Rightists as Low Decouplers: Examples from the Comments

How to have productive debates

I recently wrote that if there’s one thing that distinguishes people worth listening to, it is that they are high decouplers. This can be defined as an ability and willingness to consider individual questions and issues on their own merits without being distracted by tribalist considerations or a pre-existing narrative about the way the world works. Decoupling is not just an academic exercise, and if a debate is going to get anywhere two sides need to do things like establish shared facts and be transparent regarding important chains of reasoning.

I’ve never paid too much attention to the comments to this newsletter, generally preferring a hands-off approach, mostly because I don’t want to bother myself with curation. But I’ve come to realize that comments sections need some kind of guiding hand or they will have a tendency to constantly get hijacked. If I’m going to play that role, then, it is worthwhile to say something about what I think makes conversations worth having, and provide examples of what I consider more and less useful ways to engage with ideas.

Fleshing out the decoupling framework seems the best way to go about this. Below are examples of comments from three recent articles that I think were very low on decoupling. I’ll explain why I find these comments annoying. At the end, I’ll say a few words on the relationship between decoupling and ideology. In my experience engaging with people online and in real life, I have observed a pattern where if you have a rightist and leftist of equal intelligence, the rightist will usually find decoupling more difficult.

Example 1: NonZionism on Catholics and Protestants

The first example comes from my piece on Catholic integralism. In it, I wrote a short history of anti-papism. NonZionism, whose blog is sometimes very good, left a comment in which he took issue with some aspects of my history. This is fine, but for the most part he was angry that I was too unsympathetic to Catholics.

Your history of Catholicism and anti-Catholicism in England is all messed up…

2) It may be true that puritans claimed that 'opposition to Catholicism was the primary reason English Calvinists came to the New World in the 1620s and 1630s', but they were not fleeing Catholic priests hiding in priests holes (a real thing google it). What they meant by 'Popery' were stained glass windows, bishops, singing any kind of song except metrical psalms, not enforcing strict Sunday laws, Christmas and, frankly, just about any random thing that puritans had decided was forbidden under their ever-escalating purity spirals.

3) It's technically true that James II was the last Catholic King, but your presentation is entirely misleading. There had not been another catholic monarch for over 100 years prior, and he only became king because Charles II died without heirs. He would never have converted otherwise. His programme once in power was toleration for Catholics, and he tried various alliances, first with High Church Anglicans, then with Dissenters and Whigs, but no-one would go along with it. It's true that puritans depicted this as a culmination of 100 years of catholic scheming to take over England, but that is because they were sick in the head.

So your history is accurate in the sense that it represents the self-conception of deranged, malicious New England puritans, but not as a representation of what actually happened in history. Puritans were horrible people then and are horrible people now and it would have been better had all their ships drowned. The United States of America was founded, basically, by episcopalian* southern slave-owners and enlightenment intellectuals, and one of their goals (in which ultimately they failed) was containing the lunatic puritans who had been integral to the revolution a decade before, but were more dangerous than English rule ever had been.

The point of the relevant section of the article was to focus on American historical attitudes towards Catholicism. It wasn’t to litigate whether Protestants were correct on whether we should celebrate Christmas or have stained glass windows. I think I would take the side of seventeenth century Catholics in that debate.

A very high decoupler

There is nothing wrong with bringing up points that are tangential to the main argument of a piece. But it’s important to distinguish between issues. “You get some things wrong on the history of Protestant/Catholic relations in seventeenth century England” and “by the way, we should remember that the Protestants were in many ways deranged” are distinct points. Despite NonZionism putting forward his objections to the article in list form, the two main arguments run together throughout.

Take his point #3 above. What I dislike about this paragraph is that it implies that the reign of James II was somehow central to my argument in the section where I mention him, which is again just meant to explain how the Protestants who fled England understood the situation in their home country in the context of a brief overview of American history that spanned from colonial times to the 1960s. James II being a wise ruler can’t be a reason why my “history of Catholicism and anti-Catholicism in England is all messed up” since I didn’t take a position on his reign.

You might say that I’m nitpicking here, and this is a critique based on style more than substance. But while all the pieces are there for a good comment, engaging with something like this is a lot of work, and it is written in a way that has a tendency to hinder rather than facilitate good communication. Individual “points” combine positive and normative claims, and things I did and did not argue.

The bad structure I suspect reflects cloudy thinking. People who mash different concerns and arguments together on the page probably aren’t doing a great job of distinguishing them in their heads. The substance of their thoughts and their style of presenting them are closely related.

Anyway, I banned NonZionism for a month for reasons explained below, but will lift the ban now since I’m confident he can make useful contributions, and I’m talking about him and he should have the chance to respond if he wants. I just found out that he was also banned by Scott Alexander, so I am not the only one who has appreciated his substack but found his commenting annoying.

Example 2: Trump’s Coup Attempt

I often mention that Trump tried to pull off a coup after losing the presidency and I think that this is bad. Few rightists who are not completely ignorant of the facts will try to defend his actions between the 2020 election and January 6. But they will very often, for reasons that make sense to themselves but no one else, begin talking about BLM. Or they’ll do what Person Online did in the reply below responding to another commenter.

Suppose that Democrats were to do any or all of the following:

End the electoral college, turning presidential elections into a matter of the popular vote

Admit DC and Puerto Rico as states

Grant amnesty, citizenship (and thus voting rights) to millions of immigrants, both legal and illegal

Pack the Supreme Court, for instance by increasing the number of justices to 11 (or even more) and immediately nominating liberals to those seats

End the filibuster

Would any of these things "threaten liberal norms?" What about all of them done in combination?

Obviously, none of these things is in the same universe as a president not accepting the results of an election he lost. You can say they break with norms, but as long as Democrats go through the proper legal channels and processes for adding states and new Supreme Court justices, there is no comparison to what Trump did. If you want a closer analogy, imagine Democrats tried and failed to abolish the Electoral College, but then on January 6, 2025, Kamala Harris decided to ignore the election results and said she was going to make herself president based on the popular vote. There, you get something that sort of looks like Trump’s attempted coup in 2020, where he personally tried to get fake electors to go to Washington and Pence to listen to them instead of the real ones.

It’s very annoying that people feel the need to deny that the 2020 coup attempt was unique. There seems to be a complete inability to ever grant the other side a point on anything. I don’t care whether you vote for Trump or Harris in the end, but denying the coup attempt, an event we all witnessed that was this clear cut and well documented, or even downplaying its significance, is simply discrediting.

What Person Online is doing is not having a direct conversation about 2020 and its significance. He’s probing to see if there’s some way he can redeem Trump, and by extension the third of the country that worships him. Note the question “[w]hat about all of them done in combination?” He seems to be setting up for the next argument. If any interlocutor shows that the coup attempt in 2020 was worse than court packing or granting citizenship to illegals, he’s ready to take five different things Democrats might potentially do, put them on the ledger, and maybe that’ll balance out one attempt to steal the election. That seems to be the point of this comment later in the thread. If the conversation continued, perhaps he would have moved on to asking what if Democrats did all this while censoring social media? I feel like he’s also going to bring up the fact that at some point a Democrat said that something Republicans did was undemocratic, which by the definition of the person he’s arguing with wasn’t actually undemocratic, and so leftists are hypocrites anyway, which is another strike against them in this much larger project of redeeming Trump, because otherwise everything falls apart.

Compare all this effort to my case for voting Trump. I’m able to single out the question “is Trump a unique threat to democracy?” from other concerns. I’m pro-democracy but it’s not the only thing I care about. Democrats were pro-lockdowns and masking, are hostile to free speech, and bad for economic growth. Combining all of those things together outweighs Trump’s desire to abolish democracy.

I’m able to make a checklist in my mind. Here’s one point for Democrats, here are two for Republicans. Here’s another point for Democrats, but this one seems really important and so we’ll weigh it more. This is what free thinking means. It’s not the best way to be a campaign manager or a spokesman for a party, but my hope is to try and have interesting and intellectually productive conversations.

If you have strong feelings about 2020 and take the MAGA line on it, or even if you feel any need to make a comparison to something Democrats did or might do, I recommend this piece by Bentham. And if the information there is new to you, consider what it means that you have been living in an intellectual bubble.

Example 3: NonZionism Again

In my article on sports betting the other day, the first comment was from NonZionism, who wrote,

Liberaltarianism is the position you arrive at after concluding that good government is impossible, so you just have to disable it, but still don't want to oppose vaccine mandates because that would be déclassé.

My article was not about “liberaltarianism” and had nothing to do with vaccines, so I had to sit there and try to figure out what even the point of this was. After a brief exchange I banned the author for a month, having been primed already by the James II post. In both comments, NonZionism was simply latching on to something he had a strong opinion about. This time it was libertarianism and vaccine mandates, and he decided to use the article as an excuse to go off.

To show you I can take criticism, here are some responses to my sports gambling article that disagree with the main argument but are perfectly fair and provide useful feedback. Aside from NonZionism, here is another comment I found annoying, this time from Andy G.

“Those of us who believe in progress have an important mission, which is to convince elites that they’re too neurotic, worried about theoretical harms, and willing to err on the side of caution in situations where they more often need to get out of the way.”

If Richard really believed in the importance of this mission, he wouldn’t spend so much time talking about Trump’s aesthetics and how he talks, nor about how awful some of Trump’s most ardent supporters are (you note he rarely talks about how awful the pro-terrorists on the left are…).

If the pro-abundance, pro-progress agenda were truly that important to him, seems to me he’d spend less time on those things, and more time trumpeting the advantages of pro-abundance and the need to support same.

So color me skeptical…

I guess Trump is his James II. My position on Trump is that he’s a liar, corrupt, and denies elections. This is not “aesthetics” in the sense that I don’t like how he combs his hair. And I even put aside all of his flaws to tell you that I want Republicans to win the election because they’re still better for human progress. But that’s not good enough for Andy G! He can’t hear any criticism of Trump, and he will pop up and downplay and ask people to ignore Trump’s flaws even in response to posts that have nothing to do with the man.

Conspiracy Theorists as the Ultimate Low Decouplers

In my experience, liberals and libertarians who I engage with are much more likely to be high decouplers than conservatives. I’m unsure about NonZionism’s exact politics, but he’s very anti-immigration, and with the possible exception of him nearly every low decoupler who responds regularly to my essays and tweets is right-leaning. I see a very strong correlation between believing immigration is a major threat to the country, deflecting on Trump’s coup attempt, and not being able to stick to the topic of a conversation.

This might be selection bias. My audience is mostly conservative, so the liberals who find me are smarter and more open-minded than is typical for their side. As for libertarians, high decoupling is sort of our specialty.

But I don’t think that what I’m observing is only true for my audience. Look at how much demand there is on the right for conspiracy theories, with Donald Trump’s dominance of the Republican Party being one of the consequences of this. We can understand conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson as the ultimate low decouplers. “Our enemies are wrong on policy, and bad people, and have evil intentions, and they’re all working together, and also Satan is involved too.”

Not every low decoupler is a conspiracy theorist, and not every conspiracy theorist is a low decoupler. Person Online and Andy G can’t stop defending Trump even when his conduct is indefensible, but I’ve never seen them talking about Klaus Schwab or Bill Gates microchipping them. Joe Rogan strikes me as someone who is a conspiracy theorist while being something of a decoupler. He believes that the world is full of shadowy forces, but there are different factions and power centers within this universe, while for those like Tucker and Jones it’s all one big conspiracy, even if they remain vague on the details.

Although there are exceptions, conspiracy theories and low decoupling usually go hand-in-hand. If you see a random European politician talking about Bill Gates buying farmland, you can bet they have trouble distinguishing between the effects of policies and the intentions of those who support them. And low decouplers are often strong defenders of conspiracy theorists on their own side, since they are highly tribal and have trouble treating the question of whether someone is part of their coalition as distinct from questions like whether they are sane or a good person. When I explain why conservatives are more conspiratorial than liberals, conservatives who won’t actually defend conspiracy theories will make excuses, deflect, and desperately start looking for ways to show that their opponents still suck more. They will either make comparisons on the original axis of discussion (“Rachel Maddow is even more conspiratorial!”) or change the subject (“Which is worse, Alex Jones’ deranged rantings or cash free bail?”). They show an inability to take a simple undisputed fact like “conservatives are more conspiratorial” or “Trump is a unique threat to democracy” and learn from it. Every conversation is an opportunity to chalk up a W for team red, instead of a process of developing and refining ideas.

Academia and journalism are often closed-minded, but these fields bring in people who at least see high decoupling as an ideal, and having an ideal is the first step to sometimes living up to it. It’s funny that sometimes you’ll hear conservatives say things like we need to become more like the left and ruthlessly crush our enemies, though nobody on the left actually talks like this. And they don’t act like it either, despite what paranoid rightists believe.

I think this is all a part of what Anatoly recently called a “general rightoid factor,” in which conspiracy theorizing, low decoupling, religiosity, homophobia, hostility to women’s rights, and ethnocentrism are all part of the same package. We might even say that rightoidism is the human default, the other side of the coin of Elite Human Capital, which naturally seeks to distinguish itself from the masses. As with many things, there’s a horseshoe here, even if conservatives are worse. Jacobin Magazine is very low on decoupling, while Vox and the New York Times are much higher.

If you’re a low decoupler, I don’t think things are necessarily hopeless, as political orientations and styles of thought are more subject to change than something like intelligence. Someone can completely transform their political opinions or mode of thinking, but you won’t see an individual go from the bottom decile of intelligence to the top. Stupid rightoids might be stuck in their ways, because they lack the tools to engage in self-reflection. They won’t, for example, read an article like this and understand they should mend their ways. But since you’re here, I have more hope for you.