The political difficulty: You can't beat something with nothing. A mere "hope that we find social ways to change social norms" via "trial and error" won't win elections or guide policy.
Until new norms somehow emerge, much of politics will continue to address the social divide as thought it were a conflict between capital and labor — or perhaps a mercantilist conflict among nations.
Roughly speaking, two rival economic policy frameworks will command the debate:
1) The "redistribution" framework. Tax and transfer. Means-tested welfare. Ideas about universal basic income.
2) The "pre-distribution" framework, to shield U.S. labor from competition and to improve the bargaining power of workers. Pro-labor regulations. Minimum wages. Tariffs.
In terms of political psychology, pre-distribution appeals to workers because it "levels the playing field." Capital and foreign nations can be alter-cast and out-cast as enemies. Pre-distribution operates upstream, so to speak.
By contrast, redistribution operates downstream and therefore may more readily be dismissed rhetorically as "handouts."
In a nutshell, Arnold's diagnosis -- 'It's the culture, stupid!' — is correct. However, because no one knows how to fix culture, policy discourse will continue to focus on economic drama. The pre-distribution framework naturally appeals to workers (including 'staff') because it integrates old-school sentiments of 'the dignity of labor' and evergreen 'us vs them' politics.
I was careless then. Social policy, sure. Most policy is: bread, circuses, and a whole lof of social policy. A policy that alters or could alter cultural norms - and hence society - for the better? No.
I'm rather uncertain on the social impact of UBI alone but if it replaced many of the existing government support programs, I have no doubt it would be an improvement.
Or, if you like: we pretended to be laissez-faire, but in fact had an economic policy that reshaped the economy. However, we must continue the pretense and so we shall call the effects purely "social", not economic, ones, and we will address it with "social" policy: UBI.
I'd recommend an alternative interpretation of all that workers vs capitalists narrative stuff as less seriously economic and more as a proxy for the "Party Elites vs Republican Voters" inner struggle in the GOP for the intellectual reformulation of the party's purpose and ideas. He is really alluding to the meme of the party elites being typical elites and only fake "conservatives" who in reality have been corrupted by social pressures and money to side with "woke capital" by conning and then betraying and selling out their own constituents. The cultural crack-up and increasing anger and strain of tension and incoherence has been building and worsening for a long time, and Trump coming out of nowhere 9 years ago to easily crush over a dozen top establishment figures was a consequence and symptom of the underlying disease being ignored and left untreated for a long time. For a more severe case of an even later stage of this disease, see the recent totally catastrophic crack-up of the even more fake "conservative" tories in Britain. The national-level GOP pretends to want to do things it conspicuously elects to not pursue in earnest at every opportunity and the only policy action in any of those directions is happening solely at the state level in places like Florida and Texas.
So, in the struggle to win the hearts and minds of Republican voters and gain control over the future direction of the party, there are certain blanks in the narrative that have to be filled in and a pent-up demand to explain the cause of the rift and position oneself against the soft, fake, corrupt liars running in the party and in the pockets of donors who don't give a damn about the interests or preferences of normie Republican voters. That's where a lot of the evil capital stuff comes from. "Every big company wants more immigration and more visas for cheaper labor at the expense of the American worker, and they donate heavily to the GOP establishment politicians to make sure they get it and that any noises to the contrary are just baloney to sucker the chumps for yet another election cycle."
I've lost any confidence in NatCon. Putting aside its foreign op-like features, the fusion of insurrectionism (Eastman), Christian nationalism (Hawley's comments etc), and weird left economic policies is dumb and dangerous.
Accusing Eastman of "insurrectionism" is mistaken; he sought to proceed under the Constitution to challenge a corrupt election, somewhat parallel to what was done in the contested Tilden - Hayes election of 1876. Democrats used government agents to foment disorders at the Capitol as the basis for disrupting normal proceedings which could have sent the question of elector validity back to the state legislatures, and used the media to falsely portray what occurred as an insurrection.
I'm not sure whether even Hazony has a clear picture on where to draw the lines between which people or views are in or out of "NatCon", and at this point their conferences are just kind of extra-big tent shows providing a platform for all kinds of anti-progressive "celebrities" and heterodox takes of interest of people who lean that direction, but any of whose views cannot be said to define any kind of orthodox doctrine of an organized intellectual project. So it strikes me as really premature to settle on a position of what NatCon is or isn't, and whether whatever it happens to be or whoever happen to be the leading figures deserve ones confidence (to do what?) or not.
If it were me, I would have focused on the philosophical problem that it is impossible to have social ideals or a coherent conception of the proper aims and purposes of government without having at least some implicit fuzzy notion of "the good", and that inevitably every state has a de facto state religion even if the state tries to deny it, and that since that's the case, it's fair to consider which of the possible state religions might produce outcomes more in lines with a particular individual's or group's history, traditions, belief systems, preferences, and interests. Consider, e.g., T. S. Eliot's "The Idea of a Christian Society" (1939).
Hawley would have been better off saying, "America should stick to the ideals and values of traditional (at least, post-Civil-War) American Nationalism, and the left has been attacking and eroding the basis, benefit, and popularity of Traditional American Nationalism for a long time, in a way that has made American society much less friendly to Christians and Christianity and much more divisive and acrimonious." To categorize what Lincoln scholars refer to as the "American Civil Religion" or "Religion of the Republic" as a particularly Christian or Christianity-derived ethos is just to get the history really wrong.
As a historical matter, there is no question that the Puritans established their American colonies as strict Protestant Theocracies, and in the mid 17th century they would have balked at claims like, "Those stern Puritans, disciples of Augustine, gave us limited government and liberty of conscience and popular sovereignty. Because of our Christian heritage, we protect the liberty of all to worship according to conscience."
Um, no, the original Puritans were definitely not about any of that stuff, and to the extent Hawley is referring to general notions of tolerance and the individual's right to be left alone by "the state", these didn't take hold in most of America until the 18th century and would be better attributed to a number of other streams of influence, such as being more Quaker, traditionally British, or of reflecting Enlightenment Era rationalist liberal ideals in general.
Now, the descendants a few generations down the line from those Puritans, having mellowed out considerably (Even intensely Calvinist Sam Adams would not measure up to the more purely pious vision of his forbears) converged somewhat to the positions which came to be held by the descendants of the other distinct colonial groups, and those descendants were about that stuff. However, they understood that what they believed and were doing to be in stark contrast and even in the mode of rejection of Puritan ideals of social organization and governance. Consider, for example, the Deism of Franklin, Jefferson, and the adamantly anti-Christian and all-around bête noir Thomas Paine.
I have a right-wing in-law who is a small business owner. Other than not wanting the business to fail, the interests of him and his workers are not aligned.
As a graduate of an improv school, I can see how some politicians really are distant cousins of actors, and they take delight in fluffing up the stark contrasts of compensation between workers and C-corp. I I can see how that might fit into the narrative that he wants families to be given more support (tax incentives), and as much as I think there needs to be stronger support for them (as any individual or group), I think that sometimes it ostracizes others (single filers).
The description you provide of a childhood immersed in screens seems exactly perfect for a world in which there is air-conditioned office work for women and symbol manipulation for others. I am not sure why anyone would express discomfort with it as it is so very congruent.
I'm with Helen Andrews, who is sticking her neck out lately and concluded a recent piece thusly:
"Robert Lighthizer, who served as Donald Trump’s U.S. Trade Representative, wrote last week in the Economist: 'Since the end of the cold war, America has come as close as almost any major country in history to eliminating significant tariffs. It was a bold experiment, and it has failed.' Strong words, but entirely justified by the facts of recent history. If only libertarians would wake up and notice them."
If on some continuum "industrial policy" is utterly laughable, then "social norm policy" is the raving of the insane.
It is strange to me, the idea that there is a binary of policy and no-policy, and we belong in the healthy latter category.
This seems to me a willful pretense. Of course we are at the tail end of an experiment in policy.
If you're happy with the status quo in America, for men especially, you should just own it in its glorious particulars, instead of saying - this was freedom, above all freedom from policy. Likewise, if you're happy with a culture shaped by feminism - that is to say, again, by policy.
I read something on the internet the other day that I realized was the most unquestionably radical thought I had ever seen on my computer screen. It was a commenter, on Noah Smith's blog of all places, asking: "For example, what would it have taken for Apple to produce iterations of the iPod and iPhone here?"
I listened to a podcast with a general surgeon about the decline of American medicine, and among other things, the surgeon remarked that he and his peers have noticed that recent surgical residents perform surgical tasks at a relatively slow pace, and he speculated that this was partly because they no longer grow up performing manual tasks (for example, sewing for girls and auto repair or model building for boys), and instead they are, as you say, 'immersed in screens' or 'symbol manipulation.' Competent surgery is one of those things we can't outsource to Southeast Asia. Think about that before you go under the knife.
I am pretty amazed that we’re still a country that designs things, assuming we are (I hope) because it seems to me that building and repairing things would be a necessary precursor to designing them.
So maybe the smart folks get up to speed fast without that tinkering we used to associate with invention and manufacture.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which seems to be the main justification for going to war against China, is a specialized semiconductor foundry that fabricates chips designed by 'fabless' chip companies like Nvidia, which is based in Santa Clara, CA. Specialization and trade!
There would be so much screeching about it, but maybe the pithiest way to "go back" would be the Lochner standard for contract enforcement. Lochner is infamous, right up there with Dred Scott in the legal profession's "bad bad bad boy must never be followed again" overturned precedents. To summarize, it was a case that invalidated a labor law that limited the working hours for bakers on health grounds. The dissents are famous for setting the groundwork for progressive labor regulation of all stripes.
The thing is, capital just goes to where it thinks it will get the most Lochner-like treatment, be it in China, Vietnam, or Botswana. It is what drove the expansion of the New World in the first place -- land and a total absence of the intense labor regulation present in the Old World. In the US we have had endless self-pleasuring about how good and nice our labor standards are while doing everything we can to evade those standards by creating jobs internationally and maintaining willful blindness to illegal labor operations using non-citizens. There is no willingness whatsoever to reexamine this arrangement because it is working out fine for the people who control the country.
I'd be interested to know more about the Old World labor regulations. I would have supposed there were just too many people.
ETA: the screeching reminds me of this business about Hawley being stupid. I bet he probably is. I bet if I checked him on the the one or two subjects I know *anything* about, I might well find him so. But then, are not most of us stupid compared to the smart and successful? And you'd have to be pretty stupid to think you can go up against "the people who control the country" as you say. You're never going to win the College Bowl against those people. Or maybe, yeah, he's not bright but he's actually a little less stupid than we think, because he perceives that there's something rotten, though he can't talk about it very intelligently ...
Guilds, prohibitions against slavery, and a largely agricultural economy (too many people problem, not much wasteland to expand to). Urban real estate was also extremely expensive. By the late middle ages, the respected scholars Joseph and Frances Gies wrote that century-plus mortgages were common for prime urban real estate, such that they would be passed down through families. That is why people were willing to take the long voyage to try the grueling frontier lifestyle.
I think it's smart to evaluate politics the same way that you evaluate all conflicts. Do I have sufficient numbers of lawyers, guns, and money to win this conflict? If no, do not enter that conflict.
I can't see how slavery would have entered into Old World economic calculations given that they didn't have anywhere to grow plantation crops, and there was no shortage of labor otherwise.
I put little stock in someone like Hawley who stated he would object to certifying the Electoral College votes to "bring attention to the shortcomings" of states adhering to their election laws and the "unprecedented intrusion" of tech monopolies in the electoral process. He is a midwit both in his political and economic discernment.
He's not really a midwit. Lots of smart people in politics pretend to believe and then say a lot of stupid things, not because they are stupid, but because the system's incentives and pressures and the particular voting audience in any district select for those stupid things, and saying anything smarter or more realistic or coherent puts a candidate at a clear disadvantage. In other words, they often have to play to the crowd with all its lowest common denominators, because anyone who doesn't gets replaced by someone who does. It's like a genius cinema writer who can't get his artistic vision produced and so can only get paid to pump out dozens of mindless superhero movie scripts. So, think about it from the perspective of a smart politician playing this game and reading some criticism about it. He is bound to scoff and roll his eyes and conclude the critic is the actual midwit who isn't savvy, doesn't get it, and is too naive to understand how things work and that one can't take everything a politician says in our system literally or seriously, and you are supposed to know that, to the extent it happens at all, the real, quality, rigorous intellectual discussion can only take place elsewhere.
With all his references to St. Augustine and others, Hawley was not trying to pretend to be stupid. The audience was not a blue-collar audience, so he was free to be himself.
I don't think that's a complete picture of "the audience" for a politician like Hawley, which is in reality everyone all the time. He can't pull a Yassar Arafat and say one thing in English and then turn around and immediately say the exact opposite thing in Arabic. Sure, he can raise or lower the "grade reading level" of the way the ideas are expressed, but he can't afford any kind of inconsistencies with the messages he puts out at part of his necessarily perpetual campaigning. And the results always come out unable to withstand much rigorous intellectual scrutiny, just like with any socially acceptable cover story for crude politcs.
If Hawley wasn't also a politician I'd guess his arguments for integralism would be more rigorous and resemble those recently made by Adrian Vermeule, who can make them that way because he's not a politician and prominent member of a major party.
Whether or not Hawley is deceitfully cunning, I do agree that many politicians are just that. There are fewer, unfortunately, that live by virtues such a integrity, honor, selflessness.
To achieve rational social norms we need to first do away with norms created by the use of check box classifications of humanity and the Woke mentality that can't seem to consider that relevant factors beyond silly check-boxes. Going back to religion is not the answer.
Even those that claim rational norms as requiring a GOD viewpoint don't see the non-believer in "Pie in the Sky" silliness can still see long term family stability is good for growing children.
It's hard to take a critique seriously when the policy being critiqued is not explained, but is argued against by jumping to a negative evaluation.
"his prescription is at best irrelevant and at worst harmful."
It's not clear what he's proposing that fits this, maybe, the general: "tariffs, trade unions, and minimum wage laws. " Does he really favor min. wage laws and trade unions???
Those countries that trust God more than they trust the Govt are very very likely to do better that the secularists.
Praying to God can often satisfy the Urge to Do Something -- praying IS something. Very often when the govt does something, the US would have been better off, in the long term, if the govt had NOT acted and instead we (sinners? !!) left it "to God" -- who acts thru actions of believers, without force.
Christian nationalism would be better for Jews, and all success oriented minorities, including the white male minority, and even white females, and Asians. But opposing it without specifics is intellectually flabby. (Supporting it without specifics is a bit flabby too, but ok in a limited comment.)
Most of the Nat Con agenda looks interesting and quite relevant.
What the Left is saying, essentially: I am smarter than you and you should do what I tell you to because I am smarter than you are. And if it doesn't work it's because you didn't do it correctly.
The Right responds: I am smarter than you and you should do what I tell you to because I am smarter than you are. And if it doesn't work it's because you didn't do it correctly.
In other words, don't listen to those (other) bozos tell you what to do. Let me tell you what to do. If you did a brain transplant between someone on the far left and someone on the far right I doubt most people would notice.
Hawley is a just another guy who thinks he has all the answers but doesn't know all the questions. Worse, doesn't know he doesn't know he doesn't know all the questions.
You are correct. It's far more complicated than he thinks. Good luck on trying to convince him of that. After all he knows all the answers. Just ask him.
As for not being alarmed about the his Christian Country outlook...? Well maybe but if I were a Hindu or a Buddhist or a Shintoist or a Native American who still believed in the old ways or well you should get the idea by now. I might have second thoughts. It's not just a Jewish\Christian\Moslem divide and that's the end of your selections. One from column A or one from B or one from C. Sorry no other choices.
You are absolutely correct about it being cultural question. And the answer is? Beats me. I don't know all the questions let alone all the answers.
Arnold, how do you square your own views on Wall Street with what you're writing here?
My impression of your view on Wall Street, the Fed, and the Federal government is that they are hopelessly and incestuously intertwined. Unchecked, it's a continual exercise in socializing risks and losses while allowing insiders free profit. You put everything in sophisticated terms and leave the reader to their own conclusions, but it seems like a fair reading to say the Hawley/Nat Con approach is a folk version of the more scientific argument.
If we use the phrase "privatized profits, socialized risks," I am most upset b the socialized risks. He is most upset by the privatized profits. He also thinks that he is entitled to tell corporations how to deploy their capital, because he thinks he knows what benefits workers and they don't.
"One reason that most Jews are reluctant to move right is that they have what I call Christophobia. This is not a fear of Christ. It is a fear of Christians."
No. There are many reasons but that is the least of them.
As a Jew, I have always found it interesting that Jew and Christians share the exact same Old Testament. That makes us closer, not further...
Most jews still have an idealized image of socialism and an assumption that people are good. The phrase "Tikkun Olam", to repair and improve the world explains their motivation. Israel and the Kibbutzes were founded as a socialist state... Many of them still live in that era.
Jewish Christianophobia was once a thing, but it is now increasingly outdated and even in the past was only one part of a more general phenomenon of "Outsider Normophobia" or even more abstractly as the Nietzschean 'ressentiment' of "LowerStatus HigherStatusPhobia" / "Oppressed OppresorPhobia" that has been the psychological fuel powering the engine of the leftist political formula for centuries.
Every society has a kind of implicit archetype of what the highest status successful people are like, in terms of a combination of attributes each of which can categorize groups with different perceived average levels of status, social acceptability, competence, ability, and success. It's as easy as pushing on an open door to convince people who are perceived as outsiders or lower status or less desirable that these archetypal winners don't deserve their ill-gotten gains obtained unjustly at the expense of the losers, who are thus totally justified in ganging up on the winner class or core groups to take them down a peg and reclaim misappropriated stuff and status. This even works on fantastically successfully (and even officially discriminated against!) recent-immigrant groups from South and Northeast Asia, who can in large numbers be easily influenced to genuinely and openly hate ordinary white Americans who in most other respects in terms of life outcomes are objectively way down the various status totem poles.
While plenty have tried, Jews are too white to succeed at jumping on the anti-white bandwagon, and now that it's undeniably clear that the left openly supports any enemy of Israel no matter how depraved or what the circumstances, most Jews determined to stay leftist are desperately grasping at preserving the myth of the Christan Boogeyman at the exact time that story is becoming increasingly untenable and ridiculous as (1) Christianity and religiosity in general rapidly recedes, and (2) what devout Christians remain tend to be the biggest friends of Jews and Israel left around the American political scene, and in every other European country where regular Christian church-going already went nearly extinct decades ago, there are no such friends left, and the young Jews are leaving.
"There is a social divide in this country, but it is not between capital and labor. It is between the college-educated (especially women) and the non-college-educated (especially men).
I don't think so. The social divide is most certainly red-blue.
Maybe you mean economic divide. There is certainly an economic divide based on college but there is also one related to labor vs capital. I wouldn't want to chose which of these is more important.
Your diagnosis of the social divide is incisive.
The political difficulty: You can't beat something with nothing. A mere "hope that we find social ways to change social norms" via "trial and error" won't win elections or guide policy.
Until new norms somehow emerge, much of politics will continue to address the social divide as thought it were a conflict between capital and labor — or perhaps a mercantilist conflict among nations.
Roughly speaking, two rival economic policy frameworks will command the debate:
1) The "redistribution" framework. Tax and transfer. Means-tested welfare. Ideas about universal basic income.
2) The "pre-distribution" framework, to shield U.S. labor from competition and to improve the bargaining power of workers. Pro-labor regulations. Minimum wages. Tariffs.
In terms of political psychology, pre-distribution appeals to workers because it "levels the playing field." Capital and foreign nations can be alter-cast and out-cast as enemies. Pre-distribution operates upstream, so to speak.
By contrast, redistribution operates downstream and therefore may more readily be dismissed rhetorically as "handouts."
In a nutshell, Arnold's diagnosis -- 'It's the culture, stupid!' — is correct. However, because no one knows how to fix culture, policy discourse will continue to focus on economic drama. The pre-distribution framework naturally appeals to workers (including 'staff') because it integrates old-school sentiments of 'the dignity of labor' and evergreen 'us vs them' politics.
We should be clear, though, that UBI if enacted is not a social but an industrial or "economic" policy.
seems both social and economic to me.
I was careless then. Social policy, sure. Most policy is: bread, circuses, and a whole lof of social policy. A policy that alters or could alter cultural norms - and hence society - for the better? No.
I'm rather uncertain on the social impact of UBI alone but if it replaced many of the existing government support programs, I have no doubt it would be an improvement.
Or, if you like: we pretended to be laissez-faire, but in fact had an economic policy that reshaped the economy. However, we must continue the pretense and so we shall call the effects purely "social", not economic, ones, and we will address it with "social" policy: UBI.
I'd recommend an alternative interpretation of all that workers vs capitalists narrative stuff as less seriously economic and more as a proxy for the "Party Elites vs Republican Voters" inner struggle in the GOP for the intellectual reformulation of the party's purpose and ideas. He is really alluding to the meme of the party elites being typical elites and only fake "conservatives" who in reality have been corrupted by social pressures and money to side with "woke capital" by conning and then betraying and selling out their own constituents. The cultural crack-up and increasing anger and strain of tension and incoherence has been building and worsening for a long time, and Trump coming out of nowhere 9 years ago to easily crush over a dozen top establishment figures was a consequence and symptom of the underlying disease being ignored and left untreated for a long time. For a more severe case of an even later stage of this disease, see the recent totally catastrophic crack-up of the even more fake "conservative" tories in Britain. The national-level GOP pretends to want to do things it conspicuously elects to not pursue in earnest at every opportunity and the only policy action in any of those directions is happening solely at the state level in places like Florida and Texas.
So, in the struggle to win the hearts and minds of Republican voters and gain control over the future direction of the party, there are certain blanks in the narrative that have to be filled in and a pent-up demand to explain the cause of the rift and position oneself against the soft, fake, corrupt liars running in the party and in the pockets of donors who don't give a damn about the interests or preferences of normie Republican voters. That's where a lot of the evil capital stuff comes from. "Every big company wants more immigration and more visas for cheaper labor at the expense of the American worker, and they donate heavily to the GOP establishment politicians to make sure they get it and that any noises to the contrary are just baloney to sucker the chumps for yet another election cycle."
I've lost any confidence in NatCon. Putting aside its foreign op-like features, the fusion of insurrectionism (Eastman), Christian nationalism (Hawley's comments etc), and weird left economic policies is dumb and dangerous.
Accusing Eastman of "insurrectionism" is mistaken; he sought to proceed under the Constitution to challenge a corrupt election, somewhat parallel to what was done in the contested Tilden - Hayes election of 1876. Democrats used government agents to foment disorders at the Capitol as the basis for disrupting normal proceedings which could have sent the question of elector validity back to the state legislatures, and used the media to falsely portray what occurred as an insurrection.
I'm not sure whether even Hazony has a clear picture on where to draw the lines between which people or views are in or out of "NatCon", and at this point their conferences are just kind of extra-big tent shows providing a platform for all kinds of anti-progressive "celebrities" and heterodox takes of interest of people who lean that direction, but any of whose views cannot be said to define any kind of orthodox doctrine of an organized intellectual project. So it strikes me as really premature to settle on a position of what NatCon is or isn't, and whether whatever it happens to be or whoever happen to be the leading figures deserve ones confidence (to do what?) or not.
As for Hawley's Christian Nationalism, here is a link to his speech: https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/07/09/sen-josh-hawley-america-founded-on-christian-nationalism/
If it were me, I would have focused on the philosophical problem that it is impossible to have social ideals or a coherent conception of the proper aims and purposes of government without having at least some implicit fuzzy notion of "the good", and that inevitably every state has a de facto state religion even if the state tries to deny it, and that since that's the case, it's fair to consider which of the possible state religions might produce outcomes more in lines with a particular individual's or group's history, traditions, belief systems, preferences, and interests. Consider, e.g., T. S. Eliot's "The Idea of a Christian Society" (1939).
Hawley would have been better off saying, "America should stick to the ideals and values of traditional (at least, post-Civil-War) American Nationalism, and the left has been attacking and eroding the basis, benefit, and popularity of Traditional American Nationalism for a long time, in a way that has made American society much less friendly to Christians and Christianity and much more divisive and acrimonious." To categorize what Lincoln scholars refer to as the "American Civil Religion" or "Religion of the Republic" as a particularly Christian or Christianity-derived ethos is just to get the history really wrong.
As a historical matter, there is no question that the Puritans established their American colonies as strict Protestant Theocracies, and in the mid 17th century they would have balked at claims like, "Those stern Puritans, disciples of Augustine, gave us limited government and liberty of conscience and popular sovereignty. Because of our Christian heritage, we protect the liberty of all to worship according to conscience."
Um, no, the original Puritans were definitely not about any of that stuff, and to the extent Hawley is referring to general notions of tolerance and the individual's right to be left alone by "the state", these didn't take hold in most of America until the 18th century and would be better attributed to a number of other streams of influence, such as being more Quaker, traditionally British, or of reflecting Enlightenment Era rationalist liberal ideals in general.
Now, the descendants a few generations down the line from those Puritans, having mellowed out considerably (Even intensely Calvinist Sam Adams would not measure up to the more purely pious vision of his forbears) converged somewhat to the positions which came to be held by the descendants of the other distinct colonial groups, and those descendants were about that stuff. However, they understood that what they believed and were doing to be in stark contrast and even in the mode of rejection of Puritan ideals of social organization and governance. Consider, for example, the Deism of Franklin, Jefferson, and the adamantly anti-Christian and all-around bête noir Thomas Paine.
So I’ve now glanced at his Wikipedia page. I’m most struck that he was valedictorian of his Jesuit high school.
I think that clears him of being stupid, though it may open him more to the charge of being cynical.
A valedictorian of a Jesuit high school is prolly de facto the 2nd smartest person in the class, or at least third.
I'd like to believe that Hawley et all are just naïve populists that coud in principal be cured with a megadose of Econ 101. But I don't. :(
Labour vs Capital is a meaningful distinction in large corporations
but right wingers are owners/employees in small to medium business were the interest of the workers and the owners are aligned
I have a right-wing in-law who is a small business owner. Other than not wanting the business to fail, the interests of him and his workers are not aligned.
A couple weeks ago, I watched Hawley's inquisition of the Boeing CEO: https://youtu.be/3LOG9tL6MKM?feature=shared
As a graduate of an improv school, I can see how some politicians really are distant cousins of actors, and they take delight in fluffing up the stark contrasts of compensation between workers and C-corp. I I can see how that might fit into the narrative that he wants families to be given more support (tax incentives), and as much as I think there needs to be stronger support for them (as any individual or group), I think that sometimes it ostracizes others (single filers).
The description you provide of a childhood immersed in screens seems exactly perfect for a world in which there is air-conditioned office work for women and symbol manipulation for others. I am not sure why anyone would express discomfort with it as it is so very congruent.
I'm with Helen Andrews, who is sticking her neck out lately and concluded a recent piece thusly:
"Robert Lighthizer, who served as Donald Trump’s U.S. Trade Representative, wrote last week in the Economist: 'Since the end of the cold war, America has come as close as almost any major country in history to eliminating significant tariffs. It was a bold experiment, and it has failed.' Strong words, but entirely justified by the facts of recent history. If only libertarians would wake up and notice them."
If on some continuum "industrial policy" is utterly laughable, then "social norm policy" is the raving of the insane.
It is strange to me, the idea that there is a binary of policy and no-policy, and we belong in the healthy latter category.
This seems to me a willful pretense. Of course we are at the tail end of an experiment in policy.
If you're happy with the status quo in America, for men especially, you should just own it in its glorious particulars, instead of saying - this was freedom, above all freedom from policy. Likewise, if you're happy with a culture shaped by feminism - that is to say, again, by policy.
I read something on the internet the other day that I realized was the most unquestionably radical thought I had ever seen on my computer screen. It was a commenter, on Noah Smith's blog of all places, asking: "For example, what would it have taken for Apple to produce iterations of the iPod and iPhone here?"
I listened to a podcast with a general surgeon about the decline of American medicine, and among other things, the surgeon remarked that he and his peers have noticed that recent surgical residents perform surgical tasks at a relatively slow pace, and he speculated that this was partly because they no longer grow up performing manual tasks (for example, sewing for girls and auto repair or model building for boys), and instead they are, as you say, 'immersed in screens' or 'symbol manipulation.' Competent surgery is one of those things we can't outsource to Southeast Asia. Think about that before you go under the knife.
I am pretty amazed that we’re still a country that designs things, assuming we are (I hope) because it seems to me that building and repairing things would be a necessary precursor to designing them.
So maybe the smart folks get up to speed fast without that tinkering we used to associate with invention and manufacture.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which seems to be the main justification for going to war against China, is a specialized semiconductor foundry that fabricates chips designed by 'fabless' chip companies like Nvidia, which is based in Santa Clara, CA. Specialization and trade!
Yes, definitely that’s the example!
There would be so much screeching about it, but maybe the pithiest way to "go back" would be the Lochner standard for contract enforcement. Lochner is infamous, right up there with Dred Scott in the legal profession's "bad bad bad boy must never be followed again" overturned precedents. To summarize, it was a case that invalidated a labor law that limited the working hours for bakers on health grounds. The dissents are famous for setting the groundwork for progressive labor regulation of all stripes.
The thing is, capital just goes to where it thinks it will get the most Lochner-like treatment, be it in China, Vietnam, or Botswana. It is what drove the expansion of the New World in the first place -- land and a total absence of the intense labor regulation present in the Old World. In the US we have had endless self-pleasuring about how good and nice our labor standards are while doing everything we can to evade those standards by creating jobs internationally and maintaining willful blindness to illegal labor operations using non-citizens. There is no willingness whatsoever to reexamine this arrangement because it is working out fine for the people who control the country.
I'd be interested to know more about the Old World labor regulations. I would have supposed there were just too many people.
ETA: the screeching reminds me of this business about Hawley being stupid. I bet he probably is. I bet if I checked him on the the one or two subjects I know *anything* about, I might well find him so. But then, are not most of us stupid compared to the smart and successful? And you'd have to be pretty stupid to think you can go up against "the people who control the country" as you say. You're never going to win the College Bowl against those people. Or maybe, yeah, he's not bright but he's actually a little less stupid than we think, because he perceives that there's something rotten, though he can't talk about it very intelligently ...
We are well and truly f**ked, we stupid.
Guilds, prohibitions against slavery, and a largely agricultural economy (too many people problem, not much wasteland to expand to). Urban real estate was also extremely expensive. By the late middle ages, the respected scholars Joseph and Frances Gies wrote that century-plus mortgages were common for prime urban real estate, such that they would be passed down through families. That is why people were willing to take the long voyage to try the grueling frontier lifestyle.
I think it's smart to evaluate politics the same way that you evaluate all conflicts. Do I have sufficient numbers of lawyers, guns, and money to win this conflict? If no, do not enter that conflict.
I can't see how slavery would have entered into Old World economic calculations given that they didn't have anywhere to grow plantation crops, and there was no shortage of labor otherwise.
I put little stock in someone like Hawley who stated he would object to certifying the Electoral College votes to "bring attention to the shortcomings" of states adhering to their election laws and the "unprecedented intrusion" of tech monopolies in the electoral process. He is a midwit both in his political and economic discernment.
He's not really a midwit. Lots of smart people in politics pretend to believe and then say a lot of stupid things, not because they are stupid, but because the system's incentives and pressures and the particular voting audience in any district select for those stupid things, and saying anything smarter or more realistic or coherent puts a candidate at a clear disadvantage. In other words, they often have to play to the crowd with all its lowest common denominators, because anyone who doesn't gets replaced by someone who does. It's like a genius cinema writer who can't get his artistic vision produced and so can only get paid to pump out dozens of mindless superhero movie scripts. So, think about it from the perspective of a smart politician playing this game and reading some criticism about it. He is bound to scoff and roll his eyes and conclude the critic is the actual midwit who isn't savvy, doesn't get it, and is too naive to understand how things work and that one can't take everything a politician says in our system literally or seriously, and you are supposed to know that, to the extent it happens at all, the real, quality, rigorous intellectual discussion can only take place elsewhere.
With all his references to St. Augustine and others, Hawley was not trying to pretend to be stupid. The audience was not a blue-collar audience, so he was free to be himself.
I don't think that's a complete picture of "the audience" for a politician like Hawley, which is in reality everyone all the time. He can't pull a Yassar Arafat and say one thing in English and then turn around and immediately say the exact opposite thing in Arabic. Sure, he can raise or lower the "grade reading level" of the way the ideas are expressed, but he can't afford any kind of inconsistencies with the messages he puts out at part of his necessarily perpetual campaigning. And the results always come out unable to withstand much rigorous intellectual scrutiny, just like with any socially acceptable cover story for crude politcs.
If Hawley wasn't also a politician I'd guess his arguments for integralism would be more rigorous and resemble those recently made by Adrian Vermeule, who can make them that way because he's not a politician and prominent member of a major party.
Ah, the senator is quite bright you see.
It's his constituents who are rubes.
He is merely deceitful and duplicitous.
Um, duh! Welcome to democracy.
Well, he is a politician, after all. Deceit and duplicity are practically job requirements. He might also be stupid, however.
Whether or not Hawley is deceitfully cunning, I do agree that many politicians are just that. There are fewer, unfortunately, that live by virtues such a integrity, honor, selflessness.
I don't know about Hawley specifically but generally speaking I'm sure you are right.
I don’t prescribe a cure, but the sentiments expressed in this video are obvious to me.
https://youtu.be/HyY092tKBYU?feature=shared
To achieve rational social norms we need to first do away with norms created by the use of check box classifications of humanity and the Woke mentality that can't seem to consider that relevant factors beyond silly check-boxes. Going back to religion is not the answer.
Even those that claim rational norms as requiring a GOD viewpoint don't see the non-believer in "Pie in the Sky" silliness can still see long term family stability is good for growing children.
It's hard to take a critique seriously when the policy being critiqued is not explained, but is argued against by jumping to a negative evaluation.
"his prescription is at best irrelevant and at worst harmful."
It's not clear what he's proposing that fits this, maybe, the general: "tariffs, trade unions, and minimum wage laws. " Does he really favor min. wage laws and trade unions???
Those countries that trust God more than they trust the Govt are very very likely to do better that the secularists.
Praying to God can often satisfy the Urge to Do Something -- praying IS something. Very often when the govt does something, the US would have been better off, in the long term, if the govt had NOT acted and instead we (sinners? !!) left it "to God" -- who acts thru actions of believers, without force.
Christian nationalism would be better for Jews, and all success oriented minorities, including the white male minority, and even white females, and Asians. But opposing it without specifics is intellectually flabby. (Supporting it without specifics is a bit flabby too, but ok in a limited comment.)
Most of the Nat Con agenda looks interesting and quite relevant.
Let me try to explain this:
What the Left is saying, essentially: I am smarter than you and you should do what I tell you to because I am smarter than you are. And if it doesn't work it's because you didn't do it correctly.
The Right responds: I am smarter than you and you should do what I tell you to because I am smarter than you are. And if it doesn't work it's because you didn't do it correctly.
In other words, don't listen to those (other) bozos tell you what to do. Let me tell you what to do. If you did a brain transplant between someone on the far left and someone on the far right I doubt most people would notice.
Hawley is a just another guy who thinks he has all the answers but doesn't know all the questions. Worse, doesn't know he doesn't know he doesn't know all the questions.
You are correct. It's far more complicated than he thinks. Good luck on trying to convince him of that. After all he knows all the answers. Just ask him.
As for not being alarmed about the his Christian Country outlook...? Well maybe but if I were a Hindu or a Buddhist or a Shintoist or a Native American who still believed in the old ways or well you should get the idea by now. I might have second thoughts. It's not just a Jewish\Christian\Moslem divide and that's the end of your selections. One from column A or one from B or one from C. Sorry no other choices.
You are absolutely correct about it being cultural question. And the answer is? Beats me. I don't know all the questions let alone all the answers.
Arnold, how do you square your own views on Wall Street with what you're writing here?
My impression of your view on Wall Street, the Fed, and the Federal government is that they are hopelessly and incestuously intertwined. Unchecked, it's a continual exercise in socializing risks and losses while allowing insiders free profit. You put everything in sophisticated terms and leave the reader to their own conclusions, but it seems like a fair reading to say the Hawley/Nat Con approach is a folk version of the more scientific argument.
If we use the phrase "privatized profits, socialized risks," I am most upset b the socialized risks. He is most upset by the privatized profits. He also thinks that he is entitled to tell corporations how to deploy their capital, because he thinks he knows what benefits workers and they don't.
"One reason that most Jews are reluctant to move right is that they have what I call Christophobia. This is not a fear of Christ. It is a fear of Christians."
No. There are many reasons but that is the least of them.
As a Jew, I have always found it interesting that Jew and Christians share the exact same Old Testament. That makes us closer, not further...
Most jews still have an idealized image of socialism and an assumption that people are good. The phrase "Tikkun Olam", to repair and improve the world explains their motivation. Israel and the Kibbutzes were founded as a socialist state... Many of them still live in that era.
Jewish Christianophobia was once a thing, but it is now increasingly outdated and even in the past was only one part of a more general phenomenon of "Outsider Normophobia" or even more abstractly as the Nietzschean 'ressentiment' of "LowerStatus HigherStatusPhobia" / "Oppressed OppresorPhobia" that has been the psychological fuel powering the engine of the leftist political formula for centuries.
Every society has a kind of implicit archetype of what the highest status successful people are like, in terms of a combination of attributes each of which can categorize groups with different perceived average levels of status, social acceptability, competence, ability, and success. It's as easy as pushing on an open door to convince people who are perceived as outsiders or lower status or less desirable that these archetypal winners don't deserve their ill-gotten gains obtained unjustly at the expense of the losers, who are thus totally justified in ganging up on the winner class or core groups to take them down a peg and reclaim misappropriated stuff and status. This even works on fantastically successfully (and even officially discriminated against!) recent-immigrant groups from South and Northeast Asia, who can in large numbers be easily influenced to genuinely and openly hate ordinary white Americans who in most other respects in terms of life outcomes are objectively way down the various status totem poles.
While plenty have tried, Jews are too white to succeed at jumping on the anti-white bandwagon, and now that it's undeniably clear that the left openly supports any enemy of Israel no matter how depraved or what the circumstances, most Jews determined to stay leftist are desperately grasping at preserving the myth of the Christan Boogeyman at the exact time that story is becoming increasingly untenable and ridiculous as (1) Christianity and religiosity in general rapidly recedes, and (2) what devout Christians remain tend to be the biggest friends of Jews and Israel left around the American political scene, and in every other European country where regular Christian church-going already went nearly extinct decades ago, there are no such friends left, and the young Jews are leaving.
"There is a social divide in this country, but it is not between capital and labor. It is between the college-educated (especially women) and the non-college-educated (especially men).
I don't think so. The social divide is most certainly red-blue.
Maybe you mean economic divide. There is certainly an economic divide based on college but there is also one related to labor vs capital. I wouldn't want to chose which of these is more important.