The book was of course written before the recent report in The Atlantic about Patel’s drinking problems, which have people in the government worried. The latest news only adds to the case that I made.

The IT-lockout episode is emblematic of Patel’s tumultuous tenure as director of the FBI: He is erratic, suspicious of others, and prone to jumping to conclusions before he has necessary evidence, according to the more than two dozen people I interviewed about Patel’s conduct, including current and former FBI officials, staff at law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, hospitality-industry workers, members of Congress, political operatives, lobbyists, and former advisers. Speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information and private conversations, they described Patel’s tenure as a management failure and his personal behavior as a national-security vulnerability…

Several officials told me that Patel’s drinking has been a recurring source of concern across the government. They said that he is known to drink to the point of obvious intoxication…Early in his tenure, meetings and briefings had to be rescheduled for later in the day as a result of his alcohol-fueled nights, six current and former officials and others familiar with Patel’s schedule told me.

Upon being asked for comment, the FBI responded with a statement attributed to Patel that threatened to sue, which he soon did. This has become regular practice for him. Patel has previously filed lawsuits against the New York Times, CNN, Politico, and a pundit who appeared on MSNBC. These never go anywhere, because the standards for winning a defamation suit in the US are quite high, and nothing any of these media companies did came anywhere near the necessary threshold. But now we have an FBI Director who sees the justice system as a tool to intimidate journalists.

Professionalized law enforcement is one of the things that most clearly separates societies that function well from those that don’t. We give certain individuals a badge and a gun, let them spy on us, and take some of us away and lock us up in little cells. To keep us there for a while, they need to present evidence to judges and juries, but law enforcement officials are the ones who, within certain bounds, decide who to target and which evidence to gather. There’s no way to avoid simply having to trust that they’re doing their jobs in ways that are relatively fair and impartial.

Political bias has of course always been an issue, and this is unavoidable to some degree because institutions are composed of human beings. But before Trump’s second term, it was widely agreed that you wanted individuals at the top who went to good schools, were respected by their colleagues, followed the rules, and didn’t hawk supplements on the side.

They behaved like decent gentlemen, and avoided behavior that indicated a lack of professionalism or bias. James Comey refused to shoot hoops with Barack Obama because it would give the wrong impression. Before Trump, a DOJ “scandal” was that Bill Clinton had a brief meeting, approximately twenty minutes, with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on a plane at a time when the FBI was investigating Hillary. The Inspector General looked into it and found no evidence that they discussed the Hillary case, nor that Lynch pressured the FBI on the issue. Meanwhile, Trump publicly signs executive orders telling the administration who to go after, and hires and fires officials based on who will most zealously prosecute his enemies.

In 2013, James Comey was appointed by Obama and confirmed 93-1 in the Senate, with only Rand Paul objecting on civil liberty grounds. There were never any questions raised about his character, and he would in subsequent years go on to anger both sides of the political spectrum. Trump broke a long established norm in 2017 by firing Comey, and then appointed Chris Wray, who was opposed by only five Democrats in the Senate, in part on the grounds that he had been hand picked by Trump. But Wray was still widely respected and was easily confirmed. Like Comey, the new director also wouldn’t simply do Trump’s bidding, so he resigned after Trump won reelection and it was clear that he would be fired to make way for someone like Kash.

The list of ways in which Patel’s appointment and tenure as FBI director have broken with previous practices is practically endless. FBI directors were not supposed to change with the president, but rather served 10-year terms so they would be more independent. They were supposed to be individuals whose personal integrity was beyond question. They avoided drinking to excess in public, and scams to milk their supporters for money. Previous candidates for FBI director didn’t even have “supporters” in the way Patel does. They didn’t make the podcast circuit or write books encouraging children to worship the presidential candidate who they hoped would one day appoint them to the position. They didn’t have colleagues and subordinates talking to journalists about their erratic behavior, and when there was reporting they didn’t like, they didn’t file frivolous lawsuits in order to intimidate the press. Previous FBI directors didn’t have memecoins, and didn’t use government resources in order to chauffeur around and provide security for their girlfriend, and then think of ways to criminally go after journalists who reported on it.

I don’t know anyone who would argue that the previous norms weren’t simply better. Nobody ever said: “You know, we need law enforcement that is more corrupt, thuggish, unprofessional, and incompetent.” Comey, Wray, and every previous FBI director were simply better men than Kash Patel – and yes, that includes J Edgar Hoover. It’s hard not to laugh when conservatives talk about “third worldization.” I don’t know how you could invent a figure that would more clearly represent the decline of basic ethical and moral standards than Trump, the candidate of white grievance. And if your MAGA brain can’t process the idea that a white president with a white base of support is what you pretend to fear, then take a look at Kash. Maybe the fact that he’s Indian will help your racial bias overcome your political tribalism and get you closer to truth.

The important difference between Comey and Wray, on one hand, and Patel, on the other, is not “ideology” in any real sense. It is a matter of competence, personal integrity, and professionalism. Patel is playing a different status game than his predecessors. Chris Wray didn’t get sloshed on the job and file lawsuits that would immediately get thrown out of court because he cared what smart and decent people thought of him: the kind that try not to lie, make a good faith effort to be informed about issues before commenting on them, and hold themselves and others to certain ethical standards. MAGA is a populist movement, so individuals get ahead by appealing to the gullible and less informed. Members of their base don’t expect ethical behavior from leaders, and don’t read enough real news to even have a good sense of who is behaving ethically anyway. You will live your life in different ways depending on whether you want to be thought well of by newspaper readers and professionals in your field, or listeners of Benny Johnson’s podcast and nursing home patients with borderline dementia whose names are on Republican mailing lists.

Although we live in cynical times, I think the second Trump administration has served as a reminder of how good we had it in the recent past. In 2020, leftists misrepresented the state of American law enforcement because they did not like what arrest data and police behavior told us about racial differences in crime rates. In recent years, the right has become a cult of personality centered around a conman, and they need to pretend that institutions like the FBI were always so corrupt that it justified them not even having to pretend to adhere to old norms. Both are wrong, but the threat that the MAGA movement poses is more immediate because it is the one with power, and on the right you do not find a more responsible class that makes up enough of a critical mass to check pressures that come from below, and keep in line figures who would appeal to the lowest instincts of the base.

My new book will argue that Kash Patel is not an anomaly. He’s the natural consequence of what happens when low-trust movements that are motivated by the grievances of less informed voters take power. Watching other countries, we usually only get glimpses of what is going on when they are experiencing a populist wave. For Americans today, following the news provides, in granular detail, nonstop reminders of the differences between advanced and less developed cultures, at least for those of us who have long enough memories to remember what our leaders were like only a few years ago.

For some, it’s hard to be truly disgusted with Trump. He’s too funny, and in ways too innocent to hate: a fat toddler approaching 80 who seems to brush off unrelenting hostility from all establishment institutions and the bullets of would-be assassins, and who most of the time barely even pretends that he isn’t lying to you. He even seems to share in the natural contempt nearly all smart people feel for his most enthusiastic supporters. Patel, in contrast, is the kind of figure who typically rides to power on the coattails of a charismatic strongman: a brown-nosing striver who has no talents outside of sucking up. His tenure at the head of the FBI is a blot on the institution and the history of American law enforcement. It is yet to be seen whether this is a one-off or a watershed moment in the decline of professionalism and standards among American elites.

Thanks for reading. If you enjoy articles like this, the global rise of populism is the subject of my next book, titled Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster. Taking a global perspective, it will argue that what we are seeing is not the rise of a new ideological movement, but rather a moral and intellectual decline among leaders resulting from changes in communications technology that allow more uninformed and uneducated citizens to have their voices heard. The Trump movement is the most consequential example of this phenomenon.

You can preorder Kakistocracy at Amazon or Barnes & Noble. All preorders count toward opening-day sales, and will help determine how much attention the book receives. You are not charged until the book is shipped or you receive the digital copy, so there is no reason not to preorder.

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The religion of the Greeks does not yet prosper as I would wish, on account of those who profess it. But the gifts of the gods are great and splendid, better than any prayer or any hope…Why then do we think that this is sufficient and do not observe how the kindness of Christians to strangers, their care for the burial of their dead, and the sobriety of their lifestyle has done the most to advance their cause?…

Erect many hostels, one in each city, in order that strangers may enjoy my kindness, not only those of our own faith but also of others whosoever is in want of money. I have just been devising a plan by which you will be able to get supplies. For I have ordered that every year throughout all Galatia 30,000 modii of grain and 60,000 pints of wine shall be provided. The fifth part of these I order to be expended on the poor who serve the priests, and the rest must be distributed from me to strangers and beggars. For it is disgraceful when no Jew is a beggar and the impious Galileans [i.e., Christians] support our poor in addition to their own; everyone is able to see that our coreligionists are in want of aid from us. [emphasis added] Teach also those who profess the Greek religion to contribute to such services, and the villages of the Greek religion to offer the first-fruits to the gods. Accustom those of the Greek religion to such benevolence, teaching them that this has been our work from ancient times. Homer, at any rate, made Eumaeus say: "O Stranger, it is not lawful for me, even if one poorer than you should come, to dishonor a stranger. For all strangers and beggars are from Zeus. The gift is small, but it is precious." Do not therefore let others outdo us in good deeds while we ourselves are disgraced by laziness; rather, let us not quite abandon our piety toward the gods…

We ought to share our goods with all men, but most of all with the respectable, the helpless, and the poor, so that they have at least the essentials of life. I claim, even though it may seem paradoxical, that it is a holy deed to share our clothes and food with the wicked: we give, not to their moral character but to their human character. Therefore I believe that even prisoners deserve the same kind of care.

A concern for the poor and marginalized supposedly went back to Homer! In his mind, Julian was encouraging the Greeks to return to their charitable and humane roots.

Tom Holland argues that the Emperor was deluding himself. The Greek gods thought little of the poor and sick. They were warriors, and sometimes murderers and rapists, traits they shared with the human and semi-divine heroes of The Iliad and The Odyssey. Julian, who was raised a Christian, had taken the values of that faith for granted so much that he imagined their existence across the entire history of Greek culture.

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A single criticism from any one individual may not tell us much. But when a criticism recurs and is common among a certain political community, it says something about me, that community itself, or both. At the end of this article, I’ll put forward a unified theory of Hanania-hate. Yes, as you might predict, it involves me being unusually brilliant and courageous, but it’ll hopefully include some things you don’t yet know.

Left-wingers want to feel smarter than others and exclude them based on having the wrong ideas. Right-wingers are paranoid and conspiratorial. Thus, the left will say I have really evil values, and their criticisms are aimed at others on their side of the political spectrum who talk to or associate with me. The right will accuse me of lying, because they are always on the lookout for someone trying to trick them. My views on liberals reading and conservatives watching TV are shaped to some extent by how each side reacts to me, as only one of them appears able to understand my views.

Although the list could be much longer, when we discuss categories of haters, three in particular stand out in terms of the number and prominence of adherents to each school of Hanania criticism. I thought about including a fourth category of “pedo hunters,” or those particularly triggered by me not taking the Epstein files seriously and showing contempt for the idea that we would lock female teachers up for having sexual relationships with male students. But let’s set that aside, as it’s not as directly relevant to politics. Here we’re talking about a specific kind of moral panic, which I’ve already criticized elsewhere.

1. Culture of Life Types

The first category is the simplest and most straightforward to understand. I take extreme positions on abortion, surrogacy, and euthanasia. This is offensive to people who believe in what has been called the Culture of Life, whether rooted in Catholic theology, some other religious tradition, or common gut instincts. Sometimes, social conservatives will criticize utilitarian approaches to these topics, imagining Peter Singer types as their enemies. My views are partly rooted in utilitarianism, but also in an explicit rejection of the moral values of the Culture of Life framework. For example, some will talk about “human dignity” when opposing euthanasia, and I agree that this is an important consideration. But to them it means being forced to continue breathing no matter how low your quality of life sinks and how much of a burden you are on others. To me, dignity means being independent, healthy, able to make one’s own choices, and supporting one’s loved ones instead of being a drain on them. At a certain point, not killing yourself is simply indecent. For these reasons, I find opposition to euthanasia in particular deeply contemptible. I have more sympathy for pro-life ideology, yet it’s disturbing how much those who oppose abortion prioritize saving fetuses with severe handicaps over other children.

A lot of people agree with me on aborting fetuses with Down syndrome, and letting people end their own lives. But if these issues aren’t your main focus, and they aren’t for me, then it makes sense to keep one’s mouth shut about these positions. I can think of quite a few writers who make opposition to euthanasia a major priority, but few who are as committed to the pro-liberty position. I am willing to take the heat by saying what many people believe but will not articulate because there is little upside to doing so.

Culture of Life types are the easiest haters to understand. They believe in one set of values, I believe in another. As we’ll see, the two other kinds of haters dislike me for very specific reasons that are central to their own psyches and their views of my relationships with other people. A Christian conservative writer once DMed me and said that at first she hated me but then realized that I actually care about what’s true so now she feels differently. This is what honest disagreement looks like. This is not possible with the morons in the next category, or the shrieking authoritarians in the one after that.

2. Jilted Rightoids

In my first few years as a public figure, I was known largely as a harsh critic of wokeness. Over time, I would become disgusted with the right, and start to believe that they were wrong on immigration, and also that they had formed a community that was extremely lacking in epistemological standards and basic morality. The year 2021 was key here, as it was when the stolen election and anti-vaxx narratives started rising on the right, and I could see that I was one of the only people within the tent who was willing to tell the truth about what was happening. Actually, we can go one step further, as I was one of few people not so partisan-brained that I could understand that there was nothing to either narrative.

I was still known as a right-wing writer when the Huffington Post exposed my past racisms in summer 2023, and the article that was published actually recreated some of the goodwill that had been lost. Nonetheless, this did not change my perception of the problems with the right, which would get worse over the years.

Many of the “noticers” have not appreciated this noticing. Since, as I’ve documented, conservatives don’t read, they miss the longform articles explaining in painstaking detail what I’ve been thinking, and jump to the idea that I’m just saying the things I say to gain acceptance from the left. Here’s an exchange I had with Yarvin late last year:

The entire justification for the 2023 Huffington Post piece was that I was close to Republican politicians and Silicon Valley rightists. The exposé came out at the exact moment when, instead of hurting your prospects, being seen as based was increasingly an asset. The best path to profiting from all this would’ve been saying something like “that was bad, but it was a long time ago, leftists are scum for bringing this up, and I’m going to fight them because they’re the real racists and want to cancel people for saying the wrong thing” or something of that sort. Instead I told the truth, which was what I said was bad, leftists actually have a point about racism on the right, and that rightists were still flawed for denying elections, hating vaccines, and not engaging with any real sources of news.

I had a friend comment that turning against the tech right around 2023-2024 was basically the definition of selling an asset when the price is low. But I didn’t care! Everything within me rebels against smart people turning into Catturd, and there are few things more disgusting than watching intelligent individuals like JD Vance and Elon Musk shape their ideologies to fit the prejudices of the lowest kinds of slop merchants. It would be one thing to try to appeal to stupid people while keeping in mind that they’re stupid. But as Trivers taught, human psychology doesn’t work like that. There’s a saying that people become what they pretend to be. In politics, the equivalent idea is that you become who you pander to. Having contempt for low human capital is more than a matter of gaining the benefit of excluding less intelligent voices from the discourse. It is a kind of protection for the soul, preventing those who might in other circumstances know better from losing their dignity.

But it’s not simply that I’m a heretic of the Cult of Based. I strike at the very heart of rightoids’ self-conception. Vanguard conservatism in the last decade has been rooted in the idea that the right’s political views are the natural consequence of taking a series of “red pills.” This leads to clarity and the acceptance of supposed truths surrounding topics like race and sex differences, the overwhelming harms of mass migration and diversity, the negative role women have come to play in political life, the flaws of democracy, and the evils of egalitarianism. I come along and tell you that I know rightists’ arguments better than they do, I’ve made many of them myself, and, with a handful of exceptions, you’re much better off listening to the mainstream media than right-wing intellectuals and influencers on the issues they care about.

One of the themes I’ve often hit on is that, as much as the neoreactionary and nationalist types see themselves as anti-egalitarians, they are often critiquing the establishment from the left. When I or others point out that Steve Sailer’s opposition to high-skill immigration makes little sense given his stated values and priorities, he retorts that he is the only one who is primarily considering the well-being of citizens. See also my debates with Amy Wax on Indians in America. The arguments against high-skill immigration are really bad, but particularly so for those who take seriously the importance of IQ. If you think high intelligence has all kinds of positive externalities, then you must really hate having non-whites around to justify restricting skilled immigration, and since even self-styled thought criminals don’t like to admit that they’re that prejudiced, they selectively turn into socialist degrowthers when the topic comes up.

Amy is still a friend, and I’ve had pleasant interactions with Steve, despite his propensity to take shots in comments sections. But to be able to remain on civil terms with Trump supporters has been increasingly difficult, especially when they are hyper online types.

Last year, Deep Left wrote an article on Hanania Derangement Syndrome, which focuses on this group of haters. The top comment is from a rightoid proving my point.

I’m in awe of how people can think about a topic (me) this much while doing so little research to check their theories against the evidence. I do not “strike” this person as someone who learned something new about the world, even though I spend so much time writing about how I’ve changed my mind and the exact reasons why that I’ve decided I need to stop doing it and just refer people to older essays going forward. But this guy – and there are many more like him – probably has not read many essays and sees a handful of tweets now and then and so spins up a theory based on the most uncharitable interpretation possible.

Rightists are conspiratorial and intellectually lazy, so they naturally believe their opponents are lying about their views. From them, I often get replies like “You know X, but are choosing to lie about it.” Most of the time, neither of the other two camps of haters accuses me of dishonesty. In fact, the criticism goes in the other direction, with the tone of “and he’s not even trying to hide it!” Observing rightists interact with my work has been one reason why I’ve polarized so strongly against them. Leftists also have criticisms, but at least have the decency to kind of know what they’re talking about.

Once in a while, conservatives will make something close to the opposite argument, and gloat that the left will never accept me. Or perhaps the two views are reconcilable, and I am Machiavellian, but really bad at it. Few among this crowd consider a third possibility: that leftists who agree with me appreciate my work, and those who disagree don’t! Either way, the most prominent rightists today have brains that really are poorly equipped to understand that some people actually care about ideas. It’s not like I’m the only one they misunderstand. When it tries to explain the left, intellectual conservatism today emphasizes factors like status and power seeking. There’s a place for this kind of analysis, but when that’s all you talk about and it is your entire model for understanding politics, you are going to miss a lot.

3. Yglesias-Haters

The final category is the Yglesias-Hater. To them, I’m simply a pawn in a larger war over the future of the left. These are the people who just can’t believe that I am treated with respect by important and influential writers and institutions.

Taylor Lorenz isn’t completely wrong. Some on the left want to take their side in a more pro-market direction. I am pro-market. This correlates strongly with being skeptical of woke, so the alignment makes sense. Again, you have to credit the left for actually seeing what’s going on much more clearly than conspiracy-brained rightists.

Emil Kirkegaard has created a tool for investigating Substack networks based on shared subscribers. Here is mine.1

As expected, there’s overlap with Noah Smith, Nate Silver, and Yglesias. These are some of the main targets of people on the left who want their side to be purer in its hostility to corporations and unwillingness to question politically correct dogma.

Many leftists are obsessed with linking me to Yglesias in particular. From reading them, you would think that we go on vacations together and hold hands while taking long walks on the beach. Yet the extent of the relationship is basically Yglesias once in a while shares my essays and responds to my tweets. As a result, the Bluesky crowd will summon him at random times to answer for my sins.

It’s funny to note that years ago I was in a right-wing group chat that at one point was named “Matt Yglesias fan club,” because I spent so much time defending Yglesias from the charge that he was slimy and dishonest that it became a running joke. So while leftists hate him for responding to my articles, I’ve had similar conflict with rightists over standing up for Yglesias. Yes, it’s basically horseshoe theory again, in which tribal minds think alike, and are particularly triggered by those who approach issues in more nuanced and less partisan ways. It’s like fate wants to bring us together, but, alas, we are not actually friends.2

Derek Thompson’s appearance on my podcast to talk about Abundance has become a point of contention in the discourse surrounding the book. This one I feel bad about, as Derek is such a nice guy, describing himself as “pathologically agreeable” when I talked to him. Being hated by hordes of drooling morons is probably not as fun for him as it is for me.

Leftists have traditionally seen themselves as the arbiters of what ideas and people are acceptable. Circa 2015-2021, they were at the height of their power, and could in many cases essentially erase views they disliked from the internet. The decline of gatekeepers and an increasingly successful (and authoritarian) right made this impossible to maintain. So many of them retreated into more extreme bubbles. Unable to police society as a whole, they try to set the terms for what others on the left can say and who they can talk to. Figures like Yglesias, Klein, Thompson, and David Shor stand out as prominent intellectuals who they see as not practicing the same kind of politics of exclusion, willing to push back on sacred cows, and perhaps in their hearts harboring some cancellable views themselves.

I’m impressed by their dedication. They can’t let the smallest interaction with Yglesias go! We’re not talking about him ever agreeing with me that racism is good or something, it’s just normal nerd stuff. The instinct to set the bounds of acceptable discourse is a fundamental drive for many of these people, and it seems that deciding who matters is key to their sense of self-worth. I’ve previously written that the distinction between populism and elitism can be understood in terms of whether individuals seek status by trying to impress large numbers of people or a select group. The conservative influencer gets his status from the number of followers he has, while the left-wing journalist is attached to prestigious institutions, and may have little independent public profile at all. The latter is generally preferable, since elite institutions sometimes get things right, while appealing to a massive audience when talking about political issues is practically always a negative signal, since all but a tiny portion of the population is either dumb or intellectually lazy.

Yet while all elite institutions and epistemological communities gatekeep, sometimes gatekeeping is done by ideologues with awful political commitments. Yglesias has written about how he’s too big to be bullied, but attacking him sends a signal that there are a lot of people out there ready to make life difficult for anyone on the left who is less prominent and might be tempted to step out of line. I don’t know how much left-wing cancellers consciously think in such strategic terms, and how much they’re just emotionally lashing out and indirectly creating a chilling effect, but it’s probably a combination of both.

If Yglesias were on the right, he would not have nearly as many haters on his own side. Imagine a conservative who was willing to challenge some right-wing ideas, but did it mostly in long-form essays and always voted Republican in the end. Right-wingers wouldn’t read enough of his articles to get the nuance of his views, and in the end what they care about most is that individuals affirm tribal loyalty by voting the right way. Yglesias-hate is for people who read. Here, you are dealing with deranged ideologues rather than conspiracy theorists or low trust individuals who always think they need to be on guard so you don’t fool them.

The Common Theme

Setting aside the Culture of Life folks, I think that the two remaining types of haters share a fundamental critique. Both dislike the centrist establishment, and are upset that I have a certain level of acceptance within it. To the rightists, this says something about my character, since I apparently just figured out what buttons to push and was let into the club. I succeeded by pulling the wool over their eyes. The leftist haters are less interested in me as an individual and see me as a symbol with which to smear others within their coalition they want to keep in line, particularly Yglesias, who they imagine is my soulmate.

I think there’s a broader lesson here. My haters provide strong support for my view of politics. Right-left remains an important axis. But there is also a populist-antipopulist axis, and on this dimension few people unapologetically take the antipopulist side. The GMU economics department is a major exception, and it’s unsurprising that some of the closest Substacks in my network are Caplan, Hanson, and Decker. But Tyler and Bryan are too nice to be hated, and so all the rage people feel toward the substance of unapologetic antipopulism is directed at me (and sometimes Decker when he’s imagining himself fighting a civil war or getting cucked).

I found this exchange quite amusing.

One guy can’t believe that I succeeded while being too racist against black people, and the other responds with a complaint that I’m too harsh on white people. I’m pretty sure no one else can inspire such a conversation!

I see a symmetry on the ends of the political spectrum, where both sides have built images of themselves as defenders of oppressed minorities. For the left, it is various identity groups, but particularly American blacks. The right is now doing the same thing with working class whites. I wrote about JD Vance as the white Sharpton, pointing out the psychological and ideological similarities between these two approaches to politics. Those who are fans of Vance or BLM do not want to see themselves in the other side. But my fanbase is composed to a large extent of those who can look beyond the right-left divide and see similarities in the most prominent forms of American identitarianism.

I think the Bluesky message below gets at something important.

One of the questions for the future is whether politics will reorient in a way that will make my politics more legible to a larger number of people. As Sam Kriss wrote last year:

Maybe the greatest ideological entrepreneur of our era is Richard Hanania. Far more than any of his competitors—Curtis Yarvin, Bronze Age Pervert, me—he seems to prefigure the politics of the future…

In the last few years, Hanania has made a kind of aretaic turn. Instead of the white race, he now believes in a universal herrenvolk stratum of ‘elite human capital.’ He now supports gay marriage and trans rights, because gay and trans people tend to be wealthier, more liberal, and higher IQ, and because openness to sexual minorities seems to be a trait of elite human capital. He supports abortion, and quotes Jessica Valenti while doing so. He opposes Trump and the MAGA movement, because they’re all plainly morons. He no longer opposes mass immigration, because it provides a wider talent pool from which elite human capital might be drawn, even if it’s statistically likelier to come from some groups than others. He likes Jews. He has rearranged his Hitler particles into an almost perfect facsimile of liberalism, with just one piece missing, which is the assumption of a universal human dignity. Perhaps relatedly, he also believes that he, as an instance of elite human capital, could easily write a Jacobean tragedy as good as any of Shakespeare’s, if he had a few days to learn all the old-timey words.

I hate to say it, but I think this thing might have legs. The centre-left is hollowed out, it’s empty, its current best idea for 2028 is just running Kamala Harris again in the hope that things go differently. That space is there to be filled, and what makes elite human capitalism potent is that it doesn’t just flatter the position of the ruling classes—they have plenty of options on that front—but also provides the materials for an entirely new round of shrieking moral priggishness.

Basically, I believe in the need for a ruling class. From the perspective of the broad scope of human history, American elites in the post-World War II era have been close to the best anyone can hope for. This is true even if they say some not very nice things about me. Yes, they kind of went crazy in the 2010s, but the answer was to try to reform the institutions they had built, not tear them down with no hope of alternatives through the efforts of a coalition of social media grifters, theocratic freaks, internet misanthropes, hateful racists, borderline schizophrenic podcast hosts, conspiracy theorists, and brain rotted tech bros. Something like the Elite Human Capital framework can potentially provide the moral courage and intellectual scaffolding to fight the two-front war against barbarians from outside Western institutions and those who would subvert them from within.

I think those who like my work understand this, which is why they think it is sometimes worthwhile to take the heat that comes from engaging with me. I may be the tip of the spear of a new political realignment. Or I may continue as an interesting intellectual sideshow in a politics that continues to be defined by two sides that have embraced forms of identitarianism that are largely mirror images of one another.

As you can probably tell, I’m more emotionally disgusted with the right-wing haters. If the left ever seizes total power and wants to imprison me, their indictment will actually have accurate citations. Rightists will spin up paranoid fantasies and charge me with being a gay Jewish pedophile and credit Nick Shirley’s stellar reporting for breaking the story. To not be understood is much worse than being hated, and rightists just have a less accurate model of reality almost across the board.

All of this is a bit self-aggrandizing. So let me close by talking about my flaws. Mainly, I can be kind of a prick. It’s getting better over time, but there are moments when I’ve been mean-spirited, rude, and sadistic. Yes, yes, my work as a whole is in the service of truth, but sometimes I want to make people who deserve it feel bad. This may not be the healthiest instinct, but it is one of the secrets to my productivity, and I think the same is true for a lot of people involved in political or intellectual life. One thing I’ve lost the right to do as a result is complain too much when people hate me. All I ask is that they at least do the reading.

Thanks for reading. One thing I’ve learned is that when you have a book coming out, you can never assume that even regular readers are aware of it.

For that reason, over the next few months I’m not going to miss any opportunity to inform my audience that I have a new book called Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster coming out in July – details here. If you enjoy articles like this, appreciate me as a truly independent writer, and would like to support my work, the best way to do so is to preorder the book, which you can do at the links here to Amazon or Barnes & Noble. All preorders count toward opening day sales, and will help determine how much attention it receives.

I will be reading the audiobook, in case that makes it more appealing.

On a different note, if a little box appears below, it means that you are not yet a free or paid subscriber. Sign up to get more articles and updates in the future.

1

I also share subscribers with Michael Tracey, probably because we do a lot of streams together. But he’s so far away in the network map that to show Tracey would require one to zoom out and be less able to see what is going on. What this means is that, although Michael and I share some subscribers, it’s an idiosyncratic relationship in terms of the overall Substack network and we cluster in completely different places.

For fun, here’s what Michael’s network looks like, which is truly all over the map.

Should writers use AI? It’s a topic that has generated frenzied discussion. Recently, Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle kicked up a storm when she wrote on X that she uses AI for such tasks as transcribing interviews, analyzing her arguments, and fact-checking. Critics accused her of outsourcing her thinking and told her to find a new job. A Rutgers philosophy professor even said that “in a healthier media culture, an admission like this would at the very least get her fired.” One wonders what he means by at the very least and what kind of punishment he has in mind as a maximum.

Yet the arguments one can make against her use of AI also apply to other forms of technology that are widely considered acceptable. In fact, I would go one step further than McArdle and say that there is nothing inherently wrong with writers using AI to compose text. The only way it would be unethical is if writers fail to disclose it, because people have an obligation to disclose information that publishers or readers might find relevant. Since I can write fast and well enough not to benefit much from AI writing, and because it would be against the rules of Globe Ideas anyway, I did not use AI to write this piece. But I would encourage publications to avoid blanket rules against such a practice for those who need it. (I did use AI to check spelling and grammar before submitting my draft.)

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I can put it this way: For people who tend to think illogically and get their facts wrong, AI is better than what they have traditionally used to develop their worldviews. For those who are smart, based in reality, and diligent about getting things correct, LLMs are also a plus. We should therefore expect AI to make society smarter nearly across the board. This is unlike the internet, which I have argued has been good for some people and bad for others. The table below reflects my views.

Here I want to focus on the right side of the bell curve. More specifically, what kind of relationships should writers have with AI?

Note that I’m using “writer” here very broadly, to refer to not only essayists but also journalists and academics.

Imagine some time next year we all start to notice a brilliant young thinker who has a lot of interesting things to say. He seems to be on top of trends, presents new ways of looking at current events, and has a perspective that helps accurately predict what happens in the world. The writing is clear, neither dumbing down the ideas nor presenting them in ways that are inaccessible. When you fact check this person’s claims, they are almost always correct, and when it is called for he owns up to a mistake and issues a correction.

It is then revealed that this person’s writing was all done by AI. How should we react to this news? From my perspective, it shouldn’t really matter, and we should hope that this person continues to do the same kind of work. If their articles are thought provoking and factual, there is no reason that them being written by AI takes away from these qualities. The only argument I see you can make against him is that he was not fully honest with his audience, but this raises the question of why we should care in the first place. Let’s say this writer apologizes for the deception and says he’s going to fully disclose his use of AI from now on, but that his process will remain the same. I think at that point he would still be worth reading.

Maybe the problem is that using AI is not fair to other writers? Banning it would be like prohibiting steroids in athletic competition. But LLMs are available to everyone, and they don’t cause long-term health damage, so this is not the same thing. Some leftists seem to think that we should ban or refuse to use AI because it will take jobs, but this is just classic lump of labor fallacy, and instead of going over why this is the wrong way to view the world, I’m just going to send you here, here, and here.

Another potential issue people bring up is that AI may reduce our ability to think. This seems silly to me. One could’ve said the same about the internet. “Oh, you can just Google something? Doesn’t that rot your brain, when before you would have had to learn the Dewey Decimal System, get a stack of books, and look through them until you found the exact information you want?” Sure, the internet has made a lot of people dumber, but it’s also made the best quality work smarter. I think we should be more optimistic about AI raising the collective intelligence of society as a whole, which would be the opposite impact of social media. If you care about truth and are an intelligent person, there’s no way that immediate factchecking and more access to information won’t improve your work.

Maybe the specific skill of writing itself will atrophy. But skills often atrophy when they’re no longer necessary, and that’s fine. People’s penmanship almost certainly got worse after the invention of word processors. Maybe in a decade, intellectuals are just basically polishing AI content, or editing it to fit their views. Whatever thinking skills writing develops will probably still be exercised by the need to determine what is true or false in the output of AI, packaging ideas, and marketing them.

Some people are bad or slow writers, but there’s no reason that should exclude them from public discourse. I can’t relate to this particular problem. I once had an Ivy League professor tell me he doesn’t know if it’s worth producing op-eds, because each time he has to take a day to do it. I was shocked, as I can write an op-ed on any topic I’m knowledgeable about in an hour, with maybe two hours to get from a blank page to the finished product. I’m not saying this as a theoretical skill; it’s something that I’ve done regularly over the years for some of the most prominent newspapers in the country. There’s no temptation to just put my notes or outline into an LLM and ask for an article, since I don’t really produce notes or outlines except for a few phrases or sentence fragments that I put down to jog my memory, and it would take about as much time to explain to the LLM what kind of article I wanted as it would to just write it myself. It’s hard to imagine this changing even as AI gets better, since writing is simply not my bottleneck for producing essays.

Yet this is a gift, and there may be people out there with ideas just as good who simply don’t have this one particular skill. For them, AI for writing is no different from glasses for those who can’t see well: a technological fix to a natural shortcoming. We shouldn’t shame them for this. We don’t care whether an author used reading glasses when he was researching a book. Similarly, if I knew a writer used AI to help them compose their work, all I would care about is whether it was high quality.

In addition to making writing more accessible for those who have something important to say, AI-maxxing can create new forms of journalism and academic work there wouldn’t otherwise be a market for. Yglesias recently wrote about how AI can produce pretty decent local news coverage during a time when doing it the old-fashioned way makes less economic sense. Sure, you need enough human control to feel safe that the work is accurate, but that is much less expensive than hiring a team of reporters. When it comes to local journalism, we are going to have to choose between AI reporters and not having much news coverage at all. You can imagine something similar with academic work. Archives are increasingly being digitized, and there may not be enough human scholars with the time and expertise to extract what is important from the material. Again, quality control is necessary, but I would have no problem reading an AI book on ancient history or political science if it went through proper factchecking protocols.

I was thinking about this when listening to a Blocked and Reported podcast on recent AI scandals. People have very strong opinions on whether and under what circumstances writers and journalists should use this technology. But the entire discussion strikes me as pointless. Imagine if there was a debate in 1999 over whether authors should use the internet. AI is so beneficial to writers and content creators that people will have no choice but to use it. This is true whether you are producing high quality journalism or academic work, or slop that you want to go viral on X. It’s going to be impossible to resist the temptation to put notes into an LLM and ask for a rough draft, or to ask AI to occasionally structure a sentence better.

When I was in law school, I would edit law review articles by professors, and occasionally I’d see a citation to a newspaper story. This was in an earlier era of the internet, and they would put the page number in there to make it look like they were citing the physical copy. But I could tell they didn’t get it from there because there were sometimes differences in the headline between the paper version and the article posted on the internet. Today, there’s less reason for anyone to pretend that they tracked down a paper copy for a citation. Once newspapers went online, it was unrealistic to expect people to go to a newsstand or library to get the same article they can just make pop up on their computer. Likewise, no one is going to forgo the convenience and productivity-enhancing aspects of AI when it comes to writing, editing, proofreading, and factchecking.

Current AI scandals remind me of discussions over botched plastic surgery. Once in a while, you’ll see someone whose face has been disfigured, and people will use it to advise against getting any work done. But we don’t notice all the people who have gotten facelifts or Botox injections and achieved a natural and more appealing look. I’ve noticed that in recent years, women are staying attractive for much longer, and this is obviously something that should be celebrated. With AI, we similarly hear about instances when things go poorly, while ignoring cases where people are using the tool correctly.

One of the scandals covered by Katie and Jesse is that of the UK populist writer Matt Goodwin. The author’s latest book included fake quotes, which people naturally presume he got from AI. The problem here though isn’t AI, but rather that he is apparently a careless researcher who didn’t know enough about the tool he was using to realize that you need to check its references. I use AI for factchecking and research all the time, but to my knowledge, I’ve never included a fabricated quote in an article, because I always try to track down my sources. Likewise, when it comes to producing legal documents, we hear about lawyers who get caught citing cases that don’t exist, but surely there are many more people in the legal profession using LLMs whose finished work is beyond reproach.

One can imagine true cases of fraud. Let’s say I write a memoir, but I tell ChatGPT to just make stuff up based on some notes and information about me that is available on the internet. This is dishonest and wrong, since people will buy the book because they’re interested in my experiences and how I perceive them. In such cases, using AI should continue to be banned or stigmatized. Perhaps people have similar expectations when it comes to fiction, wanting the author to take them on a personal journey. But what about if someone is writing about housing policy or the national debt? In that case, what matters is whether what is being published is factual and well-argued, not how humans and robots divided the work.

Since I’m calling for AI-maxxing, I’m going to close this article by taking my own advice. I’m done making my points, so instead of writing a closing paragraph myself, I’ve outsourced the job to AI. Putting an earlier version of this article into ChatGPT, I asked it to come up with a 300 word or less closing paragraph that sums up the arguments in the style of the author. Here is what we get:

In the end, the case against AI writing collapses once we focus on what actually matters: truth, insight, and usefulness. If a piece of journalism, scholarship, or commentary is accurate, well-reasoned, and illuminating, the division of labor between human and machine is largely irrelevant. Technologies have always displaced specific skills while expanding the range of people able to contribute—word processors weakened penmanship, search engines replaced library stacks, and online archives transformed research—but each ultimately raised the ceiling of intellectual production. AI promises the same, lowering the barriers to entry for those with ideas but limited writing ability, enabling new forms of local journalism and large-scale academic synthesis, and accelerating fact-checking, editing, and discovery. The real risks are not unique to AI but familiar ones: carelessness, dishonesty, and poor verification. When fabricated quotes or nonexistent cases appear, the problem is sloppy authorship, not the tool itself. We already judge work by its quality rather than whether someone used reading glasses, spell-check, or online databases; AI should be treated no differently. There may remain narrow domains—memoirs, personal narratives, or works marketed as direct expressions of lived experience—where undisclosed AI use would mislead readers. But for analytical writing about policy, history, or public affairs, what ultimately matters is whether the final product is correct and valuable. As with the internet before it, AI will become unavoidable because it makes writers more productive and readers better informed. The sensible response is not to police its use, but to demand higher standards of accuracy and argument, regardless of how the words were produced.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Thanks for reading. One thing I’ve learned is that when you have a book coming out, you can never assume that even regular readers are aware of it.

For that reason, over the next few months I’m not going to miss any opportunity to inform my audience that I have a new book called Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster coming out in July – details here. If you enjoy articles like this, appreciate me as a truly independent writer, and would like to support my work, the best way to do so is to preorder the book, which you can do at the links here to Amazon or Barnes & Noble. All preorders count toward opening day sales, and will help determine how much attention it receives.

I will be reading the audiobook, in case that makes it more appealing.

On a different note, if a little box appears below, it means that you are not yet a free or paid subscriber. Sign up to get more articles and updates in the future.

This is quite remarkable, since nearly every point in the plan involves the US moving toward the Iranian position, rather than vice versa. Among the provisions are lifting all sanctions, continued Iranian control over Hormuz, US military withdrawal from the Middle East, reparations for the war, and acceptance of nuclear enrichment, although Iran commits not to build nuclear weapons.

Obviously, the US is not going to completely withdraw from the region or pay reparations. But Trump already lifted some sanctions during the war. And he’s now talking about the US and Iran working together to collect tolls through Hormuz! I would be shocked if this happened, given the many institutional and political barriers standing in the way of such an arrangement. Much more likely is that the US just accepts de facto Iranian control, which it could use to charge tolls or perhaps get other kinds of concessions from the international community. Understand that there’s a lot of room between Iran letting traffic flow freely and closing Hormuz. They now have the luxury to favor some countries and business interests over others, from which they can extract concessions. Even before the ceasefire, Trump was saying that the US didn’t care about Hormuz, right before demanding Iran open it or see its civilization destroyed. This indicates that he knew that the passage matters, but wanted to find a way to let the Iranians have control while saving face.

I was more optimistic than most at the outset of the conflict. But here’s what I wrote in an op-ed in the days after it began.

Now the United States and Israel have gone well beyond the Soleimani assassination, killing Ayatollah Khamenei and several other top Iranian officials. It is too early to say what will happen, and there may yet be negative consequences for the greater Middle East and perhaps some terrorist attacks elsewhere, like the shootings that just occurred in Austin, Texas. But note that anti-interventionists no longer discuss “World War III” or make such apocalyptic forecasts, which generally depended on the assumption that Russia or China might come to the aid of the target of American intervention. And although a broader regional war is possible, Iran would fight it practically alone against the United States, Israel, and the Gulf Arab states. Trump’s latest gambit may be ill-considered, but through the killing of Soleimani, the decimation of Hezbollah, and our maximum pressure campaign, over time we’ve learned that the Iranian ability to inflict significant harms on the United States is quite limited.

Most of this holds up. We didn’t have terrorist attacks, major American casualties, or World War III. But the last sentence should be modified. Iran’s ability to harm the US may be limited, but, by shaving a couple percentage points off the stock market and sending oil well over $100, they could clearly do enough to make fighting them a negative sum proposition for the US.

I’ll admit getting a bit too excited in the first 24 hours on X, but I was impressed that we wiped out much of the leadership of the country right from the beginning, and that indeed was a pretty remarkable accomplishment. But even here, again, I did not claim that the war was obviously a good idea, and said we’d have to see how it turns out. Yes, I know Trump is an idiot, but you cannot get around the fact that Venezuela was a clear victory, and I maintain it wasn’t completely irrational to think that this could’ve worked out too.

Of course, it was too early within the first few days to pass judgment, since we didn’t know what information the US and Israelis had access to. Looking back at Venezuela, it seems likely that there was some kind of agreement with Delcy Rodriguez and perhaps others. Plausibly, something like that could’ve been going on with Iran, and we needed a little time for it to be clear whether this was the case.

A few weeks ago, I wrote that you should judge foreign policy decisions by their short-term results. Not the first 24 hours, but on the order of weeks or months rather than years or decades.

Now we’ve arrived at a ceasefire, which means either the war is over, or we’ve reached the official end of its initial phase. Either way, I consider a ceasefire to be the absolute latest point at which you can pass judgment – a sufficient condition, though not a necessary one. And here I am concluding that the decision to launch the war was a failure. Maybe wiser decisions will be made down the line and things will work out anyway, or currently unforeseeable circumstances will emerge that leave us better off, but as far as the original initiative, the status quo ante was clearly preferable to what we have now, and this should be the verdict of history.

Stanford political scientist James Fearon once posed the question of why wars occur if they are costly. We might think that perfectly rational actors would forecast the likely end result, and simply negotiate toward that position, without the downsides of actually fighting. One answer is that there is often asymmetric information about capabilities, intentions, and resolve. Country A might make a threat against Country B, but Country B doesn’t know if they’ll actually follow through. Neither side, of course, has perfect insight into the other’s military capabilities or willingness to fight. There are also cognitive biases, and the world is just too complex to expect each side to come to the same conclusion regarding the likely outcome of a conflict. From this perspective, one way to understand what happened over the last six weeks is to ask what we have learned, and how the new information changes the contours of international politics.

Iranians Had More Resolve Than We Thought

The New York Times reported the following the week before the US attack:

“[Khamenei] is expecting to be a martyr and thinking, this is my system and legacy, and I will stand until the end,” Mr. Nasr said. “He is distributing power and preparing the state for the next big thing, both succession and war, aware that succession may come as a consequence of war.”

Iran is operating on the basis that U.S. military strikes are inevitable and imminent, even as both sides continue to engage diplomatically and negotiate on a nuclear deal, the six officials and three Guards members said. They said Iran had placed all of its armed forces on the highest state of alert and was preparing to resist fiercely.

The country is positioning ballistic missile launchers along its western border with Iraq — close enough to strike Israel — and along its southern shores on the Persian Gulf, within range of American military bases and other targets in the region, the three Guards members and four senior officials said.

Iran said it would resist fiercely, but its response to previous attacks had been quite limited, so it was possible to expect that the same thing would happen this time. Consider the following timeline:

1. In January 2020, Trump killed Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force of the IRGC, and Iran retaliated by firing more than a dozen ballistic missiles at US bases in Iraq. No troops were killed, and Iran signaled that there wouldn’t be any more strikes.

2. In April 2024, Israel killed senior IRGC officers at an Iranian diplomatic compound in Damascus. Iran’s response was firing 300 drones and missiles directly at Israel.

3. In June 2025, in what came to be known as the “Twelve-Day War,” the US and Israel struck Iranian nuclear facilities. Iran again fired on Israel and a US air base in Qatar, while some drones were intercepted over neighboring countries and smaller incidents occurred at US sites in Iraq.

Notably, the US and Israel broke new taboos in each of these strikes. Before January 2020, it was considered practically unthinkable for the US to publicly assassinate a top Iranian official. April 2024 involved hitting a diplomatic compound, something that has traditionally been off limits. Finally, June 2025 was a further escalation, with the US and Israel finally bombing Iranian soil.

In each case, the Iranian response was mostly limited, symbolic, and designed to save face while avoiding escalation. Notably, there were no significant or lasting attacks on the Gulf Arab states, and no closing of the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump was certainly feeling confident after the success of the Maduro raid. But we know that the other factor weighing on his mind was how weakly Iran had responded to previous attacks. He dismissed the idea that Tehran would close the Strait of Hormuz rather than capitulate. It wasn’t that crazy of a view.

But, as it turned out, the US and Israel went to the well once too often, and this time the Iranians decided to really fight back. In a way they had no choice, because once you kill their top leaders, demand regime change, and try to wipe out their military capabilities, there isn’t much reason for them not to keep going. But, as will be discussed below, it looks like regime change wasn’t something the administration even considered really doable, in which case that raises the question of how exactly they expected this to go well.

The Regime Is Not That Fragile

In addition to showing more resolve than expected, the regime has more control over the country it rules than we thought. In the early days of the conflict, it looked like there might actually be a plan to overthrow the current government. Trump recently revealed to an interviewer that the US sent guns to the Iranian opposition, but he thinks that the Kurds kept them. There was initially talk of having the Kurds themselves go fight the Iranian regime, which would have made sense if they had in fact been armed, but Trump poured cold water on the idea, and it seems like they were unwilling.

Regarding what the expectations were going in, the New York Times tells us that on February 11 Netanyahu gave a presentation to Trump and other top US officials arguing that there was a decent chance of regime change. For its part, American intelligence said that killing the ayatollah and reducing Iranian power were achievable, but regime change and a popular uprising were much less likely. The Trump administration decided to go in anyway, on the grounds that the first two goals were enough. To me, regime change was the large payoff that could potentially justify a war, but if that was never really on the table, then it’s a lot less clear exactly what a positive outcome would have looked like, other than a complete Iranian surrender.

The realizations that the Iranian government has resolve and that it is not that fragile are related. When dictatorships fall, it is often because there are factions within the state that will not act decisively to crush a protest movement or uprising. This is what happened with the overthrow of Mubarak in Egypt, and during the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the Iranian government is competent, self-confident, and brutal enough to both face off against the US and its Middle East allies, and also stop any grassroots uprising from below from threatening its power. Now that we know that, the war has put it in a better position at home and abroad.

The US Cannot Open Hormuz by Force on a Politically Realistic Timeline

So if regime change was off the table, the second-best result was to have a weakened Iranian government, further away from having a nuclear weapon, and with many fewer missiles and offensive capabilities. But the reason that we didn’t want a strong Iran was in part that it could menace its neighbors and the global economy, by hitting oil producers and closing the Strait of Hormuz. Yet during the war, it did both of those things, and will probably hold on to Hormuz.

The Iranian regime cares about its own survival, and Trump presumably cares most about the stock market and low gas prices, so Republicans can win office and he can keep all his gains from the presidency and not go to jail. So even though the US can do more damage to Iran than vice versa, the mullahs it turns out had more leverage. During the fighting, Iran didn’t have to dominate the Strait of Hormuz or destroy the Arab Gulf states. All that was necessary was to keep Hormuz closed by making the waterway a war zone and harassing its neighbors.

That’s what it did, as shown in the map below, which tracks strikes in the region between February 28 and March 10.

As a result, traffic in oil, fuels, and natural gas through Hormuz all collapsed.

The experience of the conflict with the Houthis of the last few years gave few reasons to have been optimistic regarding any battle for Hormuz.

On the other side of the Arabian Peninsula, diagonally from the Strait of Hormuz, there’s another passage called Bab al-Mandeb.

After the beginning of the Gaza War in October 2023, the Houthis began to fire at Israeli cities and commercial vessels. In December, the US launched Operation Prosperity Guardian, which involved defensive naval escorts and shooting down drones and missiles. The next year saw the US conduct airstrikes against Houthi targets within Yemen, and Trump escalated the effort in March 2025. That operation can only be considered a failure. The US dropped $1.5 billion worth of munitions on the Houthis and lost more than a dozen Reaper drones worth about $30 million each. Three fighter jets valued at $67 million each also fell into the ocean, including one that went overboard when the USS Truman swerved to avoid a Houthi attack. Houthi leaders were killed and many of their weapons were eliminated, but their ability to disrupt sea traffic remained intact.

A ceasefire was announced last May, in which the Houthis promised not to attack US vessels, but they would otherwise continue to do what they wanted. By summer, the Houthis were attacking merchant vessels again. Today, traffic through Bab al-Mandeb remains half of what it was before October 2023.

Trump could afford to walk away from the conflict with the Houthis because Bab al-Mandeb is not as important to the global economy as the Strait of Hormuz. Before the war with Iran began, one-fifth of the world’s oil supply went through the Strait of Hormuz, compared to about 9% for Bab al-Mandeb when the Houthis began disrupting shipping. Aside from the numbers involved, the goods that went through Bab al-Mandeb had an alternative route that involved going around the Cape of Good Hope, which can be seen in the chart below.

As oil going through Bab al-Mandeb declined after 2023, the amount transported via the southern coast of Africa went up by about the same amount. But there’s no alternative sea route to the Strait of Hormuz, and available land options can only handle a fraction of the traffic. Moreover, Iran was hitting oil facilities directly, which added more to the strain on the global economy.

Of course, although the Houthi conflict did not provide encouragement, before the war we couldn’t say for sure that the US wouldn’t be able to open Hormuz by force. There may have been some reason that the situation in Bab al-Mandeb was different. In fact, according to a March 11 report from the Congressional Research Service, “Prior to Operation Epic Fury, there appears to have been consensus among analysts that the U.S. military has the capacity to counter Iran’s forces and restore the flow of shipping in the event of Iranian attempts to disrupt the Strait.”

One could have thought before the war that simply threatening to bomb Iran into the Stone Age would be enough – the Houthis were already there! (not literally, obviously, but closer than Iran) But Trump tried that, and ended up folding. Other countries rejected American requests for help with Hormuz. If Trump was being told by military leaders that the US could open the Strait alone fast enough, given his character I think there’s a good chance he would’ve tried. But it looks like it was never considered possible, or at least not on a short enough time scale for it to make sense politically. If Trump was informed that it could be done, but it would take two years, obviously he wasn’t going to accept that given that he thinks more about his financial interests than his legacy.

What Comes Next

I think Iran has won a kind of peace of mind. They’ve shown that they can cause great pain for the rest of the world, and that their regime won’t fold or collapse in the face of a major attack. Every American president from now on will know that deciding to go to war with Iran will tank the global economy and become the dominant issue of their presidency, hindering the ability to achieve all other political goals. Before, they could delude themselves that it could be quick and easy. Even future presidents hostile to the regime are unlikely to care so much about Iran that they think that the issue is worth tanking their approval rating by ten points and risking nearly all of their political capital.

This likely applies to Trump too once the two-week ceasefire is up. I expect him to find a way to save face and not restart the war. The thing to understand about Trump is that he’s very petty and selfish (I know, I know, breaking news). He wants to do well in the midterms and have a Republican president as his successor, since the goal is to – in addition to looking like a winner – avoid investigations and potential liability for the corruption and crimes of himself, his family, and associates. You obviously never know with this guy, but from the way he talks about Hormuz, it seems clear he wants a way out.

Iran didn’t even go all the way up the escalatory ladder, and promised to hit the energy producing facilities of the Gulf Arab states if Trump followed through on his threat last night. It was Trump who blinked, and no president is likely to be even more willing to accept such a risk. Closing Hormuz is no longer a theoretical cost of war. Iran will probably maintain some control, and that makes it a sure thing in the event of another conflict.

Assuming the Iranians wait out Trump, the next president will be much saner, so of course will likely conclude that a war with Iran is basically off the table unless they do something really crazy. Which they actually might, given that US intelligence believes that they tried to kill Trump.

From this perspective, it doesn’t matter much that the US and Israel have degraded Iranian military capabilities and added to a potential timeline to obtain nuclear weapons. Before the war, the regime was building its strength but had to worry about an American attack. Military force only works to permanently set the regime back if you can credibly promise to keep doing it, which I don’t think any US government can at this point.

Does this mean that Khamenei the younger goes full steam ahead for a nuclear weapon? Perhaps not. This is one of the things that can turn the world fully against the Iranians. If they judge that they extracted a high enough cost that they believe that no American president will launch another war, the rational approach would probably be to rebuild their missile program and other conventional capabilities, while holding off on nukes. Recall that even after Trump left the JCPOA, Iran stayed in the deal for nearly two more years because it valued what it got in terms of better relations with other powers and sanctions relief. Of course, there’s no guarantee that the Iranians see things this way, and perhaps the new supreme leader, who is said to be more extreme than his father, might now be determined to build nuclear weapons. But I think the regime doing so would be much more likely if the result of the conflict was more ambiguous.

I expect Trump to pivot away from fully supporting Israel. Honestly, it’s a bit of a mystery why he hasn’t up to this point, and I would chalk it up to the personal influences of Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, along with Fox News. But positioning as anti-Netanyahu would get him good coverage both among the MSM and right-wing influencers, along with creating more goodwill among the international community. There are some among Trump’s fans who still like Israel, but they are the ones who are most cult-like – think Catturd – so will change positions as soon as he does. Trump may also feel misled or betrayed by Netanyahu’s advocacy on behalf of war. That said, Fox, Kushner, and Witkoff are still there, and so maybe nothing changes in the general US approach to the Middle East.

This all sounds kind of bleak, but I think an unambiguous result in either direction may have been better than a stalemate. Best case scenario was of course the regime falling and being replaced by something better. But given that didn’t happen, it might be preferable to take another war off the table than have a more uncertain result. Iran has shown it can inflict enough damage to make another attack all but unthinkable for any American president, perhaps including Trump. This is in the end what matters, and the regime is stronger now that everyone knows this.

Thanks for reading. One thing I’ve learned is that when you have a book coming out, you can never assume that even regular readers are aware of it.

For that reason, over the next few months I’m not going to miss any opportunity to inform my audience that I have a new book called Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster coming out in July – details here. If you enjoy articles like this, appreciate me as a truly independent writer, and would like to support my work, the best way to do so is to preorder the book, which you can do at the links here to Amazon or Barnes & Noble. All preorders count toward opening day sales, and will help determine how much attention it receives.

I will be reading the audiobook, in case that makes it more appealing.

On a different note, if a little box appears below, it means that you are not yet a free or paid subscriber. Sign up to get more articles and updates in the future.

Consider another paradox. In the months following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, polls showed that around 80%-90% of Ukrainians were against any territorial concessions to end the war, and about 70% said that their nation should fight until victory. At the same time, Ukraine banned men of military age from fleeing the country under martial law. One might ask why such a step would be necessary. If there was a near societal consensus on the desirability of the war effort, you would think that people would voluntarily sign up, or at least stay home and contribute in other ways. Of course, just because the government banned military-age men from leaving, it doesn’t prove that this step was necessary for the war effort. But I think most of us understand that it probably was.

All of this means that in both Gaza and Ukraine, in the early days of each conflict at least, your typical male would likely tell a pollster they want their country to fight to the end, but would also seriously consider packing up and leaving to somewhere safer if the option were available.

There are similar phenomena closer to home. Most Americans say that it is important that their food and groceries be produced domestically. Yet if this is the case, you might ask why tariffs would be necessary in the first place. Nothing is stopping businesses from making things in America, charging a higher price, and benefiting from the economic nationalism of consumers. Yet while you’ll often see a “Made in America” label on goods, this is cheap talk and people in the end care a lot more about prices. When Trump put a tariff of 145% on Chinese goods, a businessman decided to conduct an experiment. Visitors to his website were able to buy a specialized shower head. For some, he offered a Chinese-made product that was $129, while for others he offered one made in America that cost $239. He sold 584 Chinese-made shower heads and no American-made ones. Surveys sometimes show a willingness to pay more money for goods manufactured domestically, but these results don’t bear out in the real world.

One more: The Nazi Party could not even get its own members to boycott Jewish-owned stores. Despite massive propaganda, as long as Jews were able to provide the goods and services people wanted for better prices, they could still economically prosper in a Germany that made antisemitism state ideology. Even Hitler and Göring bought drapery from a well-regarded Jewish firm. When boycotts and voluntary efforts to direct business toward Aryans failed, the government famously resorted to more extreme methods.

The lesson here is that when you talk about what people want, you need to differentiate between what we can think of as two forms of the collective will: political attitudes and the choices reflected in everyday behavior. There are Palestinians who are among the lucky few who have fled their homes and made it to a Western country, but would show outrage if you suggested that all those they left behind should be allowed the same right.

The most important difference between the two kinds of views and attitudes is that, when it comes to everyday behavior, people have an incentive to think carefully about their actions, because they actually suffer the consequences of the choices they make. In politics, one vote or one guy’s opinion is unlikely to make a difference, so people indulge in whatever positions happen to sound good. This simple concept explains why most have such dumb political views. No control over what happens means no incentive to get things right, which means there is little reason to expect rationality.

Wokeness sounds good, so people say that all races and both sexes are equally capable of doing any possible job. Yet corporate executives constantly beat themselves up over not hiring enough women and minorities, or at least they did before the second Trump administration. This is because when they act as businessmen, they are plugged into reality, but when they are talking about politics, they blow with the wind. And this hypocrisy is a good thing! You wouldn’t want them all acting on their stated beliefs. It’s not an accident that affirmative action goes furthest in places where quality is subjective or market incentives are muted, namely journalism and academia.

A major division in politics revolves around which form of public opinion you think we should give more weight to. On the About page of the online magazine Compact, we find the following.

Compact, an online magazine founded in 2022, seeks a new political center devoted to the common good. Believing that political forces, not economic ones, should determine our common life, we draw on the social-democratic tradition to argue for an order marked by authentic freedom, social stability, and shared prosperity.

I would translate the phrase “that political forces, not economic ones, should determine our common life” as in effect saying “society should be governed by humans at their most irrational, not when they are most rational.”

Practically everyone agrees that there are some situations where the social good should trump selfish, individual interests. Classic collective action problems provide the clearest instances of this. For example, the best world for me is one where I am allowed to pollute the environment but no one else is. So we have laws creating penalties for pollution, which restrict individual liberty but make most people better off. Yet laws like this are not controversial, even if we might debate questions like whether current environmental regulations go too far. We can differentiate between two kinds of state interventions that overrule individual choice.

1. Those that are used to overcome collective action problems

2. Those that are used to force a moral or aesthetic vision onto society

Most of the examples I bring up above are not collective action problems. If we all decide to just buy American, or government forces that choice on us, any serious economist in the world will say that we won’t become better off. We’ll become poorer, and there’s nothing to indicate that the joy of American-made toasters will provide any substantial degree of psychological compensation, since you can buy domestic goods for higher prices now and nobody does so. Maybe you can say that this itself is a collective action problem; I won’t feel better by voluntarily buying more expensive patriotic toasters, since that will make me poorer than my neighbors, but if everyone is forced to, we’ll all get poorer and happier together through paying more to support American jobs. But this seems quite far-fetched.

If all Palestinians gave up on fighting Israel and focused all their energies on creating political conditions that would allow them to leave, they would be better off. Ukraine is a more difficult issue, in that being conquered by Russia sucks, and, unlike the Palestinians, they could probably start building a decent country in the event they win the war. I think a “free Palestine” would be a basket case anyway, and if I found myself among a people with a political culture that screwed up, I would support surrender to most foreign enemies or mass emigration. So only Ukraine arguably resembles more of a classic collective action problem, where we could plausibly think that the country is better off via conscription, even if many individuals would rather free ride off the sacrifices of others. Gaza has a kind of conscription imposed by Hamas and the international community, in that the people there are forced to remain as human shields. But no one has ever explained to me in a satisfactory way what is supposed to be the greater good that they need to remain on their land for.

Populists, socialists, nationalists, and nativists don’t want to accept that they are usually fighting for 2. They pretend that their policies are actually about overcoming collective action problems, or the selfish actions of a few. Greedy capitalists ship jobs overseas, and employers hire immigrant labor, and practically everyone who opposes immigration argues that stopping this from happening would make Americans better off. Nazis did not simply say they wanted a country where only Aryans were in charge because they hated Jews; instead they represented them as spiritual and moral contaminants and argued they made Germans worse off. When you point out flaws in the empirical arguments of nationalists, they resort to “there’s more to life than GDP” or “we’re a nation, not an economy.” Well ok then. Stop lying about economics if you think it’s not that important. Tell us exactly what we’re getting in exchange for a lower standard of living and more expensive goods.

All of this indicates that socialist and nativist intellectuals are close to admitting that if they’re wrong on the facts, then their positions cannot be justified. Or at the very least, they would have a tough time selling them to others. Most people are pragmatic, and want policies that will make the lives of themselves and their co-nationals better. So while a significant minority of the population just dislikes foreigners or corporations and reverse engineers narratives that blame at least one disfavored group for societal problems, to build winning coalitions, they need to win over those who are open to supporting whatever they think works. It is true that a majority of the public might share similar inclinations and biases, but what makes normies different from ideologues is that the squishy middle can be moved relatively easily via moral or utilitarian argumentation.

Thus, while economic nationalism sells well, most Americans are opposed to Trump’s tariffs. Sure, the average voter loves the idea of Buy American. But as we’ve seen, not enough to actually pay more for domestically-made goods. Regular Americans can afford to be irrational when it comes to their political opinions, but even here, the fact that media and political elites are so skeptical of Trump’s tariffs and are constantly spelling out their costs is enough to make them unpopular. The average voter is of course not so rational that he draws the lesson that protectionism is bad in principle. He just keeps hearing that what Trump is doing is making life more expensive, and somehow goes on assuming that a more thoughtful form of economic nationalism can actually work. A more typical president would just do some protectionist things that sound good but aren’t consequential enough to hurt him politically. Trump, though, because he is crazy and surrounded by sycophants, engages in more clearly self-destructive policies.

I would take one more step, and say that the aesthetic appeals of nativism, socialism, and populism collapse even for many of the most dedicated proponents of these ideas once the assumptions that undergird them are shown to be false. I have always liked the aesthetics of fascism. But as I become more certain that the empirical assumptions of the far-right are wrong, my aesthetic judgments shift accordingly. Tribalism is fun, egalitarianism has no natural appeal to me, and I love watching Game of Thrones and reading about aristocratic societies because life seems a lot more meaningful with hierarchies. I share the rightist disgust instinct for things like fat people and tattoos. But, even if you have such natural inclinations, if you’re also smart and intellectually honest, you have to realize at some point that liberalism is the worldview most correct in its empirical claims, and every other ideology sacrifices human health and prosperity for the sake of maintaining emotionally comforting delusions. And just because your delusions are based in anti-egalitarian principles rather than a notion of equality doesn’t change that fact.

My natural instincts are fascist, but every modern anti-liberal thinker I find painfully embarrassing at an intellectual level, and so the instincts have changed. I can now appreciate trans women. Maybe this is why I hate rightists so much. They’re what I would be if I were dumber, which I find horrifying. I sometimes am tempted to come up with my own non-liberal philosophy, but I don’t think I would have any followers. So liberalism easily defeats all the alternatives.

This is a reason to keep making empirical arguments. Yes, people will often be disinclined to believe them, for reasons of ego maintenance, personal ambition, and, as mentioned already, the fact that there is usually little to no incentive to form rational political opinions.

But sometimes, if your arguments are good enough, you present them well and often enough, and the people expressing those opinions have enough prestige, you can go against the grain of human nature. Liberals have historically been opportunists, being effective in situations when a policy that would usually be popular clearly fails – think Trump’s tariffs – or in places the political discourse is not paying attention, so that well-placed individuals can push through reasonable policies – think of some of the FDA reforms that are currently happening. To expect broad political movements that are in any sense coherent and rational at this point is perhaps asking too much. Such political forces have existed in the past, with mid-twentieth-century neoliberalism being a good example. The conditions for such movements are less favorable today. But hopefully this is only a temporary state of affairs, rather than a permanent shift resulting from changes in communications technology. I am beginning to hope that AI will lead us in a better direction.

Thanks for reading. One thing I’ve learned is that when you have a book coming out, you can never assume that even regular readers are aware of it.

For that reason, over the next few months I’m not going to miss any opportunity to inform my audience that I have a new book called Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster coming out in July – details here. If you enjoy articles like this, appreciate me as a truly independent writer, and would like to support my work, the best way to do so is to preorder the book, which you can do at the links here to Amazon or Barnes & Noble. All preorders count toward opening day sales, and will help determine how much attention it receives.

I will be reading the audiobook, in case that makes it more appealing.

On a different note, if a little box appears below, it means that you are not yet a free or paid subscriber. Sign up to get more articles and updates in the future.

I’ve previously blamed my right-wing radicalism on being a loser. But looking back, the hate was so overwhelming that I think that even had I been unusually socially adept, I still would’ve had a deep bitterness toward the world and sought to harm it. When people behaved kindly to me, I felt contempt for their weakness. When they insulted me, I was affronted. In either case, my pride was wounded. I believe that a lot of men are like this, to varying degrees. At the left end of the bell curve, they form gangs and engage in street crime. The smarter among them develop ideological preoccupations, and whether these are harmless or end up causing damage to the world depends on historical circumstances. Even the dumb ones have their own ideologies of a sort – think of how important rules and codes of honor are to the functioning of mafias and gangs.

Christianity has historically been a way to make young men somewhat less awful, and, since that won’t fly for most modern educated people, we have feminized leftism. I’ve always been amused when conservatives try to draw an intellectual and spiritual connection between modern leftists and mid-twentieth century communists. No, they’re not going to put you in death camps or gulags, you hysterical brain-rotted rightoid. They’re too contemptuous of masculine norms to do that. But “feminization has made leftists less murderous and given us less to complain about” isn’t an appealing message.

All of this is to say that young men in their default state are a menace. The rise of Fuentes, crypto scams, Tate, Clavicular, sports betting, the manosphere, and support for Trump are all part of the same phenomenon. Christianity has gotten weaker over the previous decades, and so has, over the last few years, political correctness. When not constrained by either of these worldviews, males return to their natural state: gooning degenerate crypto scammers. If you meet a young man who has got his life together and is of solid moral character, he’s usually at least semi-woke or part of a religious community. The fact that so much degeneracy happens in cyberspace today likely helps save us from any substantial increases in violence as the restraining power of civilizing ideologies declines.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) is essentially about the self-justifying evils of this demographic, told through a psychological portrait of a former student living in St Petersburg named Rodion Raskolnikov. Make all the excuses you want for young men. Blame society, their families, or women. In the end, granting too much explanatory power to any of these variables amounts to denying human nature.

Dostoevsky gradually strips away any such illusions you might have. Raskolnikov may be an extreme case, but his brooding hatefulness and smug moral imbecility are things that most young men need to answer for in some degree. The book also shows a path out of a prideful contempt for humanity. One hundred and sixty years after Crime and Punishment was published in monthly installments, it is still a striking read, particularly at a time when the awfulness of young men is once again prominent, largely interpreted and understood by intellectuals through the language of statistics and academic social science.

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Politically, as we all know, they are almost as far apart as two states can be. Trump won Texas by 14 percentage points, while Harris took her home state by 20. Every statewide elected official in Texas is a Republican, and every statewide official in California is a Democrat.

This has had all kinds of policy implications, but one of the clearest differences is on housing.

In California, the median home price is $809,000, second behind Hawaii. That is over 2.5 times higher than Texas, where it is $308,000. This isn’t because Californians all enjoy larger homes. If you do the math as price per square foot, California housing is still twice as expensive as it is in Texas.

Taking into account income doesn’t change much either. As M. Nolan Gray writes,

If we zoom in on cities, the situation is even bleaker. Take Harris County, home of Houston, and Los Angeles County, home of Los Angeles. In 1970, the ratio of median home value to median household income was 1.4 and 2.2, respectively. In 2020, it was 3.0 and 8.6. While Houston remains a place where normal Americans can show up and claim their slice of the dream, Los Angeles excludes all but the most affluent households.

Housing is the single biggest item in the budgets of US households, making up about 20% of consumption.1 In some states, it costs 2-3x as much as in others.

This is why Abundance, probably the most influential book on the left of the last few years, acknowledges that Democratic governance has failed miserably in this area. On the left flank of Ezra and Derek, there are “anti-monopoly” types who will say no, the main problem to focus on is the power of major corporations. Yet they have not been able to show any substantial relationship between corporate consolidation in the building industry and housing prices, the way you can just look at differences between red and blue states. The world is not as mysterious as those hostile to free markets pretend.

When Ezra interviewed one of the shining lights of the anti-corporate cause, she was unable to answer the question of why Democratic states are so much more expensive than Republican ones.

Ezra Klein: But California versus Texas — I want to keep grounded there.

Why is it four times more? If you only look at market-rate housing, California is more than two times per square foot than Texas. Why?

Zephyr Teachout: As I wrote in the review, I have some initial thoughts on housing. But I actually think there are a lot of areas of overlap on housing. We both agree that there are actually significant problems with zoning.

My suspicion is that there is a decent amount of problem in the concentration in the home-building market and some of the supplies for construction market. I don’t know if that’s different in those different areas —

Ezra Klein: It just seems unlikely to me that California would be much more porous to corporate power than Texas.

Zephyr Teachout: Yes. I don’t need to fight you on particular housing policies that you’re deep in the weeds of, on zoning policies. Your theory, as I understand it, is that the main reason for the cost difference is left-wing resistance. Rick Caruso is this billionaire in Los Angeles who was leading a big NIMBY movement to make sure that you didn’t have any reform on single-family housing. Does he fit into your story?

This is embarrassing. Some on the left have simply decided that corporate power is the problem, and then work backwards. In 2024, more new housing permits were granted in Dallas and Houston than all of California. The cause of the disparity in housing prices is obvious. Land use restrictions are supposed to have some kind of positive payoff, but I’ve heard nothing to indicate that Texas suffers more than California in terms of extra traffic, strained infrastructure, noisy neighbors, or anything else that strict zoning laws are meant to prevent. I went to Dallas once and it was remarkably ugly, but Austin manages to be both pleasant and affordable. Whatever benefits stricter zoning brings to California, there is no way that they outweigh pricing people out of living in the state. I know tech workers for major corporations around LA and San Diego who make six-figure salaries but see owning a two-bedroom home within reasonable commuting distance of their job as an unreachable dream. The Bay Area is of course even worse. There is no natural reason for this; it is simply a set of policy choices that led to this state of affairs.

The rise of the Abundance movement has given me some hope. In both Republican and Democratic states across the country, there have been steps to remove supply-side constraints on housing. Texas and California have both passed major laws in the last few years on this issue. You would think that perhaps this would close the gap in land use regulations between the states. However, despite starting out with less burdensome restrictions, Texas is going farther than California in its reforms, which means that the disparity between the two states is likely to grow rather than shrink.

California Assembly Bill 130 (AB 130) and Senate Bill 131 (SB 131) substantially expand California Environmental Quality Act exemptions and streamlining for infill housing. As with its federal equivalent, the state’s environmental review process has been identified as one of the major barriers to building more housing. SB 79, also signed last year, overrides local zoning to allow mid-rise housing near transit. This is on the heels of steps taken in 2024 to make it easier for individuals to build accessory dwelling units and for the state government to place pressure on local communities that block housing.

Meanwhile, through SB 840, Texas has adopted by-right zoning rules in cities with populations of over 150,000 that sit in counties of over 300,000. This would cover 19 of the 22 largest cities in the state, with Amarillo and Laredo not meeting the county threshold, and Denton being slightly below 150,000 people as of 2020, though it will certainly meet the requirement after the next census.

With by-right zoning, cities must approve multifamily housing projects in areas zoned for commercial, office, retail, warehouse, or mixed use, so long as the project complies with applicable development rules. It largely eliminates local discretion, or the ability to keep people from residing in nonindustrial commercial districts, though certain exceptions remain for heavy industry and sensitive areas.

The Texas legislature didn’t simply accept preexisting zoning requirements as given, but placed meaningful limits on what covered cities are allowed to do in this area. More specifically, “municipalities cannot impose height, density, setback or parking requirements more restrictive than 36 units per acre, one parking space per unit, 45-foot building heights or 25-foot setbacks.” SB 840 was followed up by SB 15, which requires covered cities to allow smaller-lot single-family development on qualifying unplatted land, limiting municipalities’ ability to use minimum lot-size, setback, parking, and related zoning rules to block that housing.

While it’s a great step for California to eliminate environmental review for some infill housing, Texas never required such paperwork in the first place. Both states took steps to overrule local zoning discretion, but California did it near public transit, while Texas did so for all commercial or mixed-use areas in nearly all of its largest cities. California hopes to nudge localities into better behavior; Texas is now simply telling them that they can no longer restrict the rights of their residents and stomp on the American dream to placate selfish and short-sighted interests.

One way to think about the new Texas law is that, in most commercial and business zones in the affected cities, multifamily housing must be allowed by right, with some exceptions. In California, by contrast, as in practically all other states, major cities can still designate areas for commercial or business use only, where housing is either prohibited or subject to discretionary approval and significant conditions.

I’ll note here that Florida also passed a zoning reform in 2023, but it made by-right zoning dependent on a percentage of units being affordable. This is of course silly, since market rate housing increases supply and reduces costs for everyone. Even if you only build McMansions, then McMansions will be more affordable and more people will move into them. At that point, there will be more availability of homes at the next tier of affordability, all the way down to the least expensive forms of housing. What we actually need most desperately is higher supply and lower prices for higher-end housing, since that allows the most skilled workers to be more productive. Texas is unique in the breadth and scope of its zoning reform, which has been one of the most undercovered stories in politics.

It is interesting to watch Texas extend the gap between itself and California, even as major politicians, including Gavin Newsom, heap praise on Abundance. Conservatives are not reading books on how we need to scale back land use regulations. They’re not reading much of anything, yet somehow continue to do the right thing. Ezra and Derek haven’t completely failed in their efforts, and deserve credit for the reforms that California has undertaken in the last few years. They only look small relative to what Texas is doing.

What lesson can we learn from all this? Consider it a blow against Elite Human Capital theory, which says that on average, smarter and more intellectually inclined movements will be more likely to get policy right. And maybe ideas don’t matter all that much in the grand scheme of things, or they are downstream of coalitional interests. Republicans protect the interests of business, while Democrats are beholden to a professional activist class. Each side has its own parochial concerns, but the interests of business are more likely to be aligned with the common good than are the interests of environmentalists, labor union leaders, or civil rights activists.

After all, businesses generally get rich by selling products and services to people that they voluntarily buy. The activist class focuses on forcing people to do things that they wouldn’t otherwise. Sometimes, this can serve the common good, when for example they prevent pollution. Other times, however, it may be pure parasitism, as when a union demands a higher wage for its members, which improves their situation but restricts output and raises prices, making society as a whole worse off. Labor unions are among the most formidable opponents of abundance-style reforms in California. They get higher wages for a few construction workers, at the cost of making it much more difficult for working class people of any profession to build a life in the state. Or you might see groups with an aesthetic vision that they prioritize over human well-being, as is the case with many environmentalists.

Maybe ideas move things on the margins. Ezra and Derek topping the New York Times bestseller list might make California, say, 20% less restrictive when it comes to land use regulations. But all their success cannot change the nature of their coalition enough to get the state to Texas-level freedom. On the other hand, maybe they do in the long-run and the reforms of the last few years are just the beginning. But Texas on housing is already where the abundance crowd dreams of California being, and the former arrived at this point even as the right-wing discourse continues to be dominated by uninformed trash.

It must be noted here that the Trump administration’s main contribution to the housing issue has been trying to clamp down on corporate ownership, a completely irrational concern, but one that it shares with Elizabeth Warren and her allies on the left. This led to a disastrous provision in a recent bill that passed the Senate requiring that institutional investors – those owning at least 350 homes – sell single-family houses they build or acquire for rental purposes to individual buyers within seven years. This makes the entire bill, which otherwise has many good provisions, likely a net negative, and the whole thing may thankfully get killed in the House.

Here’s Warren justifying the ban on institutional owners of single-family homes.

They can also build as many apartment houses, as many condo complexes, as many triplexes as they want. But there’s a point of principle here, and that is that private equity cannot come in and buy up all of the housing supply in America. Homes should be for families, not for giant corporations.

The phrase “homes are for people, not corporations” is so stupid it hurts.

According to Warren, then, it’s fine to rent from a large corporate owner if…you share walls with someone else? Otherwise you either buy a home yourself, or rent it from a small company or individual? This is apparently a matter of great principle! The Warren quote above is so bad that all on its own it has shaken my conviction on how much the right dominates the market for stupid ideas. Then again, when you ask Vance which Democrats he likes, Warren is the one whose name he brings up.

So as Texas moves in a positive direction, the Trump administration and the national Republican Party shifts towards Warren-style anti-corporate demagoguery. This reflects the conservative movement now being a combination of the ghost of Reagan and business interests on one side, and stupid populism on the other. Which faction predominates depends on whether we are talking about the state or local level. The problem with national politics is that it grabs the attention of right-wing media figures and influencers, who are overwhelmingly driven by culture war grievance, conspiracy theories, and the kinds of ideas that sound good to the simple-minded. In the Texas state legislature, the ghost of Reagan and the self-interest of developers dominate. But within the Trump administration, the national conversation is shaped by influencers, and also more intellectually-inclined populists who seek to differentiate themselves from the pro-market policies that have been working at the state level.

People sometimes accuse me of worshipping Elite Human Capital. Far from it. I would be very happy to have a movement that was somewhat dumber but more pro-market and not hobbled by domination of the activist class. Unfortunately, go too far left on the human capital spectrum, you reach many of their same positions. Trump ends up agreeing with Elizabeth Warren on important issues because he’s an idiot, and the same is true of Vance because he’s outsourced his thinking to idiots in the service of gaining power. I guess we can say that at least Warren will let smart people into the country and allow scientists to develop vaccines.

If there’s one thing that can be said in defense of right-wing populism, it’s that it is too scatterbrained to ever do as much economic damage as Elizabeth Warren and the generations of activists who ruined housing in California. And it’s easily co-optable in a pro-market direction. The same voters who love every piece of populist slop Trump throws in their direction also gave pro-housing Republicans control in Texas. Unfortunately, Trump’s successor appears to be a true believer in some of the worst economic ideas out there, and someone who would fight to push the rest of the conservative movement in the populist direction. If he is successful, there may one day no longer even be relatively pro-market states we can use to point out the failures of leftism.

I want people to stop giving younger generations names. Except in articles like this where you deconstruct the concept, there is rarely any reason to use terms like “Generation Z” or (God help us) “Generation Alpha.” For cohort analysis, you can just split people up by the decade they were born and get all of the same benefits without the drawbacks. The names of generations used to mean something, and were applied retroactively. Today, we simply assign young people to arbitrary letter cohorts. This is pathological, and likely has had harmful downstream effects.

I asked ChatGPT to give me a table describing American generations, and this is what it came up with.

There is something strange about this list. Note that the first four are named after shared experiences. People born in the early twentieth century were “great” because they lived through the Depression and won World War II. Then came the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers. Gen X represented the idea that we didn’t know what was coming after the Boomers.

But for the last three generations, we are just phoning it in. X started out representing an unknown variable, but was reinterpreted as a chronological placeholder. We call those who came of age at the turn of the millennium “Millennials.” Then you get Gen Z as the second cohort after Gen X. Having run through the alphabet so quickly because we started near the end, we decided to start over and switch to Greek, and so say hello to Generation Alpha.

This is like if you’re having kids, and name the first two Tom and Sally. Then you call your third Octavian, because you’re a big fan of the Roman Empire. At that point, you start naming the next ones Nonius, Decimus, and so on. Octavian wasn’t your eighth kid, and Generation X didn’t get its name because it was the 24th generation since the founding of the United States. But for some reason, its label now determines what every subsequent generation is called. And this doesn’t work retroactively. If X is going to be our reference point, maybe we should change “Baby Boomers” to Generation W, and say that Abraham Lincoln was a member of Generation N or however the math works out, but no one ever suggests doing this.

The reason that generations now have generic names is we’re naming them much earlier than before. Here’s another ChatGPT chart, which lists the source or context of each label.

The phrase “Greatest Generation” wasn’t in circulation until all members of that cohort were at least at the cusp of old age. Even with Generation X, the popularization of the term is traced to 1991, when everyone in that group was between 11 and 26. This means that many Generation Xers reached adulthood without ever hearing about themselves as part of a specific generation. Now, we’re already talking about “Generation Alpha,” a bucket we’re going to presumably put all babies into until 2028. Here’s a Google ngrams chart demonstrating the same point.

Confirming the ChatGPT analysis, almost nobody talked about Generation X until the 1990s. That’s more than a decade after the last of that generation was born. “Millennials” takes off much earlier. Meanwhile, the younger members of Gen Z were born in 2012, and at that moment Gen Z discourse was already a thing. The Greatest Generation was collecting social security when they got their label, but today Americans are already classified as fetuses. We’re naming generations so early that we have to default to letters of the alphabet since the kids haven’t even had a chance to grow up and earn designations that reflect common experiences or shared traits. Think about how lame it would be if today we were stuck referring to the men who landed at Normandy and fought through one island after another in the Pacific as “Generation U.” Or imagine the Gettysburg Address using our contemporary naming conventions:

Four score and seven years ago, Generations H through J brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now, those of us of Generations L-M-N-O-P are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. Our brave soldiers of Generation O and Generation P fought on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.

It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this, so that one day even those whom we shall call Zoomers may live in freedom, and the blessings of liberty will extend even beyond the Latin alphabet and into the Greek.

Beyond making everything sound ugly, I think that all of this has a subtle impact on the culture. Before we named generations, we used to talk of “young people.” A young person has certain traits that make them different from someone who is middle-aged or elderly, but there was a time that everyone was expected to reach certain milestones and graduate to later stages of life. You didn’t grow up with an identity that implied you were in the very essence of your being distinct from your parents and grandparents.

Yet when we name generations before kids have even become adults, you get something like the following process.

1. From a very young age, you know that you are a “Zoomer.”

2. People start to have stereotypes of what it means to be a Zoomer. Since Zoomers are young, these stereotypes relate at least in part to things that are universal to young people, namely being irresponsible and immature.

3. When Zoomers grow up, they still take the generational identity with them. A middle-aged Zoomer is still a Zoomer.

4. This contributes to extended childhood. Do Zoomers move out on their own, find stable careers, get married, have kids? Much less than previous generations. They’ve already internalized stereotypes about themselves that make them think of themselves forever as young people.

I obviously can’t prove this. But there’s a correlation: we started naming generations earlier, and people started growing up later. And the process makes sense to me. The real question is what we actually gain by saying “Generation Z” instead of “young people” when talking about the same group of individuals. I can’t think of many benefits. If it turns out that Zoomers maintain their traits into old age, we are free to make a retrospective judgment about that fact. Perhaps growing up during Covid or the Trump presidency turns out to have created lasting scars. Then we can start calling them “Generation Covid” or “Generation Trump” or whatever, instead of imposing the idea that they are going to grow up in a way that makes them different from previous cohorts. What we shouldn’t do is force an identity onto them, and then when things happen, peer over their shoulder going “See? See? You guys are so special and have been through SOO MUCH.”

Think about meeting a thirty-year-old sometime next year. Maybe that person is considering getting married. They can ask themselves the question in one of two ways.

1. Is it normal and right for people to get married at 30?

2. Is it normal and right for Zoomers to get married at 30?

There is an important distinction here in terms of setting expectations for one’s self, along with the ones we have for other people. With (1), you are putting your experience and life situation in the context of the full scope of human history, or at least the time of your parents and grandparents, which serves as your reference point. With (2), you ask whether this is something that makes sense for someone in your generational cohort.

Of course, in 2027, we will all assume that of course “Zoomers” don’t get married at 30. No Zoomer has ever been 30 before (the same process can explain why they didn’t get married at 20 or 25, and might not at 35). And we’ve spent the last decade plus using “Zoomers” as a general term for young people. I think that even when Millennials and Gen X are well into their golden years, they will still think of Zoomers as a bunch of unserious kids. And maybe with Zoomers having set the bar so low, Generation Alpha comes along and starts to be thought of as even less mature and capable of adult living. That is, unless nominal determinism means that the name Generation Alpha increases their self-esteem. In that case, we will observe a precipitous rise in swashbuckling behavior among young men, before the next generation sees its confidence collapse as a result of always being told that they are Beta.

Instead of emphasizing what is common to the human experience as we reach different stages of life, young people now walk around with the implicit assumption that they are somehow different. When you say old people might have something to teach young people, it sounds plausible. But if you frame the same thing as a matter of whether a “Boomer” has anything useful to say to a “Zoomer,” we’ve defined people in such a way that we expect there to be unbridgeable gaps. I get frustrated when I hear young people talk about how nobody older can understand their dating or financial struggles. I think it’s in part that they’ve been taught their whole lives that contemporary adults grew up in a social context that was too divorced from their own to provide any insights. So if I say that some young man should stop acting like a loser and just approach women, they’ll act like this is impossible, as if human nature has completely changed and even basic lessons of evolutionary psychology – like things as fundamental as men care more about looks than women – have been completely invalidated by recent technological and social changes.

It’s deeply annoying, and I’ve observed that the more that people latch on to generational analysis, the more self-pitying and conspiratorial they are. When I hear someone talk about their experience as a Zoomer, it’s usually a red flag, like when someone centers their racial background in a discussion of how they view the world. I expect to soon hear about how hard their life is and how they lack the ability to improve it due to forces beyond their control. As with all forms of identity politics, focusing on generations leads to judging arguments by the traits of the speaker, and elevates “lived experience” over logic and empirical evidence.

A New York Times headline from last Thursday reads “‘It Feels Like There’s No Jobs’: 12 Gen Z Voters on the U.S. Economy." It’s obvious to me that as soon as the report is framed as Gen Z talking about its experiences, we know that the spin is going to be negative. The connection between the labeling of identity groups and the culture of victimhood is so strong that if the narrative were positive, it would be more natural to use a different term to refer to those being profiled.

Classifications have their own way of becoming self-fulfilling prophecies. I’ve previously discussed how terms like “Asian American Pacific Islander” and “Hispanic” were used as government categories before being adopted in the wider discourse. Once the state divides people into groups and distributes advantages on that basis, the relevant labels acquire cultural resonance. We are not even giving kids a chance to grow up before putting into their minds the idea that everything they experience will be different from all that came before. Of course, each generation does face new challenges. But we are biasing the way we view the world by deciding ahead of time that each cohort is going to experience something so unique that it needs its own label. This reinforces young people’s natural tendency toward self-absorption and creates a psychological barrier that prevents them from benefiting from the accumulated wisdom of previous generations.

And consider the arbitrariness with which we do this. For some reason, we have settled on sixteen-year intervals, maybe to accommodate our shorter attention spans as we seek out new things to talk about. I was born in 1985, and so I’m supposed to have more in common with people born in 1995 (“fellow Millennials”) than in 1980 (Gen X). But there’s no reason why that should be the case. I’m old enough to have gone through most of my formative years without the internet. This must have created a very different experience from that of the youngest millennials.

I actually didn’t find out what generation I was until Gabriel Rossman told me a few years ago. I’d always been so allergic to generational analysis that I refused to learn exactly where the lines were. My assumption was that I was Gen X, because that was the cohort people talked about when I was growing up in the 1990s. Had I known that I was a Millennial, perhaps I would’ve turned out much more emotionally fragile and lived up to that stereotype, or even gone gay.

Imagine if we taught history in this way. Maybe we decide that it should be understood as occurring in twenty-five-year intervals. So we talk about 1926-1950, 1951-1975, 1976-2000, etc. Instead, we discuss events thematically – the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Cold War, etc., – since that is the best way to gain an understanding of what is important. The Boomers, the final generation not to span the now-standard sixteen years, were named according to a demographic trend that we could bracket as it was nearing its end. This one made sense, because large families create a different kind of society than one where more people go childless or stop at one kid. But as people were living through it, they just considered this the norm. They had no way of knowing that America would not stabilize at a TFR of 3-3.5 indefinitely, and the uniquely family friendly and pro-natalist culture that the United States enjoyed in the postwar years could only be appreciated once we saw what came next.

There isn’t any grand conspiracy behind generational naming conventions. This is something we’ve just lazily slid into without giving it much thought, as society has turned more toward therapy culture, identity politics, and navel gazing. We choose time periods like 1981-1996 because they appear to span a multiple of five years, without stopping to notice that they actually cover sixteen – which seems even more senselessly random.

I hope to convince people that this has all been a mistake, and instead of using letters to refer to people born during arbitrary sets of time, we should just talk about “kids,” “young people,” “teenagers,” etc, the way everyone did before the early aughts. When discussing the past, we can always look back and decide what was noteworthy in the formative years of any particular cohort of Americans, and where exactly we should draw the lines. But I see little evidence that imposing arbitrary generational labels prospectively has much benefit, and good reason to believe that it prolongs adolescence and creates unnecessary barriers to understanding between Americans of different ages.

If you spend time on social media, you will see that it is very common for people to accuse their political opponents of lying. Especially when the target is smart, you’ll often hear criticisms along the lines of “no way he believes this.” And it is true that smart people sometimes say crazy things. It is very easy to assume that they are seeking some material or social advantage when they purport to believe in irrational ideas. Maybe a politician is trying to win an election, or an influencer is attempting to gain a larger audience.

Yet if you understand Trivers’ theory of self-deception, you see that the question “Does this person really believe this or are they grifting?” is usually meaningless. Or at the very least it needs to be more precisely defined before we put forward an answer.

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Regardless of what really happened, when the story is mistold, it is held up as a demonstration of Eastern wisdom, reflecting the Chinese propensity to take a very long view of history. Simple Westerners only think about immediate impacts; much wiser Oriental leaders take a wait-and-see approach and then draw more lasting lessons.

Yet the alleged Chinese perspective is really dumb. The further away we get from the French Revolution, the less certain its impacts become. Did the French Revolution cause Bolshevism? Or maybe we can say that the nationalism it fostered in fact brought down the Soviet Union? Do we stop and judge in 1943 or 1991? Things will look very different depending on which year we choose. You can make a good historical argument that the French Revolution caused Napoleon. But to get from that event to World War I, there are too many uncertainties to come up with any kind of reasonable counterfactual.

I’ve been thinking about this fake piece of Chinese wisdom while participating in the discussion about Venezuela. Right now, it looks like things are going well. I remember what the debates were like two months ago, and if anyone told you that soon Delcy Rodriguez would welcome back foreign investors, reform energy laws toward American preferences, amnesty or release large numbers of prisoners, and be kissing up to Trump on social media and yucking it up with Doug Burgum, they would’ve said you were dreaming. Moreover, public opinion polling shows that Venezuelans overwhelmingly support the raid. Any American leader would’ve taken that over the status quo ante. For that reason, I’m ready to declare Venezuela a success. On Iran, I’ll continue to reserve judgment until at least a few more months.

This reminds me of a debate scholars have had over the generations about the role Christianity has played in the history of the world. Sometimes you’ll hear writers argue that the faith is responsible for all good things that have happened in Western civilization over the last few centuries. I’ve always found this odd, since as Christianity took over Europe, living standards and the state of technological development plummeted, as explained by Bryan Ward-Perkins in The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization. By his estimate, things did not begin to recover until well into the Middle Ages. Are we to grant Christianity a thousand-year mulligan from the time of Constantine’s conversion? I don’t know how you can skip how bad things got after Rome collapsed, but then give Christianity credit for what came later.

You can write very entertaining books about why Christianity was responsible for modern science and the Industrial Revolution, they can sound convincing to smart people, and I’ve read and enjoyed many of them myself. They might even be true. But I think that a question like “Would the world be better or worse off if Christianity never existed?” is way too complex to be addressed by mere mortals.

It’s funny because if you read Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he tells a story that takes the opposite view of many moderns (check out my 2020 thread). During the Enlightenment, intellectuals believed that Christian superstition ruined ancient civilization. Like all writers, Gibbon was reflecting the prejudices of his time, and it seems as if the kinds of academics who write books about Christianity now are either believers or have a cultural affinity toward the faith. Today we know that Gibbon made a lot of stuff up, and needless to say modern historians have access to more archives and better methods, and are a lot more careful with their facts. But in the centuries since The Decline and Fall, I don’t think that they’ve figured out how to adequately engage in a two-millennium counterfactual. Scholars now have more confirmation that life did actually get worse for most people after the fall of Rome, and this obviously supports Gibbon’s theory better than those of his modern counterparts.

Judging the Maduro Raid

What will Venezuela be like in five years? I don’t know. But even if it turns out terribly, we will have no counterfactual regarding what would have happened had Maduro remained in power. It seems to me that opponents of intervention are doing the following:

1. When things seem to be going well, assert that it’s too soon to say anything.

2. Wait for bad things to happen, and then declare them the result of the American intervention.

At some point, something bad will happen in Venezuela or elsewhere in the world. Anti-interventionists will then stand up and say “I told you so.” Even if bad things happen outside of Venezuela, they will be able to blame the fracturing of international norms or somehow tie it back to Maduro’s arrest, ignoring the fact that wars and violations of international law have always been regular occurrences.

In the weeks after Maduro was seized, the value of the Venezuelan stock market skyrocketed 260%. Some argue that liquidity was low, but tens of billions of dollars isn’t exactly nothing, and I put a lot of weight on this piece of data. In The Midas Paradox, Scott Sumner judges the wisdom of US policy up to and throughout the Great Depression based on the immediate movements of the stock market, and other indicators like bond and foreign exchange markets. If FDR announced a change in policy and the stock market went down, for example, he doesn’t care if it ended up rising six months down the line. The theory behind this idea is that people with skin in the game take into account all foreseeable circumstances at the time an event occurs, and what happens later can always be better explained by more proximate causes. I prefer this approach because otherwise you can just come up with any story you want about the wisdom of various economic policies.

What happens to the relevant stock exchanges after a foreign policy event is just one data point. We can look at others too. In the case of Venezuela, the country is economically and politically freer than it was a few months ago, and has a more plausible path to good governance. People ask when there will be a free and fair election, and the question isn’t whether this is likely, but whether it is more or less likely than in an alternative timeline where Maduro stayed in power. The signals on Venezuela are not mixed. They’re all pointing in the same direction and the operation is over, and for those reasons it is not too early to say that interventionists have been vindicated.

Judging the War with Iran

I’m willing to accept the other side of this coin, and say that the fact that the stock market went down after the war with Iran started is an indication that Trump made a mistake. On the first day of trading after the bombing began, the S&P 500 was about flat. I’ll make the argument harder for myself and take the state of the S&P 500 two trading days after the war started, down about 2%, since that’s maybe about how much time it took to fully understand the initial scope and aim of the intervention.

Of course, we all knew that the stock market would fall if we started bombing Iran, so that can’t be the full story. But the magnitude matters a lot. And we simply can’t wait an indefinite amount of time to judge the wisdom of the intervention.

Unfortunately, it looks as if the odds that the Iranian regime will fall by the end of 2026 are the same as they were at the start of the war. Yet, right when the war was launched, the chances skyrocketed from 36% to a high of 61%. We had a few weeks of elevated chances of regime change, before the market settled back to the baseline.

So in retrospect, the Trump administration did increase the chances that the regime would fall. It’s looking the same as before now, but that should not have much influence on how we see the original decision to pull the trigger. That is, unless you think that the fact that war was seen as a credible option was why the baseline odds of regime change were so high, and maybe the war was necessary for the threat ever to have been credible, and also to maintain more pressure on the regime going forward. This would argue in favor of a more hawkish approach. At the same time, a similar logic can force us to say that we’re underestimating the economic damage of the war, since markets had already priced in the cost of conflict before the bombing began. Maybe the stock market lost 2%, but it was already 1% lower than it otherwise would have been just because we know Trump was going to attack Iran. I hope that these two ways of taking the previous policy into account balance one another out, since they point in opposite directions regarding whether the war was a good decision.

Anyway, we can begin by saying that on the plus side we have a twenty-five-percentage-point increase in the probability of a regime change and a weakened Iran as a consolation prize, balanced against a 2% loss of the stock market, which means approximately $1.2 trillion in value destroyed. But the stock market does not cover the extent of economic damage. That $1.2 trillion is in corporate profits, and corporate profits make up about 10% of GDP. So we might at first glance consider multiplying the $1.2 trillion by ten, but it’s doubtful that the war will impact all sectors and forms of output equally. I’m going to multiply the effect by six times, and get $7.2 trillion in economic damage in terms of expected present value.

But I’m a global citizen, and will take a global perspective. According to one estimate, as of March 9, about $6 trillion in equities value was lost globally since the start of the war. It’s hard to know whether to attribute this all to the conflict, but let’s do so anyway. We can again multiply this by 6, and end up with a grand total of $36 trillion in global economic damages.

I’m not going to count the direct costs of the war in terms of money spent, since this is negligible compared to the overall economic effect. We have to throw in Iranian and American casualties, but these aren’t particularly high if we convert them into monetary terms. Let’s put the statistical value of life at $10 million, and assume this war has killed 3,000 people. Both of these estimates are way too high, and multiplying them we only get about $30 billion. Once again, this is a rounding error. Iranian infrastructure and real estate are likewise not that valuable in the grand scheme of things. The impacts on the global economy as reflected in equity markets are the costs you should be thinking about in this conflict.

If we stop the tape today, the question boils down to this: Was $36 trillion in lost value worth a twenty-five-percentage point increase in regime change, and a weaker Iran regardless? Another way to look at it is whether it would be worth $144 trillion for a 100% chance of regime change in Iran. Since $144 trillion is greater than the entire yearly GDP of the world, we have to say no, especially since there’s no guarantee regime change would work out well. As mentioned, I also think that Iran’s offensive capabilities being wiped out and many of its leaders killed should be considered pluses and placed on the ledger. But even with that, it’s hard to see how you end up with a benefit that is worth losing that much in economic costs.

We’re still early here, though, and we don’t know which way this will go. With the Maduro raid, I’m comfortable saying that it is “over” – anything that happens from now will be the result of more proximate causes. But when it comes to war with Iran, we’re still in the opening stages of the conflict. The ultimate outcome can be anything from a quick finish that limits the economic damage and sends indicators back to where they were, just with a weakened Iran, to stagflation and a global recession. The bulk of the cost of the war is from economic damage, and most of the economic damage is coming from the closing of the Strait of Hormuz. So if the Trump administration can figure out how to open it through force, which some have argued is doable, global equities will recover and you get the benefits of a weaker Iran at low cost even if the war continues.

All of this is to say that I’m fine with continuing to wait. We can have a rule: in the first few months or so after an action is taken, if all the indicators are either positive or negative, then a move was either clearly justified or a mistake. When the record is mixed, like here, or things are still early, you can reserve judgment. You usually can’t call a war a failure if it’s only been going on for a few weeks and much about its trajectory remains up in the air, but a raid that is carried out and only seems to have positive results within the next few months can be declared a success.

What I won’t do on Iran, however, is simply wait indefinitely until I can say that the war was a good idea. If Iran looks to be in worse shape and not getting better and the world is more unstable in say a year with a weaker economy, I will declare that the war was wrong. But if things look good in one year and bad in two years, I will still say that the war was a good decision. The one-year limit is arbitrary, and one can argue that maybe it should be two months, or six months. In all honesty, circumstances will provide various moments as candidates for when we can judge the outcome of the war.

Regardless, the point is that your time horizon here should be short. Definitely not on the order of several years or decades, and certainly not generations or centuries, as implied in the fake version of the Zhou Enlai quote. I’m inclined to say that the ultimate impact of the Iran War should be judged probably by the point that either the Strait of Hormuz is opened, or it is clear that the closure is going to last at least long enough to justify the initial drop in equities – at which point equities should drop even further and it won’t even be a close call.

Of course, there has to be some allowance for freak events that might occur. If Iran gets hit with a major asteroid in six months and it devolves into anarchy immediately after, and things looked to be going well before that point in time, I will not blame that on the war.

So we have an immediate verdict on Venezuela, which is that it was a good move. On Iran, we got a slight decrease in the stock market, a substantial increase in odds of regime change, the decline of Iran as a threat, and perhaps $36 trillion in global financial losses. Looks bad, but the market might yet recover.

You can imagine scenarios where the Iran war would’ve clearly been a mistake at this point. Let’s say that the stock market dropped 12% in the immediate aftermath of the beginning of the bombing, as what happened in the days after “Liberation Day” tariffs were announced, and the odds of regime change only went up 10%. In that case the war would’ve been a disaster. It’s also possible that casualties could’ve been so high that this would have been a major consideration in the analysis, but it’s looking doubtful that we’ll get to that point.

Speaking of Liberation Day, the fact that the market responded so negatively to Trump’s tariffs should be taken as indisputable evidence that protectionism is stupid. The stock market’s reaction to Liberation Day was more negative than to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the current war with Iran. Yes, the market ended up recovering, but this was clearly tied to Trump backing off, and we consistently see how each piece of news on tariffs either sends equities up or down in predictable ways consistent with standard economic theories. Again, if the stock market dropped by a similar amount after Trump and Israel attacked Iran, it would be enough to declare the war a failure. If someone is still defending Trump’s views on trade at this point, you should think much less of them.

You may ask what about blowback? The beauty of trusting markets is that this should be factored into prices. If, due to the war with Iran, we should expect to see more wars and terrorist attacks, then equity markets will consider that. Markets don’t fully take into account the potential human costs of more wars. But if those become more likely, we now have relevant prediction markets, and we should see movement there. In my experience, wars tend not to impact unrelated markets all that much, indicating that most models of the world that believe in second- and third-order effects of foreign policy decisions aren’t very well founded.

Summarizing My Method

In conclusion, my method for judging the wisdom of any foreign policy action is the following:

1. Decide what you care about first.

2. Reserve judgment if the initial decision is still unfolding.

3. Look for short-term market proxies for the things you care about.

4. Try to factor in the best you can things you care about without good market proxies, through, for example, cost-benefit analysis using the statistical value of life.

5. Feel free to disagree with market proxies, but you need to start with them and let them guide you (Out of intellectual humility, I will very rarely disagree with market proxies).

6. Maybe after 5-20 years you can do a more meaningful retrospective, but the judgment window has to close at some point. You can declare Napoleon as the result of the French Revolution but not anything after Napoleon.

There are several weaknesses of this method. Number 2 poses particular problems, since the course of events often doesn’t give you a clean cut-off point. I’m tempted to draw the line here and say that the market reaction, and the fact that the odds of regime change are flat, are enough to declare the Iran War a failure. But again, this is early, and you have to leave open the possibility that it ends soon and markets rally. We should be spending our time looking for proxies and thinking about when is the right time to judge the initial decision to go to war; not sitting around and trying to just guess what the world looks like one or two years from now.

What all this demonstrates is that, even when outsourcing your thinking to markets, contemplating the wisdom of foreign policy decisions is still a complex undertaking. But without using markets as guideposts, we’re completely lost. There are a hundred objections one can make to my methodology, and I’m not saying that you’re going to get a mathematically precise answer to every foreign policy question. But the methodology does impose some limits, and I think it’s the best that we can do. Even if you have a range of a, say, 1-3% drop in equity markets depending on what date you use to judge, that is at least a bounded estimate. Normal foreign policy discourse is fuzzy and provides few lessons, while the market-based approach reliant on immediate impacts is still fuzzy but allows you to glimpse the outlines of causal paths that can be taken and added to a repository of knowledge.

Regarding 5, people can of course say the market is getting things wrong. But whenever analysts doubt market indicators, the burden of proof is always on them to show why they know better than the aggregate estimates that are calculated based on the decisions of all those who have money on the line. Anyone who can consistently beat the market will get very rich, and you should be skeptical of any individual who claims that ability.

According to Casey, I’ve been documenting the Groyperization and human capital decline of the conservative movement and predicting that it will accelerate. The worse things get, the more I can feel like a genius.

There is certainly something there. I do like feeling smart and being right about things. I’ve been disgusted with the right, and constantly harp on how a movement this divorced from good epistemological practices and knowledge-producing institutions is on the road to hell. Facebook rumors and social media algorithms are powerful on both sides, but on the left, this is at least balanced by a substantial number of people in the coalition who are educated, informed, and read serious newspapers and magazines, meaning that they know something about current events and are exposed to the views of smart people who have thought carefully about issues.

Conservatives don’t read real news, and neither do young people. So young conservatives represent a place on the Venn diagram where you will find some of the most poorly-informed voters out there. They are the perfect demographic to be taken in by grifters. A recent New York Times profile of Fishback supporters provides insights on this. One of them is a 20-year-old who had his political awakening when Kanye West published a list “of names of Jewish people who are in control of banking systems and stuff like that.” This kid feels helpless when researching Epstein conspiracy theories online, and says he can’t distinguish what is real from what is AI, but is glad to have Fishback as someone who can serve as a guide to understanding how the world works.

All of this is to say that if I were designing a candidate in a lab to test my theory that the right is in deep trouble, I couldn’t come up with anything better than James Fishback. I first saw him pop up as a social media troll who would defend obvious nonsense like Trump’s tariffs or advocate for DOGE dividend checks. It turned out he had been sued by the financial firm he was employed by for making up a fake position for himself to attract outside clients and stealing their confidential information before reinventing himself as a MAGA influencer. His former firm won a judgment of $229,000 against him for unpaid loans, and he separately settled the other suit by admitting to the theft and agreeing to cover their legal fees.

After a short stint praising Bari Weiss, writing for the Free Press, defending Israel, and trying to be a more mainstream Republican, he’s basically run as a Groyper candidate, complaining about H1B visas and “goyslop” being served in college cafeterias. Fishback refers to his black opponent, Byron Donalds, as “By’rone,” calls him a DEI candidate, and mocks him in Ebonics. While all populists complain about foreigners, Fishback takes things a step further, denouncing the idea of Americans from other states being able to move to Florida and sell their products there. Fishback at one point promised to take a 23andMe test, presumably to show his Groyper fans that he’s not Jewish, but now claims that the company never got back to him.

As reporters have dug in, they’ve discovered more unflattering things about his past, like the fact that he misrepresented himself as a DOGE adviser. When he was in his Bari Weiss phase, Fishback started a right-wing equivalent of the National Speech and Debate Association, and ended up moving in with a high-school student he met through that endeavor after she turned 18, because of course he did. She later tried to get a restraining order against him, again because of course this is how these things go.

In his short time in public life, Fishback has had so many scandals, red flags, and entertaining anecdotes that any profile of him has to be selective in which ones to bring up. He has a Trump-like quality of being so shameless, and so constantly outrageous across so many dimensions, that it simply overwhelms any ability to critique or judge, and in the end creates a bemused if grudging respect even among his critics. I summarized some of the details included in just one ABC News story in the tweet below.

One of Fishback’s latest spats involves him accusing Waffle House of banning him from their restaurants for being opposed to Israel. To make all this even more entertaining, according to reporting by the Free Press, he’s probably not even eligible to be governor of Florida.

A disillusioned Fishback campaign staffer recently leaked some texts to Will Sommer, writing at The Bulwark, in which the conversation revolves around the candidate’s couch being repossessed. The texts also indicate that he wore a fancy watch to a deposition, and that when the attorneys for his creditors suggested he should hand it over, Fishback claimed to have lost it. His ongoing legal battles involve Fishback trying to argue that the Tesla he drives around actually belongs to his dad, so he shouldn’t have to hand it over to his old firm, and needing to appear in court on April 1 to explain why he shouldn’t be held in contempt for not sharing documents that would help his creditors seize his assets.

My take when Fishback started running was that he might represent something that was coming down the line, but it was too early for him to be a real candidate. Donalds had name recognition and the Trump endorsement. Then I started seeing Fishback interacting with crowds of young people. Large crowds don’t always mean you’re going to win, but in a gubernatorial primary, the ability to go viral and get people to show up in person to see you isn’t nothing. The more I watched, the more I had to admit, the guy has real talent as a communicator.

The X account of the University of Florida College Republicans informs me that at their recent Fishback event, they had an estimated 500 people, out of around 600 RSVPs. This blows away the 180 who came to a Byron Donalds rally on the same campus, and 250 who showed up to see Charlie Kirk last year. Though Don Jr apparently beat them all with 800 in 2019. All the non-Fishback estimates come from the campus paper, The Florida Alligator.

After noticing the crowds, the next step was seeing a few profiles of Fishback in the right-wing press that were much more sympathetic than I expected. Here’s a piece by Nikos Mohammadi in UnHerd that treats the racism as an unfortunate distraction from what is portrayed as a sensible economic populist message, rather than the whole key to Fishback’s appeal. The Spectator asks whether he is “the right’s answer to Zohran Mamdani.” Fishback has also gotten a respectful interview in The American Conservative. On X, that magazine has become something of a Fishback booster account.

These pieces really annoyed me, and I ended up arguing with the author of the UnHerd article on X. From my perspective, it is a mistake to consider Fishback’s economic policies and Groyperism separately. If you ask Goebbels his economic policy and he says “we need to get Jews out of banking, medicine, the trades, etc.” you don’t just say well he’s racist but also has some economically populist views. The economic opinions are just part of the scapegoating. Same with the guy who’s posting online about how much he dislikes Indians and then talks about the effects of H1Bs on wages. While you may be able to treat the economic positions of leftists on their own terms, for racists who are clearly looking to blame foreigners and non-white people for problems anyway, their economic views are a natural outgrowth of their bigotry.

Seeing the ways in which the populist right-wing press is willing to look past Fishback’s flaws was an important indicator, but I still thought we needed some polling. In the last few weeks, we finally got some. While a few months ago he wasn’t even being asked about, now, according to a University of North Florida survey, if we assume Casey DeSantis isn’t going to run, Fishback is in a distant second place at 6%, behind Donalds at 31%. Among 18-34-year-olds, those percentages are reversed, with Fishback beating Donalds, 32% to 8%. Granted, the sample size for the younger group is only 39 people but, according to ChatGPT’s calculations, that gives us a 95% confidence interval of Fishback being at somewhere between 17% and 47% among that demographic. It also says that we can be 99% sure that he’s actually leading Donalds among young people. People make a mistake in thinking that a small sample size means data is worthless. It just gives you wide error bars, but if one candidate’s measured advantage over his opponent is large enough, that can make up for that fact and you can be confident about who is in the lead.

In other words, Fishback’s advantage is so substantial among young people that, if this poll accurately sampled 18-34-year-old GOP voters in Florida – a nontrivial assumption – even with a small sample size we can be nearly sure that he’s winning that group. Moreover, among those 35-54, the sample size is 121, and Fishback is still at 11%, consistent with the finding for the younger age group.

The New York Times has a page that collects different polls in political races. Among those that meet their criteria for “selected pollsters,” the University of North Florida survey mentioned above, covering February 16-20, is the only one conducted on the Florida Republican gubernatorial primary since early January. Something called the James Madison Institute sponsored a non-select poll that ran from February 13-16, and it had Fishback at 3% overall, and 9% among 18-34 year-olds. This is obviously much different from the UNF survey, so if we take the two polls together and just average them, we get Fishback at maybe 5% overall, and 20% among the youngest Republicans.

Whatever Fishback’s true level of support among the youth is, it’s still early, and undecideds are in the range of 40-50%, meaning that people aren’t really paying attention to the campaign. Donalds isn’t the only grown-up candidate in the race, as it also includes Jay Collins, the current lieutenant governor, and Paul Renner, a former speaker of the state House. If Donalds falters, then, it doesn’t necessarily have to be Fishback who fills the void.

So right now, we’ve got one front runner, two serious candidates, and Fishback and potentially Casey DeSantis as wildcards.

Could Fishback actually win? Why not? Donalds is a stiff who sucks at talking. Fishback, people used to say, is running an “online campaign.” At some point we all need to learn that online is where much of life happens these days. It’s become clear that Fishback doesn’t just go viral and participate in Twitter Spaces; you also see him going viral through actually doing events and meeting with large groups of young people. He’s even got groupies. What else do you need to consider the Fishback candidacy real? He hasn’t had enough time to turn his online attention into a lot of support among voters, except among the 18-34-year-old demographic, which is most online and so probably most exposed to his message. But I don’t think that older Republican voters are necessarily going to be immune to Fishback’s charms when they see more of him.

The UF College Republicans X account informs me that around 80% of their members are supporting Fishback. This indicates that he’s particularly popular among young Republicans with the highest level of interest in the race. Usually, political parties follow the lead of their more active members, which is another reason to be bullish on Fishback.

“Ah, but surely the Republican primary voter will reject a lying, scandal-plagued, smooth-talking conman whose shortcomings keep being exposed by the mainstream media!” If we’ve learned one lesson from the last decade, it’s that such a person is exactly who Republican voters want. And although Trump is exceptional, it doesn’t mean that GOP voters can’t see aspects of what they like about him in other candidates. Fishback has reached the youth first. Maybe there’s a boomer wall that will stop him from going any further. Or maybe this is now just a party that wants candidates who will take racist populism as far as possible and show them a good time.

Polymarket has Fishback at 10%. This is down from him hovering above 15% in early February. I was not surprised when he reached his highest point, as novelty candidates tend to have surges in prediction markets. This happened with Casey Putsch running against Vivek in the Ohio primaries, though he’s proved to be much less plausible as a candidate than Fishback.

What I’m actually surprised about is that Fishback is lower than he was back when he wasn’t showing up in the polling at all. Now, he’s somewhere between second and fourth place in the few polls we have, and with a lot more buzz. For him to stay at 10% puts a lot of faith in the Republican primary voter, and his ability to behave responsibly when it is time to vote. I don’t know if Fishback is too low; I’d say he’s about rightly priced. But again, Donalds is boring, and there’s a lot of time for him to flounder. I would put Donalds closer to 65%, hold Fishback at 10%, and buy Collins, Renner, and DeSantis.

Regardless of what happens in the Florida gubernatorial primary – again, Fishback may not even be eligible! – I think we’ve seen enough to understand that Trump wasn’t a one-off. The conservative movement is now stacked with blowhards, racists, and conmen from top to bottom. If you can entertain a crowd, you’re in the running, and bigotry is part of the fun. Those who would object are lame, and probably closet libs. It’s telling that in one X space, Fishback told a guy to go join the Democratic Party if he did not like the way he talked about “By’rone.” The Based Ritual doesn’t always demand that you actively be racist, but one thing it doesn’t tolerate is objecting to racism.

So do I actually want Fishback and Fuentes to win, so I can say I was right about everything? Trust me, if there were ever a primary between Fuentes and Ben Shapiro, I would give my vote to Shapiro. But yeah, I can’t deny there is a smug satisfaction in watching everything I’ve prophesied come true. And if the alternative to Groyperism is a more “moderate” right-wing populism that hates markets anyway, wants to keep all the brown people out, and just refuses to scapegoat Jews like it does every other minority group, then Fishback can perhaps play a role in running the GOP into the ground and helping something better emerge after it goes through a necessary rebuilding.

Whether or not Fishback ends up winning, I see little to indicate that he doesn’t represent the future of American conservatism. Young Republicans and newer entrants are, compared to older members of the party, less consistently conservative and more open both to left-wing ideas and explicit racism. A decade of Trumpist domination over the GOP has accelerated human capital polarization between the two parties, and the full consequences of that shift are yet to play out. As conservatives who are more educated and have higher levels of media literacy die off or leave the party, those who are left behind or actively enter the Trumpian GOP are those more likely to get behind scammers and bigots. Fishback’s performance in the gubernatorial race will help tell us how far along we are in the GOP’s transition to a more populist and racist party, but the ultimate destination is the same.

As young conservatives grow older, I doubt they’ll discover the merits of the MSM, and they are probably going to be less likely to meet the most important milestones of previous generations, namely getting married and having kids, which are often said to have a moderating effect on individuals’ political attitudes. This means that it would not be unreasonable to expect that the quality of Republican politicians and influencers will just continue to get worse indefinitely. Figures like Fishback should become a regular part of our politics.

Fishback’s sympathetic coverage in the populist-leaning right-wing press is a sign of how even the most odious figures will come to be normalized by the mainstream and relatively intellectual parts of the new conservative coalition. In some ways, this is ideological. Some right-wing writers want Republicans to become more economically statist and skeptical of Israel, and they look past Fishback’s flaws because they agree with him on these issues. But to get behind a character this bad is about more than ideological alignment; it’s a reminder of how populism involves a degradation of all moral and intellectual standards.

• On early Christians being tempted by women and Ethiopian kids

• The history of Catholics castrating boys to preserve their voices

• Early Christians castrating themselves to not be sexually tempted, and its modern relevance

• Eighteenth-century Scottish pioneers in gooning

I often read various books on the same topic together, so this has sparked my interest in Christian history. In addition to MacCulloch, I’ve also started Dominion by Tom Holland, which I’ve enjoyed and may write something on, along with some academic articles. For now, here are twelve thoughts on Lower Than the Angels.

1. Was Christianity the original incel religion? I was struck by how sex-negative the movement was in its earliest days. Paul’s letters basically had the message that “sex is so awful, but fine, get married if it lets you avoid fornication.” The idea that celibacy is better than marriage, which is better than sex outside of marriage, seems to have been the common Christian view, and for Catholics and Orthodox believers might still be. This is covered in detail in the chapter titled “Virgins, Celibates, Ascetics (c. 100-c. 300).” Beginning in the second century, you find a lot of Christian texts discussing the merits of celibacy, and very few talking about marriage, which was usually addressed in a much more negative light.

In order to reinforce this view, thinkers cited Jesus’ parable about different sowers getting yields of thirty times, sixty times, or one hundred times. Without any good reason, this was interpreted by an early third-century North African writer as representing married people who renounced sex, virginal ascetics, and martyrs. It was the consensus up to the Middle Ages that this biblical classification system referred to the married, widows, and virgins, with of course the more sex you are currently having or have had in the past, particularly for women, the lower you are in the ranking.

Early Christians were so sex-negative that it was even a live debate whether castration was desirable.

To begin with, the developing Christian hierarchy was not certain how to react to this zeal for castration; should it be commended as demonstrating Christian self-control? Thus the Athenian convert and philosopher Athenagoras, addressing his Plea for the Christians to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius in the mid-170s, emphasized that ‘remaining in virginity and in the state of a eunuch brings one nearer to God.’ At what point did rhetoric shade into practice? Justin Martyr, pioneer among the second-century literary defenders of Christianity now known as apologists, sympathetically described the disappointment of a young man in Alexandria who petitioned the Roman governor in the city for permission to seek castration from surgeons, to show to the world how far Christians were from indulging in free love. The governor rejected the proposal, leaving him to be ‘satisfied with his own approving conscience, and the approval of those who thought as he did’. The Emperor Antoninus Pius was the notional reader of this apology, so Justin must have believed that elite Romans would have found the tale impressive rather than risible. In a slightly later generation in Alexandria, the brilliant speculative theologian and biblical commentator Origen is said actually to have undergone castration through similar youthful enthusiasm. Yet during the course of the third century Christian official mood-music on voluntary castration changed, and the fourth-century Church historian Eusebios (Eusebius), author of an admiring biography of Origen, reports the story with a mixture of embarrassment and defiant commendation – a confusion that probably indicates its genuineness.

Here’s a satirical depiction of Origen castrating himself from late fifteenth-century France, included in the book.

Protestantism was in part a rebellion against the extreme sex-negativity of Catholicism, which still hadn’t completely subsided a millennium and a half later.

2. This got me thinking of another ideology that is less sex-positive toward family formation than rival worldviews, yet nonetheless has grown rapidly through conversion: liberalism. You would think that through the process of cultural evolution, more pro-natal ideologies would win out. Yet we have approximately three centuries now of liberalism being less conducive to forming and creating families than alternatives, and yet its growth has been rapid, outcompeting rival faiths.

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This was of course wrong. I eventually found my way not by becoming more like women, but leaning into what was particularly male about my personality: willingness to break taboos, obsession with work at the expense of cultivating relationships, arrogance and defiance in the face of social pressure to conform, boldness in social interactions. The original “red pill” when it came to dating advice from the early 2000s was that many of the things we tell ourselves about relationships between the sexes are false. I’ve come to distrust the entire red pill mindset as applied to politics and life more generally, as it leads people in stupid directions on a wide range of issues. But I think that in this particular case, mainstream discourse is actively misleading.

Perhaps I took the advice about finding someone who was similar to me too literally. This goes back to anti-woke as a form of autism, where you hear the things people say due to social desirability bias and come to believe that they reflect underlying reality. But as I observe what has gone wrong in relations between the sexes, it seems that society is increasingly taking false beliefs and making them the basis of laws, norms, and social judgments. As is often the case, although our day-to-day behavior is more consistent with human nature, political and social attitudes are determined by what sounds good, and while it makes sense for every individual to adopt their views in this way, the net effect on society as a whole can be harmful.

In recent years, I’ve written about what seem like mostly independent phenomena relating to the ways society gets sex wrong. These include:

• Pedo hysteria

• Opposition to age gap relationships

• The taboos on dating at work

• The injustice and utter depravity of putting women in jail for having sexual relations with teenage males

I’ve come to realize that there’s a general theme that ties all of these things together: Society is trying to make heterosexuals into lesbians.

In pornography and male fantasies, lesbians are feminine and attractive, performing for the male gaze. In real life, they’re often frumpy and de-sexualized. Long-term lesbian couples will have similar personalities, mannerisms, interests, and behavior. In contrast to male homosexual communities that become obsessed with physical appearance, lesbians will let themselves go since attractiveness matters less to their partners, and form attachments based on a holistic appreciation of the individual.

Male-female differences in partner preferences have been shown to apply to homosexuals. Klümper et al. (2023) surveyed LGB users of a German dating website and found that, like their heterosexual counterparts, among homosexuals men cared more about looks than women. Lesbians were most likely to value someone who was like-minded, heterosexual women came in second on this measure, and gay and straight men were further behind. Of eleven different traits that one might want in a partner, sex was a statistically significant predictor for each of them, while sexual orientation was only statistically significant for four, with gays caring more than heterosexuals about finding someone who is adventurous, wealthy and generous, and approachable, and less about whether a partner is child-friendly.

Overall, gay men still have the same kinds of preferences as other men, and lesbians still have the preferences of women. I suspect surveys if anything underestimate sex differences, because social desirability has a role to play. A lot of men probably don’t want to admit how much they care about looks, and how much they just want a wide range of short-term sexual partners.

Revealed preferences seem to show much larger male-female differences than survey data. For example, in one 1993 study, the authors analyzed a random sample of newspaper ads for males and females, gays and straights, from four American cities. Gay men were by far the most likely to mention physical traits, and lesbians were the least. When each sex is left to its own devices, individuals can more fully indulge their true preferences.

Likewise, I’m not aware of any research on this, but I suspect that if you polled people on frequency of pornography consumption, male-female differences in how they respond would be much smaller than what you would find in consumer behavior.

The culture of lesbianization involves taking the female-female model of romance and, through cultural pressure and sometimes legal persecution, forcing it onto heterosexuals. The only true kind of romantic attachment is said to be based not on “superficial” characteristics like looks, money, or status. Rather, people should only be attracted to others based on things that are “real,” namely intelligence, personality, personal compatibility, and loyalty.

The problem is that heterosexual attraction doesn’t work like this. Men like youth and beauty; women like status, money, and power. We build friendships based on common interests and personality compatibility. But romantic attraction operates according to a different module in the brain, although there is of course some overlap. Often a woman will like a man precisely because he has a lot of money, has had worldly success, or even because he is in a position of authority over her. There are good evolutionary explanations of this, and the relationships that are formed on such grounds are not any less real or valuable than others. Men will, in contrast, like women because they’re young and attractive. Heterosexual attraction depends on complementarity and difference.

Trying to remove power disparities in heterosexual relationships is as misguided as working to eliminate them in the economy. If you’re going to have a rule that says no one should be allowed to become too rich because you worry about power differentials, the more seriously you take that approach the less of an economy you will have in the first place. Too much concern with equality will stand in the way of any attempts to redistribute resources to the poor and make them better off, because there will be little to redistribute.

Socialism sounds better than capitalism, but socialist principles are based on false beliefs and therefore lead to failure, while capitalist assumptions accurately describe the world. Likewise, Americans today may see lesbians as more enlightened in their romantic preferences than heterosexuals, but trying to make heterosexuals into lesbians just means you’ll have a lot fewer heterosexual relationships.

The quest to remove power differentials in sex is even worse than trying to do the same in the economy. I want to associate with Amazon not because it has power per se, but because it can bring a wide range of goods to my house quickly and cheaply. Power is simply a byproduct of Amazon’s success. Yet a power differential is often the very source of sexual attraction. You can’t get around this. A dislike of power differentials in romantic relationships always turns into problematizing some of the most prominent aspects of heterosexuality.

The lesbianization of heterosexuality would perhaps not be so bad if people were still pairing up and having children, which would mean we could be picky about which kinds of relationships we thought were deserving of social approval. But they’re not, and we need to be encouraging as much coupling up as possible. For nations with sub-replacement fertility to find new forms of heterosexuality to denounce and stigmatize is like a country experiencing a generation-long depression doubling down on going to war with the profit motive. Here’s a tweet that went viral a few months ago on how almost every relationship that formed in past generations would violate some arbitrary Gen Z rule about how couples are supposed to pair up, like no approaching people at work or having age gaps that are too large. This can be confirmed by checking out a wide range of books and movies made before the last few decades.

I suspect that there are some women out there who simply cannot be attracted to men who are equal to them in social status. They may need to find men who are more established and have had some success in life in order to have any romantic attraction at all. Talking to women, I’ve found that there is a wide range of feelings on this, from “Of course I only like guys who are rich/older/more successful” to “Ew Epstein is GROSS!!!” But in the marketplace of ideas, women who are hostile to what is seen to be a more transactional model of relationships are more likely to make their voices heard due to social desirability bias, and probably would be more inclined to write books and think pieces about their views even in its absence.

But I’m pretty sure that educated people in the modern West vastly underestimate the degree to which fellow humans prefer more transactional romantic relationships, or the degree to which they can be advantageous for all parties involved. Some societies take these things for granted. In more traditional cultures, for example, you might hear a young woman told that she should lock up a desirable husband while she still has her looks, and this only sounds awful to those of us who have been taught our whole lives that it is immoral to think in such terms.

I’m a bit puzzled sometimes when I see an attractive young woman working a low-wage job, and it makes me think of men I know who earn six- or seven-figure salaries who have had no luck in their romantic lives. I believe that there’s a failure in the dating market when older high-income men are not pairing up with attractive, lower-income women, and that such couples would be a lot more common if people weren’t pressured into believing that romantic relationships are only acceptable if they’re based on both sides having equal status on every significant dimension.

Our judgments are interwoven with class dynamics. Men who go all in on youth and beauty as criteria are seen as Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein types. Someone like Donald Trump is of course too shallow to have any kind of real relationship with anyone, so romantic partners just exist for sexual gratification and as a reflection of his greatness. Men who are more reflective in their outlook with upper-class sensibilities are more likely to actually want someone who is more intellectually and emotionally equal. And that’s completely fine! We just shouldn’t be stigmatizing relationships in either direction.

Partly the class difference in what men want from women reflects a selection effect, where society stigmatizes relationships with large power disparities, so men who break that taboo are willing to break taboos in other ways too. Again, Trump and Epstein. But I do think that this is one of those things where liberalism is correct, and we need to be nonjudgmental regarding how adults live. The societal interests here are making sure that people pair up and have kids, and also that they gain the benefits that appear to be correlated with, and maybe caused by, being married. Society does not have an interest in all heterosexual relationships living up to lesbian norms.

I think that the Clavicular phenomenon represents the flip side of the coin of lesbianization. Looksmaxxing teaches that heterosexual relationships most naturally operate according to the preferences of men. Just as female beauty is the primary thing that matters when it comes to women seeking heterosexual partners, men are judged by who mogs. When I was growing up and young males went online to get advice, the red pill dating gurus they found focused very little on looks and much more on behavior, confidence, and personality. I feel lucky to have been born during this era, which I think gave men much more realistic advice, so I spent my youth trying to improve my personality instead of smashing my face with a hammer.

Part of this shift was probably the rise of dating apps, where looks became more important because your picture had to reach a certain threshold to stand out from the large numbers of men who would be constantly bombarding any semi-attractive woman with a profile. But the other factor related to the digital realm conquering real life is that young people just started socializing less and ended up with poorer models of human relationships and how they work. Men and women stopped understanding each other and began to theorize about relationships in gender-segregated spaces. So women and feminized institutions decided that heterosexuals were lesbians, while male and non-mainstream spaces decided they were gay men. The incel movement is the pessimistic version of the heterosexuals as gays philosophy, while Clavicular and looksmaxxing represent a more agentic version. But the underlying assumptions are the same. Andrew Tate, a generation older than Clavicular, is a throwback to the previous red pill culture, which formed in the earliest days of the internet when real-life interactions had a much larger role in shaping people’s understanding of the world.

To talk about the lesbianization of heterosexuality does not mean that society necessarily treats men and women as equal in every way. Jeffrey Epstein used adult women – setting aside the at most tiny minority who weren’t of legal age – for companionship and sex. But the women just as much relied on their assets to use him for money, fame, and access to a good time. These were straightforward transactional relationships, but they’re now seen as one-sided exploitation. A more ideologically consistent form of lesbianization would condemn both parties. But feminist hypocrisy also gets a seat at the table, so we only denounce men for using whatever advantages they have in pursuing desirable romantic partners.

It’s probably unhealthy to give every man social carte blanche to indulge his inner Jeffrey Epstein. But we need some realism too. Yes, men will like younger women, and women will like older men who have power over them, whether it’s because they are wealthier, higher status, or have a position of authority. If this is the basis of individuals pairing up, finding companionship, and ultimately forming families, this is both consistent with human nature and good for society. The dividing line between “real” relationships that depend on commonality and ones based on superficial or problematic forms of attraction is rooted in a fundamental denial of the preferences of large portions of humanity. We have screwed up heterosexuality through the idea that we need to minimize power disparities in relationships. This is yet another instance of the harms that are caused when things people start off saying they believe due to social desirability bias eventually come to be taken to reflect the way the world actually works.

Every time the United States uses force abroad or looks as if it is about to, opponents of intervention bring up Afghanistan and Iraq. Both wars started out with narrowly defined objectives as part of the war on terror but ended up causing chaos on the ground and costing thousands of American lives.

Yet if the approximately decade and a half after 9/11 seemed to discredit interventionism, the period that began with the first Trump administration has shown the degree to which many of the assumptions of anti-interventionists have been misguided. What we need going forward is a synthesis, which takes the real lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan while also appreciating that there are instances where American power can be used for good by removing certain leaders. So far, it appears that the president has arrived at such an approach, and there are initial indications that what we might call Trump’s leader-decapitation strategy is working.

Consider the arguments that have in recent years been used to caution against striking Iran. After Trump assassinated Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani in 2020, Bernie Sanders warned that the president was on the brink of starting a conflict that could cause thousands of deaths and cost trillions of dollars. Joe Biden said that Trump had “just tossed a stick of dynamite into a tinderbox.” On Twitter and TikTok, talk of “World War III” went viral. In actuality, the Iranians fired a few missiles at American bases and did little else in response. A few years later, Iran’s main foreign proxy, Hezbollah, was knocked out of commission as the Israelis assassinated one after another of its leaders in Lebanon. Israel’s northern border has remained relatively stable since.

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The impetus to finally write this article came from seeing the excellent essay “Why Europe Doesn’t Have a Tesla,” by Peter Garicano in Works in Progress (see also this podcast). In fact, it’s so good that I think he’s done much of the work for me, so I’m going to post large excerpts and share some additional thoughts.

One reason I hesitated to finish the third part of the series was that I wanted to write that labor laws are a large part of the explanation as to why the US is so much wealthier than Europe. This has always been a hunch, but I didn’t know if I could sufficiently prove it. Garicano’s article has helped convince me that I am correct, and if anything I underestimated the degree to which labor laws hold Europe back.

Before I start, I want to note two things. First, I now realize that in the earlier articles of this series I focused too narrowly on labor unions. They’re very bad, but the issue is actually broader and is really about having a free market in labor. You could have a country with no unions but that nonetheless enacts worker protections that are terrible for individual liberty and growth. Labor unions are a mechanism through which countries get bad policy. But governments often do many of the same things through legislation. It’s important to be anti-labor union, but you should just as strongly be against worker protections that mimic what unions do.

Second, I arrive at the view that the free market in labor is key to the US-Europe wealth gap partly through a process of elimination. Americans do much better than Europeans, but the US is not clearly economically freer in most areas. For example, Heritage’s 2025 index of economic freedom puts it behind eleven European countries. The US is ranked 27th in the world in overall economic freedom, but 3rd in labor freedom. Given the degree to which the US has surpassed other major nations, perhaps indexes like this are underweighting the importance of this one particular category. America is far from a capitalist paradise; particularly in housing and allowing people to build, we do a pretty poor job.

Having read Garicano’s article helped me realize how massive the gap in labor freedom is between the US and Europe. Imagine if the entire force of government policy was put toward enforcing a status quo bias in other contexts: government created every possible financial incentive to keep people in the same homes; made sure they continually drive the same cars or buy vehicles from the same companies; or put up an endless number of barriers in the way of them switching grocery stores or banks. Everyone would realize that such policies represent the height of economic illiteracy and would be bound to have all kinds of unintended consequences. Yet we treat labor as different, even though the underlying economic principles are exactly the same.

Garicano begins:

In recent decades, Europe has fallen behind the United States. In 2000, incomes in the original six members of the European Union were just 10 percent behind Americans. Today, they are 20 percent lower. One factor behind this has been the lack of innovation in European business. To a striking extent, Europe lacks tech giants like Google, Meta and Amazon. But even in industries in which it has traditionally excelled, like carmaking, Europe has failed to keep up. Tesla is now worth more than the next nine largest carmakers in the world put together. Six American cities are now served by robotaxis made by Waymo. Understanding why Europe doesn’t have Google is important. Understanding why it doesn’t have a Tesla is existential.

There are many partial explanations: high energy prices, expensive housing, excessive proceduralism, high taxes, extractive interest groups, and politicians with a penchant for degrowth. But all of these problems are true of California as well [emphasis added], which is nonetheless home to Waymo and birthed Tesla before it moved its headquarters to Texas in 2021. Explanations often blame Europe’s lack of research spending, but governments spend more on research in Europe than in America. And just seven companies globally – Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Samsung, and Huawei – spend more on research each year than Volkswagen.

What really sets Europe apart from states like California is different. Relative to income, it costs large companies four times more to lay off Germans and French than American workers, a difference arising entirely from different regulatory approaches. As a result, it virtually never happens: Americans are ten times more likely to be fired than Germans in any given year [emphasis added]. In this respect, the European economy differs greatly from the American one. By American standards, a European business has to be exceptionally confident that it will want an employee for a long time before hiring them.

So California clearly screws a lot of things up. Taxes basically reach European levels at the highest income brackets, and we don’t get anywhere near the quality of services. Nonetheless, California contains the heart of the global tech industry. There aren’t many things that the state appears to be doing right. By just being in the United States, it has much weaker labor protections than Europe, at least in the private sector.

All businesses make mistakes. Dismantling these failures often means shedding physical assets: writing down investments and breaking factory leases. But for many companies, most of the cost of failure comes from making employees redundant. These payments are large even in countries with laissez-faire labor rules like the US: when Google restructured in 2023, it spent $2.1 billion laying off 12,000 workers, about $175,000 per person. Its second largest expense, breaking office leases, was $1.8 billion…

Some American employers offer more generous redundancy packages, like Google in the example above. But this happens because American businesses want the concessions that they extract in exchange…

The opposite is true in most European countries. Severance payments are often mandated by law and are much larger than in the US. In Germany, a worker who is fairly dismissed due to business needs is entitled by law to 15 days of pay for every year they have spent with the employer.

Getting as far as making these severance payments can be a challenge for German employers. Under the Protection Against Dismissal Act, the Kündigungsschutzgesetz, redundancies over ten employees must pass a social selection test (Sozialauswahl). Employers cannot choose who leaves: they must rank employees by age, years of service, family maintenance obligations, and degree of disability, and then prioritize dismissing those with the weakest social claim to the job. If someone is dismissed for operational reasons but the company posts a similar job elsewhere, the dismissal is usually invalid.

Disabled employees can be dismissed only with the approval of the Integration Office (Integrationsamt), a public body. The office will weigh the employer’s reasons, whether they have taken sufficient steps to integrate the employee, and whether they could be redeployed elsewhere in the organization. Workers who also become caregivers cannot be dismissed at all for up to two full years after they tell their bosses they fulfill that role.

As a company becomes larger and tries to let more workers go at once these difficulties increase. In many European countries, companies with more than a certain number of workers – 50 in the Netherlands, 5 in Germany – are obliged to create a works council, which represents employees and, in some countries, must give its approval to decisions the employer wants to make regarding its employees, including layoffs or pay rises or cuts.

Much of this was news to me. In Germany, they not only tell you if you can fire people, but you can’t even decide who to keep! Paying employees indefinitely to leave is the optimistic scenario when they are no longer needed. The worse outcome is that you’re forced to hold on to them indefinitely.

Basically, what this system amounts to is a welfare state, while placing the burden on those who create jobs in the first place. To make another analogy, imagine we wanted to provide healthcare for the poor. But instead of paying for it through general taxation, we said anyone who provides any amount of charity to someone living in poverty must be the one to pick up the tab for their health insurance. How would such a system make sense? And this isn’t simply a matter of finding ways to provide welfare, but something much more extreme, involving locking employers in relationships they can’t get out of. You’re also misallocating labor, since having workers in places where they’re not needed prevents them from making a contribution elsewhere.

Here’s the situation in France.

French law requires any restructuring involving more than ten employees in a month, even if they work in different parts of the company, to be approved by a special regulator and reviewed by the works council in two meetings over multiple months. It is only allowed after a ‘good faith’ attempt to protect the jobs of the workers involved (by attempting to give them jobs elsewhere in the company, keep them on part-time, or induce other companies to hire them). To prove that financial conditions justify the layoffs, French companies often impose hiring freezes across the company when employees in one division are let go.

If a court determines that a company that has laid off employees was not in a financial state to merit laying off workers, that court has the power to reclassify the dismissals as unfair and impose even higher severance as a fine. Continental, a tire company, tried to shrink its French workforce during the financial crisis. A court decided that there was a ‘lack of economic justification for the dismissals in light of the overall situation and results of the global Continental group’. The company was obliged to pay up to three years of salary to the 680 employees involved.

These rules – severance, negotiating periods, works councils, buyouts, and waiting periods – collectively impose high costs on a European company that tries to let workers go. The costs of restructuring are so high that companies will often try and bribe their workers to leave. In 2023, Amazon offered French employees a year’s salary to leave voluntarily so they didn’t have to fire them and go through a legal restructuring. In 2024, German chemical manufacturer Bayer offered long-tenured workers 52.5 months of pay, or over four years’ worth, in exchange for quitting.

According to a rough estimate by Olivier Coste and Yann Coatanlem, a corporate restructuring in Germany and France costs companies the equivalent of 31 and 38 months of salary per employee laid off, putting all of the above costs together. In Italy, this is 52 months. In Spain, it is 62 months. In the United States, the cost per employee is just 7 months.

Imagine wanting so desperately to get rid of workers that you pay them four years’ salary so they go away. These employees must be providing remarkably little value. You’d rather they do nothing for four years and eat their salaries than get all the work they produce over that time period and then have to keep paying them for work in years 5+.

Surprisingly, all of this doesn’t seem to lead to that much unemployment.

The standard story is that these rules lead to lower wages, when employers can negotiate wages directly with individual workers, or lower employment levels, when companies have to bargain with workers en masse and cannot just price the cost of firing them into wages. But Europe’s stagnation, especially in the north, has ceased to be primarily a problem of unemployment. In the Euro area, about 71 out of every 100 people of working age have a job. This is nearly the same as in the United States, where about 72 out of 100 working-age people are employed.

Rather than reduce hiring in response to more expensive firing, companies in Europe have shifted activity away from areas where layoffs are likely. European workers are for sure, solid work only. This works well in periods of little innovation, or when innovation is gradual. The continent, however, is poorly equipped for moments of great experimentation.

By overcoming government foolishness, markets demonstrate their resilience and flexibility. European workers don’t simply go to waste. Rather, the entire economy becomes centered around making decisions that are financially safe rather than those that can lead to major payoffs. The unemployment rate doesn’t look so bad, but you still get society-wide stagnation.

Garicano continues by showing how these laws affect specific industries.

Building self-driving cars has involved lots of failures. Apple spent $10 billion on its self-driving car project, before scrapping it and never transported a single paying customer. General Motors acquired Cruise, an autonomous taxi company, for $1 billion in 2016, only to close it down in 2024. It had sold just $102 million worth of rides in 2023, making a loss of $3.4 billion that year.

But failures like these are unavoidable in pursuit of innovations that succeed. Waymo is estimated to serve a fifth of the San Francisco ride hailing market, and, as of April 2025, carries a quarter of a million passengers each week in five cities. Uber and Lyft, which had halted their self-driving cars in 2020 and 2021 after years of losses, have partnered with Wayve and Baidu to offer autonomous alternatives to Waymo and the Tesla cybercab.

For both American and European companies, the upsides of success from bets like these are similar. But the downsides from failed bets are much greater for Europeans. On top of the lost investment, many European companies also face significant severance costs, negotiations with worker representatives, requirements to redeploy unneeded workers internally, and the need for permission from regulators to approve layoffs.

In 2018, Audi launched the Q8 E-Tron, a fully electric SUV. As bets go, the E-Tron wasn’t even that bold: Porsche, Jaguar, BMW, and Volkswagen would all announce major electric models that year.

Unfortunately, the E-Tron saw weak sales, and it was cancelled in 2024. The factory where it was built, Audi Brussels, was to be closed. But instead of just writing off the plant, as an American company would have done, Audi had to set up a huge scheme to pay departing workers. After months of negotiations, Audi agreed to spend €610 million on severance, or over €200,000 per employee. These payments to employees more than doubled the costs of closing the car factory, costing more than writing off all its assets.

A luxury electric SUV may still turn out to be a good idea, and Audi may still be the company that will make the best one. But Audi executives have learned their lesson. A future E-Tron, they have indicated, will be built at a plant in Mexico.

Failure costs lead some European companies to try and avoid having to innovate altogether. For years, the German car industry refused to see that the writing was on the wall for traditional cars powered by an internal combustion engine.

Cars have come to rely more and more on software. But Europeans seem afraid to hire software engineers because then they can’t fire them, with predictable results.

In part, this was the product of complacency. Volkswagen’s leadership, made up of traditional automotive executives, saw software as an inferior artform to traditional manufacturing. They committed to highly ambitious public timelines and to developing all software in-house. The company’s in-house software team was short-staffed and struggled to meet demand. As one insider put it at the time: ‘It’s an absolute disaster’. In the months leading up to the launch, the team was finding up to 300 new bugs a day.

It was also the product of a company that has been unable to allocate and reallocate workers effectively for decades. Since 1994, Volkswagen has guaranteed German factory jobs at the company – the result of a negotiation with the union where, rather than firing people, the company cut costs by switching to a four-day workweek, an arrangement which was in force until 2006. The result has been that, for the past three decades, being hired has effectively resulted in a lifetime appointment.

In June 2024, Volkswagen admitted defeat and set up a joint venture with American electric vehicle startup Rivian. In exchange for an investment of up to $5 billion, Volkswagen received immediate access to Rivian’s software for use in its own cars. In essence, Volkswagen has had to license core technology from a small American rival because it has found innovating so hard.

I’ve quoted a lot from the piece, but there’s much more there, and I do recommend reading the whole thing.

The article was almost too convincing. I was left wondering how a country like Germany has had any economic success at all given how dysfunctional its labor laws are. I now suspect that Germany must be culturally superior to the US in terms of qualities that are conducive to economic growth. This is consistent with stereotypes about Germans being well behaved, punctual, etc. They can be seen as East Asians without going nearly as far with regard to introversion, fear of sticking out, and deference to authority. The fact that Americans are beating them so decisively in terms of economic growth and innovation reflects how superior our labor laws are, and probably differences in energy policy too.

There’s another recent article that unintentionally makes the same point. The left-wing website Drop Site News just ran a piece by Sam Carliner with the title “Javier Milei Is Set to Roll Back Argentina’s Historically Strong Labor Rights.” When you find yourself praising the status quo in a country with a century of economic failure behind it, you might want to stop and consider that maybe the policies you’re defending aren’t such a good idea. It reminds me of how Bernie Sanders responded when he was asked a question about why the US outperforms Europe at a recent event.

Carliner is anti-Milei, but shows the degree to which unions make reform more difficult. Compared to other bad policies, strong labor protections create institutions invested in stopping course corrections while also using thuggish and semi-legal or illegal means. Carliner sympathetically reports that some workers are occupying factories that their owners are trying to close. This isn’t a matter of sharing profits, it’s at the point where economic conditions are such that business owners simply want to move on from an investment, which has to happen for there to be economic growth. The article shows both how bad policy has been in Argentina, and how unreflective leftists are when they defend laws that are pro-union and supposedly pro-labor.

The point of this series is to convince you that if you’re going to have one opinion on economics that goes against conventional thinking, it should be hostility to protections for current workers and empowering labor unions. Cartels and mandates are bad, but in 95% of cases economists and those who are economically literate in advanced nations are able to recognize that, which is why we don’t have, for example, price controls on the vast majority of products. Labor law in most countries applies a unique degree of coercion and central planning as a matter of course, and Europeans moving toward the American model is low-hanging fruit. This should also be a warning regarding where the US might go wrong, given the left’s continuing enthusiasm for organized labor being echoed among many postliberals and those on the new right.

As Garicano points out and I’ve mentioned before, you don’t have to give up on redistribution. He brings attention to Denmark, Switzerland, and Austria as nations that make it relatively easy to fire someone while having the government provide a social safety net. Note that Switzerland is one of the few European countries that is on average about as rich as the United States.

There’s an interesting psychological dynamic going on, as most workers see their job from the perspective of a transactional relationship with their employer. It is easy to miss the reality that a job is not simply a negotiation over a set amount of resources between two parties. Rather, it involves providing a good or service that there is a market demand for. Perhaps you might think that voters’ roles as consumers would wake them up to that fact, but when they deal with firms all they see is the end result of market competition, missing the innovation, false starts, and broken dreams that led to them being able to shop at a certain store or order a product from an online retailer.

Moreover, you might notice that your boss is a jerk without keeping in mind all the people who never would have given you a job in the first place. And practically nobody witnesses the processes of innovation that lead to new technologies being developed.

Strong labor protections are a straightforward example of Bastiat’s idea that many economic fallacies result from focusing on the seen over the unseen. They are a textbook case of tunnel vision leading to bad policy. We think about the worker and the employer as the only two actors worth considering. Because they’re not immediate parties to the transaction, we ignore other workers who might be hired, shareholders, consumers, businesses that might benefit from creative destruction, or individuals who might in the future benefit from greater technological and business innovation. It’s a misnomer to even talk about pro-union policies or government mandates as “pro-labor,” because the benefits generally go to a narrow slice of the workforce, and not even the neediest part.

So here we have an argument that not only should the age of consent probably be raised, but violence is a normal and healthy reaction toward anyone who takes the opposite view, or in any way expresses skepticism about the possibility that legal adults should not be allowed to enter into whatever kind of relationships they want. You can watch Tracey and me respond to this video and others here. I’ve previously said that the real target of pedo hysteria is age gap relationships, and here we have a major influencer saying that age gap relationships between adults are so offensive that the thought of their existence should fill us all with murderous rage.

I realized while watching this video how central pedo hysteria is to low quality influencer discourse, and also that the derangement goes much further than I thought. Pedophilia is defined broadly, declared to be everywhere, and put at the center of our politics. Having spent a lot of time in academia and among educated elites, very few consider pedophilia to be a major societal concern. But for Low Human Capital movements, it is central. Before the Epstein craze, you had QAnon, which understands the entirety of the Trump phenomenon as a cosmic struggle against Satanic pedophiles. Note this started completely organically and unlike most political movements was not responding to signals coming from elites – at least ones whose meanings weren’t completely imagined, anyway.

In Hillbilly Elegy, JD Vance discusses how his poor and dysfunctional relatives lived in constant fear of their kids getting molested. He tells about the time he got lost at a funeral service.

When I failed to appear in the crowd of mourners leaving the church, Mamaw and Papaw grew suspicious. There were perverts even in Jackson, they told me, who wanted to stick sticks up your butt and “blow on your pecker” as much as the perverts in Ohio or Indiana or California. Papaw hatched a plan: There were only two exits to Deaton’s, and no one had driven away yet. Papaw ran to the car and grabbed a .44 Magnum for himself and a .38 Special for Mamaw. They manned the exits to the funeral home and checked every car. When they encountered an old friend, they explained the situation and enlisted help. When they met someone else, they searched the cars like goddamned DEA agents.

Ok, I guess.

Think about how strange this is. Pedophilia is a crime, but so are trespassing, robbery, aggravated assault, and murder. Yet nobody builds a political identity around hatred of any of these other crimes while expanding its definition. The idea that our society goes soft on pedophiles is insane. There is so little pedophilia that Jeffrey Epstein had sexual contact with post-pubescent girls two decades ago, and this story is currently dominating political headlines. I’ve seen TikTok videos where ex-cons talk about how child molesters are considered the lowest of the low in prison, and nobody finds it strange how men who have sexual relations with 14-year-old girls are in many cases considered worse than murderers. Had Epstein been convicted of killing someone and served his sentence, there would be less outrage directed at those who stayed friends with him than there currently is.

American society seems prone to always be moralizing about sex. Maybe this is part of our Puritan inheritance. As women have gained the freedom to be more openly promiscuous and homosexuality has been destigmatized on the grounds of individual liberty, more attention has shifted to focusing on the forms of behavior that one can argue do not involve consent, and so are still potential targets. It’s a Low Human Capital obsession in particular because losers feel the need to look down on someone else. While elites can take comfort in having prestigious jobs and being more intelligent and harder working than others, those with lower status need something else to grab on to.

So they tell themselves “at least I’m not attracted to children.” Talk about having low standards. Of course, they do not simply admit this is their motivation and stop there, but must give their desire to kick down a noble justification. Thus conspiracy theories are born. I don’t simply hate pedophiles because they’re the only people I can look down on. In fact, quite the opposite. Pedophiles are running society! They’re much higher status than I am, but I’m still better than them because they’re evil, and I get my news from Alex Jones and Dave Smith instead of mainstream newspapers, which are either run by pedophiles or cover for them.

Since again, there is very little elite pedophilia going on, Low Human Capital can either make up facts, or take true events and declare they involve pedophilia despite what the word has traditionally meant. Epstein was a pedophile because some of his sexual partners may have been under 18. But if there’s too big of an age gap, can’t an 18-year-old be a victim of pedophilia too when you think about it? They’ve decided to get mad at adults having sex with children first, and then will keep playing with definitions until they get the thing that they are desperate to be mad at.

If I went around saying how I hated bank robbers and wanted to make them suffer as much as possible, people would justifiably find this deranged, even if they did not like bank robbers. Recently in the UK, three teenagers were convicted of beating a man to death after he arranged to meet a 16-year-old girl, who was above the age of consent. The toxic mix of low-status hatred and moral righteousness leads to a very ugly place. Videos of “pedophiles” getting abused and publicly humiliated rack up huge numbers on social media, and again we have to think how strange this would be for any other crime. Often, these aren’t even men who we have any reason to think make such behavior a regular habit, but were instead entrapped by the pedo hunters. It’s not enough to punish those who are actually guilty of this particular crime; we must find out who is even theoretically capable of engaging in it, and try to destroy them.

The left-wing version of pedo hysteria is less conspiratorial, consistent with leftists being less conspiratorial as a general matter. The far left doesn’t need to imagine elites eating babies, because they agree with Dave Smith that older men having sex with younger women is bad enough, especially when the men are wealthy and there are power differentials (as if young beautiful women are completely lacking in that respect). Interestingly, you find the most extreme pedo hysterics on the left to be those of relatively lower status – the Bluesky crowd, who are the types more likely to complain that The Atlantic or The New York Times is racist than be quoted in either publication. “Pedophilia,” or whatever they describe as “creepy” sexual behavior, is a cudgel with which to attack those they hate, like Yglesias and the Abundance Bros because someone in their network at some point might have had a tenuous connection to Epstein. But the disagreement is ideological, tied to the leftist critique of mainstream liberals that they don’t take power disparities seriously enough. Thus, those who think it should be stigmatized if not illegal for older men to have sex with 18-year-old women also think that economic issues should be approached primarily from the perspective of how to dismantle corporate power.

Dave Smith might have arrived at a similar place from the right, but I think he’s appealing to an audience that is lower than MAGAs, in the realm of “too stupid to be ideological.” In mainstream MAGA, rich older men with younger women is accepted as normal, as I’m sure a brief glance around Mar-a-Lago would demonstrate. This crowd tends to have a strict cut-off of 18, above which they do not judge.

As I’ve written before, there is harm in just letting the proles have their fun. More than prison sentences that are often unjust from any rational perspective, I think that pedo hysteria is tied to a whole host of other negative societal trends. It reinforces therapy culture, since you need to pretend that sexual relations between teens and adults are so inherently traumatic that it justifies the extremely punitive social and legal punishments people desire to inflict on adults who break this particular taboo. It also reinforces extended childhood. Instead of just shrugging our shoulders and saying the age of consent line has to be drawn somewhere and not getting too bent out of shape about those who violate the law any more than we do about other crimes – which would be the healthy approach – when we say that 17-year-olds are by some law of nature inherently unable to consent to major life decisions, and that sex with anyone above a certain age will permanently destroy their souls, we are not getting them ready for adulthood. Dave Smith thinks 18 might be too young. Can people of that age even be considered adults then? On what basis can they make decisions about their careers or where to live? If 18 is too young for sex, when exactly can you start thinking about buying a home or starting a family?

You’ll often hear pedo hysterics assert that 16- and 17-year-olds are “children.” But we never refer to them as children in any other context. Imagine you say to someone that you went to a restaurant and your waitress was a child. Or that you accidentally hit a child with your car. Nobody would think you were talking about a 17-year-old in either case. To call someone of that age a “child” is infantilizing. It’s done with a very specific agenda only when the topic is sex. And maybe you can limit this infantilizing to one narrow area of life, but I doubt it. Calling older teenagers children in one context seems like it’s going to affect their self-perceptions in others. And given that extended childhood is one of the main social pathologies of our time, we must push back against any cultural trend that is moving us further in that direction.

Watching Dave Smith has made me realize that there’s another reason to fight pedo hysteria. This is the fuel that drives so much of low human capital involvement in politics. Trump has never made being anti-pedophilia a major issue, to say the least. But because he appeals to stupid people, they’ve adopted him as the leader of that cause. It’s similar to how he came to be an avatar for the anti-vaxx movement despite Operation Warp Speed. The logic of “stupid people are anti-vaxx and stupid people love Trump” was too strong for him not to shift on this issue. Trump is not the best spokesman for the side of the angels in a cosmology founded on pedo hysteria in any way other than the fact that his base is the bottom of the barrel in terms of human capital, where such passions are found.

One might say elites need to be tough on pedophilia, because otherwise stupid people will be very upset and then destabilize society. This reminds me of debates about immigration, where it can be argued that you need stricter borders lest populist authoritarians take up the issue and become powerful. But I think attitudes toward sex are too important to leave them to be shaped by the instincts of the most resentful and lowest status members of society. The Epstein thing has taken off because elites have joined in the pedophile hysteria, as it is consistent with Democratic political goals and the culture of MeToo, not because elites haven’t taken pedophilia seriously enough. Left-wing pedo hysteria makes sense in the context of a larger political project involving using government and social coercion to infringe on individual liberty, while the right-wing version is part of the larger story of conservatism’s human capital decline. Few causes in politics involve standing up against both of these forces, and that makes the battle worth fighting.

Not even those sympathetic toward his views thought he did a good job articulating them. But we have seen some try to make the case that, even if Jeremy was not the best representative for the position, white culture does exist, no less than American black or Hispanic culture does, and it is being discriminated against.

This whole debate is pretty annoying, because it seems as if we’re fighting over words to hide what is a more substantive disagreement over ideas and empirical propositions. Sure, you can say “white culture” exists. You can group people together and divide them into whatever categories you want. Here is a list of cultures you can say I arguably belong to:

1. American

2. Arab-American

3. Palestinian-American

4. Jordanian-American

5. Arab American

6. Person of color

7. White

8. Gentile (non-Jew)

9. Chicagoan

10. Californian

11. Educated elite

12. Midwesterner

13. West Coaster

14. Westerner (as in Western civilization)

15. Libertarian

16. Male

17. Heterosexual

18. Asperger’s

19. English speaker

I could go on. We don’t have to ask which of these cultures are real and which are made up. It’s like trying to decide which races are real, or how many languages there are. These are human-made categories that we are free to accept or reject as they overlap and exist on continuous spectrums.

Yet the process of accepting or rejecting a certain identity communicates something about my place in the world and how I perceive it. I could be a “person of color” or “white” in the American context, but which I choose clearly tells you something about my politics. If I go around calling myself a “Gentile,” I’m probably cheekily communicating that I believe in Jewish conspiracies controlling the world.

So the question is, what exactly are “white culture” enthusiasts trying to communicate? If someone says that he is proud to be an Italian-American, it means that he enjoys quoting mob movies and his grandmother’s lasagna. There is nothing threatening or morally objectionable about this. But if the same person tells me he is proud to be a white American, he’s probably a fascist. It is rational to assume that such a person has a zero-sum view of the world, thinks that the 2020 election was stolen, and loved what Trump was doing in Minneapolis, meaning that he supports authoritarian means through which to achieve demographic goals. If you’re non-white, you have nothing to fear from an American of Irish descent who has an overly enthusiastic St Patrick’s Day, but you know that the guy who cares about white identity is coming for your family.

This doesn’t mean that “white culture” does not exist. Rather, only that it is a fundamentally unhealthy identity in the American context. This is in part because identities usually require some kind of parity to be seen as sportsmanlike. Imagine if East Asian countries decided to form a bloc to push around Africans. Most mentally healthy people would recoil from this, regardless of whether you can say East Asian culture exists. This is also why we look with suspicion toward attempts to organize around male or heterosexual identity. White Americans are a majority of the country, and collectively have so much power and influence that no macro-race can come anywhere close to competing. American identity is fine because the “other” in this context is usually powerful nation-states. Yet while invoking American nationalism in a competition with China is seen as an acceptable way to behave, to place tariffs on Swaziland because Trump thinks they are one of the countries that is “ripping us off” is grotesque.

Whiteness is the American default, and Americanism is becoming the global default. To worry about “white culture” being under threat in 2026 is like living in fear that Christianity is going to disappear at the height of the Middle Ages. If you’re a white American, people in every corner of the globe speak your language, practice your religion, wear your clothes, follow your politics, and generally accept your framing of reality. Most white Americans do not feel threatened, and those who do reveal a pathological degree of paranoia. “But I can’t say I’m proud to be WHITE!!!” If that’s your grievance, your true desire seems to be to shove your cultural hegemony in the face of others.

One argument for white identity is that it’s a necessity in the face of DEI and hostility from mainstream culture. Scott Greer takes a version of this position. I think that a lot of right-wingers are kind of hiding the ball here, or perhaps not even being honest with themselves. White culture is safe, but white demographic dominance is not. They go straight from the position that whites are becoming a smaller portion of the population to the idea that white culture is being erased.

That’s a testable proposition. Yet when they try to explain exactly how white culture is under threat, rightists end up mumbling about hot dogs and baseball. I live in a heavily immigrant area, and trust me, the NFL is still allowed and there are more than enough burger places in town. Sometimes rightists will talk about concepts like democracy and the rule of law being the products of white culture, but this line of argument has been completely discredited by Trump’s 2020 coup attempt, and the historically unprecedented levels of corruption and authoritarianism in his second administration. If you’re going to accuse any group in American society of rejecting Western political values, you should start with non-college whites. But I wouldn’t do that, because I don’t believe that higher order political outcomes are caused in straightforward ways by individual group characteristics.

Liberals are afraid that if they grant white culture exists, they might by their own logic have to buy into the right’s identitarian political agenda. The left’s position is somewhere between meaningless and completely false. Yet their instincts are correct in that they’re arguing with people who are paranoid, driven by grievance and hate, and completely unwilling to hold themselves to the standards they pretend to believe in.

There was already a term called “Western culture,” which was used by a previous generation of conservatives. One can argue that “white culture” means the same thing, but those who talk in such terms practically always have an underlying agenda that involves making race itself more salient. When someone talks about “Western culture” but dislikes the phrase “white culture,” you can assume that he’s a conservative who actually holds on to American values as they would have been understood by people on the right in a previous generation. Someone who insists on saying “white” is the kind of person who feels at home in Trump’s version of the Republican Party. The claim that they hold certain values like rationalism, honesty, and sportsmanship close to their hearts is belied every day by the activities of the administration that they support.

The Mises Caucus, a faction of the Libertarian Party as far as I can tell, has over 150,000 followers on X. It often posts about Pizzagate and the deep state stealing elections. It’s basically a nonstop firehose of based signalling and MAGA nonsense. There’s also a major influencer named “The Redheaded Libertarian,” who spends more time showing cleavage and talking about the crimes of pedophile elites than the ways in which prices allow for an efficient distribution of resources through the aggregation of information.

Compare these figures with libertarians at the Cato Institute or in the economics departments of places like the University of Chicago and George Mason University. We can divide libertarians into two categories: elites and populists. Compared to their populist counterparts, elite libertarians tend to be more socially liberal, less favorably disposed toward foreign dictatorships, non-conspiratorial in their thinking, and anti-woke when it is tied to statist projects but less horrified by tolerance as a cultural phenomenon. Not all populist libertarians are influencers. One might put Hans-Hermann Hoppe in this category for claiming to have put together a case for restrictive immigration policies based on libertarian principles. He’s also written a book on how democracy has failed to protect individual rights. Ironically, populist libertarians are more likely to be explicit defenders of authoritarianism, even though their ideas have very little appeal among elites, while elite libertarians are more attached to democratic norms and processes.

Most libertarian-leaning members of Congress, or those who talk about liberty in classical liberal terms, can also be considered populists. The Freedom Caucus, which on paper at least organizes around the idea of cutting spending and smaller government, puts its weight behind funding DHS and protecting ICE agents from scrutiny or legal accountability. It recently called on Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act “if Democrat-run Sanctuary Cities continue enabling Communist agitators assaulting ICE and federal law enforcement.” No matter what you think of this position, it is difficult to see how being on the side of the administration in its draconian vision of immigration enforcement and contempt for constitutional rights lines up with a strong commitment to limited government. If you believe these positions are consistent, let me also note that members of the Freedom Caucus were among the most enthusiastic members of Congress acting in support of Trump’s 2020 coup attempt. No reasonable person can argue there’s a consistent through line that in ideological terms unites small government, anti-immigration, and lying about a stolen election. From my perspective, I see the Freedom Caucus being correct on some economic issues, taking views inconsistent with any individualist philosophy on immigration, and then on the 2020 election engaging in a naked authoritarian power grab.

Not every member of the Freedom Caucus has gone along with Trump’s authoritarianism and election denial. But those who didn’t in years past became outcasts. One such example is Justin Amash, who was a founding member of the group but then resigned in 2019 after saying Trump had committed impeachable offenses. Given that he has no more role to play in Republican politics, this is a classic case of an exception proving the rule. The stolen election stuff is pretty much the purest instance of an integrity question one can find, since there are no ideological grounds on which to tell blatant lies about 2020 and try to overturn American democracy on that basis.1 And on this moral test, politicians with libertarian-leaning views on economics failed worse than practically any other congressional faction.

These are two very different tribes, and it’s an interesting question of how they can both identify with the same political label. What exactly does the Cato Institute or George Mason University have in common with “The Redheaded Libertarian”? To put it another way, how does a philosophy that prioritizes nonaggression and individual liberty above all else so often end up represented in politics and the media by collectivists and authoritarians?

I think that the explanation goes something like this. Very few people understand economics or the case for free market positions on most things. They only know that economic collectivism sounds good and capitalism sounds bad. Most psychologically normal human beings support the thing that sounds good over the thing that sounds bad, so they become anti-market. This describes most leftists and centrists.

Yet some people are into vice signalling. They want to convey that they do not suffer from pathological altruism, and are willing to do what it takes for the long-run future of their country. When they hear leftist propaganda about how capitalism allows a small, select group of elites to monopolize resources, keep marginalized groups in their place, and dominate the rest of society, they say “that sounds great, sign me up!”

If we’re being charitable, we could say that such individuals are not vice signalling, but instead signalling that they hold to a different set of virtues than most people. But I think the key to this crowd is that they are inclined toward “harder” virtues that are in practice difficult to distinguish from vice, like willingness to inflict suffering for a cause. The intellectual who is into libertarian ideas understands the arguments of Hayek and Friedman, and perhaps looks at empirical data showing that the US has been growing faster than Europe over the last several decades, which can in part be attributed to freer markets. The Tennessee congressman who riles up his high school educated constituents by talking about how we need to hang some pedophiles gets to many of the same positions because he sees small government as a way to express disdain for poor minorities.

I believe that the free market position on most economic questions is the correct one. So people who are intelligent, have good epistemological standards, and care about truth – a very small minority – will support capitalism for intellectually defensible reasons. Yet there are a lot more vice signallers (or “hard” virtue signallers) out there than good-faith rationalists. Thus, a large portion of any libertarian movement, unless it does a lot of gatekeeping, will be overrun by conspiracy theorists and misanthropes. And when libertarianism builds a mass following – whether reflected in the success of major influencers or elected politicians – it will be within a vice signalling framework.

If you’re a vice signaller, libertarianism is far from the most natural ideology for you to adopt. Most such people across history have gone for straight authoritarianism, rather than an ideology that is accused by its critics of being authoritarian but in practice grants a great deal of individual liberty. In the American context, vice signallers have flocked to libertarianism because historically elites in effect took more fascist-adjacent ideologies off the table.

With the democratization of the discourse, those with a taste for authoritarianism can go for the real thing instead of the classical liberal substitute. When Andrew Kolvet of Turning Point USA was on Ross Douthat’s podcast recently, the number one position he advocated for was an immigration moratorium. When Douthat asked him what else he wanted, Kolvet started talking about housing. He said we needed to build more, and also brought up large corporate investors buying residences. I was fascinated that he went straight for a statist solution to the cost issue rather than a free market one, especially given that even some on the left have come to acknowledge the primary role that land use restrictions play in making housing unaffordable. This demonstrates, I think, just how naturally disinclined modern rightists are toward any policy program that relies on increasing liberty, unless it is coded in culture war terms, meaning that it helps someone considered to be part of their tribe like gun owners or fundamentalist Christians.

Elite and populist libertarianism have fundamentally different projects. Elite libertarians understand that the masses are against them, and seek to build a coalition of the highly educated in order to implement a minoritarian agenda that will make society better. Populist libertarianism believes that the people are on their side, or at least can be tricked into joining them, and want to mobilize the masses against elites. In some ways, they’re right, since xenophobia and conspiracy theories are much more popular among the public than they are in elite circles. To be fair, populist libertarians are not complete statists, and will take their ideology seriously to a certain extent. The Freedom Caucus, after all, remains in favor of lower taxes and less top-line spending. But when libertarian ideology conflicts with right-wing culture war preferences – see topics like immigration and support for Trump – they play the role of enthusiastic soldiers in a coalition dominated by right-wing values and tribal loyalty. Ultimately, elite libertarians are driven by ideas, while populist libertarianism is a strategy for gaining a large audience and a mode of emotional catharsis for those angry at the world.

Most populist libertarians are not thoughtful enough to make good arguments on this, but there are ways to defend their ideology and approach to politics on pragmatic terms. Most of the public does not care for free markets or individual liberty, so the only way for libertarians to have any voice in politics is to act as an appendage to one side of the culture war. Conservatives may dislike markets as much as liberals, but it is the left where you find the true committed anti-market ideologues. Therefore, dabbling in Epstein conspiracy theories and anti-immigrant scapegoating is the only practical way to defeat the left, which is what matters. As evidence, look at how much better conservative run states have been doing over the last several decades. Republican messaging has been aimed at the chuds in the middle of the country, but because libertarians are part of the coalition, this has meant that where conservatives have power we see greater growth and more individual liberty.

I think that this argument worked until 2025, at the latest. In a previous generation, conservative elites would use culture war issues as a mobilization strategy but often end up governing in a reasonable, pro-market direction. Trump succeeded as a political entrepreneur in part by realizing that the Republican voter cared little for the issues that have traditionally animated conservative intellectuals. Parallel with Trump’s political dominance of the party has been the rise of the postliberal intellectual movement, which advocates more statist positions on issues like trade, immigration, and labor unions. Running on chuddery but governing in a generally pro-market direction was a balance that the Republican Party was able to pull off throughout approximately the period from the rise of Ronald Reagan to the beginning of Trump’s second term.

The populist takeover of the Republican Party has broken that alliance, and the second Trump administration now has little to offer libertarians and classical liberals. Vance, who pals around with postliberals and takes their ideas seriously, offers even less, and, if he becomes president, will likely complete American conservatism’s turn away from individual liberty as a guiding principle. Populism as a mobilization strategy for libertarian policies worked until technological changes disrupted the equilibrium that kept a lid on authoritarianism, racism, and conspiracy theories, and allowed for there to be a large gap between the instincts of the mobilized faction of the right-wing discourse and what Republicans actually did while in office.

I think at this point there’s no turning back to the old bargain. Libertarians were probably smart to be part of the conservative coalition for the last three generations. They got a lot out of it and can be proud that they have kept the US economically freer and therefore richer than the rest of the developed world. Yet to have lasting success – and to roll back the rise in state power, rather than simply check its growth – libertarians will have to win over intellectual elites and those who care about ideas. For better or worse, those people are now almost exclusively found on the left.