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).
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.