MAGA, Brain Drain, Not Practicing Law, My First Book, and More

The second mailbag

By an over 3-1 margin, people would rather that I write the responses to the mailbag than do it by podcast. We’ll therefore go with that.

I was just on Ethan Strauss’ podcast, which you can listen to here.

I’ve basically followed the practice of answering the questions that got the most likes. I also picked a few that were buried that I thought were particularly interesting. There’s a tendency for the earliest comments to get the most likes, which makes them more visible, which in turn gets more likes, in a self-reinforcing cycle. Therefore, I was on the lookout for good questions that came relatively late and didn’t have much of a chance to be voted up.

I address questions on why I didn’t practice law, my updated take on my first book, what anti-market thinkers get right, whether the US should adopt a Gulf Arab-type immigration system, and more.

ECLECTIC JOURNEYS writes

For your “Bullying Grandma” theory, why was it a “Bullying Grandma” instead of "Bullying Grandpa"?

Now that’s a fun question. When I think about a MAGA rally, the old ladies are the ones who seem to be the most enthusiastic and aggressive. And when I think about the most obnoxious MAGA members of Congress, Boebert and MTG pop into my mind. They’re both pretty young, although Boebert is a literal grandma. I see MAGA’s reliance on emotion, pettiness, and personal rivalries as inherently feminine. This might not be the way people usually think of Trump supporters, since they regard themselves as belonging to a masculine movement, and I enjoy highlighting that disconnect. So Bullying Grandmas feels right to me, though there are of course Bullying Grandpas out there too.

Nate:

Why did you decide not to practice law after obtaining your J.D. from a top school? I feel like in a different life, you would have made a good lawyer. If you could return to your twenties, would you still go to law school?

I talked about why I didn’t become a lawyer in my autism piece. See footnote 1 and the accompanying text. As for whether I should’ve gone to law school, when I look back on my life it’s very hard to do counterfactuals. A lot had to go right for me to get to this point, and I’m happy where I am, so I’m tempted to say I wouldn’t change anything. One thing going to an elite law school did was it was the first time in my life I was around people who were comparable in intelligence. I had a prole background, then went to a not very competitive undergrad, so this was a completely new experience that I didn’t get until late in life.

I don’t think that I would be the person I am or have the same insights without it. Rob Henderson talks a lot about the culture shock he experienced going to Yale, and I went through something sort of similar, though not at the undergrad level like he did. Being around elite law students, along with the judges and intellectual celebrities that we were surrounded by, might not have been that important to someone with a more upper class background. I actually enjoyed law school intellectually, it was in the end more valuable than my political science PhD, since what we talked about at least mattered. Political science was supposed to make up for its distance from the real world by offering more in the way of truth and intellectual purity, but the vast majority of what we learned ended up striking me as trivial or wrong.

At a more superficial level, people knowing that I graduated from the University of Chicago Law School tells them that I’m pretty smart. In our culture we don’t walk around with our IQs tattooed on our faces, but degrees serve a kind of similar purpose, which is why people compete so desperately to get into top schools even if the direct financial benefits are not always that high. Again, background matters here, as if I had gone to Yale or Harvard as an undergrad, I wouldn’t have needed a Chicago degree to show I was smart, so getting my JD from there was more valuable to me than it would have been for others. Not that I think it’s irrational to make assumptions about people’s IQs depending on where they went to school. Just like racial profiling, it’s a statistical judgment based on truth. Those who read me should be judging my intelligence and insight by the substance of what I say, but all the time, and especially when you’re just starting out, people are rationally looking for indications as to whether you’re worth listening to or not.

So no, I can’t say I regret going to law school, although it was probably unlikely I would ever practice law.

Usually Wash

Are you going to do another mega-poll on what your audience thinks where they rate things from 1 to 5? Curious to see how it's changed since last time you did such a poll. How has it grown and with what demographics? Who has joined? Who has left? Maybe the pro-Putin pro-Taliban crowd.

Probably not for a while. In the original survey, my audience tilted heavily towards classical liberalism. Since that time, I’ve ditched the conservative label completely and have moved more in that direction, so it’s hard to see how it would be much different. It’s a bit of work, and I haven’t seen much to indicate that the composition of my audience has changed, so I don’t know if that’s the best use of my time.

Squirrel House writes:

What are the odds University of Austin Texas and the Peterson Academy succeed at achieving their respective mission statements, i.e., to challenge and replace our traditional educational institutions?

I am not optimistic. Not because I don’t think it can be done, but rather that I think it won’t be done in these specific cases.

UATX was the only institution that denounced me after the HuffPost cancellation attempt, so thankfully I feel free to be as brutally honest here as I want, as I otherwise might have been tempted to hold back.