Arnold, you wrote, "As an aside, I believe that making a difference in your more immediate world is more important than making a difference in the wider world."
I agree. You wrioe it as an "aside,: but to me it was the most important thing you wrote.
If part of your own immediate world is your readership, then how can you apply your rigorous thinking (and prodigious reading) to guide your readers to have the most positive impact on their immediate worlds?
Perhaps you could take that up as a theme for 2022.
"Trying to use government to promote your values is only good until the other side wins an election; but then you have handed them a government that is more intrusive and less restrained."
No way. One would be hard pressed to think of some recent, concrete example of this. If they win control over the government, "the other side" just gets busy making the government as intrusive and unrestrained as they want in order to pursue their goals and further their broader agenda.
A party that generally doesn't care about intrusion and restraint and is constantly complaining about limits and champing at the bit for more power, more programs, etc. is not going to be held in check by the other party's hesitant restraint in the prior iteration. The just-so stories one would have to tell to make that true just do not describe the reality of our current political situation.
That is especially true if the other side is enthusiastically and effectively theocratic anyway, in the sense of being supremely confident and fanatically zealous in their belief that the values they are promoting are not "their" values, but universally and objectively true ethical concepts that transcend politics or debate, and which all enlightened and right-thinking people should understand to be completely unobjectionable except by evil heretics who must be punished and 'held accountable'. And indeed, for the furtherance of which it is not just laudable but morally compulsory for the government, every organization, and every individual to pursue and promote to their utmost.
Here's how you can prove me wrong and change my mind: tell me some kind of normal program or policy* that Democrats have the power / numbers to get done right now, but they are being held back from getting done, only because the Republicans held the line in some previous iteration by not implementing some policy that would be favored by currently modal "Common Good Conservatism".
Maybe it exists, but I'm coming up blank.
*An exception is special procedural maneuvers which amount to 'strategic escalations' which are structurally suppressed for normal game-theoretic reasons, with red lines being crossed usually only in moments when both the stakes and the first-escaltor's level of political confidence are extraordinarily high. For instance, 'the nuclear option' for eliminating filibusters of judicial confirmations. Or, what hasn't happened, yet: abolishing the filibuster altogether, or packing the Supreme Court.
Both sides might indeed hesitate for a long time from being the first to escalate in these particular kinds of ways, worried that the other party will use the same tactics against them in the future. But that's just because that context happens to line up with: "politics and war are on the same spectrum." And this logic applies to tactics, not to setting of public policy and exercise of government authority.
"Trying to use government to promote your values is only good until the other side wins an election; but then you have handed them a government that is more intrusive and less restrained." I haven't noticed that restraint on the part of Republicans -- to the extent that it has been exercised -- has made Democrats any less restrained. Biden, for example, was quick to undo restraints enacted by Trump (e.g., curtailing illegal immigration, curbing regulatory excesses, nominating constitutionalist judges, not wasting taxpayers' money on futile "climate change" initiatives).
The example I am looking for would follow this pattern, "The only reason the progressives are currently able to get away with A is because when the conservatives were in power, they didn't hold the line on B and decided to promote C, which was the key event which opened the floodgates, and without which, the progressives, even upon taking power, would have remained constrained in regard to doing A today."
Well, the fact that Republicans stopped caring at all about deficits and high government spending has arguably opened the floodgates. I know, it has usually been more talk than action on their part, but in the last two presidential elections it wasn't really even an issue.
It is certainly a shame we don't have a party that even pretends to care about 'fiscal responsibility' anymore, so no argument there. It's going to come back to haunt us.
But I just don't think the progressives would be spending one dime less were it otherwise. A lot of the whattaboutism on this topic, e.g., on tax cuts, is completely rhetorical and doesn't indicate any "but for" causality.
Once parties get in the habit of using state power and money to pay off their clients with giveaways and other goodies, public opinion ceases to serve as an effective bulwark to future expansion and fiscal imprudence, and this seems to be true of pretty much every democracy.
At that point you are only left with market consequences like inflation, currency collapse, high bond rates, geopolitical weakening, and so forth as sources of deterrence and discipline, and if one is enjoying a temporary holiday from reality on those measures, then the sky's the limit on more government spending until reality reasserts itself.
What serious issue-motivated PACs do is they scorecard politicians, they exaggerate the differences, and establish political incentives that make it easy for self-interested politicians to move at least marginally in the right direction.
What you're doing is blurring the difference among competing politicians. You're saying whether you spend a little bit extra or a ton extra, it's all the same. Then the political incentives are to do go-big colossal new spending, and self-interested politicians will follow accordingly.
A great essay on the nature of our current social ills. The source is not politics, but the type of thinking that guides our experience and actions. Your idea of rigorous thought, rather than logical thought may be a helpful idea.
How does rigorous thought contrast with logical thought? Are logical forms such as syllogism necessary for rigorous thought but not sufficient? Syllogism is the way to derive true conclusions from premises, but syllogism does not provide a method for evaluating different premises.
Is rigorous thought characterized by a willingness to consider, compare, and evaluate mutually exclusive logical arguments? That seems to be an attribute of the FITs--an ability to list, compare, and contrast arguments in a way that exposes their strengths, weaknesses, errors, and truths. I
"I can be persuaded—indeed I am persuaded—that the Woke religion is a very serious threat to values that I hold dear and that I believe are important for this country to uphold. But I don’t think that the woke religion will be defeated in a national election by a political program. It will be defeated among the educated elites if and when they return to rigorous thinking."
I think Hanania (and others, like Caldwell) have shown that the Woke religion in many (but not all) of its forms results from the current implementation of the Civil Rights Act. If they're right, then rigorous thinking among the elites won't help us. Rather, zealously non-woke conservatives winning presidential elections (and other elections) will. A conservative presidential administration can change the implementation of the Civil Rights legislation in at least four ways: (1) appoint non-woke, conservative judges; (2) appoint non-woke, conservative personnel to the EEOC and similar agencies in the Justice Department; (3) change the regulatory rules and guidelines that deal with the implementation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (e.g., https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/cm-615-harassment or https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2020-title29-vol4/xml/CFR-2020-title29-vol4-part1608.xml); and (4) promulgate executive orders that actively eliminate what Rufo calls "applied Critical Race Theory"--make affirmative action forbidden for government contractors, eliminate "diversity training", etc.
Furthermore, an even more radical agenda could be adopted by conservative states to rein in their woke universities. They could lay-off their admissions departments and replace them with simple standardized test standards at *all* levels of admission and for all schools, including professional schools. They could require all law professors at the public law schools to have, say, 18 years of practice in the state. This would result in a purging of the law faculties, and they could be replaced with experienced, local practitioners. (Legal scholarship has no value.) They could fund a large-scale replication of all social science research done by publicly funded professors and fire the professors whose research does not replicate. They could change the qualifications for hiring new teachers and adopt some kind of apprenticeship system. (This also would allow them to lay-off the Education departments.) I could go on--I did not even mention laying-off all the embedded DEI people. All of these jobs involve indoctrinating others into the woke religion or implementing the woke religion and have no upside value.
"A conservative presidential administration can change the implementation of the Civil Rights legislation in at least four ways ... "
No, he can't.
This is a really important point. It's very hard for people to accept or grasp this fact, for lots of reasons. You'll see this kind of thing tossed around the conservative / non-progressive commentariat a lot, usually with that kind of smug tone of "sophisticated people like me aren't being fooled like the chumps out there and know Republican politicians are all huge fakers about all this stuff, because, if they really wanted to, all they'd have to do is ... "
Now, it's true, a lot of Republican politicians are huge fakers, who wouldn't do those things about the stuff they pretend to complain about, even if they could. But also, even if they wanted to, they couldn't.
The claim that they could is based on a naive belief that one can actually play the game by the formal rules. It doesn't work that way, and this is a wall it seems that every Republican administration must crash against hard to relearn the same lesson.
In naive formal technicality world, these are 'just' executive orders and regulations that a Republican President could reverse any time he wanted. Buit no, all of those suggestions are completely intolerable to a critical mass of the people entrenched in positions that allow them to utterly freeze and neutralize any attempts to move in those directions until they are completely reversed the first minute after the next Democrat's inauguration.
There is, in fact, no possible "business as usual" way for conservatives to achieve those kinds of objectives.
The clearest recent example is DACA. DACA was " 'just' an executive order!" An illegal and unconstitutional one at that: not even SCOTUS would pretend otherwise, while twisting the law into knots as necessary to keep it going anyway. "Legitimacy! Credibility!" What a sad joke.
So, "all Trump has to do is ..." announce the reversal DACA. Which he did. But nothing happened. In fact, and this is kind of hilarious in terms of just how brazen it is, there wasn't a single day in which the bureaucracy even slowed down processing applications for new and renewed work authorization documents. Hundreds of thousands per year. Those documents were being issued on the basis of 'just' an EO, and another EO told people to stop printing and mailing them. But ... they kept going out the door, like none of that effort at 'reversal' was based in rightful authority or had any legal effect or even mattered at all.
Because it didn't.
If one takes a hard look at about a hundred other examples, one quickly comes to the conclusion that there is the formal law and the written constitution, and then there is the *actual* law and the *actual* constitution, largely anchored in woke* principles which cannot be uprooted, and against which any Republican President would contend in vain, unless his administration was engaged in such a ruthless Total War to retake actual power that, were he successful, it could only be to the extent it completely changed the true and current nature of the American regime and system of government.
And, not to put too fine a point on it, but anyone willing and able to go that far, would just go all the way. That's the true depth of the trouble we're in. There is no "all he has to do is ..." All the stuff one would need to do lies in the vast no man's land of possibilities with complete defeat and domination on one side, and new regime on the other.
*Not all the principles are 'woke'. It's easy to argue that the New Deal's "APA" structure amended the De Facto Constitution, as did the War Powers Act and FISA, without having to go to the trouble of actually, you know, amending the constitution. But on a practical level, it was like we had a second civil war in the 60's that came along with a second set of civil war amendments to the constitution, and those are woke amendments.
Well said Handle! Reality is much harsher to the prospect of "fixing the Constitution" then the political Right understands or can admit. However, I don't think this means Constitutionalists should give up on the Federal government, declaring it too far gone. The political battle matters symbolically to voters and the argument does help to slow the intrusions of the Federal government.
What might change the inevitable demise of the USA as a Constitutional Republic? What might preserve the idea that citizens have some guaranteed space between their lives and government? It will be citizens "fighting" to preserve that space. We are seeing this already with domestic migration patterns - citizens are "voting with their feet" to leave government they find too controlling for government that appears to be less so.
It will be interesting to see if the desire for liberty has a more durable impact on a state's politics than the desire for lower taxes. In other words, will Florida and Arizona become "redder" states after Covid? If so, that might be an important signal. But if Florida and Arizona persist as "swing states" then that could embolden the Left giving them confidence that even if they lose population in Blue states, they will not lose their overall political advantage.
I am well-aware of the bizarre happenings surrounding DACA. I heard Republican veterans of the Justice Department before Trump took office emphasize that EOs had to be "unwound" in a certain way. The whole thing still seems crazy. But despite all that, is DACA the law right now? No. GWB appointed federal judge Andrew Hanen ordered it to be shut down as of July 16, 2021. (But you'll probably counter that the personnel of the bureaucracy are still processing applications and ignoring the court order--still, it matters.) It will probably go to the Supreme Court again (after the 5th Circuit does its thing), and it will probably be found unconstitutional--since Republican presidents have built a majority on the Court.
I do not disagree with anything you said and overall am pessimistic about countering the Woke religion. I agree that it will take a ruthless total war in the bureaucracies, which, even if it begins at the start of a two-term administration, may fail in the long run. Better that than going gentle into that good night.
"Shut down"? Heh, not quite. Never believe media stories about immigration law. In fact, that case is a good illustration of my general point about the evaporation of genuine 'law' in our system.
Without getting into the technicalities of the current legal status of the program, what DACA did was make about approx. 800 thousand people eligible to have an initial application approved, and, surprise, practically 100% of those people applied right away, years ago. Why would they wait?
There is a very small number of people who were maybe actually eligible and could have had an application approved early on, but missed the boat for whatever reason. There is a larger - though still small -number of people who were definitely legally ineligible at the time, but some judge said YOLO and changed the law with a deft flick of his interpretive wrist, nunc pro tunc, and thus ordered the government to process these people in anyway. As they say in immigration law, "It ain't over 'til the alien wins." While you won't find it in the written constitution, it might as well be one of the amendments to our actually operative constitution.
The point is, compared to the overall size of the problem, this flow of new initial applications has been a mere trickle for about five years. It is so low, and the rejection rate also so low, that USCIS has stopped reporting those numbers, because, they claim, with a little legwork, one could actually figure out who the one or two rejected people are, and then infer the derogatory facts about them that are supposed to be kept 'private'. And, of course, as another half a decade has gone by and most of these people in the potential new-initial pool have already tried their luck, what's still left is a mere trickle of a trickle.
And it was *not* the approx. one thousand renewals being issued every single day that Hanen 'shut down', but only *this tiny trickle of a trickle*! Oooooh! Take that, bureaucracy! Behold my power! "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Ok, I confess, that above was a little snarky in tone, but consider how little that giant nothingburger of a legal result - about as strong a development as one can point to and as much as the system would tolerate without immediate reversal - does to counter my claim that, in fact, conservative Presidents and judges do not actually have "all they have to do is ..." options. Every possible "all they have to do is ... " move faces a defense-in-depth of a dozen more additional escalations by the opposition.
The big picture problem is that the "all they have do is ... " position stems from the faulty assumption that we still actually operate under a system governed by the Rule of Law, in which one could look at the written rules of the games and make accurate conclusions from them about what one can and can't do. We don't.
Where it matters, exceptions now outnumber examples. There is no point in Charlie Brown trying to analyze what political possibilities might open up if he could get the ball 40, 50, or 60 yards down the field, respectively. He will never be allowed to kick the football in the first place.
Please don't give into the common temptation to assign responsibility for federal government spending solely to whoever was the President at the time, not even by implication.
Congress has the larger role to play in terms of decision-making with regard to spending. The President may make proposals, but he must work within the confines of what the members of Congress will allow.
For example, it's historically typical for Republican Presidents to propose less spending than a Democratic controlled Congress is willing to settle for, and vice-versa. Most of the time, Congress has won those arguments.
One way to think about "rigor" is to think about timeframe. Posner famously wrote, "Rats are at least as rational as human beings". If a rat sees another rat in the way of food, the rat bites the other.
Point is, Rationality comes down to how far ahead one thinks. If you think like a rat, only in terms of the most immediate consequences, it's rational to bite the other rat. With more foresight, humans often find such brutality counterproductive. If we push someone out of the way to get our food, we know we may get a knife in the back.
Across both the left and the right, I'd describe the breakdown of rigor as a breakdown of foresight. It's not that we're no longer rational, but the timeline over which our rational calculation takes place seems to have dwindled to weeks or months. Today's grand plans don't give any thought to how they'd actually operate. For that matter, many small plans don't either. The long-term merit or sustainability of most any action doesn't seem to be part of the rational calculation anymore.
It is hard to imagine how or why elites would return to rigorous thinking when all of their incentives point them away from it. There are few saints. Politics is about changing those incentives; I don't see how it can be avoided.
Kling has had right-wing views on issues like spending and health care. Republican elected officials that champion those views fail to deliver any major wins on those issues for for decades, and Kling has lost patience and even developed a bitter contempt for right wing politics.
It is frustrating to write books on these ideas, talk about these ideas, and have them go no where, and have basically no control over national politics. Kling is right that normal people, himself included have more control over their immediate lives and have negligible control over national politics, so it's logical to focus on the former, and it's likely frustrating to invest in the latter.
Republican politicians have served an important function to slow or stop many of the more terrible ideas on the left. If the left had another few senators, we'd see even more explosive federal spending, and drastic expansion of federal government in every day life.
Kling is right that right-wing views have to persuade influential elites, not just win elections, that elites are increasingly good at overturning.
One great example and sign of optimism for right-wing views: Elon Musk. He has very right-wing political views. He says government is notoriously wasteful and inefficient at everything, he's against subsidies, he's pro market, he has right-wing ideas on currency. And he delivers amazing new products and innovations. He's exciting in every way.
In a nod to Tolkien, everyone is grasping at the ring. Arnold is correct in a sense - the ring of Federal Power won't serve any master faithfully. It can't be held loosely as it is burden and a target, and it can't be worn. That leaves only one possibility.
The fundamental weakness of the anti-Left is the lack of a coherent message other than "We oppose "crazy." Opposing crazy can work in the short-term - it helped elect a Republican in Virginia. However, while opposing crazy can be an opportunistic campaign strategy, it is not durable. In particular it does not answer the question of "what is good public policy?" and this means it does not lead to a constructive political message.
The Left, with its media allies, has built a brand of "We care about people". True or not this brand is of tremendous value and it gives the Left an advantage whenever a public crisis hits the headlines. Anti-Left intellectuals have pushed for the GOP to embrace and promote principled based governance. Yet for a host of reasons this has not happened. The GOP members cannot agree on the principles and they all too often abandon them - principles that are abandoned at the first hint of trouble are marketing slogans.
I have little hope the GOP can lead a renaissance of principled public policy. I think what we will see is states and institutions which are successful in tempering political extremism will become role models. This will not fix broken governments and institutions but it will empower leaders to consider a rebalancing of institutional priorities is possible.
There is a similar debate that has been longstanding, but particularly heated currently, within the Democratic Party. Not that he is an oracle of careful thought about economics, but Senator Manchin (D-WV) has brought some notion of costs and benefits to the so-called Build Back Better legislation now winding its way through Congress, albeit still willing to support more than $1 trillion of new spending. His position has raised the heat inside the party between New Progressives and Old Centrists.
"The way I see it, elites on the left and the right are failing us." It could be rephrased as that we don't have elites, we just have pretenders contesting for status. We have a lot of people who think they at least up to the standard of one of Napoleon's aides (few can even muster the thumos for a properly delusional Napoleon complex), but they can't do the math required to shoot artillery with any accuracy and cannot inspire anyone to march in formation.
“ They do not seem to understand the value of random testing, or human challenge trials, or cost-benefit analysis”. Grouping human challenge trials in the same set as the other two would rarely be considered rigorous thinking.
“Sir, (or Ma’am), we think we’ve got a mighty fine vaccine we are trying out here. For who knows what reason, you have volunteered to not only receive the vaccine, but allow us to do our utmost to see that you are, despite the vaccine, infected. If we succeed in infecting you, you may die. If the vaccine defeats our efforts, we become rich and famous—you receive the warm glow of contributing to our success.”
“Sir, (or Ma’am) you have been chosen to have your mouth swabbed.”
“People, I have made some calculations to consider when you debate whether to implement a particular policy.”
Arnold, you wrote, "As an aside, I believe that making a difference in your more immediate world is more important than making a difference in the wider world."
I agree. You wrioe it as an "aside,: but to me it was the most important thing you wrote.
If part of your own immediate world is your readership, then how can you apply your rigorous thinking (and prodigious reading) to guide your readers to have the most positive impact on their immediate worlds?
Perhaps you could take that up as a theme for 2022.
"Trying to use government to promote your values is only good until the other side wins an election; but then you have handed them a government that is more intrusive and less restrained."
No way. One would be hard pressed to think of some recent, concrete example of this. If they win control over the government, "the other side" just gets busy making the government as intrusive and unrestrained as they want in order to pursue their goals and further their broader agenda.
A party that generally doesn't care about intrusion and restraint and is constantly complaining about limits and champing at the bit for more power, more programs, etc. is not going to be held in check by the other party's hesitant restraint in the prior iteration. The just-so stories one would have to tell to make that true just do not describe the reality of our current political situation.
That is especially true if the other side is enthusiastically and effectively theocratic anyway, in the sense of being supremely confident and fanatically zealous in their belief that the values they are promoting are not "their" values, but universally and objectively true ethical concepts that transcend politics or debate, and which all enlightened and right-thinking people should understand to be completely unobjectionable except by evil heretics who must be punished and 'held accountable'. And indeed, for the furtherance of which it is not just laudable but morally compulsory for the government, every organization, and every individual to pursue and promote to their utmost.
Here's how you can prove me wrong and change my mind: tell me some kind of normal program or policy* that Democrats have the power / numbers to get done right now, but they are being held back from getting done, only because the Republicans held the line in some previous iteration by not implementing some policy that would be favored by currently modal "Common Good Conservatism".
Maybe it exists, but I'm coming up blank.
*An exception is special procedural maneuvers which amount to 'strategic escalations' which are structurally suppressed for normal game-theoretic reasons, with red lines being crossed usually only in moments when both the stakes and the first-escaltor's level of political confidence are extraordinarily high. For instance, 'the nuclear option' for eliminating filibusters of judicial confirmations. Or, what hasn't happened, yet: abolishing the filibuster altogether, or packing the Supreme Court.
Both sides might indeed hesitate for a long time from being the first to escalate in these particular kinds of ways, worried that the other party will use the same tactics against them in the future. But that's just because that context happens to line up with: "politics and war are on the same spectrum." And this logic applies to tactics, not to setting of public policy and exercise of government authority.
"Trying to use government to promote your values is only good until the other side wins an election; but then you have handed them a government that is more intrusive and less restrained." I haven't noticed that restraint on the part of Republicans -- to the extent that it has been exercised -- has made Democrats any less restrained. Biden, for example, was quick to undo restraints enacted by Trump (e.g., curtailing illegal immigration, curbing regulatory excesses, nominating constitutionalist judges, not wasting taxpayers' money on futile "climate change" initiatives).
The example I am looking for would follow this pattern, "The only reason the progressives are currently able to get away with A is because when the conservatives were in power, they didn't hold the line on B and decided to promote C, which was the key event which opened the floodgates, and without which, the progressives, even upon taking power, would have remained constrained in regard to doing A today."
Well, the fact that Republicans stopped caring at all about deficits and high government spending has arguably opened the floodgates. I know, it has usually been more talk than action on their part, but in the last two presidential elections it wasn't really even an issue.
It is certainly a shame we don't have a party that even pretends to care about 'fiscal responsibility' anymore, so no argument there. It's going to come back to haunt us.
But I just don't think the progressives would be spending one dime less were it otherwise. A lot of the whattaboutism on this topic, e.g., on tax cuts, is completely rhetorical and doesn't indicate any "but for" causality.
Once parties get in the habit of using state power and money to pay off their clients with giveaways and other goodies, public opinion ceases to serve as an effective bulwark to future expansion and fiscal imprudence, and this seems to be true of pretty much every democracy.
At that point you are only left with market consequences like inflation, currency collapse, high bond rates, geopolitical weakening, and so forth as sources of deterrence and discipline, and if one is enjoying a temporary holiday from reality on those measures, then the sky's the limit on more government spending until reality reasserts itself.
You're part of the problem on spending.
What serious issue-motivated PACs do is they scorecard politicians, they exaggerate the differences, and establish political incentives that make it easy for self-interested politicians to move at least marginally in the right direction.
What you're doing is blurring the difference among competing politicians. You're saying whether you spend a little bit extra or a ton extra, it's all the same. Then the political incentives are to do go-big colossal new spending, and self-interested politicians will follow accordingly.
A great essay on the nature of our current social ills. The source is not politics, but the type of thinking that guides our experience and actions. Your idea of rigorous thought, rather than logical thought may be a helpful idea.
How does rigorous thought contrast with logical thought? Are logical forms such as syllogism necessary for rigorous thought but not sufficient? Syllogism is the way to derive true conclusions from premises, but syllogism does not provide a method for evaluating different premises.
Is rigorous thought characterized by a willingness to consider, compare, and evaluate mutually exclusive logical arguments? That seems to be an attribute of the FITs--an ability to list, compare, and contrast arguments in a way that exposes their strengths, weaknesses, errors, and truths. I
"I can be persuaded—indeed I am persuaded—that the Woke religion is a very serious threat to values that I hold dear and that I believe are important for this country to uphold. But I don’t think that the woke religion will be defeated in a national election by a political program. It will be defeated among the educated elites if and when they return to rigorous thinking."
I think Hanania (and others, like Caldwell) have shown that the Woke religion in many (but not all) of its forms results from the current implementation of the Civil Rights Act. If they're right, then rigorous thinking among the elites won't help us. Rather, zealously non-woke conservatives winning presidential elections (and other elections) will. A conservative presidential administration can change the implementation of the Civil Rights legislation in at least four ways: (1) appoint non-woke, conservative judges; (2) appoint non-woke, conservative personnel to the EEOC and similar agencies in the Justice Department; (3) change the regulatory rules and guidelines that deal with the implementation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (e.g., https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/cm-615-harassment or https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2020-title29-vol4/xml/CFR-2020-title29-vol4-part1608.xml); and (4) promulgate executive orders that actively eliminate what Rufo calls "applied Critical Race Theory"--make affirmative action forbidden for government contractors, eliminate "diversity training", etc.
Furthermore, an even more radical agenda could be adopted by conservative states to rein in their woke universities. They could lay-off their admissions departments and replace them with simple standardized test standards at *all* levels of admission and for all schools, including professional schools. They could require all law professors at the public law schools to have, say, 18 years of practice in the state. This would result in a purging of the law faculties, and they could be replaced with experienced, local practitioners. (Legal scholarship has no value.) They could fund a large-scale replication of all social science research done by publicly funded professors and fire the professors whose research does not replicate. They could change the qualifications for hiring new teachers and adopt some kind of apprenticeship system. (This also would allow them to lay-off the Education departments.) I could go on--I did not even mention laying-off all the embedded DEI people. All of these jobs involve indoctrinating others into the woke religion or implementing the woke religion and have no upside value.
"A conservative presidential administration can change the implementation of the Civil Rights legislation in at least four ways ... "
No, he can't.
This is a really important point. It's very hard for people to accept or grasp this fact, for lots of reasons. You'll see this kind of thing tossed around the conservative / non-progressive commentariat a lot, usually with that kind of smug tone of "sophisticated people like me aren't being fooled like the chumps out there and know Republican politicians are all huge fakers about all this stuff, because, if they really wanted to, all they'd have to do is ... "
Now, it's true, a lot of Republican politicians are huge fakers, who wouldn't do those things about the stuff they pretend to complain about, even if they could. But also, even if they wanted to, they couldn't.
The claim that they could is based on a naive belief that one can actually play the game by the formal rules. It doesn't work that way, and this is a wall it seems that every Republican administration must crash against hard to relearn the same lesson.
In naive formal technicality world, these are 'just' executive orders and regulations that a Republican President could reverse any time he wanted. Buit no, all of those suggestions are completely intolerable to a critical mass of the people entrenched in positions that allow them to utterly freeze and neutralize any attempts to move in those directions until they are completely reversed the first minute after the next Democrat's inauguration.
There is, in fact, no possible "business as usual" way for conservatives to achieve those kinds of objectives.
The clearest recent example is DACA. DACA was " 'just' an executive order!" An illegal and unconstitutional one at that: not even SCOTUS would pretend otherwise, while twisting the law into knots as necessary to keep it going anyway. "Legitimacy! Credibility!" What a sad joke.
So, "all Trump has to do is ..." announce the reversal DACA. Which he did. But nothing happened. In fact, and this is kind of hilarious in terms of just how brazen it is, there wasn't a single day in which the bureaucracy even slowed down processing applications for new and renewed work authorization documents. Hundreds of thousands per year. Those documents were being issued on the basis of 'just' an EO, and another EO told people to stop printing and mailing them. But ... they kept going out the door, like none of that effort at 'reversal' was based in rightful authority or had any legal effect or even mattered at all.
Because it didn't.
If one takes a hard look at about a hundred other examples, one quickly comes to the conclusion that there is the formal law and the written constitution, and then there is the *actual* law and the *actual* constitution, largely anchored in woke* principles which cannot be uprooted, and against which any Republican President would contend in vain, unless his administration was engaged in such a ruthless Total War to retake actual power that, were he successful, it could only be to the extent it completely changed the true and current nature of the American regime and system of government.
And, not to put too fine a point on it, but anyone willing and able to go that far, would just go all the way. That's the true depth of the trouble we're in. There is no "all he has to do is ..." All the stuff one would need to do lies in the vast no man's land of possibilities with complete defeat and domination on one side, and new regime on the other.
*Not all the principles are 'woke'. It's easy to argue that the New Deal's "APA" structure amended the De Facto Constitution, as did the War Powers Act and FISA, without having to go to the trouble of actually, you know, amending the constitution. But on a practical level, it was like we had a second civil war in the 60's that came along with a second set of civil war amendments to the constitution, and those are woke amendments.
Well said Handle! Reality is much harsher to the prospect of "fixing the Constitution" then the political Right understands or can admit. However, I don't think this means Constitutionalists should give up on the Federal government, declaring it too far gone. The political battle matters symbolically to voters and the argument does help to slow the intrusions of the Federal government.
What might change the inevitable demise of the USA as a Constitutional Republic? What might preserve the idea that citizens have some guaranteed space between their lives and government? It will be citizens "fighting" to preserve that space. We are seeing this already with domestic migration patterns - citizens are "voting with their feet" to leave government they find too controlling for government that appears to be less so.
It will be interesting to see if the desire for liberty has a more durable impact on a state's politics than the desire for lower taxes. In other words, will Florida and Arizona become "redder" states after Covid? If so, that might be an important signal. But if Florida and Arizona persist as "swing states" then that could embolden the Left giving them confidence that even if they lose population in Blue states, they will not lose their overall political advantage.
I am well-aware of the bizarre happenings surrounding DACA. I heard Republican veterans of the Justice Department before Trump took office emphasize that EOs had to be "unwound" in a certain way. The whole thing still seems crazy. But despite all that, is DACA the law right now? No. GWB appointed federal judge Andrew Hanen ordered it to be shut down as of July 16, 2021. (But you'll probably counter that the personnel of the bureaucracy are still processing applications and ignoring the court order--still, it matters.) It will probably go to the Supreme Court again (after the 5th Circuit does its thing), and it will probably be found unconstitutional--since Republican presidents have built a majority on the Court.
I do not disagree with anything you said and overall am pessimistic about countering the Woke religion. I agree that it will take a ruthless total war in the bureaucracies, which, even if it begins at the start of a two-term administration, may fail in the long run. Better that than going gentle into that good night.
"Shut down"? Heh, not quite. Never believe media stories about immigration law. In fact, that case is a good illustration of my general point about the evaporation of genuine 'law' in our system.
Without getting into the technicalities of the current legal status of the program, what DACA did was make about approx. 800 thousand people eligible to have an initial application approved, and, surprise, practically 100% of those people applied right away, years ago. Why would they wait?
There is a very small number of people who were maybe actually eligible and could have had an application approved early on, but missed the boat for whatever reason. There is a larger - though still small -number of people who were definitely legally ineligible at the time, but some judge said YOLO and changed the law with a deft flick of his interpretive wrist, nunc pro tunc, and thus ordered the government to process these people in anyway. As they say in immigration law, "It ain't over 'til the alien wins." While you won't find it in the written constitution, it might as well be one of the amendments to our actually operative constitution.
The point is, compared to the overall size of the problem, this flow of new initial applications has been a mere trickle for about five years. It is so low, and the rejection rate also so low, that USCIS has stopped reporting those numbers, because, they claim, with a little legwork, one could actually figure out who the one or two rejected people are, and then infer the derogatory facts about them that are supposed to be kept 'private'. And, of course, as another half a decade has gone by and most of these people in the potential new-initial pool have already tried their luck, what's still left is a mere trickle of a trickle.
And it was *not* the approx. one thousand renewals being issued every single day that Hanen 'shut down', but only *this tiny trickle of a trickle*! Oooooh! Take that, bureaucracy! Behold my power! "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Ok, I confess, that above was a little snarky in tone, but consider how little that giant nothingburger of a legal result - about as strong a development as one can point to and as much as the system would tolerate without immediate reversal - does to counter my claim that, in fact, conservative Presidents and judges do not actually have "all they have to do is ..." options. Every possible "all they have to do is ... " move faces a defense-in-depth of a dozen more additional escalations by the opposition.
The big picture problem is that the "all they have do is ... " position stems from the faulty assumption that we still actually operate under a system governed by the Rule of Law, in which one could look at the written rules of the games and make accurate conclusions from them about what one can and can't do. We don't.
Where it matters, exceptions now outnumber examples. There is no point in Charlie Brown trying to analyze what political possibilities might open up if he could get the ball 40, 50, or 60 yards down the field, respectively. He will never be allowed to kick the football in the first place.
Excellent piece.
Please don't give into the common temptation to assign responsibility for federal government spending solely to whoever was the President at the time, not even by implication.
Congress has the larger role to play in terms of decision-making with regard to spending. The President may make proposals, but he must work within the confines of what the members of Congress will allow.
For example, it's historically typical for Republican Presidents to propose less spending than a Democratic controlled Congress is willing to settle for, and vice-versa. Most of the time, Congress has won those arguments.
One way to think about "rigor" is to think about timeframe. Posner famously wrote, "Rats are at least as rational as human beings". If a rat sees another rat in the way of food, the rat bites the other.
Point is, Rationality comes down to how far ahead one thinks. If you think like a rat, only in terms of the most immediate consequences, it's rational to bite the other rat. With more foresight, humans often find such brutality counterproductive. If we push someone out of the way to get our food, we know we may get a knife in the back.
Across both the left and the right, I'd describe the breakdown of rigor as a breakdown of foresight. It's not that we're no longer rational, but the timeline over which our rational calculation takes place seems to have dwindled to weeks or months. Today's grand plans don't give any thought to how they'd actually operate. For that matter, many small plans don't either. The long-term merit or sustainability of most any action doesn't seem to be part of the rational calculation anymore.
It is hard to imagine how or why elites would return to rigorous thinking when all of their incentives point them away from it. There are few saints. Politics is about changing those incentives; I don't see how it can be avoided.
Why do you say, “I believe that making a difference in your more immediate world is more important than making a difference in the wider world.”?
Kling has had right-wing views on issues like spending and health care. Republican elected officials that champion those views fail to deliver any major wins on those issues for for decades, and Kling has lost patience and even developed a bitter contempt for right wing politics.
It is frustrating to write books on these ideas, talk about these ideas, and have them go no where, and have basically no control over national politics. Kling is right that normal people, himself included have more control over their immediate lives and have negligible control over national politics, so it's logical to focus on the former, and it's likely frustrating to invest in the latter.
Republican politicians have served an important function to slow or stop many of the more terrible ideas on the left. If the left had another few senators, we'd see even more explosive federal spending, and drastic expansion of federal government in every day life.
Kling is right that right-wing views have to persuade influential elites, not just win elections, that elites are increasingly good at overturning.
One great example and sign of optimism for right-wing views: Elon Musk. He has very right-wing political views. He says government is notoriously wasteful and inefficient at everything, he's against subsidies, he's pro market, he has right-wing ideas on currency. And he delivers amazing new products and innovations. He's exciting in every way.
In a nod to Tolkien, everyone is grasping at the ring. Arnold is correct in a sense - the ring of Federal Power won't serve any master faithfully. It can't be held loosely as it is burden and a target, and it can't be worn. That leaves only one possibility.
The fundamental weakness of the anti-Left is the lack of a coherent message other than "We oppose "crazy." Opposing crazy can work in the short-term - it helped elect a Republican in Virginia. However, while opposing crazy can be an opportunistic campaign strategy, it is not durable. In particular it does not answer the question of "what is good public policy?" and this means it does not lead to a constructive political message.
The Left, with its media allies, has built a brand of "We care about people". True or not this brand is of tremendous value and it gives the Left an advantage whenever a public crisis hits the headlines. Anti-Left intellectuals have pushed for the GOP to embrace and promote principled based governance. Yet for a host of reasons this has not happened. The GOP members cannot agree on the principles and they all too often abandon them - principles that are abandoned at the first hint of trouble are marketing slogans.
I have little hope the GOP can lead a renaissance of principled public policy. I think what we will see is states and institutions which are successful in tempering political extremism will become role models. This will not fix broken governments and institutions but it will empower leaders to consider a rebalancing of institutional priorities is possible.
There is a similar debate that has been longstanding, but particularly heated currently, within the Democratic Party. Not that he is an oracle of careful thought about economics, but Senator Manchin (D-WV) has brought some notion of costs and benefits to the so-called Build Back Better legislation now winding its way through Congress, albeit still willing to support more than $1 trillion of new spending. His position has raised the heat inside the party between New Progressives and Old Centrists.
"The way I see it, elites on the left and the right are failing us." It could be rephrased as that we don't have elites, we just have pretenders contesting for status. We have a lot of people who think they at least up to the standard of one of Napoleon's aides (few can even muster the thumos for a properly delusional Napoleon complex), but they can't do the math required to shoot artillery with any accuracy and cannot inspire anyone to march in formation.
“ They do not seem to understand the value of random testing, or human challenge trials, or cost-benefit analysis”. Grouping human challenge trials in the same set as the other two would rarely be considered rigorous thinking.
What do you think is wrong with the grouping?
“Sir, (or Ma’am), we think we’ve got a mighty fine vaccine we are trying out here. For who knows what reason, you have volunteered to not only receive the vaccine, but allow us to do our utmost to see that you are, despite the vaccine, infected. If we succeed in infecting you, you may die. If the vaccine defeats our efforts, we become rich and famous—you receive the warm glow of contributing to our success.”
“Sir, (or Ma’am) you have been chosen to have your mouth swabbed.”
“People, I have made some calculations to consider when you debate whether to implement a particular policy.”