Paul Krugman recently made a splash in a New York Times column by suggesting there are no “serious, honest, conservative intellectuals with real influence,” referring to the “unicorns of the intellectual right.” I largely agree with his criticisms, but I would like to offer a very different perspective. This column is my corresponding warning to the left
I think that for an intellectual to be worthy of respect, he or she must be able to recognize, understand, and confront the best arguments of the other side. This aligns closely with what Bryan Caplan calls the “ideological Turing test.” By that standard, Krugman himself is a dismal failure. The vast majority of his columns are comprised of nothing but asymmetric insight, the self-deceptive belief that you understand your opponents better than they understand themselves.
Cowen says,
the right is extremely familiar with the doctrines of the left and center-left, but the converse is somewhat less true.
That’s putting it mildly. Krugman’s credentials are imposing, and Kevin Williamson’s are not. But in a one-on-one debate between them, I would bet on Williamson.
Krugman’s op-Ed arguments typically are little more than a few ringing declarations bolstered by claims that those who disagree are stupid or evil.
You’d bet on Williamson because you would be the judge.
Lost in Cowen’s and your post is acknowledging who is being called out by krugman.
Go ahead and defend the ““serious, honest, conservative intellectuals” listed; kudlow and moore.
Neither has ever been right about anything, and lie about almost everything. For decades.
One other thing. krugman said “serious, honest, conservative intellectuals with real influence.”
That is not saying there are not any serious, honest, conservative intellectuals, just none with any influence.
They have less influence because they keep get Williamsoned.
How does that add up with kudlow and moore having influence?
Trying to say that the left forced them to be accepted by “williamsoning” serious, honest conservative candidates?
Kids in high school are already getting Williamsoned by teachers who read Krugman’s columns and think that insults are arguments. Under Krugman’s influence, teachers are making sure that their students learn to not think. That’s Krugman’s influence.
Kevin Williamson, despite Krugman’s hit piece is a brilliant writer. Other serious people on the right with influence would have to include Thoma Sowell, Richard Epstein, Walter Williams, Jonah Goldberg, Ben Sasse, Daniel Hannan, and Don Boudreaux.
I’ve read very little of Williamson’s writings. Not the point. The point is that he was fired largely because of his abortion podcast(which is simply hideous), and the uproar on the right claiming it was because of his different views than the left.
No, he was fired because of the podcast.
Plenty of other places that will accept his writing, and allow him to influence people.
Ross Douthat obviously qualifies, and his columns appear on the same pages as Krugman’s.
Credentials are the province of those who hand them out.
T never figured out the definition of conservative, something about tradition.
To me, ‘conservative’ is like ‘capital’, define when you see it.
In reality, being fired by the Atlantic was probably the best thing for KDW as we was 80% of Ann Coultor of bomb throwing hate onto liberals and poor people. (He appears to enjoy evicting people from houses and I do believe he would hang women who got legal abortions. Still he should have not fired and I believe Jeff Goldberg is the one who screwed up there.) Anyway, he got interesting with Trump because he did consistently hate against the WWC communities and made anti-anti-Trump whatever. Again, now KDW got the greatest career boost by ‘quieted’ by the left media and will probably book deal. Also, I find it weird that Fox News and conservative media is not considered MSM in some way and most liberals read up on a lot of conservatives. It is just the conservative movement is led by Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity versus Douthat or say Brooks who was great until 2002.
I would agree that Ross Douthat is better conservative pundit and I wish Krugman stayed in the economics lane more often.
At the heart of the conservative movement, we have Tyler Cowen and Ross Douthat and liberals believe the Cowen creative destruction appears to broken a lot of Ross Douthat religious local community.
“Partly, what elites want is for the poor to have lives and manners more like their own: less Seven-Layer Burrito, more Whole Foods; less screaming at their kids in the Walmart parking lot and more giving them hideous and crippling fits of anxiety about getting into the right pre-kindergarten. Elites want for the poor to behave themselves, to stop being unruly and bumptious, to get over their distasteful enthusiasms, their bitter clinging to God and guns. Progressive elites in particular live in horror of the fact that poor people tend to suffer disproportionately from such health problems as obesity and diabetes, and that they do not take their social views from Chris Hayes — and these two phenomena are essentially the same thing in their minds. Consider how much commentary from the Left about the Tea Party has consisted of variations on: ‘Poor people are gross.'”
That’s Kevin Williamson from 2014. He doesn’t hate poor people.
He’s right, and the reverse is also true. The working class thinks the enthusiasms of the upper class are totally misguided; think Whole Foods (a tomato costs what?), selective pre-Kindergarten, or guilt over things that aren’t your fault and you can’t change (pretty much all of the social justice movement goes here). Trump won with them because his tastes are accessible to them; he’s associated with beauty pageants, casinos, professional wrestling, and reality TV.
But it’s good for the poor to have lives more like the elites in many ways: Don’t have kids unless you’re married and can afford them. Put some effort into school, and at all costs get at least a high school diploma. Be careful of becoming involved with things that can bite you in the ass: alcohol, various drugs, friends who just want to “have a good time.”
As someone said (Charles Murray? Bryan Caplan?), this is what the elite practice but don’t preach. It is a major reason their children stay elite.
Sure. Elite customs work for them; otherwise they wouldn’t be elite for long. But a lot of elite customs are arbitrary. Others are pure signalling; people signal how elite they are by deliberately acting unlike the working class.
And just because elite customs work for them doesn’t mean they work for everyone. With an IQ of 120, education opens a lot of doors. With an IQ of 80, it opens far fewer.
A high school diploma opens a substantial number of doors that would be closed without it. No matter how stupid you are or how little you actually learned.
Which is why it is useful to you to tough it out even if you don’t think you’re getting any education out of it. In Bryan Caplan terms, it signals conscientiousness and conformity (and a certain, though maybe pretty low, level of intelligence).
@Roger: You’re right, but most of the mistakes I’m seeing are on the other end of the spectrum. I have a friend with a learning disability. They gave her accommodations through college and eventually she got a job in my division. Six months later she was fired for incompetence. Justly so- she kept screwing up because she’s dumb. But now she’s an unemployed meathead with student debt, which is significantly worse than being an unemployed meathead debt-free.
Agreed. Which is why I said high school diploma.
1. For a figure not-too-recently deceased I suggest Robert Conquest.
2. For a living figure I suggest Roger Scruton.
3. Thomas Sowell comes to mind. He doesn’t champ at the bit to give policy prescriptions. In his memoir he said he had little advice to young Black men trying to better themselves because “I am not Dear Abby.”
Only the last of the three is an economist, and American. Conquest was Anglo-American, spent time at Stanford, and a historian. It seems Scruton is British through and through–and a philosopher.
What about Yuval Levin? He may be reading this–I regret I had not heard of him until he was mentioned there.
One of the big problems is that the solidly left wing intellectuals seem to have “rock star” recognition–Chomsky, for example, a linguist who opines on US foreign policy.
Or the late Eric Hobsbawm.
Many probably haven’t heard of Robert Conquest, relative to the number for whom Chomsky is a household name.
I don’t recall who it was that stated that the average scholar does not want to appear on TV, rowsing himself (herself) from Chapel Hill, NC or Ames Iowa to fly to New York. This insight sounds rather Krugmanesque, but many people could have said it
How many intellectuals on the right, truly serious ones, and interested in holding public attention, have there been since Milton Friedman?
Walter Laqueur comes to mind.
as does Niall Ferguson.
Both historicans.
Jacques Barzun of blessed memory
The essayist Joseph Epstein
Mark Bauerlein
Richard Posner wrote a book on _Public Intellectuals_–he was not impressed by their track record.
As Tyler admitted, there aren’t serious, honest, conservatives with influence, so there is little coherence or unity on the right to understand. One can argue with a few that have no influence, or criticize those who aren’t but have some influence, or what passes for it, though more bandwagoning and cheerleading than that. How can one understand what those on the right can’t understand themselves, or lack coherence on? How can one argue with those incapable of it or for whom arguments are mere ornaments to justify their wants, of no consequence themselves? Attacking straw men may not be much of an accomplishment, but when straw men are all there are, and real in the sense of their proposals, straw men it is. It is what public choice is all about, the objective, not the rationale, that the right has adopted without reserve.
After John Locke, how many intellectuals do conservatives really need? Seems like most conservative intellectuals are not that influential because they are standing on pretty sound ground. Leftists on the other hand….
I am must admit to being highly confused – in what way is John Locke conservative? I don’t mean to be critical of you, just surprised and curious as to how you come to that conclusion. He coined tabula rasa and is literally called “The Father of Liberalism”. To my mind he is the antithesis of conservative.
You are correct. Locke was of course a “liberal” which is why so many conservatives and liberals identify as “classical liberals.” Locke opposed absolute monarchy and was a major inspiration to the revolutionaries who wrote the Declaration of Independence and later the US Constitution. He advocated religious tolerance, private property, free speech, and government limited by the rule of law. A good discussion of whether this is consistent with US conservatism is at: http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2013/06/john-locke-and-conservatism.html I don’t see Locke’s thought as influencing much of contemporary US progressivism.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the most under-appreciated right-wing thinker is Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug). Like Scott Alexander (whom Tyler mentions) the influence isn’t as perceptible because his influence is almost entirely through non mainstream channels. He was certainly serious and influential enough that Scott Alexander felt the need to write a truly massive counter argument.
For better or worse, the primary form of conservative intellectual is that of the cultural critic. Yarvin certainly has plenty of that. But there have been relatively few “builders”; those who have shed new light on what it means to be a conservative or what a conservative society might look like. Burke, Chesterton, and Kirk are a few examples, and I think Yarvin fits into that category.
My point is not that I think Yarvin’s ideas should be what drives the conservative movement, but that the internet has made it possible for serious, honest intellectuals to have a degree of influence that may be hard for the like of Krugman to measure.
The essence of progressivism is that, with the application of enough intellect, all problems are resolvable.
The essence of “serious, honest, conservativism” is that you can’t do much, and even then you usually make things worse.
No wonder “intellectuals” (i.e. those with a high self-evaluation) gravitate towards progressivism. Who wants to believe that their talents are not just wasted but counter-productive?
Thank you for saying that succinctly.
William Voegeli in his polemic against the welfare state, _Never enough_, summarizes liberalism as “You’ve got a problem? We’ve got a program.”
Another phrase Voegeli comes to rely on is that for the idealtype (Weberian sense) liberal, “everything is good to try.” There is no suspicion that some things are better left alone. Let’s give it a try.
This general issue reminds me of the late Albert O. Hirschman’s book _The rhetoric of reaction: Futility, perversity, jeopardy_. He was trying to be a pragmatist about things. He was smarter man than I. I’m not certain how to summarize the book, except that he seemed to think these issues were empirical and rested upon “mundane specifics,” as Thomas Sowell likes to call them.
On Kudlow, there’s a New Yorker article:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/larry-kudlow-trumps-new-economic-adviser-talks-about-making-peace-with-tariffs
Most conservatives know the 3 things that poor people need to do, as poor people, to avoid remaining poor:
1) graduate from high school (and know how to read, write & basic ‘rithmetic).
2) have no kids until you’re married.
3) get and keep a job for at least a year.
Virtually no poor people have the above 3 behaviors and remain poor; almost all conservatives support this individual responsibility.
The famous Big Gov’t Dem intellectuals have one lousy theory after another suggesting one gov’t policy (that will fail) after another (that will also fail), in order to reduce poverty of poor people WITHOUT them changing their behavior.
Free Trade is great. But a free trade agreement, like the Paris Peace talks of 1973, are terrible if you keep your promise but the other side doesn’t do its part.
If two folk both support Free Trade, but are faced with an agreement, called “free trade” which actually favors one side, it’s not clear what policy one should then support. a) Continue, with the continued favoring of one side (including accepting cheating by one side), or b) break that agreement and renegotiate a more fair, more free, “free trade” agreement.
Krugman hates tax cuts, and is terribly and consistently wrong, yet gets high pay and high publicity. He’s serious, anti-conservative, with high influence — but he’s not honest, and he’s been more seriously wrong than right in policy support for the last 18 years (since his fav Al Gore lost).
Romney, as compared to Obama, was more serious, more honest, and more policy correct — but also lost.
Conservatives need cultural icons and examples more than “intellectuals” at this point in post-Christian crony-Capitalistic history.
Rush Limbaugh’s old book, “See, I told you so”, is full of more honest critiques of Dem/Leftist PC crap than Krugman — yet most would think Rush is less of an intellectual.
It would be a good piece of info for somebody to go thru policies enacted & support/oppose by various personalities, plus outcomes, to compare. I’m pretty sure Krugman would be poor where he wasn’t so vague so as to deny support on lousy policy.
3) get and keep a job for at least a year.
That one’s doing all the work. If you get and keep a full-time job, and it pays minimum wage (which it has to), you’re above the poverty line (still pretty skint, but not technically poor).
While it’s true that making a minimum amount of money is the secret to avoiding poverty, it’s not really helpful. The secret of immortality is clearly not to die, but how many people manage it?