A long time ago, around when Moldbug was still writing Unqualified Reservations, there was some discussion about the structure of the then-emerging neoreactionary movement. Nick Land among others wrote about it.
Land's observation was that progressivism is a value system which treats equality as the highest good. The groups opposed to progressivism then either rejected this value system entirely or had some other values that they considered equally important.
These were capitalists (which generally accept wealth and income inequality), religious or traditionalist conservatives (which accept that not all behaviors or lifestyles are equally valuable) and nationalists (which accept that we should have unequal loyalties toward or attitudes to different people groups).
Looking at your discussion of the book, I think group 1 fits fairly well onto the traditionalist wing, while group 3 is clearly influenced by nationalism. The capitalist wing, which was clearly influential in the form of the "tech right", is missing. I suppose most of this group is found in private industry instead of in university departments or think tanks.
I remember reading, back in the 1900s, in places like Commentary, that the problem with the left was that it believed there were no values, no morality, that everything should be tolerated. Then "woke" came along, and the people who said it were mugged by reality. Woke was massively intolerant, profoundly moralistic.
I feel the same way about "progressivism is a value system which treats equality as the highest good." As I hinted in a comment a few hours ago, most academics certainly don't feel that way, and academics are the vanguard of the left. To take the most obvious example, most academics do not find anything unjust in the fact that people with college degrees make more money than people who don't. In fact, they think it would be unjust if both groups made the same.
For all the rhetoric, I think the left has as hierarchical a view of justice as the medieval Catholic Church did. There are good people who deserve more and bad people who deserve less. In some ways, "woke" was just a codification and justification for unequal treatment.
I'm pretty sure I agree that the academics believe they should make money. Maybe many even believe college grads should. That misses that there is a large contingent (academic or not) that believe there should be equal outcomes and incomes.
There are certainly lots of academics who say that, but I question their sincerity. Many do the "reality" two-step: there should be equal outcomes and incomes but that's not the way the world is, so I have to push for all I can get. In reality ...
When I say I question their sincerity, I don't mean that they are being consciously hypocritical. They simply don't see how different their behavior is from their rhetoric.
Most chase after more money and some want equal outcomes but do you know to what extent they are the same academics? I don't and I doubt you do either.
Thanks for the interesting pushback. I think that Commentary was largely wrong in the 1990s, whereas Land was largely right. Obviously, that's not a contradiction. And from my personal experience and observations, I think that well-paid and well-off leftists recognize that there is at least some prima facie conflict between their ideologies and lifestyles, which well-off rightists, particularly in the capitalist wing, generally do not acknowledge or agree to.
>Good people who deserve more and bad people who deserve less
I’m not Catholic, to my elderly neighbor’s daily disappointment - but I associate the above phenomenon more with e.g. the Levelers and other proto-communist sects. The people limned with such unfortunately dull thoroughness in “The World Turned Upside Down”. AKA The Book Picked Up and Turned Upside Down for the 5th Time.
Yes, because it isn't equality, but egalitarianism. "relating to or believing in the principle that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities." Which contains three parts and people will sometimes emphasize the various parts differently for different groups, possibly based on the moral dyad.
I think one big reason non-liberal voices are so rare in academia today is that education—especially since the late 19th century—has become a heavily regulated, taxpayer-funded industry. When the federal and state governments took over the system, they didn’t just fund it—they standardized and regulated it. And that standardization and regulation tends to reward ideological conformity and mediocrity over intellectual risk-taking, especially from conservative or libertarian thinkers.
Add to that the political power of teachers' unions, which shape not just policy but the pipeline of who becomes a teacher or professor in the first place, and you get a system where heterodox voices are filtered out long before they reach tenure.
Change won’t come from within. It’s going to take decades of work building outside alternatives—charter schools, voucher-backed private options, homeschooling, and microschools. That’s where the long game is. We also need to start seriously confronting the role of government in funding and controlling both K–12 and public universities if we want real change.
The factors you're talking about apply much more to primary and secondary ed, but higher ed is much more progressive than primary and secondary. Seems like a problem with the theory.
You're absolutely right about that, Cinna. Colleges and universities have become much more leftist since the 1960s. Sorry if I wasn't sufficiently clear about that in my comment.
A random stray thought mugged me. Postal workers were the largest part of the federal government for a long time, and (as I understand it) corrupt as hell due to so many patronage posts to fill for new Presidents. The Civil Service tamed that corruption some. civil service unions changed the corruption, and the expansion of the bureaucracy expanded the civil service and union corruption.
I wonder if teachers were the pre-unions state counterpart to postal workers.
It's my understanding that postal workers were effectively the federal government's patronage class for much of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Then, in 1962, JFK signed Executive Order 10988 which formally granted federal employees—including postal workers—the right to unionize and collectively bargain (with certain restrictions). That order marked the beginning of the modern public-sector union era. The timing matters too—it was part of the broader New Frontier mindset of expanding and entrenching federal institutional control. And once those union protections were locked in, the dynamics shifted from spoil-based corruption to structural entrenchment.
Similarly, the K–12 system evolved from a patchwork of local norms and schoolhouses to a centralized, heavily unionized, federally and state capital-based, bureaucratically regulated system. The changes weren’t just about funding—it was about who controls the levers (and money every school year), and who gets filtered out. Teachers' unions became gatekeepers, not just protectors of benefits. And just like the old postal patronage system, once the incentives became institutionalized, there was no going back—only a slow grind forward through parallel systems like charters, homeschooling, and microschools. (And, on those fronts, NH just became the 17th state to allow school choice—up from ZERO states just four years ago! https://substack.com/@stevenscesa/note/c-126373900 )
You're just bleating out wrongness everywhere. Teacher unions do not control who becomes a teacher and K12 us anything but heavily centralized to nane just two idiotic declarations you've inflicted on the comments.
You are absolutely that K-12 is not institutionally centralized. No one organization owns all the schools in a state. But there is a tremendous amount of top-down homogenization. Most all states have state "standards" that say what must be taught each year, and what students should know. The state decides when the school year begins and ends. It requires a certain amount of days and "instructional hours" (180 and 990 in Massachusetts). It probably imposes a "tenure" system; after two or three or four years, a teacher must be let go or given tenure, in which case she can only be fired for egregious behavior or because of a "reduction in force"--and then perhaps only if she is low on the seniority list.
All regions also have "accreditation" agencies, which impose a daunting list of requirements. So, every high school in my state must have a school library with a minimum number of volumes and a certain percentage of which must be published within the last few years.
He was primarily complaining about federal. Obviously, schools follow state standards.
I'd point out that top-down homogenization and centralized aren't the same thing. Teachers have way too much freedom for "centralized" to ever be an accurate descriptor.
In practice, teachers have a lot of freedom, but that is largely because the higher ups (department head, assistant principal, principal) don't know what's going on in each individual classroom. This is especially true is the contract says that visits have to be scheduled beforehand. "Once the classroom door closes, it's just you and the class."
I understand that may be changing. In some places, teachers have to file reports on what they did, and some places have each period's activities and homework posted online. If that ever becomes standard (and posts are checked for accuracy, and for how close the lessons follow the standards), teachers will lose a lot of their freedom. Though that would require hiring more people to monitor the online content.
I agree with Kling's critique of Deneen. The failure in our current culture is Illiberalism. It is the refusal to allow criticism and disagreement. The virtue of "being nice" has become a vice and the consequence is a society that is incredibly mean and intolerant of nonconforming opinion.
We all know of the vitriol between the "Right" and the "Left". Unfortunately meanness exists everywhere. Being nice is actually a weapon used to pummel people, including people that are supposed to be allies - witness the observation that the "safe & friendly" BlueSky social media platform invites ugliness and bitterness as participants become ever more intolerant of disagreement.
American society would benefit from a change in priority from "being nice and conforming" to "being excellent". What is missing from 21st century society is the recognition that excellent people make society better - we need individuals to be more excellent. We need institutional leaders with the wisdom and courage to openly recognize that some ideas are superior than others. Liberalism has allowed people to choose many different paths. But it is not the fault of Liberalism that people are scared of speaking openly that some paths are superior and some are inferior - Illiberalism did that!
Good point. I am often confused by people claiming, in effect, that the problem over the last 5 years was too much freedom: too much speech, too much ability to do what you thought was right, etc. That coming from people claiming to be on the right.
Can you explain that? I'm not aware of anyone explicitly claiming too much freedom, right or left. Maybe I don't know what you mean by "in effect." Maybe your more focused on people from the right not liking what they see as immoral. IDK.
While it's accurate to say he's post-liberal (or perhaps reconstructed pre-liberal, what neo-reactionary would mean if hadn't come to be associated with something different) that economics-focused description of Vermeule's thinking isn't being fair and wouldn't pass the Ideological Turing Test. I am not a fan of his work, for instance, I am not at all convinced by his arguments in favor of "Common Good Constitutionalism", I think his arguments against mainstream Originalism are weak, and his various defenses of the administrative state have marked the low points of his career in terms of his debate with Hamburger and two embarrassing collaborations with Sunstein, neither of which "aged well" as they say. Vermeule seems to live in a permanent and imperturbable cognitive dissonance of bolstering the legitimacy of the scope of power wielded by existing institutions in more-or-less their current form but then complaining constantly about the kind of people who have captured total control over those institutions and the bad things they do with that power. Nevertheless, I wouldn't characterize Vermeule's critique or political philosophy as being one primarily obsessed with opposition to market- determined outcomes in the economic sphere.
Despite disagreeing with, and being willing to argue that he was thoroughly bested, I would say that I am grateful to Vermeule for opening up the debate with Philip Hamburger over the latter's excellent book "Is Administrative Law Unlawful?" The practice of constitutionalism is difficult and the heat of such bitter engagements generates a certain amount of light and clarity, at least about where the fissures are: generating publicity for the under appreciated Hamburger would just be an incidental benefit.
Similarly with Deneen. Vermeule really has very little to say about economics other than the standard signaling analyses in his books with Sunstein, but Deneen is engaged in laying out what he sees as tradeoffs consequent to neoliberal economics, and in so doing displaying more of an economic approach to thinking than many apostles of the "free market" (whatever that is) who seem to tend to want to deny any tradeoffs whatsoever, the market being all pure and holy or something like that.
Having grown tired of the whole toxic circus, as of late I have taken refuge and solace in Richard Rorty's call for tolerance:
"I simply want to suggest that we keep pragmatic tolerance going as long as we can--that both sides see the other as honest, if misguided, colleagues, doing their best to bring light to a dark time. In particular, we should remind ourselves that although there are relations between academic politics and real politics, they are not tight enough to justify carrying the passions of the latter over into the former."
No, but I don't want to forget that once upon a time such a thing could be said with a reasonably straight face. Who knows, maybe their are small, isolated, quasi-monastic communities off the grid where such interaction remains possible?
The more distant some topic is away from politics, personal soap-opera dramas, and mass-marketing the more likely one can find a community where discourse is aligned with comity and accuracy and with status arranged according to a hierarchy of excellence, real achievement, and dedication, and where people from different walks of life can still cooperate and interact in a friendly and productive manner in the context of pursuing that interest.
For all the talk of the value of institutions and norms, one simply has to note that in the kind of situation above, the right things often happen almost spontaneously and effortlessly, as the incentives are right. Move away from that, however, and the incentives work the other way and inevitably break everything down, and even the best institutions and norms exist to fight the uphill battle against breakdown, and still usually fail, especially when they do not focus on ways to protect themselves from the erosion by intentional delegitimation.
Now, that article has its flaws to include Lili's slant of course. Not all platforms are equal and Substack is better and has grown a lot since then, but, let's face it, it's still pretty small in the big picture. But her central message is true enough: that, with the exception of a few pockets, of online discourse on the worst platforms having completed its rapid corruption and degeneration into mostly a postmodernist wasteland where the only rational move for experienced survivalists is the cynical presumption that every purportedly literal text is really code about some instrumental contextual subtext (i.e., moves in some game and fights over influence).
Actually, her point is not so much that this degeneration is a fact, but that all smart people who had been "very online" for a while at that point should also be presumed to be fully aware of that fact, and that the crafting of any message in a style inconsistent with the author's knowledge of that fact and the parade of horribles that is "the history of how we got here", such as calling for "presumption of good faith" is at best extremely naive and, more likely, itself part of yet another strategic move. Certainly no progress is possible unless people are aware of and honest about the nature of the problem.
The book is at its best in its arguments against textualism, which is often conflated with originalism but isn't the same thing. You could be a common good originalist but you could not be a common good textualist.
I know Vermeule claims to be making that distinction, it's just that I don't really buy it. In theory it's possible to make rigorous, meaningful, and consistent clasdistic distinctions between textualism and originalism as if they are each genus categories with their own constituent species and sub-species. In practice people get both semantically strategic (e.g., "motte and bailey") or just very intellectually sloppy and use the words, if not interchangeably then with lots of overlap, to mean different things at different times, with "mood affiliation" (yet under the pretense of arising from a principled perspective) seeming to be the real priority.
One can see the difference in Vermeule's output itself. When he's writing a book or an academic article, he tends to keep the rigor and level of distinction up. Then he'll get on twitter or substack and all of that seems to go out the window according to what is most convenient to the point he is trying to make at the time. "True Scotsman Originalism" as "Textualism but Subordinate to what Vermeule thinks are Good Results" is somehow distinguishable objectively from Results-Oriented Politically-Activist Jurisprudence because ... um .... uh ....
Perhaps the best example of this is the way people infamously abuse the term "Democracy" as in "Protect Our Democracy!" to mean "Results Determined By Voting But Only When I like the Results." Anything purporting to be 'originalist' while neutralizing the defining characteristic of its interpretive-constraint and disciplinary function is an incoherent self-contradiction.
There is no index in the galley, so I can't be sure. She would probably put you in the Hard Right Underbelly category. But even Pinkoski seems to be higher than you on the pecking order, so I think you fell under her radar.
I like that AK uses the term “markets”. The term “the market” or “the free market” invokes something imaginary, like “human rights”. From there it is a quick jump to ideology, which is inherently anti-conservative. The only sense in which talk of markets relates to conservatism is this slender thread: it is true and important to recognize that markets naturally emerge, in human behavior - and recognizing this obvious truth is part of living grounded in reality, which is an aspect of conservatism.
The question should not be “who are the conservatives?” at least if asked by a member of the academic left, who cannot be expected to know anything about the real and much more valid question, “what is worth conserving, and why?”, and only then “who are the people trying to do that?”
To a certain extent the "Hard Right Underbelly", even if it existed before in various guises, probably cannot be completely understood in the present without this because this is in part what it is in reactance and revolt against. Some of the extremeness of the victimhood culture with regard to its identitarians abandonment of dignity culture leaves people with the "wrong" identitarian phenotypes no recourse but to move towards Honor Culture as a rational response. This may or may not all be downstream of people who are incapable of separating race from class in certain regards. The TL/DR short version of the micro foundations of the new right something along the lines of, "oh you are a victim? How nice. Well, I am not going to let you make me your victim."
Implicit perhaps in the author's thesis is that ideas matter more than practical political realities when determining the causes of political change. This is a common academic argumentation trick in listing a lot of "but-for" causes without doing any real weighing of which causes are actually the most important. If you can make this pile of irrelevant causes seem relevant, you could write a whole book about how Taylor Swift's latest album caused the election of Donald Trump, or how the prosecution of Sam Bankman-Fried caused the attacks of October 7th. Opinion writers use this method all the time to create frisson.
So, on the protectionist turn in American politics, how much was actually caused by any of the people profiled in this book and how much was actually caused by Gen. Sec. Jinping's policy turns since 2016 and the emergence of credibly competitive Chinese multinationals in major industries like social media, microchips, and car manufacturing? Dirty scriveners and other assorted ink-stained wretches are irrelevant until someone with power and money has a need for them. Attributing huge political shifts to writers is like blaming troubadours or particular conflicts in English and French estates laws for the Hundred Years War.
She discusses the many causal factors of social change and explains why she emphasizes ideas as a causal force. She handles this question well, although she may come out differently from someone else.
I'll take your word for it that she mentions it, but I'd need a lot of convincing because I think the external factors are more important. For example, people have been criticizing the universities for a long time, but big-money centrists did not start crossing the aisle on the issue in volume until the 10/7 reaction gave them the justification. The same ideas from the same critics became more convincing to moderates because of external conditions.
Have you soured on Hanania? He has undergone a shift to be closer to a regular Never Trumper, but I feel like that happened after you stopped linking to him.
I stopped reading or paying attention to him a while ago, so I am not sure if it's fair to say he's switched his views, or if so, to get more money or likes or whatever. He just didn't seem have anything new or interesting or valuable to say after his initial burst of activity. And yeah, he's blinded by animus and obsessed with repeatedly harping on the many ways Trump is horrible and a shameless liar, and how many of his supporters are gullible fools or worse. But, to my point about "new, interesting, and valuable" we all knew that about Trump and his supporters a long time ago, like we know it about our whole political class and everybody's supporters - that's Modern Democracy. And we all also knew there was no winning alternative on the right to horrible liar Trump, that's also Modern Democracy.
If a person has consumed content from a "Politicial Writer or Thinker", they presumably feel that a desire has been satisfied. If not, he won't do it again. What is the gain? (It doesn't have to be politics: it could be a variety of other subjects.) Maybe it's a feeling that, because I have this information, I am more in control, equipped to make better decisions, safer.
Of course, I ask myself about a lot of subjects... "What am I going to do differently?"
Supposing I did get accurate information about politics from a source and it opened up into a revelation, what would I change in my life? In a few cases, there might be something obvious: will I visit, will I invest, etc. Mostly though, it's all just cogitating about politics.
It's good Arnold read this stuff and told me about it. Now, I don't have to. Thanks much.
I’m fairly ignorant of conservative intellectuals and ideas. Maybe someone can tell me what their top three conservative ideas are? What makes these ideas conservative?
It helps to read someone sympathetic to the ideas and personalities and who's not out to satisfy the demand from the market for confirmation-bias and perform some pre-determined hatchet-job under the guise of some objective explanatory history. One is wasting one's time with Field or Sam Tanenhaus.
For much better coverage of the recent upheaval and realignment in the American right, I recommend George Hawley's books, especially , "Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism".
I wish Mr. Kling would review a book by John Warner, a well-informed, academic critic of AI, entitled "More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI."
A long time ago, around when Moldbug was still writing Unqualified Reservations, there was some discussion about the structure of the then-emerging neoreactionary movement. Nick Land among others wrote about it.
Land's observation was that progressivism is a value system which treats equality as the highest good. The groups opposed to progressivism then either rejected this value system entirely or had some other values that they considered equally important.
These were capitalists (which generally accept wealth and income inequality), religious or traditionalist conservatives (which accept that not all behaviors or lifestyles are equally valuable) and nationalists (which accept that we should have unequal loyalties toward or attitudes to different people groups).
Looking at your discussion of the book, I think group 1 fits fairly well onto the traditionalist wing, while group 3 is clearly influenced by nationalism. The capitalist wing, which was clearly influential in the form of the "tech right", is missing. I suppose most of this group is found in private industry instead of in university departments or think tanks.
I remember reading, back in the 1900s, in places like Commentary, that the problem with the left was that it believed there were no values, no morality, that everything should be tolerated. Then "woke" came along, and the people who said it were mugged by reality. Woke was massively intolerant, profoundly moralistic.
I feel the same way about "progressivism is a value system which treats equality as the highest good." As I hinted in a comment a few hours ago, most academics certainly don't feel that way, and academics are the vanguard of the left. To take the most obvious example, most academics do not find anything unjust in the fact that people with college degrees make more money than people who don't. In fact, they think it would be unjust if both groups made the same.
For all the rhetoric, I think the left has as hierarchical a view of justice as the medieval Catholic Church did. There are good people who deserve more and bad people who deserve less. In some ways, "woke" was just a codification and justification for unequal treatment.
I'm pretty sure I agree that the academics believe they should make money. Maybe many even believe college grads should. That misses that there is a large contingent (academic or not) that believe there should be equal outcomes and incomes.
There are certainly lots of academics who say that, but I question their sincerity. Many do the "reality" two-step: there should be equal outcomes and incomes but that's not the way the world is, so I have to push for all I can get. In reality ...
When I say I question their sincerity, I don't mean that they are being consciously hypocritical. They simply don't see how different their behavior is from their rhetoric.
Most chase after more money and some want equal outcomes but do you know to what extent they are the same academics? I don't and I doubt you do either.
Thanks for the interesting pushback. I think that Commentary was largely wrong in the 1990s, whereas Land was largely right. Obviously, that's not a contradiction. And from my personal experience and observations, I think that well-paid and well-off leftists recognize that there is at least some prima facie conflict between their ideologies and lifestyles, which well-off rightists, particularly in the capitalist wing, generally do not acknowledge or agree to.
>Good people who deserve more and bad people who deserve less
I’m not Catholic, to my elderly neighbor’s daily disappointment - but I associate the above phenomenon more with e.g. the Levelers and other proto-communist sects. The people limned with such unfortunately dull thoroughness in “The World Turned Upside Down”. AKA The Book Picked Up and Turned Upside Down for the 5th Time.
Yes, because it isn't equality, but egalitarianism. "relating to or believing in the principle that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities." Which contains three parts and people will sometimes emphasize the various parts differently for different groups, possibly based on the moral dyad.
Good article to start my Monday morning with!
I think one big reason non-liberal voices are so rare in academia today is that education—especially since the late 19th century—has become a heavily regulated, taxpayer-funded industry. When the federal and state governments took over the system, they didn’t just fund it—they standardized and regulated it. And that standardization and regulation tends to reward ideological conformity and mediocrity over intellectual risk-taking, especially from conservative or libertarian thinkers.
Add to that the political power of teachers' unions, which shape not just policy but the pipeline of who becomes a teacher or professor in the first place, and you get a system where heterodox voices are filtered out long before they reach tenure.
Change won’t come from within. It’s going to take decades of work building outside alternatives—charter schools, voucher-backed private options, homeschooling, and microschools. That’s where the long game is. We also need to start seriously confronting the role of government in funding and controlling both K–12 and public universities if we want real change.
I write on themes like this every week at https://stevenscesa.substack.com/ . Come check it out.
The factors you're talking about apply much more to primary and secondary ed, but higher ed is much more progressive than primary and secondary. Seems like a problem with the theory.
You're absolutely right about that, Cinna. Colleges and universities have become much more leftist since the 1960s. Sorry if I wasn't sufficiently clear about that in my comment.
I'm not so sure post secondary is any more to the left, it's just more visible.
A random stray thought mugged me. Postal workers were the largest part of the federal government for a long time, and (as I understand it) corrupt as hell due to so many patronage posts to fill for new Presidents. The Civil Service tamed that corruption some. civil service unions changed the corruption, and the expansion of the bureaucracy expanded the civil service and union corruption.
I wonder if teachers were the pre-unions state counterpart to postal workers.
It's my understanding that postal workers were effectively the federal government's patronage class for much of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Then, in 1962, JFK signed Executive Order 10988 which formally granted federal employees—including postal workers—the right to unionize and collectively bargain (with certain restrictions). That order marked the beginning of the modern public-sector union era. The timing matters too—it was part of the broader New Frontier mindset of expanding and entrenching federal institutional control. And once those union protections were locked in, the dynamics shifted from spoil-based corruption to structural entrenchment.
Similarly, the K–12 system evolved from a patchwork of local norms and schoolhouses to a centralized, heavily unionized, federally and state capital-based, bureaucratically regulated system. The changes weren’t just about funding—it was about who controls the levers (and money every school year), and who gets filtered out. Teachers' unions became gatekeepers, not just protectors of benefits. And just like the old postal patronage system, once the incentives became institutionalized, there was no going back—only a slow grind forward through parallel systems like charters, homeschooling, and microschools. (And, on those fronts, NH just became the 17th state to allow school choice—up from ZERO states just four years ago! https://substack.com/@stevenscesa/note/c-126373900 )
Thanks for all that. I knew that FDR at one point had said unionizing government employees was a bad idea, but never knew when it happened.
You're just bleating out wrongness everywhere. Teacher unions do not control who becomes a teacher and K12 us anything but heavily centralized to nane just two idiotic declarations you've inflicted on the comments.
You are absolutely that K-12 is not institutionally centralized. No one organization owns all the schools in a state. But there is a tremendous amount of top-down homogenization. Most all states have state "standards" that say what must be taught each year, and what students should know. The state decides when the school year begins and ends. It requires a certain amount of days and "instructional hours" (180 and 990 in Massachusetts). It probably imposes a "tenure" system; after two or three or four years, a teacher must be let go or given tenure, in which case she can only be fired for egregious behavior or because of a "reduction in force"--and then perhaps only if she is low on the seniority list.
All regions also have "accreditation" agencies, which impose a daunting list of requirements. So, every high school in my state must have a school library with a minimum number of volumes and a certain percentage of which must be published within the last few years.
He was primarily complaining about federal. Obviously, schools follow state standards.
I'd point out that top-down homogenization and centralized aren't the same thing. Teachers have way too much freedom for "centralized" to ever be an accurate descriptor.
In practice, teachers have a lot of freedom, but that is largely because the higher ups (department head, assistant principal, principal) don't know what's going on in each individual classroom. This is especially true is the contract says that visits have to be scheduled beforehand. "Once the classroom door closes, it's just you and the class."
I understand that may be changing. In some places, teachers have to file reports on what they did, and some places have each period's activities and homework posted online. If that ever becomes standard (and posts are checked for accuracy, and for how close the lessons follow the standards), teachers will lose a lot of their freedom. Though that would require hiring more people to monitor the online content.
I agree with Kling's critique of Deneen. The failure in our current culture is Illiberalism. It is the refusal to allow criticism and disagreement. The virtue of "being nice" has become a vice and the consequence is a society that is incredibly mean and intolerant of nonconforming opinion.
We all know of the vitriol between the "Right" and the "Left". Unfortunately meanness exists everywhere. Being nice is actually a weapon used to pummel people, including people that are supposed to be allies - witness the observation that the "safe & friendly" BlueSky social media platform invites ugliness and bitterness as participants become ever more intolerant of disagreement.
American society would benefit from a change in priority from "being nice and conforming" to "being excellent". What is missing from 21st century society is the recognition that excellent people make society better - we need individuals to be more excellent. We need institutional leaders with the wisdom and courage to openly recognize that some ideas are superior than others. Liberalism has allowed people to choose many different paths. But it is not the fault of Liberalism that people are scared of speaking openly that some paths are superior and some are inferior - Illiberalism did that!
"Be excellent to each other." - Bill & Ted
Good point. I am often confused by people claiming, in effect, that the problem over the last 5 years was too much freedom: too much speech, too much ability to do what you thought was right, etc. That coming from people claiming to be on the right.
Can you explain that? I'm not aware of anyone explicitly claiming too much freedom, right or left. Maybe I don't know what you mean by "in effect." Maybe your more focused on people from the right not liking what they see as immoral. IDK.
While it's accurate to say he's post-liberal (or perhaps reconstructed pre-liberal, what neo-reactionary would mean if hadn't come to be associated with something different) that economics-focused description of Vermeule's thinking isn't being fair and wouldn't pass the Ideological Turing Test. I am not a fan of his work, for instance, I am not at all convinced by his arguments in favor of "Common Good Constitutionalism", I think his arguments against mainstream Originalism are weak, and his various defenses of the administrative state have marked the low points of his career in terms of his debate with Hamburger and two embarrassing collaborations with Sunstein, neither of which "aged well" as they say. Vermeule seems to live in a permanent and imperturbable cognitive dissonance of bolstering the legitimacy of the scope of power wielded by existing institutions in more-or-less their current form but then complaining constantly about the kind of people who have captured total control over those institutions and the bad things they do with that power. Nevertheless, I wouldn't characterize Vermeule's critique or political philosophy as being one primarily obsessed with opposition to market- determined outcomes in the economic sphere.
Despite disagreeing with, and being willing to argue that he was thoroughly bested, I would say that I am grateful to Vermeule for opening up the debate with Philip Hamburger over the latter's excellent book "Is Administrative Law Unlawful?" The practice of constitutionalism is difficult and the heat of such bitter engagements generates a certain amount of light and clarity, at least about where the fissures are: generating publicity for the under appreciated Hamburger would just be an incidental benefit.
Similarly with Deneen. Vermeule really has very little to say about economics other than the standard signaling analyses in his books with Sunstein, but Deneen is engaged in laying out what he sees as tradeoffs consequent to neoliberal economics, and in so doing displaying more of an economic approach to thinking than many apostles of the "free market" (whatever that is) who seem to tend to want to deny any tradeoffs whatsoever, the market being all pure and holy or something like that.
Having grown tired of the whole toxic circus, as of late I have taken refuge and solace in Richard Rorty's call for tolerance:
"I simply want to suggest that we keep pragmatic tolerance going as long as we can--that both sides see the other as honest, if misguided, colleagues, doing their best to bring light to a dark time. In particular, we should remind ourselves that although there are relations between academic politics and real politics, they are not tight enough to justify carrying the passions of the latter over into the former."
Rorty's call didn't age well either.
No, but I don't want to forget that once upon a time such a thing could be said with a reasonably straight face. Who knows, maybe their are small, isolated, quasi-monastic communities off the grid where such interaction remains possible?
The more distant some topic is away from politics, personal soap-opera dramas, and mass-marketing the more likely one can find a community where discourse is aligned with comity and accuracy and with status arranged according to a hierarchy of excellence, real achievement, and dedication, and where people from different walks of life can still cooperate and interact in a friendly and productive manner in the context of pursuing that interest.
For all the talk of the value of institutions and norms, one simply has to note that in the kind of situation above, the right things often happen almost spontaneously and effortlessly, as the incentives are right. Move away from that, however, and the incentives work the other way and inevitably break everything down, and even the best institutions and norms exist to fight the uphill battle against breakdown, and still usually fail, especially when they do not focus on ways to protect themselves from the erosion by intentional delegitimation.
I will once again highly recommend Lili Loofbourow's essay "Illiberalism Isn’t to Blame for the Death of Good-Faith Debate" https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/07/illiberalism-cancel-culture-free-speech-internet-ugh.html
Now, that article has its flaws to include Lili's slant of course. Not all platforms are equal and Substack is better and has grown a lot since then, but, let's face it, it's still pretty small in the big picture. But her central message is true enough: that, with the exception of a few pockets, of online discourse on the worst platforms having completed its rapid corruption and degeneration into mostly a postmodernist wasteland where the only rational move for experienced survivalists is the cynical presumption that every purportedly literal text is really code about some instrumental contextual subtext (i.e., moves in some game and fights over influence).
Actually, her point is not so much that this degeneration is a fact, but that all smart people who had been "very online" for a while at that point should also be presumed to be fully aware of that fact, and that the crafting of any message in a style inconsistent with the author's knowledge of that fact and the parade of horribles that is "the history of how we got here", such as calling for "presumption of good faith" is at best extremely naive and, more likely, itself part of yet another strategic move. Certainly no progress is possible unless people are aware of and honest about the nature of the problem.
The book is at its best in its arguments against textualism, which is often conflated with originalism but isn't the same thing. You could be a common good originalist but you could not be a common good textualist.
I know Vermeule claims to be making that distinction, it's just that I don't really buy it. In theory it's possible to make rigorous, meaningful, and consistent clasdistic distinctions between textualism and originalism as if they are each genus categories with their own constituent species and sub-species. In practice people get both semantically strategic (e.g., "motte and bailey") or just very intellectually sloppy and use the words, if not interchangeably then with lots of overlap, to mean different things at different times, with "mood affiliation" (yet under the pretense of arising from a principled perspective) seeming to be the real priority.
One can see the difference in Vermeule's output itself. When he's writing a book or an academic article, he tends to keep the rigor and level of distinction up. Then he'll get on twitter or substack and all of that seems to go out the window according to what is most convenient to the point he is trying to make at the time. "True Scotsman Originalism" as "Textualism but Subordinate to what Vermeule thinks are Good Results" is somehow distinguishable objectively from Results-Oriented Politically-Activist Jurisprudence because ... um .... uh ....
Perhaps the best example of this is the way people infamously abuse the term "Democracy" as in "Protect Our Democracy!" to mean "Results Determined By Voting But Only When I like the Results." Anything purporting to be 'originalist' while neutralizing the defining characteristic of its interpretive-constraint and disciplinary function is an incoherent self-contradiction.
Am I in this book?
There is no index in the galley, so I can't be sure. She would probably put you in the Hard Right Underbelly category. But even Pinkoski seems to be higher than you on the pecking order, so I think you fell under her radar.
Steve doesn't have an academic appointment, and it sounds like she doesn't take anyone without an academic appointment seriously.
Ah, academics are such egalitarians.
“Markets are the things we do together”
I like that AK uses the term “markets”. The term “the market” or “the free market” invokes something imaginary, like “human rights”. From there it is a quick jump to ideology, which is inherently anti-conservative. The only sense in which talk of markets relates to conservatism is this slender thread: it is true and important to recognize that markets naturally emerge, in human behavior - and recognizing this obvious truth is part of living grounded in reality, which is an aspect of conservatism.
The question should not be “who are the conservatives?” at least if asked by a member of the academic left, who cannot be expected to know anything about the real and much more valid question, “what is worth conserving, and why?”, and only then “who are the people trying to do that?”
There was an article and podcast a while back about the signaling micro foundations of woke.
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-origin-of-woke-a-george-mason
https://mindsalmostmeeting.com/episodes/on-woke
To a certain extent the "Hard Right Underbelly", even if it existed before in various guises, probably cannot be completely understood in the present without this because this is in part what it is in reactance and revolt against. Some of the extremeness of the victimhood culture with regard to its identitarians abandonment of dignity culture leaves people with the "wrong" identitarian phenotypes no recourse but to move towards Honor Culture as a rational response. This may or may not all be downstream of people who are incapable of separating race from class in certain regards. The TL/DR short version of the micro foundations of the new right something along the lines of, "oh you are a victim? How nice. Well, I am not going to let you make me your victim."
Implicit perhaps in the author's thesis is that ideas matter more than practical political realities when determining the causes of political change. This is a common academic argumentation trick in listing a lot of "but-for" causes without doing any real weighing of which causes are actually the most important. If you can make this pile of irrelevant causes seem relevant, you could write a whole book about how Taylor Swift's latest album caused the election of Donald Trump, or how the prosecution of Sam Bankman-Fried caused the attacks of October 7th. Opinion writers use this method all the time to create frisson.
So, on the protectionist turn in American politics, how much was actually caused by any of the people profiled in this book and how much was actually caused by Gen. Sec. Jinping's policy turns since 2016 and the emergence of credibly competitive Chinese multinationals in major industries like social media, microchips, and car manufacturing? Dirty scriveners and other assorted ink-stained wretches are irrelevant until someone with power and money has a need for them. Attributing huge political shifts to writers is like blaming troubadours or particular conflicts in English and French estates laws for the Hundred Years War.
She discusses the many causal factors of social change and explains why she emphasizes ideas as a causal force. She handles this question well, although she may come out differently from someone else.
I'll take your word for it that she mentions it, but I'd need a lot of convincing because I think the external factors are more important. For example, people have been criticizing the universities for a long time, but big-money centrists did not start crossing the aisle on the issue in volume until the 10/7 reaction gave them the justification. The same ideas from the same critics became more convincing to moderates because of external conditions.
Have you soured on Hanania? He has undergone a shift to be closer to a regular Never Trumper, but I feel like that happened after you stopped linking to him.
Possibly the fact that Hanania switches his views for anyone who pays him was a contributing factor.
I stopped reading or paying attention to him a while ago, so I am not sure if it's fair to say he's switched his views, or if so, to get more money or likes or whatever. He just didn't seem have anything new or interesting or valuable to say after his initial burst of activity. And yeah, he's blinded by animus and obsessed with repeatedly harping on the many ways Trump is horrible and a shameless liar, and how many of his supporters are gullible fools or worse. But, to my point about "new, interesting, and valuable" we all knew that about Trump and his supporters a long time ago, like we know it about our whole political class and everybody's supporters - that's Modern Democracy. And we all also knew there was no winning alternative on the right to horrible liar Trump, that's also Modern Democracy.
The Claremont political philosophy grad school was cancelled a few years ago.
If a person has consumed content from a "Politicial Writer or Thinker", they presumably feel that a desire has been satisfied. If not, he won't do it again. What is the gain? (It doesn't have to be politics: it could be a variety of other subjects.) Maybe it's a feeling that, because I have this information, I am more in control, equipped to make better decisions, safer.
Of course, I ask myself about a lot of subjects... "What am I going to do differently?"
Supposing I did get accurate information about politics from a source and it opened up into a revelation, what would I change in my life? In a few cases, there might be something obvious: will I visit, will I invest, etc. Mostly though, it's all just cogitating about politics.
It's good Arnold read this stuff and told me about it. Now, I don't have to. Thanks much.
I’m fairly ignorant of conservative intellectuals and ideas. Maybe someone can tell me what their top three conservative ideas are? What makes these ideas conservative?
It helps to read someone sympathetic to the ideas and personalities and who's not out to satisfy the demand from the market for confirmation-bias and perform some pre-determined hatchet-job under the guise of some objective explanatory history. One is wasting one's time with Field or Sam Tanenhaus.
For much better coverage of the recent upheaval and realignment in the American right, I recommend George Hawley's books, especially , "Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism".
I wish Mr. Kling would review a book by John Warner, a well-informed, academic critic of AI, entitled "More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI."
https://www.amazon.com/More-Than-Words-Think-Writing/dp/1541605500