Best of luck with the new book! I look forward to reading it. Particularly if it contains concrete solutions. I also have distain for left-wing lies about race and sex and what they’ve done to society.
The left and Biden admin have done a good job hiding their ultimate goal by manipulating language. For example, the word 'equity'. Most people don't realize or care that woke/DEI/ESG is a war against straight (Christian) white men. If you think this is conspiratorial, look at the definition of 'marginalized communities'. It's everyone except heterosexual white men. The sad thing is that it may be too late to turn the ship around. At least in our lifetime. I'm hopeful you can make a difference. Thank you!
I appreciate the effort to outline the relatively simple things legislators and administrators can do to change the regs & laws. This gets neglected too often. People tend to curse the system rather than roll up their sleeves and getting at doing the work to change things.
Freddie deBoer (as does Matt Yglesias) regularly castigates leftist(/ish) "allies" for neglecting the work of politics in favor of virtue signaling the ideology underlying "progressive" policy. Conservatives and the forces gathering to counter wokeism would do well to heed the advice of Richard and his counterparts on the left.
I pre-ordered and am excited to read it. Re: ideas:
“I take issue with those who put too much stress on the world of ideas — laws and regulations were created by legislators, judges, and bureaucrats, and they set off changes in the ways institutions were regulated by government, which included more internal self-regulation.”
You make it sound like civil rights law are akin to path dependency (e.g. the QWERTY keyboard). No doubt some bureaucrats engage in self-justifying behavior but the fact that the civil rights bureaucracy exists in the first place is partially traceable to pre-woke ideas (Boas, et al.) that began to overturn the Darwinian paradigm over 100 years ago and accelerated under the New Left.
Stephen Jay Gould popularized the analogy of the QWERTY keyboard in his book "Bully for Brontosaurus", in the chapter "The Panda's Thumb of Technology".
Congratulations on the book. I preordered it about 6 weeks ago so looking forward to reading it soon.
I probably think there’s a straighter line between philosophers’ ideas and wokeness than you do, mainly because the “aggressive activists” you mentioned were usually radical Marxists steeped in ideas, and if normie libs felt it was necessary to placate them, then they had at least some power.
But your overall point of unintended consequences and seemingly benign regulations bringing us here is a good one. And you’re moving the ball significantly down the field in criticizing civil rights law, which normie conservatives have been afraid of doing since the 1960s, so your courage is appreciated. As much as I like Rufo, it’s easier to criticize academics from 50+ years ago than civil rights, which as a term still retains positive connotations.
It’s important to hammer away at it and expose some of its myths so I hope your book goes a long way.
I think many of them weren’t really steeped in ideas, some were and they probably had an outsized influence but many were just emotional and latching on to whatever language was available. I’m thinking particularly of race activists and sensitive women who change corporations from the inside with help from civil rights law.
I agree, “steeped in ideas” is probably the wrong way to put it. I more meant that these activists are accurate reflections of the ideas they’re taught in college. They have the personal qualities of being emotional, neurotic, passionate, etc. but it was their professors and classes that directed their energy into an explicitly political direction.
One thing that’s always struck me about woke college students is how committed they are to regurgitating the exact jargon they’re taught, so in that sense they’re the real world reflection of those ideas. In the mid 2010s, people like Bill Maher would complain about the things millennial students would say when they tried to shut down a conservative speaker or something, but they didn’t really notice that everything the students said was taken verbatim from what their professors and textbooks said in whatever “studies” classes they took.
I don’t think they’re particularly deep or curious people themselves, but they’re zealous about applying their professors’ ideas into the real world.
And as you said, aided very much by civil rights law.
Emotional women can latch onto many different ideas (e.g., the temperance movement, anti-porn, etc.) but they long ago latched onto anti-racist egalitarian ideas that morphed into Wokeism because these ideas were already influential. The fact that liberals second-guessed themselves on color blindness in the face of pushy activists when they had the public on their side shows how important ideas are. Even conservatives waffled due to white guilt. And there is the disproportionate you-know-who factor, as they are bonkers when it comes to defending minorities.
I ordered your book because of the coordinated hit job on your career/personality by the left and Michael Lind. I hate when people attack people instead of their ideas. You are one hell of a jerk at times but at least you are intellectually honest and argue your positions without caring if they are "socially correct." I vehemently disagree with you many times but you are a fresh voice and a courageous one.
This is bound to be an interesting book, whether or not the author hits the bulls-eye 100% of the time. At a bare minimum, it will greatly enhance the discussion about the origins of 'wokeness': right now, we're at a primitive level of discussion, blaming it all on a conspiracy of globalists who evidently want to destroy their own labor force, or on this or that obscure long-dead Marxoid social theorist.
I've pre-ordered the book, and, from reading Richard's column here, have enough confidence that it will make for some good arguments to have started urging 35K 'followers' on Twitter to get it (but, as we know, "liberals read, conservatives watch TV"), and will 'storm the plan' next week on a few dozen online forums with the same message.
Yes, the title will limit the audience, and we can expect a MASSIVE smear campaign against it, but it's exactly those people who are already anti-woke that need to be reached first. You don't get 'woke' by rational arguments and you won't become 'unwoke' by rational arguments (for the most part).
My worry: politics -- as opposed to writing startling columns that challenge some of our unexamined assumptions -- involves compromises, patience, doing things in stages, making alliances: things many conservatives associate with being a 'RINO'.
But we need to master these arts of political action. Maybe Richard's next book -- although it would clearly run against his emotional grain -- will be the conservatives' equivalent of Lenin's 'LEFT-WING' COMMUNISM, AN INFANTILE DISORDER, written a few years after the Revolution to teach his followers how to politically maneuver and act with their cerebral cortexes, not their amygdalas.
Enormous congratulations are in order. If it is forgivable to minorly derail such a thread, I'd like to note that Jesse Merriam's account of the "canonization" of Brown vs Board of Education is very much related, and surely complementary to Mr. Hanania's important book:
The tough thing for me (a leftist) is dealing with my frustration that so many people in my (now former) tribe absolutely don’t accept concepts like critical thinking, civil discourse, understanding how tribalism erodes your ability to accept truth/reality, etc.
What ultimately released me from a grudging detente with them is the realization that many on my side believe that even talking about hypothetical accountability and oversight of their policies, words, and actions is racist/misogynist etc.
I was once told by a guy who could no longer dismiss my point about something, after I patiently reiterated how small our disagreement really was, and how he’d misunderstood what I had said, over and over, that I “could have found a better thing to spend my time on than disagreeing with a POC”
In other words, just disagreeing with him when he was wrong made me an asshole.
We never accepted that bullshit from the right, and we shouldn’t accept it from our own side.
"We can understand the motivations of the people behind mandate x; they were usually normie liberals rather than Marxist radicals, often just trying to please some aggressive activists."
So close, but yet so far. The single most important question in politics, is why do normie liberals *consistently* implement the demands of aggressive far left activists. Any plausible answer to this questions will lead to realise that the next President can abolish Woke by 'eliminating the mandate to do x is pretty straightforward, and he can also throw out y and z while he’s at it, without much of a political cost' is totally delusional.
The problem wasn't caving to the demands of aggressive activists. If you read the book, you'll find the problem was the compromisey centrists on both sides who gave vast, vague powers to unelected bureaucrats, oft' times for outright cynical reasons. The sex component of the civil rights bureacracy literally began as a Dixiecrat poison pill to kill the act in the womb. Nixon used existing civil rights legislation as a way of fucking with the unions he was feuding with.
Hanania makes the case that we would've been better off with a quota system, both because it's more obviously morally wrong, and therefore easier to fight against, and because it would not have necessitated the creation of a vast national bureacracy that regulates every aspect of life in all of the public sphere and most of the private sphere. The compromises unknowingly made everything worse. Hence why wokeness was born in the US, and why despite our voting pool skewing rightward, we have the wokest institutions in the world.
"Hanania makes the case that we would've been better off with a quota system, both because it's more obviously morally wrong, and therefore easier to fight against, and because it would not have necessitated the creation of a vast national bureacracy that regulates every aspect of life in all of the public sphere and most of the private sphere"
Try wargaming this a little. If such a a system of overt quotas had been created in the 1960s, it would indeed have be 'easier to fight' and so conservatives would have fought against it, and succeeded, say in the 1970s, and so exactly the same system of compromises that allowed for the creation of a vast bureaucracy would have emerged at a few years delay. In other words, the American system of Woke is a product of a a dynamic equilibrium, which includes conservatives. Seen in this light, conservatism is best seen not as 'opposition', but as a training algorithm that enables liberalism to develop more powerful forms such that 'it regulates every aspect of life in all of the public sphere and most of the private sphere'.
"Hence why wokeness was born in the US, and why despite our voting pool skewing rightward, we have the wokest institutions in the world"
This is just a particular expression of a more fundamental truth, which is that though the American masses are more conservative than those in other developed countries, the American ruling class is more left-wing. Eugene Lyons wrote about how this was already true in the 1930s, so it isn't a product of any laws passed in the 1960s. As Whittaker Chambers said "In the United States, the working class are Democrats. The middle class are Republicans. The upper class are Communists."
Which brings us to my point, namely the elusive and paradoxical nature of the relationship between liberals and left-wing radicals. Let us take Obama. There is no doubt that in his 20s he was an 'Anti-American' radical, and that as President, he was an establishment liberal, working convivially with big business and bringing democracy to Libya. Did he have a change of heart? Not that we know of. Did he moderate his specific policy views? Again, if you go through them one by one, apparently not. So what changed? Did anything change? Or is 'Anti American radical' and 'establishment liberal' actually a question of your particular position within the larger structure rather than anything else?
Or let's take Harry Dexter White. Was he a pillar of the New Deal Establishment who set up the IMF and World Bank, or was he a spy for Communist Russia? Well, apparently he was both. As Ben Stell writes 'As for White's domestic politics, these were mainstream New Deal progressive, and there is no evidence that he admired communism as a political ideology. It is this chasm between what is known publicly of White's economic and political views, on the one hand, and his clandestine behavior on behalf of the Soviets, on the other, that accounts for the plethora of unpersuasive profiles of the man that have emerged.'. Clearly our paradigm for understanding these phenonemena is wrong.
There are stupid answers to these questions, like liberals are actually just commies in disguise (the truth is closer to the precise opposite). But if you start to reflect on them, before too long you see an almost limitless horror, and you realise that political activism is just kind of a sick joke. And at that point, you either give up on being a pundit, or you carve out a nice niche for yourself as an open-borders edgitarian. Just sayin'.
There is no such thing as "true conservatism" anywhere. Nor "true liberalism". Each philosophy is always just what the most prominent people on the side say it is, and bitching that it's not some "genuine opposition" which exists only in your imagination is exactly the sort of useless kvetching that I already didn't have patience for when I heard it from socialists.
The fact is, you have no good reasons to support your idea that the results to a backlash to a quota system would be the same system we have now. The awful system we have now is not the product of some underguiding philosophy, but the product of Men. Disparate actors making disparate decisions with contradictory motivations. A different set of players could've brought any number of other outcomes. The system we have now is no more inevitable than the falls of the Russian or British empires, and you fool yourself just as much as any Marxist thinking we're bound by "historical forces", like we have any business saying what those are or could be, given we only have one species with which to study proper history from, and we lack a record for most of the events of even that.
Most ‘woke’ institutions seem to go well above and beyond what would be useful to avert the hammer of civil rights law, and the intensity and frequency of wokeness, as we’ve seen in the last few years, waxes and wanes dramatically even over short time periods when the law remains unchanged, so the more or less monocausal explanation you present seems like a reach. You often seem to disdain social scientists pretense of doing quantitative (‘real scientific’ research) but do you actually try to show, analytically, that being more woke reduces a company or nonprofit’s probability of being hit with a civil rights law suit? There are certain logistic regressions like this that need to be done for this thesis to rise above being a just-so story.
The way all this happened reminds me of how Orthodox Jews have strange codes about what yiy can and can't do in the sabbath. It isn't like they necessarily believe you can't take an elevator or some other silly think in the sabbath - they just aren't sure so they err on the side of caution. There were real attempts in the South to dodge reasonable civil right law with bullshit substitute metrics designed to defacto discriminate but then the effort to address this took on a life and logic far beyond the narrow obvious instances and then institutions engage in simple error management theory along with some ideological concept creep to get out of hand.
“We can understand the motivations of the people behind mandate x; they were usually normie liberals rather than Marxist radicals, often just trying to please some aggressive activists.”
Why do “liberals” bother pleasing these activists? Perhaps because there is significant ethnic overlap between the radicals and liberals in terms of co-ethnics who obsess over the status of minorities.
I'm reading your book right now, and I just had an epiphany. I've wondered for many years why Marxism is more socially acceptable than racism when it's responsible for even more deaths than the Holocaust. But I think I just put it together, reading your book.
It's because companies are legally required to fire racists, but they're not legally required to fire communists. In fact, in California, it's illegal to fire someone for being a communist, but it's still required to fire racists because the federal law against creating a hostile work environment trumps the state law against firing people for their political beliefs.
Am I onto something here? I ask because I've never been to law school and have no qualifications.
Hey Richard, I'm not on Twitter, so I'm dropping this here. You tweeted this: https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1708913886576136432 about dictatorships misreporting GDP. However, it looks like you inadvertently misrepresented the source slightly. It (or at least the part that isn't paywalled) doesn't say that "Per capita GDP in dictatorships might be *half* of official numbers," but rather that "GDP *growth*" might be half of official numbers.
Worse, you misrepresented civil rights law entirely. Which you and I know you did not do. but you seem to have come to the conclusion that you are smarter then most anyone about public policy economics, and other recent Homosapien endeavors. You can only say this, because you live within the coddled world of Substack, where you write for a leadership that doesn’t have the smarts to challenge you. You’re a smart enough gentleman; why are you so terrified to live chat with others who might be as smart as you?
Your case for reading one book is absurd. No one should just read one particular book. People should read as widely as time allows. People should acquaint themselves with other books that have been written on the same subject, and books that disagree with one's pre-conceptions.
“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.” ― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Specifically with reference to your book, I'd like to know how yours differs from Christopher Caldwell's The Age of Entitlement, James Burnham's The Managerial Elite, and Dwight Waldo's The Administrative State. Since I don't have all the time in the world and also, I'm stupid, I'd appreciate someone smarter to digest this in a good review.
Anyone who makes a case for reading only one book is not a thinker, he is a salesman, and I'm suspicious of him.
Best of luck with the new book! I look forward to reading it. Particularly if it contains concrete solutions. I also have distain for left-wing lies about race and sex and what they’ve done to society.
The left and Biden admin have done a good job hiding their ultimate goal by manipulating language. For example, the word 'equity'. Most people don't realize or care that woke/DEI/ESG is a war against straight (Christian) white men. If you think this is conspiratorial, look at the definition of 'marginalized communities'. It's everyone except heterosexual white men. The sad thing is that it may be too late to turn the ship around. At least in our lifetime. I'm hopeful you can make a difference. Thank you!
I appreciate the effort to outline the relatively simple things legislators and administrators can do to change the regs & laws. This gets neglected too often. People tend to curse the system rather than roll up their sleeves and getting at doing the work to change things.
Freddie deBoer (as does Matt Yglesias) regularly castigates leftist(/ish) "allies" for neglecting the work of politics in favor of virtue signaling the ideology underlying "progressive" policy. Conservatives and the forces gathering to counter wokeism would do well to heed the advice of Richard and his counterparts on the left.
I pre-ordered and am excited to read it. Re: ideas:
“I take issue with those who put too much stress on the world of ideas — laws and regulations were created by legislators, judges, and bureaucrats, and they set off changes in the ways institutions were regulated by government, which included more internal self-regulation.”
You make it sound like civil rights law are akin to path dependency (e.g. the QWERTY keyboard). No doubt some bureaucrats engage in self-justifying behavior but the fact that the civil rights bureaucracy exists in the first place is partially traceable to pre-woke ideas (Boas, et al.) that began to overturn the Darwinian paradigm over 100 years ago and accelerated under the New Left.
I like the analogy of the QWERTY keyboard, wish I’d thought of it.
Stephen Jay Gould popularized the analogy of the QWERTY keyboard in his book "Bully for Brontosaurus", in the chapter "The Panda's Thumb of Technology".
Congratulations on the book. I preordered it about 6 weeks ago so looking forward to reading it soon.
I probably think there’s a straighter line between philosophers’ ideas and wokeness than you do, mainly because the “aggressive activists” you mentioned were usually radical Marxists steeped in ideas, and if normie libs felt it was necessary to placate them, then they had at least some power.
But your overall point of unintended consequences and seemingly benign regulations bringing us here is a good one. And you’re moving the ball significantly down the field in criticizing civil rights law, which normie conservatives have been afraid of doing since the 1960s, so your courage is appreciated. As much as I like Rufo, it’s easier to criticize academics from 50+ years ago than civil rights, which as a term still retains positive connotations.
It’s important to hammer away at it and expose some of its myths so I hope your book goes a long way.
I think many of them weren’t really steeped in ideas, some were and they probably had an outsized influence but many were just emotional and latching on to whatever language was available. I’m thinking particularly of race activists and sensitive women who change corporations from the inside with help from civil rights law.
I agree, “steeped in ideas” is probably the wrong way to put it. I more meant that these activists are accurate reflections of the ideas they’re taught in college. They have the personal qualities of being emotional, neurotic, passionate, etc. but it was their professors and classes that directed their energy into an explicitly political direction.
One thing that’s always struck me about woke college students is how committed they are to regurgitating the exact jargon they’re taught, so in that sense they’re the real world reflection of those ideas. In the mid 2010s, people like Bill Maher would complain about the things millennial students would say when they tried to shut down a conservative speaker or something, but they didn’t really notice that everything the students said was taken verbatim from what their professors and textbooks said in whatever “studies” classes they took.
I don’t think they’re particularly deep or curious people themselves, but they’re zealous about applying their professors’ ideas into the real world.
And as you said, aided very much by civil rights law.
Emotional women can latch onto many different ideas (e.g., the temperance movement, anti-porn, etc.) but they long ago latched onto anti-racist egalitarian ideas that morphed into Wokeism because these ideas were already influential. The fact that liberals second-guessed themselves on color blindness in the face of pushy activists when they had the public on their side shows how important ideas are. Even conservatives waffled due to white guilt. And there is the disproportionate you-know-who factor, as they are bonkers when it comes to defending minorities.
I feel like I'd have a hard time being convinced of this thesis but you've convinced me that there's a chance you could convince me of it.
I ordered your book because of the coordinated hit job on your career/personality by the left and Michael Lind. I hate when people attack people instead of their ideas. You are one hell of a jerk at times but at least you are intellectually honest and argue your positions without caring if they are "socially correct." I vehemently disagree with you many times but you are a fresh voice and a courageous one.
This is bound to be an interesting book, whether or not the author hits the bulls-eye 100% of the time. At a bare minimum, it will greatly enhance the discussion about the origins of 'wokeness': right now, we're at a primitive level of discussion, blaming it all on a conspiracy of globalists who evidently want to destroy their own labor force, or on this or that obscure long-dead Marxoid social theorist.
I've pre-ordered the book, and, from reading Richard's column here, have enough confidence that it will make for some good arguments to have started urging 35K 'followers' on Twitter to get it (but, as we know, "liberals read, conservatives watch TV"), and will 'storm the plan' next week on a few dozen online forums with the same message.
Yes, the title will limit the audience, and we can expect a MASSIVE smear campaign against it, but it's exactly those people who are already anti-woke that need to be reached first. You don't get 'woke' by rational arguments and you won't become 'unwoke' by rational arguments (for the most part).
My worry: politics -- as opposed to writing startling columns that challenge some of our unexamined assumptions -- involves compromises, patience, doing things in stages, making alliances: things many conservatives associate with being a 'RINO'.
But we need to master these arts of political action. Maybe Richard's next book -- although it would clearly run against his emotional grain -- will be the conservatives' equivalent of Lenin's 'LEFT-WING' COMMUNISM, AN INFANTILE DISORDER, written a few years after the Revolution to teach his followers how to politically maneuver and act with their cerebral cortexes, not their amygdalas.
Enormous congratulations are in order. If it is forgivable to minorly derail such a thread, I'd like to note that Jesse Merriam's account of the "canonization" of Brown vs Board of Education is very much related, and surely complementary to Mr. Hanania's important book:
https://dc.claremont.org/how-we-got-our-antiracist-constitution-canonizing-brown-v-board-of-education-in-courts-and-minds/
The tough thing for me (a leftist) is dealing with my frustration that so many people in my (now former) tribe absolutely don’t accept concepts like critical thinking, civil discourse, understanding how tribalism erodes your ability to accept truth/reality, etc.
What ultimately released me from a grudging detente with them is the realization that many on my side believe that even talking about hypothetical accountability and oversight of their policies, words, and actions is racist/misogynist etc.
I was once told by a guy who could no longer dismiss my point about something, after I patiently reiterated how small our disagreement really was, and how he’d misunderstood what I had said, over and over, that I “could have found a better thing to spend my time on than disagreeing with a POC”
In other words, just disagreeing with him when he was wrong made me an asshole.
We never accepted that bullshit from the right, and we shouldn’t accept it from our own side.
"We can understand the motivations of the people behind mandate x; they were usually normie liberals rather than Marxist radicals, often just trying to please some aggressive activists."
So close, but yet so far. The single most important question in politics, is why do normie liberals *consistently* implement the demands of aggressive far left activists. Any plausible answer to this questions will lead to realise that the next President can abolish Woke by 'eliminating the mandate to do x is pretty straightforward, and he can also throw out y and z while he’s at it, without much of a political cost' is totally delusional.
The problem wasn't caving to the demands of aggressive activists. If you read the book, you'll find the problem was the compromisey centrists on both sides who gave vast, vague powers to unelected bureaucrats, oft' times for outright cynical reasons. The sex component of the civil rights bureacracy literally began as a Dixiecrat poison pill to kill the act in the womb. Nixon used existing civil rights legislation as a way of fucking with the unions he was feuding with.
Hanania makes the case that we would've been better off with a quota system, both because it's more obviously morally wrong, and therefore easier to fight against, and because it would not have necessitated the creation of a vast national bureacracy that regulates every aspect of life in all of the public sphere and most of the private sphere. The compromises unknowingly made everything worse. Hence why wokeness was born in the US, and why despite our voting pool skewing rightward, we have the wokest institutions in the world.
OK, a few things to deal with here.
"Hanania makes the case that we would've been better off with a quota system, both because it's more obviously morally wrong, and therefore easier to fight against, and because it would not have necessitated the creation of a vast national bureacracy that regulates every aspect of life in all of the public sphere and most of the private sphere"
Try wargaming this a little. If such a a system of overt quotas had been created in the 1960s, it would indeed have be 'easier to fight' and so conservatives would have fought against it, and succeeded, say in the 1970s, and so exactly the same system of compromises that allowed for the creation of a vast bureaucracy would have emerged at a few years delay. In other words, the American system of Woke is a product of a a dynamic equilibrium, which includes conservatives. Seen in this light, conservatism is best seen not as 'opposition', but as a training algorithm that enables liberalism to develop more powerful forms such that 'it regulates every aspect of life in all of the public sphere and most of the private sphere'.
"Hence why wokeness was born in the US, and why despite our voting pool skewing rightward, we have the wokest institutions in the world"
This is just a particular expression of a more fundamental truth, which is that though the American masses are more conservative than those in other developed countries, the American ruling class is more left-wing. Eugene Lyons wrote about how this was already true in the 1930s, so it isn't a product of any laws passed in the 1960s. As Whittaker Chambers said "In the United States, the working class are Democrats. The middle class are Republicans. The upper class are Communists."
Which brings us to my point, namely the elusive and paradoxical nature of the relationship between liberals and left-wing radicals. Let us take Obama. There is no doubt that in his 20s he was an 'Anti-American' radical, and that as President, he was an establishment liberal, working convivially with big business and bringing democracy to Libya. Did he have a change of heart? Not that we know of. Did he moderate his specific policy views? Again, if you go through them one by one, apparently not. So what changed? Did anything change? Or is 'Anti American radical' and 'establishment liberal' actually a question of your particular position within the larger structure rather than anything else?
Or let's take Harry Dexter White. Was he a pillar of the New Deal Establishment who set up the IMF and World Bank, or was he a spy for Communist Russia? Well, apparently he was both. As Ben Stell writes 'As for White's domestic politics, these were mainstream New Deal progressive, and there is no evidence that he admired communism as a political ideology. It is this chasm between what is known publicly of White's economic and political views, on the one hand, and his clandestine behavior on behalf of the Soviets, on the other, that accounts for the plethora of unpersuasive profiles of the man that have emerged.'. Clearly our paradigm for understanding these phenonemena is wrong.
There are stupid answers to these questions, like liberals are actually just commies in disguise (the truth is closer to the precise opposite). But if you start to reflect on them, before too long you see an almost limitless horror, and you realise that political activism is just kind of a sick joke. And at that point, you either give up on being a pundit, or you carve out a nice niche for yourself as an open-borders edgitarian. Just sayin'.
There is no such thing as "true conservatism" anywhere. Nor "true liberalism". Each philosophy is always just what the most prominent people on the side say it is, and bitching that it's not some "genuine opposition" which exists only in your imagination is exactly the sort of useless kvetching that I already didn't have patience for when I heard it from socialists.
The fact is, you have no good reasons to support your idea that the results to a backlash to a quota system would be the same system we have now. The awful system we have now is not the product of some underguiding philosophy, but the product of Men. Disparate actors making disparate decisions with contradictory motivations. A different set of players could've brought any number of other outcomes. The system we have now is no more inevitable than the falls of the Russian or British empires, and you fool yourself just as much as any Marxist thinking we're bound by "historical forces", like we have any business saying what those are or could be, given we only have one species with which to study proper history from, and we lack a record for most of the events of even that.
"There is no such thing as "true conservatism" anywhere. Nor "true liberalism"."
Correct.
"The awful system we have now is not the product of some underguiding philosophy, but the product of Men"
Correct.
"A different set of players could've brought any number of other outcomes."
Correct.
"The system we have now is no more inevitable than the falls of the Russian or British empires"
Correct.
"we only have one species with which to study proper history from, and we lack a record for most of the events of even that"
Correct. We understand human society only through a glass, darkly. But none of that addresses what I said. Try harder.
"The single most important question in politics, is why do normie liberals *consistently* implement the demands of aggressive far left activists."
No, they don't. Which is why we still have police and prisons, for example.
I also have observed this dynamic and I'm puzzled by it. What's your favorite answer to it?
Most ‘woke’ institutions seem to go well above and beyond what would be useful to avert the hammer of civil rights law, and the intensity and frequency of wokeness, as we’ve seen in the last few years, waxes and wanes dramatically even over short time periods when the law remains unchanged, so the more or less monocausal explanation you present seems like a reach. You often seem to disdain social scientists pretense of doing quantitative (‘real scientific’ research) but do you actually try to show, analytically, that being more woke reduces a company or nonprofit’s probability of being hit with a civil rights law suit? There are certain logistic regressions like this that need to be done for this thesis to rise above being a just-so story.
The way all this happened reminds me of how Orthodox Jews have strange codes about what yiy can and can't do in the sabbath. It isn't like they necessarily believe you can't take an elevator or some other silly think in the sabbath - they just aren't sure so they err on the side of caution. There were real attempts in the South to dodge reasonable civil right law with bullshit substitute metrics designed to defacto discriminate but then the effort to address this took on a life and logic far beyond the narrow obvious instances and then institutions engage in simple error management theory along with some ideological concept creep to get out of hand.
“We can understand the motivations of the people behind mandate x; they were usually normie liberals rather than Marxist radicals, often just trying to please some aggressive activists.”
Why do “liberals” bother pleasing these activists? Perhaps because there is significant ethnic overlap between the radicals and liberals in terms of co-ethnics who obsess over the status of minorities.
I'm reading your book right now, and I just had an epiphany. I've wondered for many years why Marxism is more socially acceptable than racism when it's responsible for even more deaths than the Holocaust. But I think I just put it together, reading your book.
It's because companies are legally required to fire racists, but they're not legally required to fire communists. In fact, in California, it's illegal to fire someone for being a communist, but it's still required to fire racists because the federal law against creating a hostile work environment trumps the state law against firing people for their political beliefs.
Am I onto something here? I ask because I've never been to law school and have no qualifications.
There may be something to that
Hey Richard, I'm not on Twitter, so I'm dropping this here. You tweeted this: https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1708913886576136432 about dictatorships misreporting GDP. However, it looks like you inadvertently misrepresented the source slightly. It (or at least the part that isn't paywalled) doesn't say that "Per capita GDP in dictatorships might be *half* of official numbers," but rather that "GDP *growth*" might be half of official numbers.
Incidentally, your Ukraine trolling made it onto the front page of reddit, and none of the comments seemed to recognize that it was satire: https://www.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/16xu0nr/tell_me_you_got_no_brain/.
The post was subsequently deleted for some reason.
Look at the second figure of the tweet.
Worse, you misrepresented civil rights law entirely. Which you and I know you did not do. but you seem to have come to the conclusion that you are smarter then most anyone about public policy economics, and other recent Homosapien endeavors. You can only say this, because you live within the coddled world of Substack, where you write for a leadership that doesn’t have the smarts to challenge you. You’re a smart enough gentleman; why are you so terrified to live chat with others who might be as smart as you?
Wow! I guess they've been falsifying growth for so long that doubling their claimed growth has led to a doubling of claimed GDP.
Your case for reading one book is absurd. No one should just read one particular book. People should read as widely as time allows. People should acquaint themselves with other books that have been written on the same subject, and books that disagree with one's pre-conceptions.
“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.” ― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Specifically with reference to your book, I'd like to know how yours differs from Christopher Caldwell's The Age of Entitlement, James Burnham's The Managerial Elite, and Dwight Waldo's The Administrative State. Since I don't have all the time in the world and also, I'm stupid, I'd appreciate someone smarter to digest this in a good review.
Anyone who makes a case for reading only one book is not a thinker, he is a salesman, and I'm suspicious of him.