Once upon a time, digital tech firms, having caught the regulatory state off-guard, spontaneously embraced de facto freedom from regulation. Nowadays, big tech firms lobby heavily for preemptive regulation of digital tech old and new. See, for example, Sam Altman's plea for regulation of AI. It's unclear whether the motives are insider-ism (regulatory capture), fear of a hostile standoff by lawmakers, and/or elite ideology. Count me more skeptical than Richard Hanania.
‘... the openness to change of the left.’ What drivel! The Left are not open to change. It MUST be done their centuries old, tired, failed way. Of course the Left’s way never fails - it just hasn’t had enough money spent on it, or hasn’t been done long enough, or not enough resources applied. Left open to change? Please... do me a favour, pull the other one, it’s got bells on.
What makes Elon Musk a special billionaire is he sees threats to own well-being and that of his employees and his children and he makes a public personal defense - he puts his own money and reputation at risk to defy the political consensus. He saw California's Covid policies threatening his business and he pushed back, ultimately moving Tesla's HQ to Texas. He sees Transgender activism a threat to children and so he defies his corporate executive peers and he speaks out in criticism. He sees threats to free speech and so he buys Twitter.
But Musk is a unique case. He made his billions off of government subsidies yet he feels no loyalty to government. Contrast that to Zuckerberg, Google and other Silicon Valley firms who profit from their government ties and who are all too willing to please the government's wishes.
1) Richard wants them to try to cut Social Security, DOA. Probably the single worst thing the GOP wasted political capital on for the last 20 years. If you hate olds just assume the US is going bankrupt eventually and pass huge child tax credits to funnel what money is left to young faster.
I would guess tech right opinions on healthcare run the gamut, and that's where the money is.
2) He wants more immigration even though immigration turned Silicon Valley into a one party far left state.
3) Move on from legalizing pot to legalizing meth?
4) All of the reforms Richard says he likes (low taxes, growth, school choice, anti-woke) are all happening in Red States full of those GOP populists he hates.
Silicon Valley voted in favor of affirmative action:
Hanania's loathing of "Trump Republicans" specifically and of populism generally shows how narrow and naive Hanania's politics are. Kling is right to group Hanania with Paul Ryan. I would add Mitt Romney - same failed presidential ticket by the way.
The technocrat Republicans like Ryan and Romney love to talk about the ideal government policies, but they fail to consider how to get those policies implemented. They have no care in the world for the actual politics of policy change.
And so it is with Hanania. He pokes his finger at all the "ugly" Republicans. He laments the crazy Progressives. He criticizes populist movements and politicians. All true complaints. So who is going to lead policy change, Richard? And how is that change going to be realized seeing you have written off all the people who care about winning political battles?
"Squirrel" Trump might win another battle, but any win is unlikely to result in anything nearly as substantive as the Paul Ryan led tax cuts. Competence really does matter. And the Republicans have been busy burning theirs up for the sake of the performance. It's a hole that too many hole dwellers don't want to leave.
Trump is a untrustworthy leader. What is needed is a better leader for "Trump Republicans" to follow. The same demographic was Reagan Democrats in the 1980s. Same type of people. Very different results because they had a better leader.
Hanania enjoys insulting Trump Republicans. Yet these are the same people he will need to realize the policy changes he desires.
Hanania is somewhat of a troll of course (and he's self-aware about this), but as someone with more "populist" leanings than him, I sympathize with his frustration with Trump Republicans. The fact is that this is a low-IQ movement, and so much of it absolutely repulses people in a position to affect policy change.
Wondering out loud, what would be a high-IQ political movement? Who belongs to it?
My quick answer is big money lobbyists. They are smart in knowing what they want and knowing they can pay for it. I see all "volunteers" as occupying the spectrum of "dumb politics". Human capital that is too easily exploited for the personal gain of politicians.
Reagan was a leader with a positive vision and actual policies. The only 2024 "happy warrior" I've seen so far is Tim Scott. Any 2024 Trump voters are almost by definition low information, anti-policy, and conspiracists. They might be needed to get over the line. But there's nothing good to be said about them from a citizenship perspective. Why does the party let these minority of nuts have so much say? It's not like very many are going to vote for the D candidate.
95% of the thousands who attended Trump rallies in 2016 were good, optimistic American citizens. They were drawn to Trump because out of all the GOP candidates he was the only one unequivocally advocating for and defending them.
It is that simple. Trump became a giant pimple on the rump of the Republican Party because the Republican party was dismissive of its own party members and citizens willing to join the party. The GOP of Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney was all for immigration. All for Big Tech and Big Business. What Ryan and Romney had no time for was the everyday concerns of American citizens. Trump came along and gave this huge demographic something to cheer about.
The slur of "populism" is so conveniently used by political minorities. It is their way to dismiss real concerns of the citizenry. And then when a politician comes along that taps into those concerns and becomes popular himself, the political minority throw hissy fits and scream "How dare you be a populist!"
So strange. If government does not represent the popular views of the citizenry, what does it represent? Whose interests does it serve?
The citizenry are ignorant and they vote expressively. That's always been true. Trump is a charismatic game show host who is out for himself. Somehow some people believe he is on their side too. Support in 2016 might be understandable for some of the reasons you state. Not so in 2023/24. We need competent, sane elites. Paul Ryan was the one who got the tax cuts passed, not Orange Julius.
Trump ran a brilliant campaign in 2016, he won a shocking stunning upset victory against much larger groups of well funded opponents. I'd argue that is a form of competence.
Paul Ryan seems to be a competent policy writer. But there are lots of those. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 was a team effort victory as is all legislation. Both Paul Ryan and Trump were part of the same team. If your argument is that Trump didn't write the actual policies, so what? Most presidents don't do that, they all have large teams of hundreds or thousands of people, and we don't know those people's names or who did what. That reminds me of when people used to bash Steve Jobs for not single handedly inventing all of Apple's products, but rather hiring thousands of others to do all the work. Of course CEOs hire thousands of workers, that's not a reasonable criticism.
Also, Paul Ryan made his name as a health care policy specialist, and rose to the leadership of the Republican Party on the issue of health care. The Republican Party won lots of elections on that issue, had control over all three branches of government, and under Paul Ryan's leadership, they seemed to squander their election victories and do nothing. I'd call that incompetence.
I wonder if this doesn't actually stem from an atheistic, ev. pscyh-inspired might makes right mentality, which Hanania subscribes to more than the modal right populist. You can lament the progressive domination but they're dominant for a reason. Hanania can't help but be impressed by their cunning (and the fact the apolitical, intelligent professional class leans in the Dem direction).
I thought it as a good essay. The #1 issue is that the crop of new "educated conservatives" is smaller and smaller every year. Even if one is dispositionally conservative (in the traditional American sense) it's hard to develop the knowledge and skills in today's education system that has fewer and fewer conservative role models. I see it with one of my teenagers. Conformity is prevalent and the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.
"Here, Hanania sounds to me like a Paul Ryan Republican. As it stands today, that faction is under the bus, having been tossed there by Donald Trump and his supporters."
Paul Ryan and similar Republicans tossed themselves under that bus.
"like a Paul Ryan Republican. As it stands today, that faction is under the bus, having been tossed there by Donald Trump and his supporters."
It was Paul Ryan who failed as a Republican House leader to get funding for a border wall, as was promised by Trump -- Ryan did more tossing Trump under the bus first.
This is kinda common in those who complain about Trump. Trump-haters insult or badly treat Trump, who returns even worse insults or worse treatment. (Lately with DeSantis, Trump is insulting first - and many Trump supporters are supporting him less because of this.)
Kling has often complained about lousy Trump appointees - yet since Biden's successful steal* of the election, no Kling complaints about any of Biden's terrible picks doing lousy stuff. Plus, Trump in changing / improving was at least going thru the advantage of democratic gov't - peaceful replacement of those not performing.
The Tech Right, and Kling, like rich Rep donors, don't like Trump and especially his strong anti-illegal immigrant stance, which all nativist anti-immigrants also are against. Tho it's Trump's boasting and vulgar "rich & winning" claims & style which so many educated folk make him "unqualified" to be President.
*Kling's idea is that gov't supported censorship of true news about a candidate doesn't rise to the level of "stealing" an election, because of the ballots being counted. Tho the FBI supported RussiaHoax was all about vague influence, rather than specific censorship of the truth - and of course, none of the deep state illegal election influencers will be indicted or punished. Most won't even be investigated.
Why is it so hard to accept the truth? The election was unfree, unfair - therefore stolen. Kling prefers confirmation bias analysis to claim "not stolen" rather than - yes, deep state stole the election. Why? probably because accepting that 2020 was stolen means ... what? That more should vote Trump 2024 for "some kind of justice"? - and Trump haters hate that idea, tho many want to continue the outrage porn of Trump hate intellectual masturbation.
I'll support Trump or DeSantis - any Rep better than every Dem. (I'm already tired of 2024.)
"populism" and "economic populism" are very different things. All these words are somewhat arbitrary made up categories. "Populism" is opposition to the present political elite ruling class. On issues like the origin of COVID, the populist position is this corrupt USA elite funded the research at the Wuhan lab and then played all these dirty tricks to lie about it. On tech censorship, the populist position is that the government is playing all these dirty censorship tricks to reduce circulation of narratives they dislike and amplify circulation of narratives that they do like. "Economic populism" is something totally different. The populists are critical of the US military industrial complex and the war in Ukraine in particular.
Elon Musk is a populist on all three issues I cited. Musk is of course an elite, he's one of the richest people on the planet, but he's a populist in a political sense. He's even a populist leader.
"Economic populism" is something completely different. I'm sympathetic with the "populism" that attacks US elite corruption and I'm not sympathetic with economic populism.
Hananis says, "The Tech Right is in many ways anti-populist". I don't think that is true, but it's arguably because we are using different interpretations of that term. I would cite the late Angelo Codevilla as a leading populist pundit. I think the tech right is aligned with and not opposed to someone like Codevilla.
Agreed. Hanania is wrong in his broader anti-populism and in thinking the Tech Right is distinct from the Popularity right.
But it true that the new Republicans have moved towards economic populism too. But that too is a form of ideological surrender where Republicans cede terms of the debate to their enemies.
The Paul Ryan Republican faction is thrown under the bus by Trump. Kling keeps saying that over and over.
Paul Ryan rose to the leadership of the Republican Party as a health care policy specialist and despite winning lots of elections and having control of all three branches of federal government, under Paul Ryan's leadership the Republican's ultimately delivered nothing or next to nothing. Paul Ryan may be a great policy writer, he may have great policy ideas, but as a political leader specifically on the health care issue, he seems to have done a terrible job of leading the party, building consensus, building messaging, and passing quality legislation.
Also, while Paul Ryan was leading health care legislation efforts with all three branches of federal government under Republican control, I noticed Kling was decidedly uninterested in everything Paul Ryan was doing.
Also, the tech right has been around for a while, they were a key part of Trump's success. Peter Thiel is obviously part of the tech right, he has been one of the most influential voices of the right and endorsed Trump in 2016. Elon Musk is now the biggest politically outspoken figure of the tech right in 2023.
Note the throwing under the bus too the idea that "crony capitalism" is bad. The difference between the Tech Right and libertarianism is the former's idea that government interference/subsidy on tech's behalf is good.
So it's a Paul Ryan + an unabashed support for Big Serious Capitalists, contra the romance of the small business person. None of this Institute for Justice stuff wherein helping taco truck entrepreneurs is on equal footing with less corporate regulation.
Great explanation of the shallowness I feel about too much of Richard's pseudo-insightful writing. Yet I'm glad Richard names it Tech Right, because of its economics, rather than the alpha soup. The contrarians among the top 10% IQ folk will always be a small segment-and usually turning off a majority of the voters who might support the positions if sold by a less superior seller/ politician.
Once upon a time, digital tech firms, having caught the regulatory state off-guard, spontaneously embraced de facto freedom from regulation. Nowadays, big tech firms lobby heavily for preemptive regulation of digital tech old and new. See, for example, Sam Altman's plea for regulation of AI. It's unclear whether the motives are insider-ism (regulatory capture), fear of a hostile standoff by lawmakers, and/or elite ideology. Count me more skeptical than Richard Hanania.
‘... the openness to change of the left.’ What drivel! The Left are not open to change. It MUST be done their centuries old, tired, failed way. Of course the Left’s way never fails - it just hasn’t had enough money spent on it, or hasn’t been done long enough, or not enough resources applied. Left open to change? Please... do me a favour, pull the other one, it’s got bells on.
What makes Elon Musk a special billionaire is he sees threats to own well-being and that of his employees and his children and he makes a public personal defense - he puts his own money and reputation at risk to defy the political consensus. He saw California's Covid policies threatening his business and he pushed back, ultimately moving Tesla's HQ to Texas. He sees Transgender activism a threat to children and so he defies his corporate executive peers and he speaks out in criticism. He sees threats to free speech and so he buys Twitter.
But Musk is a unique case. He made his billions off of government subsidies yet he feels no loyalty to government. Contrast that to Zuckerberg, Google and other Silicon Valley firms who profit from their government ties and who are all too willing to please the government's wishes.
Tech Right: Andrew Yang plus HBD statistics.
What's the political platform of the tech right?
1) Richard wants them to try to cut Social Security, DOA. Probably the single worst thing the GOP wasted political capital on for the last 20 years. If you hate olds just assume the US is going bankrupt eventually and pass huge child tax credits to funnel what money is left to young faster.
I would guess tech right opinions on healthcare run the gamut, and that's where the money is.
2) He wants more immigration even though immigration turned Silicon Valley into a one party far left state.
3) Move on from legalizing pot to legalizing meth?
4) All of the reforms Richard says he likes (low taxes, growth, school choice, anti-woke) are all happening in Red States full of those GOP populists he hates.
Silicon Valley voted in favor of affirmative action:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/results-california-proposition-16-repeal-ban-on-affirmative-action.html
Hanania's loathing of "Trump Republicans" specifically and of populism generally shows how narrow and naive Hanania's politics are. Kling is right to group Hanania with Paul Ryan. I would add Mitt Romney - same failed presidential ticket by the way.
The technocrat Republicans like Ryan and Romney love to talk about the ideal government policies, but they fail to consider how to get those policies implemented. They have no care in the world for the actual politics of policy change.
And so it is with Hanania. He pokes his finger at all the "ugly" Republicans. He laments the crazy Progressives. He criticizes populist movements and politicians. All true complaints. So who is going to lead policy change, Richard? And how is that change going to be realized seeing you have written off all the people who care about winning political battles?
"Squirrel" Trump might win another battle, but any win is unlikely to result in anything nearly as substantive as the Paul Ryan led tax cuts. Competence really does matter. And the Republicans have been busy burning theirs up for the sake of the performance. It's a hole that too many hole dwellers don't want to leave.
Trump is a untrustworthy leader. What is needed is a better leader for "Trump Republicans" to follow. The same demographic was Reagan Democrats in the 1980s. Same type of people. Very different results because they had a better leader.
Hanania enjoys insulting Trump Republicans. Yet these are the same people he will need to realize the policy changes he desires.
Hanania is somewhat of a troll of course (and he's self-aware about this), but as someone with more "populist" leanings than him, I sympathize with his frustration with Trump Republicans. The fact is that this is a low-IQ movement, and so much of it absolutely repulses people in a position to affect policy change.
Wondering out loud, what would be a high-IQ political movement? Who belongs to it?
My quick answer is big money lobbyists. They are smart in knowing what they want and knowing they can pay for it. I see all "volunteers" as occupying the spectrum of "dumb politics". Human capital that is too easily exploited for the personal gain of politicians.
Reagan was a leader with a positive vision and actual policies. The only 2024 "happy warrior" I've seen so far is Tim Scott. Any 2024 Trump voters are almost by definition low information, anti-policy, and conspiracists. They might be needed to get over the line. But there's nothing good to be said about them from a citizenship perspective. Why does the party let these minority of nuts have so much say? It's not like very many are going to vote for the D candidate.
95% of the thousands who attended Trump rallies in 2016 were good, optimistic American citizens. They were drawn to Trump because out of all the GOP candidates he was the only one unequivocally advocating for and defending them.
It is that simple. Trump became a giant pimple on the rump of the Republican Party because the Republican party was dismissive of its own party members and citizens willing to join the party. The GOP of Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney was all for immigration. All for Big Tech and Big Business. What Ryan and Romney had no time for was the everyday concerns of American citizens. Trump came along and gave this huge demographic something to cheer about.
The slur of "populism" is so conveniently used by political minorities. It is their way to dismiss real concerns of the citizenry. And then when a politician comes along that taps into those concerns and becomes popular himself, the political minority throw hissy fits and scream "How dare you be a populist!"
So strange. If government does not represent the popular views of the citizenry, what does it represent? Whose interests does it serve?
The citizenry are ignorant and they vote expressively. That's always been true. Trump is a charismatic game show host who is out for himself. Somehow some people believe he is on their side too. Support in 2016 might be understandable for some of the reasons you state. Not so in 2023/24. We need competent, sane elites. Paul Ryan was the one who got the tax cuts passed, not Orange Julius.
Informed people don't really want to go back to card catalogs in the library with the too frequent inability to find the book in the stacks. Informed people like being able to buy almost anything in the world with a few clicks. Informed people, including conservative watermelon farmers in FL, understand why the USA needs immigrants. https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2023/06/02/florida-immigration-law-undocumented-farm-workers-tuchman-dnt-ac360-vpx.cnn
Trump ran a brilliant campaign in 2016, he won a shocking stunning upset victory against much larger groups of well funded opponents. I'd argue that is a form of competence.
Paul Ryan seems to be a competent policy writer. But there are lots of those. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 was a team effort victory as is all legislation. Both Paul Ryan and Trump were part of the same team. If your argument is that Trump didn't write the actual policies, so what? Most presidents don't do that, they all have large teams of hundreds or thousands of people, and we don't know those people's names or who did what. That reminds me of when people used to bash Steve Jobs for not single handedly inventing all of Apple's products, but rather hiring thousands of others to do all the work. Of course CEOs hire thousands of workers, that's not a reasonable criticism.
Also, Paul Ryan made his name as a health care policy specialist, and rose to the leadership of the Republican Party on the issue of health care. The Republican Party won lots of elections on that issue, had control over all three branches of government, and under Paul Ryan's leadership, they seemed to squander their election victories and do nothing. I'd call that incompetence.
I wonder if this doesn't actually stem from an atheistic, ev. pscyh-inspired might makes right mentality, which Hanania subscribes to more than the modal right populist. You can lament the progressive domination but they're dominant for a reason. Hanania can't help but be impressed by their cunning (and the fact the apolitical, intelligent professional class leans in the Dem direction).
I thought it as a good essay. The #1 issue is that the crop of new "educated conservatives" is smaller and smaller every year. Even if one is dispositionally conservative (in the traditional American sense) it's hard to develop the knowledge and skills in today's education system that has fewer and fewer conservative role models. I see it with one of my teenagers. Conformity is prevalent and the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.
"Here, Hanania sounds to me like a Paul Ryan Republican. As it stands today, that faction is under the bus, having been tossed there by Donald Trump and his supporters."
Paul Ryan and similar Republicans tossed themselves under that bus.
"like a Paul Ryan Republican. As it stands today, that faction is under the bus, having been tossed there by Donald Trump and his supporters."
It was Paul Ryan who failed as a Republican House leader to get funding for a border wall, as was promised by Trump -- Ryan did more tossing Trump under the bus first.
This is kinda common in those who complain about Trump. Trump-haters insult or badly treat Trump, who returns even worse insults or worse treatment. (Lately with DeSantis, Trump is insulting first - and many Trump supporters are supporting him less because of this.)
Kling has often complained about lousy Trump appointees - yet since Biden's successful steal* of the election, no Kling complaints about any of Biden's terrible picks doing lousy stuff. Plus, Trump in changing / improving was at least going thru the advantage of democratic gov't - peaceful replacement of those not performing.
The Tech Right, and Kling, like rich Rep donors, don't like Trump and especially his strong anti-illegal immigrant stance, which all nativist anti-immigrants also are against. Tho it's Trump's boasting and vulgar "rich & winning" claims & style which so many educated folk make him "unqualified" to be President.
*Kling's idea is that gov't supported censorship of true news about a candidate doesn't rise to the level of "stealing" an election, because of the ballots being counted. Tho the FBI supported RussiaHoax was all about vague influence, rather than specific censorship of the truth - and of course, none of the deep state illegal election influencers will be indicted or punished. Most won't even be investigated.
Why is it so hard to accept the truth? The election was unfree, unfair - therefore stolen. Kling prefers confirmation bias analysis to claim "not stolen" rather than - yes, deep state stole the election. Why? probably because accepting that 2020 was stolen means ... what? That more should vote Trump 2024 for "some kind of justice"? - and Trump haters hate that idea, tho many want to continue the outrage porn of Trump hate intellectual masturbation.
I'll support Trump or DeSantis - any Rep better than every Dem. (I'm already tired of 2024.)
Hanania's article is good. But these people have a broader spectrum of views than what he describes https://twitter.com/Scholars_Stage/status/1665839448741879808?t=dUK_LTMA_TPgnQs634E6bQ&s=19
Hanania is right about the economic populism. It's going to get mugged by reality.
"populism" and "economic populism" are very different things. All these words are somewhat arbitrary made up categories. "Populism" is opposition to the present political elite ruling class. On issues like the origin of COVID, the populist position is this corrupt USA elite funded the research at the Wuhan lab and then played all these dirty tricks to lie about it. On tech censorship, the populist position is that the government is playing all these dirty censorship tricks to reduce circulation of narratives they dislike and amplify circulation of narratives that they do like. "Economic populism" is something totally different. The populists are critical of the US military industrial complex and the war in Ukraine in particular.
Elon Musk is a populist on all three issues I cited. Musk is of course an elite, he's one of the richest people on the planet, but he's a populist in a political sense. He's even a populist leader.
"Economic populism" is something completely different. I'm sympathetic with the "populism" that attacks US elite corruption and I'm not sympathetic with economic populism.
Hananis says, "The Tech Right is in many ways anti-populist". I don't think that is true, but it's arguably because we are using different interpretations of that term. I would cite the late Angelo Codevilla as a leading populist pundit. I think the tech right is aligned with and not opposed to someone like Codevilla.
Agreed. Hanania is wrong in his broader anti-populism and in thinking the Tech Right is distinct from the Popularity right.
But it true that the new Republicans have moved towards economic populism too. But that too is a form of ideological surrender where Republicans cede terms of the debate to their enemies.
The Paul Ryan Republican faction is thrown under the bus by Trump. Kling keeps saying that over and over.
Paul Ryan rose to the leadership of the Republican Party as a health care policy specialist and despite winning lots of elections and having control of all three branches of federal government, under Paul Ryan's leadership the Republican's ultimately delivered nothing or next to nothing. Paul Ryan may be a great policy writer, he may have great policy ideas, but as a political leader specifically on the health care issue, he seems to have done a terrible job of leading the party, building consensus, building messaging, and passing quality legislation.
Also, while Paul Ryan was leading health care legislation efforts with all three branches of federal government under Republican control, I noticed Kling was decidedly uninterested in everything Paul Ryan was doing.
Also, the tech right has been around for a while, they were a key part of Trump's success. Peter Thiel is obviously part of the tech right, he has been one of the most influential voices of the right and endorsed Trump in 2016. Elon Musk is now the biggest politically outspoken figure of the tech right in 2023.
“And if I were younger and more focused, I would be trying to turn one of my LLM app ideas into a business right now.”
Would love to hear more about your llm app ideas...🙏👍
https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/five-chatgpt-businesses-you-should?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Note the throwing under the bus too the idea that "crony capitalism" is bad. The difference between the Tech Right and libertarianism is the former's idea that government interference/subsidy on tech's behalf is good.
So it's a Paul Ryan + an unabashed support for Big Serious Capitalists, contra the romance of the small business person. None of this Institute for Justice stuff wherein helping taco truck entrepreneurs is on equal footing with less corporate regulation.
Great explanation of the shallowness I feel about too much of Richard's pseudo-insightful writing. Yet I'm glad Richard names it Tech Right, because of its economics, rather than the alpha soup. The contrarians among the top 10% IQ folk will always be a small segment-and usually turning off a majority of the voters who might support the positions if sold by a less superior seller/ politician.