The problem is that finding an anti-woke positive message veers dangerously close to asking what the meaning of life is.
Wokeism smells like religion because it gives adherents an all encompassing, infinitely large mission that can absorb unlimited energies from unlimited people (at least, if you accept the axioms). It is a Meaning Of Life.
To compete with that you've got ... what? Going to Mars? Irrelevant to 99.999% of all people because Mars is cold and empty and they can't take part even if for some reason moving to an oxygen-free freezing desert sounded good. The Enlightenment Project? What does that even mean? National greatness? The best of a bad bunch but even so, it hardly means anything.
I felt for many years that at the root of a lot of social problems in our society is the realization that we're stuck here on Earth, that we explored the whole thing and that there's nowhere left to go. Why exactly are we here? What is it all for? What should we strive for? Very few politicians are willing to make a full throated pitch for technological utopianism, partly because that offers nothing to anyone who isn't a technologist and politicians rarely are. Traditionally Christianity offered answers, so discarding it has left a meaning-shaped hole that the culture war fills (but unfortunately, fills with bitterness).
American Awakening by Prof. Joshua Mitchell (at Georgetown) is really good on this. Identity Politics/ Wokeism is basically a Christian heresy, and has to be engaged at the religious level, not only the marketing level.
i tend to think more of Social Justice as half Protestant, half Marxist, but his point (and the basic idea of its deep and obvious religious roots) still stands...
Social Justice definitely incorporates a lot of Frankfurt School post-Marxist analysis, for sure. Of course, Marxism also emerged in a Jewish/Christian context, so there will inevitably be a lot of overlap.
Marx fits easily into the Jewish prophetic tradition, he is as much a religious figure as Moses or Isaiah, and I would be far from the first person to point out the many similarities bw Marxism and Christianity, just replace Jehovah w Homo Deus (or maybe w Hegel's conception of History) and Jesus w "the proletariat."
Humans always recycle the same few ideas just in new and shinier packages.
>The problem is that finding an anti-woke positive message veers dangerously close to asking what the meaning of life is.<
Pretty much nailed it. Society had an anti-woke positive message for literally all of history until 2 seconds ago, it involved some pretty simple things like going to church, getting married, and having kids. But today many people who claim to "oppose wokeness" are still scared to endorse such things, instead dodging the issue entirely or grasping for really weak tea as an alternative (going to Mars? Seriously? What are we even going to do when we get there?). Even endorsing "national greatness" is disallowed on similar grounds because it smells too much of traditional values.
Well, I'm sorry to inform you, but real life is not a science fiction movie. Even if we could manage to colonize some other celestial body (why this is a goal when we haven't even colonized Antarctica, I don't know), only a tiny proportion of the population could participate in that, and only in some unknown future time frame. Even then, what are those colonists going to do once they've established their little community on Mars or wherever?
One would assume they're going to multiply and, y'know, form a communal identity. But why would they do something so utterly banal? Clearly instead they're supposed to be doing something much better and more exciting, such as..... ??
>The problems with that message are that it is very personal (people don’t want politicians telling them what their religion or family should be)<
Every message of this sort is necessarily personal. You're telling people what they should be doing with their lives. If you think that's a problem, fair enough, be a libertarian. But then you can't really complain about "lack of a positive vision" or whatever.
>not very inspiring (churches are usually not selective, most people get married, and even animals have kids),<
It wouldn't have been inspiring until about two seconds ago as until then it was true most everyone got married and had kids--it wasn't any sort of special message that really had to be preached. But if we look at young generations today, it is certainly not true that most of them get married and have kids.
Family and children are the most consistent sources of meaning in most people's lives, if they have them. You could put devotion to God up there if you believe in that. When you're old and looking back on your life those are the things you will be proud of and that will make you content with yourself. You're not going to be happy with your life because of how many pride marches you went to or how much you adored Elon Musk or anything else. This is also in line with the simple biological reality that successful reproduction is life's most fundamental purpose.
>and isn’t really in opposition to most of wokeness (like the racial parts).<
Sure, but that's a negative message, i.e. "wokeness sucks, you should abhor it." We're talking here about offering a "positive alternative." Of course, you can and should do both.
This is a great point: how do you compete against an ideology selling all the juicy parts of religion—Utopianism, a handy color-coded chart that shows you how to parse Good/Evil, a chance to be on the side of the angels (Right side of history), a Promised Land, plus a way to signal how much smarter & kinder you are than your neighbors (not to mention all the employment opportunities it offers)?
Liberalism and democracy, rule of law, Bill of Rights are systems, procedures, guides, but Communism/Leftism are always MOVEMENTS, almost like tent revivals, they are post-Christian religions, which is why they've always been much more about passion for a fantasy future than pursuing actual effective policy.
And like you said, this role was once filled by Christianity and ever since the decline of Christianity we've been ripe for a hostile takeover by a younger, stronger ideological movement.
Yes, technological utopianism is another form of secular millenarianism offering to take the place of Christianity. It's ultimately just as unfulfilling as wokeness. Sorry Marc, Elon, etc.
It means something a bit like the positivity people felt towards technology in the 1950s: the future is bright, everyone will be unimaginably wealthy, disease will be forgotten, leisure time will be abundant and so on.
Of all the alternatives posited so far, I feel this is the best. It's actually believable in a way that going to Mars isn't. It's nearly universal: everyone wants our lives to be easier and better regardless of ideology, and many people can understand their own work as contributing to that future in some small way. Even if you aren't inventing flying cars yourself, maybe you work in recruiting or HR for a company that supplies something to a company that supplies something to a company that is working on flying cars. I daresay it's a lot more universal than wokeism, as straight white men have a positive role to play in any technological utopian vision, as does everyone else.
Still, there are critical problems:
1. It has little to offer people whose work is more about maintaining the status quo than changing it (e.g. lawyers, bankers, etc). You can weave a story about how everyone contributes to the glorious sparkly future in some tiny way, but realistically the guy working directly on the flying car or cure for cancer will be seen as better.
2. It has nothing to say about what makes you a good or bad person individually, or how to judge the moral outcome of everyday situations.
3. There's no obvious way to signal your allegiance.
4. Academia is a huge problem. It's structurally incentivized to tell everyone the world is facing some enormous end-of-days crisis that only increased grant funding can solve. Academic dominance of society means the population is now bought into a series of essentially false Revelations style beliefs that the end of the world is just around the corner, so attempting to preach technological positivity would smack right into the need to be a "climate change denier" as woke people would put it. You wouldn't actually need to deny that the climate changes, nobody does, but you would definitely need to deny the climatologist's pessimistic vision of the future and that in turn means directly denying many of their claims.
This whole discussion goes down the route of designing a new religion. Sounds hard.
You did a pretty good job of debunking your own suggestion so I don't feel much need to reply to that.
>This whole discussion goes down the route of designing a new religion. Sounds hard.<
Or maybe it would be easier to just stick with the religion we've already had for thousands of years with by far the deepest roots in our culture. As opposed to sitting here trying to come up with some sort of sci-fi techno-worship religion for no apparent reason besides an aversion to traditional faiths.
That's certainly one approach, but Christianity appears to have lost the battle of ideas. Perhaps a radical spin on it could do something, but otherwise it seems unlikely to be coming back. It has problems too, after all. There's only so many thousands of years that can pass between a religion being founded and it ceasing to have relevance presumably, given that adaptation and flexibility aren't famous characteristics of any of the Abrahamic religions.
>That's certainly one approach, but Christianity appears to have lost the battle of ideas.<
When you say "lose the battle of ideas," what this means is that elites and those in power don't like it. If they did like it and decided to promote it, it would then win the so-called "battle of ideas" practically overnight. Given that we are discussing where broad political movements should go with their energy, it's a circular argument to say something should be abandoned because it has "lost the battle of ideas." This would be tantamount to saying in Hitler's Germany that it's silly to bother trying to rebuff anti-semitism because clearly anti-semitism has already won the "battle of ideas."
Everything else besides woke has currently "lost the battle of ideas." The whole point of the conversation is to determine what elites should be promoting instead of woke.
>There's only so many thousands of years that can pass between a religion being founded and it ceasing to have relevance presumably, given that adaptation and flexibility aren't famous characteristics of any of the Abrahamic religions.<
Are you serious? You think the faiths spanning half the entire world's population (if we're including all three of Christianity, Islam and Judaism as "Abrahamic") and stretching in time back to antiquity don't show any "adaptation and flexibility?" On the contrary, this set of ideas seems to be among the most durable ever devised, given its ability to penetrate and persist across wildly different cultures on every continent for thousands of years.
I would rather argue that Christianity has become *too* flexible in the sense that it has made too much room for wokeism to infiltrate its ranks, although Christians as a whole still remain more resistant to woke than atheists, and I don't think that's an accident.
Anyways, the idea that you're going to throw away something with that kind of a proven track record in favor of some personal philosophy that you can't even properly articulate, well, saying it seems conceited would be a bit of an understatement. I don't know how to explain it other than that you must have a first-principles commitment to rejecting traditional faiths, by any means and at any cost. To be fair, a lot of people do have that, and many including myself blame this irrational hostility as one reason for the rise of woke to begin with.
Well, the author mentioned rockets and Mars specifically. Now, if we're talking nuclear energy, durable bridges, and increasing crop yields/acre then yeah I think that is something that can resonate with folks. But much of the TU stuff being promoted by Andreessen and Musk is too esoteric. Idk anything about Vivek, seems like a nice guy.
1) Why do you think that South Asians (like Vivek and also Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley) seem to be more successful in American politics than East Asians, despite East Asians making up more of the population?
2) You say that social liberalism and economic conservatism are both high-status. Does that mean libertarians are the highest-status people? If so, why is the Libertarian Party not gaining much traction?
East Asians simply don’t have very charismatic or outgoing personalities, same reason they’re underrepresented as great founders, etc despite being good at tech.
As for libertarians, their positions are unpopular, sometimes status and people agreeing with you work at cross purposes. Probably ideal to have a mix of higher status and popular positions.
Another reason this is absurd is it doesn’t take into account distribution of where people live. There’s an entire state where East Asians make up a significant portion of the population, which is Hawaii. Cities have Koreatowns and Chinatowns but no Indiatowns. So of course that’ll translate into political power, the fact that per capita East Asians and South Asians are about equal helps the point.
Ah, so "Well, technically, there are *more* East Asians in political positions than Indians, but that's probably because the less extraverted East Asians nonetheless have a lot of major population centers while south Asians have to win over non-Indian populations" would have been a sensible rejoinder.
The question--the premise of which you agreed with:
"Why do you think that South Asians (like Vivek and also Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley) seem to be more successful in American politics than East Asians, despite East Asians making up more of the population?"
That's clearly not true. They aren't "more successful". They aren't more highly represented.
So you can make all the excuses you like, but they should have been made in the first comment.
They are more successful on a per capita basis given the constraints of the political system, which is what people would understand as more successful in common sense terms. Anyway you are very rude and have a bad tone so I’m suspending you for a week.
Those East Asians do well, but they had the advantage of running in heavily-East Asian areas. Hirono was elected in Hawaii, which has the biggest East Asian population of any state, and where most East Asian Senators have come from (the big exception being Duckworth in Illinois). When you look at elected East Asian Representatives like Young Kim, Jill Tokuda, Ted Lieu, Grace Meng and Michelle Steel, same thing.
South Asians, meanwhile, can win in places without a lot of South Asians. Nikki Haley had hardly any South Asians in South Carolina, same with Bobby Jindal in Louisiana. Or Shri Thanedar, who managed to beat multiple Black candidates in a heavily-Black district to win.
That's the problem with East Asian candidates, they can't seem to win without East Asian support.
This touches on my pet theory about your question, which I initially hesitated to post, but after reading this comment figure I may as well chime in. South Asians are more aesthetically appealing as leaders than East Asians. If we were to put it in crude terms, South Asian features are "more white" than those of East Asians. Nikki Haley is an excellent example of this.
Do bear in mind though, I have no real evidence for this, it is just a thought I had.
You don't need to be so cautious! The Aryan invasion of India undeniably means that many Indians are genetically closer to Europeans than East Asians are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Aryan_migrations
Yasheng Huang is an interesting guy. I have not heard him opine on the politics question but I think I remember him speaking about the preponderance of South Asian CEOs at tech firms. I think he would argue that the universality of the Confucian exam system from about 600 triggered a change in East Asian social systems. Reciting the correct answer was raised in status and convincing others of your point of view was lowered in status. That's a monocausal explanation obvs but he seems like a widely read and thoughtful guy.
South Asians should be dropped. Bobby, Nikki and Vivek are people of Indian origin, India has a very strong and unique political culture - there's plenty of political wisdom and campaign strategies they can leverage. That gives them a huge leg up on campaigning, deal making and political organization. They can literally ask their cousins in India for ideas.
2. Libertarianism has been low status because most of the candidates are low status (i.e. wacky and generally unserious). The libertarian gubernatorial candidate in my home state ran strictly on platitudes with the exception of unbanning flavored vape sales. Otherwise, they are seen as the type of guys (yes, it's like 90% men) who will argue passionately that it should be legal to sell fentanyl in elementary schools or yell at you for 30 straight minutes about The Creature from Jekyll Island. I say this as someone with many libertarian tendencies.
There seems to be a big divide between the libertarian wonks that work at Cato and worship Austrian School economics versus the actual people that run as Libertarians.
Libertarian (on/off) Rand Paul is the 8th most popular Republican according to a yougov.com poll. So there's that. I think he's a clown, so there's that too.
The first wave of Indian immigrants were Punjabi agricultural workers who came in the late 19th, early 20th century. They mostly intermingled with Mexican farm workers and married into the Mexican-American community and lost their identity.
2) the second wave were professionals who came after 1965 with advanced or in the position to attain advanced degrees. While they tended to enter milieus like academia and corporate R&D that somewhat more socially liberal than the general population, they nevertheless interacted and socialized with mostly white peers in these situations. Some professional Indian immigrants had experience with the British or previously traveled to the UK, so they already acclimatized to Western professional mores. Is this population and their immediate descendants that see the most public visibility.
3) successive waves of people came from the late '80s who were more small proprietors or involved in higher paying blue collar labor like truck driving. These people tend to have more traditional beliefs and outlooks similar to other immigrants communities. Though they often become quite wealthy, they're not really high status (i.e owning a motel vs owning a yacht)
Yeah, many people have discussed that South Asians often do much better at getting promoted than East Asians have, despite non-Asian people liking East Asians more.
Andrew Yang flopped hard when he was trying to run for mayor of my city (NYC). He came in first during early polling and then tanked later on. I think that for an East Asian candidate to do well, they must not project a "goofy" vibe like Yang has, but a more serious one, or else the stereotypes consume the politician.
A large portion of East Asians are either immigrants or under 35, which rules them out for president. There's also a language issue: Indians speak English fluently before they arrive in America, and an Indian accent is much easier to understand than a Chinese accent. Probably explains why so many Indian immigrants are CEOs.
I suspect that in a generation the divide won't be as large.
IIRC a majority of Indian Americans came to the US within the last 20-30 years. East Asians on the other hand are not as immigrant heavy demographic. I think English fluency is the main factor in the success of Indian immigrants over East Asian immigrants.
Libertarianism as a vague set of ideas absolutely is high status, we just tend to think of libertarians as the people who want to go back to the gold standard, because that's the kind of low status people who vote third party. There are lots of high status libertarians, but Democrats and Republicans split their vote.
I don't know if economic conservatism is really high-status. After all, our elite class appears to be overwhelmingly liberal in their economic views, at least going by their words (maybe not their deeds). Wouldn't that make socialism the "higher status" viewpoint?
In a previous life I worked some with Vivek. He is, easily, one of the three smartest people I’ve interacted with in my life, maybe number one. And his intelligence is immediately obvious but not off-putting. I hope his campaign goes well, whatever that means.
Well, one of his intelligences is that he was able to tailor his message to the audience based on their level of sophistication (or lack thereof). He’s coming off as more intellectual than your normal Fox News talking head when he goes on there, but he’s still dumbing it down for that audience. Compare to when he’s on Maher, where he (appropriately) takes it up a notch. And when dealing with actual smart folks, he knows how to speak that language too.
Always enjoy your takes, but surprised you agree with the MSM on the idea that "poor candidate selection" was a major factor in Republican losses. Oz was a centrist, but he lost to Fetterman, who is mentally challenged, to put it mildly. Blake Masters was bright and interesting, and lost to a boring boomer. Seems like these losses were due to the fact that the RNC refused to financially support candidates that veer too far from the approved message, plus demographic changes and mail in voting.
Many white working class voters that went full MAGA weren't ready to vote for a Turkish Muslim guy that says "crudité" over a white guy that wears Carhartt hoodies. Voters could picture sharing a beer with Fetterman but not Oz.
Demographic changes (i.e., the pipeline of pre-programmed Democrat voters entering the electorate courtesy of the public education system) plus activist-led mail-in ballot harvesting makes second-order effects like "poor candidate selection" virtually irrelevant.
Senator Astronaut is dull but gives the impression of being competent and safe. In the AZ public's mind, Masters went past interesting and into nutty territory, unfortunately. And that certainly wasn't helped by having to share the ticket with Kari Lake.
Oz and Masters were endorsed by Trump, which is a bad thing in a general election. (Kemp was anti-endorsed and won easily.) They have also never run for office before - 538 has a piece about that being a big disadvantage.
I'm too lazy to find it but Richard wrote about this awhile ago, voters are dumb, but they are savants when it comes to spotting a certain kind of phoniness.
Blake Masters was an extreme full MAGA election denier, and he was running against an incumbent which is always hard. Oz wasn't extreme or crazy but he was a carpetbagger and the race was close. You can always find outliers in a trend, but if you count up election losses vs wins, it is very clear that the trend in 2022 was away from extremist candidates. Even many extremists who won underperformed in their districts. Mail in voting doesn't favor Democrats, in fact more Republicans cast mail in votes before people started spreading conspiracy theories about them.
Importantly, "extremist" means extreme MAGA, not extremely conservative. Kemp and DeWine are much more conservative than some of the crazy MAGA types. Trump himself is a moderate on most issues, it's his personality and style that's extreme (and extremely off-putting).
The poll you use to prove people support federal government agencies was taken before the Covid regime, which renders it as relevant as a poll about the DoD before 1967 or so. I would put money that support for each of those agencies (especially the CDC) has but cut by at least 50% in the last three years.
Maybe not quite that much, but it's significant. NBC doesn't ask exactly the same question, but it gives us good comparative data between April 2020 and January 2022. In April, 69% of the public said they trusted the CDC, with only 13% saying they didn't. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21184709/220027-nbc-news-january-poll.pdf
Don't agree that successful politics relies on a positive message, because recent Democratic successes falsify this notion. Since 2016 Democrats have run on Trump, Trump, Trump. Their apparently successful 2022 messaging centered on "election denial" is an extension of "Trump is bad." They didn't offer any sort of a positive vision, they focused on how much their opponent is Hitler and brought more wokeism in after winning elections on those grounds.
I do agree with you that coming across as angry and bitter appears to be bad for a politician, which explains the success of people like John Fetterman and Joe Biden. Sure, they might be literal corpses, but that's the thing--dead people aren't very scary or threatening. I can totally buy that people vote against the person they hate more/are more scared of, not for the guy they actually like. If we take the broader view of the past few election cycles, I think it would be reasonable to frame it as Trump and his buddies coming across as bitter, angry, and resentful, and losing because of it.
But that still does not mean Democrats offered any kind of positive message. They just succeeded in painting the other guys as losers. It also fits the 2016 outcome if we consider Hillary as someone who was bitter over all her previous political scandals compared to Trump who was fresh at the time and did not yet have anything to act resentful about.
This is not to say that I don't think it's a good idea to offer people a positive vision for their lives, either. I think it is good to do that. But number one, I don't necessarily think it follows that "our democracy" is any good at actually doing that or incentivizes politicians to do it, and number two, doing that honestly would involve treading upon forbidden ground (i.e. suggesting that family, community, and *gasp* maybe even religion! actually matter and are good things) and is thus disallowed.
RH again with solid analysis. I believe I can paraphrase it as "Republicans are losers, Democrats are not; Republicans will lose less and win more if they become more like winners in key ways." This seems true enough, but is answering a question most Republicans aren't asking: "How do we win elections?"
It might seem shocking that politically-interested people could not put "win elections" at the top of the priority stack, but this is just what Yudkowsky meant when he said that rationalism = winning.
But wait just a sec -- this comment so far might seem biased against Republicans. Let's look again and see if I've missed something. Oh, yes! Being on the losing side of a conflict doesn't mean being on the wrong side of it, and some people (deontologists, perhaps) do what they feel is right, and often get very very angry about people doing things that feel wrong -- especially if they're doing it to the deontologist's own family and community.
Sure, it's easy to be on the winning side when a massive army attacks one's less-numerous country -- just switch teams! Don't you want to win? Don't let pesky and outdated concepts like "treason" stand in your way!
All important issues recognizable to conservatives a century ago have been definitively decided in favor of progressives, beyond any possibility of redress. The trend seems likely to continue. Conservatives will continue to lose, and maybe they'd lose a little slower if they gave up being angry about it, and gave up being white or christian or rural or any of the rest. But what would be the point? Shouldn't they just join the winning team?
> All important issues recognizable to conservatives a century ago have been definitively decided in favor of progressives, beyond any possibility of redress
Surely the gaping and obvious exception to that claim is the failure of communism? For almost all of the 20th century progressivism was defined by the attempts to implement socialism over the corpse of capitalist oppression. Nobody gave much thought to the sorts of issues that animate progressives today. If you took a progressive from the 1920s and dropped him into the 2020s he probably wouldn't feel like all the important issues had been decided in favor of progressivism. He'd learn about the history of the USSR and conclude that progressivism had been utterly defeated by the reactionary forces of imperialist capital.
I think we underestimate the extent to which wokeism and modern progressivism is simply about resurrecting the ideas of the 20th century in a new form, ideas that were discredited so thoroughly and totally that they were burned to the ground with people dancing on their ashes. That's why people like Corbyn and Sanders come across as so incredibly legacy in their views, whereas the sort of things that Reagan was talking about would still resonate with conservatives or even libertarians today.
That's an entertaining way of framing it, but it has the Diagoras problem of silent evidence.
1920s conservatives were all christian. Christian churches wouldn't even change their stance on contraception until 1930 or so, and conservatives weren't even watching movies enough notice how depraved they were (that would wait until the 30s, too). They weren't talking about the issues of today because those issues weren't on the table. They were talking about the Red Menace, yes. Why? Because they cared about economics? No of course not, that's an absurdist modern claim made from the perspective of someone who has already given up caring about all the things that conservatives were afraid communism would destroy: the family, their faith, the nation (defined in a nativist sense, like what the word means), etc.
Yeah I'm sure they'd be really glad that Communism, like the sabot on a anti-tank round, fell away even as its payload destroyed everything they really did care about.
Do brown people have a comparative advantage in adopting the mantle of 90s Liberalism? Woke activists don't seem to really know what to do with them.
A white guy that runs on returning to 90s Liberalism will get accused of wanting to gas trans people and deport minorities to Auschwitz or whatever.
But when a brown guy promotes color-blind views that were the norm a few decades ago, the progressives are less riled up and there's more room to thread the needle.... stake out a more neutral position. Or so it seems.
The Pew poll didn't surprise me, but it did depress me. I can take some solace in the fact that it was from March 2020... just before the public got more data.
That's a very well argued essay. Unfortunately for you, as Ramaswamy is currently polling between zero and one points in the republican primary (https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/republican_nomination_polls/#!), it is all worthless dribble without a shred of truth to be found. Trump is far ahead, followed by DeSantis. To those of us that live in the real world rather than up in the clouds, it seems that bitterness sells. On both the left and the right grievance is the order of the day. You might bother to include some statistics the next time that you decide to present yourself as a genius political strategist, though in this case there are none to be found in your favour.
I took particular umbrage at this line:
"...and the need for an immigration system based on merit, rather than a globalist conspiracy to flood first world countries."
I always feel somewhat low status when attempting to advance criticisms of the dominant cultures of financialisation, borderless trade, DEI and so on. But is this because one is inevitably associated with actually low status people, who just react to everything on a gut level (and often construct mad stories which may actually be allegories that they mistake as reality)?
Richard seems to be onto something here and I hope he keeps talking about it.
This entire post is rather tedious. You’re correct that the low status, stupidity problem is the biggest thing hindering Republicans, your proscription of returning to Bush like pro-immigration, Reagan politics is so stale it beggars belief. I’d rather live under a literal Communist government than have to endure that crap again. It doesn’t even penetrate the woke narrative. It’s literally “ok, I accept that our country exists only to extract wealth from the land and provide more to the great god GDP, we’ll just do it more efficiently and not under the guise of helping oppressed minorities or whatever.” Worthless. Cede every moral argument to the Left. Let’s see where that got the British Tories and Canada, oh yeah, LOL.
In fact your argument is basically “Republicans should become like the Tories”. Ramaswamy is literally just Rishi Sunak. Well given they are about to be vaporized from orbit electorally by like 20 points, I’m not sure your advice is wise. The reality is the voters want immigration restriction because they are motivated by nativist tendencies. You burn them they’ll just vote for Daddy Biden and the social welfare state in lieu of a genuine nationalist program.
Richard, do you think your endorsement will help or hurt Vivek? Even if he agrees with you (as I'm sure a lot of people do) about "womens' tears" and police profiling, those positions are very easy to paint in a bad light politically.
Generally the Democrats since Bill Clinton have presented a moderate facade while deferring to their activist base behind the scene (ie Biden rhetoric on immigration versus how his appointees behave).
Do you recommend Republicans take a similar approach?
Yeah, for example on affirmative action if I were a GOP candidate I would say, "We must make sure that everyone is treated equally and also be mindful that some people come from disadvantaged backgrounds."
And then tell my staffers to cancel all affirmative active programs.
If abortion constitutes baby murder, it kind of has to be a federal issue, don't you think? And if it doesn't, well then now you have the liberal position. Which, politically, is a lot more convenient to have, no doubts about that. But political convenience and moral truth often don't go together.
Because we can be abortion-conservative in our own local communities+cultures. Then those cultures that encourage abortion, will slowly remove themselves from the gene pool.
In the long term, cultural acceptance of killing your own babies is a self-solving problem.
Smells of a troll comment. But, taking you seriously for two seconds, it's better to convert the "enemy's" babies to your own ideology. Woke proved this.
The Overton Window and rhetoric in general are overrated. People should just do stuff, the words of rhetoric and policy are often unrelated. Claim to be for social security while having some technocratic plan to gut and phase it out over time.
***the need…not to fight a “deep state” cabal conspiring against Republicans***
Doesn’t this depend on whether or not there actually IS a “deep state” cabal conspiring against Republicans?
Do you think Russiagate, the first bogus Trump impeachment, the suppressing of information about the Hunter Biden laptop and all the other censorship accomplished by government collaborating media and tech companies, and all the other government/media hoaxes were NOT “conspiring against Republicans”?
Or do you just think that it’s so low-status to complain about these conspiracies that Republicans should stop fighting them?
So I looked at Vivek's twitter, read his pitch, and he seems fine. I don't think he'll win the nom but I'd prefer him over all the candidates save for 1 or 2 maybe. But other than I guess abortion and vaccines, doesn't seem that different than Desantis. And Desantis is fairly moderate on both of those issues. Also Vivek doesn't seem particularly hawkish on Ukraine (which I like, but everyone else, including Hanania, is now saying is a political liability).
What am I missing? Is he trying to thread the needle? He seems like a slightly more positive version of Desantis. Is there really that much daylight between them?
The problem is that finding an anti-woke positive message veers dangerously close to asking what the meaning of life is.
Wokeism smells like religion because it gives adherents an all encompassing, infinitely large mission that can absorb unlimited energies from unlimited people (at least, if you accept the axioms). It is a Meaning Of Life.
To compete with that you've got ... what? Going to Mars? Irrelevant to 99.999% of all people because Mars is cold and empty and they can't take part even if for some reason moving to an oxygen-free freezing desert sounded good. The Enlightenment Project? What does that even mean? National greatness? The best of a bad bunch but even so, it hardly means anything.
I felt for many years that at the root of a lot of social problems in our society is the realization that we're stuck here on Earth, that we explored the whole thing and that there's nowhere left to go. Why exactly are we here? What is it all for? What should we strive for? Very few politicians are willing to make a full throated pitch for technological utopianism, partly because that offers nothing to anyone who isn't a technologist and politicians rarely are. Traditionally Christianity offered answers, so discarding it has left a meaning-shaped hole that the culture war fills (but unfortunately, fills with bitterness).
American Awakening by Prof. Joshua Mitchell (at Georgetown) is really good on this. Identity Politics/ Wokeism is basically a Christian heresy, and has to be engaged at the religious level, not only the marketing level.
i read, was excellent.
i tend to think more of Social Justice as half Protestant, half Marxist, but his point (and the basic idea of its deep and obvious religious roots) still stands...
Social Justice definitely incorporates a lot of Frankfurt School post-Marxist analysis, for sure. Of course, Marxism also emerged in a Jewish/Christian context, so there will inevitably be a lot of overlap.
Marx fits easily into the Jewish prophetic tradition, he is as much a religious figure as Moses or Isaiah, and I would be far from the first person to point out the many similarities bw Marxism and Christianity, just replace Jehovah w Homo Deus (or maybe w Hegel's conception of History) and Jesus w "the proletariat."
Humans always recycle the same few ideas just in new and shinier packages.
Yep, that puts a much finer point on it than I did.
>The problem is that finding an anti-woke positive message veers dangerously close to asking what the meaning of life is.<
Pretty much nailed it. Society had an anti-woke positive message for literally all of history until 2 seconds ago, it involved some pretty simple things like going to church, getting married, and having kids. But today many people who claim to "oppose wokeness" are still scared to endorse such things, instead dodging the issue entirely or grasping for really weak tea as an alternative (going to Mars? Seriously? What are we even going to do when we get there?). Even endorsing "national greatness" is disallowed on similar grounds because it smells too much of traditional values.
Well, I'm sorry to inform you, but real life is not a science fiction movie. Even if we could manage to colonize some other celestial body (why this is a goal when we haven't even colonized Antarctica, I don't know), only a tiny proportion of the population could participate in that, and only in some unknown future time frame. Even then, what are those colonists going to do once they've established their little community on Mars or wherever?
One would assume they're going to multiply and, y'know, form a communal identity. But why would they do something so utterly banal? Clearly instead they're supposed to be doing something much better and more exciting, such as..... ??
And what do you propose that our hypothetical Mars colonists do once they're there?
>The problems with that message are that it is very personal (people don’t want politicians telling them what their religion or family should be)<
Every message of this sort is necessarily personal. You're telling people what they should be doing with their lives. If you think that's a problem, fair enough, be a libertarian. But then you can't really complain about "lack of a positive vision" or whatever.
>not very inspiring (churches are usually not selective, most people get married, and even animals have kids),<
It wouldn't have been inspiring until about two seconds ago as until then it was true most everyone got married and had kids--it wasn't any sort of special message that really had to be preached. But if we look at young generations today, it is certainly not true that most of them get married and have kids.
Family and children are the most consistent sources of meaning in most people's lives, if they have them. You could put devotion to God up there if you believe in that. When you're old and looking back on your life those are the things you will be proud of and that will make you content with yourself. You're not going to be happy with your life because of how many pride marches you went to or how much you adored Elon Musk or anything else. This is also in line with the simple biological reality that successful reproduction is life's most fundamental purpose.
>and isn’t really in opposition to most of wokeness (like the racial parts).<
Sure, but that's a negative message, i.e. "wokeness sucks, you should abhor it." We're talking here about offering a "positive alternative." Of course, you can and should do both.
This is a great point: how do you compete against an ideology selling all the juicy parts of religion—Utopianism, a handy color-coded chart that shows you how to parse Good/Evil, a chance to be on the side of the angels (Right side of history), a Promised Land, plus a way to signal how much smarter & kinder you are than your neighbors (not to mention all the employment opportunities it offers)?
Liberalism and democracy, rule of law, Bill of Rights are systems, procedures, guides, but Communism/Leftism are always MOVEMENTS, almost like tent revivals, they are post-Christian religions, which is why they've always been much more about passion for a fantasy future than pursuing actual effective policy.
And like you said, this role was once filled by Christianity and ever since the decline of Christianity we've been ripe for a hostile takeover by a younger, stronger ideological movement.
Yes, technological utopianism is another form of secular millenarianism offering to take the place of Christianity. It's ultimately just as unfulfilling as wokeness. Sorry Marc, Elon, etc.
What does "technological utopianism" mean? How is the average person supposed to participate in that in a meaningful way?
It means something a bit like the positivity people felt towards technology in the 1950s: the future is bright, everyone will be unimaginably wealthy, disease will be forgotten, leisure time will be abundant and so on.
Of all the alternatives posited so far, I feel this is the best. It's actually believable in a way that going to Mars isn't. It's nearly universal: everyone wants our lives to be easier and better regardless of ideology, and many people can understand their own work as contributing to that future in some small way. Even if you aren't inventing flying cars yourself, maybe you work in recruiting or HR for a company that supplies something to a company that supplies something to a company that is working on flying cars. I daresay it's a lot more universal than wokeism, as straight white men have a positive role to play in any technological utopian vision, as does everyone else.
Still, there are critical problems:
1. It has little to offer people whose work is more about maintaining the status quo than changing it (e.g. lawyers, bankers, etc). You can weave a story about how everyone contributes to the glorious sparkly future in some tiny way, but realistically the guy working directly on the flying car or cure for cancer will be seen as better.
2. It has nothing to say about what makes you a good or bad person individually, or how to judge the moral outcome of everyday situations.
3. There's no obvious way to signal your allegiance.
4. Academia is a huge problem. It's structurally incentivized to tell everyone the world is facing some enormous end-of-days crisis that only increased grant funding can solve. Academic dominance of society means the population is now bought into a series of essentially false Revelations style beliefs that the end of the world is just around the corner, so attempting to preach technological positivity would smack right into the need to be a "climate change denier" as woke people would put it. You wouldn't actually need to deny that the climate changes, nobody does, but you would definitely need to deny the climatologist's pessimistic vision of the future and that in turn means directly denying many of their claims.
This whole discussion goes down the route of designing a new religion. Sounds hard.
You did a pretty good job of debunking your own suggestion so I don't feel much need to reply to that.
>This whole discussion goes down the route of designing a new religion. Sounds hard.<
Or maybe it would be easier to just stick with the religion we've already had for thousands of years with by far the deepest roots in our culture. As opposed to sitting here trying to come up with some sort of sci-fi techno-worship religion for no apparent reason besides an aversion to traditional faiths.
That's certainly one approach, but Christianity appears to have lost the battle of ideas. Perhaps a radical spin on it could do something, but otherwise it seems unlikely to be coming back. It has problems too, after all. There's only so many thousands of years that can pass between a religion being founded and it ceasing to have relevance presumably, given that adaptation and flexibility aren't famous characteristics of any of the Abrahamic religions.
>That's certainly one approach, but Christianity appears to have lost the battle of ideas.<
When you say "lose the battle of ideas," what this means is that elites and those in power don't like it. If they did like it and decided to promote it, it would then win the so-called "battle of ideas" practically overnight. Given that we are discussing where broad political movements should go with their energy, it's a circular argument to say something should be abandoned because it has "lost the battle of ideas." This would be tantamount to saying in Hitler's Germany that it's silly to bother trying to rebuff anti-semitism because clearly anti-semitism has already won the "battle of ideas."
Everything else besides woke has currently "lost the battle of ideas." The whole point of the conversation is to determine what elites should be promoting instead of woke.
>There's only so many thousands of years that can pass between a religion being founded and it ceasing to have relevance presumably, given that adaptation and flexibility aren't famous characteristics of any of the Abrahamic religions.<
Are you serious? You think the faiths spanning half the entire world's population (if we're including all three of Christianity, Islam and Judaism as "Abrahamic") and stretching in time back to antiquity don't show any "adaptation and flexibility?" On the contrary, this set of ideas seems to be among the most durable ever devised, given its ability to penetrate and persist across wildly different cultures on every continent for thousands of years.
I would rather argue that Christianity has become *too* flexible in the sense that it has made too much room for wokeism to infiltrate its ranks, although Christians as a whole still remain more resistant to woke than atheists, and I don't think that's an accident.
Anyways, the idea that you're going to throw away something with that kind of a proven track record in favor of some personal philosophy that you can't even properly articulate, well, saying it seems conceited would be a bit of an understatement. I don't know how to explain it other than that you must have a first-principles commitment to rejecting traditional faiths, by any means and at any cost. To be fair, a lot of people do have that, and many including myself blame this irrational hostility as one reason for the rise of woke to begin with.
Well, the author mentioned rockets and Mars specifically. Now, if we're talking nuclear energy, durable bridges, and increasing crop yields/acre then yeah I think that is something that can resonate with folks. But much of the TU stuff being promoted by Andreessen and Musk is too esoteric. Idk anything about Vivek, seems like a nice guy.
Good points. I do have two questions:
1) Why do you think that South Asians (like Vivek and also Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley) seem to be more successful in American politics than East Asians, despite East Asians making up more of the population?
2) You say that social liberalism and economic conservatism are both high-status. Does that mean libertarians are the highest-status people? If so, why is the Libertarian Party not gaining much traction?
East Asians simply don’t have very charismatic or outgoing personalities, same reason they’re underrepresented as great founders, etc despite being good at tech.
As for libertarians, their positions are unpopular, sometimes status and people agreeing with you work at cross purposes. Probably ideal to have a mix of higher status and popular positions.
Yes that would be a great analysis if the number of East Asian and South Asians were the same and had been in the country for an equal period of time.
Another reason this is absurd is it doesn’t take into account distribution of where people live. There’s an entire state where East Asians make up a significant portion of the population, which is Hawaii. Cities have Koreatowns and Chinatowns but no Indiatowns. So of course that’ll translate into political power, the fact that per capita East Asians and South Asians are about equal helps the point.
New York City most certainly does have South Asian ("Indian") neighborhoods.
Ah, so "Well, technically, there are *more* East Asians in political positions than Indians, but that's probably because the less extraverted East Asians nonetheless have a lot of major population centers while south Asians have to win over non-Indian populations" would have been a sensible rejoinder.
The question--the premise of which you agreed with:
"Why do you think that South Asians (like Vivek and also Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley) seem to be more successful in American politics than East Asians, despite East Asians making up more of the population?"
That's clearly not true. They aren't "more successful". They aren't more highly represented.
So you can make all the excuses you like, but they should have been made in the first comment.
They are more successful on a per capita basis given the constraints of the political system, which is what people would understand as more successful in common sense terms. Anyway you are very rude and have a bad tone so I’m suspending you for a week.
Those East Asians do well, but they had the advantage of running in heavily-East Asian areas. Hirono was elected in Hawaii, which has the biggest East Asian population of any state, and where most East Asian Senators have come from (the big exception being Duckworth in Illinois). When you look at elected East Asian Representatives like Young Kim, Jill Tokuda, Ted Lieu, Grace Meng and Michelle Steel, same thing.
South Asians, meanwhile, can win in places without a lot of South Asians. Nikki Haley had hardly any South Asians in South Carolina, same with Bobby Jindal in Louisiana. Or Shri Thanedar, who managed to beat multiple Black candidates in a heavily-Black district to win.
That's the problem with East Asian candidates, they can't seem to win without East Asian support.
This touches on my pet theory about your question, which I initially hesitated to post, but after reading this comment figure I may as well chime in. South Asians are more aesthetically appealing as leaders than East Asians. If we were to put it in crude terms, South Asian features are "more white" than those of East Asians. Nikki Haley is an excellent example of this.
Do bear in mind though, I have no real evidence for this, it is just a thought I had.
You don't need to be so cautious! The Aryan invasion of India undeniably means that many Indians are genetically closer to Europeans than East Asians are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Aryan_migrations
Yasheng Huang is an interesting guy. I have not heard him opine on the politics question but I think I remember him speaking about the preponderance of South Asian CEOs at tech firms. I think he would argue that the universality of the Confucian exam system from about 600 triggered a change in East Asian social systems. Reciting the correct answer was raised in status and convincing others of your point of view was lowered in status. That's a monocausal explanation obvs but he seems like a widely read and thoughtful guy.
South Asians should be dropped. Bobby, Nikki and Vivek are people of Indian origin, India has a very strong and unique political culture - there's plenty of political wisdom and campaign strategies they can leverage. That gives them a huge leg up on campaigning, deal making and political organization. They can literally ask their cousins in India for ideas.
I think this is a very lukewarm take. You’re suggesting all East Asians have the same set of personality characteristics? Data or it didn’t happen.
2. Libertarianism has been low status because most of the candidates are low status (i.e. wacky and generally unserious). The libertarian gubernatorial candidate in my home state ran strictly on platitudes with the exception of unbanning flavored vape sales. Otherwise, they are seen as the type of guys (yes, it's like 90% men) who will argue passionately that it should be legal to sell fentanyl in elementary schools or yell at you for 30 straight minutes about The Creature from Jekyll Island. I say this as someone with many libertarian tendencies.
There seems to be a big divide between the libertarian wonks that work at Cato and worship Austrian School economics versus the actual people that run as Libertarians.
Cato is controlled by the regime. If you want to read about *real* libertarians, look at the Mises Institute (mises.org).
Libertarian (on/off) Rand Paul is the 8th most popular Republican according to a yougov.com poll. So there's that. I think he's a clown, so there's that too.
In regards to 1):
The first wave of Indian immigrants were Punjabi agricultural workers who came in the late 19th, early 20th century. They mostly intermingled with Mexican farm workers and married into the Mexican-American community and lost their identity.
2) the second wave were professionals who came after 1965 with advanced or in the position to attain advanced degrees. While they tended to enter milieus like academia and corporate R&D that somewhat more socially liberal than the general population, they nevertheless interacted and socialized with mostly white peers in these situations. Some professional Indian immigrants had experience with the British or previously traveled to the UK, so they already acclimatized to Western professional mores. Is this population and their immediate descendants that see the most public visibility.
3) successive waves of people came from the late '80s who were more small proprietors or involved in higher paying blue collar labor like truck driving. These people tend to have more traditional beliefs and outlooks similar to other immigrants communities. Though they often become quite wealthy, they're not really high status (i.e owning a motel vs owning a yacht)
Not just politics but business too.
Though you can't forget Andrew Yang. Seems like Vivek Ramaswamy will be the Yang of 24.
Yeah, many people have discussed that South Asians often do much better at getting promoted than East Asians have, despite non-Asian people liking East Asians more.
Andrew Yang flopped hard when he was trying to run for mayor of my city (NYC). He came in first during early polling and then tanked later on. I think that for an East Asian candidate to do well, they must not project a "goofy" vibe like Yang has, but a more serious one, or else the stereotypes consume the politician.
A large portion of East Asians are either immigrants or under 35, which rules them out for president. There's also a language issue: Indians speak English fluently before they arrive in America, and an Indian accent is much easier to understand than a Chinese accent. Probably explains why so many Indian immigrants are CEOs.
I suspect that in a generation the divide won't be as large.
IIRC a majority of Indian Americans came to the US within the last 20-30 years. East Asians on the other hand are not as immigrant heavy demographic. I think English fluency is the main factor in the success of Indian immigrants over East Asian immigrants.
Libertarianism as a vague set of ideas absolutely is high status, we just tend to think of libertarians as the people who want to go back to the gold standard, because that's the kind of low status people who vote third party. There are lots of high status libertarians, but Democrats and Republicans split their vote.
I don't know if economic conservatism is really high-status. After all, our elite class appears to be overwhelmingly liberal in their economic views, at least going by their words (maybe not their deeds). Wouldn't that make socialism the "higher status" viewpoint?
In a previous life I worked some with Vivek. He is, easily, one of the three smartest people I’ve interacted with in my life, maybe number one. And his intelligence is immediately obvious but not off-putting. I hope his campaign goes well, whatever that means.
One of the three smartest people you've interacted with? Great, now he's doomed. :(
Well, one of his intelligences is that he was able to tailor his message to the audience based on their level of sophistication (or lack thereof). He’s coming off as more intellectual than your normal Fox News talking head when he goes on there, but he’s still dumbing it down for that audience. Compare to when he’s on Maher, where he (appropriately) takes it up a notch. And when dealing with actual smart folks, he knows how to speak that language too.
He’s good.
Before I send my $15 I would appreciate if you can forward his anal exam
Always enjoy your takes, but surprised you agree with the MSM on the idea that "poor candidate selection" was a major factor in Republican losses. Oz was a centrist, but he lost to Fetterman, who is mentally challenged, to put it mildly. Blake Masters was bright and interesting, and lost to a boring boomer. Seems like these losses were due to the fact that the RNC refused to financially support candidates that veer too far from the approved message, plus demographic changes and mail in voting.
Many white working class voters that went full MAGA weren't ready to vote for a Turkish Muslim guy that says "crudité" over a white guy that wears Carhartt hoodies. Voters could picture sharing a beer with Fetterman but not Oz.
https://societystandpoint.substack.com/p/dr-mehmet-oz-lost-to-john-fetterman
Demographic changes (i.e., the pipeline of pre-programmed Democrat voters entering the electorate courtesy of the public education system) plus activist-led mail-in ballot harvesting makes second-order effects like "poor candidate selection" virtually irrelevant.
Senator Astronaut is dull but gives the impression of being competent and safe. In the AZ public's mind, Masters went past interesting and into nutty territory, unfortunately. And that certainly wasn't helped by having to share the ticket with Kari Lake.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/arizona-gop-senate-blake-masters-emails-b2162160.html
https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/08/politics/blake-masters-january-6-comments/index.html
Oz and Masters were endorsed by Trump, which is a bad thing in a general election. (Kemp was anti-endorsed and won easily.) They have also never run for office before - 538 has a piece about that being a big disadvantage.
I'm too lazy to find it but Richard wrote about this awhile ago, voters are dumb, but they are savants when it comes to spotting a certain kind of phoniness.
Blake Masters was an extreme full MAGA election denier, and he was running against an incumbent which is always hard. Oz wasn't extreme or crazy but he was a carpetbagger and the race was close. You can always find outliers in a trend, but if you count up election losses vs wins, it is very clear that the trend in 2022 was away from extremist candidates. Even many extremists who won underperformed in their districts. Mail in voting doesn't favor Democrats, in fact more Republicans cast mail in votes before people started spreading conspiracy theories about them.
Importantly, "extremist" means extreme MAGA, not extremely conservative. Kemp and DeWine are much more conservative than some of the crazy MAGA types. Trump himself is a moderate on most issues, it's his personality and style that's extreme (and extremely off-putting).
The poll you use to prove people support federal government agencies was taken before the Covid regime, which renders it as relevant as a poll about the DoD before 1967 or so. I would put money that support for each of those agencies (especially the CDC) has but cut by at least 50% in the last three years.
Maybe not quite that much, but it's significant. NBC doesn't ask exactly the same question, but it gives us good comparative data between April 2020 and January 2022. In April, 69% of the public said they trusted the CDC, with only 13% saying they didn't. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21184709/220027-nbc-news-january-poll.pdf
Don't agree that successful politics relies on a positive message, because recent Democratic successes falsify this notion. Since 2016 Democrats have run on Trump, Trump, Trump. Their apparently successful 2022 messaging centered on "election denial" is an extension of "Trump is bad." They didn't offer any sort of a positive vision, they focused on how much their opponent is Hitler and brought more wokeism in after winning elections on those grounds.
I do agree with you that coming across as angry and bitter appears to be bad for a politician, which explains the success of people like John Fetterman and Joe Biden. Sure, they might be literal corpses, but that's the thing--dead people aren't very scary or threatening. I can totally buy that people vote against the person they hate more/are more scared of, not for the guy they actually like. If we take the broader view of the past few election cycles, I think it would be reasonable to frame it as Trump and his buddies coming across as bitter, angry, and resentful, and losing because of it.
But that still does not mean Democrats offered any kind of positive message. They just succeeded in painting the other guys as losers. It also fits the 2016 outcome if we consider Hillary as someone who was bitter over all her previous political scandals compared to Trump who was fresh at the time and did not yet have anything to act resentful about.
This is not to say that I don't think it's a good idea to offer people a positive vision for their lives, either. I think it is good to do that. But number one, I don't necessarily think it follows that "our democracy" is any good at actually doing that or incentivizes politicians to do it, and number two, doing that honestly would involve treading upon forbidden ground (i.e. suggesting that family, community, and *gasp* maybe even religion! actually matter and are good things) and is thus disallowed.
RH again with solid analysis. I believe I can paraphrase it as "Republicans are losers, Democrats are not; Republicans will lose less and win more if they become more like winners in key ways." This seems true enough, but is answering a question most Republicans aren't asking: "How do we win elections?"
It might seem shocking that politically-interested people could not put "win elections" at the top of the priority stack, but this is just what Yudkowsky meant when he said that rationalism = winning.
But wait just a sec -- this comment so far might seem biased against Republicans. Let's look again and see if I've missed something. Oh, yes! Being on the losing side of a conflict doesn't mean being on the wrong side of it, and some people (deontologists, perhaps) do what they feel is right, and often get very very angry about people doing things that feel wrong -- especially if they're doing it to the deontologist's own family and community.
Sure, it's easy to be on the winning side when a massive army attacks one's less-numerous country -- just switch teams! Don't you want to win? Don't let pesky and outdated concepts like "treason" stand in your way!
All important issues recognizable to conservatives a century ago have been definitively decided in favor of progressives, beyond any possibility of redress. The trend seems likely to continue. Conservatives will continue to lose, and maybe they'd lose a little slower if they gave up being angry about it, and gave up being white or christian or rural or any of the rest. But what would be the point? Shouldn't they just join the winning team?
> All important issues recognizable to conservatives a century ago have been definitively decided in favor of progressives, beyond any possibility of redress
Surely the gaping and obvious exception to that claim is the failure of communism? For almost all of the 20th century progressivism was defined by the attempts to implement socialism over the corpse of capitalist oppression. Nobody gave much thought to the sorts of issues that animate progressives today. If you took a progressive from the 1920s and dropped him into the 2020s he probably wouldn't feel like all the important issues had been decided in favor of progressivism. He'd learn about the history of the USSR and conclude that progressivism had been utterly defeated by the reactionary forces of imperialist capital.
I think we underestimate the extent to which wokeism and modern progressivism is simply about resurrecting the ideas of the 20th century in a new form, ideas that were discredited so thoroughly and totally that they were burned to the ground with people dancing on their ashes. That's why people like Corbyn and Sanders come across as so incredibly legacy in their views, whereas the sort of things that Reagan was talking about would still resonate with conservatives or even libertarians today.
That's an entertaining way of framing it, but it has the Diagoras problem of silent evidence.
1920s conservatives were all christian. Christian churches wouldn't even change their stance on contraception until 1930 or so, and conservatives weren't even watching movies enough notice how depraved they were (that would wait until the 30s, too). They weren't talking about the issues of today because those issues weren't on the table. They were talking about the Red Menace, yes. Why? Because they cared about economics? No of course not, that's an absurdist modern claim made from the perspective of someone who has already given up caring about all the things that conservatives were afraid communism would destroy: the family, their faith, the nation (defined in a nativist sense, like what the word means), etc.
Yeah I'm sure they'd be really glad that Communism, like the sabot on a anti-tank round, fell away even as its payload destroyed everything they really did care about.
There is only wokeism in the mind of R's
Do brown people have a comparative advantage in adopting the mantle of 90s Liberalism? Woke activists don't seem to really know what to do with them.
A white guy that runs on returning to 90s Liberalism will get accused of wanting to gas trans people and deport minorities to Auschwitz or whatever.
But when a brown guy promotes color-blind views that were the norm a few decades ago, the progressives are less riled up and there's more room to thread the needle.... stake out a more neutral position. Or so it seems.
The Pew poll didn't surprise me, but it did depress me. I can take some solace in the fact that it was from March 2020... just before the public got more data.
That's a very well argued essay. Unfortunately for you, as Ramaswamy is currently polling between zero and one points in the republican primary (https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/republican_nomination_polls/#!), it is all worthless dribble without a shred of truth to be found. Trump is far ahead, followed by DeSantis. To those of us that live in the real world rather than up in the clouds, it seems that bitterness sells. On both the left and the right grievance is the order of the day. You might bother to include some statistics the next time that you decide to present yourself as a genius political strategist, though in this case there are none to be found in your favour.
I took particular umbrage at this line:
"...and the need for an immigration system based on merit, rather than a globalist conspiracy to flood first world countries."
You mean the conspiracy that politicians are following their openly stated policy positions on immigration? (https://www.foxnews.com/politics/flashback-joe-biden-constant-unrelenting-immigration) I expect this kind of dishonest framing from the mainstream media, but I had expected better of your blog.
I always feel somewhat low status when attempting to advance criticisms of the dominant cultures of financialisation, borderless trade, DEI and so on. But is this because one is inevitably associated with actually low status people, who just react to everything on a gut level (and often construct mad stories which may actually be allegories that they mistake as reality)?
Richard seems to be onto something here and I hope he keeps talking about it.
This entire post is rather tedious. You’re correct that the low status, stupidity problem is the biggest thing hindering Republicans, your proscription of returning to Bush like pro-immigration, Reagan politics is so stale it beggars belief. I’d rather live under a literal Communist government than have to endure that crap again. It doesn’t even penetrate the woke narrative. It’s literally “ok, I accept that our country exists only to extract wealth from the land and provide more to the great god GDP, we’ll just do it more efficiently and not under the guise of helping oppressed minorities or whatever.” Worthless. Cede every moral argument to the Left. Let’s see where that got the British Tories and Canada, oh yeah, LOL.
In fact your argument is basically “Republicans should become like the Tories”. Ramaswamy is literally just Rishi Sunak. Well given they are about to be vaporized from orbit electorally by like 20 points, I’m not sure your advice is wise. The reality is the voters want immigration restriction because they are motivated by nativist tendencies. You burn them they’ll just vote for Daddy Biden and the social welfare state in lieu of a genuine nationalist program.
Richard, do you think your endorsement will help or hurt Vivek? Even if he agrees with you (as I'm sure a lot of people do) about "womens' tears" and police profiling, those positions are very easy to paint in a bad light politically.
Have you tried inviting him to your podcast?
Generally the Democrats since Bill Clinton have presented a moderate facade while deferring to their activist base behind the scene (ie Biden rhetoric on immigration versus how his appointees behave).
Do you recommend Republicans take a similar approach?
Yes. Except on abortion, where they should just become liberals.
Yeah, for example on affirmative action if I were a GOP candidate I would say, "We must make sure that everyone is treated equally and also be mindful that some people come from disadvantaged backgrounds."
And then tell my staffers to cancel all affirmative active programs.
Why should we be liberals on abortion?
It's good Roe V Wade was overturned because it was a bad decision. However GOP should make abortion a state issue, not a federal issue.
If abortion constitutes baby murder, it kind of has to be a federal issue, don't you think? And if it doesn't, well then now you have the liberal position. Which, politically, is a lot more convenient to have, no doubts about that. But political convenience and moral truth often don't go together.
Because we can be abortion-conservative in our own local communities+cultures. Then those cultures that encourage abortion, will slowly remove themselves from the gene pool.
In the long term, cultural acceptance of killing your own babies is a self-solving problem.
So, it sounds like you agree that abortion = murder of a baby?
Yes. Isn't it wonderful when the enemy will murder their own babies as long as you don't lift a finger to try to stop them?
Smells of a troll comment. But, taking you seriously for two seconds, it's better to convert the "enemy's" babies to your own ideology. Woke proved this.
Isn't this facade strategy just a recipe for letting the other side push the Overton window out from under you?
The Overton Window and rhetoric in general are overrated. People should just do stuff, the words of rhetoric and policy are often unrelated. Claim to be for social security while having some technocratic plan to gut and phase it out over time.
***the need…not to fight a “deep state” cabal conspiring against Republicans***
Doesn’t this depend on whether or not there actually IS a “deep state” cabal conspiring against Republicans?
Do you think Russiagate, the first bogus Trump impeachment, the suppressing of information about the Hunter Biden laptop and all the other censorship accomplished by government collaborating media and tech companies, and all the other government/media hoaxes were NOT “conspiring against Republicans”?
Or do you just think that it’s so low-status to complain about these conspiracies that Republicans should stop fighting them?
So I looked at Vivek's twitter, read his pitch, and he seems fine. I don't think he'll win the nom but I'd prefer him over all the candidates save for 1 or 2 maybe. But other than I guess abortion and vaccines, doesn't seem that different than Desantis. And Desantis is fairly moderate on both of those issues. Also Vivek doesn't seem particularly hawkish on Ukraine (which I like, but everyone else, including Hanania, is now saying is a political liability).
What am I missing? Is he trying to thread the needle? He seems like a slightly more positive version of Desantis. Is there really that much daylight between them?