I read this comment section (as I used to read the comment section on your Wordpress blog) because it has excellent discussions. It's like a salon or a discussion group. You are the host and have the unquestionable right to do anything you want with it, of course, but I for one feel that a blanket ban on (well-mannered) discussion not directly commenting on the post would detract bigly from the value of this place. I admit it's probably easier to issue such a blanket ban than to squelch fights - easier not so much in terms of effort involved as in terms of avoiding messy personal judgment of what constitutes good manners and whether commenters X and Y are having a bad-mannered fight rather than a well-mannered discussion, as well as subsequent arguments about whether your judgment was correct, whether you are unduly partial to X or Y, and so on. It can get acrimonious and extremely unpleasant for everyone involved and I totally understand wanting to avoid it. But no-one who has a modicum of practical experience says government is easy. It should be obvious that a comment section is a little community and what moderators it has are its government. When its government refuses to govern it, it eventually devolves into lunchroom food fights and monkey feces-slinging and then dies. Examples are legion. The blanket ban is the procedural, bureaucratic way of dealing with problems of this type. Call it bureaucratic nanogovernment. The late Larry Auster and many other bloggers I could name use a different approach, somewhat similar to how militaries deal with such problems, which might be called - for contrast - monarchical nanogovernment. They implicitly or explicitly say, "I'm the host and I define what constitutes good manners in this place. Take it or leave it. I forbid discussion or criticism of how I run this place. If you have earned my respect I may entertain your opinions on that privately." One difference with the military is that the military necessarily has a hierarchy with higher levels delegating governing authority to the lower levels and supervising the use of said authority, whereas blogs are peers and each constitutes an independent realm, free to experiment with whatever type of government they each find congenial, useful etc.
<b>"It was not the Democratic Party that instigated teaching CRT. CRT comes from the schools of education. And the CRT in schools of education comes from the CRT in higher education writ large."</b>
This is horribly naive. Those schools of education are firmly under the control of the people who donate to, vote for, and control the Democratic Party.
I'd say "The Future of the Right" is more 'bleak' than 'murky'.
The right has mostly lost Big Business, Finance, and the National Security Complex, all of which can get most of what they want from the Democrats, and which have mostly accepted and adapted to the new equilibrium of woke-HR rules.
With no more of society's Commanding Heights to draw on, the establishment right can't be much more than a rump party of grifters and fake opposition who, at best, are trying to conserve yesterday's leftism. So you end up with a big portion of the population who have no other choice but to vote R but whose actual preferences and interests permanently lack voice, leadership, representation, etc.
Now, the short-term future of the right is a reaction against the excesses of the left, representing those harmed by those excesses.
The big picture stuff like doing what it would take to "Make the CDC Great Again" is no longer possible to achieve with ordinary, business-as-usual politics. Maybe that's the long-term future, but if someone actually had the power and will to do that, we would be well into "all bets are off" territory where it is impossible to make reasonable political forecasts. The emergence of a bipolar world order in which the whole world is an overlapping sphere of influences from both the US and China is also a scenario in which it's impossible to figure out what the 'right' would become.
The progressive ideology has some core ideological principles but manifests in practice according to political expediency at the present moment while the institutions of public influence try constantly to push out what 'expedient' is. And the political formula that is expedient for them is a version of clientalism in which the members of various groups perceive that they will be better off materially and in terms of social status with the progressives in charge. That is, there is an implicit quid-pro-quo or bargain for votes and contributions that is part of 'the deal'. The progressives promise that if they get power they will use it to put thumbs on the scale in favor of their clients.
In Democracy there is literally always some way to divide up the population to get to 51% according to this principle and formula of who is oppressing whom. Rich v poor, labor v management, white v nonwhite, private vs public, whatever. While clearly irresponsible there is so much political profit to be made by encouraging the consciousness of these divisions to the maximum degree and amplifying it to whatever delusional heights possible, that it present an irresistible temptation, and we now lack any effective institutional mechanism to discourage the yielding to it. So here we are.
But, by necessary consequence, that is a thumb against the people on the other side of the scale, who, if they can not be suckered into embracing their political disability, form a natural constituency for the opposition. For example, on law and order matters, progressive rule is now accurately associated with more, literal, "highway robbery" and "getting away with murder". Well, that's good for people who want to preserve the option of doing those things, or who prefer to see those things happen than to see their friends and allies harassed for it. But it's pretty bad for everyone else, especially the people who get robbed and murdered. "Is this what you want? We don't have to live like this."
Of course this "our clients vs your clients" version of politics is impossible to reconcile with a "common good" or "public interest" politics, and is just a manifestation of the overall trend in the direction of polarizing contrasts.
The (short-term) future of the right is to take that logic and expand it to every possible controversy, to find a way to fund it which isn't completely corrupting and counter-productive, and to also find a way to communicate with constituents without worrying about opponent gatekeepers. Anything involving multiple longshots has bleak prospects. But even worse, if anything like that worked, it would still have to defeat the Final Boss of the establishment declaring that system illegal as a terrorist threat to democracy or whatever (does anyone imagine it would even matter?) and sending the full force of USG against any identifiable leaders.
Again, anything that can defeat that final boss can do so much else that all bets would be off.
Douthat has an expression, "If you didn't like the Religious Right, wait until you see the Post-religious Right." I'd say, "If you don't like the Right, wait until you see what it's like with no Right at all."
I like comments on the The Post, but one of the advantages of substack is the thread clarity of seeing comments on comments. Easily skipped if the starting comment isn't so interesting. Most bloggers with comments enjoy the idea of commenters having small comment conversations with other commenters - that's how a good "comment community" is sustained. Usually also with a few host comments.
Yes to suspending commenters engaging in flame war fights, or gratuitous insults over some disagreement. Preferably after some warning.
Try looking at Freddie's hundred plus comments - he does NOT read them all; most are comments on comments ( x2 x3 x4). Or Razib Khan, Bari Weiss, Scott Alexander -- all have lively comment sections with comments on comments.
I think they also require those who comment to be subscribers. That likely self-limits the flaming.
Stopping insults is good. Stopping comments on comments is ... demoralizing, at least, and demotivating.
"But I don’t think that political power is the answer. I think we need to raise the status of rigorous thinking and lower the status of conformity to nonsense that travels under the banner of social justice. ... If you fight CRT through the political process, you may win a battle. But as long as college education has high status, and as long as CRT has high status within higher education, you will lose the war."
Why not do both? Should one not try to win battles as part of winning the war? One of your answers to the status of college problem is to erase any requirement for degrees for government jobs*. How does one coordinate collective action to get that change in government policy done if not at least in part via the political process?
Using the CRT thing as an example, try to imagine explaining this to a typical Youngkin voter mad about CRT stuff in the schools. "So, we shouldn't try to elect politicians who will order this stuff out of the government school curriculum?" - "No, you should try to lower the status of those ideas in higher education, and just wait and suck up the CRT as long as it takes to do that, which, even if the longshot works, is probably the entire childhood of your kids." - "How the heck am I supposed to do that without political action, for example, refusing to give any public money to anyone at any institution teaching any of that stuff?" - "Have you considered raising the status of critics?" - "Me and millions of other people retweet them every day ... " - "That's not what I mean."
*I'd like to lower the status of college too, but the government jobs idea does not make sense as a way to do it. In a way, it would make things worse. As someone with some familiarity with government hiring for laptop class jobs, I can assure you that the portion of hires with degrees would remain 99.99%. Let me explain.
It may be counterintuitive, but the key idea to grasp is a kind of Heisenberg Principle of Signaling: lowering the precision of a signal *boosts* the accuracy (thus value) of the signal. This is what happened to the High School graduation diploma, and which has migrated all the way up to 4-year bachelors degrees, at least. By boosting enrollments by lowering standards and dumbing down requirements for graduation, the education system has made the signal of a college degree a bare minimum requirement.
Nearly half the young people I look at with degrees and resumes that 'look right' - some from 'top-ranked' colleges - reveal themselves to lack the level of cognitive ability, skills, and conscientiousness that one would have completely taken for granted from any graduate 30 years ago. Covering up this embarrassing fact is obviously why everyone is in such a hurry to get rid of all test scores. It's like you took the few rare exceptions for a dull legacy admit or star athlete (yes, they went to such-and-such, but in their case ... ) and expanded that to half the graduating classes.
The value of the signal of a college degree is that it gives employers what they desperately need which is a 'safe', quick, and easy *filter* to reduce the huge pile of applications down to a small number which can be looked at more carefully given very scarce time. The assumption for any statistical grouping which enables this is, given that your minimum threshold floor is above some categorization's minimum, the size of that gap is inversely correlated with the likelihood of someone meeting your requirements but not being in the category. The trap we are all stuck in is precisely that this has become, as an empirical matter, a very, very safe assumption.
So, the way the change would makes things worse is that at least now the government is honest with people and tells them don't even both applying for this job unless you meet requirements A, B, and C. If we got rid of the requirement, in practice, we would only be getting rid of *explicitly giving notice to people*, which would definitely mislead a lot of young people about their chances and lead them to waste their time and even make poor life decisions as a result of the faulty assumptions these announcements would encourage.
This would put the government in the morally sketchy position of a lot of admissions offices, in which applicants tell each other, "Well, of course, they *say* you don't need to have an X, but all the smart and savvy people know that what they *actually* are looking and who they *actually* select are ... "
Are 'Left' and 'Right' useful concepts in analysis of politics?
Bryan Caplan says Yes. His "simplistic theory of Left and Right" says that the Left dislikes markets, and the the Right dislikes the Left.
Arnold Kling used to distinguish three "languages of politics" in America: progressives champion the oppressed, conservatives defend civilization, and libertarians oppose coercion. Do pairwise coalitions in this set of groups naturally translate into Left and Right? For example, does an ad-hoc coalition of progressives and libertarians sometimes constitute "the Left"?
Robin Hanson says that politics isn't about policy. It's about "status." Why would status battles among various social groups boil down to the abstraction, Left vs Right?
Tyler Cowen says that policy is about the median voter. This seems to imply that public discourse about the Left and the Right is largely rhetoric or theater.
Let's take as given: (a) A two-party system is entrenched (i.e., is some sort of equilibrium) in America, and (b) Myriad groups, defined by social distinctions and rival conceptions of justice, contend for status, advantage, or power in politics. Then each party will experiment and make adjustments in coalition-formation at the margin, in order to achieve or preserve majorities. The median voter will exercise pull. The process will always exhibit 'noise,' often erosion and poaching, and sometimes large and sudden (perhaps unexpected) shifts in allegiance. Occasionally charismatic political entrepreneurs will play an outsized role. Does Bryan Caplan's "simplistic theory of Left and Right" capture the underlying political psychology in this complex dynamic?
What would Kling the Elder, who taught political science at Washington U., say?
"The comment section is for comments on the post. It is not for comments on comments."
Whoops, I apologize! I'm quite guilty of this, maybe more guilty than anyone! I try not to make anything personal or go off-topic (too far) or get into flame wars or whatever with my comments on comments, but I didn't know about this policy. I very much want to respect your rules at your place. Does Substack let you reduce the comment thread-depth to 1?
I don't think that Adler-Bell's article accurately defined the 'new right.' Maybe I am just overly sensitive about these things, but it makes more sense to define the specific formal grouping you are criticizing rather than defining a new term that is not necessarily objective.
This is something that the editor at TNR should have pointed out and told him to rework. If he wants to write about the Vermeule-o-sphere, why not call them post-liberals, especially considering that they self-define as post-liberals and all contribute to a Substack that bills itself as "The Postliberal Order." https://postliberalorder.substack.com/ He does mention this along with the 'fractures' within the 'new right,' but the problem is that there is no new right beyond that imaginary definition that he created.
The problem with Adler-Bell grouping together these disparate people as 'new right' is that people have been glomming together random people and declaring them 'new right' for ages, and it never has any coherence to it. If he just wanted to say "these random guys under 60 who publish for various institutions and magazines" that would be more accurate, but it exposes the problem in creating such a time-wasting survey in the first place. What unites BAPists, Claremonters, Yarvinites, and Fedcaths? Very little! There is no coalition beyond a very loosely imagined one. In fact, if we look at the least coalitional figure out of all them, Rufo, we see why the instinct to just hang out, make speeches, and write op-eds at one another does not lead to significant political action.
The problem for the right is I think structural. In normal times the right plays defense while the left plays offense. This is the very nature of conservatism vs progressivism. When the right plays offense, it's accused of fascism, usually but not always without reason.
The question for the right is how to create a vision of the country to aspire to, rather than to simply reminisce wistfully for. The right needs to present a more compelling version of the future than the left that isn't just about the good old days. Given how unhinged the left has become, it shouldn't be that hard. But the right has to get out of the Washington Generals losers mindset. It has to to view itself as more than a speedbump for the lefts ownership of the future. It has to get out of the mindset that losing is ok, so long as you scored a few moral victories along the way (owned the libs). It can't be satisfied being dragged towards the future by the left, kvetching at every step.
I'd prefer to lower the status of vigorous thinking. Less tongue in cheek, lower the requirement for vigorous thinking.
If I were to campaign to barstool conservatives, my message to would be a repetitive drumbeat of "Those clever ivory tower assholes are always inventing new ways to screw you over. Like checkers and global thermonuclear war, the only way to win is not to play. That means KISS. Don't indulge the desire for complexity, because outside of a few really specialized tasks (like global thermonuclear war), all of this complex stuff is just set up to let insiders, people with crazy political agendas, and people with huge amounts of money to throw around make more money."
The policy agenda to go with that is to attack institutional complexity on every front to make things better off for the average person and make it possible for them to spend less time having to think about politics and government interactions. At the utopian level, I'd argue for something like Hayek and Buchanan's constitutional non-discrimination amendment ( https://www.cato-unbound.org/2005/12/04/james-m-buchanan/three-amendments-responsibility-generality-natural-liberty/ ).
At the practical level, it would be something like "vote for me and I'll try to make sure that the things we need operate as simply and as straightforwardly as possible".
1. The main thing I'd try to do is move from employer based to individual based health insurance by eliminating tax favored status of employer provided benefits. The end goal is everyone gets an HSA style insurance plan with a government subsidized (and backed, for low income) account. End result for people is you no longer have to worry about what happens to your health if you change or lose your job, and you don't have to spend much time thinking about whether your insurance will be accepted or your particular illness will be covered.
Beyond that, I'd push like hell to
2. Reduce educational requirements and subsidies across the board. It's mostly handouts to the wealthy.
3. Bring the weight of federal power down against cities that create ridiculous housing shortages.
4. Enact trade restrictions and tariffs on governments that effectively use or allow slave or heavily coerced labor. There should be free trade people, even if those folks are willing to work for less than Americans. Free trade shouldn't be an excuse to engage in slavery or activity that would be wantonly criminal in the US.
5. Strictly enforce immigration law a the first step toward simplifying it.
I would modify Kling's argument. Winning elections isn't enough. Winning the hearts and minds of people who wield power and influence is often more important than elections.
Elections have been going somewhere near 50:50 to Democrat/Republican, but in terms of winning the hearts and minds of people of power and influence, including staffing important institutions and bureaucracies, the Democrats have been winning by a landslide. And they've been able to overturn Republican election victories with this advantage.
"I don’t think that political power is the answer." Not the answer to politics? Tautologically, political power is all about political power. Kling's chosen example of the CRT battle is a political battle, and we can define the side that wins as the side that wields more political power. So, yes, it's absolutely about political power, however that isn't simply election outcomes.
I'm pretty certain the thrust of this article is wrong, and it tacitly admits the evidence contradicts it when it mentions polling, but then doubles back with nothing but an anecdote. In reality, young republicans are consistently to the left of old Republicans. The "New" Right is mostly older Republicans moving to the right. Younger Republicans are more focused on 'anti-woke' issues because that's the marginal battle they're fighting. Old Republicans aren't more moderate, they're just busy fighting yesterday's battles over Christianity and whatnot, battles they already lost. But if 'old Republicans' like Ronald Reagan were resurrected and shown what wokeness is, I'm quite certain they'd be even more revolted by it than the current crop of young Republicans.
On 'barstool conservatism:' I think Walther is also wrong. First of all, when you increase voter turnout, you weaken demographic associations with parties. E.g., in a low turnout election, where only the most enthusiastic 30% of people vote, you're getting the most politically engaged black voters - who will be 90% Democrat - and the most politically engaged white voters - who will be 70% Republican (numbers are pseudo-made up). But as you work your way down the population and more and more indifferent and unengaged people vote; as a result, when 60% of people vote, only 70% of black voters are Democrats and only 55% of white voters are Republicans. The apolitical masses are much more 'average' than the politically engaged tip of the ice berg. I'd guess that explains most of why Trump did better among minorities and worse among whites in 2020: it was a very high turnout election that drew a lot more erstwhile apolitical people. There isn't an emergent 'barstool conservative' demographic; those are just mostly apolitical, vaguely passive conservatives; they've always been there, like their passively progressive counterparts, they just usually don't matter much because they usually don't vote. As voter turnout converges back to normal levels, they'll go back to not mattering much.
I am skeptical of the main premise of the post, that "progressives have taken control of every efficacious power center in American society..." (But I do agree what Arnold has said at other times about the importance of promoting clear-headed thinking - on both sides of the aisle.)
I don't deny that progressives have accumulated a lot of power, but some important institutions are not subject to progressives' complete control - the House of Representatives for the time being, yes, but in all likelihood not after November 2022. The U.S. Senate - barely (by one tie-breaking, Vice Presidential vote, when relevant), but also unlikely after November 2022. Heck, I don't think Progressives even completely control the Democratic Party, or at least one might hope so, although they are the greatest influence within it. Moderate Democratic Senators are laying low, taking cover from Manchin and Sinema, but they are present. Then there's talk radio, Fox News (neither, however, a bastion of logical argumentation), and the WSJ opinion pages, some of the best real estate in printed news. The Washington Post, a newspaper with a liberal slant on the news, also has excellent opinion pages, including writers from across the spectrum, and regular columnists who are moderates or right of center, e.g. Hugh Hewitt.
I believe Biden's biggest failure is that he has failed to tamp down the "drama" and day to day uncertainty. He personally has also failed to be above the fray. I think the following is consistent with Arnold's comment: most people want our federal government go about its business as quietly and as competently as possible.
So instead of just telling teachers to stop calling my kid racist, I should vaguely, through no defined action, "lower the status of a college education."
Do you have a bullet point list of what concrete actions I should take to cause this vague and grand societal change?
I mean here I thought firing people who abuse children or trying to pry away every dollar of K-12 I can might like cause concrete improvements in my life. Maybe just not have them muzzled for eight hours a day! And those things can be sought through politics. But no, those are useless battles for things like money and basic dignity.
The best path to get what I want is to passively give up and hope someones substack article causes Harvard to change their mind about the path they've been on for decades so that the problem might turn around by the time my kids graduate.
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"My sense is that a lot of people want a government that keeps quiet and sticks to doing things it has shown it can do"
The government also runs education...you know that political thing with government money that is inherently political. And the printing press, which it clearly doesn't know how to do.
I read this comment section (as I used to read the comment section on your Wordpress blog) because it has excellent discussions. It's like a salon or a discussion group. You are the host and have the unquestionable right to do anything you want with it, of course, but I for one feel that a blanket ban on (well-mannered) discussion not directly commenting on the post would detract bigly from the value of this place. I admit it's probably easier to issue such a blanket ban than to squelch fights - easier not so much in terms of effort involved as in terms of avoiding messy personal judgment of what constitutes good manners and whether commenters X and Y are having a bad-mannered fight rather than a well-mannered discussion, as well as subsequent arguments about whether your judgment was correct, whether you are unduly partial to X or Y, and so on. It can get acrimonious and extremely unpleasant for everyone involved and I totally understand wanting to avoid it. But no-one who has a modicum of practical experience says government is easy. It should be obvious that a comment section is a little community and what moderators it has are its government. When its government refuses to govern it, it eventually devolves into lunchroom food fights and monkey feces-slinging and then dies. Examples are legion. The blanket ban is the procedural, bureaucratic way of dealing with problems of this type. Call it bureaucratic nanogovernment. The late Larry Auster and many other bloggers I could name use a different approach, somewhat similar to how militaries deal with such problems, which might be called - for contrast - monarchical nanogovernment. They implicitly or explicitly say, "I'm the host and I define what constitutes good manners in this place. Take it or leave it. I forbid discussion or criticism of how I run this place. If you have earned my respect I may entertain your opinions on that privately." One difference with the military is that the military necessarily has a hierarchy with higher levels delegating governing authority to the lower levels and supervising the use of said authority, whereas blogs are peers and each constitutes an independent realm, free to experiment with whatever type of government they each find congenial, useful etc.
<b>"It was not the Democratic Party that instigated teaching CRT. CRT comes from the schools of education. And the CRT in schools of education comes from the CRT in higher education writ large."</b>
This is horribly naive. Those schools of education are firmly under the control of the people who donate to, vote for, and control the Democratic Party.
I'd say "The Future of the Right" is more 'bleak' than 'murky'.
The right has mostly lost Big Business, Finance, and the National Security Complex, all of which can get most of what they want from the Democrats, and which have mostly accepted and adapted to the new equilibrium of woke-HR rules.
With no more of society's Commanding Heights to draw on, the establishment right can't be much more than a rump party of grifters and fake opposition who, at best, are trying to conserve yesterday's leftism. So you end up with a big portion of the population who have no other choice but to vote R but whose actual preferences and interests permanently lack voice, leadership, representation, etc.
Now, the short-term future of the right is a reaction against the excesses of the left, representing those harmed by those excesses.
The big picture stuff like doing what it would take to "Make the CDC Great Again" is no longer possible to achieve with ordinary, business-as-usual politics. Maybe that's the long-term future, but if someone actually had the power and will to do that, we would be well into "all bets are off" territory where it is impossible to make reasonable political forecasts. The emergence of a bipolar world order in which the whole world is an overlapping sphere of influences from both the US and China is also a scenario in which it's impossible to figure out what the 'right' would become.
The progressive ideology has some core ideological principles but manifests in practice according to political expediency at the present moment while the institutions of public influence try constantly to push out what 'expedient' is. And the political formula that is expedient for them is a version of clientalism in which the members of various groups perceive that they will be better off materially and in terms of social status with the progressives in charge. That is, there is an implicit quid-pro-quo or bargain for votes and contributions that is part of 'the deal'. The progressives promise that if they get power they will use it to put thumbs on the scale in favor of their clients.
In Democracy there is literally always some way to divide up the population to get to 51% according to this principle and formula of who is oppressing whom. Rich v poor, labor v management, white v nonwhite, private vs public, whatever. While clearly irresponsible there is so much political profit to be made by encouraging the consciousness of these divisions to the maximum degree and amplifying it to whatever delusional heights possible, that it present an irresistible temptation, and we now lack any effective institutional mechanism to discourage the yielding to it. So here we are.
But, by necessary consequence, that is a thumb against the people on the other side of the scale, who, if they can not be suckered into embracing their political disability, form a natural constituency for the opposition. For example, on law and order matters, progressive rule is now accurately associated with more, literal, "highway robbery" and "getting away with murder". Well, that's good for people who want to preserve the option of doing those things, or who prefer to see those things happen than to see their friends and allies harassed for it. But it's pretty bad for everyone else, especially the people who get robbed and murdered. "Is this what you want? We don't have to live like this."
Of course this "our clients vs your clients" version of politics is impossible to reconcile with a "common good" or "public interest" politics, and is just a manifestation of the overall trend in the direction of polarizing contrasts.
The (short-term) future of the right is to take that logic and expand it to every possible controversy, to find a way to fund it which isn't completely corrupting and counter-productive, and to also find a way to communicate with constituents without worrying about opponent gatekeepers. Anything involving multiple longshots has bleak prospects. But even worse, if anything like that worked, it would still have to defeat the Final Boss of the establishment declaring that system illegal as a terrorist threat to democracy or whatever (does anyone imagine it would even matter?) and sending the full force of USG against any identifiable leaders.
Again, anything that can defeat that final boss can do so much else that all bets would be off.
Douthat has an expression, "If you didn't like the Religious Right, wait until you see the Post-religious Right." I'd say, "If you don't like the Right, wait until you see what it's like with no Right at all."
I like comments on the The Post, but one of the advantages of substack is the thread clarity of seeing comments on comments. Easily skipped if the starting comment isn't so interesting. Most bloggers with comments enjoy the idea of commenters having small comment conversations with other commenters - that's how a good "comment community" is sustained. Usually also with a few host comments.
Yes to suspending commenters engaging in flame war fights, or gratuitous insults over some disagreement. Preferably after some warning.
Try looking at Freddie's hundred plus comments - he does NOT read them all; most are comments on comments ( x2 x3 x4). Or Razib Khan, Bari Weiss, Scott Alexander -- all have lively comment sections with comments on comments.
I think they also require those who comment to be subscribers. That likely self-limits the flaming.
Stopping insults is good. Stopping comments on comments is ... demoralizing, at least, and demotivating.
"But I don’t think that political power is the answer. I think we need to raise the status of rigorous thinking and lower the status of conformity to nonsense that travels under the banner of social justice. ... If you fight CRT through the political process, you may win a battle. But as long as college education has high status, and as long as CRT has high status within higher education, you will lose the war."
Why not do both? Should one not try to win battles as part of winning the war? One of your answers to the status of college problem is to erase any requirement for degrees for government jobs*. How does one coordinate collective action to get that change in government policy done if not at least in part via the political process?
Using the CRT thing as an example, try to imagine explaining this to a typical Youngkin voter mad about CRT stuff in the schools. "So, we shouldn't try to elect politicians who will order this stuff out of the government school curriculum?" - "No, you should try to lower the status of those ideas in higher education, and just wait and suck up the CRT as long as it takes to do that, which, even if the longshot works, is probably the entire childhood of your kids." - "How the heck am I supposed to do that without political action, for example, refusing to give any public money to anyone at any institution teaching any of that stuff?" - "Have you considered raising the status of critics?" - "Me and millions of other people retweet them every day ... " - "That's not what I mean."
*I'd like to lower the status of college too, but the government jobs idea does not make sense as a way to do it. In a way, it would make things worse. As someone with some familiarity with government hiring for laptop class jobs, I can assure you that the portion of hires with degrees would remain 99.99%. Let me explain.
It may be counterintuitive, but the key idea to grasp is a kind of Heisenberg Principle of Signaling: lowering the precision of a signal *boosts* the accuracy (thus value) of the signal. This is what happened to the High School graduation diploma, and which has migrated all the way up to 4-year bachelors degrees, at least. By boosting enrollments by lowering standards and dumbing down requirements for graduation, the education system has made the signal of a college degree a bare minimum requirement.
Nearly half the young people I look at with degrees and resumes that 'look right' - some from 'top-ranked' colleges - reveal themselves to lack the level of cognitive ability, skills, and conscientiousness that one would have completely taken for granted from any graduate 30 years ago. Covering up this embarrassing fact is obviously why everyone is in such a hurry to get rid of all test scores. It's like you took the few rare exceptions for a dull legacy admit or star athlete (yes, they went to such-and-such, but in their case ... ) and expanded that to half the graduating classes.
The value of the signal of a college degree is that it gives employers what they desperately need which is a 'safe', quick, and easy *filter* to reduce the huge pile of applications down to a small number which can be looked at more carefully given very scarce time. The assumption for any statistical grouping which enables this is, given that your minimum threshold floor is above some categorization's minimum, the size of that gap is inversely correlated with the likelihood of someone meeting your requirements but not being in the category. The trap we are all stuck in is precisely that this has become, as an empirical matter, a very, very safe assumption.
So, the way the change would makes things worse is that at least now the government is honest with people and tells them don't even both applying for this job unless you meet requirements A, B, and C. If we got rid of the requirement, in practice, we would only be getting rid of *explicitly giving notice to people*, which would definitely mislead a lot of young people about their chances and lead them to waste their time and even make poor life decisions as a result of the faulty assumptions these announcements would encourage.
This would put the government in the morally sketchy position of a lot of admissions offices, in which applicants tell each other, "Well, of course, they *say* you don't need to have an X, but all the smart and savvy people know that what they *actually* are looking and who they *actually* select are ... "
Are 'Left' and 'Right' useful concepts in analysis of politics?
Bryan Caplan says Yes. His "simplistic theory of Left and Right" says that the Left dislikes markets, and the the Right dislikes the Left.
Arnold Kling used to distinguish three "languages of politics" in America: progressives champion the oppressed, conservatives defend civilization, and libertarians oppose coercion. Do pairwise coalitions in this set of groups naturally translate into Left and Right? For example, does an ad-hoc coalition of progressives and libertarians sometimes constitute "the Left"?
Robin Hanson says that politics isn't about policy. It's about "status." Why would status battles among various social groups boil down to the abstraction, Left vs Right?
Tyler Cowen says that policy is about the median voter. This seems to imply that public discourse about the Left and the Right is largely rhetoric or theater.
Let's take as given: (a) A two-party system is entrenched (i.e., is some sort of equilibrium) in America, and (b) Myriad groups, defined by social distinctions and rival conceptions of justice, contend for status, advantage, or power in politics. Then each party will experiment and make adjustments in coalition-formation at the margin, in order to achieve or preserve majorities. The median voter will exercise pull. The process will always exhibit 'noise,' often erosion and poaching, and sometimes large and sudden (perhaps unexpected) shifts in allegiance. Occasionally charismatic political entrepreneurs will play an outsized role. Does Bryan Caplan's "simplistic theory of Left and Right" capture the underlying political psychology in this complex dynamic?
What would Kling the Elder, who taught political science at Washington U., say?
"The comment section is for comments on the post. It is not for comments on comments."
Whoops, I apologize! I'm quite guilty of this, maybe more guilty than anyone! I try not to make anything personal or go off-topic (too far) or get into flame wars or whatever with my comments on comments, but I didn't know about this policy. I very much want to respect your rules at your place. Does Substack let you reduce the comment thread-depth to 1?
I don't think that Adler-Bell's article accurately defined the 'new right.' Maybe I am just overly sensitive about these things, but it makes more sense to define the specific formal grouping you are criticizing rather than defining a new term that is not necessarily objective.
This is something that the editor at TNR should have pointed out and told him to rework. If he wants to write about the Vermeule-o-sphere, why not call them post-liberals, especially considering that they self-define as post-liberals and all contribute to a Substack that bills itself as "The Postliberal Order." https://postliberalorder.substack.com/ He does mention this along with the 'fractures' within the 'new right,' but the problem is that there is no new right beyond that imaginary definition that he created.
The problem with Adler-Bell grouping together these disparate people as 'new right' is that people have been glomming together random people and declaring them 'new right' for ages, and it never has any coherence to it. If he just wanted to say "these random guys under 60 who publish for various institutions and magazines" that would be more accurate, but it exposes the problem in creating such a time-wasting survey in the first place. What unites BAPists, Claremonters, Yarvinites, and Fedcaths? Very little! There is no coalition beyond a very loosely imagined one. In fact, if we look at the least coalitional figure out of all them, Rufo, we see why the instinct to just hang out, make speeches, and write op-eds at one another does not lead to significant political action.
The problem for the right is I think structural. In normal times the right plays defense while the left plays offense. This is the very nature of conservatism vs progressivism. When the right plays offense, it's accused of fascism, usually but not always without reason.
The question for the right is how to create a vision of the country to aspire to, rather than to simply reminisce wistfully for. The right needs to present a more compelling version of the future than the left that isn't just about the good old days. Given how unhinged the left has become, it shouldn't be that hard. But the right has to get out of the Washington Generals losers mindset. It has to to view itself as more than a speedbump for the lefts ownership of the future. It has to get out of the mindset that losing is ok, so long as you scored a few moral victories along the way (owned the libs). It can't be satisfied being dragged towards the future by the left, kvetching at every step.
I'd prefer to lower the status of vigorous thinking. Less tongue in cheek, lower the requirement for vigorous thinking.
If I were to campaign to barstool conservatives, my message to would be a repetitive drumbeat of "Those clever ivory tower assholes are always inventing new ways to screw you over. Like checkers and global thermonuclear war, the only way to win is not to play. That means KISS. Don't indulge the desire for complexity, because outside of a few really specialized tasks (like global thermonuclear war), all of this complex stuff is just set up to let insiders, people with crazy political agendas, and people with huge amounts of money to throw around make more money."
The policy agenda to go with that is to attack institutional complexity on every front to make things better off for the average person and make it possible for them to spend less time having to think about politics and government interactions. At the utopian level, I'd argue for something like Hayek and Buchanan's constitutional non-discrimination amendment ( https://www.cato-unbound.org/2005/12/04/james-m-buchanan/three-amendments-responsibility-generality-natural-liberty/ ).
At the practical level, it would be something like "vote for me and I'll try to make sure that the things we need operate as simply and as straightforwardly as possible".
1. The main thing I'd try to do is move from employer based to individual based health insurance by eliminating tax favored status of employer provided benefits. The end goal is everyone gets an HSA style insurance plan with a government subsidized (and backed, for low income) account. End result for people is you no longer have to worry about what happens to your health if you change or lose your job, and you don't have to spend much time thinking about whether your insurance will be accepted or your particular illness will be covered.
Beyond that, I'd push like hell to
2. Reduce educational requirements and subsidies across the board. It's mostly handouts to the wealthy.
3. Bring the weight of federal power down against cities that create ridiculous housing shortages.
4. Enact trade restrictions and tariffs on governments that effectively use or allow slave or heavily coerced labor. There should be free trade people, even if those folks are willing to work for less than Americans. Free trade shouldn't be an excuse to engage in slavery or activity that would be wantonly criminal in the US.
5. Strictly enforce immigration law a the first step toward simplifying it.
I would modify Kling's argument. Winning elections isn't enough. Winning the hearts and minds of people who wield power and influence is often more important than elections.
Elections have been going somewhere near 50:50 to Democrat/Republican, but in terms of winning the hearts and minds of people of power and influence, including staffing important institutions and bureaucracies, the Democrats have been winning by a landslide. And they've been able to overturn Republican election victories with this advantage.
"I don’t think that political power is the answer." Not the answer to politics? Tautologically, political power is all about political power. Kling's chosen example of the CRT battle is a political battle, and we can define the side that wins as the side that wields more political power. So, yes, it's absolutely about political power, however that isn't simply election outcomes.
I'm pretty certain the thrust of this article is wrong, and it tacitly admits the evidence contradicts it when it mentions polling, but then doubles back with nothing but an anecdote. In reality, young republicans are consistently to the left of old Republicans. The "New" Right is mostly older Republicans moving to the right. Younger Republicans are more focused on 'anti-woke' issues because that's the marginal battle they're fighting. Old Republicans aren't more moderate, they're just busy fighting yesterday's battles over Christianity and whatnot, battles they already lost. But if 'old Republicans' like Ronald Reagan were resurrected and shown what wokeness is, I'm quite certain they'd be even more revolted by it than the current crop of young Republicans.
On 'barstool conservatism:' I think Walther is also wrong. First of all, when you increase voter turnout, you weaken demographic associations with parties. E.g., in a low turnout election, where only the most enthusiastic 30% of people vote, you're getting the most politically engaged black voters - who will be 90% Democrat - and the most politically engaged white voters - who will be 70% Republican (numbers are pseudo-made up). But as you work your way down the population and more and more indifferent and unengaged people vote; as a result, when 60% of people vote, only 70% of black voters are Democrats and only 55% of white voters are Republicans. The apolitical masses are much more 'average' than the politically engaged tip of the ice berg. I'd guess that explains most of why Trump did better among minorities and worse among whites in 2020: it was a very high turnout election that drew a lot more erstwhile apolitical people. There isn't an emergent 'barstool conservative' demographic; those are just mostly apolitical, vaguely passive conservatives; they've always been there, like their passively progressive counterparts, they just usually don't matter much because they usually don't vote. As voter turnout converges back to normal levels, they'll go back to not mattering much.
I am skeptical of the main premise of the post, that "progressives have taken control of every efficacious power center in American society..." (But I do agree what Arnold has said at other times about the importance of promoting clear-headed thinking - on both sides of the aisle.)
I don't deny that progressives have accumulated a lot of power, but some important institutions are not subject to progressives' complete control - the House of Representatives for the time being, yes, but in all likelihood not after November 2022. The U.S. Senate - barely (by one tie-breaking, Vice Presidential vote, when relevant), but also unlikely after November 2022. Heck, I don't think Progressives even completely control the Democratic Party, or at least one might hope so, although they are the greatest influence within it. Moderate Democratic Senators are laying low, taking cover from Manchin and Sinema, but they are present. Then there's talk radio, Fox News (neither, however, a bastion of logical argumentation), and the WSJ opinion pages, some of the best real estate in printed news. The Washington Post, a newspaper with a liberal slant on the news, also has excellent opinion pages, including writers from across the spectrum, and regular columnists who are moderates or right of center, e.g. Hugh Hewitt.
I believe Biden's biggest failure is that he has failed to tamp down the "drama" and day to day uncertainty. He personally has also failed to be above the fray. I think the following is consistent with Arnold's comment: most people want our federal government go about its business as quietly and as competently as possible.
But it's curious how dumb economic policies like protection and immigration restriction got to be huge symbolic social issue for conservatives.
So instead of just telling teachers to stop calling my kid racist, I should vaguely, through no defined action, "lower the status of a college education."
Do you have a bullet point list of what concrete actions I should take to cause this vague and grand societal change?
I mean here I thought firing people who abuse children or trying to pry away every dollar of K-12 I can might like cause concrete improvements in my life. Maybe just not have them muzzled for eight hours a day! And those things can be sought through politics. But no, those are useless battles for things like money and basic dignity.
The best path to get what I want is to passively give up and hope someones substack article causes Harvard to change their mind about the path they've been on for decades so that the problem might turn around by the time my kids graduate.
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"My sense is that a lot of people want a government that keeps quiet and sticks to doing things it has shown it can do"
The government also runs education...you know that political thing with government money that is inherently political. And the printing press, which it clearly doesn't know how to do.