Category Archives: Politics

The new class war and the virus

Posted on by

Michael Lind writes,

The present system serves the credentialed elite in the large private, public, and nonprofit bureaucracies of the managerial elite quite well. In contrast, the members of the professional bourgeoisie and the small business bourgeoisie live in terror of proletarianization. Many professionals fear they will not be able to secure high-status jobs with their educational credentials, and the small proprietors fear they will lose their businesses and be compelled to work for others.

Lind sees a class war between the credentialed professionals and small business owners, with the managerial elite positioned more securely. Now, let us think about the virus situation. Many (but not all) of the credentialed professionals are able to telework. Note that many small businesses are vulnerable. Note that the managerial elite are almost all able to telework.

The managerial elite, who were already ahead, are winning during the virus crisis. You can see that in the fortunes of the S&P 4. The small business owners are losing heavily. The credentialed professionals fall somewhere in the middle. But you can see who has an interest in maximizing fears of the virus and who has an interest in minimizing those fears.

Turning to the George Floyd protests, Lind writes,

I am not the first to observe that what were initially legitimate protests against the use of excess force and racism by particular police departments have turned into a campaign for greater funding for social-services jobs and diversity officer jobs for members of the professional bourgeoisie

Lind’s point is that, not so coincidentally, economic interest tends to align with political tribalism on these issues.

More thoughts on the religion that persecutes heretics

Posted on by

In TLP, I contrast demonization rhetoric with persuasion rhetoric. As an exercise, you might try to pantomime each. That is, act out the facial expressions and hand gestures of someone who is demonizing another person. Then act our trying to persuade another person. I am pretty sure that you will appear more open and relaxed doing the second.

Demonization and persuasion are mutually exclusive. If you are demonizing, you are not persuading, and conversely.

When I wrote the book, I assumed that everyone would believe that persuasion is better than demonizing. My thought was once people recognized that their political rhetoric was demonizing, they would want to change.

But the religion that persecutes heretics actually prefers demonization to persuasion.

Paul Graham on the religion that persecutes heretics

Posted on by

Paul Graham starts with this framework:

The kids in the upper left quadrant, the aggressively conventional-minded ones, are the tattletales. They believe not only that rules must be obeyed, but that those who disobey them must be punished.

The kids in the lower left quadrant, the passively conventional-minded, are the sheep. They’re careful to obey the rules, but when other kids break them, their impulse is to worry that those kids will be punished, not to ensure that they will.

The kids in the lower right quadrant, the passively independent-minded, are the dreamy ones. They don’t care much about rules and probably aren’t 100% sure what the rules even are.

And the kids in the upper right quadrant, the aggressively independent-minded, are the naughty ones. When they see a rule, their first impulse is to question it. Merely being told what to do makes them inclined to do the opposite.

He points out that universities used to be places where the aggressively independent-minded were protected from the aggressively conventional-minded. In my terms, universities were a haven for heretics, not the wellspring of the religion that is animated by the identification and persecution of heretics.

I believe that in order to have a cohesive society, you need some enforcement of conformity. But the extend and severity of that enforcement has to have limits. I think Graham’s essay makes that same point.

Ranked-choice voting

Posted on by

Mark Begich and Sean Parnell write,

Jason McDaniel, a political scientist at San Francisco State University, found that ranked-choice voting decreased turnout by 3 to 5 percentage points on average in cities that implemented it. Mr. McDaniel was blunt in his conclusion, telling the New York Times : “My research shows that when you make things more complicated, which this does, there’s going be lower turnout.”

I had just finished reading Gehl and Porter’s The Politics Industry, in which they argue that ranked-choice voting would reverse the trend toward polarization and dysfunctional politics. Begich and Parnell never confront the argument that ranked-choice voting would improve the fortunes of centrist candidates. The current system rewards tribalism. The best way to stay in office in a safe Democratic district is to go far left and the best way to say in office in a safe Republican district is to go far right.

If you are going to write a competent op-ed against ranked-choice voting, then you should argue one or more of the following:

1. Polarization is not a major problem.
2. Ranked-choice voting would not help solve the problem.
3. Ranked-choice voting would lead to other problems that are even worse than polarization.

Begich and Parnell are so demagogic and uncharitable that their piece actually moved me in the direction of supporting ranked-choice voting.

The issue du jour

Posted on by

Russ Roberts talks with Glenn Loury, who says,

the descendants of American slaves, again, taken as a whole, are the richest and most powerful and influential population of African descent on the planet.

So, the idea that we want to scrap the [capitalist] system and start from scratch–as I say, I think it’s a very mischievous idea.

Later, Loury says,

if you brought some of the empathy for the public servants, who were teachers, over to a sense of empathy for the extremely difficult job of being a police officer in an American city, and you brought some of the sense of judgment and insistence upon accountability that is reflexively invoked when we talk about police officers over to talking about how we want to think about our public servants who are providing educational services, I think we’d all be better off.

And of course there is more.

Yoram Hazony on the Harper’s letter

Posted on by

Yoram Hazony writes,

the liberals behind the Harper’s letter still think they’re going to get an alliance with the very same neo-Marxists who are out to destroy them. And they truly believe the way they’re going to get there is by putting conservatives down.

Liberals only have two choices: Either they’ll submit to the neo-Marxists or they’ll try to put together a pro-democracy alliance with conservatives. There aren’t any other choices.

An interesting take.

Handle on the Harper’s letter

Posted on by

He writes,

If there were no excommunications or fear of potential excommunications, then people could resume the more open norms around discourse that prevailed a generation ago, and assume that there are plenty of people of good will and good faith on the other side who have good arguments that are worth trying to understand, and whose lives and situations are also important to know about so that one can empathize, mentally walk a mile in their shoes, and see where they are coming from.

. . . the only situation that allows for civil, quality discourse is when all other avenues and channels for coalition-struggle are *blocked off by Power* as costly and unprofitable. If good arguments are the only way to move the ball forward, as with lawyers in a fair trial constrained by the power of the judge and the court and the bar over them, insisting they behave, play fair, and play by the rules, then you will invest your effort in making good arguments. And so will the other guy.

Read the whole thing. It’s not actually a comment on the Harper’s letter, but I think it applies.

The point that I would make is that Demonization and Persuasion are mutually exclusive rhetorical modes. The former is dehumanizing and the latter is humane. The young social justice activists employ Demonization with pride. Again, think of them as adherents of a religion that seeks to identify and persecute heretics.

Maybe we *are* in an Atlas Shrugged moment

Posted on by

Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes,

Alexander, whose role has been to help explain Silicon Valley to itself, was taken up as a mascot and a martyr in a struggle against the Times, which, in the tweets of Srinivasan, Graham, and others, was enlisted as a proxy for all of the gatekeepers—the arbiters of what it is and is not O.K. to say, and who is allowed, by virtue of their identity, to say it. As Eric Weinstein, a podcast host and managing director at Peter Thiel’s investment firm, tweeted, “I believe that activism has taken over.” Here was the first great salvo in a new front in the culture wars.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Lewis-Kraus gets many details right, but I think he gets the theme wrong. If you were to buy into his narrative, you would come away thinking that the feud is because Silicon Valley types are very jealous of the status of people in the legacy media. There is some of that, but I think that the opposite is more prevalent.

I think of the conflict in Randian terms, as industrialists vs. moochers. The industrialists (not in the Rand sense of heavy industry, but in the contemporary sense of software eating everything) take pride in having shown an ability to build something. It might be as humble as a section of computer code that gets used. Or it might be as grand as a successful company, or two. The moochers have never built anything, and they are looking for other ways to assuage their egos and fight the zero-sum game of status. The moochers have found that social justice activism is a useful weapon for lowering the status of the industrialists.

Scott Alexander, Less Wrong, and the Intellectual Dark Web occupy a sort of Galt’s Gulch. They see the moochers as intellectually deficient. They are trying to uphold an old-fashioned value of scientific objectivity against the moochers’ assault of oppressor-oppressed framing.

UPDATE: Think of Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan in this context. What is loose in the land is a religion that is animated by the thrill of identifying and persecuting heretics.

Are we in an Atlas Shrugged moment?

Posted on by

To some people it looks that way, but I am going to say no. The key issue, in my view, is the pursuit of excellence. Can great thinkers, engineers, and entrepreneurs still pursue excellence, or are they being stifled by ankle-biting social justice activists?

I think that the pursuit of excellence is still possible. If the New York Times fails as an outlet, there is still Quillette. If many academic departments become mediocre, excellence will find its way to other departments or the corporate sector or perhaps privately-funded research institutes. If the top tech firms stifle their best talent, venture capitalists will find better uses for them.

I worry about Scott Alexander. His excellence could be harder to pursue if his worst fears about the NYT revealing his name are realized. But on the whole, I think that the ability to pursue excellence is going to still be here.

Jordan Peterson is back

Posted on by

He wrote recently,

Qualified and expert researchers in such fields are already in great danger of being pushed aside by activists of the proper opinion. The rest of us will pay in the longer run, when we no longer have the will or the capacity to make use of the rare talents that make people highly competent and productive as scientists, technological innovators, engineers or mathematicians. Wake up, STEM denizens: your famous immunity to political concerns will not protect you against what is headed your way fast over the next five or so years.