With all the news regarding Trump administration appointees and various Republicans engaging in group chat vice signalling, there’s been a great deal of media interest in “Based Ritual,” from my article last year, which has now surpassed Sydney Sweeney’s boobs to become my fourth most read Substack ever.
I’ve recently been quoted or cited on this topic in The Atlantic, Politico, UnHerd, Vanity Fair, Vox, and Vox again. Sometimes the pundit game is a meritocracy. You point out something that’s true, and then people will notice when the world confirms what you have been saying.
This week, people are now talking about how I was early on Groyperization too. The human capital framework has provided a lot of explanatory value.
Scott Alexander responded to my piece on the Fatima miracle, and I responded to his response in the comments. I remain very convinced by my “peasants are very suggestible and conformist” theory. It appears he’s conceded the point that we only know about one skeptic who was on record as skeptical beforehand and then reported witnessing something unusual. This is important, as I thought the claim that there were multiple such people was one of the most convincing arguments for there having been a miracle.
I’d like to remind people to sign up for meetings if you’re interested. I used to get a lot of requests, but although the Substack is growing, people seem to have forgotten the feature exists, or they never learned about it after signing up. Some people I’ve met through meetings have actually become friends, or I’ve promoted their work, and I always enjoy talking to fans.
I was at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics this month, where I debated John Carney, a writer for Breitbart, on the populist project. My big takeaway is I’m never going to wear glasses at a public event again.
1. Just read Hayek’s “The Intellectuals and Socialism.” I found a kinship with Hayek, writing in 1949, about how conservatives don’t have idealistic defenders of markets. This was a time when you actually had Austrian economists around. Today we have MAGAs. You’ll also see an argument similar to the one I made in “Why Is Everything Liberal?” which is sort of dated by now, because conservatives have shown in the Trump era the ability to overcome having fewer idealistic people via pure force. But as they do that, they become less reflexively pro-market and use power in order to achieve other goals. Another passage here shows how little things have changed:
The difficulty of finding genuine and disinterested support for a systematic policy for freedom is not new. In a passage of which the reception of a recent book of mine has often reminded me, Lord Acton long ago described how “at all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has been sometimes disastrous, by giving to opponents just grounds of opposition....”
This sums up the classical liberal alliance with American conservatism, which we can say has been getting more intense. Compared to a generation or two ago, libertarians are getting both more out of the deal (school choice, zero tolerance for tax increases) and more things that are objectionable (hostility to trade and immigration). The right becoming less libertarian ideologically goes hand in hand with it being less beholden to the left, which benefits libertarianism sometimes, especially at the local level. At the national level, the president’s level of discretion over trade and immigration is just too high for things to work out well.
2. NYT on older women taking testosterone, and the challenges of getting mainstream medicine to accept it as a treatment for aging. Indications here are that the Trump administration is more friendly. This is the upside of the MAHA ethos; it’s a weird thing where they’re sometimes more willing to explore new treatments than the mainstream medical establishment and also more safetyist, especially on vaccines.
How to understand this? Maybe it’s just populism, in the sense of giving in to short term-gratification. Testosterone feels good, so do it. Vaccines scare people, so don’t. This can be good in one case and bad in another.
The medical establishment in contrast is too willing to accept natural decline without any kind of intervention. They have this completely arbitrary line between “curing disease” and “enhancement.” Not that the masses don’t also have that distinction, and populist-leaning voters are probably among the most safetyist parts of the electorate in any sense of the term. But populism can also be understood as giving in to loud, mobilized minorities, and in that case anything that works to make people’s lives better, at least in the short run, will have a constituency.
These thoughts make me 20% more sympathetic to MAHA.
3. Misha Saul on the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. I think that comparing manpower and industrial capacity to say the war was unwinnable for Germany is too simplistic. Nations collapsed under less pressure in the First World War! It couldn’t be taken for granted that Stalin’s regime would hold. A testament to Soviet indoctrination and the methods for establishing control they honed over a generation.
4. Andrew Sullivan interviews Charles Murray about religion. The most telling part here was when Murray said he wouldn’t take a pill that would let him live healthily until 120 because he’d “get bored.” Really? This guy has written books every few years for several decades. He doesn’t think he could find new intellectual vistas to explore? His intellectual curiosity has been satisfied, or he thinks it will be in ten years? Just following the news to see what happens to AI and our politics would be fascinating.
There are an endless number of books I want to read and movies I want to watch and countries I want to visit that I will probably never get to. And then if I watch a movie or read a book and return to it after twenty years, it’s often like experiencing it almost new. Maybe it makes sense for a dumb person to say they’d get bored. But how could an intellectually curious person like Murray pull the boredom card for a mere 120 years?
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