I think it's one of those human dualism things, where one set of traits comes with other traits and sorry, you gotta take the sweet with the sour. My data free theory is that conservatives tend to have less raw intelligence than progressives but more wisdom - immunity to crazy ass ideas that sound new and tantalizing but also throw out lots of cultural tradition. Progressives are more intelligent and more capable of self-delusion as a result, which is how you end up with the current media commentary on the election.
The problem I have with that, and with Hanania’s whole “elite human capital” thing, is that the leftists I encounter don’t actually seem that bright. Whereas libertarians often seem nutty, but are usually really smart.
To a large extent the Progressive base is Union Teachers and HR ladies. Not the most intellectually impressive cohort. And if you read Rufo, one of the things that jumps out about CRT, is that Dereck Bell basically invented that style of “scholarship” because he wasn’t bright enough to do Harvard-level normal legal scholarship.
To be a giant dork and put it in Lord of the Rings terms, Hobbits are largely unremarkable but stable and capable of producing a Frodo, Bilbo, or Bullroarer Took. They're stodgy and suspicious of change but grudgingly willing to accept greatness when they see how much it benefits them. A society of Sarumans would tear the world apart to find out what makes it tick and loathe humans for falling short of their vision. Not that all wizards are bad, but they are more likely than hobbits to waste into niche uselessness (Radagast), just sort of disappear pursuing their own mission (the blue wizards) or get high on their own farts and decide to take over the world.
Somewhere in the intelligence, wisdom, education matrix there is also reaction to personal circumstances.
If you are a working class person of whatever ethnicity or gender you will figure out that huge influxes of unskilled labour (legal or illegal) are likely to be to your disadvantage. Understanding supply and demand doesn’t need a degree in economics.
If you live in a high crime neighbourhood, the police are pretty important to you. Defunding them, or decriminalising ‘minor’ offences will make your life worse.
If you are a woman past childbearing age, or taking a responsible approach to contraception, abortion may not be a pressing issue for you. The possibility of you or your daughters coming up against men on a sports field, or in your changing rooms, is more likely to be on your radar. So you vote again for policies that align with your priorities.
All these are intelligent responses to personal circumstances. Voting for policies that will materially worsen your life is clearly not intelligent, whatever the character flaws of the politicians involved.
On the intelligence correlation with morality, which seems to be a big feature on the liberal reaction to the election, it worth noting that of the fifteen people attending the Wannsee conference, that decided on the Final Solution in 1942, ten were degree educated of which eight had a doctorate.
The views on low skilled immigration are just wrong. People “feel” it is bad but not for any good reason, but because they’re prejudiced.
And it’s funny that you think it’s rational for a postmenopausal woman to worry about trans in sports for her daughter but not government regulating her pregnancies and forcing her to risk her life to give birth to a damaged fetus.
All of your “lived experience” arguments end up aligning with Republican talking points. That should make you suspicious.
Martin's argument is that the importation of low skilled labor will lower the price of low-skilled labor (wages). Is your argument that the latent demand for low-skilled labor is so high that it won't effect wages, and that immigrants will do work that wouldn't be done otherwise?
If there is truly a labor shortage, then no, wages won't be affected. Even if there isn't really a labor shortage but the existing pool is rotten (bad attitude, absenteeism, drug-addled, etc..; see examples from the VP-elect's book), then hardworking immigrants may be preferred without any wage depression.
Do you have examples that don't match these patterns? Places where ample low-skilled native labor exists but is actively eschewed by employers in favor of immigrants? There are people who say this about the IT industry and guest workers on H-1B visas, but that lies in a different skill category (and the same objections I raised above apply there too.)
For me the concept that if supply exceeds demand prices will go down, and vice versa, is one of the few easily comprehensible and visibly demonstrable outputs of the dismal science.
In a large and diverse modern economy that specific law in respect of labour rates is hard to to analyse. In the U.K. we kind of conducted a controlled experiment through Brexit. Finding a non partisan analysis of the impacts is difficult. I could have attached many links from right leaning sources declaring (with data) that low skilled wages went up as the labour pool from (largely) Eastern Europe faltered, but have chosen to attach the one below. The author’s political leaning seems obvious to me but he nevertheless concedes there have been some albeit minor effects and more research is necessary. Richard’s statement that it is ‘just wrong’ is certainly debatable.
Since exchanging links to cherry picked data is a fools errand I return to the lived experience argument. I doubt many contributors to this thread have ever applied for a job as a waitress or street cleaner. If the one of the working class (who isn’t a shiftless work shy drug addict - I think there’s still quite a lot of them) applies for one of those jobs, ask him or her how many others applied. The answer will vary hugely across the country but for those who find it difficult to get such a job because of the competition from those willing to work for less, dismissing their concerns by quoting abstract statistics is not a good way to get their vote.
Finally a personal anecdote. I live in a tourist area of the U.K. Pre 2016 the prevalence of Eastern Europeans in the hospitality sector was unmistakable. After Brexit many restaurants, hotels and pubs really suffered, some having to close for some days of the week. Now it is noticeable that table and bar service is more often provided by locals who are usually younger than their predecessors.
I appreciate all your points and citations. I'm groping in the dark too, not knowing exactly what is going on nor where the trends lead.
On the specific topic of supply and demand, you are of course (mathematically) right that if supply is fungible and demand is static, wages must go down, though it won't happen all of a sudden (there's a curve). Let's assume supply is fungible. I'm not sure if demand will remain static in any modern complex economy though. Won't there be at least some people investing more into businesses that require more workers when they see an expanded pool of workers? Like the restaurant and hospitality businesses, for example. Not so much for agricultural workers and farming, though I suspect there is at least some truth to the "crops rotting in the fields" meme.
I’m a centre left Brit. Just watching the “the electorate are stupid/immoral” reaction from this side of the pond with some amazement.
The Tories here have just, rightly, got an electoral pasting and are responding with a lot of “how do we need to change” soul searching. Not sure they’re changing in the right direction but they are blaming themselves, which is the correct reaction.
Happy Veteran’s Day! I hope all readers, particularly my fellow lurkers, can appreciate my small gift of, “Richard Hanania's Substack Comment Categories”, https://matthagy.github.io/rh_comment_categories/
I’ve personally enjoyed getting to know the commentators here better through this generative AI organization and summarization of common discussion topics. I definitely now recognize the need to develop a better mental model of my fellow Americans with right wing views (ie, work on my empathy) following our recent quantitative feedback on the growing prevalence of these beliefs and values. Thank you all for your collective contributions to my intellectual growth!
I'll eventually get around to similarly organizing your ever-growing backlog of articles into AI-generated categories (unless you object; only titles and links to articles will be shared). Currently refining the methods with Yglesias's Slow Boring: https://matthagy.github.io/sb_article_categories/ Hoping to encourage more exploration of past articles from thoughtful authors when new readers discover them.
And, similar to the comment work, I hope article organization and summarization help us all better understand the beliefs and values of other communities and motivate more cross-partisan-divide engagement. Moreover, these are good test cases for us to develop better intuition about the strengths and weaknesses of generative AI by applying it to novel domains that we each understand a bit as readers.
Reasonable position. The decision to vote Trump vs. anti-Trump in this election was ultimately one of perceived tradeoffs between destroying what remains of the Democratic statist edifice against the damage Trump v2 will cause. People can reasonable assign different weights to both that tilt the decision in either direction. Hopefully people like Tracing Woodgrains can now take the Democrats in a more productive direction.
The contrast with Europe is an interesting question. The US is obviously more economically free on average, though the difference is starkest between the US and Mediterranean Europe; the gap is much smaller with Northern Europe, especially the Nordic countries (who are high tax but otherwise very free). The unions you consider very important are also really only a southern European curse; not an issue at all in Germany or Scandinavia. There are aspects on which Europeans can be freer. For instance, as you're probably aware, Sweden had some of the world's least restrictive lockdowns and masking regulations. In short, accurate on the broad contours, but needs more qualifications.
We'll see whether you or Rich win the bet. The first test'll be if anybody's able to talk DJT out of pardoning the Januaryists.
Even though I've been optimistic about the loss, I nonetheless expect him to pardon them as his first action. Perhaps that'll have the decency to kill my hopes.
You think JD Vance and Tulsi Gabbard and Vivek Ramaswamy and RFK Jr. are intellectually and morally inferior? They strike me as an extraordinarily intelligent and diverse and willful group of adults. They're all articulate. None of them has even a hint of scandal. 4 years ago I would've agreed with you completely. But... now?
They aligned with Blumpft, so that makes them morally inferior by default. Their other qualities don't matter. To be fair I do think RFK is a questionable figure in general, certainly not "extraordinarily intelligent."
I can't tell if you're serious. By that 80 million Americans are "morally inferior by default." I see a lot of that kind of rhetoric right now but it's incredibly silly. Politics is complicated (as is ethics) and people make choices for many different reasons. Flattening the metric to a binary choice and assigning one option "good!" and one "bad!" is certainly simple but can't reflect reality. All I would have to do to disprove that heuristic is find a single virtuous person affiliated with Trump. The only thing we can say absolutely about Trump supporters is they chose Trump over Harris. ANY other absolute claim will be simplified and therefore incorrect.
If you are, on average, dumber and more criminal in your makeup than your opposition, which the Trumplicans objectively are, to the point where Trump has pardoned the most notoriously corrupt Democratic politicians in the country just to secure their endorsement, as well as intervened on the side of Republicans who were bipartisanly implicated in corruption just because he wants to encourage more such behavior, as well allow himself easier time in committing transgressions; then you are by definition intellectually and morally inferior to your opposition, no matter how many you have in your number. There's a reason he won majority support among felons.
The reasonable, rational side of American conservatism has completely failed to persuade Americans against voting for the know-it-all and charismatic blue types of the last twenty years. No one wants to vote or side with the pudgy, tee-totaling, analytical and boring conservative type that throws water on the big ideas of the left. Those boring disciplined types are exactly who I would want running the government.
Trump was the first person to get everyone behind him in successfully mocking the left and ultimately exposing Dems for their flaws. I'm hopeful there is enough "elite human capital" on the conservative side to run things.
Actually, if they do nothing but reverse some of the lunacy of the pats few years, that will be a success.
Life is full of bad people who do good things and good people who do bad things... Life is full of nuance, and the biggest problem with extremists on both sides is that they are blinded to nuance and cannot compromise.
But what's missing from "move humanity forward" is "forward towards what"? Is all our amazing new tech going to turn everyone into zombies like in the movie Wall-E, doing nothing but porn, pot, and video games? Is the wealthy, high-status unmarried childless knowledge worker "winning"?
If right-wing progressives want to speak to the actual Right, they need to have an answer that goes beyond "more wealth, more tech, and everyone turns into screen-addled drones."
EDIT: Poll data that Americans are becoming less oriented toward greater goods (family, community, country, faith) and more oriented toward money. Is that really "progress"? Economists would say yes, conservatives would say no.
Liberals seem really focused on the "bad people" half of this in the aftermath of the election. Most liberal copes that I read are expressing shock and outrage that so many people could vote for Orange Hitler. I would think "EHC" would be more capable of understanding that politics is actually about, y'know, policy--not about anyone's personal flaws.
Brilliant post. I've always been a left-libertarian (more libertarian than most Libertarians according to the Political Compass) but in recent months I have been wondering what it would be like to vote for the other side since I appreciate many of their positions, especially on economic issues. But they are all so crazy. Even in my country, where we don't have creationists or gun nuts, all the politicians likely to be successful on the right are nutcases or shysters. The individual members of the Conservative Party are even more off the rails. So I'll keep on voting for parties on the left and try to persuade them that their Social Justice and their regulations and their taxes go too far and need to be brought under control.
> As they make their case, libertarians should seek political victories by finding leverage wherever they can, which often means throwing their support behind the weaker party in a dispute.
> In the real world, principled defenders of liberty are rare, and they need to realize that having unpopular political opinions means that you must sometimes ally with those you find distasteful.
I agree with the sentiment behind this, but the reason intelligeng people don't do it more often is that it becomes tiring and hurtful to always have to go against the grain and play different interests off of each other, and simultaneously constantly be considered revolting or unprincipled by dominant factions.
Either way, to pull this strategy off successfully, you kind have to find a way to fetishize the hatred that gets thrown at you (a stance which often causes a lot of problems and leads to being antisocial), or literally not care enough about how people treat you, that their emotions don't matter (which is either enlightened or utterly psychopathic).
Scattered thoughts: I think American politics have reached a certain optimal strategy, embodied in both Trump and Biden, which speaks to the level of personal investment from "elite human capital" in policy.
There is simply too much to lose if our economy or country goes belly up. The strategy of our time is to run a candidate who has only weak ideological commitments (i.e. can be made to sign off on policy written by think tanks), and who appeals strongly to voters (many of whom are not the elite human capital type).
Trump is a vulgar narcissist who clearly cares more about the prestige and power of presidency than any concrete policy, but as I see it this is a feature, not a bug. Trump appeals teeming masses of retards who vote in key states, but when he gets into office Thiel and Elon will have his ear.
The trade off will be a bad immigration policy and tariffs, which will hurt economically, but thankfully an economic loss is merely a loss where it is within our power to decide which of our needs is affected. The mandate of heaven has a price tag after all.
> “ You either make alliances of convenience with the nuts, or you end up like Europe, where they have much fewer crazy rightoids but then there’s no one left to resist the expansion of suffocating state power.”
Yes, I agree with this and I think that it goes for supporters of Progress/Abundance as well. I am not a conservative, but I realize the Left are systematically undermining the foundations of material progress (as well as the constitutional Federal Republic), so I need to ally with some people who I do not really like or agree with on all issues. I want a political alliance of the Center and the Right to rollback the failed policies of the Left.
When and if we succeed, then the Right and Progress supporters can battle it out over which new policies should be implemented. Politics is about creating coalitions among people with differing beliefs. It is not for Philosopher Kings.
I think even on an individual level, one can have values along multiple axes. I’m a fiscally somewhat conservative socially liberal “classic liberal” type with a libertarian penchant who nonetheless sees the value of a social safety net and who does not idolize absolute free markets. So depending on the issue, one of those axes may take precedence over another, for me.
And if you get a room-full of people, even selected for having the same directional trends on identical axes, different issues may trigger slightly different responses. Writ on larger scale, there will be overlap and divergences on a multitude of issues even among people who “generally” agree. Then add in entire cohorts who don’t generally agree with those premises. And you’re naturally going to get a mish-mash of allegiances that may be issue specific.
So while I agree with your premise that one side has higher “human capital” than the other (and am always impressed at your capacity of “decoupling” to note that about people who are nominally on your side), I’m not sure how to sort out on some utilitarian level as to which side does more good or bad things.
"Very few people identify with the right for the same reasons that I do, namely a commitment to individual liberty, a belief in the power of economic incentives to influence behavior, and an understanding that prices are the only way to rationally aggregate information on a mass scale."
I think this is more people than you think, but you rightly point out that it's a minority, and minorities don't do well in a democracy. You have to win the masses with something...
I think it's one of those human dualism things, where one set of traits comes with other traits and sorry, you gotta take the sweet with the sour. My data free theory is that conservatives tend to have less raw intelligence than progressives but more wisdom - immunity to crazy ass ideas that sound new and tantalizing but also throw out lots of cultural tradition. Progressives are more intelligent and more capable of self-delusion as a result, which is how you end up with the current media commentary on the election.
The problem I have with that, and with Hanania’s whole “elite human capital” thing, is that the leftists I encounter don’t actually seem that bright. Whereas libertarians often seem nutty, but are usually really smart.
To a large extent the Progressive base is Union Teachers and HR ladies. Not the most intellectually impressive cohort. And if you read Rufo, one of the things that jumps out about CRT, is that Dereck Bell basically invented that style of “scholarship” because he wasn’t bright enough to do Harvard-level normal legal scholarship.
And libertarians tend to be the most intelligent of all, and therefore the most delusional. Hence 1% performance forever.
To be a giant dork and put it in Lord of the Rings terms, Hobbits are largely unremarkable but stable and capable of producing a Frodo, Bilbo, or Bullroarer Took. They're stodgy and suspicious of change but grudgingly willing to accept greatness when they see how much it benefits them. A society of Sarumans would tear the world apart to find out what makes it tick and loathe humans for falling short of their vision. Not that all wizards are bad, but they are more likely than hobbits to waste into niche uselessness (Radagast), just sort of disappear pursuing their own mission (the blue wizards) or get high on their own farts and decide to take over the world.
Also Gandalf is obviously Friedrich Hayek
Somewhere in the intelligence, wisdom, education matrix there is also reaction to personal circumstances.
If you are a working class person of whatever ethnicity or gender you will figure out that huge influxes of unskilled labour (legal or illegal) are likely to be to your disadvantage. Understanding supply and demand doesn’t need a degree in economics.
If you live in a high crime neighbourhood, the police are pretty important to you. Defunding them, or decriminalising ‘minor’ offences will make your life worse.
If you are a woman past childbearing age, or taking a responsible approach to contraception, abortion may not be a pressing issue for you. The possibility of you or your daughters coming up against men on a sports field, or in your changing rooms, is more likely to be on your radar. So you vote again for policies that align with your priorities.
All these are intelligent responses to personal circumstances. Voting for policies that will materially worsen your life is clearly not intelligent, whatever the character flaws of the politicians involved.
On the intelligence correlation with morality, which seems to be a big feature on the liberal reaction to the election, it worth noting that of the fifteen people attending the Wannsee conference, that decided on the Final Solution in 1942, ten were degree educated of which eight had a doctorate.
The views on low skilled immigration are just wrong. People “feel” it is bad but not for any good reason, but because they’re prejudiced.
And it’s funny that you think it’s rational for a postmenopausal woman to worry about trans in sports for her daughter but not government regulating her pregnancies and forcing her to risk her life to give birth to a damaged fetus.
All of your “lived experience” arguments end up aligning with Republican talking points. That should make you suspicious.
Martin's argument is that the importation of low skilled labor will lower the price of low-skilled labor (wages). Is your argument that the latent demand for low-skilled labor is so high that it won't effect wages, and that immigrants will do work that wouldn't be done otherwise?
If there is truly a labor shortage, then no, wages won't be affected. Even if there isn't really a labor shortage but the existing pool is rotten (bad attitude, absenteeism, drug-addled, etc..; see examples from the VP-elect's book), then hardworking immigrants may be preferred without any wage depression.
Do you have examples that don't match these patterns? Places where ample low-skilled native labor exists but is actively eschewed by employers in favor of immigrants? There are people who say this about the IT industry and guest workers on H-1B visas, but that lies in a different skill category (and the same objections I raised above apply there too.)
For me the concept that if supply exceeds demand prices will go down, and vice versa, is one of the few easily comprehensible and visibly demonstrable outputs of the dismal science.
In a large and diverse modern economy that specific law in respect of labour rates is hard to to analyse. In the U.K. we kind of conducted a controlled experiment through Brexit. Finding a non partisan analysis of the impacts is difficult. I could have attached many links from right leaning sources declaring (with data) that low skilled wages went up as the labour pool from (largely) Eastern Europe faltered, but have chosen to attach the one below. The author’s political leaning seems obvious to me but he nevertheless concedes there have been some albeit minor effects and more research is necessary. Richard’s statement that it is ‘just wrong’ is certainly debatable.
Since exchanging links to cherry picked data is a fools errand I return to the lived experience argument. I doubt many contributors to this thread have ever applied for a job as a waitress or street cleaner. If the one of the working class (who isn’t a shiftless work shy drug addict - I think there’s still quite a lot of them) applies for one of those jobs, ask him or her how many others applied. The answer will vary hugely across the country but for those who find it difficult to get such a job because of the competition from those willing to work for less, dismissing their concerns by quoting abstract statistics is not a good way to get their vote.
Finally a personal anecdote. I live in a tourist area of the U.K. Pre 2016 the prevalence of Eastern Europeans in the hospitality sector was unmistakable. After Brexit many restaurants, hotels and pubs really suffered, some having to close for some days of the week. Now it is noticeable that table and bar service is more often provided by locals who are usually younger than their predecessors.
https://ukandeu.ac.uk/migration-and-wages-after-covid-and-brexit/
I appreciate all your points and citations. I'm groping in the dark too, not knowing exactly what is going on nor where the trends lead.
On the specific topic of supply and demand, you are of course (mathematically) right that if supply is fungible and demand is static, wages must go down, though it won't happen all of a sudden (there's a curve). Let's assume supply is fungible. I'm not sure if demand will remain static in any modern complex economy though. Won't there be at least some people investing more into businesses that require more workers when they see an expanded pool of workers? Like the restaurant and hospitality businesses, for example. Not so much for agricultural workers and farming, though I suspect there is at least some truth to the "crops rotting in the fields" meme.
I’m a centre left Brit. Just watching the “the electorate are stupid/immoral” reaction from this side of the pond with some amazement.
The Tories here have just, rightly, got an electoral pasting and are responding with a lot of “how do we need to change” soul searching. Not sure they’re changing in the right direction but they are blaming themselves, which is the correct reaction.
That’s just openness
Happy Veteran’s Day! I hope all readers, particularly my fellow lurkers, can appreciate my small gift of, “Richard Hanania's Substack Comment Categories”, https://matthagy.github.io/rh_comment_categories/
I’ve personally enjoyed getting to know the commentators here better through this generative AI organization and summarization of common discussion topics. I definitely now recognize the need to develop a better mental model of my fellow Americans with right wing views (ie, work on my empathy) following our recent quantitative feedback on the growing prevalence of these beliefs and values. Thank you all for your collective contributions to my intellectual growth!
That’s quite an accomplishment. Will share.
Thanks, much appreciated!
I'll eventually get around to similarly organizing your ever-growing backlog of articles into AI-generated categories (unless you object; only titles and links to articles will be shared). Currently refining the methods with Yglesias's Slow Boring: https://matthagy.github.io/sb_article_categories/ Hoping to encourage more exploration of past articles from thoughtful authors when new readers discover them.
And, similar to the comment work, I hope article organization and summarization help us all better understand the beliefs and values of other communities and motivate more cross-partisan-divide engagement. Moreover, these are good test cases for us to develop better intuition about the strengths and weaknesses of generative AI by applying it to novel domains that we each understand a bit as readers.
Reasonable position. The decision to vote Trump vs. anti-Trump in this election was ultimately one of perceived tradeoffs between destroying what remains of the Democratic statist edifice against the damage Trump v2 will cause. People can reasonable assign different weights to both that tilt the decision in either direction. Hopefully people like Tracing Woodgrains can now take the Democrats in a more productive direction.
The contrast with Europe is an interesting question. The US is obviously more economically free on average, though the difference is starkest between the US and Mediterranean Europe; the gap is much smaller with Northern Europe, especially the Nordic countries (who are high tax but otherwise very free). The unions you consider very important are also really only a southern European curse; not an issue at all in Germany or Scandinavia. There are aspects on which Europeans can be freer. For instance, as you're probably aware, Sweden had some of the world's least restrictive lockdowns and masking regulations. In short, accurate on the broad contours, but needs more qualifications.
We'll see whether you or Rich win the bet. The first test'll be if anybody's able to talk DJT out of pardoning the Januaryists.
Even though I've been optimistic about the loss, I nonetheless expect him to pardon them as his first action. Perhaps that'll have the decency to kill my hopes.
You think JD Vance and Tulsi Gabbard and Vivek Ramaswamy and RFK Jr. are intellectually and morally inferior? They strike me as an extraordinarily intelligent and diverse and willful group of adults. They're all articulate. None of them has even a hint of scandal. 4 years ago I would've agreed with you completely. But... now?
They aligned with Blumpft, so that makes them morally inferior by default. Their other qualities don't matter. To be fair I do think RFK is a questionable figure in general, certainly not "extraordinarily intelligent."
I can't tell if you're serious. By that 80 million Americans are "morally inferior by default." I see a lot of that kind of rhetoric right now but it's incredibly silly. Politics is complicated (as is ethics) and people make choices for many different reasons. Flattening the metric to a binary choice and assigning one option "good!" and one "bad!" is certainly simple but can't reflect reality. All I would have to do to disprove that heuristic is find a single virtuous person affiliated with Trump. The only thing we can say absolutely about Trump supporters is they chose Trump over Harris. ANY other absolute claim will be simplified and therefore incorrect.
My comment is sarcastic and meant to mock people who think that way (liking Trump = automatically badmeanwrongstupiddumb).
Just as an aside, the use of “Blumpt” makes you sound dumb and, for many, will be reason to dismiss you out of hand.
True EHC won't dismiss comments over such a petty reason. Anyone who does is LHC and therefore irrelevant.
RFK jr doesn’t have a hint of scandal? Do you know anything about the man?
One of these things is not like the others.
If you are, on average, dumber and more criminal in your makeup than your opposition, which the Trumplicans objectively are, to the point where Trump has pardoned the most notoriously corrupt Democratic politicians in the country just to secure their endorsement, as well as intervened on the side of Republicans who were bipartisanly implicated in corruption just because he wants to encourage more such behavior, as well allow himself easier time in committing transgressions; then you are by definition intellectually and morally inferior to your opposition, no matter how many you have in your number. There's a reason he won majority support among felons.
Yes I agree. Plus the industrialist of this century, Elon Musk! Richard was so keen to write his essay he didn't bother substantiating his big claim.
The reasonable, rational side of American conservatism has completely failed to persuade Americans against voting for the know-it-all and charismatic blue types of the last twenty years. No one wants to vote or side with the pudgy, tee-totaling, analytical and boring conservative type that throws water on the big ideas of the left. Those boring disciplined types are exactly who I would want running the government.
Trump was the first person to get everyone behind him in successfully mocking the left and ultimately exposing Dems for their flaws. I'm hopeful there is enough "elite human capital" on the conservative side to run things.
Actually, if they do nothing but reverse some of the lunacy of the pats few years, that will be a success.
Life is full of bad people who do good things and good people who do bad things... Life is full of nuance, and the biggest problem with extremists on both sides is that they are blinded to nuance and cannot compromise.
But what's missing from "move humanity forward" is "forward towards what"? Is all our amazing new tech going to turn everyone into zombies like in the movie Wall-E, doing nothing but porn, pot, and video games? Is the wealthy, high-status unmarried childless knowledge worker "winning"?
If right-wing progressives want to speak to the actual Right, they need to have an answer that goes beyond "more wealth, more tech, and everyone turns into screen-addled drones."
EDIT: Poll data that Americans are becoming less oriented toward greater goods (family, community, country, faith) and more oriented toward money. Is that really "progress"? Economists would say yes, conservatives would say no.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/americans-pull-back-from-values-that-once-defined-u-s-wsj-norc-poll-finds-df8534cd
Toward whatever people want. https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/minimal-moralshtml
I get it, I'm saying that if what people want is to get rich, lie on the beach and watch VR movies all day, libertarians are fine with that, but the actual Right is not. This elaborates: https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/the-universe-and-the-university/
Elite Human Capital(tm) + $1,000,000,000 in campaign funds = failure to convince 50% of the population to vote against a senile orange felon.
At some point, you are what you can accomplish irrespective of your test scores or the credentials your ideological comrades hand you.
TL;DR:
If you’re so smart, how come you can’t beat Trump?
Liberals seem really focused on the "bad people" half of this in the aftermath of the election. Most liberal copes that I read are expressing shock and outrage that so many people could vote for Orange Hitler. I would think "EHC" would be more capable of understanding that politics is actually about, y'know, policy--not about anyone's personal flaws.
Brilliant post. I've always been a left-libertarian (more libertarian than most Libertarians according to the Political Compass) but in recent months I have been wondering what it would be like to vote for the other side since I appreciate many of their positions, especially on economic issues. But they are all so crazy. Even in my country, where we don't have creationists or gun nuts, all the politicians likely to be successful on the right are nutcases or shysters. The individual members of the Conservative Party are even more off the rails. So I'll keep on voting for parties on the left and try to persuade them that their Social Justice and their regulations and their taxes go too far and need to be brought under control.
> As they make their case, libertarians should seek political victories by finding leverage wherever they can, which often means throwing their support behind the weaker party in a dispute.
> In the real world, principled defenders of liberty are rare, and they need to realize that having unpopular political opinions means that you must sometimes ally with those you find distasteful.
I agree with the sentiment behind this, but the reason intelligeng people don't do it more often is that it becomes tiring and hurtful to always have to go against the grain and play different interests off of each other, and simultaneously constantly be considered revolting or unprincipled by dominant factions.
Either way, to pull this strategy off successfully, you kind have to find a way to fetishize the hatred that gets thrown at you (a stance which often causes a lot of problems and leads to being antisocial), or literally not care enough about how people treat you, that their emotions don't matter (which is either enlightened or utterly psychopathic).
Scattered thoughts: I think American politics have reached a certain optimal strategy, embodied in both Trump and Biden, which speaks to the level of personal investment from "elite human capital" in policy.
There is simply too much to lose if our economy or country goes belly up. The strategy of our time is to run a candidate who has only weak ideological commitments (i.e. can be made to sign off on policy written by think tanks), and who appeals strongly to voters (many of whom are not the elite human capital type).
Trump is a vulgar narcissist who clearly cares more about the prestige and power of presidency than any concrete policy, but as I see it this is a feature, not a bug. Trump appeals teeming masses of retards who vote in key states, but when he gets into office Thiel and Elon will have his ear.
The trade off will be a bad immigration policy and tariffs, which will hurt economically, but thankfully an economic loss is merely a loss where it is within our power to decide which of our needs is affected. The mandate of heaven has a price tag after all.
> “ You either make alliances of convenience with the nuts, or you end up like Europe, where they have much fewer crazy rightoids but then there’s no one left to resist the expansion of suffocating state power.”
Yes, I agree with this and I think that it goes for supporters of Progress/Abundance as well. I am not a conservative, but I realize the Left are systematically undermining the foundations of material progress (as well as the constitutional Federal Republic), so I need to ally with some people who I do not really like or agree with on all issues. I want a political alliance of the Center and the Right to rollback the failed policies of the Left.
When and if we succeed, then the Right and Progress supporters can battle it out over which new policies should be implemented. Politics is about creating coalitions among people with differing beliefs. It is not for Philosopher Kings.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/a-manifesto-for-the-progress-based
I think even on an individual level, one can have values along multiple axes. I’m a fiscally somewhat conservative socially liberal “classic liberal” type with a libertarian penchant who nonetheless sees the value of a social safety net and who does not idolize absolute free markets. So depending on the issue, one of those axes may take precedence over another, for me.
And if you get a room-full of people, even selected for having the same directional trends on identical axes, different issues may trigger slightly different responses. Writ on larger scale, there will be overlap and divergences on a multitude of issues even among people who “generally” agree. Then add in entire cohorts who don’t generally agree with those premises. And you’re naturally going to get a mish-mash of allegiances that may be issue specific.
So while I agree with your premise that one side has higher “human capital” than the other (and am always impressed at your capacity of “decoupling” to note that about people who are nominally on your side), I’m not sure how to sort out on some utilitarian level as to which side does more good or bad things.
https://open.substack.com/pub/thedailymemes/p/no-time-for-words?r=kfs8f&selection=3841a6df-fc34-4438-8695-b9d9b68e4480&utm_campaign=post-share-selection&utm_medium=web
"Very few people identify with the right for the same reasons that I do, namely a commitment to individual liberty, a belief in the power of economic incentives to influence behavior, and an understanding that prices are the only way to rationally aggregate information on a mass scale."
I think this is more people than you think, but you rightly point out that it's a minority, and minorities don't do well in a democracy. You have to win the masses with something...