti-giveaway alliance or movement functioned as a kind of proto-intersectionality which could even bring in the wealthy. Alinsky wrote about his vision of dangling just such lures to "organize" the broad middle class into something like a trade union, but then the oppressed identity group concepts took over and necessarily exclude mainstreamers.
I see a couple of barriers there. First thing is that for the average conservative in the street, academics in general has a bad rep right now. As they see it, it's the academics who make their neighborhoods unsafe, tax and regulate their businesses into the ground, and force genderqueer theory on their 7-year-old children. The second problem is more practical: they don't get paid to think about political theory, and there are only so many hours in a day. Then there's the communications-channel problem: for someone who does want to read up on it, where do you start? It's taken me years to identify a selection of sources that I consider trustworthy, and I probably spend more time reading up on it than the average non-academic.
Ive found that ordinary conservatives actually really like academics so long as they are "our guy" academics, producing scholarly output that supports, or otherwise advocating for, right wing positions. As a matter of fact, these academics are so rare that ordinary conservatives will converge on them in large numbers and tend to like them not just a little more than even the left likes academics, but far more, to the point of fawning over celebrity figures or potential "movement" leaders and sometimes that leads to embarrassing credulity and drop of healthy amounts of skepticism and scrutiny. Conservatives love to showcase these figures in a sense of relief, "See, smart people with impressive credentials have arguments for and evidence showing why we're right and how the leftist experts are lying or wrong." This feels like going from having to defend yourself at trial to getting an ace lawyer working pro Bono.
The trouble is these figures get the hatchet treatment from the progressives and that tends to select for those who aren't deterred by that prospect, which is not a typical set of personality types.
I think there is a lot of truth there. Too often the question is who get to have control, and what groups they get to benefit, and not whether or not control is proper.
Take the controversy over the administrative state as a good example of my thinking here. To be pithy, the typical RW-libertarian view is that the administrative state is bad, and decision making power should be returned more to Congress. The cynical Burnham or Bageshot view is that once a lawmaking body has given up the ghost of power, it is unlikely to regain it. The Bageshot example is that of the House of Lords giving up its power to the House of Commons. Burnham made a similar argument about the American Congress and the administrative state.
Let's imagine that Loper Bright inspires more precedent that kills the administrative state. We have returned the ghost of power to the shrunken undead shell of Congress. Yessss, no more collusion between big corporations and Washington Article II bureaucracies. Total RW-libertarian victory.
But what is this? The same big corporations are manipulating procedural outcomes by indirectly packing Article III of the government with their loyalists (ex-Biglaw partners), and Article I lobbying activity has intensified. The same processes that corrupt the Article II administrative state also lead to the continued corruption and abuse of power within the newly empowered Article I and Article III branches of government. A new movement arises... what if there were a more powerful executive branch that could restrain the immoderate overreaching of the other two branches?
"Instead, I would prefer to see someone become seasoned by working in business, K-12 education, the military, or some local government agency. In short, as I like to say about my daughters, “I wish that they would work for a profit.”"
This statement is rather strange, since three of the four occupations listed do not "work for a profit."
"Many of the other speakers heaped scorn on others within the broader conservative movement." A case of 'the narcissism of small differences' perhaps? Freud is out of favour these days but he made some very astute observations about what makes people tick.
I think that is part of it, along with misguided attempts to out the disloyal previous members. RINOs have long been a problem with the right, as small government types who get into government positions are under tremendous temptation. However most don’t seem to understand the epistemological foundations of differences, nor the distinction between those who speak A and do B and those who speak A and really mean A.
JD Vance served in the military and subsequently worked as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, but recently you expressed a strong preference for a 'moderate Republican' like Pompeo or Youngkin over Vance as Trump's vice president. I listened to Vance's NatCon speech this morning, and he poked fun at the WSJ editorial board for advocating that the US can and should project military power abroad (in Ukraine and elsewhere) while shipping its industrial base to strategic rival China. Maybe that's why you don't like him, but I agree with him that there is a fundamental contradiction between our foreign policy and domestic economic policy.
In the hallways, one of the prominent NatCons said that he thought that if Mr. Trump were to pick Youngkin, then Biden would not stand a chance. My problem with Vance is not so much where he stands on the issues. I sense that what he brings to the table is a big ego, which is not what Mr. Trump or the country can use.
Was his reasoning that swing/undecided voters would be more likely to vote for Trump with Youngkin on the ticket, or that the 'Deep State/Blob' would be more likely to 'let Trump win,' or perhaps a bit of both? Would a Trump/Youngkin ticket guarantee that a 2nd Trump administration would prove as disappointing as the first? And if Trump dies or is incapacitated in office, would you rather have Youngkin or Vance as the back-up? And at this point, it remains to be seen whether Trump will even be running against Biden, or (heaven forbid) Harris.
Trump for the most part governed like Jeb would have…and it wasn’t that bad other than a slightly too big tax cut and obviously Roe being overturned. That leads me to believe the problem with Bush/Cheney wasn’t the GOPe but Bush. Bush was wholly unfit to be president and the 9/11 rally ‘round the flag moment went to his head and he abused his power. I believe the correction to Bush was GOP senators refusing to confirm Miers even though that led to a more conservative justice…because it showed senators were taking their power back after relinquishing it after 9/11.
Don’t you get a little depressed when those positively oriented entrepreneurs tell you about their polycules? I share your outlook as someone who has straddled both worlds but I also get mad at people like Bill Gurley who criticize DC but don’t do anything about it. They seem to think just pointing out problems is enough. This is the world’s second oldest profession. Politics isn’t going away and hiving off our innovation centers from our policy center is tempting I know but it won’t work. The work of changing policy through politics is messy and dirty. I think we need more people who understand both worlds, like Dominic Cummings, to help us navigate the best path forward.
I have never met an academic of whom I am not immediately skeptical. In general I find that they have bad models for understanding the world, married to a lack of epistemic humility.
the first 2000 names in the phonebook
I believe that the NatCons are needlessly contemptuous of the Republican establishment.
Contemptuous for the wrong reasons, I'd say.
"Social conservatives, libertarians, and anti-Communist military hawks [coud have] played a [more] constructive role if they had been more friendly to long term growth with equity -- merit based immigration, progressive consumption taxes, near zero deficits, Pigou taxation of negative externalists like CO2 emissions and traffic congestion, VAT financing of the safety net. [Yes. I know. That would have made them "neoliberals" not "conservatives," but it's what they should have done.]
What you and everyone should oppose is Bushism—which is neoliberalism combined with neoconservatism. Oh, and you mention a VAT—we have one in America and it’s how we fund health insurance for those ages 18-65 and we just call it a budget expense for employers.
I'm happy enough to oppose Bush-ism. He is more responsible than another other one person for destroying the Clinton budget surplus with tax cuts and expanding Medicare w/o new taxes AND discrediting the idea of actively promoting more liberal/less repressive regimes abroad. [Personal confession. I was wrong, but I supported the Iraq invasion.]
No. the subsidies for employer "provided" health insurance are not an approximation to a VAT. They are closer to being a wage tax like SS/Medicare, but worse because they are are a flat dollar amount per employee tax that makes it relatively more expensive to hire a janitor than a CEO.
I didn’t say anything about the subsidy or tax advantages to employers for offering health insurance benefits—-I’m talking about the budget line item that pays for health care costs. So every product and good you purchase in America includes someone else’s health care costs…that is exactly like a VAT!
I'm not aware of that line item. What are you talking about?
In America employers pick up around 80% of health care costs for their employees. So a company like Microsoft or a large law firm self funds health “insurance” and Humana simply manages their health care expenses and isn’t actually providing “insurance”.
Fine, Just call it health care cost.
A VAT applies to everything and can fund anything.
Health insurance subsidies tax the middle class to pay for professional salaries to provide a service that is mostly wasteful.
"For me personally, the NatCons have pros and cons. I think that the main “pro” is their determination to speak their mind. They do not live by lies"
To sincerely believe an untruth is not a virtue. It is not for Progressives, why should it be for "conservatives?" Of course it is good when discussion with someone to acknowledge that they are arguing in good faith.
"Maybe it is sufficient to know what it is that they are against."
This is a pretty common description of conservatives. They have no real plan other than to resist change by liberals and especially progressives. Anything that looks somewhat like conservative action is almost always a reversion to some past state of being. This isn't a bad thing except when the opposition is based on denying Democrats a win instead of truly being against the change itself or the past state is something best left in the past.
"I found that the best thing about being at the conference was feeling surrounded by people who see clearly when radical progressives are telling lies and peddling moral absurdities." if they were not telling lies and peddling moral absurdities of their own.
Don't make me try to decide which "pole" is worse.
I don't know anything about these people, so will confine myself to parsing what you said about Biden:
"The NatCons have long been heavily invested in Mr. Trump.¹ After Mr. Biden’s faceplant in the debate, their mood should have been giddy. But many of the speakers did their pre-planned we-are-persecuted-because-we’re-white-male-Christians shtick. Whatever truth there is to that, this might have been a good time not to present themselves as soreheads."
Biden, not Trump, is exhibit A for their grievance. He was the last old Establishment white guy the left could run. He's *why Trump*. No one younger, remotely of his "ilk" - has been allowed to ascend in the Democratic party. The deck was cleared of such dudes (by Pelosi, by Schumer, etc.) so the rest of them could rise for racial or gender reasons. There was nothing organic about it. If there had been, they wouldn't have desperately flailed around in search of someone not purely ID-policy-grievance-oriented "who could plausibly run for sheriff" and landed on Joe Biden.
The irony - and the shortcomings - of this new-fledged group may lie with some of them having only their own superficial grievance, now, on this issue - and no understanding of the much more important things that underpin it.
Joe's cognitive challenges are the Dems (and the rest of us, in truth) finding we are utterly overdrawn on our account.
Do not imagine that conservatives will or would have always voted for Republicans, especially Establishment Republicans. We weigh two different baskets of goods. Sometimes they come out equally bad and we do not vote at all. I didn't vote in 2012, for instance.
Had the Dems taken a different tack, and future Old White Guy Bruce Babbitt been encouraged to continue to higher office - I would have voted for him in a heartbeat.
The Sam Rayburn quote is fun, but has the obvious corollary is that the practical, the hard-headed, the "good at runnning" don't always know best, either, what is to be done. This is the danger of populism, and a middle course is best.
It is too bad that Sam Rayburn didn't keep his great friend out of national politics, at least at the highest level.
#1 thing is that most of these people are mostly BSers. They can find lots of stuff to legitimately criticize. But their policies are either a) not truly popular, or b) would rely on people with legislative skills (including compromise) to pass.
Legislative skills are severely underrated. It's a common belief that congress should be made up of engineers and economists instead of lawyers. But legislative negotiation and compromise are time- and labor-intensive processes that play out over years, even decades, and it will always be that way. Engineers get frustrated with that. They seem to think you can magically remove the politics from politics.