Category Archives: Politics

Don’t hire TIVs

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Rahav Gabay and others write,

The present research investigates this Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood (TIV), which we define as an ongoing feeling that the self is a victim, which is generalized across many kinds of relationships. People who have a higher tendency for interpersonal victimhood feel victimized more often, more intensely, and for longer durations in interpersonal relations than do those who have a lower such tendency. Based on research on victimhood in interpersonal and intergroup relations, we present a conceptualization of TIV, introduce a valid and reliable measure, and examine its cognitive, emotional, and behavioral consequences.

. . .anxious attachment is associated with a combination of being unable to regulate hurt feelings, and being very sensitive to others’ responses, and with an ambivalent perception of others that involves anticipating rejection or abandonment, while depending on others as a source of self-esteem and self-worth (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2016). Thus, anxious attachment should be positively associated with TIV.

This is a study that is dubious yet appealing. It is appealing because it reduces the cry-bullies of the Woke movement to a personality type. It is dubious because it reduces a political orientation to a personality type. It is dubious because these sorts of psychological studies are not reliable.

But if you could test for this sort of personality, I would recommend not hiring anyone like this, regardless of their political orientation.

The nightmare transparent society

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Over twenty years ago, David Brin wrote The Transparent Society, which offered a vision of how we could learn to live with surveillance technology. I would describe his vision as having two components:

1. Symmetry or mutuality, leading to deterrence. Government would have the ability to spy on us, but government itself would be transparent. Because we could see what government is doing, we could deter government from abusing power.

2. Forbearance. In the restaurant, I could hear everyone’s conversation, but I don’t listen.

It seems to me that right now we have the opposite. The big tech firms see everything about us, but we know very little about how they work.

And people are fighting for attention, rather than for privacy.

Mr. Trump’s unforced personnel errors

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The Brookings Institution tracks the tremendous turnover in Mr. Trump’s key White House positions. These are not subject to Senate confirmation. Most of these people left because they were ineffective, unable to get along with Mr. Trump, or both.

Perhaps finding personnel is difficult for any outsider executive. If you hire experienced people, you end up with the establishment. If you hire inexperienced people, many of them won’t work out.

When I worked at Freddie Mac, at one point senior management hired someone from outside the company to take on a high level position in information systems. A co-worker pointed out to me that if you’re an outstanding leader, people from your old organization will want to follow you to your new one. She pointed out that nobody came with this guy, and she viewed this as a bad sign. She was right.

I am inclined to believe that a President with Mr. Trump’s outsider status could find at least one high-level staffer who could in turn bring in colleagues and former subordinates that are also highly effective. As I have said before, I think that this was Mr. Trump’s biggest weakness.

Irrational commitments

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Bobby Jindal and Alex Castellanos write,

We don’t make the big decisions in our lives with a calculator: whom we love, whom we marry, the children we bring into the world, the groups to which we are loyal, the causes for which we fight and die. We make those commitments not only with our heads, but also with our hearts.

People live not just with rational beliefs but also with irrational commitments. When Bohr says to interpret the Uncertainty Principle as implying that the location of an electron is probabilistic, he is stating a rational belief. When Einstein replies “God does not play dice!” he is stating an irrational commitment.

Moshe Koppel’s Judaism Straight Up makes a case for respecting, or at least not dismissing, irrational commitments. As an example, he uses the belief in free will. But the Enlightenment, which raised the status of Reason and lowered the status of dogma, has apparently given us a better way to approach issues in science, business, and politics. The philosophical project of many epistemologists in the British empiricist tradition seems to involve making an irrational commitment to get rid of irrational commitments.

Re-litigating the Vietnam War

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I can’t believe I’m doing this.

The conservative claims that:

1. The Communist side was really evil.

2. And we beat them. Or we could have.

My comeback is: And then what?

Look at Afghanistan or Iraq.

Were the Taliban evil? Yes. Did we beat them? Yes. Did we bring the war to a successful conclusion? No.

Was Saddam Hussein evil? Yes. Did we beat him? Yes. Did we bring the war to a successful conclusion? No.

To successfully conclude an overseas war, you need to be able to establish a government that can pacify the country. After World War II, we could do that in Japan. We could do that in Germany.

We could not do it in South Vietnam.

The people who were correct about Vietnam were the people who understood the difficulty of trying to establish a successful non-Communist government in South Vietnam. That stubborn feature of reality eluded conservative war hawks at the time. It eludes them today.

And please, don’t make me re-litigate the Diem regime. It had a stronger grip on Washington than on its own country.

Rhymes of history

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Paul Matzko’s The Radio Right describes a short-lived period in the history of radio. From about 1957 to the end of the 1960s, a set of now-forgotten political/religious AM radio broadcasters attained a listening audience that approached 20 million, at a time when our population was about half of what it is today. I recommend listening to the Matzko interview with Aaron Ross Powell and Trevor Burrus.

Some ways in which this rhymes with the present:

1. This grass-roots right was much, much bigger than the intellectual right. National Review had less than 20 thousand subscribers around 1960. Then, as now, conservative intellectuals were leaders without a following.

2. The grass-roots right was strongly attached to conspiracy stories. Back then both Communism and racial integration were part of a conspiracy. Of course, the right has no monopoly on conspiracy-mongering–look at the left’s theory that Trump-Russia collusion defeated Hillary in 2016. I think that the grass-roots right will never let go of the theory that the Democrats stole the election for Biden. I predict that four years from now at least two-thirds of Republican voters will believe that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen. Assuming Mr. Trump is not the nominee in 2024, my prediction is that the actual nominee will be unable to completely distance himself or herself from the stolen-election narrative.

3. The left treats censorship of the right as perfectly legitimate. Matzko’s main story is how President Kennedy undertook to use the IRS and the FCC to shut down the Radio Right, and by the end of the 1960s this effort had succeeded. I think it will be harder to stamp out the grass-roots right today, but the effort is surely being made. And of course, when someone is trying to shut you down, this serves to increase your openness to conspiracy theories, as Ross Douthat points out. (Pointer from Tyler Cowen. I had written most of this post before Sunday, when Tyler linked to the Douthat piece.)

From the comments, on the Trump Presidency

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Handle writes,

Trump’s not-normal sound concealed a lot of normalcy beneath. There was a lot of show on the surface about a willingness to buck the establishment, but under the surface, no real stomach to actually do one tenth of what was necessary to buck it.

I would say that it was more of a lack of resources than a lack of stomach. Mr. Trump came to office without a set of acolytes who could make him an effective executive. Instead, he cycled through people in key staff positions. The general pattern was to go from bad to worse (Secretary of State Pompeo was an exception).

His economic advisers were mediocrities. You want more Casey Mulligan, less Peter Navarro.

It was Mr. Trump who elevated Dr. Fauci on the virus. I wrote Fire the Peacetime Bureaucrats on March 19, and unfortunately I feel vindicated.

Mr. Trump arguably survived the Deep State (at least while he was in office), but the Deep State definitely survived Mr. Trump. That which does not kill the arrogant, insular national security establishment only makes it stronger.

Considering what he was working with, it is remarkable that Mr. Trump did as well as he did with judicial appointments, some business deregulation, and a foreign policy that was more constructive than than of his predecessors.

But my overall verdict is close to Handle’s. Because of Mr. Trump’s inability to find effective personnel, as an executive he spoke loudly and carried a weak stick.

Common humanity or common enemy?

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Jonathan Haidt has drawn this distinction. Eric Vieth transcribed part of a podcast in which Haidt spoke with Joe Rogan.

You can either do what we call common enemy identity politics, where you say life is a battle between good groups and evil groups. Let’s divide people by race, you know, straight versus everyone else. Men versus all the other genders and white versus everybody else. So you look at the straight white men. They’re the problem. All the other groups must unite to fight the straight white man. That’s one of the core ideas of “intersectionality.” What we say in the book is that this leads to eternal conflict.

Much better is an identity politics based on common humanity. We don’t say to hell with identity politics. We say you have to have identity politics until you have perfect justice and equality. You have to have a way for groups to organize to push back on things to demand justice. That’s fine, But you do it by first emphasizing common humanity. That’s what Martin Luther King did. That’s what Pauli Murray did. That’s what Nelson Mandela did. This wonderful woman, Pauli Murray . . . she was a gay, black, possibly trans civil rights leader in beginning the 40s . . . She says, when my opponents draw a small circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them. I shall shout for the rights of all mankind. And this is, again, what Martin Luther King did. He’s relentlessly appealing to our white brothers and sisters. He’s using the language of American. Of Christianity. Start by saying what we have in common and then people’s hearts are open. We’re within a community. Now we can talk about our difficulties. So it’s the rise of common enemy identity politics on campus in the Grievance Studies departments, especially, that I think is an alarming trend.

Unfortunately, I think that people like Haidt or Bret Weinstein or Coleman Hughes or Glenn Loury or James Lindsay are confined to an intellectual ghetto, aka the IDW. Only a few of us on the right know that they exist. We also know about Ibram X. Kendi and Nikole Hannah-Jones. But people on the left know only about the latter.

When I go to YouTube, it recommends mostly my side, but some of the other side. I suspect that when people on the left go to YouTube, they never see recommendations from the ghetto.

Post-Trump

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I keep thinking of the quote attributed to Sam Phillips prior to the discovery of Elvis Presley, to the effect that he could get rich if he could find a white singer who could provide the Negro sound and the Negro feel.

For the Republican Party in 2024, the challenge is to find someone who has Mr. Trump’s ability to tap into anti-elitism but without coming across as mean-spirited and self-centered. Note that the failure to sound mean-spirited and self-centered may be interpreted as a lack of conviction or a sign that one has been captured by the establishment.

Here are some thoughts about the required message, but without getting at the important aspect of sound and feel:

–praise America’s virtues rather than damn its faults
–equal rights, not affirmative action
–police are better than social workers at dealing with crime
–parents choose better schools than government schools
–don’t send soldiers to try to fix other countries

My guess is that in 2024 we will not see a Republican candidate support free trade or immigration, although I would hope that one can get away with sounding less harsh than Mr. Trump on those issues.

I don’t think we will see a Republican go anywhere with ideas for cutting government spending or getting government out of health care.

Of course, we don’t know what issues will arise in the meantime.

But the key point is that there is a grass roots right that distrusts normal-sounding politicians because the populists distrust what sounds normal.