You might be interested in this clip from Caplan on whether campus indoctrination matters. He says that while “The Case Against Education” says no, he has changed his mind since then.
"The loss of real-world friction coupled with the increasing centralization of the financial system has opened up possibilities for new forms of coercion, control, and power—particularly when governments and the private sector decide to cooperate. "
Exactly right Arnold. It is very sad to see principles like freedom of conscience, speech, and self-government lose their popular support. Even simple inclinations like curiosity about the factual world seem to fallen to imposing ideology on the biophysical, historical world.
You don't deter aggression from a powerful nation without harming the common people there. The choice is to do it with sanctions or with bombs, or else not to deter at all.
The "Liberal Order" was, for 80 years, part of the post WW II Pax Americana, with a semi-reluctant but economically dominant America often acting as the World's Policeman. There was an illusion, which could also be called a delusion, that it was a bi-polar world, with the alt-pole of USSR Communism.
Especially China, but also both India and Russia, are claiming to be new alternate poles to America, which has a relatively smaller percent of the world's exports and manufacturing - as had been planned for, expected, and worked for by all liberal globalists for decades.
Liberalism has been seen to be dying since Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind" in 1987, and the acceptance by "liberals" for secret discrimination against Republicans as professors in University, and the accepted atheist intolerance of believers, especially those who believe in human rights for each human fetus.
The only important diversity inside organizations, and especially colleges, is having both Republicans and Democrats, who agree to disagree, peacefully and respectfully, with words about ideas. Not slaps, nor cancel firings. OK, arts & visuals & tech, too. This discrimination was, and is, in violation of the "Liberal Order".
The college tested cancel culture actions, which has been working against Rep. professors, is slowly leading to Gab and Bitcoin other alternate, less Dem dominated areas. This war! war! war! to save Ukraine from invading Russia, totally absent in 2014 when Russia stealthily took over Crimea and the Donbas, shows at least one alt-pole thinks the old Lib Ord is too tired to keep on. It will lead many non-American countries to reduce their US Dollar dependencies, just as the US is trying to reduce its own Russian and Chinese dependencies.
The 'Liberal Order' was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the 'ordering' of any other, as a current John Adams might say.
The notion that multipolar liberalism rests on pure persuasion alone is a confused one. If we look back, the last multipolar liberal order was during the 19th century, under the guns of the dreadnoughts and battleships of the British Empire. Since then, we have had hybrid liberal orders which are neither entirely multipolar nor entirely unipolar. The US pushed and modeled a certain view of liberal republicanism which it occasionally enforced through some combination of threats and rewards.
Now, internally, the US has sought to excise its vestigial liberal tendencies, it has little desire to maintain those vestigial tendencies in its protectorates. Every cancellation is the slight bopping on the head of a heretic, which is a performance of a nascent identity that will progress to imprisoning the heretic, exiling the heretic, and finally killing as many heretics as will be necessary.
The problem is less one of how to persuade the rising authoritarians to just knock it off: the problem is how to cultivate a cohesive class who will fight, kill, and die for the fundamental material and spiritual interests that underpin a powerful liberal government which could potentially preside over a multipolar world order. The idea that this can be done through persuasion alone is like thinking you could persuade Ferdinand and Isabella to make post-Reconquista Spain into a liberal republic by just making a really good argument (and some people in fact did try to do that in the Spanish Court at the time). The other issue is that there is no natural guarantee that liberalism has to survive. The world can quite easily be split into competing authoritarianisms. In fact, liberalism might have a better shot of sustaining itself in such an environment -- just probably not in the footprint of the current US.
Liberalism as an idea without an instantiation is just a ghost. Trying to puff more ideological ectoplasm into such a ghost does not help it to find a corporeal host, so to speak.
Not sure if you've referred to this piece already, but I'd like to point that the NY Times had a good editorial on the threat to free speech in its March 20 Sunday Review.
The "media environment" often turns on a dime, to fashion the current-thing narrative. Mainstream media voices are neither soldiers nor scouts. They are flexible conformists who care naught for consistency over time. They conform to the establishment (supply side) and/or the audience (demand side).
At one remove from media voices, the empirical question is: Do establishment personnel and/or the media base think like soldiers, rather than scouts?
Or does the media triangle -- establishment/media voices/audience base -- entangle cognitive psychology and entrepreneurship in ways that don't squarely fit the soldier vs scout model?
A terrible post. Most is about an international liberal order that has never existed and it will never exist. The idea of a liberal order is relevant only at the level of countries. Since the end of WWII, we have been living in a world "order" defined by a continuous struggle for power between two main blocs, only one representing the pretension of a league of countries with some domestic liberal order. Even ignoring tension within the "liberal order" bloc, we cannot ignore that we have been living in a Cold War setup that may continue forever. Indeed, in the 1990s, that setup changed and some of us expected much larger changes. But in the past 20 years we were proved wrong, very wrong, because the URSS's fall was followed by the emergence of China and the strengthening of anti-liberal countries which control important energy sources.
To make things worse, the intra-conflicts in several countries of the "liberal world" bloc increased sharply thanks to emergent anti-liberal forces. Yes, in some of liberal countries the barbarians are winning, not a majority of votes but enough support to grab power (in particular, I mean the support of ordinary barbarians graduated in the best U.S. colleges and graduate schools and some of their professors who are leading from behind). The revival of the liberal order should start in the U.S., the U.K., and the E.U. but as of today I'm very skeptical that it will happen.
BTW, you are ignoring what is going on in Latin America. Don't count on any LA country to contain the advance of their domestic barbarians.
Centre-Left & Centre-Right. Same thing… potayto, potaahto.
Did I miss the stampede of the Liberal Order to defend our civil liberties and passive Rights under the Common Law this last two years? On what occasions did the judiciary side with claimants of their Rights and not instead affirm Government tyranny over them?
How is USA & West denying its own citizens fuel, fertiliser, food stuffs, and other Russian goods sanctioning Russia? It’s equivalent would be the Royal Navy in the 1940s sinking merchant ships bringing supplies to Britain. It would of course have saved the Kriegsmarine the bother. It’s due to the part of the brain which is missing in politicians (not alone) that understands that a Nation gets wealthy because of imports not exports.
Maybe the basic point is that "the liberal order was strong enough to weather the Russia-Ukraine war" doesn't overcome the fact that "the liberal order is weak enough that an Illiberal state overtly challenged it".
Strength means you don't get challenged in the first place.
This gets to Wright's idea that we should have negotiated harder. I tend to agree, because even the most cynical view, where we think maybe Biden or whomever wanted a war because they get a "boost" by being tough on Russia without actually getting us involved in the fight, is, in the long-run, going to be offset our show of weakness.
Better to have quietly prevented this war, because the fact of it demonstrates the erosion of our power.
You might be interested in this clip from Caplan on whether campus indoctrination matters. He says that while “The Case Against Education” says no, he has changed his mind since then.
https://mobile.twitter.com/ConceptualJames/status/1507135469850660865?cxt=HHwWgsC4zbDuteopAAAA
Michael Lind, writing in Tablet:
"The loss of real-world friction coupled with the increasing centralization of the financial system has opened up possibilities for new forms of coercion, control, and power—particularly when governments and the private sector decide to cooperate. "
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/we-will-delete-you
Exactly right Arnold. It is very sad to see principles like freedom of conscience, speech, and self-government lose their popular support. Even simple inclinations like curiosity about the factual world seem to fallen to imposing ideology on the biophysical, historical world.
You don't deter aggression from a powerful nation without harming the common people there. The choice is to do it with sanctions or with bombs, or else not to deter at all.
The "Liberal Order" was, for 80 years, part of the post WW II Pax Americana, with a semi-reluctant but economically dominant America often acting as the World's Policeman. There was an illusion, which could also be called a delusion, that it was a bi-polar world, with the alt-pole of USSR Communism.
Especially China, but also both India and Russia, are claiming to be new alternate poles to America, which has a relatively smaller percent of the world's exports and manufacturing - as had been planned for, expected, and worked for by all liberal globalists for decades.
Liberalism has been seen to be dying since Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind" in 1987, and the acceptance by "liberals" for secret discrimination against Republicans as professors in University, and the accepted atheist intolerance of believers, especially those who believe in human rights for each human fetus.
The only important diversity inside organizations, and especially colleges, is having both Republicans and Democrats, who agree to disagree, peacefully and respectfully, with words about ideas. Not slaps, nor cancel firings. OK, arts & visuals & tech, too. This discrimination was, and is, in violation of the "Liberal Order".
The college tested cancel culture actions, which has been working against Rep. professors, is slowly leading to Gab and Bitcoin other alternate, less Dem dominated areas. This war! war! war! to save Ukraine from invading Russia, totally absent in 2014 when Russia stealthily took over Crimea and the Donbas, shows at least one alt-pole thinks the old Lib Ord is too tired to keep on. It will lead many non-American countries to reduce their US Dollar dependencies, just as the US is trying to reduce its own Russian and Chinese dependencies.
The 'Liberal Order' was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the 'ordering' of any other, as a current John Adams might say.
The notion that multipolar liberalism rests on pure persuasion alone is a confused one. If we look back, the last multipolar liberal order was during the 19th century, under the guns of the dreadnoughts and battleships of the British Empire. Since then, we have had hybrid liberal orders which are neither entirely multipolar nor entirely unipolar. The US pushed and modeled a certain view of liberal republicanism which it occasionally enforced through some combination of threats and rewards.
Now, internally, the US has sought to excise its vestigial liberal tendencies, it has little desire to maintain those vestigial tendencies in its protectorates. Every cancellation is the slight bopping on the head of a heretic, which is a performance of a nascent identity that will progress to imprisoning the heretic, exiling the heretic, and finally killing as many heretics as will be necessary.
The problem is less one of how to persuade the rising authoritarians to just knock it off: the problem is how to cultivate a cohesive class who will fight, kill, and die for the fundamental material and spiritual interests that underpin a powerful liberal government which could potentially preside over a multipolar world order. The idea that this can be done through persuasion alone is like thinking you could persuade Ferdinand and Isabella to make post-Reconquista Spain into a liberal republic by just making a really good argument (and some people in fact did try to do that in the Spanish Court at the time). The other issue is that there is no natural guarantee that liberalism has to survive. The world can quite easily be split into competing authoritarianisms. In fact, liberalism might have a better shot of sustaining itself in such an environment -- just probably not in the footprint of the current US.
Liberalism as an idea without an instantiation is just a ghost. Trying to puff more ideological ectoplasm into such a ghost does not help it to find a corporeal host, so to speak.
Not sure if you've referred to this piece already, but I'd like to point that the NY Times had a good editorial on the threat to free speech in its March 20 Sunday Review.
Re: "We are rewarding soldiers, not scouts."
The "media environment" often turns on a dime, to fashion the current-thing narrative. Mainstream media voices are neither soldiers nor scouts. They are flexible conformists who care naught for consistency over time. They conform to the establishment (supply side) and/or the audience (demand side).
At one remove from media voices, the empirical question is: Do establishment personnel and/or the media base think like soldiers, rather than scouts?
Or does the media triangle -- establishment/media voices/audience base -- entangle cognitive psychology and entrepreneurship in ways that don't squarely fit the soldier vs scout model?
Re: "Assuming that Russia is chastened and no nuclear escalation takes place, we are entitled to be happy with the outcome."
Shouldn't happiness be conditional also on 3 Ukraine variables in outcome?:
Denazification. (Neo-nazi military groups in Ukraine might be strengthened by their role in national military resistance.)
Civil liberties and security of substantial Russian ethnic minority in Ukraine. (This depends partly on denazification.)
A reasonable reconstruction plan.
A terrible post. Most is about an international liberal order that has never existed and it will never exist. The idea of a liberal order is relevant only at the level of countries. Since the end of WWII, we have been living in a world "order" defined by a continuous struggle for power between two main blocs, only one representing the pretension of a league of countries with some domestic liberal order. Even ignoring tension within the "liberal order" bloc, we cannot ignore that we have been living in a Cold War setup that may continue forever. Indeed, in the 1990s, that setup changed and some of us expected much larger changes. But in the past 20 years we were proved wrong, very wrong, because the URSS's fall was followed by the emergence of China and the strengthening of anti-liberal countries which control important energy sources.
To make things worse, the intra-conflicts in several countries of the "liberal world" bloc increased sharply thanks to emergent anti-liberal forces. Yes, in some of liberal countries the barbarians are winning, not a majority of votes but enough support to grab power (in particular, I mean the support of ordinary barbarians graduated in the best U.S. colleges and graduate schools and some of their professors who are leading from behind). The revival of the liberal order should start in the U.S., the U.K., and the E.U. but as of today I'm very skeptical that it will happen.
BTW, you are ignoring what is going on in Latin America. Don't count on any LA country to contain the advance of their domestic barbarians.
Centre-Left & Centre-Right. Same thing… potayto, potaahto.
Did I miss the stampede of the Liberal Order to defend our civil liberties and passive Rights under the Common Law this last two years? On what occasions did the judiciary side with claimants of their Rights and not instead affirm Government tyranny over them?
How is USA & West denying its own citizens fuel, fertiliser, food stuffs, and other Russian goods sanctioning Russia? It’s equivalent would be the Royal Navy in the 1940s sinking merchant ships bringing supplies to Britain. It would of course have saved the Kriegsmarine the bother. It’s due to the part of the brain which is missing in politicians (not alone) that understands that a Nation gets wealthy because of imports not exports.
Maybe the basic point is that "the liberal order was strong enough to weather the Russia-Ukraine war" doesn't overcome the fact that "the liberal order is weak enough that an Illiberal state overtly challenged it".
Strength means you don't get challenged in the first place.
This gets to Wright's idea that we should have negotiated harder. I tend to agree, because even the most cynical view, where we think maybe Biden or whomever wanted a war because they get a "boost" by being tough on Russia without actually getting us involved in the fight, is, in the long-run, going to be offset our show of weakness.
Better to have quietly prevented this war, because the fact of it demonstrates the erosion of our power.