In May, C. Bradley Thompson wrote,

Last August, the Claremont Review, long a bastion of pro-American conservative thought, published a review by Michael Anton of a little-known and self-published book titled Bronze Age Mindset (hereafter BAM) by the queerly-named Bronze Age Pervert (hereafter BAP).

The essay takes on the anti-liberal American Right. I should note that the essay was published by The American Mind, which is also a Claremont enterprise. Good for them for publishing something that is highly critical of a subset of the Claremonters, although their intention may have been to put his blood in the water for hostile sharks to locate. For an example of the sharks, see Arthur Bloom.

Then there is this follow-up blog post by Thompson.

I now recognize more clearly than before that the great task for those who still want to defend the founders’ philosophy of Americanism is to answer the challenge posed by the Fight Club Right. We must demonstrate that the classical-liberal tradition of the founders is not a philosophy for perpetual losing, nor is it a Zombie-like philosophy for the walking dead. Instead, we must demonstrate how and why the philosophy of Americanism can actually win the twenty-first century Kulturkampf.

Thanks to a reader for a pointer to Thompson’s blog. I am inclined to think that the illiberal intellectuals on the right have even less impact on our political culture than libertarians. So not quite worth the rhetorical energy that Thompson gives to them.

Also, listen to Thompson’s interview with Dave Rubin. The last 10 minutes or so, they talk about the virus lockdowns as arbitrary edicts that have the potential to provoke people into reviving the spirit of the original American revolution. Don Boudreaux sounds ready for such a revival.

The Claremont Institute’s American Mind writes,

But the 2020 election is not over. The fight has just begun. This is the moment that decides everything. Everything is now at stake. Republicans must rise to the occasion. This means rallies and protests as well as investigating and ensuring that this election was lawful.

The first sentence is true. The election will be over when each state has, according to its laws, declared a winner. It is not over as I write this, and it probably will not be over when it goes live.

But when each state has declared a winner, the election will be over. It should not be litigated and re-litigated. And by no means should people take to the streets.

I certainly agree with President Trump that legal votes and only legal votes should be counted. But each state has a process in place for making that happen. That process does not involve “rallies and protests,” and I strongly believe that it should not.

I would be happy to see a commission established to evaluate and fix the American electoral process. To have a meaningful impact, the commission would have to be bipartisan and arrive at findings by consensus. I am not saying that would be easy.

In theory, a commission could find that the process in 2020 was so broken that the “wrong” candidate became President. But there is no provision in the Constitution for an electoral college “do-over,” so the result would stand.

For me, the most important part of elections is that the transfer of power should be peaceful. The Democrats were wrong to scream “Russia!” and to attempt to remove President Trump via impeachment, and I think less of them for doing so. If Biden is declared the winner and then the Republicans scream “Fraud!” for months on end, I will think less of them.

I know all the comebacks to this. The stakes are too great! We know that Biden won by fraud (as if you personally have evidence for that claim that would convince a neutral observer)! We can’t let them get away with it! Those arguments do not sway me. If we replace the electoral process with a litigation war and street demonstrations, the resulting banana republic will be worse than anything that the Democrats implement in office.

By the way, I though that Scott Sumner’s use of the term “banana republic” in recent months was over the top. But when I read the linked article, I could not help but see the aptness of the expression.

A commenter writes,

All I’m asking for is pretty simple…stop resisting arrest and let the courts adjudicate the matter. Seems like a natural win/win for all parties.

I embedded this principle in an essay I drafted but never published, called “Rule of Law Matters.” RLM uses three principles:

1. The rights of policemen to issue orders are circumscribed by laws. Police who give improper orders, meaning orders that violate a civilian’s rights, will be fined or imprisoned based on the severity of the violation.

2. Civilians are absolutely obligated to obey any policeman’s order, even one that violates (1). Failure to obey any order is a crime that will be punished through the court system.

3. When a civilian violates a policeman’s order, including an order to stop and face arrest, there will be no physical attempt to enforce that order. If necessary, the civilian will be identified and tracked and later brought before a court to face punishment.

Point (1) should be adjudicated in the courts, not be anyone resisting arrest.

Point (2) is the commenter’s point. Note that contra Michael Huemer, I endorse a duty to obey.

Point (3) is an attempt to take the violence out of arrests. The assumption is that if you cannot arrest someone peacefully right away, you can do so later, and in the meantime little or no harm will have been done. The less plausible that is, the more one has to countenance the use of force during arrests.

“Mao managed to light the fuse that would lead to that huge explosion, the Cultural Revolution,” wrote [Simon] Leys. The sequence of events he described that led to that upheaval makes the process sound methodical, but the rage and violence unleashed defy rational analysis. Roving mobs of Red Guards composed of teens and children murdered with impunity. Ancient statues, temples, and buildings were destroyed. All books, films, and magazines that predated the Cultural Revolution were withdrawn, and universities and schools were closed. Professors were harassed by the “Workers-Soldiers Propaganda Teams of the Thought of Mao Tse-Tung,” and were sent to factories or the countryside. “Proletarians” replaced them when the universities tentatively reopened in 1972. This policy did not prove to be successful. Re-educated professors were allowed to return to teaching, but only under the watchful eye of the worker-soldiers propaganda teams. The content of the classes was now predominantly political theory.

The traditional university entrance exam system was eliminated. Replacing it, Leys observed in Chinese Shadows, was an admissions system that was “tightly political: a candidate who is not the son of a worker or a poor peasant has practically no chance of admission

I note that Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying have read extensively about the Cultural Revolution (I have not). Do I need to have a “Cultural Revolution Watch” title ready for future blog posts?

A reader asks how seriously I take my consequentialism,

As I listen to the democratic senators questioning Amy Coney Barrett, I hear them engaging in speculative consequentialism. They ask to what extent the judge should consider what the questioners regard as catastrophic consequences of a decision that is otherwise reached through sound legal reasoning and constitutional validity. In particular they are claiming that millions of people will lose their health care if the court strikes down the Affordable Care Act, even if the justices rightly believe the act to be unconstitutional. Therefore, they argue, the right thing to do is to uphold the act.

1. I don’t consider myself a devotee of any well-known moral philosophy. There is a reason that the field is still contested.

2. I make a case for consequentialism against the intention heuristic in cases of high causal density. In such cases, it is very hard to know the consequences of one’s actions. Will raising the minimum wage by $1 do more good than harm for low-wage workers? We don’t know. You have to take whatever information is at hand and make your best guess. But using as a shorthand the intention that you have of helping low-wage workers is a terrible way to form your judgment. In my view, the intention heuristic used in that way does not qualify as moral philosophy. It is bad thinking.

3. So don’t ask me to make a full-on stand in favor of consequentialism. But whatever virtues and defects consequentialism has in the abstract, in practice I think that paying at least some attention to consequences is better than relying on the intention heuristic.

4. In the question at hand, there is a question of whether consequences should be judged on a case-by-case basis or on the basis of general rules (“act” utilitarian vs. “rule” utilitarian). That is a can of worms I do not want to open. But suffice to say that allowing an unconstitutional law to stand might be ok in an “act” utilitarian sense but really bad in a “rule” utilitarian sense.

In short: Consequences are hard to predict. That is why we need to worry about consequences!

Andrew Sullivan writes,

What Freddie is arguing is that, far from treating genetic inequality as a taboo, the left should actually lean into it to argue for a more radical re-ordering of society. They shouldn’t ignore genetics, or treat it as unmentionable, or go into paroxysms of fear and alarm over “eugenics” whenever the subject comes up. They should accept that inequality is natural, and construct a politics radical enough to counter it.

For DeBoer, that means ending meritocracy — for “what could be crueler than an actual meritocracy, a meritocracy fulfilled?” It means a revolutionary transformation in which there are no social or cultural rewards for higher intelligence, no higher after-tax income for the brainy, and in which education, with looser standards, is provided for everyone on demand — for the sake of nothing but itself. DeBoer believes the smart will do fine under any system, and don’t need to be incentivized — and their disproportionate gains in our increasingly knowledge-based economy can simply be redistributed to everyone else.

Henry George proposed a single tax on land, on the grounds (wink) that land is inelastically supplied. If you believe that intelligence is inherited, and you believe that intelligence is now the most important “factor of production,” then perhaps it follows that intelligence is like land.

The standard view on the left is to treat intelligence as if it were inelastically supplied at the top, so that we can tax the wealthy all we want. And also to treat it as if it were elastically supplied at the bottom, so that we can get more of it at the bottom by investing more in education and other programs.

Of course, there are other personality traits that are “factors of production” (conscientiousness, for example). But you could still focus on intelligence. You need to have a way to assess intelligence that cannot be gamed, just as for a single tax on land you would need a way to assess the value of land.