Another thing about idealists: they tend to blend “religion” and “ideas” in that gives the appearance of causal efficacy to the latter. Of course, religion involves ideas (things like scripture, creeds, catechism and affiliated intellectuals). But religion also involves communal rituals, belonging, doing things together like bible study or going to church on Sunday. Even in religion, the idea space is crowded! So, idealists should be expected to show why certain ideas are put into practice and how intensely. They don’t show this, because, lo and behold, ideas don’t make that call. Instead, the selection and emphasis comes from (1) which ideas are enforced or (2) the congregation’s sense of identity, or being on the same team. Enforcement, that there is some consequence for transgressing an ideas as applied, is thru policing, communal or hierarchical as formal or informal institutions, sometimes backed by the state, permit. Often, as anyone who’s been in a church knows, such policing is sparked by petty and narrow beefs and envy, not unlike wokeness!
Sense of identity can be pre-sectarian or inculcated thru communal rituals. For the former, note how black and white protestant congregations have acted differently despite having nearly identical doctrine. For the latter, the key point is that congregants are actually doing something together to bind as a congregation, which develops their sense of collective interest. They aren’t just pondering and reading in their rooms in isolation.
In my experience, idealists are the type of people who read and think. They imagine an alternative status hierarchy where thinking is apical. They latch on to “religion” to defend their worldview. But their concept of religion is bogus. Again, just from my own experience so I could be wrong, idealists tend to think they’re too smart to go to mass or bible study, which would involve interacting with people (too argumentative) or sitting thru a ritual (boring, also nerds can’t dance). For idealists who actually go to church, I would also venture that simply going to service, without accountability to or interaction with co-congregants, is more entertainment or emotional catharsis than religion.
Long story short, idealist have read about “religion.” But they simply have no idea of what being in congregation is like.
This is very insightful. I as a nerd used to sometimes actually ask people to explain their religious doctrine or what they believed, it never went over well. For most people that's not what it's about at all.
Something very smart I read by John Derbyshire about a decade ago, roughly to this effect:
"It's true that less than five percent of American Catholics follow this particular teaching; but that's just an illustration of the fact that religious people everywhere don't bother much with theology. Jason Slone's excellent book Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn't has interesting things to say about this. Buddhists pray to Lord Buddha, even though, according to their theology, he attained non-existence, and therefore doesn't, you know, exist. Calvinists, whose church teaches that whether you go to hell or not is already pre-determined, none the less try to live good lives. And so on.
Theology is great fun for religious intellectuals, but for ordinary believers it's mostly beside the point. The point of religion is faith in a divine order, hope that death is not blank extinction, and community of fellowship with people who believe in the same gods you do and worship them in the same way.
That's what religion's about. The theology is just there to provide indoor relief for intellectuals, a major aim of all human institutions since the beginning of time."
"Calvinists, whose church teaches that whether you go to hell or not is already pre-determined, none the less try to live good lives."
I know very little about Buddhism, but as a Calvinist, I'd classify this as an extremely superficial objection, and one that Calvin (and Scripture) addressed upfront.
Why be good to your mother when it's predetermined that she's going to love you unconditionally?
There's some truth to the broader point about theology. Though I'd say there are two separate phenomena at play. There are nominals, who don't really have any strong religious beliefs, probably subscribe to a vague works-based view of salvation, and view religion primarily as a social identity (in Christian doctrine: not saved). And then there are the pious but mostly ignorant (in Christian doctrine: potentially saved).
In a highly competitive and self-selected religious landscape like America, you're going to find pretty different proportions of these groups at any given church. Though I'd say that nominals who are Millennials and younger are not bothering to attend church at all, while among older generations they still dutifully occupy the pews of many a Catholic and Mainline Protestant church.
In an online discussion on privacy recently i’ve seen people say they would take legal action if the site was not made gdpr compliant. This is how you end up in a world where all websites everywhere displays annoying cookie banners. The law is a socially acceptable way to threaten people and people casually do it all the time
There is an easy way to avoid the banners -- just don't put surveillance cookies on other people's computers.
Here is an analogy in the offline world: Imagine that we live in a society where people regularly install hidden cameras in other people's gardens. Now there is a new law that says that if you install such camera, you must also put a visible sticker that discloses its presence. And most people are like: "Stupid law; now my garden is full of these ugly stickers!"
If this solution seems too heavy-handed, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track -- there was an attempt to self-regulate the online surveillance industry, but most companies simply ignored it.
Oct 25, 2023·edited Oct 25, 2023Liked by Richard Hanania
I can state anecdotally that in the months prior to Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, my (large and corporate) employer was all-in on diversity, to the extent that the last major internal speech they had on the subject was one which stated that managers would be judged and rewarded/penalized according to the extent to which they gave their minority subordinates leeway during annual review. The day of the ruling, the company put out a facially-bland but obviously-indignant email stating that (paraphrased/rewritten) 'While the recent Supreme Court ruling will be upsetting to many, we want our employees to know that this will have no effect on our devotion to DEI going forward'.
As of today, just 4 months later, diversity emails merely namedrop the Hyphenated-American Day of the week, or recommend the occasional ethnic cooking recipe. Explicit racial scholarships have been entirely rewritten to talk vaguely about economic privilege, and some programs seemingly disappeared entirely as if they never existed. That is obviously a huge win for law over ideaism.
My biggest worry is that just about every corporation has a records retention policy, and unlike business records, I don't think internal speeches and emails supporting previously-endorsed racial discrimination are protected for anywhere near 7 years. The GOP received a massive opportunity to engage in lawfare against "woke", but no one in office seems to notice or care. A decade from now we could find ourselves in a situation where every single corporate policy was fed 'ctrl-H', find 'racial', replace with 'economically disadvantaged', and with a straight face they will defend themselves and win every lawsuit for lack of evidence.
A guidebook to civil rights law like The Origin of Woke is an essential part of the puzzle to end America's modern class system, but your average normie won't care unless you sound an alarm and drill it through their heads that we live in an explicitly racist, anti-white system that discriminates against their children. Your essay is entirely right that ideaism cannot defeat the left, but at the same time, it is leftist ideaism that creates generations of Americans who fully endorse a narrative where tax cuts, gun rights, or localism are fundamentally derived from white supremacy because Jefferson talked about liberty but also owned slaves, or that "states rights" is a thing that Alabama said and Alabama hit black people with high pressure fire hoses in the 60s and therefore the federal government should just control everything.
It might just come down to liberals being more competent, intelligent, and brazen once again. Democrats have the Pink Floyd/Michael Jackson of politics in Emmett Till's murder, doesn't matter how old it is, they can still push copies even to a modern audience. By contrast, Republicans are by nature insecure so they talk about European communist pedophiles no one gives a shit about, and then shy away from their own #1 television music video hit, Willie Horton, because it's "dated".
The Origins of Woke puts the all the various half-baked, intellectually lazy, doomer porn theories to shame. Honestly, the question is why there isn't more law and policy focused political commentary on the conservative side. Ben Shapiro knows a great deal about law and policy, but from him I hear more screeching about "the Left" and apocalyptic commentary than sober analysis.
I would be very interested to read similar work on other areas of the "administrative state", e.g. a history of the EPA and the perhaps unintended consequences of environmental regulation. Rather than the various philosophy/intellectual history-type books that have been written (Burnham, Gottfried, Francis), I would like a much more law and policy oriented take on what the administrative state has done to society, good and bad.
I agree completely. Part of the reason this analysis isn’t out there is it doesn’t sell. There’s much more of an audience for the “what is a woman” discourse. Even my stuff only gets any attention because it’s related to culture wars. There’d be no interest among conservative audiences for a deep dive into the EPA or whatever, though the Andreessen-adjacent techno optimist types might be into it.
...I think any traditional disinterest in analysis of the administrative state is changing though, as a result of long-form 'blogging' of the sort people are gravitating towards on Substack. Analysis is sorely needed. Currently I'm in my 4th senior bureaucratic role (economic regulation) in a fourth country. The impact of legally driven bureaucracy in both the private and public sectors everywhere, is killing productivity and therefore peoples' standards of living.
Shapiro's an entertainer, I think, and wants to make money. His mom was a TV executive and his dad was a composer. I think being short and kind of dorky-sounding he probably figured political commentary was his best shot...and he was right. I do think he sincerely believes what he says...probably figured, correctly, there was a market for a right-winger who fits the debate-club archetype rather than the TV-host or radio-host archetype.
The reason there isn't more law and policy focused material is simply mass psychology. People care, politically, much more about others' affairs, beliefs, and notions of propriety than actual political architecture. This same impulse drives them to distraction over whether they think their nation finds them attractive and causes them to judge political figures solely by character and virtue signaling. If someone could find a way of maintaining democracy while shutting out the expression of this impulse in politics he'd cement himself as one of the greatest political minds that ever existed.
Talking about Traldi's review and discussion of what makes corporations adopt rainbow symbols, in Richard's book (which I'm about 70% done reading FYI) he mentions that he doesn't doesn't really get into LGBT issues that often because the left is still fighting battles about actual differential treatment on that issue. They haven't yet moved on to "disparate impact" and all the other Orwellian stuff that leftist activism gets involved with when it comes to race and sex discrimination. (This probably also explains why I am anti-woke in general, but specifically very pro-LGBT)
I think this is important because it means that LGBT issues appear less morally ambiguous to the average person. There is less of the "gaslighting" of the public about their goals that Richard describes in his book. Since activists are fighting actual mistreatment instead of chasing "disparate impact" and other statistical ghosts, they appear more heroic to consumers. This might explain why corporations have leaned so hard on "Pride" and "rainbow" branding lately. It's a civil rights issue where the genuine heroes have not yet been supplanted by cynical grifters.
I can personally say that it has this effect on me. I regard most of the corporate rainbow stuff with a mixture of appreciation and bemusement. I also tremendously enjoy how much it upsets both anticapitalist leftists and traditionalist conservatives.
I am going to suggest that you may not be aware of everything going on in the LBGT space. LBG is fine, and although the biggest battles have already been won there is still ground to cover as some people still think it’s their business who other people have relationships with. The T is a different story. There’s been a 5000% (not a typo) increase over the past 15 years in teenage females seeking medical gender transition. It’s become clear to many close to this issue that these kids have come to believe they are transgender because of the constant emphasis in our culture of how heroic, how unique, how virtuously victimized transgender people are. In addition, it’s one of the only “marginalized” identities one can opt into. The completely contradictory and intentionally confusing language used around the topic also makes it easy for anyone to convince themselves they can be part of this. Combine those cultural trends with the age-old lack of confidence, desire to reinvent themselves, distress over puberty and societal expectations around appearance and general teen angst that plague teenage girls and you get...hundreds of thousands of teens and young women believing they can become boys through surgery, to the great detriment of their mental and physical health. Frankly, I see this as a far more extreme manifestation of nonsensical ideology than anything related to race or sex.
I've definitely heard about this issue, but I don't personally find it a sign that trans activists are doing something bad, but rather a sign that medical questions are really hard. There is some percentage of the population who do receive psychological benefits from gender transition (call them group 1), and some percentage who think they will but are mistaken (call them group 2). It isn't implausible to me that the ratio of group 2 to group 1 has vastly increased lately, because of the increased visibility of trans activists in our culture. However, other explanations also seem plausible to me, for instance, maybe the increased visibility of trans activists has made lots of people who didn't think they were in Group 1 realize that they were (an analogy I've seen used is that the percentage of lefthanded people skyrocketed in the 20th century, merely because people stopped being jerks to the left-handed).
Medical transitions for teenagers are a really fraught issue because if you overcorrect either way, people will suffer. If you overdiagnose and treat people in Group 2 you'll have tons of people grow up with bodies they hate. But if you underdiagnose and don't treat people in Group 1, the same thing will happen. It's a hard problem.
The only compassionate and rational thing to do, in my opinion, is to work hard to get better at determining which group a person wanting to transition is in. I understand that trans activists' life experiences might make them prone to overestimate the percentage of people in group 1, but I can also see how their opponents could be biased to overestimate the percentage in group 2. It's simply a difficult problem.
Reading about this controversy has changed my views on one subject, which is "nonbinary" identities. There are neurological and developmental explanations as to why someone might be a transwoman or transman, that are plausible to me. But "nonbinary" seemed like some sort of New Age nonsense to me.
However, my views changed when I read accounts of "detransitioners." I discovered that a great many of them did not detransition back to their birth sex, but rather to a "nonbinary" identity, and that they wished that they had done this in the first place instead of going through all the surgery and hormone treatments to transition to the opposite sex. This made me realize that, however shaky its philosophical underpinnings might be, the "nonbinary" identity could serve an important function as a "safety valve," something that could alleviate people's feelings of gender dysphoria without them having to undergo as much risky medical intervention. This makes me think it should be heavily promoted as an option by medical professionals, for purely pragmatic reasons.
I recognize that this makes me perhaps the only person who, after studying this controversy, has come down harder in favor of weird gender ideology stuff! But I think it makes sense from a harm reduction perspective.
I once would have said the same as you. I have know people who transitioned and who seem satisfied with their choice and that is their business. However, I am now unfortunately close to this issue and have seen how it unfolds. I understand it’s hard to believe that there’s a systematic effort to locate vulnerable and insecure teens, break down their confidence and sense of self and reality, offer up gender transition as their only hope of salvation, encourage them to make as many irreversible decisions in this direction as quickly as possible, and indoctrinate them with phobias about what horrible things will happen is they ever change their minds. But that is exactly what’s happening, and you don’t have to take my word for it. Set up a Tumblr account. Go on TikTok and act as if you’re a 13 year old who’s never considered your gender before but wonder what it’s all about and search for some stuff. You’ll see. Next thing you know your entire online world will immerse you in the most absurd extreme left ideologies where everyone is gay/trans, has autism, adhd, Tourette’s, and multiple personalities, everyone has multiple psychiatric diagnoses and is on multiple medications, and capitalism, school, economic success, police, religion, being a normal healthy person, any mainstream fashion, music, or media, males, and straight or white people are all very bad and you can be punished and ostracized for any association with these things. The trans movement as it exists today (not as it was 15 years ago when a few middle aged men transitioned, and nobody claimed that there was no such thing as physical sex) is completely entrenched in woke nonsense. This is how they are recruiting teens and locking them into leftist ideology, under the guise of acceptance and kindness. But really they are using cult tactics.
Yeah, I'm angry at feminists about their effect on male-female relations, and I wonder how many kids are getting bamboozled into injecting themselves with hormones and getting awful surgeries (and it's not just young girls, BTW, though I know about the social contagion epidemic)...but if you want to f*** and marry someone of the same sex, go right ahead, none of my business. (20 years ago I would have said "it's a free country", but not anymore. Thanks, progressives.)
Conservatives like to talk a lot about ideas but hardly ever about actual power, because then they would have to do something other than complain about leftist academics ruining everything.
You're right Richard, leftist academics were and are laser-focused on power. It's time the Slobber Bucket Right started thinking similarly. I won't hold my breath!
Am I naïve in thinking that corporations adopted Wokeism because other leftish ideals are often mostly anathema to business, but predominantly held by upwardly mobile consumers? Identity leftishism is just a way of identifying safely with that important market segment. No corporation wants to get behind material redistribution, but when the left became the leftish that was the window of opportunity to adopt the old left-wing ideals of 'niceness' and 'fairness' as corporate values.
This is less complex and subtle than many of the arguments above, but satisfies a kind of Occams razor preference I have for accounting for things (albeit maybe because I'm insufficiently intellectually sophisticated).
What do you think of the theory that corporations are woke, at least in part, because they believe that Republicans will give them tax cuts and a friendly regulatory environment no matter what? No point is buying the cow when the milk is free.
The right-wing backlash against woke capitalism is a fascinating trend. I hope that it leads to more companies abandoning the rainbow flags and the 'values' nonsense.
In 1996 Prop 209 ended affirmative action in California. And yet institutions found work arounds, judges gave them passes or actively pushed them in the old ways anyway, and many aspects of race spoils and wokeism became most intense in California.
The law clearly said one thing, as it said since Civil Rights were passed, but it didn't matter, because the interpreters of the law operated within an idea set that when it conflicted with the letter of the law the law lost out.
This should be obvious to anyone that deals with law. Anyone can tell you that actual legal rulings often contradict what the law actually says often 180 degrees.
The fundamental idea is one even Kendi can understand.
"All Men Are Created Equal."
Not metaphorically. Not spiritually. Etc. Literally, genetically.
If pressed, maybe someone will say "well not all men (very grudgingly), but certainly all statistically relevant GROUPINGS of men are created equal."
And if that's the case, and there are disparities, there just HAS to be some racism out there. And there are an army of people with higher IQs than Kendi looking to explain what that racism is. Once they've determined it must exist somebody is going to "find" it.
And so that's the real idea problem. How can we get rid of all this Disparate Impact stuff when Disparate Impact proves there must be racism out there somewhere?
Why is this so important to believe people are literally equal?
If ALL MEN ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL then all sorts of things people didn't like in the pre civil rights era are just common sense. Levittown's? Reasonable way to protect your family from black crime. Segregated schools? How could blacks possibly keep up with whites academically and maintain discipline? Racist Irish Cops clubbing any black that cops an attitude? Only way to keep em in line.
If we passed everything in The Origins of Woke we would still have the problem that politicians and judges assume that Disparate Outcome = Racism. And as such they will constantly be trying to "fix" that problem by ignoring, re-interpreting, or changing the law. Any executive order can be reversed with the next democratic president or ignored by leftists judges.
The Department of Justice has an explicit civil rights division dedicated to enforcing Title VI, something the Supreme Court just ruled to be violated when used to practice affirmative action for college admissions. That should be the first avenue taken to enact change. You're right in the sense that a ruling alone will not enforce a law or force Biden's DoJ appointees to enforce the law, but you're wrong in the sense of assuming this is an insurmountable power. The most obvious solution is simply to elect a President who takes a strong stance against affirmative action and other anti-white policies, and have him bog down every single guilty college in massive civil rights lawsuits. The problem is that the front-leader and distant runner-up to replace Biden, Trump and DeSantis, have already made it clear that they're more worried about BDS than government-enforced anti-whiteness.
Well-stated ideas are important for winning elections, but it accomplishes nothing to simply blame bad ideas or talk about good ones. Ironically, the biggest flaw/oversight in The Origins of Woke imo is the uncritical acceptance of the Pendleton Act as beginning a century of meritocratic hiring until civil rights bureaucracy took over. It is the existence of civil service protection to begin with that allows entrenched, highly ideological striver types to push their bad ideas for decades beyond the administration that appointed them.
The spoils system was absolutely essential to the administrative ruthlessness of great presidents like Jackson, Tyler, and Polk, who were able to fire most who opposed them with impunity for the cost of just a little bit of graft to ensure political policy was carried out. By contrast, the way the Radical Republicans sabotaged Andrew Johnson's presidency was by inventing a kind of proto-Pendleton Act with the 1867 Tenure of Office Act (later ruled unconstitutional). To accept meritocracy as a formal regulated system rather than just market decisions is still to accept a kind of ideaism.
I find the detail really fascinating, but also think that it may be sliding by the fundamental issue, which is that there are now many people of power and influence who believe, not only that double standards in these areas are okay, but that they are actually required for social justice and individual moral goodness. That this strikes at the very principle of justice itself, which is that like cases should be decided in a like manner and by like principles, regardless of persons, is literally unrecognized by them.
I'm convinced that the mess we have with the anti-Israel protests in many universities would never have gotten to the point of police intervention if those universities had taken a firm impartial stand in the beginning based on their own codes of behavior and handled these problems through their own disciplinary procedures. Universities that did that (such as mine) have had no unmanageable problems. The threat of expulsion (and loss of social status for life) is a lot more meaningful to these kids than being arrested for some third-degree crime for which they are lionized by their peers. Expulsion is a big hammer and could have been used without any public intervention at all.
My observation is that those administrators sleepwalked into this problem because they genuinely believe that applying a double standard to this bad behavior is normal and good. It depends on "context" and the context is: who is doing the deed? It seems psychologically impossible for them to confront the problems that have brewed up. Thus, the paradox, that uncontrollable mobs emitting furious anti-semitic hate speech at their very doors is "exercise of first amendment rights," while some dopey Southern frat boys making some monkey noises is a critical national issue worthy of notice directly from the White House itself. Should we be surprised that validating these favored people might cause them to develop a sense of entitlement? And that the entire university should be outraged when the single, legal standard is, finally, applied by the public power?
Sometimes I get the feeling that my individual *I* is extremely insignificant, and that only ideas are real. Not just any flippant idea, but ideas that - for a variety of reasons, conditions, histories, and circumstances - have become embodied in law, society, and culture. I often feel like I have no choice but to submit to the sociopolitical forces that define both how I can live and how I can think. I sometimes feel obligated to continue telling myself and others certain stories about "me" and "self" in order to survive and connect meaningfully with the world as I see and experience it.
I feel like this line of thinking is maddening and unsustainable. I feel like I may be seeing through magic curtains of "freedom" and individual sovereignty that are the psychic womb my personality was formed in. And if womb, then what are the mothers and who are the gods or egregore that conceived of and nursed me?
'Oliver Traldi in Quillette asks “does the federal government require corporations to make rainbow-colored versions of their logos, or tweet in support of black trans women?” No, it certainly does not, although I think I do a good job of explaining how civil rights law led to HR and DEI, which have more immediate impacts on how corporations address political controversies.'
Strange, I didn't exactly go through your book with a fine toothed comb but even I understood your point about 'best practices' in federal courts, how corporations were forced to higher large HR organizations, and the incentive to always err on the side of woke just from a legal standpoint.
Great post, but I don't think it's true that Nazis can march anymore in practice, even if they can on paper. At Unite the Right, the cops refused to separate the Nazis from Antifa so that there would be enough violence to declare a state of emergency and shut down the event. The Supreme Court also refused to overturn the ruling that VDare is not obligated to police protection or EMS at conferences.
All due respect, but you have a penchant for stating the rather obvious. Of course one needs to take law seriously, lest you suffer punishment. Famously defined by Oliver Wendell Holmes as "a rule plus a sanction," laws have so proliferated now that anyone anywhere can be ensnared, so individuals and corporations (officially persons since Citizens United) must act accordingly to avoid the sanction. The idea that the doctrine of Disparate Impact, enabled by the 1971 Griggs decision--ironically, whose clear legislative history shows that a strict liability rule around proportionate racial representation was explicitly NOT the goal, but ended up as our test years later anyway--and then the zealous reinterpretation of it starting with the Obama Administration, is important to understand a turbocharged affirmative action effort, competence by darned, is beyond obvious.
What's more important is to understand what is driving this effort, as this is but one facet of wokeness and, therefore, a key to understanding the drivers of this wider phenomenon. The laws are enacted or are reinterpreted (like 1512(c)2, which used to be related to document destruction but now is the key to turning J6 protestors' misdemeanors into 20-year criminal sentences, unless or until the SCOTUS corrects this) in order for the powers-that-be to accomplish their goals, within the law or via lawfare. So the laws are a symptom, as are their effects, of deeper causes (or, in our case, societal sicknesses), as Dostoyevsky famously observed many years ago.
As for those deeper causes, that is a far more complex story the contours of which we all know by heart even if we cannot recite its details line-by-line. As a (mostly) libertarian type, I think, at bottom, it mostly involves, for myriad misguided reasons, a move away from JS Mill's maxim that all action in a free society should be allowed, except for those actions that cause physical harm to another (reformulating Jefferson's famous freedom-of-my-fist-until-it-hits-your-nose quotation), which Isaiah Berlin posited as the rise of positive as opposed to and often in conflict with prior negative rights. And here too, it was the end of the Lochner line of cases of the early 20th century under FDR, which reveals the law once again as merely another symptom (albeit it an important one, but definitely not a cause) of our move from precious freedom to illusory security (which includes equality of outcome, since there's always safety in numbers). Sadly, too many people thought it outrageous that New York bakers had to work so many hours, and worse still that the SCOTUS had prevented the state legislature from providing "relief," even though the bakers voluntarily went to those bread-making factories; therefore, FDR's pressure (via threats of court-packing) to change the law and thus undermine the inherent freedom of capitalists to do what they want with their property (as long as it hurt no one) and laborers to do what they want with their labor--all of this previously enshrined under the substantive due process clause of the Constitution, the very same tenuous safe harbor that pro-abortion lawyers belatedly claimed was the proper place to house Roe v Wade, and this major legal change came rather easily after the priming of the socialist pump during first 20 years of the Progressive Movement. In short, it is in our nature to meddle with the mote in our brothers' eyes, while neglecting the beam in our own. And cynical power-seekers have always wielded this human weakness for their own ends rather effectively.
So perhaps you, like those of us who have attended law school, should realize that the law is itself an empty vessel into which all sorts of philosophies are poured. Those philosophies guide the law, since there is no inherent logic within a legal system itself, just as there is no inherent arc of justice that forms sui generis, but instead a ton of cultural formation and political pressuring to bend the laws for one group's advantage or another's. And these struggles are the logical outcome of a priori tendencies within our own nature that bring us toward or away from various preferred ways of living, the merits of which we will incessantly argue over for the rest of time.
"and has many downstream societal effects that most people can’t even begin to imagine."
If you really think about laws and policy, you can figure out the effects. In the 60's, we decided to PAY for Fatherless Families. You get whatever you pay for, and you can follow the idea of Fatherlessness down to its logical conclusion, IF you properly account for what happens in that situation.
Now, if you are saying that MOST PEOPLE are of an IQ that cannot draw such extrapolations, then I would agree and you are now getting into the fruits of another situation, the inability to grasp the wisdom and education of the ages, be it by laziness or the size of the task as it grows.
Another thing about idealists: they tend to blend “religion” and “ideas” in that gives the appearance of causal efficacy to the latter. Of course, religion involves ideas (things like scripture, creeds, catechism and affiliated intellectuals). But religion also involves communal rituals, belonging, doing things together like bible study or going to church on Sunday. Even in religion, the idea space is crowded! So, idealists should be expected to show why certain ideas are put into practice and how intensely. They don’t show this, because, lo and behold, ideas don’t make that call. Instead, the selection and emphasis comes from (1) which ideas are enforced or (2) the congregation’s sense of identity, or being on the same team. Enforcement, that there is some consequence for transgressing an ideas as applied, is thru policing, communal or hierarchical as formal or informal institutions, sometimes backed by the state, permit. Often, as anyone who’s been in a church knows, such policing is sparked by petty and narrow beefs and envy, not unlike wokeness!
Sense of identity can be pre-sectarian or inculcated thru communal rituals. For the former, note how black and white protestant congregations have acted differently despite having nearly identical doctrine. For the latter, the key point is that congregants are actually doing something together to bind as a congregation, which develops their sense of collective interest. They aren’t just pondering and reading in their rooms in isolation.
In my experience, idealists are the type of people who read and think. They imagine an alternative status hierarchy where thinking is apical. They latch on to “religion” to defend their worldview. But their concept of religion is bogus. Again, just from my own experience so I could be wrong, idealists tend to think they’re too smart to go to mass or bible study, which would involve interacting with people (too argumentative) or sitting thru a ritual (boring, also nerds can’t dance). For idealists who actually go to church, I would also venture that simply going to service, without accountability to or interaction with co-congregants, is more entertainment or emotional catharsis than religion.
Long story short, idealist have read about “religion.” But they simply have no idea of what being in congregation is like.
This is very insightful. I as a nerd used to sometimes actually ask people to explain their religious doctrine or what they believed, it never went over well. For most people that's not what it's about at all.
Something very smart I read by John Derbyshire about a decade ago, roughly to this effect:
"It's true that less than five percent of American Catholics follow this particular teaching; but that's just an illustration of the fact that religious people everywhere don't bother much with theology. Jason Slone's excellent book Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn't has interesting things to say about this. Buddhists pray to Lord Buddha, even though, according to their theology, he attained non-existence, and therefore doesn't, you know, exist. Calvinists, whose church teaches that whether you go to hell or not is already pre-determined, none the less try to live good lives. And so on.
Theology is great fun for religious intellectuals, but for ordinary believers it's mostly beside the point. The point of religion is faith in a divine order, hope that death is not blank extinction, and community of fellowship with people who believe in the same gods you do and worship them in the same way.
That's what religion's about. The theology is just there to provide indoor relief for intellectuals, a major aim of all human institutions since the beginning of time."
https://www.johnderbyshire.com/Opinions/RadioDerb/2012-02-17.html
"Calvinists, whose church teaches that whether you go to hell or not is already pre-determined, none the less try to live good lives."
I know very little about Buddhism, but as a Calvinist, I'd classify this as an extremely superficial objection, and one that Calvin (and Scripture) addressed upfront.
Why be good to your mother when it's predetermined that she's going to love you unconditionally?
There's some truth to the broader point about theology. Though I'd say there are two separate phenomena at play. There are nominals, who don't really have any strong religious beliefs, probably subscribe to a vague works-based view of salvation, and view religion primarily as a social identity (in Christian doctrine: not saved). And then there are the pious but mostly ignorant (in Christian doctrine: potentially saved).
In a highly competitive and self-selected religious landscape like America, you're going to find pretty different proportions of these groups at any given church. Though I'd say that nominals who are Millennials and younger are not bothering to attend church at all, while among older generations they still dutifully occupy the pews of many a Catholic and Mainline Protestant church.
In an online discussion on privacy recently i’ve seen people say they would take legal action if the site was not made gdpr compliant. This is how you end up in a world where all websites everywhere displays annoying cookie banners. The law is a socially acceptable way to threaten people and people casually do it all the time
There is an easy way to avoid the banners -- just don't put surveillance cookies on other people's computers.
Here is an analogy in the offline world: Imagine that we live in a society where people regularly install hidden cameras in other people's gardens. Now there is a new law that says that if you install such camera, you must also put a visible sticker that discloses its presence. And most people are like: "Stupid law; now my garden is full of these ugly stickers!"
If this solution seems too heavy-handed, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track -- there was an attempt to self-regulate the online surveillance industry, but most companies simply ignored it.
I can state anecdotally that in the months prior to Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, my (large and corporate) employer was all-in on diversity, to the extent that the last major internal speech they had on the subject was one which stated that managers would be judged and rewarded/penalized according to the extent to which they gave their minority subordinates leeway during annual review. The day of the ruling, the company put out a facially-bland but obviously-indignant email stating that (paraphrased/rewritten) 'While the recent Supreme Court ruling will be upsetting to many, we want our employees to know that this will have no effect on our devotion to DEI going forward'.
As of today, just 4 months later, diversity emails merely namedrop the Hyphenated-American Day of the week, or recommend the occasional ethnic cooking recipe. Explicit racial scholarships have been entirely rewritten to talk vaguely about economic privilege, and some programs seemingly disappeared entirely as if they never existed. That is obviously a huge win for law over ideaism.
My biggest worry is that just about every corporation has a records retention policy, and unlike business records, I don't think internal speeches and emails supporting previously-endorsed racial discrimination are protected for anywhere near 7 years. The GOP received a massive opportunity to engage in lawfare against "woke", but no one in office seems to notice or care. A decade from now we could find ourselves in a situation where every single corporate policy was fed 'ctrl-H', find 'racial', replace with 'economically disadvantaged', and with a straight face they will defend themselves and win every lawsuit for lack of evidence.
A guidebook to civil rights law like The Origin of Woke is an essential part of the puzzle to end America's modern class system, but your average normie won't care unless you sound an alarm and drill it through their heads that we live in an explicitly racist, anti-white system that discriminates against their children. Your essay is entirely right that ideaism cannot defeat the left, but at the same time, it is leftist ideaism that creates generations of Americans who fully endorse a narrative where tax cuts, gun rights, or localism are fundamentally derived from white supremacy because Jefferson talked about liberty but also owned slaves, or that "states rights" is a thing that Alabama said and Alabama hit black people with high pressure fire hoses in the 60s and therefore the federal government should just control everything.
It might just come down to liberals being more competent, intelligent, and brazen once again. Democrats have the Pink Floyd/Michael Jackson of politics in Emmett Till's murder, doesn't matter how old it is, they can still push copies even to a modern audience. By contrast, Republicans are by nature insecure so they talk about European communist pedophiles no one gives a shit about, and then shy away from their own #1 television music video hit, Willie Horton, because it's "dated".
The Origins of Woke puts the all the various half-baked, intellectually lazy, doomer porn theories to shame. Honestly, the question is why there isn't more law and policy focused political commentary on the conservative side. Ben Shapiro knows a great deal about law and policy, but from him I hear more screeching about "the Left" and apocalyptic commentary than sober analysis.
I would be very interested to read similar work on other areas of the "administrative state", e.g. a history of the EPA and the perhaps unintended consequences of environmental regulation. Rather than the various philosophy/intellectual history-type books that have been written (Burnham, Gottfried, Francis), I would like a much more law and policy oriented take on what the administrative state has done to society, good and bad.
I agree completely. Part of the reason this analysis isn’t out there is it doesn’t sell. There’s much more of an audience for the “what is a woman” discourse. Even my stuff only gets any attention because it’s related to culture wars. There’d be no interest among conservative audiences for a deep dive into the EPA or whatever, though the Andreessen-adjacent techno optimist types might be into it.
...I think any traditional disinterest in analysis of the administrative state is changing though, as a result of long-form 'blogging' of the sort people are gravitating towards on Substack. Analysis is sorely needed. Currently I'm in my 4th senior bureaucratic role (economic regulation) in a fourth country. The impact of legally driven bureaucracy in both the private and public sectors everywhere, is killing productivity and therefore peoples' standards of living.
Shapiro's an entertainer, I think, and wants to make money. His mom was a TV executive and his dad was a composer. I think being short and kind of dorky-sounding he probably figured political commentary was his best shot...and he was right. I do think he sincerely believes what he says...probably figured, correctly, there was a market for a right-winger who fits the debate-club archetype rather than the TV-host or radio-host archetype.
The reason there isn't more law and policy focused material is simply mass psychology. People care, politically, much more about others' affairs, beliefs, and notions of propriety than actual political architecture. This same impulse drives them to distraction over whether they think their nation finds them attractive and causes them to judge political figures solely by character and virtue signaling. If someone could find a way of maintaining democracy while shutting out the expression of this impulse in politics he'd cement himself as one of the greatest political minds that ever existed.
Talking about Traldi's review and discussion of what makes corporations adopt rainbow symbols, in Richard's book (which I'm about 70% done reading FYI) he mentions that he doesn't doesn't really get into LGBT issues that often because the left is still fighting battles about actual differential treatment on that issue. They haven't yet moved on to "disparate impact" and all the other Orwellian stuff that leftist activism gets involved with when it comes to race and sex discrimination. (This probably also explains why I am anti-woke in general, but specifically very pro-LGBT)
I think this is important because it means that LGBT issues appear less morally ambiguous to the average person. There is less of the "gaslighting" of the public about their goals that Richard describes in his book. Since activists are fighting actual mistreatment instead of chasing "disparate impact" and other statistical ghosts, they appear more heroic to consumers. This might explain why corporations have leaned so hard on "Pride" and "rainbow" branding lately. It's a civil rights issue where the genuine heroes have not yet been supplanted by cynical grifters.
I can personally say that it has this effect on me. I regard most of the corporate rainbow stuff with a mixture of appreciation and bemusement. I also tremendously enjoy how much it upsets both anticapitalist leftists and traditionalist conservatives.
I am going to suggest that you may not be aware of everything going on in the LBGT space. LBG is fine, and although the biggest battles have already been won there is still ground to cover as some people still think it’s their business who other people have relationships with. The T is a different story. There’s been a 5000% (not a typo) increase over the past 15 years in teenage females seeking medical gender transition. It’s become clear to many close to this issue that these kids have come to believe they are transgender because of the constant emphasis in our culture of how heroic, how unique, how virtuously victimized transgender people are. In addition, it’s one of the only “marginalized” identities one can opt into. The completely contradictory and intentionally confusing language used around the topic also makes it easy for anyone to convince themselves they can be part of this. Combine those cultural trends with the age-old lack of confidence, desire to reinvent themselves, distress over puberty and societal expectations around appearance and general teen angst that plague teenage girls and you get...hundreds of thousands of teens and young women believing they can become boys through surgery, to the great detriment of their mental and physical health. Frankly, I see this as a far more extreme manifestation of nonsensical ideology than anything related to race or sex.
I've definitely heard about this issue, but I don't personally find it a sign that trans activists are doing something bad, but rather a sign that medical questions are really hard. There is some percentage of the population who do receive psychological benefits from gender transition (call them group 1), and some percentage who think they will but are mistaken (call them group 2). It isn't implausible to me that the ratio of group 2 to group 1 has vastly increased lately, because of the increased visibility of trans activists in our culture. However, other explanations also seem plausible to me, for instance, maybe the increased visibility of trans activists has made lots of people who didn't think they were in Group 1 realize that they were (an analogy I've seen used is that the percentage of lefthanded people skyrocketed in the 20th century, merely because people stopped being jerks to the left-handed).
Medical transitions for teenagers are a really fraught issue because if you overcorrect either way, people will suffer. If you overdiagnose and treat people in Group 2 you'll have tons of people grow up with bodies they hate. But if you underdiagnose and don't treat people in Group 1, the same thing will happen. It's a hard problem.
The only compassionate and rational thing to do, in my opinion, is to work hard to get better at determining which group a person wanting to transition is in. I understand that trans activists' life experiences might make them prone to overestimate the percentage of people in group 1, but I can also see how their opponents could be biased to overestimate the percentage in group 2. It's simply a difficult problem.
Reading about this controversy has changed my views on one subject, which is "nonbinary" identities. There are neurological and developmental explanations as to why someone might be a transwoman or transman, that are plausible to me. But "nonbinary" seemed like some sort of New Age nonsense to me.
However, my views changed when I read accounts of "detransitioners." I discovered that a great many of them did not detransition back to their birth sex, but rather to a "nonbinary" identity, and that they wished that they had done this in the first place instead of going through all the surgery and hormone treatments to transition to the opposite sex. This made me realize that, however shaky its philosophical underpinnings might be, the "nonbinary" identity could serve an important function as a "safety valve," something that could alleviate people's feelings of gender dysphoria without them having to undergo as much risky medical intervention. This makes me think it should be heavily promoted as an option by medical professionals, for purely pragmatic reasons.
I recognize that this makes me perhaps the only person who, after studying this controversy, has come down harder in favor of weird gender ideology stuff! But I think it makes sense from a harm reduction perspective.
I once would have said the same as you. I have know people who transitioned and who seem satisfied with their choice and that is their business. However, I am now unfortunately close to this issue and have seen how it unfolds. I understand it’s hard to believe that there’s a systematic effort to locate vulnerable and insecure teens, break down their confidence and sense of self and reality, offer up gender transition as their only hope of salvation, encourage them to make as many irreversible decisions in this direction as quickly as possible, and indoctrinate them with phobias about what horrible things will happen is they ever change their minds. But that is exactly what’s happening, and you don’t have to take my word for it. Set up a Tumblr account. Go on TikTok and act as if you’re a 13 year old who’s never considered your gender before but wonder what it’s all about and search for some stuff. You’ll see. Next thing you know your entire online world will immerse you in the most absurd extreme left ideologies where everyone is gay/trans, has autism, adhd, Tourette’s, and multiple personalities, everyone has multiple psychiatric diagnoses and is on multiple medications, and capitalism, school, economic success, police, religion, being a normal healthy person, any mainstream fashion, music, or media, males, and straight or white people are all very bad and you can be punished and ostracized for any association with these things. The trans movement as it exists today (not as it was 15 years ago when a few middle aged men transitioned, and nobody claimed that there was no such thing as physical sex) is completely entrenched in woke nonsense. This is how they are recruiting teens and locking them into leftist ideology, under the guise of acceptance and kindness. But really they are using cult tactics.
Yeah, I'm angry at feminists about their effect on male-female relations, and I wonder how many kids are getting bamboozled into injecting themselves with hormones and getting awful surgeries (and it's not just young girls, BTW, though I know about the social contagion epidemic)...but if you want to f*** and marry someone of the same sex, go right ahead, none of my business. (20 years ago I would have said "it's a free country", but not anymore. Thanks, progressives.)
What "differential treatment?" And who are the "genuine heroes" of the "LGBT movement?"
Conservatives like to talk a lot about ideas but hardly ever about actual power, because then they would have to do something other than complain about leftist academics ruining everything.
You're right Richard, leftist academics were and are laser-focused on power. It's time the Slobber Bucket Right started thinking similarly. I won't hold my breath!
Regarding interventionism's triumph, it is likely its consistency with grift that accounts for it. So too with climatism and other ideas.
Am I naïve in thinking that corporations adopted Wokeism because other leftish ideals are often mostly anathema to business, but predominantly held by upwardly mobile consumers? Identity leftishism is just a way of identifying safely with that important market segment. No corporation wants to get behind material redistribution, but when the left became the leftish that was the window of opportunity to adopt the old left-wing ideals of 'niceness' and 'fairness' as corporate values.
This is less complex and subtle than many of the arguments above, but satisfies a kind of Occams razor preference I have for accounting for things (albeit maybe because I'm insufficiently intellectually sophisticated).
What do you think of the theory that corporations are woke, at least in part, because they believe that Republicans will give them tax cuts and a friendly regulatory environment no matter what? No point is buying the cow when the milk is free.
They stopped in Florida and with Bud Light. Let's see what happens.
The right-wing backlash against woke capitalism is a fascinating trend. I hope that it leads to more companies abandoning the rainbow flags and the 'values' nonsense.
I genuinely don't know. We'll see.
In 1996 Prop 209 ended affirmative action in California. And yet institutions found work arounds, judges gave them passes or actively pushed them in the old ways anyway, and many aspects of race spoils and wokeism became most intense in California.
The law clearly said one thing, as it said since Civil Rights were passed, but it didn't matter, because the interpreters of the law operated within an idea set that when it conflicted with the letter of the law the law lost out.
This should be obvious to anyone that deals with law. Anyone can tell you that actual legal rulings often contradict what the law actually says often 180 degrees.
The fundamental idea is one even Kendi can understand.
"All Men Are Created Equal."
Not metaphorically. Not spiritually. Etc. Literally, genetically.
If pressed, maybe someone will say "well not all men (very grudgingly), but certainly all statistically relevant GROUPINGS of men are created equal."
And if that's the case, and there are disparities, there just HAS to be some racism out there. And there are an army of people with higher IQs than Kendi looking to explain what that racism is. Once they've determined it must exist somebody is going to "find" it.
And so that's the real idea problem. How can we get rid of all this Disparate Impact stuff when Disparate Impact proves there must be racism out there somewhere?
Why is this so important to believe people are literally equal?
If ALL MEN ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL then all sorts of things people didn't like in the pre civil rights era are just common sense. Levittown's? Reasonable way to protect your family from black crime. Segregated schools? How could blacks possibly keep up with whites academically and maintain discipline? Racist Irish Cops clubbing any black that cops an attitude? Only way to keep em in line.
If we passed everything in The Origins of Woke we would still have the problem that politicians and judges assume that Disparate Outcome = Racism. And as such they will constantly be trying to "fix" that problem by ignoring, re-interpreting, or changing the law. Any executive order can be reversed with the next democratic president or ignored by leftists judges.
And so ideas matter.
The Department of Justice has an explicit civil rights division dedicated to enforcing Title VI, something the Supreme Court just ruled to be violated when used to practice affirmative action for college admissions. That should be the first avenue taken to enact change. You're right in the sense that a ruling alone will not enforce a law or force Biden's DoJ appointees to enforce the law, but you're wrong in the sense of assuming this is an insurmountable power. The most obvious solution is simply to elect a President who takes a strong stance against affirmative action and other anti-white policies, and have him bog down every single guilty college in massive civil rights lawsuits. The problem is that the front-leader and distant runner-up to replace Biden, Trump and DeSantis, have already made it clear that they're more worried about BDS than government-enforced anti-whiteness.
Well-stated ideas are important for winning elections, but it accomplishes nothing to simply blame bad ideas or talk about good ones. Ironically, the biggest flaw/oversight in The Origins of Woke imo is the uncritical acceptance of the Pendleton Act as beginning a century of meritocratic hiring until civil rights bureaucracy took over. It is the existence of civil service protection to begin with that allows entrenched, highly ideological striver types to push their bad ideas for decades beyond the administration that appointed them.
The spoils system was absolutely essential to the administrative ruthlessness of great presidents like Jackson, Tyler, and Polk, who were able to fire most who opposed them with impunity for the cost of just a little bit of graft to ensure political policy was carried out. By contrast, the way the Radical Republicans sabotaged Andrew Johnson's presidency was by inventing a kind of proto-Pendleton Act with the 1867 Tenure of Office Act (later ruled unconstitutional). To accept meritocracy as a formal regulated system rather than just market decisions is still to accept a kind of ideaism.
I find the detail really fascinating, but also think that it may be sliding by the fundamental issue, which is that there are now many people of power and influence who believe, not only that double standards in these areas are okay, but that they are actually required for social justice and individual moral goodness. That this strikes at the very principle of justice itself, which is that like cases should be decided in a like manner and by like principles, regardless of persons, is literally unrecognized by them.
I'm convinced that the mess we have with the anti-Israel protests in many universities would never have gotten to the point of police intervention if those universities had taken a firm impartial stand in the beginning based on their own codes of behavior and handled these problems through their own disciplinary procedures. Universities that did that (such as mine) have had no unmanageable problems. The threat of expulsion (and loss of social status for life) is a lot more meaningful to these kids than being arrested for some third-degree crime for which they are lionized by their peers. Expulsion is a big hammer and could have been used without any public intervention at all.
My observation is that those administrators sleepwalked into this problem because they genuinely believe that applying a double standard to this bad behavior is normal and good. It depends on "context" and the context is: who is doing the deed? It seems psychologically impossible for them to confront the problems that have brewed up. Thus, the paradox, that uncontrollable mobs emitting furious anti-semitic hate speech at their very doors is "exercise of first amendment rights," while some dopey Southern frat boys making some monkey noises is a critical national issue worthy of notice directly from the White House itself. Should we be surprised that validating these favored people might cause them to develop a sense of entitlement? And that the entire university should be outraged when the single, legal standard is, finally, applied by the public power?
Sometimes I get the feeling that my individual *I* is extremely insignificant, and that only ideas are real. Not just any flippant idea, but ideas that - for a variety of reasons, conditions, histories, and circumstances - have become embodied in law, society, and culture. I often feel like I have no choice but to submit to the sociopolitical forces that define both how I can live and how I can think. I sometimes feel obligated to continue telling myself and others certain stories about "me" and "self" in order to survive and connect meaningfully with the world as I see and experience it.
I feel like this line of thinking is maddening and unsustainable. I feel like I may be seeing through magic curtains of "freedom" and individual sovereignty that are the psychic womb my personality was formed in. And if womb, then what are the mothers and who are the gods or egregore that conceived of and nursed me?
Someone help please.
'Oliver Traldi in Quillette asks “does the federal government require corporations to make rainbow-colored versions of their logos, or tweet in support of black trans women?” No, it certainly does not, although I think I do a good job of explaining how civil rights law led to HR and DEI, which have more immediate impacts on how corporations address political controversies.'
Strange, I didn't exactly go through your book with a fine toothed comb but even I understood your point about 'best practices' in federal courts, how corporations were forced to higher large HR organizations, and the incentive to always err on the side of woke just from a legal standpoint.
Great post, but I don't think it's true that Nazis can march anymore in practice, even if they can on paper. At Unite the Right, the cops refused to separate the Nazis from Antifa so that there would be enough violence to declare a state of emergency and shut down the event. The Supreme Court also refused to overturn the ruling that VDare is not obligated to police protection or EMS at conferences.
All due respect, but you have a penchant for stating the rather obvious. Of course one needs to take law seriously, lest you suffer punishment. Famously defined by Oliver Wendell Holmes as "a rule plus a sanction," laws have so proliferated now that anyone anywhere can be ensnared, so individuals and corporations (officially persons since Citizens United) must act accordingly to avoid the sanction. The idea that the doctrine of Disparate Impact, enabled by the 1971 Griggs decision--ironically, whose clear legislative history shows that a strict liability rule around proportionate racial representation was explicitly NOT the goal, but ended up as our test years later anyway--and then the zealous reinterpretation of it starting with the Obama Administration, is important to understand a turbocharged affirmative action effort, competence by darned, is beyond obvious.
What's more important is to understand what is driving this effort, as this is but one facet of wokeness and, therefore, a key to understanding the drivers of this wider phenomenon. The laws are enacted or are reinterpreted (like 1512(c)2, which used to be related to document destruction but now is the key to turning J6 protestors' misdemeanors into 20-year criminal sentences, unless or until the SCOTUS corrects this) in order for the powers-that-be to accomplish their goals, within the law or via lawfare. So the laws are a symptom, as are their effects, of deeper causes (or, in our case, societal sicknesses), as Dostoyevsky famously observed many years ago.
As for those deeper causes, that is a far more complex story the contours of which we all know by heart even if we cannot recite its details line-by-line. As a (mostly) libertarian type, I think, at bottom, it mostly involves, for myriad misguided reasons, a move away from JS Mill's maxim that all action in a free society should be allowed, except for those actions that cause physical harm to another (reformulating Jefferson's famous freedom-of-my-fist-until-it-hits-your-nose quotation), which Isaiah Berlin posited as the rise of positive as opposed to and often in conflict with prior negative rights. And here too, it was the end of the Lochner line of cases of the early 20th century under FDR, which reveals the law once again as merely another symptom (albeit it an important one, but definitely not a cause) of our move from precious freedom to illusory security (which includes equality of outcome, since there's always safety in numbers). Sadly, too many people thought it outrageous that New York bakers had to work so many hours, and worse still that the SCOTUS had prevented the state legislature from providing "relief," even though the bakers voluntarily went to those bread-making factories; therefore, FDR's pressure (via threats of court-packing) to change the law and thus undermine the inherent freedom of capitalists to do what they want with their property (as long as it hurt no one) and laborers to do what they want with their labor--all of this previously enshrined under the substantive due process clause of the Constitution, the very same tenuous safe harbor that pro-abortion lawyers belatedly claimed was the proper place to house Roe v Wade, and this major legal change came rather easily after the priming of the socialist pump during first 20 years of the Progressive Movement. In short, it is in our nature to meddle with the mote in our brothers' eyes, while neglecting the beam in our own. And cynical power-seekers have always wielded this human weakness for their own ends rather effectively.
So perhaps you, like those of us who have attended law school, should realize that the law is itself an empty vessel into which all sorts of philosophies are poured. Those philosophies guide the law, since there is no inherent logic within a legal system itself, just as there is no inherent arc of justice that forms sui generis, but instead a ton of cultural formation and political pressuring to bend the laws for one group's advantage or another's. And these struggles are the logical outcome of a priori tendencies within our own nature that bring us toward or away from various preferred ways of living, the merits of which we will incessantly argue over for the rest of time.
"and has many downstream societal effects that most people can’t even begin to imagine."
If you really think about laws and policy, you can figure out the effects. In the 60's, we decided to PAY for Fatherless Families. You get whatever you pay for, and you can follow the idea of Fatherlessness down to its logical conclusion, IF you properly account for what happens in that situation.
Now, if you are saying that MOST PEOPLE are of an IQ that cannot draw such extrapolations, then I would agree and you are now getting into the fruits of another situation, the inability to grasp the wisdom and education of the ages, be it by laziness or the size of the task as it grows.