The New Right leads to Florida and Texas. The standard bearer of the New Right literally being Florida's governor.
The New Right leads to:
1) Low Taxes, Low Regulation, Low Cost, and Growth
2) Real and meaningful pushback against Woke
3) Sensible policies on crime and immigration
4) A general pro-common sense and pro-freedom attitude, most exemplified by COVID policy differences these last two years
I don't want to be told there is no difference hear. Adding in the tax, cost of living, and perhaps soon in the future K-12 funding differences, and moving from CA to FL is practically the equivalent of winning the lottery if you've got a family. That's before talking about the culture differences.
Optimism? Nothing could be more optimistic than the people I've seen move to these states. I've had watched multiple families move to the Sunbelt these last two years and I would describe all as radical optimists (the proof in the pudding is everywhere, but the most obvious is how many children they have).
Classical Liberalism by contrast is exemplified by California. The birthplace of Reagen becoming the most dysfunctional progressive hellhole in the country due to Classical Liberal policy and culture. People on the New Right vote with their feet to leave such places. Tyler wallows and tells everyone to "Read the Room".
This is all a big Cope for the fact that the Classical Liberalism completely failed in the real world but doesn't want to fess up to it and really fight to make things better. That's not optimism, its defeatism.
Classical liberalism is based on the foundation that principles of liberty and justice are supreme and are necessary to moderate and protect social institutions from the threat of human passions.
So the New Right asks: When in the past 30 years have the Elite of the USA defended the principles of liberty and justice against human passions? When have they done this in the past five years?
When have those advocating "Classical Liberalism" taken a public stance against the corrosive philosophies of the Elite?
Judge James Ho recently did, saying he would not hire clerk's from Yale Law School. Give us 1000 more "elites" like James Ho and then we will be talking.
"Classical liberalism is California" is the most fantastic retconning I've ever seen. For decades classical liberals have been complaining about that state and instead imploring it to be more like low tax North Dakota. The stuff of think tanks.
It's no surprise that many people on the New Right are former Classical Liberals from California. They saw that Classical Liberalism inevitably leads to Progressivism. The host has no defense against the disease.
These former Classic Liberals have attempted to diagnose what went wrong in California and many of the differences between the New Right and Classical Liberals are the prescription they took away from that experience.
Progressives had nothing but disdain for classical liberalism (Koch Brothers hate, "colorblind is the new racism") before this New Right discussion came and suddenly decided they were the same force.
The logic that classical liberalism inevitably leads to progressivism would seem to be a problem for the reactionary point of view itself. You could just as well say that the reactionary/throne and altar pov led to classical liberalism.
I think people are mistaking chronological order for causality.
At the risk of quibbling over definitions, I would say that what Arnold and Tyler call "the New Right" is today's *populism*.
"Left" and "Right" are arbitrary abstractions.
Populists mistrust the competence and motivations of elites. They believe that a wide spectrum of incestuous elites (academic, technocratic, deep State, media, corporate, globalist) constitute an Establishment. They believe that the system is rigged. They believe that elites look down on them. Occasionally, they hear top elites denigrate them ("deplorables," "semi-fascists"). They resent elites' high-handedness. They believe that elites impose speech inhibition. They are loyal to populists leaders who defy elite speech inhibition.
Arnold has faith in a classical-liberal day-after-tomorrow. Populists want to check the elites and achieve status-relief today.
I'm old fashioned and have always thought of "populism" as advocating "popular" policies that do not actually improve the lives of the people being addressed -- protectionism, discrimination (or worse) against foreigners or ethnic/religious minorities and "elites" -- as a means of gaining power.
I don’t think this passes an ideological Turing test.
You could have said “popular policies”, some of which might be good and some of which might be bad, but to define it as “only those popular thing that are bad” is even worse then a straw man.
This sounds like how anti-populists do think: the [dumb] folk support policy X which does not actually improve their lives.
But for most people, there are some Democrat policies which the elites claim will help them, but actually are hurting them. Inflation, crime (including from illegal immigrants), higher gas prices, days with no baby-formula, drugs, sex-ed for 6 year olds including graphic novels of homosexual oral sex.
To Tyler and Arnold, it seems like not wanting your six-year old to see gay blow-job books is equal to censorship and book banning - and is deplorably populist.
Most parents think protecting kids from being sexualized by groomers is good, and actually better than free & obscene speech. I'm expecting parents to vote far more for Republicans, including MAGA Reps, than the polls now show.
Of course Democrats do not claim inflation helps anyone and approximately zero support more crime (a local issue, but at the national level Democrats generally have favored transfers to cities to hire more officers) an illegal immigration. (They do tend to support applying our laws that establish a procedure for dealing with people who are seeking asylum.) Restriction s on import of baby formula are longstanding, but I agree that Biden could have overridden that. What six year old's can see in books is a local school library issue, "Populism" is generally thought of as a national. issue.
Elites fall in line with ridiculous stances because they're terrified of ever sharing a position held by the bad people. When liberals stop being so afraid of disagreeing with each other, trust in elites will improve. As long as the overriding impulse is to never risk getting confused for a bad person, the elites will continue to gaslight
Tyler seems to think you can counter an aggressive “New Left” with a moderate and sensible Right. Sounds great in theory but he’s wrong. The aggressiveness of tactics employed by the New Left would easily overwhelm any soft opposition. You’re probably correct it all leads nowhere good but the choice is now between “which version of bad.”
Neither Tyler nor Arnold focus much on the real new Right - Family, God, Nation. Like Orban in Hungary, and new Italian PM Giorgia Meloni. Similar to the promises that fascists lied about - and contrary to the "equity / equal outcomes" that the Democrat socialists are promising and lying about.
As more parents understand that Democrats, both Woke and not, are leading to the destruction of the family among the non-elite, as well as long being anti-God and anti-nation, more parents who want a good future for their kids will vote Republican. It will be these votes that check Wokeism - if wokeism is to be checked.
And part of the checking will be defunding anti-Republican tax-exempt organizations. I both hope for this, and expect increasing calls for it until either the discrimination stops or the colleges and other orgs are defunded from gov't tax exemptions and Federal Loans, and Federal Research grants.
Althouse linked to David Brooks in NYT explaining, but objecting to, it as:
"a very clear class/culture/status war narrative in which common-sense Americans are being assaulted by elite progressives who let the homeless take over the streets, teach sex ed to 5-year-olds, manufacture fake news, run woke corporations, open the border and refuse to do anything about fentanyl deaths and the sorts of things that affect regular people.<<
>>It is a class conflict. The best description that I’ve read is that the country is ruled by the “front row kids:” the ones who sit in the front rows of class, always ask for the extra credit, and generally make themselves a nuisance to the rest of us. They are about 120 IQ, so above average intelligence but not genius. They are smart enough to work well within the existing institutions, usually by figuring out how to game the system for their advantage. They take all the AP/Honors/IB courses in HS, get a varsity sport on their resume, all to get into the best college possible. From there it’s internships, masters in Public Policy/International Relations/etc., or law school. They end up mid-level management in some gov agency, buy an overpriced home in NoVA or Maryland, and post pictures of themselves wearing “finisher” medals from 5ks. Meanwhile, they are incredibly sensitive to social status and their position within their circle. This makes it difficult to push back on whatever latest stupid fad is making its way through the population. They are barely competent, at best, at handling the unexpected, because their entire lives have been defined by plans and an aversion to risk."
Republicans are the good guys who want to: Make America Great Again. And being led by a Donald Trump who has, over the last 6 years, been far more honest than his critics - including Arnold Kling and Tyler Cowen.
Arnold could improve his own impartiality by listing Trump policies, including who he hired & fired, and compare the policy AND the results with Biden and Obama policies and results. Easy to excuse 2020-2021 (+?) as highly irregular due to Covid, including the 5 month (less than 2 quarters) Covid "recession", but the multi-quarter Biden not-quite "recession" for 2022. Calling the inflation/ recession a "strong economy", like Biden did, is laughably false. But while most elites can, have, and still do call Trump a clown, or worse insults, they avoid mentioning Biden by name when discussing specific policy problems, or even generally. Elites beclowning themselves.
"Opening prayer today at Eric Trump and Michael Flynn’s QAnon event: “God, open the eyes of Pres Trump’s understanding, that he will know how to implement divine intervention. And you will not surround him with RINO trash, in the name of Jesus.”"
Rod Dreher retweeted that, too - yet he, as I, continues to favor the Christian Nationalism of Orban and Meloni. (Dear God, do not surround our leader with lying sinners ...)
>>"A technological society can have no traditions." <<
I was just thinking about how respect for parents and grandparents is highly reduced as the kids know more about the current technology than the parents.
>>"If we believe in a human future, we must build it, not with kind words or tax credits, but with a serious program of technological development. Marx showed how a material transformation of the economic order could have enormous social and cultural effects. Forging the human order anew means building technologies that make it easier to live well."
<<
Normal folk need to be able to live well. Democrat policies make that almost impossible.
Rod Dreher is "normal folk"? He's as warped as the people he criticizes.
All new technology has an adjustment period. Look at the revolutions that the printing press brought to the world. Hard to see how our own time is any different. Look at how people use the social media now. The sane people have trended to less opinion and more pictures. The old people are the ones who use Facebook to spread Qanon BS.
Reminiscing about the olden days, when the memories are generally mis-shaped, doesn't move anyone of any ideology forward. Nobody of the modern era wants to go back to an agrarian time as life was hard and there was lots of suffering. Not to mention boring.
Move forward, adjust, don't look back. The nuts will burn themselves out. It's already happening even as they're not done.
The discussion I linked between Yuval Levin, an actual Burke expert, and Jonah Goldberg is highly recommended.
Classical Liberals have an underdeveloped Theory of Power. That leaves them vulnerable, and the only surprise is it's taken them this long to get mugged.
Tyler *still* doesn't realize what just happened, so of course he's sanguine about woke.
Sorry, but we are screwed. Our elites are neither intelligent nor moral, Arnold. Collapse is coming. It will probably be delayed long enough for me to die off so I won't have to suffer the consequences or be able to help rebuild it all, but the outcome is inevitable, and probaby was always inevitable- nothing lasts forever. We had a nice run while it lasted.
We forget how short the 1700's were and how much happened.
The New Right has more data than the Founding Father's did when they instituted the strongest checks and balances on political power that they could imagine (and then decided it needed to be softened up a bit to move to the Constitution). I think they would have been far less sanguine had they see the reprise of Napoleon; though they should have learned more from the Glorious Revolution and Restoration. Of course, they didn't have the US Civil War to learn from. Also, the timelines they were imagining were long, but those they were experiencing were short. It hadn't been very long since the first experiments in modern democracy.
What we know now is that over the course of 80 years, the Check and Balances on Federal Power were overcome by the Woke of the day (Abolitionists, Carpet Baggers, etc); and then more formally and more permanently to create a standing Army (ostensibly for managing the Indians/Native Americans), and then for Prohibition, WWI, the New Deal, WWII, the Cold War, the Civil Rights movement, the War on Cancer, the War on Poverty, the War on AIDS, War on Drugs, the war on Terror, the Woke...
It has never once been rolled back to restore checks and balances, unless you count some small moves by (and possibly against) Trump. Putin's oligarchs have also demonstrated that the voluntary devolution of imperial power is short lived if guarded by the Elites. China is hardly a counter-example. What legal restriction did the 'one nation two systems' impose on China?
My Xtian Socialist grandparents met on a Eugene Debs march. I grew up a non-conforming left civil libertarian, then (once I studied economics) became a full Libertarian in the '80s. I've since moved further right (joining my husband's position) for exactly the reasons Tyler points out.
At least in this historical-path-dependent, post-Marxist, post-Fascist, post-Communist world, I'm afraid
Classical Liberalism by its very trust in humanity (notwithstanding Original Sin aka EvoPsych, nor the lessons of history that you & he I hope are conversant with) the slippery slope takeover by Left authoritarianism (with its promise of Heaven on Earth) and narrowly self-interested elites becomes inevitable.
They don't need to be competent to destroy classical liberal Western Civilization. Au contraire, their very incompetence and short-sighted self-interest makes that ever more likely.
In the short run, what to do about it is obvious--stop them by any means necessary. What that means in the longer run is uncertain. I don't want to live under an authoritarian Xtian Nationalist regime either. Although the historical body count record of the Right, while dismal, is much much lower than the Left (I don't think that is happenstance).
One can view institutions of all types (government, regulatory, legal, private, religious, etc.) as having as their prime directive: "growth and survival". That is their number one motivating force. All stated goals, ideals, etc. are below the prime directive. That simple shift in perspective enables one to see that all these institutions evolve in ways that further their self-interests. If "growth and survival" are not their prime directive, they tend to cease to exist.
An organization like NASA that went to the moon on-budget and on-time learned the lesson well when their budget was killed after they succeeded. They learned that the prime directive requires they never do anything on time or budget again.
Monopoly organizations (government and private) often achieve their growth by increasing their bureaucracy and decreasing their productivity, a practice that leads to them consume larger budgets. IBM was the undisputed king of the hill in my youth, but its growth and expansion focus expanded its bureaucracy so significantly that innovation became difficult: IBM took 7 years to design a computer when the chip capacity was doubling in two years. Good luck in the IBM vs. Apple contest. In the private sector IBM had a failure mechanism called bankruptcy. Government institutions like the CDC and FDA which failed to meet the Covid-19 challenges will continue on with increased budgets.
At heart, all government organizations are monopolies whose prime directives effectively lead to turf wars between institutions and to the organizations expanding power and authority as much as they can.
"Tyler and I probably share a faith in the ability of a liberal society to self-correct."
Why? There's nothing especially liberal about our society any more. There Is No Liberal West (https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/there-is-no-liberal-west). All of the defining precepts of classical liberalism have been overthrown. The Paradox of Tolerance happened - an intolerant group (the New Left) used tolerance to take over society and impose their vision. Now we need to figure out how to fix it.
Parenthetically, I find it mildly amusing that Cowen correctly points out the importance of trust and the difficulty of building it while supporting mass immigration, one of the single most trust-corroding policies out there.
The general Libertarian and especially elite (wannabe?) Libbers emotionally in thrall to mass immigration lead them to, when necessary, think up rationalizations for why mass immigrations good points will be better than its bad points, overall, for a majority of people, when a huge increase in comfort for the immigrations is compared to only a small decrease in comfort for the current residents - with no Trust issues listed in that "rational" list of good & bad points.
All Libertarians are smart enough to "rationally" come to their emotionally satisfying Liberty (first!) conclusions.
The US population is over 50% larger than the 1970s. As a Gen X'er who has grown up in that time it's hard to see any actual net downside of mass immigration. They're not stealing anyones's jobs. There's plenty of space. The New Right is all about surrendering their own agency, joining the pouty progressives.
"I fear that tomorrow belongs to the woke. But there is still a day after tomorrow." The Day after Tomorrow is a 2004 disaster movie. I hope we don't go there.
In any case, the mean girls are in charge. They don't care much for classical liberalism or liberalism. Just be sure to mimic their dress and speech.
Tyler Cowen's clarity of thought is amazing! Also I feel the emergence of the New Right was necessary to counter the Woke narrative, yet in the end we have to strive for the middle.
The midde is where you get run over most easiy. Here is the hard truth- passion and commitment is what wins battles. That kind of passion and commitment to cause exists only on the left today, and the people "in the middle" are all cowards like Tyler Cowen, who I greatly admired at one time. When the crew of the ship is steering it into the iceberg, you are actually better off with no one at the wheel.
"the New Right stance does not lead anywhere"
The New Right leads to Florida and Texas. The standard bearer of the New Right literally being Florida's governor.
The New Right leads to:
1) Low Taxes, Low Regulation, Low Cost, and Growth
2) Real and meaningful pushback against Woke
3) Sensible policies on crime and immigration
4) A general pro-common sense and pro-freedom attitude, most exemplified by COVID policy differences these last two years
I don't want to be told there is no difference hear. Adding in the tax, cost of living, and perhaps soon in the future K-12 funding differences, and moving from CA to FL is practically the equivalent of winning the lottery if you've got a family. That's before talking about the culture differences.
Optimism? Nothing could be more optimistic than the people I've seen move to these states. I've had watched multiple families move to the Sunbelt these last two years and I would describe all as radical optimists (the proof in the pudding is everywhere, but the most obvious is how many children they have).
Classical Liberalism by contrast is exemplified by California. The birthplace of Reagen becoming the most dysfunctional progressive hellhole in the country due to Classical Liberal policy and culture. People on the New Right vote with their feet to leave such places. Tyler wallows and tells everyone to "Read the Room".
This is all a big Cope for the fact that the Classical Liberalism completely failed in the real world but doesn't want to fess up to it and really fight to make things better. That's not optimism, its defeatism.
Classical liberalism is based on the foundation that principles of liberty and justice are supreme and are necessary to moderate and protect social institutions from the threat of human passions.
So the New Right asks: When in the past 30 years have the Elite of the USA defended the principles of liberty and justice against human passions? When have they done this in the past five years?
When have those advocating "Classical Liberalism" taken a public stance against the corrosive philosophies of the Elite?
Judge James Ho recently did, saying he would not hire clerk's from Yale Law School. Give us 1000 more "elites" like James Ho and then we will be talking.
"Classical liberalism is California" is the most fantastic retconning I've ever seen. For decades classical liberals have been complaining about that state and instead imploring it to be more like low tax North Dakota. The stuff of think tanks.
It's no surprise that many people on the New Right are former Classical Liberals from California. They saw that Classical Liberalism inevitably leads to Progressivism. The host has no defense against the disease.
These former Classic Liberals have attempted to diagnose what went wrong in California and many of the differences between the New Right and Classical Liberals are the prescription they took away from that experience.
Progressives had nothing but disdain for classical liberalism (Koch Brothers hate, "colorblind is the new racism") before this New Right discussion came and suddenly decided they were the same force.
The logic that classical liberalism inevitably leads to progressivism would seem to be a problem for the reactionary point of view itself. You could just as well say that the reactionary/throne and altar pov led to classical liberalism.
I think people are mistaking chronological order for causality.
It actually reminds me of the idea that Christianity is to blame for wokism. Christianity leads to the woke?
I think there are just too many possibilities for splintering to posit a clean line.
At the risk of quibbling over definitions, I would say that what Arnold and Tyler call "the New Right" is today's *populism*.
"Left" and "Right" are arbitrary abstractions.
Populists mistrust the competence and motivations of elites. They believe that a wide spectrum of incestuous elites (academic, technocratic, deep State, media, corporate, globalist) constitute an Establishment. They believe that the system is rigged. They believe that elites look down on them. Occasionally, they hear top elites denigrate them ("deplorables," "semi-fascists"). They resent elites' high-handedness. They believe that elites impose speech inhibition. They are loyal to populists leaders who defy elite speech inhibition.
Arnold has faith in a classical-liberal day-after-tomorrow. Populists want to check the elites and achieve status-relief today.
I'm old fashioned and have always thought of "populism" as advocating "popular" policies that do not actually improve the lives of the people being addressed -- protectionism, discrimination (or worse) against foreigners or ethnic/religious minorities and "elites" -- as a means of gaining power.
I don’t think this passes an ideological Turing test.
You could have said “popular policies”, some of which might be good and some of which might be bad, but to define it as “only those popular thing that are bad” is even worse then a straw man.
This sounds like how anti-populists do think: the [dumb] folk support policy X which does not actually improve their lives.
But for most people, there are some Democrat policies which the elites claim will help them, but actually are hurting them. Inflation, crime (including from illegal immigrants), higher gas prices, days with no baby-formula, drugs, sex-ed for 6 year olds including graphic novels of homosexual oral sex.
To Tyler and Arnold, it seems like not wanting your six-year old to see gay blow-job books is equal to censorship and book banning - and is deplorably populist.
Most parents think protecting kids from being sexualized by groomers is good, and actually better than free & obscene speech. I'm expecting parents to vote far more for Republicans, including MAGA Reps, than the polls now show.
Of course Democrats do not claim inflation helps anyone and approximately zero support more crime (a local issue, but at the national level Democrats generally have favored transfers to cities to hire more officers) an illegal immigration. (They do tend to support applying our laws that establish a procedure for dealing with people who are seeking asylum.) Restriction s on import of baby formula are longstanding, but I agree that Biden could have overridden that. What six year old's can see in books is a local school library issue, "Populism" is generally thought of as a national. issue.
Elites fall in line with ridiculous stances because they're terrified of ever sharing a position held by the bad people. When liberals stop being so afraid of disagreeing with each other, trust in elites will improve. As long as the overriding impulse is to never risk getting confused for a bad person, the elites will continue to gaslight
Tyler seems to think you can counter an aggressive “New Left” with a moderate and sensible Right. Sounds great in theory but he’s wrong. The aggressiveness of tactics employed by the New Left would easily overwhelm any soft opposition. You’re probably correct it all leads nowhere good but the choice is now between “which version of bad.”
Neither Tyler nor Arnold focus much on the real new Right - Family, God, Nation. Like Orban in Hungary, and new Italian PM Giorgia Meloni. Similar to the promises that fascists lied about - and contrary to the "equity / equal outcomes" that the Democrat socialists are promising and lying about.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/italy-s-first-female-prime-minister-leads-the-most-far-right-government-since-the-fascist-era-of-mussolini/ar-AA13gmH2
As more parents understand that Democrats, both Woke and not, are leading to the destruction of the family among the non-elite, as well as long being anti-God and anti-nation, more parents who want a good future for their kids will vote Republican. It will be these votes that check Wokeism - if wokeism is to be checked.
And part of the checking will be defunding anti-Republican tax-exempt organizations. I both hope for this, and expect increasing calls for it until either the discrimination stops or the colleges and other orgs are defunded from gov't tax exemptions and Federal Loans, and Federal Research grants.
Althouse linked to David Brooks in NYT explaining, but objecting to, it as:
"a very clear class/culture/status war narrative in which common-sense Americans are being assaulted by elite progressives who let the homeless take over the streets, teach sex ed to 5-year-olds, manufacture fake news, run woke corporations, open the border and refuse to do anything about fentanyl deaths and the sorts of things that affect regular people.<<
https://althouse.blogspot.com/2022/10/david-brooks-says-trumpified-gop.html
From comments on Brooks:
>>It is a class conflict. The best description that I’ve read is that the country is ruled by the “front row kids:” the ones who sit in the front rows of class, always ask for the extra credit, and generally make themselves a nuisance to the rest of us. They are about 120 IQ, so above average intelligence but not genius. They are smart enough to work well within the existing institutions, usually by figuring out how to game the system for their advantage. They take all the AP/Honors/IB courses in HS, get a varsity sport on their resume, all to get into the best college possible. From there it’s internships, masters in Public Policy/International Relations/etc., or law school. They end up mid-level management in some gov agency, buy an overpriced home in NoVA or Maryland, and post pictures of themselves wearing “finisher” medals from 5ks. Meanwhile, they are incredibly sensitive to social status and their position within their circle. This makes it difficult to push back on whatever latest stupid fad is making its way through the population. They are barely competent, at best, at handling the unexpected, because their entire lives have been defined by plans and an aversion to risk."
Republicans are the good guys who want to: Make America Great Again. And being led by a Donald Trump who has, over the last 6 years, been far more honest than his critics - including Arnold Kling and Tyler Cowen.
Arnold could improve his own impartiality by listing Trump policies, including who he hired & fired, and compare the policy AND the results with Biden and Obama policies and results. Easy to excuse 2020-2021 (+?) as highly irregular due to Covid, including the 5 month (less than 2 quarters) Covid "recession", but the multi-quarter Biden not-quite "recession" for 2022. Calling the inflation/ recession a "strong economy", like Biden did, is laughably false. But while most elites can, have, and still do call Trump a clown, or worse insults, they avoid mentioning Biden by name when discussing specific policy problems, or even generally. Elites beclowning themselves.
More New Right Godliness: a call to insurrection.
https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/frenchpress/the-seeds-of-political-violence-are/
The New Rights' conception of God:
"Opening prayer today at Eric Trump and Michael Flynn’s QAnon event: “God, open the eyes of Pres Trump’s understanding, that he will know how to implement divine intervention. And you will not surround him with RINO trash, in the name of Jesus.”"
https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1583834164226273281
Rod Dreher retweeted that, too - yet he, as I, continues to favor the Christian Nationalism of Orban and Meloni. (Dear God, do not surround our leader with lying sinners ...)
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-end-of-conservatism-or-birth-of-a-new-right/
>>"virtues aren’t merely moral ideas: They are materially and socially rewarded, and their opposing vices are punished." <<
Rod quotes & references Jon Askonas
https://www.compactmag.com/article/why-conservatism-failed
>>"A technological society can have no traditions." <<
I was just thinking about how respect for parents and grandparents is highly reduced as the kids know more about the current technology than the parents.
>>"If we believe in a human future, we must build it, not with kind words or tax credits, but with a serious program of technological development. Marx showed how a material transformation of the economic order could have enormous social and cultural effects. Forging the human order anew means building technologies that make it easier to live well."
<<
Normal folk need to be able to live well. Democrat policies make that almost impossible.
Rod Dreher is "normal folk"? He's as warped as the people he criticizes.
All new technology has an adjustment period. Look at the revolutions that the printing press brought to the world. Hard to see how our own time is any different. Look at how people use the social media now. The sane people have trended to less opinion and more pictures. The old people are the ones who use Facebook to spread Qanon BS.
Reminiscing about the olden days, when the memories are generally mis-shaped, doesn't move anyone of any ideology forward. Nobody of the modern era wants to go back to an agrarian time as life was hard and there was lots of suffering. Not to mention boring.
Move forward, adjust, don't look back. The nuts will burn themselves out. It's already happening even as they're not done.
The discussion I linked between Yuval Levin, an actual Burke expert, and Jonah Goldberg is highly recommended.
Classical Liberals have an underdeveloped Theory of Power. That leaves them vulnerable, and the only surprise is it's taken them this long to get mugged.
Tyler *still* doesn't realize what just happened, so of course he's sanguine about woke.
Sorry, but we are screwed. Our elites are neither intelligent nor moral, Arnold. Collapse is coming. It will probably be delayed long enough for me to die off so I won't have to suffer the consequences or be able to help rebuild it all, but the outcome is inevitable, and probaby was always inevitable- nothing lasts forever. We had a nice run while it lasted.
Arnold;
You have a data problem.
We forget how short the 1700's were and how much happened.
The New Right has more data than the Founding Father's did when they instituted the strongest checks and balances on political power that they could imagine (and then decided it needed to be softened up a bit to move to the Constitution). I think they would have been far less sanguine had they see the reprise of Napoleon; though they should have learned more from the Glorious Revolution and Restoration. Of course, they didn't have the US Civil War to learn from. Also, the timelines they were imagining were long, but those they were experiencing were short. It hadn't been very long since the first experiments in modern democracy.
What we know now is that over the course of 80 years, the Check and Balances on Federal Power were overcome by the Woke of the day (Abolitionists, Carpet Baggers, etc); and then more formally and more permanently to create a standing Army (ostensibly for managing the Indians/Native Americans), and then for Prohibition, WWI, the New Deal, WWII, the Cold War, the Civil Rights movement, the War on Cancer, the War on Poverty, the War on AIDS, War on Drugs, the war on Terror, the Woke...
It has never once been rolled back to restore checks and balances, unless you count some small moves by (and possibly against) Trump. Putin's oligarchs have also demonstrated that the voluntary devolution of imperial power is short lived if guarded by the Elites. China is hardly a counter-example. What legal restriction did the 'one nation two systems' impose on China?
My Xtian Socialist grandparents met on a Eugene Debs march. I grew up a non-conforming left civil libertarian, then (once I studied economics) became a full Libertarian in the '80s. I've since moved further right (joining my husband's position) for exactly the reasons Tyler points out.
At least in this historical-path-dependent, post-Marxist, post-Fascist, post-Communist world, I'm afraid
Classical Liberalism by its very trust in humanity (notwithstanding Original Sin aka EvoPsych, nor the lessons of history that you & he I hope are conversant with) the slippery slope takeover by Left authoritarianism (with its promise of Heaven on Earth) and narrowly self-interested elites becomes inevitable.
They don't need to be competent to destroy classical liberal Western Civilization. Au contraire, their very incompetence and short-sighted self-interest makes that ever more likely.
In the short run, what to do about it is obvious--stop them by any means necessary. What that means in the longer run is uncertain. I don't want to live under an authoritarian Xtian Nationalist regime either. Although the historical body count record of the Right, while dismal, is much much lower than the Left (I don't think that is happenstance).
One can view institutions of all types (government, regulatory, legal, private, religious, etc.) as having as their prime directive: "growth and survival". That is their number one motivating force. All stated goals, ideals, etc. are below the prime directive. That simple shift in perspective enables one to see that all these institutions evolve in ways that further their self-interests. If "growth and survival" are not their prime directive, they tend to cease to exist.
An organization like NASA that went to the moon on-budget and on-time learned the lesson well when their budget was killed after they succeeded. They learned that the prime directive requires they never do anything on time or budget again.
Monopoly organizations (government and private) often achieve their growth by increasing their bureaucracy and decreasing their productivity, a practice that leads to them consume larger budgets. IBM was the undisputed king of the hill in my youth, but its growth and expansion focus expanded its bureaucracy so significantly that innovation became difficult: IBM took 7 years to design a computer when the chip capacity was doubling in two years. Good luck in the IBM vs. Apple contest. In the private sector IBM had a failure mechanism called bankruptcy. Government institutions like the CDC and FDA which failed to meet the Covid-19 challenges will continue on with increased budgets.
At heart, all government organizations are monopolies whose prime directives effectively lead to turf wars between institutions and to the organizations expanding power and authority as much as they can.
"Tyler and I probably share a faith in the ability of a liberal society to self-correct."
Why? There's nothing especially liberal about our society any more. There Is No Liberal West (https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/there-is-no-liberal-west). All of the defining precepts of classical liberalism have been overthrown. The Paradox of Tolerance happened - an intolerant group (the New Left) used tolerance to take over society and impose their vision. Now we need to figure out how to fix it.
Parenthetically, I find it mildly amusing that Cowen correctly points out the importance of trust and the difficulty of building it while supporting mass immigration, one of the single most trust-corroding policies out there.
The general Libertarian and especially elite (wannabe?) Libbers emotionally in thrall to mass immigration lead them to, when necessary, think up rationalizations for why mass immigrations good points will be better than its bad points, overall, for a majority of people, when a huge increase in comfort for the immigrations is compared to only a small decrease in comfort for the current residents - with no Trust issues listed in that "rational" list of good & bad points.
All Libertarians are smart enough to "rationally" come to their emotionally satisfying Liberty (first!) conclusions.
The US population is over 50% larger than the 1970s. As a Gen X'er who has grown up in that time it's hard to see any actual net downside of mass immigration. They're not stealing anyones's jobs. There's plenty of space. The New Right is all about surrendering their own agency, joining the pouty progressives.
"I fear that tomorrow belongs to the woke. But there is still a day after tomorrow." The Day after Tomorrow is a 2004 disaster movie. I hope we don't go there.
In any case, the mean girls are in charge. They don't care much for classical liberalism or liberalism. Just be sure to mimic their dress and speech.
Tyler Cowen's clarity of thought is amazing! Also I feel the emergence of the New Right was necessary to counter the Woke narrative, yet in the end we have to strive for the middle.
The midde is where you get run over most easiy. Here is the hard truth- passion and commitment is what wins battles. That kind of passion and commitment to cause exists only on the left today, and the people "in the middle" are all cowards like Tyler Cowen, who I greatly admired at one time. When the crew of the ship is steering it into the iceberg, you are actually better off with no one at the wheel.
What he says about classical liberals applies to old fashioned Liberals, Neoliberals, lots of old time Conservatives and probably some Progressives.
One of this week's Remnant discussions with Yuval Levin was really good. You even get a shout out. https://thedispatch.com/podcast/remnant/a-cynical-man/
Here's another, more realistic view of the situation: https://loquitur.substack.com/p/an-agenda-for-conservatives