Category Archives: Politics

Wave red cape, get response from bull

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Ryan Williams writes,

On our American Mind website, the Claremont Institute recently launched a campaign to engage citizens in debate about what it means to be an American. We are warning about the danger to the republic posed by multiculturalism, identity politics and politically correct speech restrictions. Google decided that our writings violated the company’s policy on “race and ethnicity in personalized advertising” and prevented us from advertising to our own readers about our 40th-anniversary gala dinner this Saturday.

His Claremont Institute recently held a forum in DC entitled “Multiculturalism vs. America.” I was in the audience, and like most other audience members (and several of the speakers), I disapproved of that framing.

During the Q&A, I pointed out that when Donald Trump pins a label on an opponent, that label is funny, instantly recognizable, and belittling. “Multiculturalism” is none of those. I suggested “crybullies,” a term which I have seen on the Instapundit web site. Apparently everyone thought I said “tribalism.”

The response of the Claremont folks to these complaints was that their framing was not chosen for political purposes or as a marketing slogan. My thoughts:

1. I cynically infer that launching a crusade against “multiculturalism” is an idea that resonated with some major donors.

2. I don’t have much sympathy with Williams’ whine about Google. Hence the title to this post.

3. I did have a positive reaction to many of the speakers at the session, especially Christopher DeMuth. He pointed out that in the 1960s, Martin Luther King and other dissidents were holding up American historical values and saying, in effect, “Live up to these.” In contrast, today’s left sees American historical values as nothing but a set of pathologies–racism, sexism, and rapaciousness.

4. Villanova’s Colleen Sheehan sees universities as at the heart of the problem. I am inclined to agree. Where do young activists in journalism and politics get their ideas?

Along these lines, Liel Leibovitz addresses a plea to Jewish philanthropists:

Please stop offering up lavish new buildings and campus centers and multimillion-dollar bequests in honor of your fathers and mothers, who would probably be rolling over in their graves if they could see and hear what goes on inside the buildings that bear their names. Any Jewish donor invested in any institution in which Jewish students regularly live in fear of retribution from classmates or teachers for asserting their own basic human dignity and attachment to the values of free inquiry and critical reasoning should demand her or his money back.

I am somewhat disillusioned with nonprofits in general. I have three daughters, and for a long time, I have been saying, “I wish just one of them would work for a profit.” I think that my advice to billionaires would be similar. I wish that they would invest for profits, and stay away from non-profits. With non-profits, you are subject to Conquest’s second law. Furthermore, you are raising demand for talent in the non-profit sector. Instead, what you want is for most talented people to obtain exposure to the for-profit sector, where they can better learn to appreciate what it takes to be successful as well as how many flaws and imperfections are going to be found in even the must effective organizations.

Also, non-profits don’t offer the feedback mechanisms that exist in the for-profit sector. Feedback helps to deter for-profit firms from framing major new initiatives in a self-defeating way.

Narrower, deeper, older watch

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The WSJ reported,

What’s uncertain is how much longer this kind of bridge club can survive. Below age 60, bridge players are far scarcer. . .

The American Contract Bridge League, a nonprofit that promotes the game and holds tournaments, has about 165,000 members, down from 175,000 in the late 1990s. The average age has risen to around 71 from 58 in the same period.

See my original post on narrower, deeper, older.

I worry about what deplatforming signifies

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Tyler Cowen writes,

I worry about deplatforming much less than many of you do. I remember the “good old days,” when even an anodyne blog such as Marginal Revolution, had it existed, had no platform whatsoever. All of a sudden millions of new niches were available, and many of us moved into those spaces.

In recent times, a number of the major tech companies have dumped some contributors, due to a mix of customer and employee protest. So we have gained say 99 instead of say 100, and of course I am personally happy to see many of the deplatformed sites go, or move to other carriers. Most of the deplatformed sites, of course, I am not familiar with at all, but that is endogenous. I would say don’t overreact to the endowment effect of having, for a while, felt one had literally everything. You never did. You still have way, way more than you did in the recent past.

Suppose we grant that we should not worry about a few uncouth individuals losing platforms on major web sites. We still might want to pay attention to what deplatforming signifies about the inclinations of the zealots of the new religion.

Those who seek to eliminate blasphemy see themselves as cleansing society of its impurities. It is a short step from cleansing society of blasphemy to cleansing society of “impure” people themselves.

Imagine that it’s 1931 and Tyrone is telling the Jews of Germany that he worries much less than many of them do. He reminds them that they still have way, way more than they did in the recent past.

Pro-Trump rhetoric

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Thomas D. Klingenstein writes,

Multiculturalism conceives of society as a collection of cultural identity groups, each with its own worldview, all oppressed by white males, collectively existing within permeable national boundaries. Multiculturalism replaces American citizens with so-called “global citizens.” It carves “tribes” out of a society whose most extraordinary success has been their assimilation into one people. It makes education a political exercise in the liberation of an increasing number of “others,” and makes American history a collection of stories of white oppression, thereby dismantling our unifying, self-affirming narrative—without which no nation can long survive.

. . .Trump is the only national political figure who does not care what multiculturalism thinks is wrong. He, and he alone, categorically and brazenly rejects the morality of multiculturalism. He is virtually the only one on our national political stage defending America’s understanding of right and wrong, and thus nearly alone in truly defending America. This why he is so valuable—so much depends on him.

In an interesting rhetorical move, he equates the fight against multiculturalism with the fight against slavery.

multiculturalism, as with abolition, has the potential to energize the conservative movement.

His essay is a counterpoint to an essay from two years ago by Yuval Levin. Levin contrasts conservatism with alienation.

Conservatives incline to be heavily invested in society and its institutions, even when deeply concerned about their condition and their fate. When these institutions are threatened from the left, conservatives tend to be defensive of them. Even when they are dominated by the left, as so many of our institutions are, conservatives by instinct and reflection tend to argue for reclamation and recovery—for building spaces within these institutions more than for rejection and contempt of them. If our traditional ways of doing things speak to yearnings that arise anew in every generation, then there is always reason to hope for a resurgence of orthodoxy and to work for it.

Alienation denies or rejects the possibility of such resurgence and therefore the importance of working to keep that possibility open. The work of keeping it open is the work that conservatives can often be found doing, particularly outside politics, as in the service of religious missions or of liberal education, among other causes.

Think of academia, the chief bastion of multiculturalism. A conservative would seek to reform it, by pursuing efforts such as Jonathan Haidt’s Heterodox Academy. The more alienated opponent of academia would place little hope in such attempts.

In that regard, I am probably closer to the alienated frame of mind. I doubt that Haidt has enough support among professors born after 1975.

Politics of the future?

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Uri Harris writes,

On the left, appeals to identity and structural oppression have become increasingly mainstream, while on the right, criticisms of these appeals have become similarly popular.

Harris suggests that this is the primary political division going forward, and this places the Intellectual Dark Web squarely on the right. He says it like it’s a bad thing.

Not with their own money

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Politico reports,

In their 2018 return, [Sen. Kamala] Harris and her husband, attorney Doug Emhoff, listed an adjusted gross income of $1.89 million, including Harris’ Senate salary and $320,000 she made from writing a book, “The Truths We Hold.” Harris and Emhoff married in 2014, then began filing jointly. In 2018, they paid $563,426 in federal taxes and donated $27,000 to charity.

Like many progressives, they are not very generous with their own money. If a couple with an income of $63,000 were to donate the same percentage of their income to charity, it would amount to just $900.

Yet, because of their generosity with other people’s money, these sorts of politicians can be heroes.

Cuba and hipsters

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Chris Vazquez writes,

Cuba is a beautiful place filled with amazingly incredible people, my people. But these people deserve so much more. Cuba was the pearl of the Antilles, the preferred island for the Spanish, and the envy of Latin America. Havana was beautiful the way San Francisco and Barcelona are today, not the way ancient Aztec temples or Egyptian pyramids are; but what was once the vibrant home of my abuelos and their contemporaries is now a pretty, boho chic relic for American visitors.

I have friends on the left who eagerly visited Cuba and came back saying how wonderful it is. Socialism is that hip.

Another dispatch from the IDW

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Alex Mackiel writes,

a recent study published in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience found evidence for sex differences in brain functional connectivity in utero and therefore presumably before socialization could possibly have been at play

Later in the essay:

I believe that most of the resistance to evolutionary psychology both then and now stems from two fallacies: (1) that the nasty aspects of our human nature, such as tendencies for violence, are natural and therefore, good. This is known as the naturalistic fallacy; and (2) that an evolved human nature necessarily implies genetic determinism and inflexibility

The naturalistic fallacy is that what is natural is good. What I might call the converse of the naturalistic fallacy is that what is good must be natural. So if it is good to be nonviolent, it must be natural to be nonviolent. I think that this converse of the naturalistic fallacy is what underlies some of the opposition to evolutionary psychology.

Everyone agrees that human behavior reflects both natural instincts and social constraints, with the latter coming from traditional norms and institutions. One might say that the inclination on the left is to see the natural instincts as good and the social constraints as causing problems. And the inclination on the right is to see the natural instincts as causing problems and the social constraints as good.

Later in the essay:

It is my contention that sociocultural factors that have been proposed in place of evolutionary factors as causal influences on mind and behavior have been overstated, while the importance of evolutionary factors have been understated.

That correlates with the predominance of the ideological left in academia.

Mackiel’s essay refers to a paper by David M. Buss and William von Hippel. The authors write

We conclude with the irony that our evolved psychology may interfere with the scientific understanding of our evolved psychology.

Peter Zeihan on Venezuela

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He writes,

This isn’t socialism, or even mismanagement—this is kleptocracy. (Yes yes yes there’s an argument to be made that most socialism-flavored governments concentrate so much decision-making into government hands that such cronyism is a constant danger, but that’s a debate for another time.) Suffice to say, since roughly the middle of the Chavez era in the late 2000s, the only thing socialist about the Venezuelan system has been the propaganda.

But maybe propaganda is, in fact, the true essence of socialism.

Zeihan warns,

That is what decivilizational means: a cascade of reinforcing breakdowns that do not simply damage, but destroy, the bedrock of what makes the modern world work. And that’s just one example in one sector.

What is going on in Venezuela is horrible by any measure, and in a world of Order Venezuela is the very definition of outlier. But a world of Order is not the natural state of things. Pay attention: Some shade of what the Venezuelans are going through is what many of us will need to deal with. Soon, the only thing that will truly make Venezuela stand apart is that its pain is self-inflicted.

He expresses his views effectively. I’m not saying you should accept them. But he is worth following. Check out zeihan.com, or listen to this podcast from last month. At the end of the podcast, he makes the interesting point that the number of reliable news sources has shriveled in recent years. Instead of on-the-spot reporting grounded in local knowledge, we get a deluge of opinion from talking heads and twits.

Attribution of the other’s motives

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Zara Zareen writes,

Couples who strive to judge each other benevolently — interpreting each other’s good behaviour as deliberate and habitual, and each other’s transgressions as accidental and limited (wherever possible and sensible) — are more likely to be satisfied in their relationships overall.

In political discourse these days, we do the opposite. We see the other’s good behavior as accidental and limited, and we see the other’s bad behavior as deliberate and habitual.