Wokeism doesn't result in changes to the deployment of tangible resources? How about DIE(sic) coordinators (and their voluminous staffs), minority contract set-asides, race and sex-based discrimination in hiring and promotions, welfare programs specifically directed to various identity groups including the big kahuna - slave reparations? And these are not just happening in government but widely across many businesses and other private organizations as well.
I think the distinction is not quite as sharp as you are drawing it. Even in ancient Rome we talk about the rabble being given bread *and* circuses, not just circuses. Edelmann probably sits at the point where most grifting off the government was, to use the Plunkett term, 'honest graft' of providing real improvements like new roads even if the specific deals were shady but Obama was finally forced to admit that there were few 'shovel-ready' projects funded by the 2008 stimulus bill (IIRC the vast majority of that money went to bail out various state government programs). With COVID all pretense of doing anything but the equivalent of dropping C-notes from helicopters was abandoned.
This is an important point. In 2020 the VA public university system alone spent well over $15,000,000 on DEI administrator salaries, across 15 schools. (And that is an extremely conservative estimate.) DEI not only dictates policy and hiring, but also employs an ever increasing bureaucracy, millions of dollars to create more sinecures for favored supporters. Claiming it doesn't represent a large and growing transferring of resources to build a political fortress is like claiming any random government agency doesn't. The phenomenon is simply more distributed.
Are human beings tangible resources? Because wokeism justifies and leads to murder, rape, thefts, violence, etc. Is civil society a tangible good? 13% cause 51% of murder in the US.
Per Christopher B's comment, I think there is a big temptation from people of a certain personality bent to really WANT politics and culture wars to be pointless theater. If its pointless theater, then there is no moral obligation to participate in it. If anything, there might be a moral obligation not to. And if that was already what you wanted to do, it's awfully convenient.
But does that fit the data?
Let me take a simple example. COVID spending was absolutely enormous. There were an unprecedented amount of real resources at stake. And it was a highly political issue. Lockdowns necessitated bailouts, and one side was clearly more in favor of lockdowns. More specifically, trillions of dollars was spent on bills that passed on party line votes in congress by a single vote. To say that politics didn't matter to the allocation of real resources is fantastical in light of such events.
Furthermore, we can make very direct links between things like woke-ism and real resource allocation during the pandemic. My sick 75 year old father had to wait months to get a vaccine he should have been able to get immediately. The justification for de-prioritizing him was directly spelled out by the CDC in the guidance they put out that our state adopted. "Equity" was listed as a prime reason for their allocation logic. Note that people who didn't bow to the CDC, like DeSantis in Florida, prioritized vaccines by age, my father would have been able to get his vaccine earlier if he lived in a red state.
The mind virus can go beyond government too. I still feel bad for all those kids I saw on playgrounds wearing masks, even though there was no government mandate. Their parents were infected by a mind virus that caused them to abuse their own children for culture war reasons.
Before 2020 I used to believe that politics and culture, if not unimportant, didn't influence my life enough to justify allocating much energy to it. I updated my priors after 2020.
Your incisive essay explains much with little. Voters demand theater. Interest groups demand resources ("rents"). Politicians supply both -- and somehow often play their theater role authentically.
The politics of *theater + corruption* has another basic dimension: Restrictions (regulations; new limits on individual liberties and markets). Activists demand myriad prohibitions. Rent-seekers form common cause with activists and garner resources. Examples: The Green New Deal. The War on Drugs. And Michael Tracy makes a case that politics about "human trafficking" exhibit this type of coalition.
In Bruce Yandle's classic *bootleggers & baptists* coalition, the bootleggers supply what the baptists would ban. *Illegal* corruption is a necessary input, as bootleggers bribe the authorities to turn a blind eye.) I acknowledge that the War on Drugs is an instance of bootleggers & baptists, insofar as illegal corruption protects high prevalence of illicit drug markets.
I had in mind something different than bootleggers & baptists.
Maybe call it *alarmists & insiders":
Activists sound the alarm about X; and cultivate what Bryan Caplan calls "moral panic". Insiders exploit the alarm: Politicians enact a prohibition of X; and shower resources on agencies and orgs, which effectively enforce the prohibition and sharply reduce prevalence of X. Politics about "human trafficking" are an example. (I take it that the US now exhibits a mix of high enforcement, low bribery, and low prevalence of sex markets. But I might have got the empirical pattern wrong.)
It can occur, moreover, that insiders and opportunistic entrepreneurs invest heavily also in supply of purportedly ethical substitutes for what politicians have banned. The Green New Deal is an example.
The glue of a coalition of *alarmists & insiders* is massive legal rent-seeking, rather than illegal corruption of government officials by black-market entrepreneurs.
I don't think the illegal corruption part is a necessary input to the baptists and bootleggers dynamic, just "good" intention actors pairing up with "bad" intention actors in a seemingly strange alliance. I think the environmental movement is an excellent example, as you have true believers who really want good things (even if they are wrong about what those are) and plenty of terrible actors who know better but want subsidies, kick backs and all the other benefits. I suspect this is why you get environmental activists screaming that CO2 will kill us all, but demanding nuclear plants be eradicated at the same time.
I would reserve the moniker, "bootleggers & baptists," for the peculiar dynamic in which one group of the implicit coalition illicitly supplies what the other (activist) group would ban.
By contrast, in the Green New Deal, solar-energy firms and other green rent-seekers don't sell black-market carbon. (I see that it's complicated insofar as the supply-chair for green energy might perversely increase carbon consumption.)
I don't mean to get hung up on labels. I'm trying to point out a substantive difference between (a) strange bedfellows, where one bedfellow supplies illegally what the other would ban, and (b) strange bedfellows, where one bedfellow uses the ban to get rich, either by enforcing the ban, or by providing substitutes that "sound good" to the activists.
"Edelman’s view is that ordinary citizens become fixated on famous individuals and political conflicts that are merely symbolic." This would appear to be consistent with Rene Girard's theory of mimetics; much of what people want is not so much what they rationally need but rather just what they see other people wanting.
A current instance of Edelman's point is the Ukraine situation; our propagandistic media discuss it in terms of the famous individual (Putin). They fail to consider whether things might be pretty much the same under any likely alternative Russian leader. That might lead to better understanding of the causes of the conflict, and perhaps even means of resolving it, but that would clash with the elites' grifting objective (in this case, enormous profits from munitions).
Some _are_ pushing back against discussing Russia in terms of the famous individual, but while it does lead to better understanding of the causes of the conflict (i.e., many Russians who bother to care about such things, both important and unimportant ones, really do consider Ukraine's existence as a separate nation as fundamentally illegitimate and an affront to the dignity of Russia), it does not help much with the means of resolving it. In fact the reverse is the case: focusing on Putin, while misguided, provides a simple single target, whereas focusing on those widespread Russian perceptions instead raises barely tractable questions. In addition, the former gives a potential out to Russian elites and helps Western elites who'd invested a lot in relationships with Russia, whether that be academic careers, artistic ties, business etc. look less bad and avoid difficult decisions. So politically the former focus is much the more convenient one.
This all depends on what you mean by "many Russians." Putin's media blitz may have more than 50% convince but I'm very skeptical the number was near 50% before Putin.
In case you didn't notice, I qualified the "many" with "who bother to care about such things". To expand a bit, I suspect that while the majority of Russians usually don't think about Ukrainians one way or another, being busy with their own affairs, dialog would probably elicit some such views from the median Russian in the abstract. However, he can't be bothered to do anything about it personally (consuming media and answering polls doesn't count). Putin spent almost 8 months trying to scrape up volunteers for his 'special military operation', but the yield was so low that he ended up going back on his word and declaring partial mobilization. Those who care enough to be politically active about it (never mind enlisting) are a small minority, but given the carefully cultivated political apathy of the majority of the population it is this minority who determine what will happen.
Surely one reliable way to determine who cares about such things is to see who is willing to commit their real resources and their physical bodies to the thing they purport to care about - on their own account, not just passively acquiescing in the state taking their resources and their bodies. It is much more informative to see where people move to, both within a country and between countries, than to listen to what they are saying about how deeply they care about anti-racism and equity or about collapsing American society and progressive propaganda. Among Americans with options, an overwhelming majority of white liberals move to expensive suburban school districts with 'good schools' rather than to Anacostia or East Baltimore, and (quelle surprise!) an overwhelming majority of white conservatives _also_move to expensive suburban school districts with 'good schools' rather than to Russia or even to Serbia.
> this seems a long way from where this thread started
While Trump and wokism are great examples, let’s think back to the OJ trial and the captivation and polarization that the media coverage created. All the experts and talking heads droning on and on. Did you avoid getting pulled in? Unlikely. Clearly, there were better problems to solve.
A goal of this Substack and the blog before it is to remind its readers to “wake up”! There is real work to do. We must find the truth. We must offer robust solutions.
1 I am absolutely totally unconvinced that the political theater of the greatest interest to mass media and likely also to the general public is anything close to merely symbolic. The impact of wokeism, deniers, activists, and conspiracy theorists on all sides has real consequences.
2 While not unimportant I don't see that the "pigs," rent seekers, and back roomers and what they do is any more important than the issues of political theater.
Here at the start of a new year I think it is important we consider what is most important. We have a mostly free market economy that works pretty well despite all the issues mentioned above. In our focus on the problems, we shouldn't forget that.
I accept your remark that “in the back rooms a few purposive elite organizations are using government to obtain real, meaningful resources. They get the subsidies and protection from competition . . . .” Still, I doubt that any such organization gets everything it wants, and some—though at least semi-elite—are sorely disappointed. There is competition in rent-seeking, with losers and partial-losers as well as winners. (And, of course, there is a limit to what the public will tolerate, even though it is not paying much attention.) Even after getting some of what it wanted, the elite organization must continue to work to preserve its bounty (admittedly, inertia is its friend).
Wokeism doesn't result in changes to the deployment of tangible resources? How about DIE(sic) coordinators (and their voluminous staffs), minority contract set-asides, race and sex-based discrimination in hiring and promotions, welfare programs specifically directed to various identity groups including the big kahuna - slave reparations? And these are not just happening in government but widely across many businesses and other private organizations as well.
I think the distinction is not quite as sharp as you are drawing it. Even in ancient Rome we talk about the rabble being given bread *and* circuses, not just circuses. Edelmann probably sits at the point where most grifting off the government was, to use the Plunkett term, 'honest graft' of providing real improvements like new roads even if the specific deals were shady but Obama was finally forced to admit that there were few 'shovel-ready' projects funded by the 2008 stimulus bill (IIRC the vast majority of that money went to bail out various state government programs). With COVID all pretense of doing anything but the equivalent of dropping C-notes from helicopters was abandoned.
This is an important point. In 2020 the VA public university system alone spent well over $15,000,000 on DEI administrator salaries, across 15 schools. (And that is an extremely conservative estimate.) DEI not only dictates policy and hiring, but also employs an ever increasing bureaucracy, millions of dollars to create more sinecures for favored supporters. Claiming it doesn't represent a large and growing transferring of resources to build a political fortress is like claiming any random government agency doesn't. The phenomenon is simply more distributed.
Are human beings tangible resources? Because wokeism justifies and leads to murder, rape, thefts, violence, etc. Is civil society a tangible good? 13% cause 51% of murder in the US.
Per Christopher B's comment, I think there is a big temptation from people of a certain personality bent to really WANT politics and culture wars to be pointless theater. If its pointless theater, then there is no moral obligation to participate in it. If anything, there might be a moral obligation not to. And if that was already what you wanted to do, it's awfully convenient.
But does that fit the data?
Let me take a simple example. COVID spending was absolutely enormous. There were an unprecedented amount of real resources at stake. And it was a highly political issue. Lockdowns necessitated bailouts, and one side was clearly more in favor of lockdowns. More specifically, trillions of dollars was spent on bills that passed on party line votes in congress by a single vote. To say that politics didn't matter to the allocation of real resources is fantastical in light of such events.
Furthermore, we can make very direct links between things like woke-ism and real resource allocation during the pandemic. My sick 75 year old father had to wait months to get a vaccine he should have been able to get immediately. The justification for de-prioritizing him was directly spelled out by the CDC in the guidance they put out that our state adopted. "Equity" was listed as a prime reason for their allocation logic. Note that people who didn't bow to the CDC, like DeSantis in Florida, prioritized vaccines by age, my father would have been able to get his vaccine earlier if he lived in a red state.
The mind virus can go beyond government too. I still feel bad for all those kids I saw on playgrounds wearing masks, even though there was no government mandate. Their parents were infected by a mind virus that caused them to abuse their own children for culture war reasons.
Before 2020 I used to believe that politics and culture, if not unimportant, didn't influence my life enough to justify allocating much energy to it. I updated my priors after 2020.
Your incisive essay explains much with little. Voters demand theater. Interest groups demand resources ("rents"). Politicians supply both -- and somehow often play their theater role authentically.
The politics of *theater + corruption* has another basic dimension: Restrictions (regulations; new limits on individual liberties and markets). Activists demand myriad prohibitions. Rent-seekers form common cause with activists and garner resources. Examples: The Green New Deal. The War on Drugs. And Michael Tracy makes a case that politics about "human trafficking" exhibit this type of coalition.
bootleggers and Baptists
In Bruce Yandle's classic *bootleggers & baptists* coalition, the bootleggers supply what the baptists would ban. *Illegal* corruption is a necessary input, as bootleggers bribe the authorities to turn a blind eye.) I acknowledge that the War on Drugs is an instance of bootleggers & baptists, insofar as illegal corruption protects high prevalence of illicit drug markets.
I had in mind something different than bootleggers & baptists.
Maybe call it *alarmists & insiders":
Activists sound the alarm about X; and cultivate what Bryan Caplan calls "moral panic". Insiders exploit the alarm: Politicians enact a prohibition of X; and shower resources on agencies and orgs, which effectively enforce the prohibition and sharply reduce prevalence of X. Politics about "human trafficking" are an example. (I take it that the US now exhibits a mix of high enforcement, low bribery, and low prevalence of sex markets. But I might have got the empirical pattern wrong.)
It can occur, moreover, that insiders and opportunistic entrepreneurs invest heavily also in supply of purportedly ethical substitutes for what politicians have banned. The Green New Deal is an example.
The glue of a coalition of *alarmists & insiders* is massive legal rent-seeking, rather than illegal corruption of government officials by black-market entrepreneurs.
I don't think the illegal corruption part is a necessary input to the baptists and bootleggers dynamic, just "good" intention actors pairing up with "bad" intention actors in a seemingly strange alliance. I think the environmental movement is an excellent example, as you have true believers who really want good things (even if they are wrong about what those are) and plenty of terrible actors who know better but want subsidies, kick backs and all the other benefits. I suspect this is why you get environmental activists screaming that CO2 will kill us all, but demanding nuclear plants be eradicated at the same time.
I would reserve the moniker, "bootleggers & baptists," for the peculiar dynamic in which one group of the implicit coalition illicitly supplies what the other (activist) group would ban.
By contrast, in the Green New Deal, solar-energy firms and other green rent-seekers don't sell black-market carbon. (I see that it's complicated insofar as the supply-chair for green energy might perversely increase carbon consumption.)
I don't mean to get hung up on labels. I'm trying to point out a substantive difference between (a) strange bedfellows, where one bedfellow supplies illegally what the other would ban, and (b) strange bedfellows, where one bedfellow uses the ban to get rich, either by enforcing the ban, or by providing substitutes that "sound good" to the activists.
"Edelman’s view is that ordinary citizens become fixated on famous individuals and political conflicts that are merely symbolic." This would appear to be consistent with Rene Girard's theory of mimetics; much of what people want is not so much what they rationally need but rather just what they see other people wanting.
A current instance of Edelman's point is the Ukraine situation; our propagandistic media discuss it in terms of the famous individual (Putin). They fail to consider whether things might be pretty much the same under any likely alternative Russian leader. That might lead to better understanding of the causes of the conflict, and perhaps even means of resolving it, but that would clash with the elites' grifting objective (in this case, enormous profits from munitions).
Some _are_ pushing back against discussing Russia in terms of the famous individual, but while it does lead to better understanding of the causes of the conflict (i.e., many Russians who bother to care about such things, both important and unimportant ones, really do consider Ukraine's existence as a separate nation as fundamentally illegitimate and an affront to the dignity of Russia), it does not help much with the means of resolving it. In fact the reverse is the case: focusing on Putin, while misguided, provides a simple single target, whereas focusing on those widespread Russian perceptions instead raises barely tractable questions. In addition, the former gives a potential out to Russian elites and helps Western elites who'd invested a lot in relationships with Russia, whether that be academic careers, artistic ties, business etc. look less bad and avoid difficult decisions. So politically the former focus is much the more convenient one.
This all depends on what you mean by "many Russians." Putin's media blitz may have more than 50% convince but I'm very skeptical the number was near 50% before Putin.
In case you didn't notice, I qualified the "many" with "who bother to care about such things". To expand a bit, I suspect that while the majority of Russians usually don't think about Ukrainians one way or another, being busy with their own affairs, dialog would probably elicit some such views from the median Russian in the abstract. However, he can't be bothered to do anything about it personally (consuming media and answering polls doesn't count). Putin spent almost 8 months trying to scrape up volunteers for his 'special military operation', but the yield was so low that he ended up going back on his word and declaring partial mobilization. Those who care enough to be politically active about it (never mind enlisting) are a small minority, but given the carefully cultivated political apathy of the majority of the population it is this minority who determine what will happen.
I have no idea how to determine who cares about such things and this seems a long way from where this thread started.
I get that most people associated with Russian govt support Putin and the war. That doesn't really tell us why nor what they'd support in his absence.
Surely one reliable way to determine who cares about such things is to see who is willing to commit their real resources and their physical bodies to the thing they purport to care about - on their own account, not just passively acquiescing in the state taking their resources and their bodies. It is much more informative to see where people move to, both within a country and between countries, than to listen to what they are saying about how deeply they care about anti-racism and equity or about collapsing American society and progressive propaganda. Among Americans with options, an overwhelming majority of white liberals move to expensive suburban school districts with 'good schools' rather than to Anacostia or East Baltimore, and (quelle surprise!) an overwhelming majority of white conservatives _also_move to expensive suburban school districts with 'good schools' rather than to Russia or even to Serbia.
> this seems a long way from where this thread started
So what? It's a free cou... internet.
It's not at all clear to me that Russia is destined to behave as it has under Putin but I certainly agree it's worth looking at causes beyond Putin.
I wish I had two likes to give to this.
While Trump and wokism are great examples, let’s think back to the OJ trial and the captivation and polarization that the media coverage created. All the experts and talking heads droning on and on. Did you avoid getting pulled in? Unlikely. Clearly, there were better problems to solve.
A goal of this Substack and the blog before it is to remind its readers to “wake up”! There is real work to do. We must find the truth. We must offer robust solutions.
NO.
1 I am absolutely totally unconvinced that the political theater of the greatest interest to mass media and likely also to the general public is anything close to merely symbolic. The impact of wokeism, deniers, activists, and conspiracy theorists on all sides has real consequences.
2 While not unimportant I don't see that the "pigs," rent seekers, and back roomers and what they do is any more important than the issues of political theater.
Here at the start of a new year I think it is important we consider what is most important. We have a mostly free market economy that works pretty well despite all the issues mentioned above. In our focus on the problems, we shouldn't forget that.
I accept your remark that “in the back rooms a few purposive elite organizations are using government to obtain real, meaningful resources. They get the subsidies and protection from competition . . . .” Still, I doubt that any such organization gets everything it wants, and some—though at least semi-elite—are sorely disappointed. There is competition in rent-seeking, with losers and partial-losers as well as winners. (And, of course, there is a limit to what the public will tolerate, even though it is not paying much attention.) Even after getting some of what it wanted, the elite organization must continue to work to preserve its bounty (admittedly, inertia is its friend).