Good article. "I suspect that institutions, especially when large, naturally tend towards leftism, and this isn’t anything unique to the current American political landscape."
Robert Conquest’s second law: "Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing."
It seems a bit less profound when phrased as the left simply being what we call people who seek power over others, and the right people who just want to grill. Naturally people who seek power will tend to be the ones who obtain it, and those of a more libertarian bent will not. It's inherent to the respective positions.
There are plenty of rightoids who want to seek power. They're just dumber and less competent on average, because the default position of society is still the equitarian thesis, and if you take said position seriously, you're gonna lean towards left-wing politics.
Where are these "rightoids" who desperately seek power but are too stupid to get it? The smartest people I know are all on the right but none are politically active.
One theory is that smart right-wingers are also usually smart enough to realize that pursuing politics is a bad deal for them personally, and that their energy is better spent on themselves rather than waging pseudo-religious ideological crusades. Thus leaving the intellectual landscape with few people to push back against the left's hordes of highly motivated midwits.
I definitely feel this in my own life and community. Everyone thinks wokeness and associated ills are horrible and insane, but, we are all specialists who can earn far more money and with a far easier life in industry than in politics. There's another factor: exactly because we are specialized and smart most of us have moved away from home to places where the main language is our second language. Politics requires verbal fluency, and a workaday grip on the native dialects won't suffice.
Sometimes I do think about entering politics, perhaps returning to my home country to do so. But my wife would not like it. So .... we suffer in apathetic silence as the most passionate and stupid people drive us all steadily over the edge.
Its just like you pointed out, conservatives have to play in a system where the framework works against them.
The 14th amendment is guillty of this, plus other quasi sacred documents, forcing the government to endlessly pursue "equality".
In a conservative moral framework ( God, traditional familiy and nation for example) its liberals who would look like hapless salmons swimming agaisnt the ideological current, so they would look dumb and ridiculous.
left simply being what we call people who seek power over others, and the right people who just want to grill"
This
Hanania gets too lost in mythical studff "the left is smaaarter, duh"
Nah, people that ignore basic human nature is beyond dumb
And one of the mainstays of the left over time, is their belief in DUMB egalitarian fantasies.
And he himself explained it nicely in one of his only 2 or 3 really good articles:
why does everything seem liberal?
because they are more vocal, compromised and pushy about what they want, conservatives being sadly too passive to defend what they believe in, even if they make up roughly 50% of the electorate.
Example: LGBT marriage was mostly received with a collective MEH from most on the right.
And now they are worrying abot trans and LGBT "Education" in schools
Went to a very liberal Mennonite church for a couple years. Almost everyone came from a conservative family. Amazing pitch in lunches, fun parties, quirky hipster vibe, but an awkward philosophy where everyone knew and rejected the church tradition, but liked church and was unwilling to give it up. The kids were all atheists.
Seems like Churches have a pretty narrow criteria for generational replication / stability, and actually believing in God is crucial for this.
My (pacifist) church used to be pro-business and very inclusive of Republicans. Perhaps starting during the Vietnam war in the Sixties, it has become very left wing.
Nowadays, Quakers advocate in favor of all the causes of the left that you might guess: BLM, LGBTQ, Bernie Sanders, "environmental justice", Free Palestine, etc. Over the past 60 years, they have (perhaps inadvertently) driven out anyone who doesn't share left-leaning politics.
I have no first-hand knowledge of other Protestant denominations, but here in Massachusetts they seem to be similarly oriented, flying BLM and rainbow flags.
Quakers have always been odd and regarded as at least somewhat theologically liberal and heterodox, so their history is a little different from the rest of Protestantism.
The history of the US Mainline denominations is this: their seminaries and much of their clergy were largely captured by more liberal theologies starting in the late 19th/early 20th centuries, but for various reasons the extent of their abandonment of traditional Christianity and its historic teachings wasn't always fully obvious or thoroughly realized on the ground until the later 20th century.
Starting in the later 20th century these denominations began to collapse in terms of attendance and membership and be supplanted by the conservative remnant, originally "fundamentalists" and later "evangelicals", though certain more denominational sorts of conservative Christians (e.g. Lutherans) never really bought fully into either of these labels. These days "evangelical" just means "conservative Protestant" in terms of how sociologists of religion classify people.
Now I'm not sure what the numbers look like in Massachusetts, but I imagine that even there you'll find that evangelical churches are more attended than Mainline ones, or at least that the people attending them are much younger. However, Mainline churches will have all the best, most visible real estate. This is true even where I live, in the Deep South -- the Mainline churches are near-empty, the only people present are old or gay, but they continue to occupy historic buildings downtown. The evangelical churches are overflowing but occupy strip malls, warehouses, and simpler, newer structures outside the city center.
Probably not something Richard has thought much about, but note that his statements are largely true about Protestant denominations. Leftist activists tend to capture the denominational machinery and use it to create problems for the actual believing Christians on the ground. Just like Richard's observation about doctors and the AMA, it turns out that believing Christian leaders have a preference for building churches and preaching the Word, not administering denominational machinery.
Conservatives have had a few successes in retaining or recapturing the machinery (e.g. the SBC and LCMS in the 1970s-80s). But mostly defeats (all the Mainlines, most recently the UMC). This is one reason that evangelicalism is largely congregational in polity -- which is to say, independent and decentralized. The centralized churches were almost all captured by a cabal of their enemies. My understanding is the same thing happened to European Protestant state churches (e.g. Church of England).
Although a lot of complaints could be made about the bureaucracies of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, they don't function quite the same way because they have a lot more institutional inertia.
I don't really understand how "institutional inertia" helps Eastern Orthodox churches stay pure but not the mainline of the Catholic church. Sounds like it's just not a very cohesive theory.
I have sometimes thought about incorporating UBI, or some other welfarism, as part as the conservative agenda in response to this. Hear me out.
Modern liberal democracies create rent. The government can tax and regulate a significant amount of the economy, before everything starts crumbling. The left has a myriad of ideas on where to spend this rent on, which is partially handouts to all kind of groups, and partially themselves, their jobs and hobbies. Libertarians say "Well, don't". The people however, are typically not smart enough to understand pro-market arguments, and are happy to be bribed with their own money.
Well then, why not acknowledge the "power of the people" that exists in a democracy, and actually bribe the people with their own money in a straightforward way. "Tear down the administrative state and handout the money to the people" might be more of a popular platform then "Mostly cut benefits, and lower corporate tax". The latter might be more true and efficient from an economic perspective, the first might be more effective from a political perspective. Give the poor a tangible and visible slice of the dividends created by making the state more libertarian.
This is essentially no different than a private equity firm convincing it's fellow shareholders to let them take charge of the corporation, to cut waste and boost dividends. A vote in that sense is just a piece of stock, that for archaic reasons cannot be sold.
I think this is a decent idea if and only if the UBI comes along with abolishing most of the federal government. But, it probably won't work, for the same reason that no one else with any other ideas thus far has been able to ever reduce the size of the federal government. If you propose abolishing most of the federal government, the federal government will push back on that idea.
We already had Andrew Yang try to run explicitly on the idea of UBI without attaching it to anything else serious, and that went nowhere. So unfortunately the promise of UBI does not appeal to people nearly enough for something like this to work.
UBI is profoundly anti-conservative and anti-libertarian/classical liberal.
At least as it is discussed today.
If it were possible to replace not the whole government, but all other welfare programs federal and state (or at least federal funding for state ones) besides healthcare and Social Security, then UBI would be Milton Friedman’s Negative Income Tax, and not necessarily stupid depending on the dollar amount.
But the chances of that happening - and staying that way, without additional welfare programs added back in subsequently - are precisely zero.
If it could replace Medicaid, Medicare, and social security, then the UBI might be high enough to make it politically palatable to get rid of the other welfare programs. Of course telling a bunch of retiree and soon to be retiree voters that they aren't going to get the money they promised themselves younger taxpayers would pay them is a political non-starter.
Rather than focus on political impossibilities, I wish conservatives would just focus on getting all welfare, or at least all welfare other than Medicare and Social security, in one department with all means testing tied together and the implicit marginal tax rate limited to something like 75%. Ideally it'd be more like 50% but that's probably not feasible with how much welfare money is available.
That wouldn't necessarily even save any money, but at least it would stop discouraging people from improving their situation because they don't want to lose welfare payments.
No its not, the Republican party did ubi in Alaska. Modern conservatism is just classical liberal economics at this point. However historic conservatism like Russel Kirk(not Charlie) for example, one Nation conservatism and paternalistic conservatism is not against social programs. Especially if it's something like UBI. Many of them are even explicitly anti capitalist like in Kirk's case. Of course this was back when classical liberalism was still recognized as a left wing movement. Although im Kirk's case they where already making the transition to the right for soke reason. slowly over time it took over the right. However we're starting to see the Paternalistic conservatives make a come back
First, the Alaska Republican Party of Lisa Murkowski is far from conservative.
My fondest wish would be that modern conservatism were nothing more than classical liberal economics! But sadly it is far from that.
Anti-capitalist has never been “conservative”, at least in the context of this country.
And I never said anything like the blanket statement of “conservatism is against social programs”
Finally, where you refer to Paternalistic conservatives (as you can imagine, I am definitely not one), said paternalism was almost never about economics.
That's not how that works. Murkowski is only one person. You need far more than just her. Also Alaska is pretty red and they keep voting for her so clearly they disagree that shes not conservative to some degree
Its a pragmatic version. They see free markets as as the ideal and all that stuff. Now of course you have the more economic nationalist people coming in like trump and bannon which is changing that but the Reaganomics is still alive and well. Its a kind of slow tradition into a more populist, nationalist, Paternalistic conservatism but still leans far more on the classical liberal economics.
Look into Russel Kirk he was not just some random American conservative he was an extremely popular conservative who was openly anti-capitalistic
Economics is part of if. If you have duties to people in your society that also includes economically. When you look at paternalistic conservatives of the past they where generally market skeptics. Doesn't mean they supported massive social programs but they did support restraining the market in some shape or form. Sometimes even to a large degree. In the UK for example Paternalistic conservatives would be labeled red torries because of how much they where skeptical of the market. Implying they where communist or had communist sympathies
The market loving people are the classical liberals while conservatives historically speaking and modern left wingers are market skeptics
This is a seriously dumb idea. Any UBI will be subject to the "it's not enough" chorus. You create a permanent dependent class that will become multigenerational. There will be constant pressure to steal more from the productive class.
Seriously, another welfare program is not a good idea.
That's why you don't make it another welfare program. You make it a REPLACEMENT for welfare. Ideally via negative-income tax. Abolish the whole Social Security department and just have the IRS manage NIT.
Arguably that is the path Trump sort of took, with the result that he brought over blue collar types that used to be Democrats. If you could find someone intelligent (and lacking in scandals) to implement it, maybe JD Vance for instance, I think it could be very popular.
“among [the GOP] base there is organic demand for conspiracy theories, fake news, and other kinds of stupidity”
Richard being Richard again- 85% brilliant, 15% infuriating. Mixed in with an otherwise very good piece is this ridiculous assertion.
So the Dem base isn’t equally into conspiracy theories and fake news? Russia collusion remains the ultimate conspiracy theory of our time. Trump is a dictator, Hunter laptop was fake, COVID didn’t come out of Wuhan, Trump is antisemitic, etc., etc., etc. One of the few places calling for balance, and yet Richard feels compelled to take the leftist position.
Yes, we get it that you feel the need to distinguish yourself from the alt-Right fringe, Richard. And that you dislike the MAGA base. But the idea that it is only, or even primarily, the right that eats up conspiracy theories and fake news is absurd.
I’d be happy to wager that a larger percentage of Dem voters believe their fake news and conspiracy theories than do GOP voters.
More importantly re what Richard claims to care about, a massively higher proportion of “High Status” leftists believe their conspiracy theories and fake news than do “High Status” rightists.
You are wrong. Someone should be able to tell conservatives believe more lies and fake information just by consuming a broad media diet. If you don't see that, you're biased or your sources of information are. If you need empirical confirmation, here it is: https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1755278869983302014
Also I came close to suspending you for questioning my motives, but I did not because it was only a small part of your post. So don't do that anymore.
That study is laughably biased. One of their "fake news" headlines: "A Canadian man was fined $55,000 for describing a transgender female political candidate as male." The reality: A Canadian man was fined $55,000 in damages for describing a transgender female political candidate as male... repeatedly! On hate fliers! Totally fake news! Straight from West Canada's largest newspaper:
One of the most egregious examples, but if you think that's me cherry picking, keep in mind that in the real sciences, you don't get to defend forging only a couple of data points by saying the majority are still good.
And that's merely an example of flaws at the factual/honesty level. Think of it another way from the experimental method side of things: you're a conservative who reads too much culture war Fox News stuff and watched Tucker Carlson, you hear crazy trans-related stories and lawsuits/fines all the time. Whether or not you knew of this particular (somewhat obscure) Canadian story, it would be plausible even if it were false, or if the actual fine was $550, or whatever secondary matter.
The study has no way of differentiating popular perceptions of stories that concern a factual matter with disputed perceptions vs outright schizophrenia/fabrications. The study treats correctly knowing approval rating numbers (one "fake news" headline was Trump having a 53% approval rating his second year when it was actually 40%; kind of petty) with the same gravity another fake news headline about Facebook allowing users to discuss assassinating Trump while he was president (obviously insane).
The study is pure open-access drivel and redditor midwit feed.
The reason I don't engage with you is because you seem very disturbed. And I saw your post questioning my motives, which you won't get away with here. Banned for a month.
Yeah but a lot of what is considered lies and fake news us actually just true or at least up in the air. There was a study done on this and the more left wing someone was the more wrong they were about how many black people are killed by police each other. Many of these left wingers believe like thousands lol
That's pure numbers so its simple to see what's true amd whats not. All this other stuff is like well what's really true? Its not necessarily definitive
It's not just believing in stupid things, it's the KIND of stupid things. Rightoidia's most popular stupid things are just much crazier, obviously-wrong moron-test stuff that repel educated people, like Satanic pedophilia rings. Not merely misplaced priorities based on not knowing the correct statistics. Hence why morons like Candace Owens are way more popular than actually-smart people like Steve Sailer.
Remember, lefties believe that you can "change your gender." The idea that there are Satanic pedophile rings among the elite is at least half true; we know that elite pedophile rings absolutely do exist, because every so often one of them gets exposed to at least some degree. And the notion that some of these elites also take an interest in the occult is, again, at least more plausible than the idea that "changing your gender" is possible.
And that's just one single insane undeniably false thing that the left takes as axiomatically true. Admittedly, this might be the single most crazy thing the left believes, but still--I could probably rattle off 5 more from the top of my head without having to try too hard. Another thing to remember is that left-wing lunacy is often universally accepted dogma on their side of the aisle, while people who believe in QAnon remain a fringe minority of the overall right.
When you put forward this narrative that the right is just so obviously crazier than the left, I think you're accepting the left's framing way too easily. There seems to be this unspoken and unjustified notion that QAnon is a special kind of crazy that goes above and beyond everything else for some reason.
Except rightoids clearly aren't actually interested in legitimate cases of pedophilia, because they've ignored every single one of DJT's signs of pedophilia, including the fact that he was far more likely to've been responsible for suiciding Jeffrey Epstein than Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham, seeing as how he had just as many ties to the guy, as well as extensive ties to rapists and pedophiles like Hefner, Giuliani, Michael Jackson, and George Nader. It's all demented "every single Dem and RINO is a pedophile, but not OUR Dem/RINO!" partisan fever fits, hence why serious people don't take any of it seriously.
The gender thing is just an extreme extension of the same blank-slatism that is accepted as fact by the majority of the population, including most rightoids, to this day, and which has been the default elite position for much longer. It's just most people aren't crazy or fanatical enough to follow it through to its logical conclusion. It's a wrong belief, but it's a wrong belief that's nonetheless based on a more diluted, though nonetheless extremely popular, wrong belief. It's not just crazy, nakedly-partisan lizard-people stuff. We've been laying the groudwork for it for all of living memory.
>Except rightoids clearly aren't actually interested in legitimate cases of pedophilia, because they've ignored every single one of DJT's signs of pedophilia, including the fact that he was far more likely to've been responsible for suiciding Jeffrey Epstein than Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham, seeing as how he had just as many ties to the guy, as well as extensive ties to rapists and pedophiles like Hefner, Giuliani, Michael Jackson, and George Nader.<
Oy vey, are you saying that Donald Trump is a secret pedophile rapist that had Epstein killed and got away with it? That sounds like some conspiracy thinking to me, bucko! Slow down with the tinfoil there!
>The gender thing is just an extreme extension of the same blank-slatism that is accepted as fact by the majority of the population, including most rightoids, to this day, and which has been the default elite position for much longer. It's just most people aren't crazy or fanatical enough to follow it through to its logical conclusion. It's a wrong belief, but it's a wrong belief that's nonetheless based on a more diluted, though nonetheless extremely popular, wrong belief. It's not just crazy, nakedly-partisan lizard-people stuff. We've been laying the groudwork for it for all of living memory.<
Which would, as I've said in other comments, actually make it far more dangerous. You are arguing--correctly--that this false belief is much harder for people to spot and is far more readily accepted by the general population.
I *do* agree that on average right wing fake news is crazier than left wing fake news. But that wasn’t the claim.
I have little issue that the right wing fringe is crazier than the left wing fringe. But that also wasn’t the claim.
Richard’s claim is that rightists as a group believe more fake news and conspiracy theories than leftists as a group, and that this is *obvious*. I acknowledge that it’s *possible* that it’s true. But I haven’t seen anything remotely like conclusive evidence to that effect, including what Richard has put forth. At minimum the claim that it is *obvious* is highly suspect.
Read the tweet Richard posted for an explanation. Obviously there are plenty of liberals who believe stupid things, but because they *generally* have higher IQs and a broader media diet, they are less likely to believe falsehoods.
That's not how that works. People who have higher iq's also are more trusting which allows them to be duped more easily by sources that they trust. A high iq is of course a good thing generally but everything has its pros and cons, including IQ.
Data shows conservatives are much more likely to consume media outside their political views. Not to mention the study ive seen shows liberals are far more likely to believe falsehoods
At least from a statistical standpoint. Other things can be contested like for example was the 2020 election rigged. The real answer is no one actually knows for sure. Everyone speculates based on this fact or that fact and both sides seem to be absolutely sure in their views but do we actually know for sure? Absolutely not.
Feels like lefties have been wrong on the BIG narratives in the past 5 years: namely effectiveness COVID NPIs and Russia collusion. They were confidently and persistently wrong in a way that conservatives haven't been since the Iraq WMDs.
Being right of center and consuming mainstream media, I indeed consume a broad media diet. I confess that I don’t consume right fringe media. Breitbart is too extreme for me, let alone anything further out than that.
But of course if you get to determine unilaterally that the mainstream media is “generally accurate” (I found your view on the accuracy of media relative to Bryan Caplan’s particularly weak, at least as it relates to all things politically related), and you don’t weight anything based on the cultural importance and number of unique viewers of media, then of course your claim is almost tautologically true. But if, e.g. you limit your definition of media to be only those listed on Allsides.com media bias chart (let alone only those in the leans left vs leans right columns of that chart) the idea that right of center media puts out more lies and conspiracy theories than left of center media does is imo preposterous.
If your claim were limited to “rightist whackos believe more far right garbage than leftist whackos believe far left garbage” (again, using the Allsides chart to bound the problem), I would almost certainly agree with you, and I would surely not argue with you.
But I would suggest that reality is asymmetric here; within the broad boundaries of normalcy (I think you use the term “normies”), there is much more fake news on the left than on the right. I will stop making claims about exactly what people believe, because that is almost impossible to know.
But you are making your claim about *all* people right of center vs *all* people left of center. At best you can say “well I think I’m right about that claim”; I still disagree. But for you to be *certain* about that claim is not actually based in either reason or evidence. Whether the topic is amount of fake news/conspiracy theories, or the even murkier topic of who believes it.
I just gave you a paper showing that fake news gets shared a lot more on the right than the left, and it’s not even close. This confirms that the audience for misinformation is much higher on the right as I said. Moreover, liberals are more likely to admit things against the interest of their side. This is so obvious from the stolen election cult, which is still a major issue in the Republican Party while democrats haven’t been running and purging people over Russiagate. They moved on because they care a lot more about truth and will admit they’re wrong. See also MSM admitting they were wrong about school closures, while conservative anti-vax sentiment gets only stronger.
Actually Richard, recent studies have shown that engagement with fake news does not equate to believing it (I’ll grant it to you it is weird). Even when readers of misinformation perceive a piece as inaccurate they were still more likely to share it/engage it while still preferring mainstream accurate news. Your larger point holds that sharing misinformation is problematic and the right does it more, but my point is that based on this data and study, sharing misinformation is not the same as believing as you originally implied.
It's absurd that you actually accept social studies papers that boil down to "left is super smart, right is super dumb".
Do you realize and understand that you aren't capable of detecting 100% of the pseudo-science coming out of academia? You appear to think you're capable of always catching it, which is a really common fallacy amongst public intellectual types, but you aren't. Academics get to spend all day every day coming up with ever more plausible sounding pseudoscience, there are millions of them, and you spend a few minutes to look over a paper and try and spot the problems. You are never going to succeed all the time.
There are some sources you just should not try to use to support an argument, and academic "studies" on a topic they could not be more biased on is one of those.
"Do you realize and understand that you aren't capable of detecting 100% of the pseudo-science coming out of academia?"
Right, which is why I cite a well done study when it is consistent with what I see in the world. I've spent decades paying attention to conservative and liberal media across a wide variety of sources.
"Conservatives are dumber and more dishonest than liberals" is like "the girls on Fox are prettier than MSNBC." It's so self-evident that if you can't accept it you are blind. I'm providing a study if you need it, but the fact that you need it shows it's probably hopeless. Sort of like race and IQ.
I want to be clear about this, cause words matter. Believing more things that are lies is not being dishonest. Based on the study you cited it wasn’t the number of true statements believed that differed between ideologies. It was just the number of falsehoods. Remember conservatives are more likely to have an uncritical way of processing the world, this arises in the form of “just world theory”, or “system justification theory”. A simpler way to say it is that they believe more than others that systems work the way they were intended and there is no need to challenge the assumption (controlling for ingroup bias of course) that they are not. Therefore when misinformation comes they “lazily” tend to believe it. This as opposed to intelligence, which plays a factor, is another large part of it that I believe you miss. The way to show “more dishonest” would be to see if conservatives share or engage with emails knowing they are false more than liberals. And based on the study that looked at that (supplementary) there is no difference in partisanship interacted with accuracy perception and sharing it.
I mean, I see the exact opposite. How is simply repeating variants on "this is obvious which is why I cited a bad study because it's obvious" going to convince anyone anyway? And there are people reading outside the USA. The prettiness or lack thereof of news anchors is hardly "obvious" to people who form judgements based on different sets of liberal or conservative media.
I do find it bizarre that he used to tell us social science was fake, liberals just confirming their priors about how they're better than conservatives, and now he's unironically citing that.
I won’t try to argue the rest of your points, though I find most (save the school closures one) unconvincing.
But even if I accept as gospel truth that “fake news” gets shared more often by the right than the left, and even if we completely ignore the “is it the fringes disproportionately or representative of the whole group” issue you note, it still doesn’t prove your point. Because the left need not share their own fake news nearly so much, as the MSM and Big Tech do it widely and daily for them.
But again, your point is tautological if you get to declare unilaterally that what the MSM puts out is by definition not fake news.
If this were 2015 I’d be generally willing to accept that view.
In 2024, not just me but pretty sure that smart folks like Victor Davis Hanson and Bryan Caplan don’t agree with your espoused view of MSM journalistic validity and credibility. And that does now seem to be the biggest portion of our disagreement.
The false beliefs of the left are much more dangerous in large part specifically because they have an outsized role in shaping the culture.
It doesn't matter how many MAGA boomers believe in QAnon, there's not going to be any kind of "QAnon Act" passed through Congress which re-shapes society based on those false beliefs. It won't happen. But this actually did happen with the lie of racial equity and "Civil Rights." And not only did it happen but its consequences have been extremely durable and nigh-impossible to reverse.
I'm not convinced that left-wing mass delusions are less dangerous in a more general sense either. The most "harmful" right-wing "conspiracy theory" I can think of is anti-vaxx stuff, and I use quotation marks there because I think it's still very much up for debate exactly how good vaccines are or aren't. On the other hand a common delusion believed by every left-winger I've ever met is the idea that we need to minimize or somehow entirely ban the use of fossil fuels because of "climate change." If I had to pick between no more vaccines or no more energy, which one do I think would probably be worse for society overall? I can believe that no more vaccines might be bad, but if I had to pick, I'm probably going with that over basically banning energy itself.
Much more harmful is the idea that the election was stolen, because if Biden wins by a narrow margin, Trump will have to take over by force if he is to become president.
As for the fossil fuels thing, do you really think we will be burning fossil fuels forever, that they were never going to run out? And if we eventually stop using them because they run short, how is it any different if they become too expensive to use because of the unpleasant side effects.
>Much more harmful is the idea that the election was stolen, because if Biden wins by a narrow margin, Trump will have to take over by force if he is to become president.<
Yeah, we already had a trial run of this, remember? Nothing much happened. If there was some real possibility that conservatives coping with their "stolen election" narrative would actually lead to some sort of coup that ushers in Trump as the orange God-Emperor, you could try to make a case from that. But there is no chance of that happening. Only the military could make that happen. A bunch of disgruntled boomers who watch InfoWars aren't going to pull it off.
Admittedly, the stolen election narrative has inspired more real-world consequences than QAnon, in the sense that it did at least inspire one single notable event we can point to. But that's still peanuts compared to the Summer of Floyd alone, never mind the rest of everything driven by leftist delusions. Jan. 6 aside, conservatives have proven themselves unwilling to do anything more dangerous than grumble on social media. It'll be the same this time around except there won't even be a Jan. 6 for lefties to point at.
>As for the fossil fuels thing, do you really think we will be burning fossil fuels forever, that they were never going to run out? And if we eventually stop using them because they run short, how is it any different if they become too expensive to use because of the unpleasant side effects.<
If it is true that we are going to "run out" of fossil fuels, then we should be desperately devoting huge amounts of effort towards calculating *exactly when that will be*, because if that actually happens, that will be what marks the end of society as we know it. Not the heckin' climate change. Actually ending the use of fossil fuel would result in unprecedented upheavals, the likes of which are hard to even theorize about.
Nuclear would be our only hope to maintain anything of what we hope now, but that would still require a lot of re-structuring. You can't run planes and cars on nuclear. Luckily, you *can* run cargo freighters on it, but there is currently only one operating nuclear cargo ship in the entire world (it's Russian)! How crazy is that? People claim that we're going to either run out of oil or die of climate change, and there is not one peep about switching our fleets over to nuclear? Or do we think that all the ships are going to somehow operate on windmills? That alone shows me that the people talking about fossil fuels from a left-wing viewpoint are simply not serious, full stop.
Going back to the idea of fossil fuels "running out," again, if someone were serious about this, they would start by at least trying to estimate how much time we have left to prepare so that the transition to nuclear and everything else that would go along with that, such as the end of cars and planes, would be as smooth as possible. The left wing viewpoint is so far divorced from this line of thinking that it's not even funny. Thus, again, leading me to say that left-wing viewpoints on "climate change" are simply delusion (or a big scam/grift, or some of both).
My assumption is that we'll be fine and innovation will take care of whatever comes up, as has always been the case in history thus far. But that will be in spite of left-wing climate activists, not because of them.
There is nothing special about fossil fuels. Oil is just hydrocarbons we extract from the earth. If this cost of this source rises because of the easy-to-extract oil runs low, or the side effects of adding CO2 to the air become too expensive to deal with, then it makes sense to *make* hydrocarbons out of atmospheric CO2, water and sunlight. We are going to need aviation fuel to power airplanes for the foreseeable future, so at some point we going to be making it.
Okay, I'm confused. Your first point was to imply that we are going to "run out" of fossil fuels. Then you say that, actually, we can just make more of them! So which one is it? Why raise the concern of fossil fuels "running out" if we already have the means to just make more? What exactly is your point?
Just because it's unlikely that DJT could succeed in taking over the country by force doesn't mean there aren't a lot of bad things that could happen when a significant portion of the nation now sees terrorism as a legitimate option. This country survived the '60s and '70s by the skin of our nuts. We don't need a repeat.
If we're going to start throwing the word terrorism around, then I repeat, we already lived through some left-wing-inspired terror with the Summer of Floyd, something which was much, much more destructive than anything done by anyone right-leaning anytime in living memory.
The summer of Floyd had riots of a smaller scale than those we have had many times in the past. There is plenty of precedent for not worrying about.
Jan 6 was the first-time force was used in an attempt to replace a duly elected president by someone else by force. We have no precedent; we have no idea where this could lead. They could easily have been successful had they employed firearms. In which case our democracy would already be over.
If DJT faces no consequence for trying to stay in office that means it is acceptable for someone other than the person who was elected to gain the Presidency using force. That invalidates elections and we are no longer a democratic republic. Jan 6, was not successful, but the political and legal battle is, as yet, still undecided.
Our political system is based on elections. If you throw those out then there is no way for course corrections to occur short of civil war.
There are plenty of powerful politicians who have put out Qanon stuff like wwg1wga. Your argument boils down to, right-wing beliefs are worse but don't matter because conservatives don't have much power. That's not a great argument for keeping liberals out of power, it's a great argument for keeping conservatives out of power.
No, my argument is both that and that, even if the right had more power, their whacky beliefs strike me as much less dangerous than those held by the left. Even on COVID, I have no problem saying that the crazy thing believed by the left--that we need to lockdown and mask up everyone indefinitely--was way more dangerous than right-wing anti-vaxx stuff.
If we are theorizing about what might happen if one side has too much power and rope to hang themselves with, we don't have to imagine what it would look like for the left. We already lived through it in the past few years! And if it's actually true that even Republican elites are Q-boomers, that only further proves that QAnon is harmless, because it would mean that despite right-wing politicians believing in QAnon stuff they have yet to put forward a single piece of actual policy based on QAnon! That is a pretty stark contrast to the left's willingness to totally re-shape society around narratives like COVID and George Floyd.
That's because you are looking at the content of the beliefs. That is not the issue. The issue is these beliefs are used to maintain a set of policy preferences that cannot be maintained on its own merits. The RIght used to operate through movement conservatism. That was the conservative movement beginning with Buckley and Goldwater in the 1950's which led to Reagan-Bush-Bush conservatism. Bush II kinda discredited that political movement and the conservatives moved on to MAGA.
Trump was the first MAGA regime. What he did as mostly more Reagan-Bush stuff. There is every reason to believe that a second Trump regime will mean more Reagan-Bush economic policy. But this time he isn't inheriting a delationary economy, but a mildly inflationary one. So when he cuts taxes and boosts deficits he will discourage the Fed from an rate cuts. The when the next panic happens (here I assume the historical 18 year cycle so we are looking at ca 2026) Trump will face a possible depression in the face of inflationary forces. And since the only tool that can deal with this situation (big tax increases on the rich) will not be available to him, he (and we too) will be up the proverbial creek.
That would be the perfect time for Xi to dump his US dollars, and then invade Taiwan. It's risky, but he's a dictator like Putin and Putin invaded Ukraine which still does not strike me as a great move for him.
>That's because you are looking at the content of the beliefs.<
We are discussing whether right-wing crazy beliefs or left-wing crazy beliefs are more dangerous, so yes, I am looking at the content of those beliefs. I am really not sure how the word salad you posted relates to that topic.
Yeah I went off on a tangent. I don't think beliefs right or left matter all that much. Like conservatives getting all worked up about trans kids. If you are on the Right, it's not *your* kids that are going to be affected, unless you are shit for parents. I'm not even on the Right and I don't worry about any of my grandkids going trans. The only guy I know with a trans kid is further to the Left than I. I think it's all political theatre for election purposes like gay marriage bans in 2004 and the "caravans" in 2018.
And then there is this panic about Critical Race Theory in schools. My grandson graduated in 2022. Before that we were working closely with him for a year and a half in order to get him to earn enough credits to graduate high school (he had fail at1-2 courses each year so we intervened to stop him from failing and to catch up--he finished with a 1.7 GPA). So I saw the high school curriculum. It not markedly different from what I had in the seventies. Have you *personally* encountered a problem with CRT in your kids schooling? Is this also a tempest in a teapot?
The downside of anti-vax stuff is that measles and polio come back and thousands of people die. The downside of everyone wearing masks is...that everyone is wearing masks. I'm not sure what your calculations are based on for this comparison.
I don’t know how old you are, so I can’t tell what you mean by “the lie of racial equity and ‘Civil Rights.’”
*IF* you mean the Civil Rights Act of the 1960s was an abomination and you disagree that all people should be treated equally under the law and disagree with MLK’s “judge me by the content of my character not the color of my skin” credo, then I disavow you and want nothing to do with you.
If what you mean is no more and no less than what today’s Social Justice Warriors advocate, then I agree with you at least 95%, and 110% on the issue of energy.
>If what you mean is no more and no less than what today’s Social Justice Warriors advocate, then I agree with you at least 95%, and 110% on the issue of energy.<
I think that this is what I mean, you can tell me if you're getting at something else. I agree of course that everyone should be treated equally under the law. What I mean is that the Big Lie of Civil Rights is the idea that all races are inherently exactly the same in ability, temperament, IQ, or whatever else.
The viewpoint behind Civil Rights was the (now demonstrably false) idea that if you just take away all the bad evil white racism, then racial inequalities would all disappear. The woke garbage that we have to put up with today is a descendant of that lie, and continues to be propped up because so much of the population still believes in that lie.
None of the fringe right wing conspiracy stuff has ever had even the smallest little iota of an impact on society by comparison to this one Big Lie alone, never mind the many others peddled by the left.
I disagree only in your big lie statement and in your claim that “racial inequalities would all (completely) disappear” was either the main reason or driving force behind it at the time. I believe that the truth at the time was much closer to the MLK “judge me by the content of my character”, equality under the law point.
No doubt there were radicals and outright socialists/communists pushing your point back then, but they weren’t driving forces in society or politics at all.
To me it is the modern SJW woke left that is making the claims about equity, etc. that are part of your Big Lie. That is a modern phenomena. It’s been festering and growing in academia since the 60s, no doubt, but it only even started getting out beyond there even a little bit in the 90s IMO, and it’s only really become a society-wide, leftist-consuming ideology in the last 15 years.
"When President John F. Kennedy called on Congress in June 1963 to pass what would eventually become the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he rattled off a string of statistics intended to highlight the nation's continuing racial divide a century after the Emancipation Proclamation.
African Americans born that year, Kennedy said, had "about one-half as much chance of completing high school as a white baby born in the same place on the same day, one-third as much chance of completing college, one-third as much chance of becoming a professional man, twice as much chance of becoming unemployed, about one-seventh as much chance of earning $10,000 a year, a life expectancy which is seven years shorter, and the prospects of earning only half as much."
Obviously, undeniably, the point Kennedy was making here was that passing the Civil Rights Act would close a lot of these gaps or at least go a long way towards closing them. How silly would it have sounded if he got up there and told the truth, which was that racial inequalities might shift around a bit but would ultimately remain large, undeniable and highly visible, and that 50 years later 9 in 10 blacks would still be upset about racism?
Maybe Kennedy really believed that the Civil Rights movement *would* close all these racial gaps and "solve" racism in some real way! That would've been a much more defensible position at the time, because there wasn't yet the counterfactual of how things would develop post-Civil Rights. No one knew how a society without Jim Crow might turn out. But again, it seems pretty undeniable here that Kennedy was telling people it would involve a lot less racial disparity, and that that was one of, if not the, main reason to support all the Civil Rights stuff.
Ok I no longer get what you’re saying. If you’re a freak about genetics being all- important, I suggest reading Richard’s recent piece on the subject, and the old piece of Bryan Caplan’s he recently republished.
If your point is there’s still a huge culture problem in the black community today, I agree. If your point is that public policies in cities dominated by black votes and black politicians are bad, I’d agree.
But none of that changes one whit the fact that *some* of what Kennedy was talking about at the times *was* actively caused by government, and thank goodness that was eliminated. Jim Crow was a real thing.
It also doesn’t change that *some* of it (not a lot, and certainly not most) was caused by systemic racism that unquestionably existed before the Civil Rights act, and I for one am very glad from a moral standpoint that most of that was changed, in large part by government changing the laws. It was inarguably one of the greatest, if not the greatest, accomplishments of liberals (not Democrats, mind you, but liberals) in the last 70 years. Whatever imperfections there were in the laws passed, they were net goodness. The Civil Rights Act and the Vietnam war were the two things liberals undeniably were right about.
To deny either of the above two points is to be either clueless, a bigot, or both.
None of this is to suggest that leftists are correct that there is still mass *systemic* (institutionalized) racism against blacks in our society overall today, let alone their even more ridiculous claim that systemic racism is worse now than ever. Nor that they are correct that there are no racial or gender differences in people or groups. Nor are they correct that “equity” - equality of outcomes - is a worthwhile governmental objective. But you seem to be going a whole lot further than that, and where you do, I part ways with you completely.
As this blog itself has documented these two traditions are the SAME. The 60s Civil Rights movement built the entire legal infrastructure the current Left relies on and made promises that could only be fulfilled through intensive intervention in every aspect of society.
It built the infrastructure, sure. IMO Richard’s narrative on this point is partially explanatory, but not nearly as much as he claims. No matter.
But the difference is that not only was the Civil Rights act when it happened well intentioned, much (not all, but much) of it was fine when only taken to the levels it was in the 60s and 70s. And 80s and maybe even into the 90s. Principled classic liberals should and do support most of what was in the Civil Rights Act.
At worst, it was a reasonable POV that reasonable people could disagree with in terms of what is optimal for society.
Modern SJW/woke/DEI/CRT/intersectionality / whatever you want to label it, by contrast, is NOT well intentioned. It is (pick your favorite word) evil/immoral/bad/wrong. Let’s just go with wrong. Zero sum anti-capitalist racism and identity politics in the name of correcting past wrongs (both real and imaginary) and delivering equity, not equality, is a terribly bad thing for government to do.
They are not the same, even if you believe that the second was an “inevitable” outgrowth of the first.
It was inevitable because people, for whatever reason, did not and would not tell the truth about race, which is that different races have inherent differences, almost certainly genetic/biological in nature, which will produce inherently different outcomes even in a level playing field free of any overt racism.
The correct viewpoint would be to say that yes, the law should of course favor no one by race, but also to understand that this means racial inequalities will exist, will be extreme in some cases, and will be highly visible throughout society. But people seem to be largely incapable of processing nuance at the level of mass politics; just like so many people who got onto the MAGA train end up denying the 2020 election and the effectiveness of vaccines, basically everyone who got behind Civil Rights ended up believing in total racial equity as an extension of their favored narrative.
I've been observing the GOP base my entire life. They are, in fact, my people - though I have only ever voted for Democrats. And yes, many (too many) of this base are hard-wired to believe bullshit and they have been this way for quite some time. Even many of the educated ones want to be lied to about the federal government which, imho, they hate because they associate it with taking away their "way of life" (slavery) and plunging their people into poverty.
For much of the time I have observed the party, the nutters were a fringe of the GOP - encouraged because their votes were desired, but then patted on the heads like imbecile children and told to hush up. Now, the nutters are in the driver's seat. I see no evidence that the party of Lincoln will survive Trump=Dobbs. As far as I can tell, we're all just waiting for the carcass to stop moving.
I'm 57 and from a family that held slaves in the past. One deceased member of my family served as an high ranking officer in the Confederacy at the end of the war between the states. I'd have to really scan my brain cells for memories of a person who actually owned a slave. In college, I was acquaintances with a very old gentleman - one of the agrarian writers from "I'll Take My Stand" - and he could certainly touch the war but he wasn't a slave owner.
In any event, I stand by my observation. Listen, I think the South is the greatest region in our nation and I would never live anywhere else. But we're certainly not perfect and not without our prejudices - just like every other region.
The most interesting line in this is "the man is just extremely aesthetically unappealing to educated Americans. That is to their credit." I am indifferent to Trump, have no skin in the game, am educated but am not disturbed one whit by his vulgarity, look or feel. So are you saying educated Americans are snobs? And that you are too?
Your analysis there is really off base. Look outside America. The reaction of the left is identical everywhere, even though most countries don't have any equivalent of Trump and that the leaders of the right are "aesthetically" very different. The Le Pen's are articulate blonde females and yet they provoke the same reactions in the left as Trump does. Ditto for Alice Weidel in Germany. Nigel Farage is a former commodities trader who is generally popular (was recently on a reality TV show and his performance was widely respected as gaffe free), doesn't matter, the left loathe him and treat him similarly to how they treat Trump in America.
And what of Bush? I remember similar reactions to him, similar hysteria. Ted Cruz? DeSantis? Heck even RFK Jr.
Your working assumption that there's something special about Trump is way off. Trump's every speech could be Shakespearean and the reaction he'd provoke would be identical. They aren't reacting to the man himself, but what he stands for.
The filter for "aesthetically" unappealing is basically, will this person fit into a New Yorker loft party. Because it's about being having, or at least being able to ape, the mannerisms of cosmopolitan elites. Both Trump and LePen would fail, because their core personalities, unabashed aggression and disdain for those same cosmo elites, make them anathema. And whether you like it or not, these are the mannerisms of the elites, and have consistently been for most of history really.
Liberals hated Bush, but he appealed to plenty of highly intelligent people. There was very little difference between the education levels by party affiliation at that time. Trump brought in blue collar workers and some folks who never voted before and lost the suburbs and college educated. It's not that the left hates Trump, it's that he's drastically changed who is now on the left.
FWIW, I think you are half right. There is something special about Trump, most definitely including the vulgarity, that causes not just the left but centrist and NeverTrump rightist (see Will, George) elites to be more put off by him than by anyone else. Richard is of course correct about this.
However, your point that any successful politician - or persona not a politician, e.g. Musk - on the right in fact gets and will continue to get about 90% of the same crap thrown at him/her by the left is well taken.
I'm in the same boat. I have a very high level of educational attainment and Trump doesn't bother me at all. I do wish he'd go away from an ideological perspective. But aesthetically, he's hilarious. His aesthetics are his most appealing aspect for me. Imagine if you could slap Trump's aesthetics on top of someone like DeSantis who was more of a serious ideologue underneath all the bombastic behavior?
I'm probably an outlier among people with my level of education, though. I definitely find it likely that most highly educated people, if they aren't leftists outright, at least have some reservations about Trump. They're very unlikely to be among the cultist ride-or-die types that treat Trump like the second coming of Jesus.
I suppose I'm of two minds, so I can see both sides. One watches Trump say or do something outrageous and laughs every time. He'd be a hilarious character in a satirical TV show or movie. "I'd buy that for a dollar!"
The other part of me remembers this is real life and despairs that this man is in charge of the party I have no real choice but to vote for.
Scott Greer made a recent insightful observation that Trump is funny, unlike MTG, Boebert, Gaetz, etc. None of the would-be Trumps have anything like his sense of humor or charisma. Despite some claims to the contrary, Trumpism without Trump is looking like something much worse than Trumpism *with* Trump.
"Trumpism" appears to just be a cult of personality centered on, y'know, Trump. So yeah. There isn't going to be Trumpism without Trump himself. It's anyone's guess what right-wing politics will be like post-Trump. Hopefully it somehow manages to be a bit more serious about ideology and less prone to short-sighted "own the libs" mindset.
I find Trump vulgar, so in that narrow sense only I agree with Richard. But if you think that Trumpism is just a cult of personality then you haven’t been paying attention since 2016.
Trump’s base takes him seriously but not literally, and love him because they see him - with a high amount of reasonableness - as the only one fighting for their interests, where the rest of the game is crony rigged in favor of elites and the non-working poor getting handouts.
If you remember nothing else, remember that the one thing Trump and Bernie agree on - the system is rigged - is fundamentally true.
The thing about Trump is that it appears many people have never dealt with brash egotistical in-your-face nouveau-riche vulgar New Yorkers. He's no big deal, and he's not even that uncommon. He is far more rational than he appears, and he is funny as hell. He is a natural bullshitter (in the technical sense) and clearly has been ethically challenged. I am a Canadian and have dealt with his type many times. I am truly indifferent to him. But, his style is extremely off-putting to intellectual and social snobs from the coasts. I think that Victor Davis Hansen and Scott Adams have made the best analyses of why his peeps love him.
I recall seeing a video of him, while president, visiting a firehouse and was signing autographs and he was joking and joshing with the fire guys in a really natural way, and they were all smiling and laughing. It was a nice moment, and while he is always aware there are cameras around he was ignoring media and just having fun. You can see why working people and blue collars like him.
The problem with "elites" thinking trump is aesthetically unappealing isn't that they think he's aesthetically unappealing. It's that they would choose all sorts of harm (bad economic policy, wars, increased crime, etc) over voting for somebody that is aesthetically unappealing. For many of them, it's just poor character because they are mostly insulated from the impacts of their bad decisions and the negative impact to poorer, less politically connected people doesn't bother them. For many of them, it's because they of course aren't really "elite", they are just credentialed and stupid and being in the "orange man bad" camp is them signaling they belong, even thought they don't based on IQ or skills.
I disagree with your reasoning. At least a big chunk of it.
For centrist and right-of-center elites - Exhibit 1A Will, George - I agree with you 100%.
And do understand this same problem also affects a small but significant number of non-elite upper middle class voters, mostly but not entirely women, in suburbia
For the vast majority of leftist elites, OTOH, they are gonna hate the Republican candidate no matter what. The fact that Trump is aesthetically unappealing just makes it that much easier to be more vitriolic about it. But they would do and say 90% of the same things if it were, say, Ted Cruz who was the nominee. And whatever else he is, he's not aesthetically unappealing.
DJT has no desire to make good decisions. All he cares about is popularity, and staying in power and out of prison. So any right-wing position that's unpopular, no matter how badly needed, like entitlement reform or HBD, he'll never touch.
He's also instinctively on the side of every tyrant in the world, no matter how gruesome or depraved, from Putin, to Kim Jong-Un, to Xi Jinping. But said tyrants are incapable of ever seeing America as anything other than a strategic threat, so beyond the immorality of his siding with such men on its own terms, it also fails strategically, much as it's failed every other time our leaders have sided with evil, whether FDR with Stalin, Eisenhower with Nasser, Nixon with Mao, Carter with Khomeini, or Obama with Putin and Khameini.
Trump is unappealing yet Scott Weiner at the gay pride parade is all class. Yes the Americans on the coasts are snobs. Anything that screams lower class white makes them vomit.
1)Also reducing college to 2 years (by eliminating general ed which is where most leftwing classes are and making lower div online)
2)eliminating masters degrees and making law/med school under grad
The faster these people get out of school and paying taxes the faster they meet criteria for conservative and it reduces the social influence of a very leftwing institution that elites have to filter through.
You are assuming education makes people liberal, whereas it could simply be that people who are more liberal are more likely to get an education. And if Richard is right that liberals are more likely to form their own institutions, then they will just create other groups. You can try to fight that but freedom to assemble is kind of big in this thing called the constitution.
Rich is right on this, but it's not as if such classes have zero impact, neither. Especially on account of them being mandatory. If leftoids wanna go off and do them elsewhere, that's their business as long as the rest of us aren't forced to put up with such.
It also makes sense for moral and practical reasons, as these excess classes are a tremendous waste of time and money, and that on its own should be justification enough to oppose them.
Actual studies of college students show them basically moving toward the center, from both the right and left in college.
Colleges are actually made to create socially liberal people, with probably center-left economics, not radicals. Now, yes, if you're a conservative, you might not like your kid comes back saying he has a transgender friend, and has heard from his black classmates about problems they've had with the police, but the idea that colleges create Marxists isn't true.
In the modern world, the Internet creates Marxists.
Even if this is true, it is irrelevant next to the problem of temporal and monetary wastefulness that college encourages. Almost every other good and service in the last century has gotten cheaper and better, and there is zero reason the case can't hold true for education. But it's only grown lengthier, costliet, and stupider.
It's a bad system, and totally unjustifiable from either a moral or practical perspective.
"...look at those in the idea generation space, namely education, journalism, academia, activism, and the arts. I call these the High-Status, Low Pay (HSLP) professions..."
And by "idea generation" you mean "bad idea generation." Those morons have been taught (er, educated) to think alike, virtue signal, and regurgitate exactly what they have been taught by the previous generation of morons. Ask anyone (off the record, of course) where the worst hires come from nowadays and they come EXACTLY from your "High Status" fields. If cancer had half the PR machine the no accountability "High Status" morons had, people would be drinking heavy water like it was the new Pfizer vaccine.
You do have a point that these people dominate the noise and willingly accept whatever anyone says as long as they promise an abortion to boot, including wars. What idea has this group generated that has any significance outside of self-promotion (ultimately self-abuse)? What benefit have these geniuses imparted on society?
Low-morals, low-pay, low-common sense, low-critical thinking people is what they are.
> Those morons have been taught (er, educated) to think alike, virtue signal, and regurgitate exactly what they have been taught by the previous generation of morons.
> What idea has this group generated that has any significance outside of self-promotion (ultimately self-abuse)?
Things could definitely be improved within the current setup, but the Right will always struggle with Low Human Capital as long as it clings to it is, well, "conservatism".
Trump or not (some may say he's not even conservative), conservatism just doesn't click with young people and "HSLP" people (and of course students, since they fall into both categories). Inherently, these categories are all about energy, idealism, and innovation, drawn not necessarily to left-wing ideas, but to notions of actively shaping the future for the better.
Conservatives don't really offer that. By definition, their whole deal is about "conserving" things, but where's the excitement in that?
As Hayek put it, the main flaw with conservatism is that it's destined to lose because it's all about resisting change (in our context, complaining that things are going too woke or something) without offering any real direction forward. To win over High Human Capital, you can't say we should keep "traditional values." Alright, maybe you could pick some of these values that you prioritize, but you have to weave them coherently into a fresh, bold framework filled with inspiring new ideas.
That's why, even though he's supposedly on the right, Javier Milei managed to draw in so many young, educated folks during Argentina's last presidential election. Sure, his approach might not fly in the US because the context is different. But in HIS context, he wasn't about "conserving"; he was all about shaking up the system to pave the way for a brighter future.
I think there is something to the idea of young people usually wanting to create something new.
But I think that urge may be partially artificial, and driven by the fact that we basically keep kids isolated and sheltered in this weird environment called school where the only people they interact with for most of the day are their peers, and a few (generally state-employed) teachers.
The transition from being dependent and taken care of in school, to going out into the 'real world' is often pretty jarring or even frightening.
So maybe that is driving a lot of late teens/early 20s folks into supporting an expansion of the state.
If so, then maybe a possible solution is breaking the current structure of education down some and allowing more of the 'real world' to filter in earlier.
Schools very explicitly tell kids the following: study hard because that way you can get a good job changing things (=being successful and rich), instead of a crappy job sustaining things (=flipping burgers). Parents tell kids this too. Also, schools don't teach kids about all the times people attempted to create progress and ended up making everything worse. I don't recall any part of history at my own schools covering communism for example, nor the explicitly utopian foundations of Naziism.
So it's not a surprise that kids leave school convinced that their role is to change the world for the better, and that it will be trivially easy.
Agreed. Unless the right winged reframes from resuscitating some glorious past to promising some glorious future, it's never going to attract the bright young cohorts, which is arguably the core of every populist social movement (in authoritarian where power is more centralized, this may not be the case, ie. Franco Spain, Nasser Egypt, etc.). Have to credit Hannania for pulling me on this point
I mean, conservatives do have a majority in the house, they have a super majority on the supreme Court and as recently as 2017 they controlled all 3 branches of government. Doesn't seem like losing to me.
>Trump or not (some may say he's not even conservative), conservatism just doesn't click with young people and "HSLP" people (and of course students, since they fall into both categories). Inherently, these categories are all about energy, idealism, and innovation, drawn not necessarily to left-wing ideas, but to notions of actively shaping the future for the better.
Conservatives don't really offer that. By definition, their whole deal is about "conserving" things, but where's the excitement in that?<
This could hypothetically flip when liberalism goes so far and becomes so entrenched that it is now the stagnant status quo rather than the vital new thing which is breaking apart the old system. We may be seeing the beginnings of this now that everyone has lived through a time period where wokeism had undeniably won, at least for a little while. "Conservatism" at that point would no longer mean preserving the status quo, because the status quo is DEI and HR catladies, but rather would come to mean breaking up that stagnant, stifling status quo.
The basic problem is that at that point it's already a dictatorship. Free market libertarianism isn't exactly big with the Chinese youth even though it would be radically progressive, because anyone who supports it gets severely punished.
The continued existence of Elon Musk's X shows that this is not yet the case in the West. I think it's uncertain as to whether we'll get there or not. For a while it looked like the regime was going to be more or less successful in punishing and censoring dissent out of existence. But Elon's Twitter takeover has provided a pretty strong counter-example to that thesis. Maybe this year they'll arrange to have him taken out somehow, who knows. But as it stands X is still there and its owner is still sitting there posting some pretty right wing stuff (extreme right wing relative to his social class) on a regular basis.
I agree and I think that is what is happening today. Conservatives are declaring war on institutions and enjoy LARPing as revolutionaries. Although that doesn't mean that it appeals more to young people, at least so far.
This is an excellent post. One detail worth discussing, however: it's true that the Trump executive branch didn't expand the civil rights regime, but it's not exactly true that all they did was keep the existing regime in place. They also helped entrench it deeper. The Supreme Court had been poised to reject disparate impact liability under the Fair Housing Act in the Inclusive Communities case after already construing identical language in the ADEA to prohibit it, but it ended up upholding it with Kennedy still on the bench. It wasn't necessary to wait for a change in the Court's composition to fix this - all that had to happen was for HUD to issue a reg. Unfortunately, Trump's HUD, under Ben Carson, did in fact issue a reg on the issue but instead of clarifying that the FHA does not cognize disparate impact, it endorsed the incorrect Kennedy-majority ruling and made it that much harder to reverse that ruling even though the current Court would never heave reached it.
Interesting stuff, thanks. I don't agree with much of your worldview but I think you make a good case for it.
I'm just curious, what's your check and balance on plutocracy? Smother by bureaucracy is not a failure mode that's observed too often historically, whereas there is plenty of examples of societies where plutocratic elites become too powerful, power becomes hereditary, and society is led by degenerates until invaded.
Isn't that sort of what's happening right now? Inequality in the US has been rising steadily over time, and it's now a regular thing for presidents and other high-level politicians to mysteriously become super wealthy during their time in office. And as for society being led by degenerates while being invaded, I think that's pretty self-evident at this point.
That does seem to be the trend. But there would still be way to go, in terms of both incompetence and misalignment of their interest with the majority, to plunge the level of much of the world today. Believe or not, most elites are less competent and more corrupt than in the U.S., or the west in general.
I'm aware of that. My point is that under the status quo we seem to be heading in that direction already, so it isn't apparent that there is any real trade-off between competence/corruption and dissident viewpoints. Our current rulers are quickly becoming less competent and more corrupt anyways.
Indeed, when I look at the left (which is the ruling ideology) today, it seems to me that it has been entirely consumed by delusions and scams such as DEI and other woke garbage. Everyone who still at least somewhat values competence and integrity over those things is mostly on the right now (or "centrist" at the absolute best--still placed outside the leftist club). So I'd sooner ask anyone defending the status quo why handing the reigns over to the right would somehow result in more corruption and incompetence than letting the LGBT crowd and other insane people continue running the asylum.
"Presidents and other high-level politicians to mysteriously become super wealthy during their time in office"
It isn't actually mysterious - most of say, the Obama and Clinton's wealth comes from book deals, movie productions, and other totally visible ways to make money.
They aren't say, doing shady real estate deals or pushing foreign governmetns to use the Obama Hotel for trips to DC.
There's some other slightly bipartisanly shady stuff with stocks among legislative members in general, but you fix that by rules that ban stock trading for the most part, and also raise what you get paid to be a Congressperson.
Very recently, perhaps. I would be surprised if it now begins to trend permanently downward, as opposed to any recent decrease simply being a blip in the overall trend.
I think it depends on whether the Fed is able (or wants) to keep the economy at full employment levels. One interesting thing to note is that executive pay has been stagnant for the last 20 years.
I think your article is excellent, as always when you talk about those things, but I don't think the situation is that grim for conservatives. Even in 2020 elections, less than 60% voted for Biden, in a bad year for republicans. They still have 2/5 of the educated electorated to recruit from. But they need to find a way to do this without scare way low education voters.
Richard the only high-status people left in the GOP are religious conservatives, there's a reason the Supreme Court is almost all Catholics now. Without pro-life positions there would be no one left.
Considering that religiosity is declining, it would be better to adopt positions that appealed to yesterday's conservatives. Else the Catholics will die off and then there really won't be anyone left.
>It does not matter how much elite human capital doesn’t like it, wide swaths of the country no longer have abortion clinics, which means that women who aren’t responsible enough to use birth control and who don’t have the means to go to other states are being forced to give birth.<
The idea that a woman who has a child after consensual sex is somehow "undergoing forced birth" is nonsensical. This is the same logic that leftists apply to black people when they riot or engage in other destructive behaviors; the narrative is that these people lack agency because somehow white people actually "made" them do these things, and thus we can't hold them responsible for their actions and must simply allow the behavior to continue unimpeded. Either people have agency or they don't, and the only coherent position is that they do. Selectively applying Schrodinger's Agency when it suits your personal whims is intellectually lazy. Thus "forced birth" could only be argued in cases of rape, which are of course some extreme tiny outlier of abortions. Something like 98% of abortions are "elective," meaning abortions of convenience.
The second point to be made here is that your statement essentially endorses abortion as a means of birth control. If this is the narrative, I must always ask, why draw the line at birth? Children absolutely do not stop being burdens post-birth and I have seen many people say that the actual childcare part of parenting is much more difficult than the process of pregnancy and birth. Why then do we not allow parents to dispose of unwanted infants or toddlers?
This is the kind of thing you need to explain to pro-lifers if you want to "purge" them. The pro-life position rests on the foundational tenet that unborn children are human beings i.e. people just like me or you or a toddler or an infant, simply at an earlier stage of development. In much the same way that you can't defeat wokeism without attacking the underlying tenet that there are no differences between races/genders, you won't change a pro-lifer's mind by coming at them with leftist terms like "forced birth." Anyone who accepts that frame already agrees with you on this issue.
I almost never see abortion advocates seriously try to do this, and the very few times that they try, it doesn't seem to do them any favors. Instead they either stick to leftist framing or, when they're not leftists themselves, do their best to hold their noses and ignore the issue entirely. I would expect that so long as this is the case, with polarization continuing apace, the pro-life position will slowly gain steam on the right and eventually become dominant, in the same way that the old "Chamber of Commerce" Republicans have slowly but inevitably been pushed out and replaced by populism/MAGA.
"I would expect that so long as this is the case, with polarization continuing apace, the pro-life position will slowly gain steam on the right and eventually become dominant, in the same way that the old "Chamber of Commerce" Republicans have slowly but inevitably been pushed out and replaced by populism/MAGA."
Sure, and what will happen is what just happened in an Alabama state legislature special election in a Trump +1 district - the Democrat won by 25 points running basically only on abortion and IVF.
Abortion advocates don't need to argue on the terms of what pro-lifers want, because a near supermajority even in places like Kansas and Montana find them weird and off puttting.
>Sure, and what will happen is what just happened in an Alabama state legislature special election in a Trump +1 district - the Democrat won by 25 points running basically only on abortion and IVF.<
Yes, this is why I specifically said that pro-life will become the dominant position on the right, not in the population in general.
>Abortion advocates don't need to argue on the terms of what pro-lifers want, because a near supermajority even in places like Kansas and Montana find them weird and off puttting.<
But if your thesis is that abortion is a doomsday issue for the right, then unless you're a leftist yourself, you should be *trying* to argue on the terms of what pro-lifers want and convince them out of their position, as otherwise the rest of everything that you support in politics is doomed for turbo-failure, at least if we assume that your perspective of abortion as a political "killer issue" is correct.
Personally, I am skeptical of this extreme "abortion doomerism." Voters have extremely short attention spans. I would guess that within 5-10 years, possibly sooner than that (your doomer viewpoint could be debunked as soon as this year if Trump wins the election), people will settle into abortion being a state issue as the new status quo and stop paying it any special attention.
As demonstrated by Trump and COVID, you can't artificially whip people up into this state of being hyper-scared of something and then maintain that same level of intensity long-term. Emotional fatigue sets in, other things happen in the world, life moves on. And with every year that passes, the general effectiveness of the left's fear-porn apparatus keeps diminishing as more and more people stop paying attention to legacy media.
"Yes, this is why I specifically said that pro-life will become the dominant position on the right, not in the population in general."
Which doesn't help if the peak of the right political strength nationally is around 46-47%, even when a supposedly senile corrupt old man runs for reelection.
"But if your thesis is that abortion is a doomsday issue for the right, then unless you're a leftist yourself,"
I mean, I am a leftist, so I want the 30% hard-right that wants abortion nationally banned, and has done things like put forward open plans to ban abortion nationally in statements supported by 170 of 210 Republican house members to be front facing, at all times. The good news, is until abortion is totally banned, they'll continue to be loud, and do things like try to ban IVF or say the Comstock Laws can ban the abortion pill from being sent in the mail.
The problem for people like Richard is people truly believe abortion is murder, in a way that even most of the Democratic base isn't wedded to any specific position on any issue. They care about this enough to lose.
"Personally, I am skeptical of this extreme "abortion doomerism."
People said this about Dobb and the midterms. People would forget.
People said this about this year. People would forget.
It turns out people don't like the idea of the state, even other states they don't live in banning abortion, just like people didn't think school segregation should be a state issue, and just accept the status quo.
The difference with COVID is there's a new abortion bill to bring up regularly, and as I said, the pro-life said will continue to push for new restrictions, and they'll be supported by groups that purple state candidates went to get endorsements from in a primary, and we'll be able to run ads saying, "John McRepublican was endorsed by the National Ban Abortion Foundation, but he say he's not for abortion bans."
As far as the legacy media goes, I think you guys forget it both ways - much of the pro-choice push is coming from TikTok, X, etc. and other social media, just as much as on 'legacy media.'
>The problem for people like Richard is people truly believe abortion is murder, in a way that even most of the Democratic base isn't wedded to any specific position on any issue. They care about this enough to lose.<
Yes, this is the point of my original comment. Richard (and supporters of abortion in general) only seem to engage with abortion in two ways:
1. Engage in leftist talking points such as "forced birth"
2. Claim that the issue is election kryptonite
Neither one of these will change anyone's mind. In much the same way that most people who become anti-woke do so after learning that underlying tenets of woke ideology are false, the only way you are likely to change a pro-lifer's mind on the issue is to convince him that the underlying tenet of his ideology of false--that abortion is not actually murder. And yet Richard, and other right-wing abortion supporters, never attempt this as far as I've seen.
The idea that Democrats aren't wedded to anything unpopular is also pretty laughable, but I understand that if you're a leftist you're probably incapable of believing otherwise.
From the title I expected a piece on Biden's travails. I now see it's mostly about the other dummy.
Mitt Romney, Thomas Sowell, and George Will are conservatives. Trump is not. Don't people realize that industrial policy and protectionism go against core conservative values - core liberal values as well.
Let's see...pro-life, pro-business, pro-free trade, pro-family, pro-guns, anti-wellfare state...what requirements is he missing for being considered a conservative?
- ridiculous impeachment votes, not once but twice. The first was wrong on the facts. The second was absurd. The first Republican senator in history to vote to convict a president of their own party. To say this is not an indicator of a non-conservative you have to address why EVERY. SINGLE. CONSERVATIVE voted in opposition both times.
- supported the Brady Bill and “assault weapons” bans. “Assault weapons have no place in Massachusetts.” Admittedly now he says he’s changed, but you gotta question the sincerity
- repeatedly supports federal minimum wage increases. In the last 3 years! It ain’t conservative to interfere with the ability of someone to take a job at a wage they are willing to accept.
- just last year advocated for a carbon tax: “If we want to do something serious about global emissions, we need to put a price on carbon.”
Oh, and I almost forgot:
- voted to confirm Kentanji Brown Jackson for the Supreme Court. Only fellow moderates Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski among Republicans did so.
You cannot get elected in MA as a conservative; that alone should tell you something.
Good article. "I suspect that institutions, especially when large, naturally tend towards leftism, and this isn’t anything unique to the current American political landscape."
Robert Conquest’s second law: "Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing."
It seems a bit less profound when phrased as the left simply being what we call people who seek power over others, and the right people who just want to grill. Naturally people who seek power will tend to be the ones who obtain it, and those of a more libertarian bent will not. It's inherent to the respective positions.
There are plenty of rightoids who want to seek power. They're just dumber and less competent on average, because the default position of society is still the equitarian thesis, and if you take said position seriously, you're gonna lean towards left-wing politics.
Where are these "rightoids" who desperately seek power but are too stupid to get it? The smartest people I know are all on the right but none are politically active.
One theory is that smart right-wingers are also usually smart enough to realize that pursuing politics is a bad deal for them personally, and that their energy is better spent on themselves rather than waging pseudo-religious ideological crusades. Thus leaving the intellectual landscape with few people to push back against the left's hordes of highly motivated midwits.
I definitely feel this in my own life and community. Everyone thinks wokeness and associated ills are horrible and insane, but, we are all specialists who can earn far more money and with a far easier life in industry than in politics. There's another factor: exactly because we are specialized and smart most of us have moved away from home to places where the main language is our second language. Politics requires verbal fluency, and a workaday grip on the native dialects won't suffice.
Sometimes I do think about entering politics, perhaps returning to my home country to do so. But my wife would not like it. So .... we suffer in apathetic silence as the most passionate and stupid people drive us all steadily over the edge.
This is perfect.
no we arent dumber as hanania says
Its just like you pointed out, conservatives have to play in a system where the framework works against them.
The 14th amendment is guillty of this, plus other quasi sacred documents, forcing the government to endlessly pursue "equality".
In a conservative moral framework ( God, traditional familiy and nation for example) its liberals who would look like hapless salmons swimming agaisnt the ideological current, so they would look dumb and ridiculous.
left simply being what we call people who seek power over others, and the right people who just want to grill"
This
Hanania gets too lost in mythical studff "the left is smaaarter, duh"
Nah, people that ignore basic human nature is beyond dumb
And one of the mainstays of the left over time, is their belief in DUMB egalitarian fantasies.
And he himself explained it nicely in one of his only 2 or 3 really good articles:
why does everything seem liberal?
because they are more vocal, compromised and pushy about what they want, conservatives being sadly too passive to defend what they believe in, even if they make up roughly 50% of the electorate.
Example: LGBT marriage was mostly received with a collective MEH from most on the right.
And now they are worrying abot trans and LGBT "Education" in schools
The slippery slope is REAL.
The CHURCH has never leaned left and is still very conservative, through 18 centuries
Went to a very liberal Mennonite church for a couple years. Almost everyone came from a conservative family. Amazing pitch in lunches, fun parties, quirky hipster vibe, but an awkward philosophy where everyone knew and rejected the church tradition, but liked church and was unwilling to give it up. The kids were all atheists.
Seems like Churches have a pretty narrow criteria for generational replication / stability, and actually believing in God is crucial for this.
Perhaps you refer to the Catholic church?
My (pacifist) church used to be pro-business and very inclusive of Republicans. Perhaps starting during the Vietnam war in the Sixties, it has become very left wing.
Nowadays, Quakers advocate in favor of all the causes of the left that you might guess: BLM, LGBTQ, Bernie Sanders, "environmental justice", Free Palestine, etc. Over the past 60 years, they have (perhaps inadvertently) driven out anyone who doesn't share left-leaning politics.
I have no first-hand knowledge of other Protestant denominations, but here in Massachusetts they seem to be similarly oriented, flying BLM and rainbow flags.
Quakers have always been odd and regarded as at least somewhat theologically liberal and heterodox, so their history is a little different from the rest of Protestantism.
The history of the US Mainline denominations is this: their seminaries and much of their clergy were largely captured by more liberal theologies starting in the late 19th/early 20th centuries, but for various reasons the extent of their abandonment of traditional Christianity and its historic teachings wasn't always fully obvious or thoroughly realized on the ground until the later 20th century.
Starting in the later 20th century these denominations began to collapse in terms of attendance and membership and be supplanted by the conservative remnant, originally "fundamentalists" and later "evangelicals", though certain more denominational sorts of conservative Christians (e.g. Lutherans) never really bought fully into either of these labels. These days "evangelical" just means "conservative Protestant" in terms of how sociologists of religion classify people.
Now I'm not sure what the numbers look like in Massachusetts, but I imagine that even there you'll find that evangelical churches are more attended than Mainline ones, or at least that the people attending them are much younger. However, Mainline churches will have all the best, most visible real estate. This is true even where I live, in the Deep South -- the Mainline churches are near-empty, the only people present are old or gay, but they continue to occupy historic buildings downtown. The evangelical churches are overflowing but occupy strip malls, warehouses, and simpler, newer structures outside the city center.
Re: "Deinstitutionalization"
Probably not something Richard has thought much about, but note that his statements are largely true about Protestant denominations. Leftist activists tend to capture the denominational machinery and use it to create problems for the actual believing Christians on the ground. Just like Richard's observation about doctors and the AMA, it turns out that believing Christian leaders have a preference for building churches and preaching the Word, not administering denominational machinery.
Conservatives have had a few successes in retaining or recapturing the machinery (e.g. the SBC and LCMS in the 1970s-80s). But mostly defeats (all the Mainlines, most recently the UMC). This is one reason that evangelicalism is largely congregational in polity -- which is to say, independent and decentralized. The centralized churches were almost all captured by a cabal of their enemies. My understanding is the same thing happened to European Protestant state churches (e.g. Church of England).
Although a lot of complaints could be made about the bureaucracies of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, they don't function quite the same way because they have a lot more institutional inertia.
Very interesting on Protestant churches, good example.
I don't really understand how "institutional inertia" helps Eastern Orthodox churches stay pure but not the mainline of the Catholic church. Sounds like it's just not a very cohesive theory.
I put EO and the RCC in the same category.
I have sometimes thought about incorporating UBI, or some other welfarism, as part as the conservative agenda in response to this. Hear me out.
Modern liberal democracies create rent. The government can tax and regulate a significant amount of the economy, before everything starts crumbling. The left has a myriad of ideas on where to spend this rent on, which is partially handouts to all kind of groups, and partially themselves, their jobs and hobbies. Libertarians say "Well, don't". The people however, are typically not smart enough to understand pro-market arguments, and are happy to be bribed with their own money.
Well then, why not acknowledge the "power of the people" that exists in a democracy, and actually bribe the people with their own money in a straightforward way. "Tear down the administrative state and handout the money to the people" might be more of a popular platform then "Mostly cut benefits, and lower corporate tax". The latter might be more true and efficient from an economic perspective, the first might be more effective from a political perspective. Give the poor a tangible and visible slice of the dividends created by making the state more libertarian.
This is essentially no different than a private equity firm convincing it's fellow shareholders to let them take charge of the corporation, to cut waste and boost dividends. A vote in that sense is just a piece of stock, that for archaic reasons cannot be sold.
I think this is a decent idea if and only if the UBI comes along with abolishing most of the federal government. But, it probably won't work, for the same reason that no one else with any other ideas thus far has been able to ever reduce the size of the federal government. If you propose abolishing most of the federal government, the federal government will push back on that idea.
We already had Andrew Yang try to run explicitly on the idea of UBI without attaching it to anything else serious, and that went nowhere. So unfortunately the promise of UBI does not appeal to people nearly enough for something like this to work.
UBI is profoundly anti-conservative and anti-libertarian/classical liberal.
At least as it is discussed today.
If it were possible to replace not the whole government, but all other welfare programs federal and state (or at least federal funding for state ones) besides healthcare and Social Security, then UBI would be Milton Friedman’s Negative Income Tax, and not necessarily stupid depending on the dollar amount.
But the chances of that happening - and staying that way, without additional welfare programs added back in subsequently - are precisely zero.
If it could replace Medicaid, Medicare, and social security, then the UBI might be high enough to make it politically palatable to get rid of the other welfare programs. Of course telling a bunch of retiree and soon to be retiree voters that they aren't going to get the money they promised themselves younger taxpayers would pay them is a political non-starter.
Rather than focus on political impossibilities, I wish conservatives would just focus on getting all welfare, or at least all welfare other than Medicare and Social security, in one department with all means testing tied together and the implicit marginal tax rate limited to something like 75%. Ideally it'd be more like 50% but that's probably not feasible with how much welfare money is available.
That wouldn't necessarily even save any money, but at least it would stop discouraging people from improving their situation because they don't want to lose welfare payments.
Generally agree with the strategy.
"Stacking" of benefits and hence means tests, is a recipe for poverty traps.
Don’t think I can go along with your first line, but I strongly agree with and support your last two paragraphs.
No its not, the Republican party did ubi in Alaska. Modern conservatism is just classical liberal economics at this point. However historic conservatism like Russel Kirk(not Charlie) for example, one Nation conservatism and paternalistic conservatism is not against social programs. Especially if it's something like UBI. Many of them are even explicitly anti capitalist like in Kirk's case. Of course this was back when classical liberalism was still recognized as a left wing movement. Although im Kirk's case they where already making the transition to the right for soke reason. slowly over time it took over the right. However we're starting to see the Paternalistic conservatives make a come back
First, the Alaska Republican Party of Lisa Murkowski is far from conservative.
My fondest wish would be that modern conservatism were nothing more than classical liberal economics! But sadly it is far from that.
Anti-capitalist has never been “conservative”, at least in the context of this country.
And I never said anything like the blanket statement of “conservatism is against social programs”
Finally, where you refer to Paternalistic conservatives (as you can imagine, I am definitely not one), said paternalism was almost never about economics.
That's not how that works. Murkowski is only one person. You need far more than just her. Also Alaska is pretty red and they keep voting for her so clearly they disagree that shes not conservative to some degree
Its a pragmatic version. They see free markets as as the ideal and all that stuff. Now of course you have the more economic nationalist people coming in like trump and bannon which is changing that but the Reaganomics is still alive and well. Its a kind of slow tradition into a more populist, nationalist, Paternalistic conservatism but still leans far more on the classical liberal economics.
Look into Russel Kirk he was not just some random American conservative he was an extremely popular conservative who was openly anti-capitalistic
Economics is part of if. If you have duties to people in your society that also includes economically. When you look at paternalistic conservatives of the past they where generally market skeptics. Doesn't mean they supported massive social programs but they did support restraining the market in some shape or form. Sometimes even to a large degree. In the UK for example Paternalistic conservatives would be labeled red torries because of how much they where skeptical of the market. Implying they where communist or had communist sympathies
The market loving people are the classical liberals while conservatives historically speaking and modern left wingers are market skeptics
Not just Kirk, neither. Milton Friedman was also a supporter of UBI via negative-income tax.
Objectively, it's far superior to welfare, as it accomplishes the goal of alleviating poverty while also greatly reducing the administrative state.
This is a seriously dumb idea. Any UBI will be subject to the "it's not enough" chorus. You create a permanent dependent class that will become multigenerational. There will be constant pressure to steal more from the productive class.
Seriously, another welfare program is not a good idea.
That's why you don't make it another welfare program. You make it a REPLACEMENT for welfare. Ideally via negative-income tax. Abolish the whole Social Security department and just have the IRS manage NIT.
Arguably that is the path Trump sort of took, with the result that he brought over blue collar types that used to be Democrats. If you could find someone intelligent (and lacking in scandals) to implement it, maybe JD Vance for instance, I think it could be very popular.
That's just "reduce the deficit and lower taxes" which is standard fiscal conservatism. Nothing special there.
“among [the GOP] base there is organic demand for conspiracy theories, fake news, and other kinds of stupidity”
Richard being Richard again- 85% brilliant, 15% infuriating. Mixed in with an otherwise very good piece is this ridiculous assertion.
So the Dem base isn’t equally into conspiracy theories and fake news? Russia collusion remains the ultimate conspiracy theory of our time. Trump is a dictator, Hunter laptop was fake, COVID didn’t come out of Wuhan, Trump is antisemitic, etc., etc., etc. One of the few places calling for balance, and yet Richard feels compelled to take the leftist position.
Yes, we get it that you feel the need to distinguish yourself from the alt-Right fringe, Richard. And that you dislike the MAGA base. But the idea that it is only, or even primarily, the right that eats up conspiracy theories and fake news is absurd.
I’d be happy to wager that a larger percentage of Dem voters believe their fake news and conspiracy theories than do GOP voters.
More importantly re what Richard claims to care about, a massively higher proportion of “High Status” leftists believe their conspiracy theories and fake news than do “High Status” rightists.
You are wrong. Someone should be able to tell conservatives believe more lies and fake information just by consuming a broad media diet. If you don't see that, you're biased or your sources of information are. If you need empirical confirmation, here it is: https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1755278869983302014
Also I came close to suspending you for questioning my motives, but I did not because it was only a small part of your post. So don't do that anymore.
That study is laughably biased. One of their "fake news" headlines: "A Canadian man was fined $55,000 for describing a transgender female political candidate as male." The reality: A Canadian man was fined $55,000 in damages for describing a transgender female political candidate as male... repeatedly! On hate fliers! Totally fake news! Straight from West Canada's largest newspaper:
https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/anti-gay-activist-ordered-to-pay-55000-to-b-c-trans-activist-in-fight-over-hateful-flyer
One of the most egregious examples, but if you think that's me cherry picking, keep in mind that in the real sciences, you don't get to defend forging only a couple of data points by saying the majority are still good.
And that's merely an example of flaws at the factual/honesty level. Think of it another way from the experimental method side of things: you're a conservative who reads too much culture war Fox News stuff and watched Tucker Carlson, you hear crazy trans-related stories and lawsuits/fines all the time. Whether or not you knew of this particular (somewhat obscure) Canadian story, it would be plausible even if it were false, or if the actual fine was $550, or whatever secondary matter.
The study has no way of differentiating popular perceptions of stories that concern a factual matter with disputed perceptions vs outright schizophrenia/fabrications. The study treats correctly knowing approval rating numbers (one "fake news" headline was Trump having a 53% approval rating his second year when it was actually 40%; kind of petty) with the same gravity another fake news headline about Facebook allowing users to discuss assassinating Trump while he was president (obviously insane).
The study is pure open-access drivel and redditor midwit feed.
The reason I don't engage with you is because you seem very disturbed. And I saw your post questioning my motives, which you won't get away with here. Banned for a month.
Yeah but a lot of what is considered lies and fake news us actually just true or at least up in the air. There was a study done on this and the more left wing someone was the more wrong they were about how many black people are killed by police each other. Many of these left wingers believe like thousands lol
That's pure numbers so its simple to see what's true amd whats not. All this other stuff is like well what's really true? Its not necessarily definitive
It's not just believing in stupid things, it's the KIND of stupid things. Rightoidia's most popular stupid things are just much crazier, obviously-wrong moron-test stuff that repel educated people, like Satanic pedophilia rings. Not merely misplaced priorities based on not knowing the correct statistics. Hence why morons like Candace Owens are way more popular than actually-smart people like Steve Sailer.
Remember, lefties believe that you can "change your gender." The idea that there are Satanic pedophile rings among the elite is at least half true; we know that elite pedophile rings absolutely do exist, because every so often one of them gets exposed to at least some degree. And the notion that some of these elites also take an interest in the occult is, again, at least more plausible than the idea that "changing your gender" is possible.
And that's just one single insane undeniably false thing that the left takes as axiomatically true. Admittedly, this might be the single most crazy thing the left believes, but still--I could probably rattle off 5 more from the top of my head without having to try too hard. Another thing to remember is that left-wing lunacy is often universally accepted dogma on their side of the aisle, while people who believe in QAnon remain a fringe minority of the overall right.
When you put forward this narrative that the right is just so obviously crazier than the left, I think you're accepting the left's framing way too easily. There seems to be this unspoken and unjustified notion that QAnon is a special kind of crazy that goes above and beyond everything else for some reason.
Except rightoids clearly aren't actually interested in legitimate cases of pedophilia, because they've ignored every single one of DJT's signs of pedophilia, including the fact that he was far more likely to've been responsible for suiciding Jeffrey Epstein than Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham, seeing as how he had just as many ties to the guy, as well as extensive ties to rapists and pedophiles like Hefner, Giuliani, Michael Jackson, and George Nader. It's all demented "every single Dem and RINO is a pedophile, but not OUR Dem/RINO!" partisan fever fits, hence why serious people don't take any of it seriously.
The gender thing is just an extreme extension of the same blank-slatism that is accepted as fact by the majority of the population, including most rightoids, to this day, and which has been the default elite position for much longer. It's just most people aren't crazy or fanatical enough to follow it through to its logical conclusion. It's a wrong belief, but it's a wrong belief that's nonetheless based on a more diluted, though nonetheless extremely popular, wrong belief. It's not just crazy, nakedly-partisan lizard-people stuff. We've been laying the groudwork for it for all of living memory.
>Except rightoids clearly aren't actually interested in legitimate cases of pedophilia, because they've ignored every single one of DJT's signs of pedophilia, including the fact that he was far more likely to've been responsible for suiciding Jeffrey Epstein than Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham, seeing as how he had just as many ties to the guy, as well as extensive ties to rapists and pedophiles like Hefner, Giuliani, Michael Jackson, and George Nader.<
Oy vey, are you saying that Donald Trump is a secret pedophile rapist that had Epstein killed and got away with it? That sounds like some conspiracy thinking to me, bucko! Slow down with the tinfoil there!
>The gender thing is just an extreme extension of the same blank-slatism that is accepted as fact by the majority of the population, including most rightoids, to this day, and which has been the default elite position for much longer. It's just most people aren't crazy or fanatical enough to follow it through to its logical conclusion. It's a wrong belief, but it's a wrong belief that's nonetheless based on a more diluted, though nonetheless extremely popular, wrong belief. It's not just crazy, nakedly-partisan lizard-people stuff. We've been laying the groudwork for it for all of living memory.<
Which would, as I've said in other comments, actually make it far more dangerous. You are arguing--correctly--that this false belief is much harder for people to spot and is far more readily accepted by the general population.
I *do* agree that on average right wing fake news is crazier than left wing fake news. But that wasn’t the claim.
I have little issue that the right wing fringe is crazier than the left wing fringe. But that also wasn’t the claim.
Richard’s claim is that rightists as a group believe more fake news and conspiracy theories than leftists as a group, and that this is *obvious*. I acknowledge that it’s *possible* that it’s true. But I haven’t seen anything remotely like conclusive evidence to that effect, including what Richard has put forth. At minimum the claim that it is *obvious* is highly suspect.
Read the tweet Richard posted for an explanation. Obviously there are plenty of liberals who believe stupid things, but because they *generally* have higher IQs and a broader media diet, they are less likely to believe falsehoods.
That's not how that works. People who have higher iq's also are more trusting which allows them to be duped more easily by sources that they trust. A high iq is of course a good thing generally but everything has its pros and cons, including IQ.
Data shows conservatives are much more likely to consume media outside their political views. Not to mention the study ive seen shows liberals are far more likely to believe falsehoods
At least from a statistical standpoint. Other things can be contested like for example was the 2020 election rigged. The real answer is no one actually knows for sure. Everyone speculates based on this fact or that fact and both sides seem to be absolutely sure in their views but do we actually know for sure? Absolutely not.
the higher IQs suddenly cant define what a woman is
In that case, why not support affirmative action? Since IQ doesn't matter anyway.
Feels like lefties have been wrong on the BIG narratives in the past 5 years: namely effectiveness COVID NPIs and Russia collusion. They were confidently and persistently wrong in a way that conservatives haven't been since the Iraq WMDs.
Being right of center and consuming mainstream media, I indeed consume a broad media diet. I confess that I don’t consume right fringe media. Breitbart is too extreme for me, let alone anything further out than that.
But of course if you get to determine unilaterally that the mainstream media is “generally accurate” (I found your view on the accuracy of media relative to Bryan Caplan’s particularly weak, at least as it relates to all things politically related), and you don’t weight anything based on the cultural importance and number of unique viewers of media, then of course your claim is almost tautologically true. But if, e.g. you limit your definition of media to be only those listed on Allsides.com media bias chart (let alone only those in the leans left vs leans right columns of that chart) the idea that right of center media puts out more lies and conspiracy theories than left of center media does is imo preposterous.
If your claim were limited to “rightist whackos believe more far right garbage than leftist whackos believe far left garbage” (again, using the Allsides chart to bound the problem), I would almost certainly agree with you, and I would surely not argue with you.
But I would suggest that reality is asymmetric here; within the broad boundaries of normalcy (I think you use the term “normies”), there is much more fake news on the left than on the right. I will stop making claims about exactly what people believe, because that is almost impossible to know.
But you are making your claim about *all* people right of center vs *all* people left of center. At best you can say “well I think I’m right about that claim”; I still disagree. But for you to be *certain* about that claim is not actually based in either reason or evidence. Whether the topic is amount of fake news/conspiracy theories, or the even murkier topic of who believes it.
I just gave you a paper showing that fake news gets shared a lot more on the right than the left, and it’s not even close. This confirms that the audience for misinformation is much higher on the right as I said. Moreover, liberals are more likely to admit things against the interest of their side. This is so obvious from the stolen election cult, which is still a major issue in the Republican Party while democrats haven’t been running and purging people over Russiagate. They moved on because they care a lot more about truth and will admit they’re wrong. See also MSM admitting they were wrong about school closures, while conservative anti-vax sentiment gets only stronger.
Actually Richard, recent studies have shown that engagement with fake news does not equate to believing it (I’ll grant it to you it is weird). Even when readers of misinformation perceive a piece as inaccurate they were still more likely to share it/engage it while still preferring mainstream accurate news. Your larger point holds that sharing misinformation is problematic and the right does it more, but my point is that based on this data and study, sharing misinformation is not the same as believing as you originally implied.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2315195121
It's absurd that you actually accept social studies papers that boil down to "left is super smart, right is super dumb".
Do you realize and understand that you aren't capable of detecting 100% of the pseudo-science coming out of academia? You appear to think you're capable of always catching it, which is a really common fallacy amongst public intellectual types, but you aren't. Academics get to spend all day every day coming up with ever more plausible sounding pseudoscience, there are millions of them, and you spend a few minutes to look over a paper and try and spot the problems. You are never going to succeed all the time.
There are some sources you just should not try to use to support an argument, and academic "studies" on a topic they could not be more biased on is one of those.
"Do you realize and understand that you aren't capable of detecting 100% of the pseudo-science coming out of academia?"
Right, which is why I cite a well done study when it is consistent with what I see in the world. I've spent decades paying attention to conservative and liberal media across a wide variety of sources.
"Conservatives are dumber and more dishonest than liberals" is like "the girls on Fox are prettier than MSNBC." It's so self-evident that if you can't accept it you are blind. I'm providing a study if you need it, but the fact that you need it shows it's probably hopeless. Sort of like race and IQ.
I want to be clear about this, cause words matter. Believing more things that are lies is not being dishonest. Based on the study you cited it wasn’t the number of true statements believed that differed between ideologies. It was just the number of falsehoods. Remember conservatives are more likely to have an uncritical way of processing the world, this arises in the form of “just world theory”, or “system justification theory”. A simpler way to say it is that they believe more than others that systems work the way they were intended and there is no need to challenge the assumption (controlling for ingroup bias of course) that they are not. Therefore when misinformation comes they “lazily” tend to believe it. This as opposed to intelligence, which plays a factor, is another large part of it that I believe you miss. The way to show “more dishonest” would be to see if conservatives share or engage with emails knowing they are false more than liberals. And based on the study that looked at that (supplementary) there is no difference in partisanship interacted with accuracy perception and sharing it.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2315195121#supplementary-materials
I mean, I see the exact opposite. How is simply repeating variants on "this is obvious which is why I cited a bad study because it's obvious" going to convince anyone anyway? And there are people reading outside the USA. The prettiness or lack thereof of news anchors is hardly "obvious" to people who form judgements based on different sets of liberal or conservative media.
I do find it bizarre that he used to tell us social science was fake, liberals just confirming their priors about how they're better than conservatives, and now he's unironically citing that.
That's not what I'm depending on. Denying conservatives believe more fake news is as bad as IQ denial.
I won’t try to argue the rest of your points, though I find most (save the school closures one) unconvincing.
But even if I accept as gospel truth that “fake news” gets shared more often by the right than the left, and even if we completely ignore the “is it the fringes disproportionately or representative of the whole group” issue you note, it still doesn’t prove your point. Because the left need not share their own fake news nearly so much, as the MSM and Big Tech do it widely and daily for them.
But again, your point is tautological if you get to declare unilaterally that what the MSM puts out is by definition not fake news.
If this were 2015 I’d be generally willing to accept that view.
In 2024, not just me but pretty sure that smart folks like Victor Davis Hanson and Bryan Caplan don’t agree with your espoused view of MSM journalistic validity and credibility. And that does now seem to be the biggest portion of our disagreement.
"It's not a conspiracy theory if I believe it".
😂
The false beliefs of the left are much more dangerous in large part specifically because they have an outsized role in shaping the culture.
It doesn't matter how many MAGA boomers believe in QAnon, there's not going to be any kind of "QAnon Act" passed through Congress which re-shapes society based on those false beliefs. It won't happen. But this actually did happen with the lie of racial equity and "Civil Rights." And not only did it happen but its consequences have been extremely durable and nigh-impossible to reverse.
I'm not convinced that left-wing mass delusions are less dangerous in a more general sense either. The most "harmful" right-wing "conspiracy theory" I can think of is anti-vaxx stuff, and I use quotation marks there because I think it's still very much up for debate exactly how good vaccines are or aren't. On the other hand a common delusion believed by every left-winger I've ever met is the idea that we need to minimize or somehow entirely ban the use of fossil fuels because of "climate change." If I had to pick between no more vaccines or no more energy, which one do I think would probably be worse for society overall? I can believe that no more vaccines might be bad, but if I had to pick, I'm probably going with that over basically banning energy itself.
Much more harmful is the idea that the election was stolen, because if Biden wins by a narrow margin, Trump will have to take over by force if he is to become president.
As for the fossil fuels thing, do you really think we will be burning fossil fuels forever, that they were never going to run out? And if we eventually stop using them because they run short, how is it any different if they become too expensive to use because of the unpleasant side effects.
>Much more harmful is the idea that the election was stolen, because if Biden wins by a narrow margin, Trump will have to take over by force if he is to become president.<
Yeah, we already had a trial run of this, remember? Nothing much happened. If there was some real possibility that conservatives coping with their "stolen election" narrative would actually lead to some sort of coup that ushers in Trump as the orange God-Emperor, you could try to make a case from that. But there is no chance of that happening. Only the military could make that happen. A bunch of disgruntled boomers who watch InfoWars aren't going to pull it off.
Admittedly, the stolen election narrative has inspired more real-world consequences than QAnon, in the sense that it did at least inspire one single notable event we can point to. But that's still peanuts compared to the Summer of Floyd alone, never mind the rest of everything driven by leftist delusions. Jan. 6 aside, conservatives have proven themselves unwilling to do anything more dangerous than grumble on social media. It'll be the same this time around except there won't even be a Jan. 6 for lefties to point at.
>As for the fossil fuels thing, do you really think we will be burning fossil fuels forever, that they were never going to run out? And if we eventually stop using them because they run short, how is it any different if they become too expensive to use because of the unpleasant side effects.<
If it is true that we are going to "run out" of fossil fuels, then we should be desperately devoting huge amounts of effort towards calculating *exactly when that will be*, because if that actually happens, that will be what marks the end of society as we know it. Not the heckin' climate change. Actually ending the use of fossil fuel would result in unprecedented upheavals, the likes of which are hard to even theorize about.
Nuclear would be our only hope to maintain anything of what we hope now, but that would still require a lot of re-structuring. You can't run planes and cars on nuclear. Luckily, you *can* run cargo freighters on it, but there is currently only one operating nuclear cargo ship in the entire world (it's Russian)! How crazy is that? People claim that we're going to either run out of oil or die of climate change, and there is not one peep about switching our fleets over to nuclear? Or do we think that all the ships are going to somehow operate on windmills? That alone shows me that the people talking about fossil fuels from a left-wing viewpoint are simply not serious, full stop.
Going back to the idea of fossil fuels "running out," again, if someone were serious about this, they would start by at least trying to estimate how much time we have left to prepare so that the transition to nuclear and everything else that would go along with that, such as the end of cars and planes, would be as smooth as possible. The left wing viewpoint is so far divorced from this line of thinking that it's not even funny. Thus, again, leading me to say that left-wing viewpoints on "climate change" are simply delusion (or a big scam/grift, or some of both).
My assumption is that we'll be fine and innovation will take care of whatever comes up, as has always been the case in history thus far. But that will be in spite of left-wing climate activists, not because of them.
There is nothing special about fossil fuels. Oil is just hydrocarbons we extract from the earth. If this cost of this source rises because of the easy-to-extract oil runs low, or the side effects of adding CO2 to the air become too expensive to deal with, then it makes sense to *make* hydrocarbons out of atmospheric CO2, water and sunlight. We are going to need aviation fuel to power airplanes for the foreseeable future, so at some point we going to be making it.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/a-different-way-to-look-at-solar
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-going-to-green-energy-can-lead
Okay, I'm confused. Your first point was to imply that we are going to "run out" of fossil fuels. Then you say that, actually, we can just make more of them! So which one is it? Why raise the concern of fossil fuels "running out" if we already have the means to just make more? What exactly is your point?
Just because it's unlikely that DJT could succeed in taking over the country by force doesn't mean there aren't a lot of bad things that could happen when a significant portion of the nation now sees terrorism as a legitimate option. This country survived the '60s and '70s by the skin of our nuts. We don't need a repeat.
If we're going to start throwing the word terrorism around, then I repeat, we already lived through some left-wing-inspired terror with the Summer of Floyd, something which was much, much more destructive than anything done by anyone right-leaning anytime in living memory.
The summer of Floyd had riots of a smaller scale than those we have had many times in the past. There is plenty of precedent for not worrying about.
Jan 6 was the first-time force was used in an attempt to replace a duly elected president by someone else by force. We have no precedent; we have no idea where this could lead. They could easily have been successful had they employed firearms. In which case our democracy would already be over.
If DJT faces no consequence for trying to stay in office that means it is acceptable for someone other than the person who was elected to gain the Presidency using force. That invalidates elections and we are no longer a democratic republic. Jan 6, was not successful, but the political and legal battle is, as yet, still undecided.
Our political system is based on elections. If you throw those out then there is no way for course corrections to occur short of civil war.
There are plenty of powerful politicians who have put out Qanon stuff like wwg1wga. Your argument boils down to, right-wing beliefs are worse but don't matter because conservatives don't have much power. That's not a great argument for keeping liberals out of power, it's a great argument for keeping conservatives out of power.
No, my argument is both that and that, even if the right had more power, their whacky beliefs strike me as much less dangerous than those held by the left. Even on COVID, I have no problem saying that the crazy thing believed by the left--that we need to lockdown and mask up everyone indefinitely--was way more dangerous than right-wing anti-vaxx stuff.
If we are theorizing about what might happen if one side has too much power and rope to hang themselves with, we don't have to imagine what it would look like for the left. We already lived through it in the past few years! And if it's actually true that even Republican elites are Q-boomers, that only further proves that QAnon is harmless, because it would mean that despite right-wing politicians believing in QAnon stuff they have yet to put forward a single piece of actual policy based on QAnon! That is a pretty stark contrast to the left's willingness to totally re-shape society around narratives like COVID and George Floyd.
That's because you are looking at the content of the beliefs. That is not the issue. The issue is these beliefs are used to maintain a set of policy preferences that cannot be maintained on its own merits. The RIght used to operate through movement conservatism. That was the conservative movement beginning with Buckley and Goldwater in the 1950's which led to Reagan-Bush-Bush conservatism. Bush II kinda discredited that political movement and the conservatives moved on to MAGA.
Trump was the first MAGA regime. What he did as mostly more Reagan-Bush stuff. There is every reason to believe that a second Trump regime will mean more Reagan-Bush economic policy. But this time he isn't inheriting a delationary economy, but a mildly inflationary one. So when he cuts taxes and boosts deficits he will discourage the Fed from an rate cuts. The when the next panic happens (here I assume the historical 18 year cycle so we are looking at ca 2026) Trump will face a possible depression in the face of inflationary forces. And since the only tool that can deal with this situation (big tax increases on the rich) will not be available to him, he (and we too) will be up the proverbial creek.
That would be the perfect time for Xi to dump his US dollars, and then invade Taiwan. It's risky, but he's a dictator like Putin and Putin invaded Ukraine which still does not strike me as a great move for him.
>That's because you are looking at the content of the beliefs.<
We are discussing whether right-wing crazy beliefs or left-wing crazy beliefs are more dangerous, so yes, I am looking at the content of those beliefs. I am really not sure how the word salad you posted relates to that topic.
Yeah I went off on a tangent. I don't think beliefs right or left matter all that much. Like conservatives getting all worked up about trans kids. If you are on the Right, it's not *your* kids that are going to be affected, unless you are shit for parents. I'm not even on the Right and I don't worry about any of my grandkids going trans. The only guy I know with a trans kid is further to the Left than I. I think it's all political theatre for election purposes like gay marriage bans in 2004 and the "caravans" in 2018.
And then there is this panic about Critical Race Theory in schools. My grandson graduated in 2022. Before that we were working closely with him for a year and a half in order to get him to earn enough credits to graduate high school (he had fail at1-2 courses each year so we intervened to stop him from failing and to catch up--he finished with a 1.7 GPA). So I saw the high school curriculum. It not markedly different from what I had in the seventies. Have you *personally* encountered a problem with CRT in your kids schooling? Is this also a tempest in a teapot?
The downside of anti-vax stuff is that measles and polio come back and thousands of people die. The downside of everyone wearing masks is...that everyone is wearing masks. I'm not sure what your calculations are based on for this comparison.
The downsides of young children wearing masks are now well documented (by leftists) with massive deleterious effects to their development.
Do you mind linking them? I'd really love to read about all the deleterious effects that are on par with polio and measles.
I don’t know how old you are, so I can’t tell what you mean by “the lie of racial equity and ‘Civil Rights.’”
*IF* you mean the Civil Rights Act of the 1960s was an abomination and you disagree that all people should be treated equally under the law and disagree with MLK’s “judge me by the content of my character not the color of my skin” credo, then I disavow you and want nothing to do with you.
If what you mean is no more and no less than what today’s Social Justice Warriors advocate, then I agree with you at least 95%, and 110% on the issue of energy.
>If what you mean is no more and no less than what today’s Social Justice Warriors advocate, then I agree with you at least 95%, and 110% on the issue of energy.<
I think that this is what I mean, you can tell me if you're getting at something else. I agree of course that everyone should be treated equally under the law. What I mean is that the Big Lie of Civil Rights is the idea that all races are inherently exactly the same in ability, temperament, IQ, or whatever else.
The viewpoint behind Civil Rights was the (now demonstrably false) idea that if you just take away all the bad evil white racism, then racial inequalities would all disappear. The woke garbage that we have to put up with today is a descendant of that lie, and continues to be propped up because so much of the population still believes in that lie.
None of the fringe right wing conspiracy stuff has ever had even the smallest little iota of an impact on society by comparison to this one Big Lie alone, never mind the many others peddled by the left.
We are pretty close.
I disagree only in your big lie statement and in your claim that “racial inequalities would all (completely) disappear” was either the main reason or driving force behind it at the time. I believe that the truth at the time was much closer to the MLK “judge me by the content of my character”, equality under the law point.
No doubt there were radicals and outright socialists/communists pushing your point back then, but they weren’t driving forces in society or politics at all.
To me it is the modern SJW woke left that is making the claims about equity, etc. that are part of your Big Lie. That is a modern phenomena. It’s been festering and growing in academia since the 60s, no doubt, but it only even started getting out beyond there even a little bit in the 90s IMO, and it’s only really become a society-wide, leftist-consuming ideology in the last 15 years.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/01/19/civil-rights-act-progress/4641967/
"When President John F. Kennedy called on Congress in June 1963 to pass what would eventually become the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he rattled off a string of statistics intended to highlight the nation's continuing racial divide a century after the Emancipation Proclamation.
African Americans born that year, Kennedy said, had "about one-half as much chance of completing high school as a white baby born in the same place on the same day, one-third as much chance of completing college, one-third as much chance of becoming a professional man, twice as much chance of becoming unemployed, about one-seventh as much chance of earning $10,000 a year, a life expectancy which is seven years shorter, and the prospects of earning only half as much."
Obviously, undeniably, the point Kennedy was making here was that passing the Civil Rights Act would close a lot of these gaps or at least go a long way towards closing them. How silly would it have sounded if he got up there and told the truth, which was that racial inequalities might shift around a bit but would ultimately remain large, undeniable and highly visible, and that 50 years later 9 in 10 blacks would still be upset about racism?
Maybe Kennedy really believed that the Civil Rights movement *would* close all these racial gaps and "solve" racism in some real way! That would've been a much more defensible position at the time, because there wasn't yet the counterfactual of how things would develop post-Civil Rights. No one knew how a society without Jim Crow might turn out. But again, it seems pretty undeniable here that Kennedy was telling people it would involve a lot less racial disparity, and that that was one of, if not the, main reason to support all the Civil Rights stuff.
Ok I no longer get what you’re saying. If you’re a freak about genetics being all- important, I suggest reading Richard’s recent piece on the subject, and the old piece of Bryan Caplan’s he recently republished.
If your point is there’s still a huge culture problem in the black community today, I agree. If your point is that public policies in cities dominated by black votes and black politicians are bad, I’d agree.
But none of that changes one whit the fact that *some* of what Kennedy was talking about at the times *was* actively caused by government, and thank goodness that was eliminated. Jim Crow was a real thing.
It also doesn’t change that *some* of it (not a lot, and certainly not most) was caused by systemic racism that unquestionably existed before the Civil Rights act, and I for one am very glad from a moral standpoint that most of that was changed, in large part by government changing the laws. It was inarguably one of the greatest, if not the greatest, accomplishments of liberals (not Democrats, mind you, but liberals) in the last 70 years. Whatever imperfections there were in the laws passed, they were net goodness. The Civil Rights Act and the Vietnam war were the two things liberals undeniably were right about.
To deny either of the above two points is to be either clueless, a bigot, or both.
None of this is to suggest that leftists are correct that there is still mass *systemic* (institutionalized) racism against blacks in our society overall today, let alone their even more ridiculous claim that systemic racism is worse now than ever. Nor that they are correct that there are no racial or gender differences in people or groups. Nor are they correct that “equity” - equality of outcomes - is a worthwhile governmental objective. But you seem to be going a whole lot further than that, and where you do, I part ways with you completely.
As this blog itself has documented these two traditions are the SAME. The 60s Civil Rights movement built the entire legal infrastructure the current Left relies on and made promises that could only be fulfilled through intensive intervention in every aspect of society.
It built the infrastructure, sure. IMO Richard’s narrative on this point is partially explanatory, but not nearly as much as he claims. No matter.
But the difference is that not only was the Civil Rights act when it happened well intentioned, much (not all, but much) of it was fine when only taken to the levels it was in the 60s and 70s. And 80s and maybe even into the 90s. Principled classic liberals should and do support most of what was in the Civil Rights Act.
At worst, it was a reasonable POV that reasonable people could disagree with in terms of what is optimal for society.
Modern SJW/woke/DEI/CRT/intersectionality / whatever you want to label it, by contrast, is NOT well intentioned. It is (pick your favorite word) evil/immoral/bad/wrong. Let’s just go with wrong. Zero sum anti-capitalist racism and identity politics in the name of correcting past wrongs (both real and imaginary) and delivering equity, not equality, is a terribly bad thing for government to do.
They are not the same, even if you believe that the second was an “inevitable” outgrowth of the first.
Lots of incredibly destructive things are well intentioned.
I agree with that statement 100%.
But you have done nothing to buttress your claim that the two traditions are *the same*.
It was inevitable because people, for whatever reason, did not and would not tell the truth about race, which is that different races have inherent differences, almost certainly genetic/biological in nature, which will produce inherently different outcomes even in a level playing field free of any overt racism.
The correct viewpoint would be to say that yes, the law should of course favor no one by race, but also to understand that this means racial inequalities will exist, will be extreme in some cases, and will be highly visible throughout society. But people seem to be largely incapable of processing nuance at the level of mass politics; just like so many people who got onto the MAGA train end up denying the 2020 election and the effectiveness of vaccines, basically everyone who got behind Civil Rights ended up believing in total racial equity as an extension of their favored narrative.
Banned for questioning my motives. Come back in a week if you want to debate ideas instead of launch cowardly attacks.
I've been observing the GOP base my entire life. They are, in fact, my people - though I have only ever voted for Democrats. And yes, many (too many) of this base are hard-wired to believe bullshit and they have been this way for quite some time. Even many of the educated ones want to be lied to about the federal government which, imho, they hate because they associate it with taking away their "way of life" (slavery) and plunging their people into poverty.
For much of the time I have observed the party, the nutters were a fringe of the GOP - encouraged because their votes were desired, but then patted on the heads like imbecile children and told to hush up. Now, the nutters are in the driver's seat. I see no evidence that the party of Lincoln will survive Trump=Dobbs. As far as I can tell, we're all just waiting for the carcass to stop moving.
I'm 57 and from a family that held slaves in the past. One deceased member of my family served as an high ranking officer in the Confederacy at the end of the war between the states. I'd have to really scan my brain cells for memories of a person who actually owned a slave. In college, I was acquaintances with a very old gentleman - one of the agrarian writers from "I'll Take My Stand" - and he could certainly touch the war but he wasn't a slave owner.
In any event, I stand by my observation. Listen, I think the South is the greatest region in our nation and I would never live anywhere else. But we're certainly not perfect and not without our prejudices - just like every other region.
That's NOT what I said. I'll let me words stand for themselves.
The most interesting line in this is "the man is just extremely aesthetically unappealing to educated Americans. That is to their credit." I am indifferent to Trump, have no skin in the game, am educated but am not disturbed one whit by his vulgarity, look or feel. So are you saying educated Americans are snobs? And that you are too?
One of those things that if it has to be explained to you, you just have no credibility on anything.
Your analysis there is really off base. Look outside America. The reaction of the left is identical everywhere, even though most countries don't have any equivalent of Trump and that the leaders of the right are "aesthetically" very different. The Le Pen's are articulate blonde females and yet they provoke the same reactions in the left as Trump does. Ditto for Alice Weidel in Germany. Nigel Farage is a former commodities trader who is generally popular (was recently on a reality TV show and his performance was widely respected as gaffe free), doesn't matter, the left loathe him and treat him similarly to how they treat Trump in America.
And what of Bush? I remember similar reactions to him, similar hysteria. Ted Cruz? DeSantis? Heck even RFK Jr.
Your working assumption that there's something special about Trump is way off. Trump's every speech could be Shakespearean and the reaction he'd provoke would be identical. They aren't reacting to the man himself, but what he stands for.
The filter for "aesthetically" unappealing is basically, will this person fit into a New Yorker loft party. Because it's about being having, or at least being able to ape, the mannerisms of cosmopolitan elites. Both Trump and LePen would fail, because their core personalities, unabashed aggression and disdain for those same cosmo elites, make them anathema. And whether you like it or not, these are the mannerisms of the elites, and have consistently been for most of history really.
So basically, Trump gives prole vibes.
Liberals hated Bush, but he appealed to plenty of highly intelligent people. There was very little difference between the education levels by party affiliation at that time. Trump brought in blue collar workers and some folks who never voted before and lost the suburbs and college educated. It's not that the left hates Trump, it's that he's drastically changed who is now on the left.
It certainly wasn't presented that way at the time. Bush was roundly derided as stupid and the people who supported him were all painted as hicks.
FWIW, I think you are half right. There is something special about Trump, most definitely including the vulgarity, that causes not just the left but centrist and NeverTrump rightist (see Will, George) elites to be more put off by him than by anyone else. Richard is of course correct about this.
However, your point that any successful politician - or persona not a politician, e.g. Musk - on the right in fact gets and will continue to get about 90% of the same crap thrown at him/her by the left is well taken.
I'm in the same boat. I have a very high level of educational attainment and Trump doesn't bother me at all. I do wish he'd go away from an ideological perspective. But aesthetically, he's hilarious. His aesthetics are his most appealing aspect for me. Imagine if you could slap Trump's aesthetics on top of someone like DeSantis who was more of a serious ideologue underneath all the bombastic behavior?
I'm probably an outlier among people with my level of education, though. I definitely find it likely that most highly educated people, if they aren't leftists outright, at least have some reservations about Trump. They're very unlikely to be among the cultist ride-or-die types that treat Trump like the second coming of Jesus.
I suppose I'm of two minds, so I can see both sides. One watches Trump say or do something outrageous and laughs every time. He'd be a hilarious character in a satirical TV show or movie. "I'd buy that for a dollar!"
The other part of me remembers this is real life and despairs that this man is in charge of the party I have no real choice but to vote for.
Scott Greer made a recent insightful observation that Trump is funny, unlike MTG, Boebert, Gaetz, etc. None of the would-be Trumps have anything like his sense of humor or charisma. Despite some claims to the contrary, Trumpism without Trump is looking like something much worse than Trumpism *with* Trump.
"Trumpism" appears to just be a cult of personality centered on, y'know, Trump. So yeah. There isn't going to be Trumpism without Trump himself. It's anyone's guess what right-wing politics will be like post-Trump. Hopefully it somehow manages to be a bit more serious about ideology and less prone to short-sighted "own the libs" mindset.
I find Trump vulgar, so in that narrow sense only I agree with Richard. But if you think that Trumpism is just a cult of personality then you haven’t been paying attention since 2016.
Trump’s base takes him seriously but not literally, and love him because they see him - with a high amount of reasonableness - as the only one fighting for their interests, where the rest of the game is crony rigged in favor of elites and the non-working poor getting handouts.
If you remember nothing else, remember that the one thing Trump and Bernie agree on - the system is rigged - is fundamentally true.
That is a good observation, his base takes him seriously, but not literally.
It is an excellent observation, but I can't take credit for it; it was coined by Salena Zito of The Atlantic:
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/4302014-she-saw-trump-coming-in-2016-better-than-anyone-what-does-salena-zito-see-for-2024/
The original [paywalled]: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/trump-makes-his-case-in-pittsburgh/501335/
The thing about Trump is that it appears many people have never dealt with brash egotistical in-your-face nouveau-riche vulgar New Yorkers. He's no big deal, and he's not even that uncommon. He is far more rational than he appears, and he is funny as hell. He is a natural bullshitter (in the technical sense) and clearly has been ethically challenged. I am a Canadian and have dealt with his type many times. I am truly indifferent to him. But, his style is extremely off-putting to intellectual and social snobs from the coasts. I think that Victor Davis Hansen and Scott Adams have made the best analyses of why his peeps love him.
I recall seeing a video of him, while president, visiting a firehouse and was signing autographs and he was joking and joshing with the fire guys in a really natural way, and they were all smiling and laughing. It was a nice moment, and while he is always aware there are cameras around he was ignoring media and just having fun. You can see why working people and blue collars like him.
The problem with "elites" thinking trump is aesthetically unappealing isn't that they think he's aesthetically unappealing. It's that they would choose all sorts of harm (bad economic policy, wars, increased crime, etc) over voting for somebody that is aesthetically unappealing. For many of them, it's just poor character because they are mostly insulated from the impacts of their bad decisions and the negative impact to poorer, less politically connected people doesn't bother them. For many of them, it's because they of course aren't really "elite", they are just credentialed and stupid and being in the "orange man bad" camp is them signaling they belong, even thought they don't based on IQ or skills.
Aesthetics are not the reason elites don't like Trump. It's because they have read history and understand the dangers of demagogues in a democracy.
I disagree with your reasoning. At least a big chunk of it.
For centrist and right-of-center elites - Exhibit 1A Will, George - I agree with you 100%.
And do understand this same problem also affects a small but significant number of non-elite upper middle class voters, mostly but not entirely women, in suburbia
For the vast majority of leftist elites, OTOH, they are gonna hate the Republican candidate no matter what. The fact that Trump is aesthetically unappealing just makes it that much easier to be more vitriolic about it. But they would do and say 90% of the same things if it were, say, Ted Cruz who was the nominee. And whatever else he is, he's not aesthetically unappealing.
DJT has no desire to make good decisions. All he cares about is popularity, and staying in power and out of prison. So any right-wing position that's unpopular, no matter how badly needed, like entitlement reform or HBD, he'll never touch.
He's also instinctively on the side of every tyrant in the world, no matter how gruesome or depraved, from Putin, to Kim Jong-Un, to Xi Jinping. But said tyrants are incapable of ever seeing America as anything other than a strategic threat, so beyond the immorality of his siding with such men on its own terms, it also fails strategically, much as it's failed every other time our leaders have sided with evil, whether FDR with Stalin, Eisenhower with Nasser, Nixon with Mao, Carter with Khomeini, or Obama with Putin and Khameini.
Agree.
Trump is unappealing yet Scott Weiner at the gay pride parade is all class. Yes the Americans on the coasts are snobs. Anything that screams lower class white makes them vomit.
And I totally get that Trump can be vulgar. It just doesn't bother me, and many others.
Great example, the desires of the aesthetes is selective.
Richard
1)Also reducing college to 2 years (by eliminating general ed which is where most leftwing classes are and making lower div online)
2)eliminating masters degrees and making law/med school under grad
The faster these people get out of school and paying taxes the faster they meet criteria for conservative and it reduces the social influence of a very leftwing institution that elites have to filter through.
You are assuming education makes people liberal, whereas it could simply be that people who are more liberal are more likely to get an education. And if Richard is right that liberals are more likely to form their own institutions, then they will just create other groups. You can try to fight that but freedom to assemble is kind of big in this thing called the constitution.
Rich is right on this, but it's not as if such classes have zero impact, neither. Especially on account of them being mandatory. If leftoids wanna go off and do them elsewhere, that's their business as long as the rest of us aren't forced to put up with such.
It also makes sense for moral and practical reasons, as these excess classes are a tremendous waste of time and money, and that on its own should be justification enough to oppose them.
Actual studies of college students show them basically moving toward the center, from both the right and left in college.
Colleges are actually made to create socially liberal people, with probably center-left economics, not radicals. Now, yes, if you're a conservative, you might not like your kid comes back saying he has a transgender friend, and has heard from his black classmates about problems they've had with the police, but the idea that colleges create Marxists isn't true.
In the modern world, the Internet creates Marxists.
Even if this is true, it is irrelevant next to the problem of temporal and monetary wastefulness that college encourages. Almost every other good and service in the last century has gotten cheaper and better, and there is zero reason the case can't hold true for education. But it's only grown lengthier, costliet, and stupider.
It's a bad system, and totally unjustifiable from either a moral or practical perspective.
"...look at those in the idea generation space, namely education, journalism, academia, activism, and the arts. I call these the High-Status, Low Pay (HSLP) professions..."
And by "idea generation" you mean "bad idea generation." Those morons have been taught (er, educated) to think alike, virtue signal, and regurgitate exactly what they have been taught by the previous generation of morons. Ask anyone (off the record, of course) where the worst hires come from nowadays and they come EXACTLY from your "High Status" fields. If cancer had half the PR machine the no accountability "High Status" morons had, people would be drinking heavy water like it was the new Pfizer vaccine.
You do have a point that these people dominate the noise and willingly accept whatever anyone says as long as they promise an abortion to boot, including wars. What idea has this group generated that has any significance outside of self-promotion (ultimately self-abuse)? What benefit have these geniuses imparted on society?
Low-morals, low-pay, low-common sense, low-critical thinking people is what they are.
> Those morons have been taught (er, educated) to think alike, virtue signal, and regurgitate exactly what they have been taught by the previous generation of morons.
> What idea has this group generated that has any significance outside of self-promotion (ultimately self-abuse)?
"Those morons" coined a concept that's significant to you: virtue signaling. Either an academic or a journalist, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_signalling.
Things could definitely be improved within the current setup, but the Right will always struggle with Low Human Capital as long as it clings to it is, well, "conservatism".
Trump or not (some may say he's not even conservative), conservatism just doesn't click with young people and "HSLP" people (and of course students, since they fall into both categories). Inherently, these categories are all about energy, idealism, and innovation, drawn not necessarily to left-wing ideas, but to notions of actively shaping the future for the better.
Conservatives don't really offer that. By definition, their whole deal is about "conserving" things, but where's the excitement in that?
As Hayek put it, the main flaw with conservatism is that it's destined to lose because it's all about resisting change (in our context, complaining that things are going too woke or something) without offering any real direction forward. To win over High Human Capital, you can't say we should keep "traditional values." Alright, maybe you could pick some of these values that you prioritize, but you have to weave them coherently into a fresh, bold framework filled with inspiring new ideas.
That's why, even though he's supposedly on the right, Javier Milei managed to draw in so many young, educated folks during Argentina's last presidential election. Sure, his approach might not fly in the US because the context is different. But in HIS context, he wasn't about "conserving"; he was all about shaking up the system to pave the way for a brighter future.
I think there is something to the idea of young people usually wanting to create something new.
But I think that urge may be partially artificial, and driven by the fact that we basically keep kids isolated and sheltered in this weird environment called school where the only people they interact with for most of the day are their peers, and a few (generally state-employed) teachers.
The transition from being dependent and taken care of in school, to going out into the 'real world' is often pretty jarring or even frightening.
So maybe that is driving a lot of late teens/early 20s folks into supporting an expansion of the state.
If so, then maybe a possible solution is breaking the current structure of education down some and allowing more of the 'real world' to filter in earlier.
Schools very explicitly tell kids the following: study hard because that way you can get a good job changing things (=being successful and rich), instead of a crappy job sustaining things (=flipping burgers). Parents tell kids this too. Also, schools don't teach kids about all the times people attempted to create progress and ended up making everything worse. I don't recall any part of history at my own schools covering communism for example, nor the explicitly utopian foundations of Naziism.
So it's not a surprise that kids leave school convinced that their role is to change the world for the better, and that it will be trivially easy.
Agreed. Unless the right winged reframes from resuscitating some glorious past to promising some glorious future, it's never going to attract the bright young cohorts, which is arguably the core of every populist social movement (in authoritarian where power is more centralized, this may not be the case, ie. Franco Spain, Nasser Egypt, etc.). Have to credit Hannania for pulling me on this point
I mean, conservatives do have a majority in the house, they have a super majority on the supreme Court and as recently as 2017 they controlled all 3 branches of government. Doesn't seem like losing to me.
This is completely ahistorical there are numerous counter examples of younger generations being to the Right of older generations.
>Trump or not (some may say he's not even conservative), conservatism just doesn't click with young people and "HSLP" people (and of course students, since they fall into both categories). Inherently, these categories are all about energy, idealism, and innovation, drawn not necessarily to left-wing ideas, but to notions of actively shaping the future for the better.
Conservatives don't really offer that. By definition, their whole deal is about "conserving" things, but where's the excitement in that?<
This could hypothetically flip when liberalism goes so far and becomes so entrenched that it is now the stagnant status quo rather than the vital new thing which is breaking apart the old system. We may be seeing the beginnings of this now that everyone has lived through a time period where wokeism had undeniably won, at least for a little while. "Conservatism" at that point would no longer mean preserving the status quo, because the status quo is DEI and HR catladies, but rather would come to mean breaking up that stagnant, stifling status quo.
The basic problem is that at that point it's already a dictatorship. Free market libertarianism isn't exactly big with the Chinese youth even though it would be radically progressive, because anyone who supports it gets severely punished.
The continued existence of Elon Musk's X shows that this is not yet the case in the West. I think it's uncertain as to whether we'll get there or not. For a while it looked like the regime was going to be more or less successful in punishing and censoring dissent out of existence. But Elon's Twitter takeover has provided a pretty strong counter-example to that thesis. Maybe this year they'll arrange to have him taken out somehow, who knows. But as it stands X is still there and its owner is still sitting there posting some pretty right wing stuff (extreme right wing relative to his social class) on a regular basis.
I agree and I think that is what is happening today. Conservatives are declaring war on institutions and enjoy LARPing as revolutionaries. Although that doesn't mean that it appeals more to young people, at least so far.
Brian Chau would probably suggest that "HSLP," as you outline it, is actually, largely "MWLP." (MidWit, Low Pay)
This is an excellent post. One detail worth discussing, however: it's true that the Trump executive branch didn't expand the civil rights regime, but it's not exactly true that all they did was keep the existing regime in place. They also helped entrench it deeper. The Supreme Court had been poised to reject disparate impact liability under the Fair Housing Act in the Inclusive Communities case after already construing identical language in the ADEA to prohibit it, but it ended up upholding it with Kennedy still on the bench. It wasn't necessary to wait for a change in the Court's composition to fix this - all that had to happen was for HUD to issue a reg. Unfortunately, Trump's HUD, under Ben Carson, did in fact issue a reg on the issue but instead of clarifying that the FHA does not cognize disparate impact, it endorsed the incorrect Kennedy-majority ruling and made it that much harder to reverse that ruling even though the current Court would never heave reached it.
Interesting stuff, thanks. I don't agree with much of your worldview but I think you make a good case for it.
I'm just curious, what's your check and balance on plutocracy? Smother by bureaucracy is not a failure mode that's observed too often historically, whereas there is plenty of examples of societies where plutocratic elites become too powerful, power becomes hereditary, and society is led by degenerates until invaded.
Isn't that sort of what's happening right now? Inequality in the US has been rising steadily over time, and it's now a regular thing for presidents and other high-level politicians to mysteriously become super wealthy during their time in office. And as for society being led by degenerates while being invaded, I think that's pretty self-evident at this point.
That does seem to be the trend. But there would still be way to go, in terms of both incompetence and misalignment of their interest with the majority, to plunge the level of much of the world today. Believe or not, most elites are less competent and more corrupt than in the U.S., or the west in general.
I'm aware of that. My point is that under the status quo we seem to be heading in that direction already, so it isn't apparent that there is any real trade-off between competence/corruption and dissident viewpoints. Our current rulers are quickly becoming less competent and more corrupt anyways.
Indeed, when I look at the left (which is the ruling ideology) today, it seems to me that it has been entirely consumed by delusions and scams such as DEI and other woke garbage. Everyone who still at least somewhat values competence and integrity over those things is mostly on the right now (or "centrist" at the absolute best--still placed outside the leftist club). So I'd sooner ask anyone defending the status quo why handing the reigns over to the right would somehow result in more corruption and incompetence than letting the LGBT crowd and other insane people continue running the asylum.
"Presidents and other high-level politicians to mysteriously become super wealthy during their time in office"
It isn't actually mysterious - most of say, the Obama and Clinton's wealth comes from book deals, movie productions, and other totally visible ways to make money.
They aren't say, doing shady real estate deals or pushing foreign governmetns to use the Obama Hotel for trips to DC.
There's some other slightly bipartisanly shady stuff with stocks among legislative members in general, but you fix that by rules that ban stock trading for the most part, and also raise what you get paid to be a Congressperson.
Income inequality has fallen recently.
Very recently, perhaps. I would be surprised if it now begins to trend permanently downward, as opposed to any recent decrease simply being a blip in the overall trend.
I think it depends on whether the Fed is able (or wants) to keep the economy at full employment levels. One interesting thing to note is that executive pay has been stagnant for the last 20 years.
I think your article is excellent, as always when you talk about those things, but I don't think the situation is that grim for conservatives. Even in 2020 elections, less than 60% voted for Biden, in a bad year for republicans. They still have 2/5 of the educated electorated to recruit from. But they need to find a way to do this without scare way low education voters.
How is that graph about appointee ideology generated? Seems like one can make that graph show whatever you want based on how you scale the data.
I'm sure it comes from some standard measure, but it's not at all clear that measure has the desired meaning.
Richard the only high-status people left in the GOP are religious conservatives, there's a reason the Supreme Court is almost all Catholics now. Without pro-life positions there would be no one left.
Considering that religiosity is declining, it would be better to adopt positions that appealed to yesterday's conservatives. Else the Catholics will die off and then there really won't be anyone left.
>It does not matter how much elite human capital doesn’t like it, wide swaths of the country no longer have abortion clinics, which means that women who aren’t responsible enough to use birth control and who don’t have the means to go to other states are being forced to give birth.<
The idea that a woman who has a child after consensual sex is somehow "undergoing forced birth" is nonsensical. This is the same logic that leftists apply to black people when they riot or engage in other destructive behaviors; the narrative is that these people lack agency because somehow white people actually "made" them do these things, and thus we can't hold them responsible for their actions and must simply allow the behavior to continue unimpeded. Either people have agency or they don't, and the only coherent position is that they do. Selectively applying Schrodinger's Agency when it suits your personal whims is intellectually lazy. Thus "forced birth" could only be argued in cases of rape, which are of course some extreme tiny outlier of abortions. Something like 98% of abortions are "elective," meaning abortions of convenience.
The second point to be made here is that your statement essentially endorses abortion as a means of birth control. If this is the narrative, I must always ask, why draw the line at birth? Children absolutely do not stop being burdens post-birth and I have seen many people say that the actual childcare part of parenting is much more difficult than the process of pregnancy and birth. Why then do we not allow parents to dispose of unwanted infants or toddlers?
This is the kind of thing you need to explain to pro-lifers if you want to "purge" them. The pro-life position rests on the foundational tenet that unborn children are human beings i.e. people just like me or you or a toddler or an infant, simply at an earlier stage of development. In much the same way that you can't defeat wokeism without attacking the underlying tenet that there are no differences between races/genders, you won't change a pro-lifer's mind by coming at them with leftist terms like "forced birth." Anyone who accepts that frame already agrees with you on this issue.
I almost never see abortion advocates seriously try to do this, and the very few times that they try, it doesn't seem to do them any favors. Instead they either stick to leftist framing or, when they're not leftists themselves, do their best to hold their noses and ignore the issue entirely. I would expect that so long as this is the case, with polarization continuing apace, the pro-life position will slowly gain steam on the right and eventually become dominant, in the same way that the old "Chamber of Commerce" Republicans have slowly but inevitably been pushed out and replaced by populism/MAGA.
"I would expect that so long as this is the case, with polarization continuing apace, the pro-life position will slowly gain steam on the right and eventually become dominant, in the same way that the old "Chamber of Commerce" Republicans have slowly but inevitably been pushed out and replaced by populism/MAGA."
Sure, and what will happen is what just happened in an Alabama state legislature special election in a Trump +1 district - the Democrat won by 25 points running basically only on abortion and IVF.
Abortion advocates don't need to argue on the terms of what pro-lifers want, because a near supermajority even in places like Kansas and Montana find them weird and off puttting.
>Sure, and what will happen is what just happened in an Alabama state legislature special election in a Trump +1 district - the Democrat won by 25 points running basically only on abortion and IVF.<
Yes, this is why I specifically said that pro-life will become the dominant position on the right, not in the population in general.
>Abortion advocates don't need to argue on the terms of what pro-lifers want, because a near supermajority even in places like Kansas and Montana find them weird and off puttting.<
But if your thesis is that abortion is a doomsday issue for the right, then unless you're a leftist yourself, you should be *trying* to argue on the terms of what pro-lifers want and convince them out of their position, as otherwise the rest of everything that you support in politics is doomed for turbo-failure, at least if we assume that your perspective of abortion as a political "killer issue" is correct.
Personally, I am skeptical of this extreme "abortion doomerism." Voters have extremely short attention spans. I would guess that within 5-10 years, possibly sooner than that (your doomer viewpoint could be debunked as soon as this year if Trump wins the election), people will settle into abortion being a state issue as the new status quo and stop paying it any special attention.
As demonstrated by Trump and COVID, you can't artificially whip people up into this state of being hyper-scared of something and then maintain that same level of intensity long-term. Emotional fatigue sets in, other things happen in the world, life moves on. And with every year that passes, the general effectiveness of the left's fear-porn apparatus keeps diminishing as more and more people stop paying attention to legacy media.
"Yes, this is why I specifically said that pro-life will become the dominant position on the right, not in the population in general."
Which doesn't help if the peak of the right political strength nationally is around 46-47%, even when a supposedly senile corrupt old man runs for reelection.
"But if your thesis is that abortion is a doomsday issue for the right, then unless you're a leftist yourself,"
I mean, I am a leftist, so I want the 30% hard-right that wants abortion nationally banned, and has done things like put forward open plans to ban abortion nationally in statements supported by 170 of 210 Republican house members to be front facing, at all times. The good news, is until abortion is totally banned, they'll continue to be loud, and do things like try to ban IVF or say the Comstock Laws can ban the abortion pill from being sent in the mail.
The problem for people like Richard is people truly believe abortion is murder, in a way that even most of the Democratic base isn't wedded to any specific position on any issue. They care about this enough to lose.
"Personally, I am skeptical of this extreme "abortion doomerism."
People said this about Dobb and the midterms. People would forget.
People said this about this year. People would forget.
It turns out people don't like the idea of the state, even other states they don't live in banning abortion, just like people didn't think school segregation should be a state issue, and just accept the status quo.
The difference with COVID is there's a new abortion bill to bring up regularly, and as I said, the pro-life said will continue to push for new restrictions, and they'll be supported by groups that purple state candidates went to get endorsements from in a primary, and we'll be able to run ads saying, "John McRepublican was endorsed by the National Ban Abortion Foundation, but he say he's not for abortion bans."
As far as the legacy media goes, I think you guys forget it both ways - much of the pro-choice push is coming from TikTok, X, etc. and other social media, just as much as on 'legacy media.'
>The problem for people like Richard is people truly believe abortion is murder, in a way that even most of the Democratic base isn't wedded to any specific position on any issue. They care about this enough to lose.<
Yes, this is the point of my original comment. Richard (and supporters of abortion in general) only seem to engage with abortion in two ways:
1. Engage in leftist talking points such as "forced birth"
2. Claim that the issue is election kryptonite
Neither one of these will change anyone's mind. In much the same way that most people who become anti-woke do so after learning that underlying tenets of woke ideology are false, the only way you are likely to change a pro-lifer's mind on the issue is to convince him that the underlying tenet of his ideology of false--that abortion is not actually murder. And yet Richard, and other right-wing abortion supporters, never attempt this as far as I've seen.
The idea that Democrats aren't wedded to anything unpopular is also pretty laughable, but I understand that if you're a leftist you're probably incapable of believing otherwise.
From the title I expected a piece on Biden's travails. I now see it's mostly about the other dummy.
Mitt Romney, Thomas Sowell, and George Will are conservatives. Trump is not. Don't people realize that industrial policy and protectionism go against core conservative values - core liberal values as well.
Mitt Romney is not a conservative like the other two people you named. Mitt Romney is a right of center moderate Republican.
Let's see...pro-life, pro-business, pro-free trade, pro-family, pro-guns, anti-wellfare state...what requirements is he missing for being considered a conservative?
Hmmm, let’s count the ways:
- RomneyCare
- ridiculous impeachment votes, not once but twice. The first was wrong on the facts. The second was absurd. The first Republican senator in history to vote to convict a president of their own party. To say this is not an indicator of a non-conservative you have to address why EVERY. SINGLE. CONSERVATIVE voted in opposition both times.
- supported the Brady Bill and “assault weapons” bans. “Assault weapons have no place in Massachusetts.” Admittedly now he says he’s changed, but you gotta question the sincerity
- repeatedly supports federal minimum wage increases. In the last 3 years! It ain’t conservative to interfere with the ability of someone to take a job at a wage they are willing to accept.
- just last year advocated for a carbon tax: “If we want to do something serious about global emissions, we need to put a price on carbon.”
Oh, and I almost forgot:
- voted to confirm Kentanji Brown Jackson for the Supreme Court. Only fellow moderates Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski among Republicans did so.
You cannot get elected in MA as a conservative; that alone should tell you something.