So much hubris, and so little self-awareness. Klein approaches a decent level of self-knowledge, but whenever he says something reasonable (e.g. Biden isn't fit to be President) he gets shouted down by his own. And now the few who are piling in on "Abundance" with token deregulatory gestures seem to be just engaging in cynical electioneering.
Richard Hanania has done some excellent work in the past year or so arguing that Democrats (together with the small segment of Never Trump Republicans) are in fact intellectually and morally superior to MAGAs.
This was not true at the time Sowell was writing. The degeneration of the Republican base and the crank sort are a recent phenomenon.
This doesn't mean that the Democrats are all that great. Hanania would agree with you (Arnold) that thoughtful libertarians are better than Democrats on both these courts.
But it does deserve to be acknowledged. I would say that a failure to acknowledge it is your number one blind spot, actually.
It’s great to quote Sowell, and maybe especially The Vision of the Anointed. Rob Henderson’s Luxury Beliefs is a better phrase, but a subset of the Vision based beliefs. Tho from 1994, most of the topical examples Sowell uses are still relevant, including outrage over higher infant death of black babies delivered by white doctors.
It would be great if Arnold would do a book review of it.
Abundance, for the working & middle classes, is already Trump’s econ plan.
And it’s working. Especially tariffs.
Most “expert” economists have a Blind Spot about tariffs & leverage, including AK. Recent trade deals, with Japan and especially Europe, show Trump’s deal instincts as better than Ivory Tower theory.
"Sowell argues that people on the left who are politically engaged behave as if they were anointed with wisdom that others lack. This belief is so strongly held that nothing counts as evidence against it. It is an axiom, not an empirically falsifiable proposition."
I think it's a function of the desire to reward cooperators and punish defectors that you've written about previously. The Ezra Klein types probably conceive the situation as being one where their coalition favors more collective action, which they classify as a form of cooperation and thus pro-social behavior, while their opponents do not, making them defectors and thus anti-social, little different from chronic litterers or vandals. You can understand how this would lead to a sense of self-righteousness: if your primary political opposition is comprised largely of people exhibiting anti-social tendencies, you'd never consider them legitimate, either.
If you ask me, this is a cognitive failure born of sub-Dunbar thinking, but I'm sure I've got my own epistemological failure modes, also.
I think it's mainly that the other side is happy with sending random Venezuelan people straight to Salvadoran prison without a trial. Etc etc, examples could be multiplied.
I say this in full knowledge that Democrats are on board with a lot of race and sex discrimination and have done much evil in service of that goal. Still, the El Salvador thing plus January 6, etc etc, reflects worse moral values and quality of thinking.
People get used to doing whatever is easiest for themselves, in the short run.
I noticed that after Covid. Places that had closed to the public, or closed their bathrooms, were slow to re-open; McDonald's in particular locally for the longest time seemed to realize it could do business without letting nasty people inside and having to clean up after them.
Take the open border. It's obvious that people for whom more immigration was a good thing, electorally, and status-wise among their social crowd - would not enforce the border with much energy. Then in time, one would not even need to reference that a border or an immigrant flood existed, so lax was one's enforcement of it. By inaction, one had produced a policy change.
If pressed, you could observe that there was still a border, still some Border Patrol in some places.
This is so much the case, that GOP or Dem, either happily acquiesced in this scheme because - easy.
Not easy in its ultimate consequences, of course, at the border or in the hinterland or in the metro areas that represent all of American population growth in the last few decades - but easy for a long time in the way that nothing is easier than something.
You could adduce the Long War as opposed to my thesis - and I'd accept that. Wouldn't it have been easier to end it, much sooner? I think that perpetuating it got at something much more fundamental to people's hubristic worldview, and perhaps a divide between the class of likely policymakers, and the military.
It was easier not to make waves about the Long War.
I’d forget about American exceptionalism or quirks altogether.
I observe that people who are not nutjobs, don’t mind in the main deferring to someone they regard as their superior, whether by nature or by birth. For many people, this is the most comfortable way to get along, myself included.
I’m certain Mark Twain made a similar observation somewhere.
We’re a long way in time from the frontier.
Problem is that some large percentage of people, variably of course but widely, have another instinct, that of scenting frauds.
Obviously, America has a proud tradition of fraudsters and demagogues who seek and gain political office. I think at points the public has been less credulous about those people and more like, oh, how much harm can they really do? This has been amply illustrated in my state, where there’s been almost an affection for nuts and idiots, the more colorful the better, who want to go to the statehouse.
The trouble is that now, combined with the screechy ideologues, they are easily the majority of the elected. They are dealing with some pretty big sums of money. They can do and are doing real harm.
I don’t include Trump in this crowd because of one key difference: he has a surprisingly sound track record for being right about things. And I say that as someone for whom he’s dead wrong about what’s indisputably most important.
"These all are related problems stemming from inter-related causes. Their root is a painful, but well-earned, collapse in national trust."
People, that is just incoherent gibberish-speak, strategically dissembled to shift accountability away from the blameworthy. Which is exactly the problem! You know it wasn't written by the AI's because the AI's have already developed the minimum sense of intellectual shame that would have prevented them from doing so.
It is an absurd usage of the word 'root', i.e., an ultimate upstream cause not itself caused by its own downstream effects. As if the problem was 'trust', which somehow itself is not a consequence of observed failures stemming from a lack of trustworthiness. It would be error but at least not immediately ridiculous to say it's some kind of Catch-22 or vicious cycle, in which trust could bootstrap itself into a self-validating truth if we just believe in it like the kids in Peter Pan, but the writers like DiStefano who blame vague abstract concepts like 'trust' fall short of even the attempt to make that error.
"I’m willing to support Abundance, but not as merely a Democratic Party reform. I want it integrated into an agenda meant to restore faith in the American system and to renew America." - With this line, DiStefano double down on avoiding accountability. It's really hard to fix a problem when you refuse to clearly identify and deal with its actual root cause. He shows that he totally missed the "Everything Bagel Liberalism" (really, progressivism) point Klein and Thompson made when identifying the main culprit and driver of the phenomenon, which Klein also calls 'Vetocracy'. Much as DiStefano might not want to concede the point, it is indeed a problem particular to the American Left. And, to the extent the Left maintains enough power to stop building in America, is something that can only be remedied by, yes, reforms to the way that power is organized and manifested in the form of the Democratic Party.
To be fair, Klein and Thompson weren't quite brave (or reckless) enough to explicitly spoon-feed and hand-walk their center-left readers the whole way to the conclusion, because every step along that path creates more distracting problems for what is already an uphill battle.
Here is what "Vetocracy / Everything Bagel Progressivism" means, in real-speak translation,
"Look people, in actual reality, we cannot get everything you want. Understanding this and facing it is what it means to be be mature, well-adjusted adults in the room and not a bunch of fanatical children lost in magical thinking and imaginative fantasies untethered to actual existence. There IS scarcity, there ARE constraints and limits, of time, money, material, political power, manpower, land, everything. There are inescapable conflicts and trade-offs. Not everything is magically positive-sum. Inevitably, insurmountably, there are occasions for which, if we increase some this, there is literally no choice but to decrease some other that.
"If we are trying to get as much as much as we want that we can get, then to do so so in a smart and sane way means we need to admit these trade-offs exist, understand them, and try our best to prioritize so we can compromise to optimize. To the extent we refuse to do that, we are choosing, actively or passively, a -worse- future, one we will like -less- than a possible alternative! It is because we, the left, the current attitudes and arrangements of the American Democratic Party, cannot currently actually make these trade-offs and do this rational prioritization, that we are -screwing America up- by making it poorer and poorly-performing where nothing can get done. Not even by the GOVERNMENT which -should- theoretically (i.e., like in China, or in New Deal America) enjoy all kind of advantages in getting big things done because, it can use its legal might to just steamroller over troublemakers and roadblockers in ways that make all the power and wealth of big private companies look negligible by comparison.
"And yet, just look at and face the facts. American government now -sucks- at getting things done. Yeah, you are going to blame the right, look, I totally despite them too, but you know what, here's another wake-up call from adult reality: in the bluest places where we can blame the right the least, the government sucks the most. Ouch! I know! This is pretty bad for us, and a particular problem for our particular political side as opposed to an American problem for all distrusting Americans (only some idiot would think that) - precisely because we are the adherents of the ideology and members of the party which WANTS the GOVERNMENT to be the institution doing all these things, which prefers it to those private sectors alternatives, which advocates for more being done by government and which argues for that end not in the manner of saying it's worth the cost, but in saying that the government is actually better at doing them!
Which, sad to say, it currently IS NOT! That would be bad enough, if we could kind of keep fooling people to keep believing government is not as bad as it seems. Unfortunately, we can't even do THAT well anymore, and most people now really believe government IS just as bad as it LOOKS to be in terms getting things done. We haven't faced a collapse in pro-state-competence morale this bad since Reagan! And it's because we aren't prioritizing. We are sweating the small stuff, and for the sake of preventing a drop of some cost we are giving up an ocean of benefit.
Consequentially we are -screwing ourselves- by making our cities and our country pathetic, poorer, and poorer-performing, and making our party lose credibility and popularity, i.e., votes, i.e. POWER! Come on American Left, you let the Wokerati run things for a while, how'd that work out? "That's how you got Trump!" What, too soon? It's the second time! Now it's time to let us center-left adults-in-the-room take the wheel for a while, and get things back on track."
This is what DiStefano missed, and it shows. Now, the problem is, "Ok, and how exactly are you going to prioritize? What principle of adjudication are you going to use to settle disputes and choose between rival claims? How are you weighing all the various factors in your grand social utility formula, and what measure are you trying to optimize for? And what gives you the right to decide? How many points does Social Justice get per basket?"
This is where Klein and Thompson are going to let such a questioner down. They seem only able to vaguely point to, well, on the one hand, a Neoliberal conception of general economic growth, which doesn't exactly "excite the base", to put it mildly. Or else, on the other hand, the political expediency of whatever it takes to keep winning elections. So, some kind of CCP-like sustainable inner-party mechanism that gets the joke and is able to pay lip service to the folk version of the political ideology while at the same time knowing it's kind of childish and dangerous and preventing it from ever actually getting implemented enough that it becomes another example of the party inadvertently shooting itself in the foot, and also somehow making sure that noisy troublemakers on their left who don't get the joke nevertheless get shut out and shut down.
“There is no class of Americans that is morally and intellectually superior to everyone else.”
Well that certainly may have been true while the Declaration of Independence was fresh and of consequence but by the time the reactionary counter-revolutionary cabal, working in secret, conspired to defenestrate the Articles of Confederation and supplant it with the republican second constitution, nothing could be farther from the truth. Madison’s notes on the Philadelphia proceedings are replete with examples of how the usurping constitution is founded on the principle of a superior governing class exercising control over the lesser classes whose role was to shut up and be governed.
Just one quick example, on August 7, 1787, Madison records Governor Morris declaiming (sounding like quite a few popular substackers):
“He had long learned not to be the dupe of words. The sound of Aristocracy therefore had no effect on him. The sound of Aristocracy therefore had no effect on him. It was the thing, not the name, to which he was opposed, and one of his principal objections to the Constitution as it is now before us, is that it threatens this country with an Aristocracy. The aristocracy will grow out of the House of Representatives. Give the votes to people who have no property, and they will sell them to the rich who will be able to buy them. We should not confine our attention to the present moment. The time is not distant when this country will abound with mechanics & manufacturers who will receive their bread from their employers. Will such men be the secure & faithful Guardians of liberty? Will they be the impregnable barrier against aristocracy? --He was as little duped by the association of the words ‘taxation & Representation.’ The man who does not give his vote freely is not represented. It is the man who dictates the vote. Children do not vote. Why? Because they want prudence, because they have no will of their own. The ignorant & the dependent can be as little trusted with the public interest. He did not conceive the difficulty of defining ‘freeholders’ to be insuperable. Still less that the restriction could be unpopular. 9/10 of the people are at present freeholders and these will certainly be pleased with it. As to Merchants etc if they have wealth & value the right they can aquire it. If not they don’t deserve it.”
And Morris won out in the end with no provision made for universal suffrage, nor even universal male suffrage provided for. This was left to the states whose inhabitants would have to fight for the right to vote. See: The Dorr Rebellion. No, the first nation to provide for universal male suffrage was France in 1848, and indeed this was a significant milestone in the history of democracy and no doubt an underlying reason for American conservative undying contempt for the French Revolution.
Which brings us to the abundance agenda. DiStefano’s heart appears in the right place, but what reform movement is going to get the institutions to work that hasn’t been tried 10 times already. The establishment indulges in the vision of the annointed and every reform initiative so far has done nothing but further entrench and divert more resources to it from the productive economy. The system is rotten from the core and thus constitutional reform seems, at least to one observer, to offer the last remaining chance at finding a path to national survival before the whole system implodes.
Thankfully there are many examples that we might profit from considering. To identify such states we might consider looking at Human Development Index rankings next to Government Budget per Capita and try to find nations that do a good job of creating the opportunity for a high quality of life while constraining government consumption of resources. Not surprisingly perhaps, we can find countries like Spain that spends but $11856.92 per capita per year in government budget yet scores 0.918 on the Human Development Index (in the top 30). Not surprisingly, perhaps, its constitution provides for a unitary by highly decentralized state that seems to resemble the Articles of Confederation more than the second constitution. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Spain ) Does Spain offer guideposts for a path to make America great again?
As more accurate versions of the truth are discovered and propagated, they become the new norm. Slowly, the popular JFK quotation evolves into a growing chorus of: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what your country is doing to you.”
The abundance movement seems to be the public choice movement in infancy. Be patient as these folks learn its fundamentals. Understand that their progress is heavily constrained by tribal loyalties, perception management, and risk of material loss. Also see the positive contribution they make to our country. Not all of them, but most.
My favorite part of this post is its opening lines, not only because of its accuracy, but because it sees dogma as a force for good and bad. You’re reinforcing in my mind that there is such thing as good dogma—perhaps synonymous with the word truth.
“A central dogma of American politics is that everyone is entitled to dignity. That is what ‘all men are created equal’ has traditionally meant.
My sense is that the central dogma of partisan Democrats is that they are the best political party because they are morally and intellectually superior to other Americans.”
When Dr. Kling was on Askblog, the header was "Taking the most charitable view of those who disagree". I notice just now that it's not here at his Substack blog, and there seems to be less and less of that attitude, both in Dr. Kling's own posts and in the responses to them in this comment section.
To be clear, I don't disagree with the substance of most of Dr. K's writing, including this current post. But recently, there seems to be more of assymetrical insight in those posts, and a great deal of it here in the comments. Indeed, some of the latter seem very much like the mirror image of the tendency on the left to treat opposition to progressivism as a psychiatric disorder, to be diagnosed and hopefully cured, and not as a position subject to reasoned debate.
There is also a difference between making an observation about the behaviours and belief systems of groups of individuals (or Trump) and honestly debating a policy supported by that group on its merits. Kling seems very fair when it comes to the latter, whereas an observation is an observation - doesn’t do much good to obscure it.
Most liberals say the same thing. Neither is accurate though I agree it often seems that way. If nothing else, I'd suggest you attend some Braver Angels events. Probably not exactly what you are looking for but it might be close. It might give you some hope.
As a general rule, first, verify d/dx > 0. Otherwise it is a waste of time and effort.
What I mean is, there has to be some justifiable expectation that change is possible and feasible. That original positions would change with exposure to more and better information and logically valid arguments which weight against those positions. One doesn't have to get all 'Bayesian' or 'Rationalist' about it, it's about knowing one is dealing with another who possesses the quality of being genuinely open-minded and persuadable. It is pointless to push against an immovable object.
The question is one of reasonableness and flexibility of belief, the difference between an eternally provisional hypothesis and a eternally impervious dogma. It's not necessarily wrong in some pan-metaphysical sense to have and adhere to inflexible beliefs, however, it is pointless to have debates about them, and fraudulent to entice others in bad faith to engage in such debates under the false pretense that one's mind is open when it is in fact closed.
In science one can only assess claims if they are in principle falsifiable. In markets one can only haggle over an exchange if there are prices, as opposed to matters some humans hold sacred to the point they are not for sale at any price. In the law a prosecutor can only bear a burden of providing proof beyond reasonable amounts of doubt, but not that of addressing all possible doubts.
Similarly, if "reasoned debate" is to have any meaning, it is reliant on a foundation consisting of the tacit or implicit promise by participants that they have open minds and would change their opinions or positions under some reasonable set of circumstance of feasibly demonstrable set of evidence and arguments. And the best and quickest way to test for this condition at the very outset is simple to ask one's opponent to explicitly articulate those circumstances in advance. "Provide me a target to aim at, and commit on your honor that should I hit it, you will be persuaded." It doesn't have to be "on honor", though sometimes that's enough. One could go further and actually put some real money at stake in a big public bet.
And if the person you are dealing with is unwilling to do that, then best to move on to someone who will.
I'm not even sure if one side or the other has to be able to change their position. Your position and mine might differ on some fundamental premise that's not subject to scientific proof or disproof.
The obvious example of this is abortion: many, if not most, opponents of abortion on demand believe that the conceptus has a moral status close to or equal to that of someone who's been born; many, if not most, proponents of AOD believe that its moral status is far less than that of a born human being. These beliefs aren't subject to scientific proof or disproof; and their holders' stance on abortion derive from those fundamental premises, so can't be changed by factual evidence.
But nevertheless, reasoned debate can occur. It might not change minds, but at least it can give each side a more charitable picture of the other. In the absence of such debate, it's easy for supporters of AOD to believe that its opponents only want to subjugate women; and easy for opponents to believe that supporters are indifferent to the suffering and death of helpless babies. Let the two sides encounter one another in a non-hostile fashion, and it's far less easy for each to regard the other as a collection of moral monsters who need to be suppressed by any means possible.
"recently, there seems to be more of assymetrical insight in those posts" . . . I believe that is true . . . but there may well be a good reason for that. Sometimes the drag from one side of the pole becomes so obvious that the center cannot hold.
The problem for Democrats is their political support is based on massive grift. The biggest supporters of the Democratic party are college academia and public sector unions (especially public education). Both these groups have the self-interest of using taxpayer money to provide themselves secure, comfortable employment. These groups assert their financial benefit is deserved because they provide a public good but they refuse to be measured by how well they actually perform that job!
An abundance agenda would require the demolition of the college academy cartel and public sector unions. Thus, I do not see the abundance agenda being accepted by the Democratic party. The gatekeepers of that party will refuse it and the party will have no choice but to go along - for the Democratic party is hostage to the status quo of funneling taxpayer money to academia and the public sector.
For a centrist political movement the Abundance agenda is fantastic and has the potential of pulling moderates away from the Democratic party dogma. The great question is can these moderates be elected? Clearly it is not easy for a "moderate" to survive his/her own party dogma- look at the grief Fetterman and Massie get for bucking their party dogma.
Trumpism / MAGA is about national abundance - big spending and the promotion of domestic industry. The Trump agenda is making the Democrats irrelevant on the national stage. But if/when economic crisis comes Trumpism will face a reckoning. It would be great if the Democrats were able to respond at that moment with a message of national investment with real accountability. But alas, I do not believe that can happen. A zebra cannot change its stripes.
When Democrats come back into power they will pull the same political stunt they have done for the past 60 years - promising bread in everyone's basket and then failing to deliver.
The plan is to elect moderates in red and purple states but still have the progressives drive the agenda.
See also, putting the “centrist” meat puppet Biden atop the Bernie/Liz platform, or all of the “centrist” Dem House candidates pushed forward in the 2006 or 2018 midterms only to follow Pelosi’s agenda to the letter without dissent, or Rahm saying a man can’t be a woman. Centrism is for show only. It is not where the money is, but it is where some of the votes are. The key is to get some of those votes but never risk the money.
That sense of moral superiority also stems from the fact that most progressives only know people like themselves. It’s the “ conservatives in the mist” of Jonah Goldberg. Consequently they automatically assign the worst intentions to people and ideas they literally do not understand, hence the idea that Americans are the worst bigots on the planet and need to be managed and educated serves as virtue signaling and justification for censure.
So much hubris, and so little self-awareness. Klein approaches a decent level of self-knowledge, but whenever he says something reasonable (e.g. Biden isn't fit to be President) he gets shouted down by his own. And now the few who are piling in on "Abundance" with token deregulatory gestures seem to be just engaging in cynical electioneering.
Richard Hanania has done some excellent work in the past year or so arguing that Democrats (together with the small segment of Never Trump Republicans) are in fact intellectually and morally superior to MAGAs.
This was not true at the time Sowell was writing. The degeneration of the Republican base and the crank sort are a recent phenomenon.
This doesn't mean that the Democrats are all that great. Hanania would agree with you (Arnold) that thoughtful libertarians are better than Democrats on both these courts.
But it does deserve to be acknowledged. I would say that a failure to acknowledge it is your number one blind spot, actually.
I agree, by the way, that a tendency to greatly exaggerate their/our moral and political superiority is a huge blind spot on the left of center.
It’s great to quote Sowell, and maybe especially The Vision of the Anointed. Rob Henderson’s Luxury Beliefs is a better phrase, but a subset of the Vision based beliefs. Tho from 1994, most of the topical examples Sowell uses are still relevant, including outrage over higher infant death of black babies delivered by white doctors.
It would be great if Arnold would do a book review of it.
Or even get an interview with Sowell, now 96?
Sadly, Tom Lehrer died, at 97.
Abundance as non-partisan is a great idea.
Abundance, for the working & middle classes, is already Trump’s econ plan.
And it’s working. Especially tariffs.
Most “expert” economists have a Blind Spot about tariffs & leverage, including AK. Recent trade deals, with Japan and especially Europe, show Trump’s deal instincts as better than Ivory Tower theory.
https://x.com/BehizyTweets/status/1949544940616487419 for example.
Having never heard of Abundance (capital A) and have just read that piece (linked) and still missing it, can someone here explain in in English?
"Sowell argues that people on the left who are politically engaged behave as if they were anointed with wisdom that others lack. This belief is so strongly held that nothing counts as evidence against it. It is an axiom, not an empirically falsifiable proposition."
I think it's a function of the desire to reward cooperators and punish defectors that you've written about previously. The Ezra Klein types probably conceive the situation as being one where their coalition favors more collective action, which they classify as a form of cooperation and thus pro-social behavior, while their opponents do not, making them defectors and thus anti-social, little different from chronic litterers or vandals. You can understand how this would lead to a sense of self-righteousness: if your primary political opposition is comprised largely of people exhibiting anti-social tendencies, you'd never consider them legitimate, either.
If you ask me, this is a cognitive failure born of sub-Dunbar thinking, but I'm sure I've got my own epistemological failure modes, also.
I think it's mainly that the other side is happy with sending random Venezuelan people straight to Salvadoran prison without a trial. Etc etc, examples could be multiplied.
I say this in full knowledge that Democrats are on board with a lot of race and sex discrimination and have done much evil in service of that goal. Still, the El Salvador thing plus January 6, etc etc, reflects worse moral values and quality of thinking.
Then there is "what is easy".
People get used to doing whatever is easiest for themselves, in the short run.
I noticed that after Covid. Places that had closed to the public, or closed their bathrooms, were slow to re-open; McDonald's in particular locally for the longest time seemed to realize it could do business without letting nasty people inside and having to clean up after them.
Take the open border. It's obvious that people for whom more immigration was a good thing, electorally, and status-wise among their social crowd - would not enforce the border with much energy. Then in time, one would not even need to reference that a border or an immigrant flood existed, so lax was one's enforcement of it. By inaction, one had produced a policy change.
If pressed, you could observe that there was still a border, still some Border Patrol in some places.
This is so much the case, that GOP or Dem, either happily acquiesced in this scheme because - easy.
Not easy in its ultimate consequences, of course, at the border or in the hinterland or in the metro areas that represent all of American population growth in the last few decades - but easy for a long time in the way that nothing is easier than something.
You could adduce the Long War as opposed to my thesis - and I'd accept that. Wouldn't it have been easier to end it, much sooner? I think that perpetuating it got at something much more fundamental to people's hubristic worldview, and perhaps a divide between the class of likely policymakers, and the military.
It was easier not to make waves about the Long War.
I’d forget about American exceptionalism or quirks altogether.
I observe that people who are not nutjobs, don’t mind in the main deferring to someone they regard as their superior, whether by nature or by birth. For many people, this is the most comfortable way to get along, myself included.
I’m certain Mark Twain made a similar observation somewhere.
We’re a long way in time from the frontier.
Problem is that some large percentage of people, variably of course but widely, have another instinct, that of scenting frauds.
Obviously, America has a proud tradition of fraudsters and demagogues who seek and gain political office. I think at points the public has been less credulous about those people and more like, oh, how much harm can they really do? This has been amply illustrated in my state, where there’s been almost an affection for nuts and idiots, the more colorful the better, who want to go to the statehouse.
The trouble is that now, combined with the screechy ideologues, they are easily the majority of the elected. They are dealing with some pretty big sums of money. They can do and are doing real harm.
I don’t include Trump in this crowd because of one key difference: he has a surprisingly sound track record for being right about things. And I say that as someone for whom he’s dead wrong about what’s indisputably most important.
"These all are related problems stemming from inter-related causes. Their root is a painful, but well-earned, collapse in national trust."
People, that is just incoherent gibberish-speak, strategically dissembled to shift accountability away from the blameworthy. Which is exactly the problem! You know it wasn't written by the AI's because the AI's have already developed the minimum sense of intellectual shame that would have prevented them from doing so.
It is an absurd usage of the word 'root', i.e., an ultimate upstream cause not itself caused by its own downstream effects. As if the problem was 'trust', which somehow itself is not a consequence of observed failures stemming from a lack of trustworthiness. It would be error but at least not immediately ridiculous to say it's some kind of Catch-22 or vicious cycle, in which trust could bootstrap itself into a self-validating truth if we just believe in it like the kids in Peter Pan, but the writers like DiStefano who blame vague abstract concepts like 'trust' fall short of even the attempt to make that error.
"I’m willing to support Abundance, but not as merely a Democratic Party reform. I want it integrated into an agenda meant to restore faith in the American system and to renew America." - With this line, DiStefano double down on avoiding accountability. It's really hard to fix a problem when you refuse to clearly identify and deal with its actual root cause. He shows that he totally missed the "Everything Bagel Liberalism" (really, progressivism) point Klein and Thompson made when identifying the main culprit and driver of the phenomenon, which Klein also calls 'Vetocracy'. Much as DiStefano might not want to concede the point, it is indeed a problem particular to the American Left. And, to the extent the Left maintains enough power to stop building in America, is something that can only be remedied by, yes, reforms to the way that power is organized and manifested in the form of the Democratic Party.
To be fair, Klein and Thompson weren't quite brave (or reckless) enough to explicitly spoon-feed and hand-walk their center-left readers the whole way to the conclusion, because every step along that path creates more distracting problems for what is already an uphill battle.
Here is what "Vetocracy / Everything Bagel Progressivism" means, in real-speak translation,
"Look people, in actual reality, we cannot get everything you want. Understanding this and facing it is what it means to be be mature, well-adjusted adults in the room and not a bunch of fanatical children lost in magical thinking and imaginative fantasies untethered to actual existence. There IS scarcity, there ARE constraints and limits, of time, money, material, political power, manpower, land, everything. There are inescapable conflicts and trade-offs. Not everything is magically positive-sum. Inevitably, insurmountably, there are occasions for which, if we increase some this, there is literally no choice but to decrease some other that.
"If we are trying to get as much as much as we want that we can get, then to do so so in a smart and sane way means we need to admit these trade-offs exist, understand them, and try our best to prioritize so we can compromise to optimize. To the extent we refuse to do that, we are choosing, actively or passively, a -worse- future, one we will like -less- than a possible alternative! It is because we, the left, the current attitudes and arrangements of the American Democratic Party, cannot currently actually make these trade-offs and do this rational prioritization, that we are -screwing America up- by making it poorer and poorly-performing where nothing can get done. Not even by the GOVERNMENT which -should- theoretically (i.e., like in China, or in New Deal America) enjoy all kind of advantages in getting big things done because, it can use its legal might to just steamroller over troublemakers and roadblockers in ways that make all the power and wealth of big private companies look negligible by comparison.
"And yet, just look at and face the facts. American government now -sucks- at getting things done. Yeah, you are going to blame the right, look, I totally despite them too, but you know what, here's another wake-up call from adult reality: in the bluest places where we can blame the right the least, the government sucks the most. Ouch! I know! This is pretty bad for us, and a particular problem for our particular political side as opposed to an American problem for all distrusting Americans (only some idiot would think that) - precisely because we are the adherents of the ideology and members of the party which WANTS the GOVERNMENT to be the institution doing all these things, which prefers it to those private sectors alternatives, which advocates for more being done by government and which argues for that end not in the manner of saying it's worth the cost, but in saying that the government is actually better at doing them!
Which, sad to say, it currently IS NOT! That would be bad enough, if we could kind of keep fooling people to keep believing government is not as bad as it seems. Unfortunately, we can't even do THAT well anymore, and most people now really believe government IS just as bad as it LOOKS to be in terms getting things done. We haven't faced a collapse in pro-state-competence morale this bad since Reagan! And it's because we aren't prioritizing. We are sweating the small stuff, and for the sake of preventing a drop of some cost we are giving up an ocean of benefit.
Consequentially we are -screwing ourselves- by making our cities and our country pathetic, poorer, and poorer-performing, and making our party lose credibility and popularity, i.e., votes, i.e. POWER! Come on American Left, you let the Wokerati run things for a while, how'd that work out? "That's how you got Trump!" What, too soon? It's the second time! Now it's time to let us center-left adults-in-the-room take the wheel for a while, and get things back on track."
This is what DiStefano missed, and it shows. Now, the problem is, "Ok, and how exactly are you going to prioritize? What principle of adjudication are you going to use to settle disputes and choose between rival claims? How are you weighing all the various factors in your grand social utility formula, and what measure are you trying to optimize for? And what gives you the right to decide? How many points does Social Justice get per basket?"
This is where Klein and Thompson are going to let such a questioner down. They seem only able to vaguely point to, well, on the one hand, a Neoliberal conception of general economic growth, which doesn't exactly "excite the base", to put it mildly. Or else, on the other hand, the political expediency of whatever it takes to keep winning elections. So, some kind of CCP-like sustainable inner-party mechanism that gets the joke and is able to pay lip service to the folk version of the political ideology while at the same time knowing it's kind of childish and dangerous and preventing it from ever actually getting implemented enough that it becomes another example of the party inadvertently shooting itself in the foot, and also somehow making sure that noisy troublemakers on their left who don't get the joke nevertheless get shut out and shut down.
“There is no class of Americans that is morally and intellectually superior to everyone else.”
Well that certainly may have been true while the Declaration of Independence was fresh and of consequence but by the time the reactionary counter-revolutionary cabal, working in secret, conspired to defenestrate the Articles of Confederation and supplant it with the republican second constitution, nothing could be farther from the truth. Madison’s notes on the Philadelphia proceedings are replete with examples of how the usurping constitution is founded on the principle of a superior governing class exercising control over the lesser classes whose role was to shut up and be governed.
Just one quick example, on August 7, 1787, Madison records Governor Morris declaiming (sounding like quite a few popular substackers):
“He had long learned not to be the dupe of words. The sound of Aristocracy therefore had no effect on him. The sound of Aristocracy therefore had no effect on him. It was the thing, not the name, to which he was opposed, and one of his principal objections to the Constitution as it is now before us, is that it threatens this country with an Aristocracy. The aristocracy will grow out of the House of Representatives. Give the votes to people who have no property, and they will sell them to the rich who will be able to buy them. We should not confine our attention to the present moment. The time is not distant when this country will abound with mechanics & manufacturers who will receive their bread from their employers. Will such men be the secure & faithful Guardians of liberty? Will they be the impregnable barrier against aristocracy? --He was as little duped by the association of the words ‘taxation & Representation.’ The man who does not give his vote freely is not represented. It is the man who dictates the vote. Children do not vote. Why? Because they want prudence, because they have no will of their own. The ignorant & the dependent can be as little trusted with the public interest. He did not conceive the difficulty of defining ‘freeholders’ to be insuperable. Still less that the restriction could be unpopular. 9/10 of the people are at present freeholders and these will certainly be pleased with it. As to Merchants etc if they have wealth & value the right they can aquire it. If not they don’t deserve it.”
And Morris won out in the end with no provision made for universal suffrage, nor even universal male suffrage provided for. This was left to the states whose inhabitants would have to fight for the right to vote. See: The Dorr Rebellion. No, the first nation to provide for universal male suffrage was France in 1848, and indeed this was a significant milestone in the history of democracy and no doubt an underlying reason for American conservative undying contempt for the French Revolution.
Which brings us to the abundance agenda. DiStefano’s heart appears in the right place, but what reform movement is going to get the institutions to work that hasn’t been tried 10 times already. The establishment indulges in the vision of the annointed and every reform initiative so far has done nothing but further entrench and divert more resources to it from the productive economy. The system is rotten from the core and thus constitutional reform seems, at least to one observer, to offer the last remaining chance at finding a path to national survival before the whole system implodes.
Thankfully there are many examples that we might profit from considering. To identify such states we might consider looking at Human Development Index rankings next to Government Budget per Capita and try to find nations that do a good job of creating the opportunity for a high quality of life while constraining government consumption of resources. Not surprisingly perhaps, we can find countries like Spain that spends but $11856.92 per capita per year in government budget yet scores 0.918 on the Human Development Index (in the top 30). Not surprisingly, perhaps, its constitution provides for a unitary by highly decentralized state that seems to resemble the Articles of Confederation more than the second constitution. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Spain ) Does Spain offer guideposts for a path to make America great again?
As more accurate versions of the truth are discovered and propagated, they become the new norm. Slowly, the popular JFK quotation evolves into a growing chorus of: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what your country is doing to you.”
The abundance movement seems to be the public choice movement in infancy. Be patient as these folks learn its fundamentals. Understand that their progress is heavily constrained by tribal loyalties, perception management, and risk of material loss. Also see the positive contribution they make to our country. Not all of them, but most.
My favorite part of this post is its opening lines, not only because of its accuracy, but because it sees dogma as a force for good and bad. You’re reinforcing in my mind that there is such thing as good dogma—perhaps synonymous with the word truth.
“A central dogma of American politics is that everyone is entitled to dignity. That is what ‘all men are created equal’ has traditionally meant.
My sense is that the central dogma of partisan Democrats is that they are the best political party because they are morally and intellectually superior to other Americans.”
“Half the harm that is done in the world
Is due to people who want to feel important.
They don’t mean to do harm—but the harm does not interest them.
Or they do not see it, or they justify it
Because they are absorbed in the endless struggle
To think well of themselves.” T.S. Eliot (The Cocktail Party)
Excellent.
Good one today. Thanks much.
When Dr. Kling was on Askblog, the header was "Taking the most charitable view of those who disagree". I notice just now that it's not here at his Substack blog, and there seems to be less and less of that attitude, both in Dr. Kling's own posts and in the responses to them in this comment section.
To be clear, I don't disagree with the substance of most of Dr. K's writing, including this current post. But recently, there seems to be more of assymetrical insight in those posts, and a great deal of it here in the comments. Indeed, some of the latter seem very much like the mirror image of the tendency on the left to treat opposition to progressivism as a psychiatric disorder, to be diagnosed and hopefully cured, and not as a position subject to reasoned debate.
There is also a difference between making an observation about the behaviours and belief systems of groups of individuals (or Trump) and honestly debating a policy supported by that group on its merits. Kling seems very fair when it comes to the latter, whereas an observation is an observation - doesn’t do much good to obscure it.
How would one approach trying to have a reasoned debate if the subject is the inability to have reasoned debate?
Most liberals say the same thing. Neither is accurate though I agree it often seems that way. If nothing else, I'd suggest you attend some Braver Angels events. Probably not exactly what you are looking for but it might be close. It might give you some hope.
As a general rule, first, verify d/dx > 0. Otherwise it is a waste of time and effort.
What I mean is, there has to be some justifiable expectation that change is possible and feasible. That original positions would change with exposure to more and better information and logically valid arguments which weight against those positions. One doesn't have to get all 'Bayesian' or 'Rationalist' about it, it's about knowing one is dealing with another who possesses the quality of being genuinely open-minded and persuadable. It is pointless to push against an immovable object.
The question is one of reasonableness and flexibility of belief, the difference between an eternally provisional hypothesis and a eternally impervious dogma. It's not necessarily wrong in some pan-metaphysical sense to have and adhere to inflexible beliefs, however, it is pointless to have debates about them, and fraudulent to entice others in bad faith to engage in such debates under the false pretense that one's mind is open when it is in fact closed.
In science one can only assess claims if they are in principle falsifiable. In markets one can only haggle over an exchange if there are prices, as opposed to matters some humans hold sacred to the point they are not for sale at any price. In the law a prosecutor can only bear a burden of providing proof beyond reasonable amounts of doubt, but not that of addressing all possible doubts.
Similarly, if "reasoned debate" is to have any meaning, it is reliant on a foundation consisting of the tacit or implicit promise by participants that they have open minds and would change their opinions or positions under some reasonable set of circumstance of feasibly demonstrable set of evidence and arguments. And the best and quickest way to test for this condition at the very outset is simple to ask one's opponent to explicitly articulate those circumstances in advance. "Provide me a target to aim at, and commit on your honor that should I hit it, you will be persuaded." It doesn't have to be "on honor", though sometimes that's enough. One could go further and actually put some real money at stake in a big public bet.
And if the person you are dealing with is unwilling to do that, then best to move on to someone who will.
I'm not even sure if one side or the other has to be able to change their position. Your position and mine might differ on some fundamental premise that's not subject to scientific proof or disproof.
The obvious example of this is abortion: many, if not most, opponents of abortion on demand believe that the conceptus has a moral status close to or equal to that of someone who's been born; many, if not most, proponents of AOD believe that its moral status is far less than that of a born human being. These beliefs aren't subject to scientific proof or disproof; and their holders' stance on abortion derive from those fundamental premises, so can't be changed by factual evidence.
But nevertheless, reasoned debate can occur. It might not change minds, but at least it can give each side a more charitable picture of the other. In the absence of such debate, it's easy for supporters of AOD to believe that its opponents only want to subjugate women; and easy for opponents to believe that supporters are indifferent to the suffering and death of helpless babies. Let the two sides encounter one another in a non-hostile fashion, and it's far less easy for each to regard the other as a collection of moral monsters who need to be suppressed by any means possible.
"recently, there seems to be more of assymetrical insight in those posts" . . . I believe that is true . . . but there may well be a good reason for that. Sometimes the drag from one side of the pole becomes so obvious that the center cannot hold.
The problem for Democrats is their political support is based on massive grift. The biggest supporters of the Democratic party are college academia and public sector unions (especially public education). Both these groups have the self-interest of using taxpayer money to provide themselves secure, comfortable employment. These groups assert their financial benefit is deserved because they provide a public good but they refuse to be measured by how well they actually perform that job!
An abundance agenda would require the demolition of the college academy cartel and public sector unions. Thus, I do not see the abundance agenda being accepted by the Democratic party. The gatekeepers of that party will refuse it and the party will have no choice but to go along - for the Democratic party is hostage to the status quo of funneling taxpayer money to academia and the public sector.
For a centrist political movement the Abundance agenda is fantastic and has the potential of pulling moderates away from the Democratic party dogma. The great question is can these moderates be elected? Clearly it is not easy for a "moderate" to survive his/her own party dogma- look at the grief Fetterman and Massie get for bucking their party dogma.
Trumpism / MAGA is about national abundance - big spending and the promotion of domestic industry. The Trump agenda is making the Democrats irrelevant on the national stage. But if/when economic crisis comes Trumpism will face a reckoning. It would be great if the Democrats were able to respond at that moment with a message of national investment with real accountability. But alas, I do not believe that can happen. A zebra cannot change its stripes.
When Democrats come back into power they will pull the same political stunt they have done for the past 60 years - promising bread in everyone's basket and then failing to deliver.
The plan is to elect moderates in red and purple states but still have the progressives drive the agenda.
See also, putting the “centrist” meat puppet Biden atop the Bernie/Liz platform, or all of the “centrist” Dem House candidates pushed forward in the 2006 or 2018 midterms only to follow Pelosi’s agenda to the letter without dissent, or Rahm saying a man can’t be a woman. Centrism is for show only. It is not where the money is, but it is where some of the votes are. The key is to get some of those votes but never risk the money.
That sense of moral superiority also stems from the fact that most progressives only know people like themselves. It’s the “ conservatives in the mist” of Jonah Goldberg. Consequently they automatically assign the worst intentions to people and ideas they literally do not understand, hence the idea that Americans are the worst bigots on the planet and need to be managed and educated serves as virtue signaling and justification for censure.
“Richard Nixon? Richard Nixon? I don’t know anyone who voted for Richard Nixon.”
The basket of deplorables, flyover country.