Liberalism, ISIS, and Toaster Nationalism

Being poor doesn't give you more meaning

I drive really fast, take risks on the road, and sometimes get into accidents. Often, I cut people off. I worried that I shouldn’t write these sentences because car insurance companies might start using AI in order to decide what my rate should be, if they don’t already, but then I chose to take the risk, since again I have a compulsion to do this sort of thing. My three-year-old daughter likes to sit in the front seat, and sometimes I let her. There was a time when I drove around for years with an expired tag, got pulled over near UCLA, and had to take an Uber home. The driver found it funny that I was a professor (actually TA) and in this situation, as apparently his view of academics was that we were all very responsible people.

Why do I do all this? It saves me a bit of time, but mostly it’s probably because following rules just feels gay. Why should I have to register my car? There may be a good reason for it, but actually going through the process feels degrading, especially for an important intellectual. And kids are now weak because we raise them in a bubble, emphasizing safety over the chance to learn, explore, play, or just do something fun like drive around next to one of their parents. So I think that there’s a non-zero optimal level of risk they should face in life, and most of them are to the left of that curve.

I like watching The Sopranos and Game of Thrones, reading about the Civil War and World War II. I live a pretty exciting and interesting life compared to most moderns. I get to meet some of the most intellectually fascinating people in the world, express my ideas to an audience that is both wide and highly selected, and play a role in the great political and social debates of the time. I also have children, at least until I kill them all through my reckless driving.

But there is very little chance of physical danger or ability to test myself in life-or-death situations. And deep down, this bothers me. Maybe I should find a way to get over it and be satisfied with my own intellectual and moral courage, and most days that’s how I feel. But the need for something riskier is an itch that won’t go away, which sometimes manifests itself on the road or through obnoxious trolling. I wanted to start taking boxing classes and eventually spar, but with the children and work it wasn’t realistic. When they’re all old enough I’m going to hopefully circle back to this, and get my thrills by being punched in the face by other old guys. It’s still kind of fake because it’s not taking a risk for a great cause, like killing invading Russians motivated to die for rightoid memes. But it’ll perhaps add something that I feel is missing.

In the meantime, I drive recklessly and see what happens. About a year ago I was trying to make a U-Turn and crashed into a guy in a run-down pickup who seemed like an illegal immigrant, but thankfully he had insurance. I felt really bad, because he got out of the car and was dejected, walking around like “Man brooo…. I don’t need this brooo!!!” I also troll on X and sometimes say obnoxious things. I know some people wish I would be a little bit more professional in my behavior, and sometimes I wish I was too, but it just seems boring. I need constant stimulation. My job is writing about topics I’m interested in, and I unwind with trolling and interpersonal drama. People sometimes ask how I’m so brave, and part of the answer is that I would be bored to death if I wasn’t.

Many people who are comfortable as liberals seem not to have this unease. For others, religion gives them all the meaning they need, and they can just focus on rational ways to make the world better. It’s not an accident that Mormons have some of the highest levels of community cohesion in the country while being less subject to embracing MAGA than other parts of the conservative coalition. But some of us are just restless, and need to find ways to deal with the sense that everyday life is not enough.

All of this is leading up to a point, which is that I get the illiberal temptation. We evolved to feel most alive during moments of danger. You can have a nice family and make a lot of money, and take an occasional vacation, and for many it won’t be enough. Today, kids on social media share memes about how awesome life was in the 1980s and 1990s when you’d just buy a nice house in the suburbs and have a few kids. But a staple of the art of the time was that this was lame and boring and led to nothing but despair, as seen in movies like American Beauty, Fight Club, and The Ice Storm.

This is the dilemma of modernity. Life is too easy relative to any other point of our history. This has combined with the rise of smart phones and social media to make many people miserable. They develop illiberal political views in response. Fall into an internet rabbithole, and you can just deny reality and pretend like life actually is hard and there is an oppressive force worth struggling against, because you suffer from structural racism, transphobia, population replacement, or the never-ending lies of the “Cathedral.” You see it in memes about how pleasant life on one salary was in the 1950s, with a reminder to “never forget what they took from you.” A lot of this stuff is pathetic and self-pitying, if not downright pathological, but there’s also a payoff in that it has all the elements of what makes a good story: a desired end state, high-stakes, comrades-in-arms, moral certainty, and a clear enemy.

The problem of course is that such worldviews are built on lies, so they can’t really solve the problems they were meant to address. There really isn’t a straightforward enemy you can blame for your problems, and to the extent that there is, it’s people like your middle class grandparents who don’t want any housing built around where they live, rather than Soros rubbing his hands together and thinking about how to trans little kids. And because they’re motivated by a need for meaning rather than approaching issues with an empirical mindset, non-liberals tend to have terrible economic ideas.

With liberalism, you can have peace and prosperity, but there also comes a sense of ennui that we have to figure out how to deal with. With illiberalism, in contrast, you can dull your negative feelings for a bit, but end up right where you started, just poorer. Hungary banned gay pride parades and has kept out immigrants. Japan and South Korea have also adopted policies closer to right-wing preferences. There’s no indication that these countries are happier than other states that have bought into “Globohomo,” and surveys indicate that they underperform here relative to their levels of wealth. I would guess the causation goes in the other direction, in which cultures that are sadder and more anxious and fearful are less open to the world.

If there is an argument to be made that many people become miserable because life is too easy, one might ask why we don’t just follow the illiberals, adopt their dumb economic ideas, and then become poor and happy? If people really feel that trade with China is economically harmful, despite all evidence to the contrary, let politicians demagogue and “protect jobs” even if it reduces GDP.

I think that the problem is that once you’ve been exposed to the existence of higher standards of living, then poverty, or even slower growth, becomes soul crushing. If nationalists got what they wanted and ended all migration and trade, or socialists were able to humble all the CEOs and destroy markets, there would be a temporary high for the winning faction. But then the policies would lead to economic stagnation or a decline, and the mere fact of knowing that faster growth is possible – by either observing other countries who are doing something different or just looking at the recent past – would lead to widespread unrest. Freddie deBoer says that the fact that everyone hates neoliberalism is evidence that it hasn’t worked. The problem is that they would hate any system in the years after iPhones were introduced, and slower growth would only give people what feels like statistical validation that their anxieties are based in objective reality.

I’m not saying here that poverty plus ignorance necessarily leads to happiness. I think that people in developed democracies are probably happier than hunter-gatherers living in a pristine state of nature, though I can’t prove it. What I would argue though is that the temptation towards illiberalism represents a certain kind of unhappiness that is the product of high living standards. Medieval peasants surely had their own forms of misery that are incomprehensible to us.

Even if poverty plus ignorance does make people happy, the moment you know that air conditioning, convenient appliances, and incremental gains in one’s standard of living are possible, there’s no going back. This is why illiberals always promise good jobs and affordable groceries, no matter how economically ignorant they are or how loudly they denounce the concept of maximizing GDP. A rural Afghan might have been happy as a clam before exposure to the outside world. But once he is aware that there are other countries where all people have running water, or even learns what is happening in Kabul, he is going to desire material comforts. Surveys show that third world nations are very unhappy, and if you don’t believe surveys, just consider the fact that a substantial portion of their populations would give everything they have to begin life at the bottom rung of the ladder in a first world country. It’s unclear whether they would be happier if they had no knowledge of the existence of developed democracies, though I grant it is possible, even if doubtful. For practical purposes, however, it doesn’t matter, because there is no way to make humanity forget that higher living standards and economic growth are possible. Even in North Korea, where consuming foreign media can be punishable by death, the government has to admit the fact that the South is much wealthier, as it has become common knowledge.

Liberalism doesn’t have a clear answer to the fact that modern life is kind of gay. Illiberalism might if it were more radical. But in the developed world it has to accommodate itself to democratic politics. I often use JD Vance as a foil in my articles, and that’s because he’s a prominent figure who represents many of the worst cultural and intellectual trends of our time. During the 2024 campaign, he solemnly declared that “a million cheap, knockoff toasters aren’t worth the price of a single American manufacturing job.” Watch the actual video, and witness the conviction with which he emphasizes his totally based, non-bugman position.

Personally, I’m not that attached to my toaster. I can give it up, if you tell me there’s some awesome payoff for the sacrifice. What is Vance offering instead? “Uh, a slightly more expensive toaster.” That’s kind of unfair – he’s actually offering meaning in the form of being able to be part of a team and blame foreigners for your problems. But if you’re the least bit economically literate, you understand what’s going on here, and the magic is gone. And since we can’t just all become willfully stupid in order to find meaning – in addition to the problem of slowing growth mentioned above – we need to reject Toaster Nationalism.

Compare this to ISIS, which in the mid-2010s drew young men from around the world into the Middle East with the promise of guns, glory, and countless sex slaves. I often think about one fighter who compared it to being in Call of Duty. I think, until he was blown apart, your typical ISIS fighter was probably happier and more fulfilled than the vast majority of people in advanced economies. But I’ll take the radical position that we don’t want to become ISIS, as much fun as that would be. Putinism is a kind of midway point between ISIS and Western democracy, but once again that is not a good option.

This is why I’ve previously encouraged people who want meaning in their lives to go fight for Ukraine. Of all the causes people are killing and dying for around the world, it’s probably the least morally ambiguous. Unlike Vance’s Toaster Nationalism, the neocons at least let you fight wars. Sure, they also had lies. In the end, it didn’t much matter for American interests whether Iraq became a democracy, and we were basically stuck there because Bush wanted to LARP as Churchill, which was good for him psychologically and also decent politics, at least for a while. But the War on Terror provided meaning in a way that I find much less repulsive than flexing over how you made toasters more expensive. Those guys that were battling door-to-door in Fallujah ended up with cool stories to tell, unlike the politico advocating economic nationalism who has declared war on math instead of terrorism. Though even the heroism of those days has been tainted by trauma culture, which told the troops when they came home that they could get sympathy and government money by recasting themselves as victims.

What we need is to be honest about the causes of ennui, and find ways to direct the desire for meaning in a positive direction. Illiberal politics can “work” in the sense that those who partake in such movements may find their purpose, but the end result is usually stupid, and such efforts are self-defeating because they reduce people’s standard of living. What I’d prefer is a technocratic elite that sits around thinking of how to raise GDP but also takes these broader questions about human nature into account. One can imagine using the education system, tax policy, and subsidies in order to encourage people to do things like go outside, make friends, get married, have children, and even fight wars when something like the invasion of Ukraine happens. I’ve mentioned that even having kids is kind of gay, but it’s actually meaningful compared to not having them, so the rightoids with their memes are in a sense correct. Subsidizing fight clubs for boys and trips to the shooting range could be on the table. The free market response here is that if people value these things, they’ll do them anyway, but if we want to be paternalistic and address the crisis of meaning, we should face that problem directly, rather than pretending that expensive toasters will make life more bearable.

There are even more radical options we might consider. Maybe we let individuals sell themselves into slavery, which could pass a cost-benefit test and respect individual choice, while at the same giving people the sense that they’re living in a more romantic society like that of medieval Europe or the antebellum South. Or let’s perhaps allow prisoners serving life sentences fight to the death on national TV, with the winner getting supervised release. And then before the loser is executed, representatives of the major religions of the world come and present their case for each faith, giving him the option of picking one, and people can cheer or boo based on what they think will happen to his soul as a result. Once we’ve directed people away from economic populism, we’ll have a lot more money to experiment with.

On the issue of technology, politicians and intellectuals generally fall into the camp of techno-optimists and techno-pessimists. If someone complains about kids spending too much time on their phones, they often don’t like Amazon’s delivery service either. This is irrational. There is good reason to be concerned with young people retreating from the real world and into the digital realm, but no good reason to be opposed to a big tech company bringing cheaper goods to your doorstep through two-day shipping. Rather than going by mood affiliation regarding attitudes towards change, we need a default that most forms of innovation and creative destruction are good, but the net effect can be bad if enough evidence accumulates, as I believe it has in the case of the dangers of smartphones.

When economists point out that postliberals don’t understand economics, they retreat to some slogan like “we’re a nation, not an economy.” The logic here needs to be broken down. Paying more for a toaster makes a country a nation because…why exactly? I’m sympathetic to the idea that there is something off about modern life. More than sympathetic – the unease manifests in my everyday behavior. But slower economic growth isn’t the solution to any of the problems of modernity.