I read "Hillbilly Elegy" when it came out back in 2016, and I didn't feel that Vance was dripping with contempt for his fellow hillbillies. To me, it came across as "these people have many admirable qualities, and also have a lot of problems - some these are from external causes, and some are from their own behavior, and some are from a combination of both."
For the record, I'm of hillbilly descent; my father was from Magoffin County, KY (which borders Breathitt County) and spent his teens and young adulthood moving back and forth between Magoffin County and southern Ohio. As my Kentucky relatives would say, thar ain't but one gineration between me and the coal mines. So, I'm inclined to be charitable towards my people, while simultaneously acknowledging that there is a lot of dysfunction in hillbilly society.
I get the vibe that Kamala is much more at home in the elite milieu than Vance is, even though he's a graduate of Yale and learned to blend in with the upper class to an extent. While Kamala likes to emphasize that she grew up "middle class", her mother was a scientist and her father was a professor of economics at Stanford so while they may have been middle-class by income, they were really more of the upper-class in terms of education and culture. So she has grown up absorbing the knowledge of the correct things to say and what not to say, while I think Vance has to always kind of think about it first (and often ends up saying quite the wrong thing anyway!) Trump likewise is an outsider to elite culture, despite growing up very wealthy. It's not uncommon in people who are blue-collar rich; I know many owners of large, successful contracting companies or real estate developers who are like that. But unlike Vance, Trump has never had an iota of self-consciousness, and he's always enjoyed ruffling people's feathers. Vance seems more conflicted; part of him wants to be accepted by the Ivy League elite types, but part of him also wants to give them the middle finger. That inner conflict, plus the fact that he's not a very seasoned politician, keeps resulting in his various mis-steps and unfortunate statements and the overall weird/awkward vibe.
Regarding Vance's accent, some people are more adept at code-switching than others. My dad lived in the NYC suburbs from the age of thirty until his death, but he never lost his Kentucky accent - nor would he have wanted to, despite having a professional career. He always described himself as a "Kentuckian" and had a fervent devotion to his home state which never dimmed.
I think the exact opposite. Vance is extremely uncomfortable around "regular" people. He's an ideas guy. And even worse than that, he's a nerd. He can't even make a few minutes of small talk with people behind the counter at a donut shop. He seems most natural when he's on a podcast, talking about how we should make it illegal for women to cross state lines if they might get an abortion. My guess is that he misses living in San Francisco, mingling with tech bro weirdos like Thiel.
Kamala, on the other hand, clearly enjoys talking to all kinds of people. She's much more natural as a politician.
I also think it's hilarious that she's obviously very comfortable with her weight, while Vance is constantly complaining about how easy it is to gain weight on the campaign trail. He refused food at an Ohio state fair! He just isn't cut out for this.
“To me, it came across as ‘these people have many admirable qualities, and also have a lot of problems - some these are from external causes, and some are from their own behavior, and some are from a combination of both.’"
Well stated!
But Richard, at least in this piece, prefers to err on the side of intellectual coherence in his story than accuracy.
This makes me think that there is some kind of "intellectual coherence uncanny valley." Having a strong need for intellectual coherence helps you live a more disciplined and organized life. However, having a moderate need for it that can be overriden by other drives creates the hazard that you will twist all your beliefs in service of those drives. That has a risk of creating a monstrous ideology that is far worse than mere intellectual inconsistency.
Another way of looking at it might be that Vance wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants to think of himself as a man who behaves according to principles, but also wants to cozy up to powerful people who manifestly do not. If he was really courageous and truly dedicated to coherence he would admit to himself that he was working with an unprincipled man for purely instrumental reasons and take the hit to his ego that that admission would cause. Instead, rather than taking the hit, he has chosen to wimp out and distort his beliefs to help him pretend that Trump isn't that unprincipled. What a wuss.
Idk I kind of like Vance. Without him, It would be a lot more difficult to justify voting for Republicans. I feel like Republicans with Vance as VP, there is some hope that 90% of the stupid stuff promised to the chuds was just lies to convince chuds to vote for them. I actually hope that government size might be reduced ( don’t really believe it though).
With Kamala and the democrats party in power, I can expect that their bureaucrats will be effective in making the bureaucracy larger and more stupid once again. It will make the USA worse.
That’s about where I am on Vance. He brings the intellect the GOP needs and that’s also making him poll extremely poorly. He can and probably will slaughter Tim Walz in the VP debate and no one will care.
Being yoked to Trump is quite unfortunate for him as Vance could be a much more well spoken politician without Trump in the way and be more popular, but now he’ll always be « the guy that pushed the Haitians eating cats story ».
The anti-immigrant stances are funny as both Trump and Vance have foreign wives, and I think that could be well worth its own article. Personally, I think they’re both examples of a rising fundamental difference between the parties and sexes. More men vote red and are having increasing discontent with American women, while those same women flock to the Democratic Party in droves. Even so, we have not heard much from Melania Trump nor Usha Vance at all in this campaign. I hope there’s no truth to those marriages being on the rocks.
I'm in the same boat. I think the problem isn't Vance's need to be intellectually coherent and I even think that there is a constituency that will actually reward intellectual coherency in an election where every other candidate is incoherent. The problem here is that Vance feels the need to be a complete Trump sycophant when in reality he would be more rewarded if he disagreed with Trump more on the crazy stuff.
Compare him to Pence in 2016 after the grab the pussy scandal. Pence unconditionally denounced Trumps actions but gave him grace. Had the vp pick instead been a Trump sycophant who brushed it off as not a big deal similar to Trump, he might have lost enough Midwestern Evangelicals/ suburbanites to cost him the election.
But Vance didn't denounce the eating dogs statement and instead doubled down on it. It's still possible to make an anti illegal immigration stance without defending Trumps absurd statements.
Vance genuinely seems more afraid getting attacked by Catturd and Laura Loomer on twitter than losing potential constituencies to win the election and that's the big problem here.
There's something uniquely satisfying about psychoanalyzing JD Vance. Maybe it's because I see myself in him, idk. I did it in an essay last week, and you take it to another level with your analysis of him: high ambition, high need for intellectual coherence, plus underlying anger.
"We find out that in 2016 she became the first black woman ever elected to the Senate from California and the second from any state in American history, but she didn’t find such milestones worth mentioning in her previous book."
Well, I'm no fan of Kamala, but TBF, that hadn't happened yet when she wrote her first book.
I think you overestimate how charismatic Kamala is. Someone who does really believe in what they're saying and is ambitious about their goals is more charismatic than any sort of chameleon, on average. They're just rare in major politics because it's not common that the policies the voters want for that particular election match with an ambitious politician's agenda.
The chameleon bit he was referring to was her accent. Which is a common thing for well-traveled Americans. My Texan father who went to college in Boston and married someone from New Jersey has 3 different accents he drops into depending on who he's talking to. It's a natural instinct, aimed at making the people we're talking to feel more comfortable, and it's totally subconscious.
The same is true for which policies or topics you tend to emphasize when making political points (as RH notes about Harris). Her values hadn't changed between 2009 and 2019, but her choice of what to emphasize had indeed changed with the times. And has changed yet again in 2024. I want a politician who has beliefs, who isn't Aaron Burr out there, but who is malleable enough to listen to what his constituents are telling him or her, assess which way the wind is blowing, and know when and how to make a deal and take half a loaf. That's one of the few counts on which GW Bush was better than Obama.
I think the reason she’s been more successful as a campaigner than in 2019 is that her current positions align better with her actual beliefs and values. She’s inherently a bit left of center and thus seems more comfortable in her own skin now. In 2019 she seemed awkward, unsure and forced. That’s why her campaign went nowhere.
I claim that these positions are a more comfortable fit for her because she is not inherently a far leftist. She is not a creature of rock solid positions. She will swing to where she thinks the votes are (like many pols). But she is more at ease with the current swing because it fits better with her innate preferences.
She's charismatic relative to Vance, I think that's the only comparison he was making. You are right that she is not spectacularly charismatic but surely she is much higher than average? Think of the average human.
Even if it might be true - and boy, talk about the pot calling the kettle black - how is it relevant comparing the Presidential candidate of one party with the VP candidate of the other?
Well, I guess neither was elected to their position by voters, so there is that… 😏
I think it just depends. Hillary Clinton was quite inauthentic and also supremely hated. Justin Trudeau was quite popular early in his term and today is quite unpopular.
That the "big lies" pushed by the Dems are so egregiously destructive, that even Trump's sociopathy is the lesser evil.
In a typical Dem jurisdiction like NY or CA, the average elected official believes things like: "Our society is so White Supremacist that racist police officers are constantly attacking and killing the innocent black bodies of young black men"... and that false belief justifies "criminal justice reforms" that result in many, many thousands of innocent people dead or maimed because their attackers are free to walk the streets when they should be rotting in prison. Or again, they believe "Men can become women"... and that belief is why, to the extent that Dems/libs are in charge of things, literally every girls' locker room, girls' sports team, women's prison, women's shelter, etc. is forced to admit the presence of biological males, many of whom change their "identity" precisely in order to gain this access, as in a steady stream of reports here: https://reduxx.info/
The dishonesty of Trump/Vance is basically "ordinary politician dishonesty," while the Big Lies of the liberals attack the core of civilization itself.
The obsession the online right has with trans issues is bizarre. I am a woman. I do not want to compete against men if playing in a sports tournament. I do not want to share a locker room with a biological male.
And guess what? I have never been asked to. The only situation that came remotely close was a trans coworker who was occasionally in the women's bathroom at the same time as me.
There just aren't that many trans people out there, and this is coming from someone who lives in San Francisco. Of the people that are trans, they behave like normal people, which is to say that they are generally conflict-averse, and reluctant to create situations where they make others uncomfortable. A trans woman who hasn't had bottom surgery would most likely change in a private bathroom or handicapped stall, rather than charging naked into the sauna.
I'm on the right, but I sort of agree with this. The trans issue seldom has much practical impact on the ground. Though it can have a practical impact in online spaces. Even Scott Alexander had a policy (not sure if he still does) of banning people for "misgendering".
In practice, it serves more to highlight and reinforce a cultural divide. If you're on the conservative side of it, trans ideology is so plainly and obviously insane that the immediate instinct is to conclude that there can be no common ground with someone pushing it as self-evidently correct; that such a person is operating within an entirely different reality from the rest of us. It can be hard to get past it.
What is so strange about it? I agree that saying that males can be women and vice versa is weird, but it's also semantics. It is absolutely true that people born into a male body can have neurological wiring that leads them to identify as female, and vice versa. So while I'm not on board with "pregnant men," I'm fully on board with "I identify as a woman."
This is so reminiscent of gay rights, and people *insisted* that being gay was a choice, or a mental illness. People said that gay men were perverts, and that gay people should not be allowed to adopt. Now we accept that gay people are wired differently. It's rare, but it happens. Even more rarely, a person's neurological self-identity, most likely wired during fetal development, does not match their sex.
Most trans people are not being featured on LibsOfTikTok. They are going about their lives, presenting as the gender they identify with.
I think the difference comes down to the fact that many, if not most conservative folks have someone in their life (family or friends) that they care deeply for and is gay. As was said before, there just aren’t that many trans folks, and so there aren’t as many opportunities to cross that divide.
I would say that the kinds of lies that Trump spreads about immigrants are on par with the kind of lies about white people that the "woke" left likes to spread. They aren't "ordinary politician dishonesty," an ordinary Republican like Romney or Jeb Bush is too good of a person to tell those kinds of lies. The lies that Trump and Vance spread about Springfield are so horrible, and have had such bad consequences, that they totally disqualify the pair from office. Vance should be expelled from the Senate, he's a liar on par with George Santos.
By contrast, the "woke" craziness is mostly an online phenomenon that most Democrats do not take seriously. They seemed to for a bit in 2020, but that was mostly because the large BLM protests created a false impression that wokeness was more popular than it really was, not because they truly believed in it.
Now that wokeness has started to lose power, mainstream Democrats are starting to ignore it or push back at it. The anti-civilization forces on the left have been routed. The ones on the right are just getting started.
Illegal aliens and temporary nonimmigrant visa holders are not immigrants. Those Haitians are here based on temporary humanitarian parole which allows them to live and work in the U.S. for 2 years only. They are migrants, not immigrants.
Woke is NOT an online phenomenon. It is embedded into every corporation and school. I must attend mandatory DIE training by and my kids schools are also about DIE, restorative justice and culturally responsive learning.
My company celebrated a man as woman on the year. Trans identified people may not be everywhere but their ideology certainly is. No men in my bathroom, locker room or any other intimate spaces. Tired of minorities wreaking havoc on the majority.
I missed the part where the specific program under which the Haitians are legally in the country makes it okay to slander them. Spreading false rumors that someone is abducting and eating pets, or hunting wildlife without a license, is wrong regardless. Not only does it harm them, it also harms citizens by making them frightened and worried for no reason.
Wokeness is not just a term for left wing beliefs in general. It is a term for a specific strain of leftist thought that focuses on language policing and cancelation as tools of control, and has a Manichean worldview that divides everyone into oppressors and oppressed. There are many prominent leftists who are critics of wokeness, Freddie DeBoer is one who is active on substack.
DEI and related programs (like its predecessor, sensitivity training) have risen in popularity lately because the popularity of wokeness online caused companies to believe wokeness was more popular than it actually was. Now that wokeness has weakened many companies are beginning to cut back and downsize their DEI teams.
The belief that trans people are the gender they say they are predated wokeness by decades. States first started allowing people to change their gender on their birth certificates in the Seventies. There are many critics of wokeness who support trans rights, what they oppose is using tactics like cancelation to support them.
I corrected the mid-usage of the term immigrant. I did not state or imply it was fine to state Haitians were eating cats. Do not put words in my mouth.
Wokeness entails much more than can cancellation and speech monitoring. I prefer the term successor ideology. A limited and targeted retreat from the excesses of progressives is no win. It’s a strategic re-grouping.
Trans is a modern phenomenon as is its ideology. The idea that there is such a thing as gender expression that conflicted with and overrode sex and secondary sex characteristics is hogwash and totally made up.
I do agree our current ills stem from a deeper ideology that pre-dates 2012.
Very occasionally, people are born with six toes. We don't tell them that they've made a choice to have six toes, and if they really tried, they would only have five.
I'm left handed. For most of history, this was considered a flaw, and even twenty years ago, lefties were made to use their right hands in school. But even though lefties can learn to write with their non-dominant hand, they will still naturally use their left for everything else.
Fifty years ago, epilepsy was considered a mental illness, and even further back than that, a moral failing. Sometimes, people are born different. Biology is sloppy.
Having 6 toes still makes a foot. Having 47 chromosomes still makes one a human being Having a penis still makes one a man.
There are no objective criteria for trans other than feelings and self-identification.
Do believe Rachel Dolezal could be black based on her feeling black? You’ll tell me being black is intrinsic and immutable and different than gender, which is both intrinsic and immutable but also fluid and changeable.
I'm not in a swing state, so I'm contemplating some form of third party vote, since I agree that Trump is bad (although I still think the Dems are worse)
This is one of your weakest pieces, betraying poor theory of mind on multiple fronts, and failing to steel man a couple times.
1) "The fact that Vance is high on both ambition and need for intellectual coherence, along with his underlying anger that is in some ways related to these traits, are what I think people are sensing when they refer to him as weird. He often looks physically uncomfortable with the things he has to say." No, you've completely misunderstood and overcomplicated this. Vance is a fat dork and that's why he's called weird. You put him back in high school and remove any politics and he's still never going to be one of the cool kids. This isn't the case for Clinton, Obama, Kamala or Trump. But crucially nor is it the case for Vivek. Vivek didn't give off weird, loser vibes cos that's not remotely what he is. But if your explanation was true he should've done - he literally criticised January 6 in his book. Walz called Vance weird cos he's a canny politician and saw a weakness: the same weakness he'd see even if it was someone as honest as Bryan Caplan.
2) "An acceptance of the positive effects of immigration was once central to Vance’s understanding of how he became the man he is today, and his new Trumpist position can’t help but create cognitive dissonance." This is a straw man - his position hasn't moved from all immigrants good to all immigrants bad. His position is that unselective, uncontrolled mass immigration of poor people is a big net negative for the country. That's consistent with believing that some immigrants bring good values and contribute a lot. I think there's a poor theory of mind here cos you used to be a racist who hung out with a lot of angry hateful racists like Richard Spencer, so you assume those who hate mass immigration tend to be motivated by the same impulses. But this isn't the case for most educated right wingers. It may interest you to know that among British neoliberals e.g. the Adam Smith Institute, strong antipathy to uncontrolled mass immigration is common - the ASI recently published a paper criticising it.
3) "Something that is particularly disturbing about Vance, which plays into the weirdness discourse, is how extremely angry he seems at the world". His anger relative to other politicians is overstated cos of how his politics is emotionally coded. But to the extent it isn't that, it's cos he just doesn't have particularly good social skills. As you pointed it out it's strange that he never code switched. Unless you have good social skills and are low in neuroticism, the crucible of politics with all the invective levelled, will manifest as anger for a male politician.
4)"Make the world ugly enough, and Trump becomes beautiful...Elites are seething with contempt towards the good men and women who built this country. If they allow high levels of immigration, it isn’t because they think it’s good economics or the right thing to do morally." Ironically you've taken right wing failures to understand their opponents and compounded it with your own. Conservative voters have bad theory of mind for progressives cos the real explanation for retarded woke politics - limitless purity spirals enabled by social media, status seeking and the sacralisation of the civil rights movement - is hard to understand and explain. Describing the mechanism of emergent social phenomena makes for terrible rhetoric, and so conservative pundits opt for the less complicated conspiracy explanation - corruption, greed etc. But this isn't unique to the right. This is exactly how progressives treat cops and capitalists. They don't grasp complex systems, so they opt for attributing bad consequences to malevolence. I can't help but think you're misreading of the situation is driven by your aesthetic revulsion of MAGA, and the fact that you yourself used to be hateful malcontent who subsumed their identity into nativist politics. But most educated high iq right wingers aren't doing that.
It’s not just Spencer. 10-15 years ago I knew basically everyone on the right who was a prominent anti-immigration advocate. Yes, they were all privately very racist. Their views have become mainstream within the Republican Party as open bigotry becomes acceptable. Young conservatives love Fuentes, Trump, etc. because of their crude racism, not in spite of it.
I think it’s possible for conservatives in the UK to be anti-immigration and not be hateful because there’s actually arguments you can make against Islamic migration. But I’ve seen few logical arguments against Hispanic immigration, much less a reason anyone should be so passionate about it. Buchananites made predictions of Mexican secession, etc and they were wrong about everything. Anti-immigration sentiment on the American right is completely about demagoguery and bad people looking to kick who they can, but sometimes generalized misanthropy.
“Their views have become mainstream within the Republican Party as open bigotry becomes acceptable.”
What utter crap. Mainstream?
You *actually* are claiming that anti-Hispanic bigotry is *mainstream* in the Republican Party, while at the same time *deny* that open antisemitism and pro-terrorist sympathy are mainstream in the Democrat Party?
Even for you I find it hard to believe you can hold both ideas in your head simultaneously.
Of the nine Jewish senators, twenty-four Jewish House members, and twelve Jewish governors, one is Republican. The other forty-four are Democrats.
Antisemitism is just one more problem that exists on the fringes of the Democratic Party, but is acceptable to broad swaths of the Republican Party. For all of my objections to Tlaib and Omar, they have never accused Jews of using lasers to start wildfires. Harris is not going to bring a Holocaust denier to a 9/11 memorial ceremony.
I suppose next you will claim Bill Ackman is antisemitic too, for recognizing that today’s open antisemitism comes almost entirely from the woke DEI oppressor-oppressed ideology left.
I think you underestimate the revulsion that the mainstream left feels for FP, particularly its murderous fringe. Of all the aspects of leftist insanity, this one is getting the hardest blowback. 90% of Jews are Zionists, and even after a year of protests, Jews remain 70-30 Democrats, no different from any past year.
I really urge you to consider just how ugly we consider the antisemitism on the right for FP to move *no* Jewish voters to the right. We're not stupid.
“I really urge you to consider just how ugly we consider the antisemitism on the right for FP to move *no* Jewish voters to the right. We're not stupid.”
Thanks much for THIS sentence.
First, it has indeed moved *some*, though almost exclusively males, and sadly all too few.
Second, I don’t doubt at all that many Jewish people (friends and relatives most definitely included) TELL THEMSELVES that your claim is true, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The antisemites have not had power on the right in the 60 years I’ve been alive, and have not been welcome openly ANYWHERE in the GOP in the last 40+ years. David Duke was widely repudiated by the GOP; can you say the same about Ilan Omar and the Squad, or the “Genocide Josh” campaign? Rhetorical question, of course. I notice you chose not to respond at all to that.
The evidence about young leftists is overwhelming. Check out how many 18-24 year olds choose “Back Hamas” in the Harvard-Harris polls (and this is all 18-24 year olds, not broken out by political lean, so there is no doubt the percentages on the left who support this are *far* higher) I posted links to nearby
I don’t think my Jewish brethren are stupid. I believe they are in denial. Older liberals in general, and older Jewish liberals in particular, have buried their head in the sand about the open antisemitism on the left, which unquestionably skews younger, and cling to stories about the powerless radical right fringe to make themselves feel better about their suicidal choice to remain supporting today’s Democrats.
Dem leaders almost never condemn the open antisemitism on the left. University presidents both actively and passively support it (which you’d be aware of if you watched the Congressional hearings where the 3 spoke). The “Genocide Josh” smear campaign from the left was successful; I mean, why would the Democrats want to put the very popular governor of the most important swing state likely to determine the election on the ticket?
I don’t think my Jewish brethren are stupid. I believe they are in denial.
Your views are those of an ostrich with your head buried in the sand.
Antisemitism is openly supported by the left on university campuses and by the Squad. Presumably you did not watch the 3 university presidents speaking before Congress in the fall.
See the October and December Harvard-Harris polls (yes, *those* right-wingers!):
Your claims about “broad swaths of Republicans” are simply your own projections; antisemitism exists on the right, no doubt, but it is accepted openly precisely nowhere.
As the liberal Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said: “you are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.”
This is again why I talked about the edges of the Democratic party, versus Trump befriending people like Kenya and Fuentes. Yes, many of the college protestors are latently antisemitic (and some explicitly). But they are not movers and shakers in the Democratic Party.
Yes, I see where Kamala, Biden and Pelosi and Durbin have been at non-stop war with AOC, Omar and the Squad, slapping them down at every turn [yes, they actually did slap Omar down once or twice]. And at war with 95% of university presidents and their DEI ideology. Right…! 🙄
Again, willful blindness and bald-faced lying assertions [“large swaths of the Republican Party”) do not make what you say true. Fuentes and his followers are a far tinier group than the woke SJW left, and the claim that said DEI/woke group has no power on the left is beyond laughable.
Smart opponents of unselective mass immigration care about the issue because it's low hanging fruit. If you pick the best you can literally turn immigration into an unalloyed good. Instead, letting in relatively unproductive, let alone violent people, is a totally unnecessary, self-inflicted wound. Most non-racists are ethical particularists who believe it's ok to greatly prioritise the interests of your fellow citizens over non citizens. Now ofc Caplan et al consider this basically tantamount to racism. (But if that's how you're using "racist" you're being disingenuous and should be upfront about it.) I presume you're using racist to convey its actual meaning - hatred or contempt towards other races. Nick Fuentes is a freak and I presume most of his fans are freaks. I'm sure some of them are just edgelords but if you tell me they're all just racists I could believe it. But they aren't representative of educated people who oppose mass immigration. As to Mexican immigration, isn't Reagan's amnesty largely responsible for California turning blue? In short, smart right wingers hate unselective mass immigration cos it's brought huge economic and political costs for no gain (relative to a hyper-selective system). Given that's it's also the most popular right wing position, why wouldn't they focus on it?
Alright you found one example of a group that opposes immigration in the UK that isn’t full of demented bigots. That’s still not the norm, and the vast majority of people who champion this issue have serious personality and cognitive flaws, with Tucker and Trump being the most obvious example.
As for the idea you should favor your fellow countrymen, yes I do consider it indistinguishable from racism. Elite Human Capital rejects it because as soon as you reject genetic distance as a basis for moral worth, then where someone is born is just as illogical. If anything, genetic relatedness is more real. We have to make concessions to nationalism unfortunately but it’s something that we should move away from.
"one example of a group that opposes immigration in the UK that isn’t full of demented bigots." Why do you think their motive is unrepresentative of people from good unis who oppose mass immigration? Most of the people you knew were huge psychological outliers - a requisite to be properly part of an online political community, let alone to become a prominent advocate. None of the people I know who oppose mass immigration are motivated by racism.They're motivated by the same considerations outlined in the ASI thread - which you've conceded aren't bigoted. Strong opposition to mass immigration (relative to selective immigration) logically follows from ethical particularism (the implicit morality of most people). So we should expect most people not in thrall to 2024 progressive taboos to oppose it. That's a considerable mass of people even among the uni grad classes. On the other hand, to become a racist uni grad, requires a very unusual psychology and/or upbringing, given interaction with non-whites at school, uni and work, in an environment where racism is the cardinal sin. If you're a remotely emotionally healthy or socially normal person you will inevitably have forged some degree of relationship with some non white people. I don't deny that there are v socially maladapted people whose personal resentment and misanthropy fuels their anti immigration politics. Nor that they have a massively outsized voice online due to their unhinged fanaticism. But that's precisely the point - among uni educated anti- immigration people there's a silent majority - who have normal lives and normie friends and partners and who won't speak politics publicly, let alone make it their identity, cos of the social and professional price. But you don't know that cos they'd have been socially repelled by 20 yr old you, and by every Nick Fuentes- loving dweeb. You're actually making a base rate fallacy - you think because all maladjusted, racist educated men are anti-immigration, that therefore the majority of anti-immigration educated people are maladjusted racists. But they're not, because the maladjusted racists are such a fringe among uni grads, that they're extremely outnumbered by even the (v small) minority of normal, educated people who oppose mass immigration. But there's a selection bias that people like you, Anatoly Karlin and Richard Spencer have that makes you blind to it.
"Elite Human Capital rejects it because as soon as you reject genetic distance as a basis for moral worth, then where someone is born is just as illogical." - EHC, like the vast majority, don't have thoughts, they adopt the dogmas of their in group. They do not reason from first principles. Relative to open borders, EHC were extremely anti immigration until ten years ago ago and they would revert in an instant if a critical mass of prestige thought leaders told them to. There's no inherent link between EHC and open borders.
“ As for the idea you should favor your fellow countrymen, yes I do consider it indistinguishable from racism.”
So in your view every single elected president of the U.S prior to Obama (and perhaps him as well, though he clearly didn’t favor U.S. interests over Iran’s…) was a racist?
Because every one of them put the interests of the American people ahead of the interests of non-Americans.
> "You would feel bad all the time too if you were a person with a real intellectual life who was forced to go out and praise someone as stupid and corrupt as Trump on a daily basis. All politicians have to lie and twist the truth to a certain extent, but Trump is simply an outlier in how morally grotesque and uniquely indefensible he is, both as a person and a politician who one would expect to act like a serious person and put forth coherent policy ideas."
> "But since Trump is obviously a corrupt and scatter-brained maniac..."
(much else besides)
"...therefore, in conclusion, I'm voting Trump and so should you!" -Richard, a month or two ago
Like, OK RH, I buy your characterization of him and his crazed, even maniacal pathology. But in spite of all that, you want to put the guy back in the oval office for another 4 years? Even if you prefer the economic policy he would sign into law, and his approach to identity politics / woke stuff, and can point to the fact that zero nuclear wars were started in his first term, you'd think just the opportunity cost alone of "hey maybe America could do something better with these 4 years than *gestures at all of Trump's enablers and fellow-grifters* THAT" would be a persuasive argument against anyone with sense voting for him. You're not a nihilist, you seem to want the best for America, so I struggle to read the above and understand how you're still clinging that voting intention. Perhaps the tone of this post indicates that you're rethinking that position - and if so, good. Let us know when you come around.
I don't really understand how you can be a pro-choice libertarian and shrug off abortion rights for women who live in red states, as Hanania has. If you believe property rights are sacrosanct, then there is nothing more fundamentally yours than your own body.
…which is exactly the argument of pro-life folks about the rights of the unborn fetus to his/her own life.
[For the record, I don’t agree with either extreme on this particular issue, but I chime in to point out the flawed logic of this particular argument.]
> Elites are seething with contempt towards the good men and women who built this country. If they allow high levels of immigration, it isn’t because they think it’s good economics or the right thing to do morally. The point is to humiliate, destroy, and replace regular, implicitly white, Americans. Such a worldview is truly poisonous, but
but is it wrong though?
First, a factual point: here https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/02/book-review-ages-of-discord/ ctrl-F plutocracy, check the link to the expert opinion, observe Scott's reaction, observe nobody trying to tell him that he misunderstood something and the lack of further updates. On the meta-level, ask yourself how is it possible that Scott, who probably had been reading Caplan and Hanson for a better part of a decade at that point, was so surprised. Are you similarly surprised right now too?
As I understand it, economists don't lie about the subject if asked directly, but their position is that restricting immigration is not a good solution, if people are upset about the resulting unfair outcomes for the working class, they should just use some fraction of the increase in the GDP to compensate the workers. Will we do such a wealth transfer? Of course not, that's communism. Well then, too bad for the workers, they'll have to deal with it.
The problem with this not-quite-direct lie is that in a democracy elites are by definition a voting minority, and admitting the above out loud will immediately result in the masses electing a trump, "no, you deal with it, GDP be damned". Furthermore, workers getting shafted by immigration tend to believe their own lying eyes rather than economists and other public intellectuals nimbly navigating this sensitive issue, so you are likely to get a trump anyway.
Another interesting article is https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/6418456/Labour-wanted-mass-immigration-to-make-UK-more-multicultural-says-former-adviser.html (paywall bypass: https://archive.ph/Ol5Vh) (that's the UK of course, but I'm sure the sentiment is universal). Here one might try to steelman the openly expressed position, that those people did not intend for their policies to "destroy and replace" native population, they didn't expect them to have major real world consequences, just a symbolic humiliation (deserved for the parochial racism in their opinion). But if the consequences are coming, who cares about the not-that-bad intentions of the humiliators?
I am not similarly surprised because I've been reading Caplan for a long time and he makes it pretty clear that mass immigration of low skilled workers might slightly decrease the earnings of low-skilled Americans. For instance, here he cites an estimate that it might depress the wages of high school dropouts by 8%:
Caplan goes on to point out that we should not organize our entire economy around a single special interest group, and that it is unconscionable that we are willing to deprive so many immigrants of better lives just to give a small percent of Americans a tiny raise:
I, of course, completely agree with Caplan. I spent a good part of my life working minimum wage jobs, if I could have pushed a button that would give me an 8% raise while deporting all immigrants I would not have done so. That's not because I hold Americans in contempt, it's because wrong is wrong, even if it helps you.
Similarly, I do not think pro-immigration politicians are motivated by a desire to hurt and humiliate low-skilled Americans. They just recognize that the entire economy should not be held hostage to a minority special interest group, and that it is morally wrong to deprive the majority of American of the benefits of immigration in order to give one group a small raise (not to mention the massive benefits the immigrants themselves would be deprived of).
I would also dispute your assertion that there is no way workers will be compensated by social programs. A program specifically focused on compensating people who lost wages due to immigration might be a nonstarter, but if increased immigration stimulates the economy then much of the increased revenue will likely go to social programs.
(Your argument is actually pretty much identical to an argument that I have seen socialists make against deregulation, which is that even if wealth transfers are more efficient than protective regulations, they won't be implemented because they are so unpopular. I don't find the socialist argument convincing either).
The Telegraph article also shows no evidence of a desire to "destroy and replace" the population. Making the UK multicultural doesn't mean the original culture is destroyed and replaced, it means it still exists, but there are other cultures existing alongside it. It makes sense that they might get some amusement out of right wingers being annoyed by this, but that isn't the main goal. They might also be amused that nativist right-wingers are in danger of losing support, since one of the easiest ways to destroy people's opposition to immigration is to have them actually live alongside immigrants.
> since one of the easiest ways to destroy people's opposition to immigration is to have them actually live alongside immigrants.
This is a very questionable assertion, given the noticeable rise in anti-immigration sentiments specifically in areas experiencing increased immigration. I think that you're assuming the conclusion, that people are against immigration solely for racist reasons, but if they are forced to live near immigrants they realize that immigrants are good people just like them.
I think that this premise is demonstrably wrong for two reasons. First of all, forcing people of different ethnicities to live together is how you cause ethnic tensions: Rwandan genocide, Kosovo, Jewish pogroms were done by their neighbors, not by strange people who never saw a Jew in their life.
Consider this: do you agree that a significant cause of Africa experiencing constant widespread genocidal wars is that Britain and other colonialist powers drew country borders there rather arbitrarily, disregarding actual ethnic distributions? This is an extremely common argument, I actually expect you to have made it multiple times yourself. But how does it square with your theory, shouldn't the natives so blessed by the British have become super tolerant instead?
Second, you presume that immigrants are in fact good hombres, but consider this: https://nypost.com/2024/09/22/us-news/chicago-gangbangers-face-off-against-venezuelans/ . What's your theory about why this is happening: is the proportion of gangbangers among Venezuelan immigrants in Chicago the same as in Venezuela, and if so, what should be done about immigration from there? Or is it significantly higher, then why, and if so, what should be done about immigration from there?
Statistically speaking, high-immigration areas tend to be more in favor of immigration and think more positively of immigrants. You will note that large coastal cities with the most immigrants tend to be the most anti-Trump, while rural, central areas with little immigration support him more strongly. There is a lot of support for the "contact hypothesis," where living alongside other groups leads to greater support and acceptance of them:
I can definitely attest after moving to an area with a greater immigrant population, it was shocking how little ethnic tension there was. I never took the apocalyptic rhetoric of the nativist right seriously, but I assumed it was based on some kernel of truth. It wasn't until I had more personal experience that I realized how much of it was completely made up.
There are definitely some individuals who grow to dislike immigrants after living alongside them, but they appear to be a minority who don't represent the average person.
Ethnic tensions cannot solely be caused by living alongside people of different ethnicities, since there are many examples of different ethnicities living alongside each other in peace. What seems a more likely cause in the case of Africa was that there was no governmental system in place that ensured that different ethnic groups were treated equally and unable to use the power of the government to dominate one another. By contrast, America had mass immigration for the entire 19th century, but had a strong rule of law that allowed all the different groups to live alongside each other equally. The only exception was in the South, where Southern whites were able to subvert the rule of law and put a system in place that did allow them to dominate others. Similarly, some multicethnic African countries, such as Botswana, were able to avoid a lot of ethnic conflict merely by having the right policies.
I am not sure what you are asking in the last question. There are definitely efforts made to make sure that immigrants are not criminals before they are admitted, but they are obviously imperfect. If you think they need to be made more thorough that doesn't seem like a bad idea. One of the main reasons we have issues with migrants right now is that the departments in charge of processing them are underfunded.
As far as I can tell, both articles you linked do nothing to prove that the causation goes in the direction they assume. The baseline assumption should be that immigrants tend to move to more immigrant-friendly places, the question is how locals' attitudes change when they get their wish. The reaction to Texas bussing their immigrants to sanctuary cities, that city with allegedly pet-eating Haitians, the article about Chicago gangbangers upset about Venezuelan competition I linked, and tons of other anecdotal examples suggest that oftentimes they grow unhappy with consequences of their original attitude.
I don't doubt that under *certain conditions* exposure to immigrants can improve attitudes towards them: if they are productive members of society and culturally assimilate in important ways. For example, in the US by and large only blacks dislike Asians.
One question is if the baseline is even neutral or if the immigrant population must be *better* than natives to overcome the natural hostility.
Then, what is there to do when the immigrants are noticeably *worse* than locals as far as being productive, not committing crimes, and conforming to various cultural norms, like those Venezuelans? You can't determine if they were criminals if they have no documents and you can't predict if they will become criminals except statistically.
I tend to look at it as in some ways analogous to an individual's duties. Most people believe that they have a duty to their families, but also a duty to their community and the world. People don't just pursue the interests of their family and no one else, they also contribute to money or time to charity. I donated some money to charity this year that I could have used to buy my daughter more toys, but that doesn't mean I'm neglecting my duty to her.
Similarly, I think that while the US has a primary duty to its citizens, it should also expend some effort to making the world a better place in general. In this particular case, however, there isn't a conflict. Immigration benefits more American citizens than it harms. Opponents of immigration like to frame it as benefiting elites at the expense of the majority, but actually it benefits the majority at the expense of a small minority of low-skilled Americans who make up about 5% of the population.
Making the world a better place doesn't mean inviting the world's masses to immigrate into the U.S. and certainly not illegally, which the US is absolutely supporting through ever-expanding asylum rules and a lack of enforcement.
Again, I want to understand what benefits means (define it, measure it and who determines if it is indeed beneficial). I'm not swayed by economic arguments only. I believe cultural reasons are absolutely valid and even if immigration had NO ill effects whatsoever (economic, cultural, social), a nation-state still has the right to JUST SAY NO. That is where we differ. The people have the last word and owe foreign nationals nothing. Immigration is their sole democratic prerogative.
I liken it to a person deciding to say no to a promotion. You may get a better title, more money, fewer working hours but still, some people would say no, I don't want it even if it is objectively better for me in all ways.
The specific benefits I am referring to are economic. Having more workers increases economic activity, which increases the purchasing power of the average American's money. It also means more taxes revenue, which reduces the size of the deficit. Generally all Americans seem to benefit from this with the exception of high school dropouts, who are either not affected at all, or are slightly negatively affected, depending on the study (and who could have avoided the situation they were in by finishing high school).
Cultural, noneconomic worries about immigration are often most pronounced among people who are not exposed to the immigrants in question. The native-born citizens of large cities where there are a lot of immigrants are more likely to be in favor of immigration. This makes sense, if you only know about (for example) Muslim immigrants from the news you might be concerned about them. If you know them as the people who fixed your car for cheaper than a dealership could do, started a great restaurant near you, and are helping your daughter overcome her speech delay, you are probably less concerned.
That's a big unsubstantiated jump from Increased economic activity (e.g., more people working) to increase in purchasing power (e..g, your dollar buys more good). Again, my point is that Americans have the unqualified right to say no to immigration. We don't have to justify it either, as if more immigration always and forever is the default and opponents must satisfy the burden of proof to limit it. It's actually the other way around.
Exposure to other people can actually solidify opposition to legal and illegal immigration and confirm stereotypes of ethnic and racial groups. Sometimes getting to know your neighbors makes you realize you were right all along. They do belong in your neighborhood. The change they bring is not the change you want. I'd suggest you read the old NYT article about Mexicans complaining about those Americans who moved to Mexico City during the pandemic. They HATED the changes they wrought and complained about those gringos despite the Americans being wealthy, not using welfare or taking jobs from Mexicans. It turns out no one wants outsiders changing their demographics and culture. It's only racist when white people complain.
I'm not some white, country bumpkin from flyover country who's never come across an eye-talian or Mohammedian so is "scared" of these different people. I have plenty of exposure to immigrations, illegal aliens and temporarily legal foreign nationals (like those Haitians you incorrectly called immigrants). My own experience has actually shifted my views on immigration significantly.
Though I don't think that Kamala varying in the level of emphasis she puts on race, to reflect the level of emphasis the broader culture is focusing on it, can exactly be called "intellectually incoherent" or flip-flopping. Everyone from politicians to the media to regular every-day people shifts the things they focus on more or less, as topics get hot and then fade. That's pretty normal and doesn't reflect incoherence, IMO, absent actually changing one's positions.
FWIW, perhaps a lot of people weren't paying much attention to the 2020 DNC primaries, or have short memories. Because one of the reasons Kamala bombed so badly in 2020 is precisely because black voters didn't like her, and she was seen as way too establishment and not left enough. They thought she was a sell-out and not even in the top 5 candidates for supporting black voters. Black voters liked Marianne Williamson better than Kamala -- she was the one pushing reparations. They were all calling her a cop, and I think we all remember what people's feelings on cops were, at the time.
There was also a big outcry after she did an interview in 2019 where she was asked about reparations and instead floated some policy for a tax credit to all working families making under $100k, rather than one for black families specifically. And said "I’m not gonna sit here and say I’m gonna do something that’s only gonna benefit Black people. No." When that clip circulated, all the reparations activists and black Twitter were furious and criticizing her, basically calling her a useless Uncle Tom.
She was quickly deemed a non-contender and booted in 2020 during the height of COVID/George Floyd psychosis on the left. To me her present persona/agenda seems like her being more authentically mainstream and establishment because that's who she actually is and where she's comfortable. It was in 2020 that she came off as uncomfortable and fake, having to pander to the demands of the extreme left -- and no one bought it at the time and she never even reached 5% in the primaries.
On JD, did he always seem angry? When he was running for Senate, was he like that? If not, perhaps he's just angry about this brutal situation he's put himself in -- it honestly is hard not to feel sorry for him, though he made the decision. What are the chances that if 1. Trump wins, and 2. JD succeeds him, that he would come out as his more natural persona and start lecturing his constituents to put down the Mountain Dew and Krispy Kreme and start spending their paychecks on paying their bills instead of at the tattoo parlor? That would probably make me like him better.
I think one element of the reason Vance comes off so poorly is that as a politician Trump has very few actual beliefs. Pretty much it's just xenophobia and protectionism. Trade policy is (to normal people) weird and complicated and politicians play football with it all the time - but Trump's anti-immigrant bent is very clear, very explicit, and very much based on hate. The Haitians living in Springfield are legally here, but Trump chose to spread vile lies about them anyways, finding himself unable to even denounce bomb threats. Following in Trump's footsteps, Vance has no choice but embrace that kind of lie, explicitly saying that he'll keep calling them illegal immigrants (even though, again, they are here legally).
The most important concept in this essay is the “need for intellectual coherence” characteristic. I had never heard this before and it clarifies a lot about how people think and act in the world. For anyone high in this trait there will be a conflict between social/professional goals and the urge to understand and describe the world accurately. Of course, most of us are not politicians so we can get away with having unpopular views as long as we can be diplomatic or keep our mouths shut.
Being low in need for intellectual coherence is better for being popular and likable. When there’s a tradeoff between two things one approach is to just care about one at the expense of the other. If you don’t care about accurately understanding and describing the world it allows you to say and think whatever you want in order to make people like you.
Well, one way it’s easy to be more intellectually coherent is to play fast and loose with the facts. Richard did that with his assertion that Vance’s book “dripped with contempt” for poor rural whites when as another commenter here notes it was much more balanced than that.
There is an intellectual honesty axis that is quite related. Vance seems to be higher on intellectual honesty. Bill Clinton was quite low on that axis even as he was surely VERY high on intellectual coherence.
We all seem to agree that since neither Trump nor Kamala are high on intellectual, period, whether for the same or for different reasons they are let off the hook on intellectual coherence and we ignore intellectual honesty with them. At least Richard surely did here.
The problem with race as a constant presence win a society is that it's always just around the corner from becoming the big thing again. Maybe for America that not insubstantial nuisance is worth it, but for Europe it's not. A continent that is cargo culting the US on diversity without any of the conditions in place. Just look at how extraordinary both of Kamala's parents are for their home countries! Literally nothing to generalise to the world's enormous reservoir of potential third world immigrants from her story at all.
Yeah because the first black Economics professor in the US is the definition of normal and every Indian is a Brahmin (literally the most elite Indian caste.)
I think Vance's anger issues are mostly innate, but this article gives a pretty good explanation for Vance's need for the seeing the world as worse than it actually is. In fact, I think this phenomenon (which we can call "push-pull polarization") has so many examples that it is a virtual certainty. I think it also explains the complete disillusionment of other prominent figures like Tucker Carlson and more broadly the entire MAGA right.
I will give three examples of social movements that have taken similar turns:
1) Feminism: I think it was Christina Hoff Sommers who said "feminists seem to get angrier and angrier the more rights women get". I personally noticed this too -- Tumbler feminism around 2010 was getting increasingly radicalized, and increasingly built around nonsense issues like manspreading. Initially, I thought this was paradoxical.
Recently, I've come to realize that the mechanics of this transformation can be easily understood by the modern term "grifting". The less genuine causes available to a movement, the more fake causes its leaders need to make up. And the easiest way to do that is to hyperfocus on tiny issues, and to exaggerate the maliciousness of your enemies; so can continue to sell your followers a purpose while riding high as a noble crusader.
2) Spread of Christianity: Thomas Sowell has talked about how the initial Christian evangelist movements (right after the death of Christ) were very different from the later ones (400 - 1000 AD). Initial movements were mostly focused on faith and personal values. Later ones were political in nature, establishing strict social rules as well as laying the pretext for conquerors. (Remember that "grifts" aren't all about money, they're also about power and prestige, so this is a pretty old phenomenon)
Note: I listened to this on an interview (I think by Peter Robinson) so I don't recall all the details. Sowell also mentioned this pattern applies to mass movements in general.
3) Covid: This is something I actually predicted and am proud of. I noticed that the medical establishment post 2022 started to give ground on a surprising number of theories on which the dissidents were right - inefficacy of masks, myocarditis, school closures, and even admitting the lockdowns were over-wrought. Meanwhile, other tense issues like mandatory vaccines were struck down by the court and did not merit further discussion. All legitimate covid-dissident issues thus stolen from them, I theorized that this movement would completely lose its mind -- and that's exactly what happened. (though I wouldn't have guessed the crazies would include Bret Weinstein and Joe Rogan).
“But since Trump is obviously a corrupt and scatter-brained maniac”
Textbook Richard in this piece. Interesting ideas that are IMO 85% correct, but he has to go out of his way to use pejorative language about Trump and non-pejorative language about Kamala even when accurately describing their behaviors similarly.
There was no need - and no legit rationale - to use the word “corrupt” to describe Trump but not Harris, but Richard felt compelled to throw in that cheap shot anyway.
Richard DOES prove with his word choice that he is indeed somewhere between Vance and Harris on the need for intellectual coherence…
I read "Hillbilly Elegy" when it came out back in 2016, and I didn't feel that Vance was dripping with contempt for his fellow hillbillies. To me, it came across as "these people have many admirable qualities, and also have a lot of problems - some these are from external causes, and some are from their own behavior, and some are from a combination of both."
For the record, I'm of hillbilly descent; my father was from Magoffin County, KY (which borders Breathitt County) and spent his teens and young adulthood moving back and forth between Magoffin County and southern Ohio. As my Kentucky relatives would say, thar ain't but one gineration between me and the coal mines. So, I'm inclined to be charitable towards my people, while simultaneously acknowledging that there is a lot of dysfunction in hillbilly society.
I get the vibe that Kamala is much more at home in the elite milieu than Vance is, even though he's a graduate of Yale and learned to blend in with the upper class to an extent. While Kamala likes to emphasize that she grew up "middle class", her mother was a scientist and her father was a professor of economics at Stanford so while they may have been middle-class by income, they were really more of the upper-class in terms of education and culture. So she has grown up absorbing the knowledge of the correct things to say and what not to say, while I think Vance has to always kind of think about it first (and often ends up saying quite the wrong thing anyway!) Trump likewise is an outsider to elite culture, despite growing up very wealthy. It's not uncommon in people who are blue-collar rich; I know many owners of large, successful contracting companies or real estate developers who are like that. But unlike Vance, Trump has never had an iota of self-consciousness, and he's always enjoyed ruffling people's feathers. Vance seems more conflicted; part of him wants to be accepted by the Ivy League elite types, but part of him also wants to give them the middle finger. That inner conflict, plus the fact that he's not a very seasoned politician, keeps resulting in his various mis-steps and unfortunate statements and the overall weird/awkward vibe.
Regarding Vance's accent, some people are more adept at code-switching than others. My dad lived in the NYC suburbs from the age of thirty until his death, but he never lost his Kentucky accent - nor would he have wanted to, despite having a professional career. He always described himself as a "Kentuckian" and had a fervent devotion to his home state which never dimmed.
I think the exact opposite. Vance is extremely uncomfortable around "regular" people. He's an ideas guy. And even worse than that, he's a nerd. He can't even make a few minutes of small talk with people behind the counter at a donut shop. He seems most natural when he's on a podcast, talking about how we should make it illegal for women to cross state lines if they might get an abortion. My guess is that he misses living in San Francisco, mingling with tech bro weirdos like Thiel.
Kamala, on the other hand, clearly enjoys talking to all kinds of people. She's much more natural as a politician.
I also think it's hilarious that she's obviously very comfortable with her weight, while Vance is constantly complaining about how easy it is to gain weight on the campaign trail. He refused food at an Ohio state fair! He just isn't cut out for this.
Read the book Nixon land. Vance and Nixon have a super similar personality. Same resentments, similar intellect.
“To me, it came across as ‘these people have many admirable qualities, and also have a lot of problems - some these are from external causes, and some are from their own behavior, and some are from a combination of both.’"
Well stated!
But Richard, at least in this piece, prefers to err on the side of intellectual coherence in his story than accuracy.
This makes me think that there is some kind of "intellectual coherence uncanny valley." Having a strong need for intellectual coherence helps you live a more disciplined and organized life. However, having a moderate need for it that can be overriden by other drives creates the hazard that you will twist all your beliefs in service of those drives. That has a risk of creating a monstrous ideology that is far worse than mere intellectual inconsistency.
Another way of looking at it might be that Vance wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants to think of himself as a man who behaves according to principles, but also wants to cozy up to powerful people who manifestly do not. If he was really courageous and truly dedicated to coherence he would admit to himself that he was working with an unprincipled man for purely instrumental reasons and take the hit to his ego that that admission would cause. Instead, rather than taking the hit, he has chosen to wimp out and distort his beliefs to help him pretend that Trump isn't that unprincipled. What a wuss.
Very insightful comment.
Idk I kind of like Vance. Without him, It would be a lot more difficult to justify voting for Republicans. I feel like Republicans with Vance as VP, there is some hope that 90% of the stupid stuff promised to the chuds was just lies to convince chuds to vote for them. I actually hope that government size might be reduced ( don’t really believe it though).
With Kamala and the democrats party in power, I can expect that their bureaucrats will be effective in making the bureaucracy larger and more stupid once again. It will make the USA worse.
That’s about where I am on Vance. He brings the intellect the GOP needs and that’s also making him poll extremely poorly. He can and probably will slaughter Tim Walz in the VP debate and no one will care.
Being yoked to Trump is quite unfortunate for him as Vance could be a much more well spoken politician without Trump in the way and be more popular, but now he’ll always be « the guy that pushed the Haitians eating cats story ».
The anti-immigrant stances are funny as both Trump and Vance have foreign wives, and I think that could be well worth its own article. Personally, I think they’re both examples of a rising fundamental difference between the parties and sexes. More men vote red and are having increasing discontent with American women, while those same women flock to the Democratic Party in droves. Even so, we have not heard much from Melania Trump nor Usha Vance at all in this campaign. I hope there’s no truth to those marriages being on the rocks.
I'm in the same boat. I think the problem isn't Vance's need to be intellectually coherent and I even think that there is a constituency that will actually reward intellectual coherency in an election where every other candidate is incoherent. The problem here is that Vance feels the need to be a complete Trump sycophant when in reality he would be more rewarded if he disagreed with Trump more on the crazy stuff.
Compare him to Pence in 2016 after the grab the pussy scandal. Pence unconditionally denounced Trumps actions but gave him grace. Had the vp pick instead been a Trump sycophant who brushed it off as not a big deal similar to Trump, he might have lost enough Midwestern Evangelicals/ suburbanites to cost him the election.
But Vance didn't denounce the eating dogs statement and instead doubled down on it. It's still possible to make an anti illegal immigration stance without defending Trumps absurd statements.
Vance genuinely seems more afraid getting attacked by Catturd and Laura Loomer on twitter than losing potential constituencies to win the election and that's the big problem here.
There's something uniquely satisfying about psychoanalyzing JD Vance. Maybe it's because I see myself in him, idk. I did it in an essay last week, and you take it to another level with your analysis of him: high ambition, high need for intellectual coherence, plus underlying anger.
"We find out that in 2016 she became the first black woman ever elected to the Senate from California and the second from any state in American history, but she didn’t find such milestones worth mentioning in her previous book."
Well, I'm no fan of Kamala, but TBF, that hadn't happened yet when she wrote her first book.
I think you overestimate how charismatic Kamala is. Someone who does really believe in what they're saying and is ambitious about their goals is more charismatic than any sort of chameleon, on average. They're just rare in major politics because it's not common that the policies the voters want for that particular election match with an ambitious politician's agenda.
But yeah Vance is very uncharismatic.
The chameleon bit he was referring to was her accent. Which is a common thing for well-traveled Americans. My Texan father who went to college in Boston and married someone from New Jersey has 3 different accents he drops into depending on who he's talking to. It's a natural instinct, aimed at making the people we're talking to feel more comfortable, and it's totally subconscious.
The same is true for which policies or topics you tend to emphasize when making political points (as RH notes about Harris). Her values hadn't changed between 2009 and 2019, but her choice of what to emphasize had indeed changed with the times. And has changed yet again in 2024. I want a politician who has beliefs, who isn't Aaron Burr out there, but who is malleable enough to listen to what his constituents are telling him or her, assess which way the wind is blowing, and know when and how to make a deal and take half a loaf. That's one of the few counts on which GW Bush was better than Obama.
>Her values hadn't changed between 2009 and 2019, but her choice of what to emphasize had indeed changed with the times.
I'm skeptical of that. I think her 2019 values were far farther left than her 2009 ones, or at least her behavior was far farther left.
But that’s just it, behavior and values aren’t the same thing. NO ONE disputes that her behavior in 2019 was even further left.
I think the reason she’s been more successful as a campaigner than in 2019 is that her current positions align better with her actual beliefs and values. She’s inherently a bit left of center and thus seems more comfortable in her own skin now. In 2019 she seemed awkward, unsure and forced. That’s why her campaign went nowhere.
She has always been the furthest left of center of basically anyone in any campaign she ran in California, and she tried to do the same in 2019.
Her “official” positions have now flip flopped on fracking, on building the wall, etc. you claim this is *her*?
If she is so / more comfortable in her own skin now, why isn’t she doing press interviews and taking press questions?
I think your claims above lack all credibility.
I claim that these positions are a more comfortable fit for her because she is not inherently a far leftist. She is not a creature of rock solid positions. She will swing to where she thinks the votes are (like many pols). But she is more at ease with the current swing because it fits better with her innate preferences.
She's charismatic relative to Vance, I think that's the only comparison he was making. You are right that she is not spectacularly charismatic but surely she is much higher than average? Think of the average human.
Even if it might be true - and boy, talk about the pot calling the kettle black - how is it relevant comparing the Presidential candidate of one party with the VP candidate of the other?
Well, I guess neither was elected to their position by voters, so there is that… 😏
I think authentic politicians receive more love but also more hate. I am thinking of Milei or some communist/socialist leaders as examples.
I think it just depends. Hillary Clinton was quite inauthentic and also supremely hated. Justin Trudeau was quite popular early in his term and today is quite unpopular.
I hope that Messrs. Hanania and Lomez will have a debate about all this. But most conservatives would take a line similar to this one: https://x.com/hpmcd1/status/1834339581220606449
That the "big lies" pushed by the Dems are so egregiously destructive, that even Trump's sociopathy is the lesser evil.
In a typical Dem jurisdiction like NY or CA, the average elected official believes things like: "Our society is so White Supremacist that racist police officers are constantly attacking and killing the innocent black bodies of young black men"... and that false belief justifies "criminal justice reforms" that result in many, many thousands of innocent people dead or maimed because their attackers are free to walk the streets when they should be rotting in prison. Or again, they believe "Men can become women"... and that belief is why, to the extent that Dems/libs are in charge of things, literally every girls' locker room, girls' sports team, women's prison, women's shelter, etc. is forced to admit the presence of biological males, many of whom change their "identity" precisely in order to gain this access, as in a steady stream of reports here: https://reduxx.info/
The dishonesty of Trump/Vance is basically "ordinary politician dishonesty," while the Big Lies of the liberals attack the core of civilization itself.
The obsession the online right has with trans issues is bizarre. I am a woman. I do not want to compete against men if playing in a sports tournament. I do not want to share a locker room with a biological male.
And guess what? I have never been asked to. The only situation that came remotely close was a trans coworker who was occasionally in the women's bathroom at the same time as me.
There just aren't that many trans people out there, and this is coming from someone who lives in San Francisco. Of the people that are trans, they behave like normal people, which is to say that they are generally conflict-averse, and reluctant to create situations where they make others uncomfortable. A trans woman who hasn't had bottom surgery would most likely change in a private bathroom or handicapped stall, rather than charging naked into the sauna.
I'm on the right, but I sort of agree with this. The trans issue seldom has much practical impact on the ground. Though it can have a practical impact in online spaces. Even Scott Alexander had a policy (not sure if he still does) of banning people for "misgendering".
In practice, it serves more to highlight and reinforce a cultural divide. If you're on the conservative side of it, trans ideology is so plainly and obviously insane that the immediate instinct is to conclude that there can be no common ground with someone pushing it as self-evidently correct; that such a person is operating within an entirely different reality from the rest of us. It can be hard to get past it.
What is so strange about it? I agree that saying that males can be women and vice versa is weird, but it's also semantics. It is absolutely true that people born into a male body can have neurological wiring that leads them to identify as female, and vice versa. So while I'm not on board with "pregnant men," I'm fully on board with "I identify as a woman."
This is so reminiscent of gay rights, and people *insisted* that being gay was a choice, or a mental illness. People said that gay men were perverts, and that gay people should not be allowed to adopt. Now we accept that gay people are wired differently. It's rare, but it happens. Even more rarely, a person's neurological self-identity, most likely wired during fetal development, does not match their sex.
Most trans people are not being featured on LibsOfTikTok. They are going about their lives, presenting as the gender they identify with.
I think the difference comes down to the fact that many, if not most conservative folks have someone in their life (family or friends) that they care deeply for and is gay. As was said before, there just aren’t that many trans folks, and so there aren’t as many opportunities to cross that divide.
I would say that the kinds of lies that Trump spreads about immigrants are on par with the kind of lies about white people that the "woke" left likes to spread. They aren't "ordinary politician dishonesty," an ordinary Republican like Romney or Jeb Bush is too good of a person to tell those kinds of lies. The lies that Trump and Vance spread about Springfield are so horrible, and have had such bad consequences, that they totally disqualify the pair from office. Vance should be expelled from the Senate, he's a liar on par with George Santos.
By contrast, the "woke" craziness is mostly an online phenomenon that most Democrats do not take seriously. They seemed to for a bit in 2020, but that was mostly because the large BLM protests created a false impression that wokeness was more popular than it really was, not because they truly believed in it.
Now that wokeness has started to lose power, mainstream Democrats are starting to ignore it or push back at it. The anti-civilization forces on the left have been routed. The ones on the right are just getting started.
Illegal aliens and temporary nonimmigrant visa holders are not immigrants. Those Haitians are here based on temporary humanitarian parole which allows them to live and work in the U.S. for 2 years only. They are migrants, not immigrants.
Woke is NOT an online phenomenon. It is embedded into every corporation and school. I must attend mandatory DIE training by and my kids schools are also about DIE, restorative justice and culturally responsive learning.
My company celebrated a man as woman on the year. Trans identified people may not be everywhere but their ideology certainly is. No men in my bathroom, locker room or any other intimate spaces. Tired of minorities wreaking havoc on the majority.
I missed the part where the specific program under which the Haitians are legally in the country makes it okay to slander them. Spreading false rumors that someone is abducting and eating pets, or hunting wildlife without a license, is wrong regardless. Not only does it harm them, it also harms citizens by making them frightened and worried for no reason.
Wokeness is not just a term for left wing beliefs in general. It is a term for a specific strain of leftist thought that focuses on language policing and cancelation as tools of control, and has a Manichean worldview that divides everyone into oppressors and oppressed. There are many prominent leftists who are critics of wokeness, Freddie DeBoer is one who is active on substack.
DEI and related programs (like its predecessor, sensitivity training) have risen in popularity lately because the popularity of wokeness online caused companies to believe wokeness was more popular than it actually was. Now that wokeness has weakened many companies are beginning to cut back and downsize their DEI teams.
The belief that trans people are the gender they say they are predated wokeness by decades. States first started allowing people to change their gender on their birth certificates in the Seventies. There are many critics of wokeness who support trans rights, what they oppose is using tactics like cancelation to support them.
I corrected the mid-usage of the term immigrant. I did not state or imply it was fine to state Haitians were eating cats. Do not put words in my mouth.
Wokeness entails much more than can cancellation and speech monitoring. I prefer the term successor ideology. A limited and targeted retreat from the excesses of progressives is no win. It’s a strategic re-grouping.
Trans is a modern phenomenon as is its ideology. The idea that there is such a thing as gender expression that conflicted with and overrode sex and secondary sex characteristics is hogwash and totally made up.
I do agree our current ills stem from a deeper ideology that pre-dates 2012.
Very occasionally, people are born with six toes. We don't tell them that they've made a choice to have six toes, and if they really tried, they would only have five.
I'm left handed. For most of history, this was considered a flaw, and even twenty years ago, lefties were made to use their right hands in school. But even though lefties can learn to write with their non-dominant hand, they will still naturally use their left for everything else.
Fifty years ago, epilepsy was considered a mental illness, and even further back than that, a moral failing. Sometimes, people are born different. Biology is sloppy.
Having 6 toes still makes a foot. Having 47 chromosomes still makes one a human being Having a penis still makes one a man.
There are no objective criteria for trans other than feelings and self-identification.
Do believe Rachel Dolezal could be black based on her feeling black? You’ll tell me being black is intrinsic and immutable and different than gender, which is both intrinsic and immutable but also fluid and changeable.
Like word for word what the communists said. The enemy is so evil, any lie is justified. The Nazis said the same thing.
No, I said that Trump is the "lesser evil," not that the bad stuff about Trump is "justified." That's different!
This is about abortion (from an anti-abortion perspective) but the argument can be abstracted out to any perspective where "Trump is bad but I think the Dems are worse." https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2024/08/12/donald-trump-has-put-social-conservatives-in-a-dilemma/
I'm not in a swing state, so I'm contemplating some form of third party vote, since I agree that Trump is bad (although I still think the Dems are worse)
That’s not what he said at all. He said no more and no less that:
- Dem lies are a 9 on the scale
- Trump/Vance lies are a 5
Trump/Vance lies are bad, Dem lies are much worse.
I happen to agree with him 100%.
It’s a general election. We gotta choose somebody.
So true
This is one of your weakest pieces, betraying poor theory of mind on multiple fronts, and failing to steel man a couple times.
1) "The fact that Vance is high on both ambition and need for intellectual coherence, along with his underlying anger that is in some ways related to these traits, are what I think people are sensing when they refer to him as weird. He often looks physically uncomfortable with the things he has to say." No, you've completely misunderstood and overcomplicated this. Vance is a fat dork and that's why he's called weird. You put him back in high school and remove any politics and he's still never going to be one of the cool kids. This isn't the case for Clinton, Obama, Kamala or Trump. But crucially nor is it the case for Vivek. Vivek didn't give off weird, loser vibes cos that's not remotely what he is. But if your explanation was true he should've done - he literally criticised January 6 in his book. Walz called Vance weird cos he's a canny politician and saw a weakness: the same weakness he'd see even if it was someone as honest as Bryan Caplan.
2) "An acceptance of the positive effects of immigration was once central to Vance’s understanding of how he became the man he is today, and his new Trumpist position can’t help but create cognitive dissonance." This is a straw man - his position hasn't moved from all immigrants good to all immigrants bad. His position is that unselective, uncontrolled mass immigration of poor people is a big net negative for the country. That's consistent with believing that some immigrants bring good values and contribute a lot. I think there's a poor theory of mind here cos you used to be a racist who hung out with a lot of angry hateful racists like Richard Spencer, so you assume those who hate mass immigration tend to be motivated by the same impulses. But this isn't the case for most educated right wingers. It may interest you to know that among British neoliberals e.g. the Adam Smith Institute, strong antipathy to uncontrolled mass immigration is common - the ASI recently published a paper criticising it.
3) "Something that is particularly disturbing about Vance, which plays into the weirdness discourse, is how extremely angry he seems at the world". His anger relative to other politicians is overstated cos of how his politics is emotionally coded. But to the extent it isn't that, it's cos he just doesn't have particularly good social skills. As you pointed it out it's strange that he never code switched. Unless you have good social skills and are low in neuroticism, the crucible of politics with all the invective levelled, will manifest as anger for a male politician.
4)"Make the world ugly enough, and Trump becomes beautiful...Elites are seething with contempt towards the good men and women who built this country. If they allow high levels of immigration, it isn’t because they think it’s good economics or the right thing to do morally." Ironically you've taken right wing failures to understand their opponents and compounded it with your own. Conservative voters have bad theory of mind for progressives cos the real explanation for retarded woke politics - limitless purity spirals enabled by social media, status seeking and the sacralisation of the civil rights movement - is hard to understand and explain. Describing the mechanism of emergent social phenomena makes for terrible rhetoric, and so conservative pundits opt for the less complicated conspiracy explanation - corruption, greed etc. But this isn't unique to the right. This is exactly how progressives treat cops and capitalists. They don't grasp complex systems, so they opt for attributing bad consequences to malevolence. I can't help but think you're misreading of the situation is driven by your aesthetic revulsion of MAGA, and the fact that you yourself used to be hateful malcontent who subsumed their identity into nativist politics. But most educated high iq right wingers aren't doing that.
It’s not just Spencer. 10-15 years ago I knew basically everyone on the right who was a prominent anti-immigration advocate. Yes, they were all privately very racist. Their views have become mainstream within the Republican Party as open bigotry becomes acceptable. Young conservatives love Fuentes, Trump, etc. because of their crude racism, not in spite of it.
I think it’s possible for conservatives in the UK to be anti-immigration and not be hateful because there’s actually arguments you can make against Islamic migration. But I’ve seen few logical arguments against Hispanic immigration, much less a reason anyone should be so passionate about it. Buchananites made predictions of Mexican secession, etc and they were wrong about everything. Anti-immigration sentiment on the American right is completely about demagoguery and bad people looking to kick who they can, but sometimes generalized misanthropy.
“Their views have become mainstream within the Republican Party as open bigotry becomes acceptable.”
What utter crap. Mainstream?
You *actually* are claiming that anti-Hispanic bigotry is *mainstream* in the Republican Party, while at the same time *deny* that open antisemitism and pro-terrorist sympathy are mainstream in the Democrat Party?
Even for you I find it hard to believe you can hold both ideas in your head simultaneously.
Of the nine Jewish senators, twenty-four Jewish House members, and twelve Jewish governors, one is Republican. The other forty-four are Democrats.
Antisemitism is just one more problem that exists on the fringes of the Democratic Party, but is acceptable to broad swaths of the Republican Party. For all of my objections to Tlaib and Omar, they have never accused Jews of using lasers to start wildfires. Harris is not going to bring a Holocaust denier to a 9/11 memorial ceremony.
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/bill-ackman-college-presidents-a20ff0d3
https://x.com/BillAckman/status/1731532031048245631?lang=en
I suppose next you will claim Bill Ackman is antisemitic too, for recognizing that today’s open antisemitism comes almost entirely from the woke DEI oppressor-oppressed ideology left.
I think you underestimate the revulsion that the mainstream left feels for FP, particularly its murderous fringe. Of all the aspects of leftist insanity, this one is getting the hardest blowback. 90% of Jews are Zionists, and even after a year of protests, Jews remain 70-30 Democrats, no different from any past year.
I really urge you to consider just how ugly we consider the antisemitism on the right for FP to move *no* Jewish voters to the right. We're not stupid.
“I really urge you to consider just how ugly we consider the antisemitism on the right for FP to move *no* Jewish voters to the right. We're not stupid.”
Thanks much for THIS sentence.
First, it has indeed moved *some*, though almost exclusively males, and sadly all too few.
Second, I don’t doubt at all that many Jewish people (friends and relatives most definitely included) TELL THEMSELVES that your claim is true, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The antisemites have not had power on the right in the 60 years I’ve been alive, and have not been welcome openly ANYWHERE in the GOP in the last 40+ years. David Duke was widely repudiated by the GOP; can you say the same about Ilan Omar and the Squad, or the “Genocide Josh” campaign? Rhetorical question, of course. I notice you chose not to respond at all to that.
The evidence about young leftists is overwhelming. Check out how many 18-24 year olds choose “Back Hamas” in the Harvard-Harris polls (and this is all 18-24 year olds, not broken out by political lean, so there is no doubt the percentages on the left who support this are *far* higher) I posted links to nearby
I don’t think my Jewish brethren are stupid. I believe they are in denial. Older liberals in general, and older Jewish liberals in particular, have buried their head in the sand about the open antisemitism on the left, which unquestionably skews younger, and cling to stories about the powerless radical right fringe to make themselves feel better about their suicidal choice to remain supporting today’s Democrats.
Dem leaders almost never condemn the open antisemitism on the left. University presidents both actively and passively support it (which you’d be aware of if you watched the Congressional hearings where the 3 spoke). The “Genocide Josh” smear campaign from the left was successful; I mean, why would the Democrats want to put the very popular governor of the most important swing state likely to determine the election on the ticket?
I don’t think my Jewish brethren are stupid. I believe they are in denial.
“First they came for the trade unionists…”
Your views are those of an ostrich with your head buried in the sand.
Antisemitism is openly supported by the left on university campuses and by the Squad. Presumably you did not watch the 3 university presidents speaking before Congress in the fall.
See the October and December Harvard-Harris polls (yes, *those* right-wingers!):
https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/HHP_Oct23_KeyResults.pdf
https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/HHP_Dec23_KeyResults.pdf
You gonna claim all those 18-24 year olds choosing Back Hamas are right-wingers?!? 🙄
You gonna claim the “Genocide Josh” campaign was a right-wing smear job?
https://www.newsweek.com/no-genocide-josh-campaign-doubles-down-shapiro-vp-speculation-grows-1934107
https://jewishinsider.com/2024/07/left-wing-anti-israel-activists-organize-against-josh-shapiro-for-veepstakes/
Your claims about “broad swaths of Republicans” are simply your own projections; antisemitism exists on the right, no doubt, but it is accepted openly precisely nowhere.
As the liberal Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said: “you are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.”
This is again why I talked about the edges of the Democratic party, versus Trump befriending people like Kenya and Fuentes. Yes, many of the college protestors are latently antisemitic (and some explicitly). But they are not movers and shakers in the Democratic Party.
Yes, I see where Kamala, Biden and Pelosi and Durbin have been at non-stop war with AOC, Omar and the Squad, slapping them down at every turn [yes, they actually did slap Omar down once or twice]. And at war with 95% of university presidents and their DEI ideology. Right…! 🙄
Again, willful blindness and bald-faced lying assertions [“large swaths of the Republican Party”) do not make what you say true. Fuentes and his followers are a far tinier group than the woke SJW left, and the claim that said DEI/woke group has no power on the left is beyond laughable.
Read this thread by an ASI guy - it's not primarily about Islam, it's about prosperity.
https://x.com/sam_bidwell/status/1836321565195067557?t=RGZ4XwPLUvp_-6PYzd3rWg&s=19
Smart opponents of unselective mass immigration care about the issue because it's low hanging fruit. If you pick the best you can literally turn immigration into an unalloyed good. Instead, letting in relatively unproductive, let alone violent people, is a totally unnecessary, self-inflicted wound. Most non-racists are ethical particularists who believe it's ok to greatly prioritise the interests of your fellow citizens over non citizens. Now ofc Caplan et al consider this basically tantamount to racism. (But if that's how you're using "racist" you're being disingenuous and should be upfront about it.) I presume you're using racist to convey its actual meaning - hatred or contempt towards other races. Nick Fuentes is a freak and I presume most of his fans are freaks. I'm sure some of them are just edgelords but if you tell me they're all just racists I could believe it. But they aren't representative of educated people who oppose mass immigration. As to Mexican immigration, isn't Reagan's amnesty largely responsible for California turning blue? In short, smart right wingers hate unselective mass immigration cos it's brought huge economic and political costs for no gain (relative to a hyper-selective system). Given that's it's also the most popular right wing position, why wouldn't they focus on it?
Alright you found one example of a group that opposes immigration in the UK that isn’t full of demented bigots. That’s still not the norm, and the vast majority of people who champion this issue have serious personality and cognitive flaws, with Tucker and Trump being the most obvious example.
As for the idea you should favor your fellow countrymen, yes I do consider it indistinguishable from racism. Elite Human Capital rejects it because as soon as you reject genetic distance as a basis for moral worth, then where someone is born is just as illogical. If anything, genetic relatedness is more real. We have to make concessions to nationalism unfortunately but it’s something that we should move away from.
"one example of a group that opposes immigration in the UK that isn’t full of demented bigots." Why do you think their motive is unrepresentative of people from good unis who oppose mass immigration? Most of the people you knew were huge psychological outliers - a requisite to be properly part of an online political community, let alone to become a prominent advocate. None of the people I know who oppose mass immigration are motivated by racism.They're motivated by the same considerations outlined in the ASI thread - which you've conceded aren't bigoted. Strong opposition to mass immigration (relative to selective immigration) logically follows from ethical particularism (the implicit morality of most people). So we should expect most people not in thrall to 2024 progressive taboos to oppose it. That's a considerable mass of people even among the uni grad classes. On the other hand, to become a racist uni grad, requires a very unusual psychology and/or upbringing, given interaction with non-whites at school, uni and work, in an environment where racism is the cardinal sin. If you're a remotely emotionally healthy or socially normal person you will inevitably have forged some degree of relationship with some non white people. I don't deny that there are v socially maladapted people whose personal resentment and misanthropy fuels their anti immigration politics. Nor that they have a massively outsized voice online due to their unhinged fanaticism. But that's precisely the point - among uni educated anti- immigration people there's a silent majority - who have normal lives and normie friends and partners and who won't speak politics publicly, let alone make it their identity, cos of the social and professional price. But you don't know that cos they'd have been socially repelled by 20 yr old you, and by every Nick Fuentes- loving dweeb. You're actually making a base rate fallacy - you think because all maladjusted, racist educated men are anti-immigration, that therefore the majority of anti-immigration educated people are maladjusted racists. But they're not, because the maladjusted racists are such a fringe among uni grads, that they're extremely outnumbered by even the (v small) minority of normal, educated people who oppose mass immigration. But there's a selection bias that people like you, Anatoly Karlin and Richard Spencer have that makes you blind to it.
"Elite Human Capital rejects it because as soon as you reject genetic distance as a basis for moral worth, then where someone is born is just as illogical." - EHC, like the vast majority, don't have thoughts, they adopt the dogmas of their in group. They do not reason from first principles. Relative to open borders, EHC were extremely anti immigration until ten years ago ago and they would revert in an instant if a critical mass of prestige thought leaders told them to. There's no inherent link between EHC and open borders.
“ As for the idea you should favor your fellow countrymen, yes I do consider it indistinguishable from racism.”
So in your view every single elected president of the U.S prior to Obama (and perhaps him as well, though he clearly didn’t favor U.S. interests over Iran’s…) was a racist?
Because every one of them put the interests of the American people ahead of the interests of non-Americans.
No, that's not at all why California turned blue. If it were simply immigration, Texas would have gone on the same direction.
Every ethnicity in California is more Democratic than Republican.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/database/compare/party-affiliation/by/racial-and-ethnic-composition/among/state/california/
> "You would feel bad all the time too if you were a person with a real intellectual life who was forced to go out and praise someone as stupid and corrupt as Trump on a daily basis. All politicians have to lie and twist the truth to a certain extent, but Trump is simply an outlier in how morally grotesque and uniquely indefensible he is, both as a person and a politician who one would expect to act like a serious person and put forth coherent policy ideas."
> "But since Trump is obviously a corrupt and scatter-brained maniac..."
(much else besides)
"...therefore, in conclusion, I'm voting Trump and so should you!" -Richard, a month or two ago
Like, OK RH, I buy your characterization of him and his crazed, even maniacal pathology. But in spite of all that, you want to put the guy back in the oval office for another 4 years? Even if you prefer the economic policy he would sign into law, and his approach to identity politics / woke stuff, and can point to the fact that zero nuclear wars were started in his first term, you'd think just the opportunity cost alone of "hey maybe America could do something better with these 4 years than *gestures at all of Trump's enablers and fellow-grifters* THAT" would be a persuasive argument against anyone with sense voting for him. You're not a nihilist, you seem to want the best for America, so I struggle to read the above and understand how you're still clinging that voting intention. Perhaps the tone of this post indicates that you're rethinking that position - and if so, good. Let us know when you come around.
I don't know why Hanania wouldnt just vote Kamala for president and then vote Red for the rest of the ballot.
I don't really understand how you can be a pro-choice libertarian and shrug off abortion rights for women who live in red states, as Hanania has. If you believe property rights are sacrosanct, then there is nothing more fundamentally yours than your own body.
…which is exactly the argument of pro-life folks about the rights of the unborn fetus to his/her own life.
[For the record, I don’t agree with either extreme on this particular issue, but I chime in to point out the flawed logic of this particular argument.]
> Elites are seething with contempt towards the good men and women who built this country. If they allow high levels of immigration, it isn’t because they think it’s good economics or the right thing to do morally. The point is to humiliate, destroy, and replace regular, implicitly white, Americans. Such a worldview is truly poisonous, but
but is it wrong though?
First, a factual point: here https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/02/book-review-ages-of-discord/ ctrl-F plutocracy, check the link to the expert opinion, observe Scott's reaction, observe nobody trying to tell him that he misunderstood something and the lack of further updates. On the meta-level, ask yourself how is it possible that Scott, who probably had been reading Caplan and Hanson for a better part of a decade at that point, was so surprised. Are you similarly surprised right now too?
As I understand it, economists don't lie about the subject if asked directly, but their position is that restricting immigration is not a good solution, if people are upset about the resulting unfair outcomes for the working class, they should just use some fraction of the increase in the GDP to compensate the workers. Will we do such a wealth transfer? Of course not, that's communism. Well then, too bad for the workers, they'll have to deal with it.
The problem with this not-quite-direct lie is that in a democracy elites are by definition a voting minority, and admitting the above out loud will immediately result in the masses electing a trump, "no, you deal with it, GDP be damned". Furthermore, workers getting shafted by immigration tend to believe their own lying eyes rather than economists and other public intellectuals nimbly navigating this sensitive issue, so you are likely to get a trump anyway.
Another interesting article is https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/6418456/Labour-wanted-mass-immigration-to-make-UK-more-multicultural-says-former-adviser.html (paywall bypass: https://archive.ph/Ol5Vh) (that's the UK of course, but I'm sure the sentiment is universal). Here one might try to steelman the openly expressed position, that those people did not intend for their policies to "destroy and replace" native population, they didn't expect them to have major real world consequences, just a symbolic humiliation (deserved for the parochial racism in their opinion). But if the consequences are coming, who cares about the not-that-bad intentions of the humiliators?
I am not similarly surprised because I've been reading Caplan for a long time and he makes it pretty clear that mass immigration of low skilled workers might slightly decrease the earnings of low-skilled Americans. For instance, here he cites an estimate that it might depress the wages of high school dropouts by 8%:
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2006/03/with_critics_of.html
Caplan goes on to point out that we should not organize our entire economy around a single special interest group, and that it is unconscionable that we are willing to deprive so many immigrants of better lives just to give a small percent of Americans a tiny raise:
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2006/03/are_lowskilled.html
I, of course, completely agree with Caplan. I spent a good part of my life working minimum wage jobs, if I could have pushed a button that would give me an 8% raise while deporting all immigrants I would not have done so. That's not because I hold Americans in contempt, it's because wrong is wrong, even if it helps you.
Similarly, I do not think pro-immigration politicians are motivated by a desire to hurt and humiliate low-skilled Americans. They just recognize that the entire economy should not be held hostage to a minority special interest group, and that it is morally wrong to deprive the majority of American of the benefits of immigration in order to give one group a small raise (not to mention the massive benefits the immigrants themselves would be deprived of).
I would also dispute your assertion that there is no way workers will be compensated by social programs. A program specifically focused on compensating people who lost wages due to immigration might be a nonstarter, but if increased immigration stimulates the economy then much of the increased revenue will likely go to social programs.
(Your argument is actually pretty much identical to an argument that I have seen socialists make against deregulation, which is that even if wealth transfers are more efficient than protective regulations, they won't be implemented because they are so unpopular. I don't find the socialist argument convincing either).
The Telegraph article also shows no evidence of a desire to "destroy and replace" the population. Making the UK multicultural doesn't mean the original culture is destroyed and replaced, it means it still exists, but there are other cultures existing alongside it. It makes sense that they might get some amusement out of right wingers being annoyed by this, but that isn't the main goal. They might also be amused that nativist right-wingers are in danger of losing support, since one of the easiest ways to destroy people's opposition to immigration is to have them actually live alongside immigrants.
> since one of the easiest ways to destroy people's opposition to immigration is to have them actually live alongside immigrants.
This is a very questionable assertion, given the noticeable rise in anti-immigration sentiments specifically in areas experiencing increased immigration. I think that you're assuming the conclusion, that people are against immigration solely for racist reasons, but if they are forced to live near immigrants they realize that immigrants are good people just like them.
I think that this premise is demonstrably wrong for two reasons. First of all, forcing people of different ethnicities to live together is how you cause ethnic tensions: Rwandan genocide, Kosovo, Jewish pogroms were done by their neighbors, not by strange people who never saw a Jew in their life.
Consider this: do you agree that a significant cause of Africa experiencing constant widespread genocidal wars is that Britain and other colonialist powers drew country borders there rather arbitrarily, disregarding actual ethnic distributions? This is an extremely common argument, I actually expect you to have made it multiple times yourself. But how does it square with your theory, shouldn't the natives so blessed by the British have become super tolerant instead?
Second, you presume that immigrants are in fact good hombres, but consider this: https://nypost.com/2024/09/22/us-news/chicago-gangbangers-face-off-against-venezuelans/ . What's your theory about why this is happening: is the proportion of gangbangers among Venezuelan immigrants in Chicago the same as in Venezuela, and if so, what should be done about immigration from there? Or is it significantly higher, then why, and if so, what should be done about immigration from there?
Statistically speaking, high-immigration areas tend to be more in favor of immigration and think more positively of immigrants. You will note that large coastal cities with the most immigrants tend to be the most anti-Trump, while rural, central areas with little immigration support him more strongly. There is a lot of support for the "contact hypothesis," where living alongside other groups leads to greater support and acceptance of them:
https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/long-run-contact-immigrant-groups-prejudice-and-altruism
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2006/05/immigration_see.html
I can definitely attest after moving to an area with a greater immigrant population, it was shocking how little ethnic tension there was. I never took the apocalyptic rhetoric of the nativist right seriously, but I assumed it was based on some kernel of truth. It wasn't until I had more personal experience that I realized how much of it was completely made up.
There are definitely some individuals who grow to dislike immigrants after living alongside them, but they appear to be a minority who don't represent the average person.
Ethnic tensions cannot solely be caused by living alongside people of different ethnicities, since there are many examples of different ethnicities living alongside each other in peace. What seems a more likely cause in the case of Africa was that there was no governmental system in place that ensured that different ethnic groups were treated equally and unable to use the power of the government to dominate one another. By contrast, America had mass immigration for the entire 19th century, but had a strong rule of law that allowed all the different groups to live alongside each other equally. The only exception was in the South, where Southern whites were able to subvert the rule of law and put a system in place that did allow them to dominate others. Similarly, some multicethnic African countries, such as Botswana, were able to avoid a lot of ethnic conflict merely by having the right policies.
I am not sure what you are asking in the last question. There are definitely efforts made to make sure that immigrants are not criminals before they are admitted, but they are obviously imperfect. If you think they need to be made more thorough that doesn't seem like a bad idea. One of the main reasons we have issues with migrants right now is that the departments in charge of processing them are underfunded.
As far as I can tell, both articles you linked do nothing to prove that the causation goes in the direction they assume. The baseline assumption should be that immigrants tend to move to more immigrant-friendly places, the question is how locals' attitudes change when they get their wish. The reaction to Texas bussing their immigrants to sanctuary cities, that city with allegedly pet-eating Haitians, the article about Chicago gangbangers upset about Venezuelan competition I linked, and tons of other anecdotal examples suggest that oftentimes they grow unhappy with consequences of their original attitude.
I don't doubt that under *certain conditions* exposure to immigrants can improve attitudes towards them: if they are productive members of society and culturally assimilate in important ways. For example, in the US by and large only blacks dislike Asians.
One question is if the baseline is even neutral or if the immigrant population must be *better* than natives to overcome the natural hostility.
Then, what is there to do when the immigrants are noticeably *worse* than locals as far as being productive, not committing crimes, and conforming to various cultural norms, like those Venezuelans? You can't determine if they were criminals if they have no documents and you can't predict if they will become criminals except statistically.
The U.S. does not nose foreign nationals better lives. It owes its citizens better lives.
I tend to look at it as in some ways analogous to an individual's duties. Most people believe that they have a duty to their families, but also a duty to their community and the world. People don't just pursue the interests of their family and no one else, they also contribute to money or time to charity. I donated some money to charity this year that I could have used to buy my daughter more toys, but that doesn't mean I'm neglecting my duty to her.
Similarly, I think that while the US has a primary duty to its citizens, it should also expend some effort to making the world a better place in general. In this particular case, however, there isn't a conflict. Immigration benefits more American citizens than it harms. Opponents of immigration like to frame it as benefiting elites at the expense of the majority, but actually it benefits the majority at the expense of a small minority of low-skilled Americans who make up about 5% of the population.
Making the world a better place doesn't mean inviting the world's masses to immigrate into the U.S. and certainly not illegally, which the US is absolutely supporting through ever-expanding asylum rules and a lack of enforcement.
Again, I want to understand what benefits means (define it, measure it and who determines if it is indeed beneficial). I'm not swayed by economic arguments only. I believe cultural reasons are absolutely valid and even if immigration had NO ill effects whatsoever (economic, cultural, social), a nation-state still has the right to JUST SAY NO. That is where we differ. The people have the last word and owe foreign nationals nothing. Immigration is their sole democratic prerogative.
I liken it to a person deciding to say no to a promotion. You may get a better title, more money, fewer working hours but still, some people would say no, I don't want it even if it is objectively better for me in all ways.
The specific benefits I am referring to are economic. Having more workers increases economic activity, which increases the purchasing power of the average American's money. It also means more taxes revenue, which reduces the size of the deficit. Generally all Americans seem to benefit from this with the exception of high school dropouts, who are either not affected at all, or are slightly negatively affected, depending on the study (and who could have avoided the situation they were in by finishing high school).
https://www.bu.edu/articles/2024/do-immigrants-and-immigration-help-the-economy/
https://www.cato.org/commentary/more-immigrants-can-help-reduce-deficits-debt
Cultural, noneconomic worries about immigration are often most pronounced among people who are not exposed to the immigrants in question. The native-born citizens of large cities where there are a lot of immigrants are more likely to be in favor of immigration. This makes sense, if you only know about (for example) Muslim immigrants from the news you might be concerned about them. If you know them as the people who fixed your car for cheaper than a dealership could do, started a great restaurant near you, and are helping your daughter overcome her speech delay, you are probably less concerned.
That's a big unsubstantiated jump from Increased economic activity (e.g., more people working) to increase in purchasing power (e..g, your dollar buys more good). Again, my point is that Americans have the unqualified right to say no to immigration. We don't have to justify it either, as if more immigration always and forever is the default and opponents must satisfy the burden of proof to limit it. It's actually the other way around.
Exposure to other people can actually solidify opposition to legal and illegal immigration and confirm stereotypes of ethnic and racial groups. Sometimes getting to know your neighbors makes you realize you were right all along. They do belong in your neighborhood. The change they bring is not the change you want. I'd suggest you read the old NYT article about Mexicans complaining about those Americans who moved to Mexico City during the pandemic. They HATED the changes they wrought and complained about those gringos despite the Americans being wealthy, not using welfare or taking jobs from Mexicans. It turns out no one wants outsiders changing their demographics and culture. It's only racist when white people complain.
I'm not some white, country bumpkin from flyover country who's never come across an eye-talian or Mohammedian so is "scared" of these different people. I have plenty of exposure to immigrations, illegal aliens and temporarily legal foreign nationals (like those Haitians you incorrectly called immigrants). My own experience has actually shifted my views on immigration significantly.
Nice article.
Though I don't think that Kamala varying in the level of emphasis she puts on race, to reflect the level of emphasis the broader culture is focusing on it, can exactly be called "intellectually incoherent" or flip-flopping. Everyone from politicians to the media to regular every-day people shifts the things they focus on more or less, as topics get hot and then fade. That's pretty normal and doesn't reflect incoherence, IMO, absent actually changing one's positions.
FWIW, perhaps a lot of people weren't paying much attention to the 2020 DNC primaries, or have short memories. Because one of the reasons Kamala bombed so badly in 2020 is precisely because black voters didn't like her, and she was seen as way too establishment and not left enough. They thought she was a sell-out and not even in the top 5 candidates for supporting black voters. Black voters liked Marianne Williamson better than Kamala -- she was the one pushing reparations. They were all calling her a cop, and I think we all remember what people's feelings on cops were, at the time.
There was also a big outcry after she did an interview in 2019 where she was asked about reparations and instead floated some policy for a tax credit to all working families making under $100k, rather than one for black families specifically. And said "I’m not gonna sit here and say I’m gonna do something that’s only gonna benefit Black people. No." When that clip circulated, all the reparations activists and black Twitter were furious and criticizing her, basically calling her a useless Uncle Tom.
She was quickly deemed a non-contender and booted in 2020 during the height of COVID/George Floyd psychosis on the left. To me her present persona/agenda seems like her being more authentically mainstream and establishment because that's who she actually is and where she's comfortable. It was in 2020 that she came off as uncomfortable and fake, having to pander to the demands of the extreme left -- and no one bought it at the time and she never even reached 5% in the primaries.
On JD, did he always seem angry? When he was running for Senate, was he like that? If not, perhaps he's just angry about this brutal situation he's put himself in -- it honestly is hard not to feel sorry for him, though he made the decision. What are the chances that if 1. Trump wins, and 2. JD succeeds him, that he would come out as his more natural persona and start lecturing his constituents to put down the Mountain Dew and Krispy Kreme and start spending their paychecks on paying their bills instead of at the tattoo parlor? That would probably make me like him better.
I think one element of the reason Vance comes off so poorly is that as a politician Trump has very few actual beliefs. Pretty much it's just xenophobia and protectionism. Trade policy is (to normal people) weird and complicated and politicians play football with it all the time - but Trump's anti-immigrant bent is very clear, very explicit, and very much based on hate. The Haitians living in Springfield are legally here, but Trump chose to spread vile lies about them anyways, finding himself unable to even denounce bomb threats. Following in Trump's footsteps, Vance has no choice but embrace that kind of lie, explicitly saying that he'll keep calling them illegal immigrants (even though, again, they are here legally).
The most important concept in this essay is the “need for intellectual coherence” characteristic. I had never heard this before and it clarifies a lot about how people think and act in the world. For anyone high in this trait there will be a conflict between social/professional goals and the urge to understand and describe the world accurately. Of course, most of us are not politicians so we can get away with having unpopular views as long as we can be diplomatic or keep our mouths shut.
Being low in need for intellectual coherence is better for being popular and likable. When there’s a tradeoff between two things one approach is to just care about one at the expense of the other. If you don’t care about accurately understanding and describing the world it allows you to say and think whatever you want in order to make people like you.
Well, one way it’s easy to be more intellectually coherent is to play fast and loose with the facts. Richard did that with his assertion that Vance’s book “dripped with contempt” for poor rural whites when as another commenter here notes it was much more balanced than that.
There is an intellectual honesty axis that is quite related. Vance seems to be higher on intellectual honesty. Bill Clinton was quite low on that axis even as he was surely VERY high on intellectual coherence.
We all seem to agree that since neither Trump nor Kamala are high on intellectual, period, whether for the same or for different reasons they are let off the hook on intellectual coherence and we ignore intellectual honesty with them. At least Richard surely did here.
The problem with race as a constant presence win a society is that it's always just around the corner from becoming the big thing again. Maybe for America that not insubstantial nuisance is worth it, but for Europe it's not. A continent that is cargo culting the US on diversity without any of the conditions in place. Just look at how extraordinary both of Kamala's parents are for their home countries! Literally nothing to generalise to the world's enormous reservoir of potential third world immigrants from her story at all.
Then don't generalize. Look at statistics. Her parents are not abnormal.
Yeah because the first black Economics professor in the US is the definition of normal and every Indian is a Brahmin (literally the most elite Indian caste.)
Are you a a retard?
I think Vance's anger issues are mostly innate, but this article gives a pretty good explanation for Vance's need for the seeing the world as worse than it actually is. In fact, I think this phenomenon (which we can call "push-pull polarization") has so many examples that it is a virtual certainty. I think it also explains the complete disillusionment of other prominent figures like Tucker Carlson and more broadly the entire MAGA right.
I will give three examples of social movements that have taken similar turns:
1) Feminism: I think it was Christina Hoff Sommers who said "feminists seem to get angrier and angrier the more rights women get". I personally noticed this too -- Tumbler feminism around 2010 was getting increasingly radicalized, and increasingly built around nonsense issues like manspreading. Initially, I thought this was paradoxical.
Recently, I've come to realize that the mechanics of this transformation can be easily understood by the modern term "grifting". The less genuine causes available to a movement, the more fake causes its leaders need to make up. And the easiest way to do that is to hyperfocus on tiny issues, and to exaggerate the maliciousness of your enemies; so can continue to sell your followers a purpose while riding high as a noble crusader.
2) Spread of Christianity: Thomas Sowell has talked about how the initial Christian evangelist movements (right after the death of Christ) were very different from the later ones (400 - 1000 AD). Initial movements were mostly focused on faith and personal values. Later ones were political in nature, establishing strict social rules as well as laying the pretext for conquerors. (Remember that "grifts" aren't all about money, they're also about power and prestige, so this is a pretty old phenomenon)
Note: I listened to this on an interview (I think by Peter Robinson) so I don't recall all the details. Sowell also mentioned this pattern applies to mass movements in general.
3) Covid: This is something I actually predicted and am proud of. I noticed that the medical establishment post 2022 started to give ground on a surprising number of theories on which the dissidents were right - inefficacy of masks, myocarditis, school closures, and even admitting the lockdowns were over-wrought. Meanwhile, other tense issues like mandatory vaccines were struck down by the court and did not merit further discussion. All legitimate covid-dissident issues thus stolen from them, I theorized that this movement would completely lose its mind -- and that's exactly what happened. (though I wouldn't have guessed the crazies would include Bret Weinstein and Joe Rogan).
“But since Trump is obviously a corrupt and scatter-brained maniac”
Textbook Richard in this piece. Interesting ideas that are IMO 85% correct, but he has to go out of his way to use pejorative language about Trump and non-pejorative language about Kamala even when accurately describing their behaviors similarly.
There was no need - and no legit rationale - to use the word “corrupt” to describe Trump but not Harris, but Richard felt compelled to throw in that cheap shot anyway.
Richard DOES prove with his word choice that he is indeed somewhere between Vance and Harris on the need for intellectual coherence…