These days, I am thinking about this oxymoron. As a libertarian/conservative, you feel like dealing with the mainstream media is like playing basketball with the refs on the other team. And with cancel culture and Biden’s idea of unity, it feels like the other team has decided to foul at will. Hence, it is tempting for conservatives to radicalize.
One idea I have for an organizing principle:
Anyone, not just the rich and the well-connected, should be able to escape the consequences of progressive policies
Everyone, not just the wealthy, should be able to enjoy the same level of police protection that the rich enjoy in their gated communities.
Everyone, not just the wealthy, should be able to choose a private-school rather than be forced to deal with the teachers’ unions.
Everyone, not just the elite Woke, should be able to express their political beliefs without fear of retribution on the job or in selling a product.
Etc.
This reads very close to Scott Alexander’s proposal that Republicans adopt class struggle framing
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-modest-proposal-for-republicans
Thanks for that link Brad. It’s a great example of why Arnold is, and ought to be, so high on Scott.
Scott Alexander writes some brilliant op-eds: this isn’t one of them.
Consider the sub-heading, “Pivot from mindless populist rage to a thoughtful campaign to fight classism”. Summarizing the Trump platform as “mindless populist rage” is probably reasonable and fair to those who hate Trump and feel contempt for Trump supporters. That’s the opposite of being charitable or generous to viewpoints that we disagree with. It also clearly wouldn’t pass the Ideological Turing Test. I, as a Trump supporter, sure don’t feel that is a fair or reasonable viewpoint. I might also note, that a lot of the political left is filled with rage. People get angry about politics.
This is all wrong. I’m hearing the laziest of dumb stereotypes.
The signature Trump Towers on 5th Ave is a fancy apartment in Manhattan where Trump very famously lived for many years. Tampa voted 85% Biden, which is about the same as Manhattan. The ultra-liberals I know don’t dislike Tampa at all. I love Thai food and Ethiopian food, so do many Trump supporters. And I imagine taste in restaurants isn’t a big driving factor for any Trump voters. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
If you think it matters to be charitable or generous to viewpoints that we disagree with, and if you think it matters to avoid using the laziest of dumb stereotypes, how does Scott Alexander’s op-ed not pass your sensibilities, but Trump does?
How do you hold these views and still support Trump?
Trump famously insulted other politicians and news media figures and portrayed them in the worst light possible. That’s the opposite of what I advocate here. I have very different standards for an op-ed writer than I do for competing politicians.
I imagine most of us have made up our minds. So we might not persuade each other of much.
I remember reading here outrage about Trump famously insulting McCain in 2015. I sincerely believe that McCain was much worse. Most politicians are smiles and kindness on camera and kind to other celebrities, but mean and self-interested off camera. Trump is the reverse of that. McCain mocked his own voters, but was kind to other politicians. In my view, politicians like Trump and McCain are better equipped and even expect to get mocked and insulted and criticized. Criticizing rank and file Republican voters is really a much worse sin in my judgement.
I thought that there was a lot of good content in that post, but in toto it comes across like saying the GOP should try to be everything to everyone. It’s pretty difficult to give the same speech to a diverse crowd and have everyone from the Nigerian Uber driver to the West Virginia coal miner to the wealthy Jewish businesswoman walking away interpreting it as saying they’re the ‘good guy’/victim in the system and that someone else is going to pay.
Progressives and non-progressives both want equity, just in different ways.
Non-progressives are upset that many people can’t afford to escape the consequences of progressive policies, while progressives are upset that many people can.
One can frame these matters in terms of equal rights. One could say, “In a rich, powerful, first world nation, everyone should have the right to walk down any street in any neighborhood in the country at any time, day or night, and feel safe and secure in their person and possessions, under the equally effective protection of the law.”
When framed that way, it’s possible to resolve certain confused questions of public policy. When someone complains about the “mass incarceration” crisis, and you ask them, “Ok, what’s the correct amount of incarceration above zero, and why that level?” you get nothing back, because the thinking behind the complaint is not coherent, and you are missing a constraining equation needed to solve for the variable. If you add in the right to equal public safety, then the correct amount of incarceration is whatever amount is necessary to guarantee that right everywhere.
What makes the proposal of “equal right of escape” truly ‘radical’ is what is implied when one takes it seriously and starts thinking of what it would take to actually achieve it.
This framing of the issue doesn’t solve the problem Handle. “Whatever amount is necessary to guarantee that right everywhere” just begs the question.
No one knows what the “correct” level of incarceration is that would “guarantee” that right. But whatever that optimal level of incarceration is, there’s a pretty good chance it is well below the highest level anywhere else in a world containing many authoritarian regimes.
And everybody always wants to be able to escape the consequences of policies they disagree with. Non-progressives have their own differing set of polices they think shouldn’t be escapable.
“there’s a pretty good chance it is well below the highest level anywhere else in a world containing many authoritarian regimes.”
This is false, and it is based on bad faith and lies.
When you look at the prison population in America, you see a lot of violent criminals. Even many not technically listed for violent crimes are often in jail for violent crimes, and everyone acknowledges that lots of drug charges are just plea bargains in cases of violent crime.
https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/the-numbers-dont-lie-its-the-hard-core-doing-hard-time/
Whenever we try to release some of these violent criminals, crime increases. We’ve gotten a pretty good example of that lately. Events a generation ago and again today disprove your assertion that we are past the optimal incarceration rate.
The USAs demographics, you know which ones, mean that we have a higher rate of violent behavior inherent to our population. Either these people will be out on the street committing crimes, or they will be in jail. Blaming us for the fact that we don’t have the same violent crime rates as Japan isn’t helpful and is bad faith.
Yes and if we could only add torture and guilt by association to our crime fighting toolkit, as you have previously advocated, then we would truly have a policy that radically “conserves” some of mankind’s oldest traditions.
It’s common for people to imagine that cracking down harder on crime means more cruelty and ruthless brutality, but my sense is that the opposite is now true, and it has already been technologically possible for some time to reduce any kind of crime to an arbitrarily low level in a perfectly humane (or at least physically gentle) manner with minimal expenditure of resources.
All you have to do give up privacy and go Full Chinese, “How I learned to stop worrying and love the digital panopticon.” That raises the expected chance of “crime doesn’t pay” early detection to near 100%, and so you hardly have to incarcerate anyone after the “learning about the new normal” adjustment phase, because everyone is deterred.
The irony is that most developed countries are getting a privacy-neutralizing panopticon too, it’s just that people are somewhat careless and ignorant / willfully blind about it, and also, that the authorities are often judicially prohibited or otherwise unwilling to use it in many cases.
I’m going to disagree with both of you.
Greg G: It’s perfectly plausible that nearly every country underincarcerates, or that US incarceration rate reflects criminality rather than overpenalization (e.g., there are many countries with much stricter drug laws that incarcerate far fewer people for drug crimes), nor is incarceration really reflective of political authoritarianism (political prisoners even in very repressive regimes are generally a negligible fraction).
asdf: there’s pretty good empirical evidence that people incarcerated for misdemeanors are more likely to commit crimes than people given less severe sentences, and if most drug criminals did indeed commit violent crimes as well, then if we decriminalize drug offenses, they’ll still end up in prison anyway, because they won’t be able to plead down to just the drug offenses.
We shouldn’t think about criminal justice in terms of some target incarceration rate. IMO, dispensing with incarceration for classes of crimes like misdemeanors where there’s evidence it’s counterproductive, and decriminalizing victimless crimes are probably worth doing in their own right, and also probably won’t dramatically reduce the incarceration rate.
I’ll agree on an aspect in the end, but want to start with this.
They may not end up in jail anyway. Part of the reason prosecutors allow them to plead down to drug offenses is that drug offenses are so much easier to prove. Now maybe that seems like a miscarriage of justice, but I’ve been on Baltimore juries and read about similar experiences in a number of sources. Lots of people get off from lots of violent crime they commit.
Here’s a statistic. In 1965, 90% of murders were solved. Today it’s 60%. Baltimore in 2019, before George Floyd, only cleared 32% of its homicide cases. Homicide! Forget getting any case less than homicide solved or even investigated.
My wife watched a man get off in a case where he clearly assaulted a man with a knife with intent to kill and threatened to kill the witnesses who all ditched town, because one out of the twelve jurors was a far left ideologue.
I think Handle’s analogy of “take away every tool but a 20lb sledgehammer and everything is a nail” is apt. When just about every criminal in the underclass is doing some sort of drug, it becomes a go to way of putting them away because when they are arrested they will be in possession and it’s easy as heck to prove.
Maybe it should be easier to convict violent criminals (in Japan it happens 99% of the time), but we have what we have.
I agree that alternative to incarceration for first time offender misdemeanor crimes makes sense. But what do you propose? My own idea is Singapore style corporal punishment. I think a few whacks of the cane would do more to set people straight then wasting time behind bars, but I know its never happening.
-‘No one knows what the “correct” level of incarceration is that would “guarantee” that right.’-
Right, but that answer cuts both ways.
Those on the left who complain about “mass incarceration” also can’t tell you an optimal amount of incarceration, but the way they frame it, the answer is always going to be that fewer should be.
Handle’s framing directly counters this.
If there are neighborhoods in which it is foolish to walk around late at night, then clearly there remain dangerous people out there which ought to be incarcerated. Moreover, this is a position that is hard to argue against: not only due to people want to be safe and believe everyone should feel safe, failures to maintain public safety disproportionately affect communities of color!
While I’m sure there are legitimate issues with respect to policing and incarceration, what is the likely outcome of not effectively pushing back against rhetoric in the vein of “defund the police” and “mass incarceration”? In all likelihood, it will result emboldened criminals, and more of them on the streets.
“No one knows what the “correct” level of incarceration is that would “guarantee” that right. But whatever that optimal level of incarceration is, there’s a pretty good chance it is well below the highest level anywhere else in a world containing many authoritarian regimes.”
I didn’t say it was something calculable a priori from first principles. More like autopilot constantly adjusting the throttle and trim to keep a plane on a steady course for wherever one’s sweet spot is for optimizing cost and benefit. That’s the common sense approach to maintaining the level of anything you are trying to keep under control.
Of course it also depends on what else is one’s law enforcement toolkit. The American system of criminal justice ‘collapsed’ – in Stuntz’s sense that, given the particular specific details of the American context, it can only be tolerably successful via a ‘mass incarceration’ approach – because of the set of legal prohibitions and constraints on prosecutors and police officers which were invented starting about 60 years ago. After the judges took everything else away and said that all that was allowed was “a hammer”, the system reacted to the predictable explosion in crime by picking up a 20-pound sledge hammer and frantically pounding everyone in its sights.
“And everybody always wants to be able to escape the consequences of policies they disagree with.”
It’s not about law in general. We’re not talking about someone who wishes to take cocaine or have a late-term abortion wanting the ability to get away with breaking that law. It’s about “policy for thee, not for me.”
It’s more about the problem with hypocrisy and imposition of negative policy externalities on others, resulting from low-cost signalling coming from people who can afford private alternatives, and indeed, who predictably respond to the manifestation of those externalities by shelling out for those alternatives, under the cover story of some socially acceptable excuse.
>—“More like autopilot constantly adjusting the throttle and trim to keep a plane on a steady course…”
Nope. This is a very misleading analogy that misses my point entirely. We actually DO have a technology for flying planes on autopilot that is astonishingly accurate and effective.
We DON’T have any method remotely comparable for determining the “correct” level of incarceration. That problem will remain a matter of controversial judgement calls for the foreseeable future.
Libertarian thought experiment time: suppose everything were privatized, and everyone bought crime insurance, and the better insurance you got, the more severely the criminal who victimizes you is punished (in part because the cost of a longer sentence is higher). Of course, the criminal can offer to pay the insurance company a fine to reduce or eliminate his sentence, but the price of a year in prison is implicitly set by consumers (because no one will buy insurance from a company that ‘sells’ criminals a year reduction in their sentence for $1).
Bottom line: the insurance company does the equivalent of mediating bargaining between prospective-criminal and prospective-victim over the deterrence value of the criminal’s sentence-time relative to the cost of the crime to the victim, and we would, in theory, end up with an optimal incarceration rate, at the point where the deterrence value of the marginal day in prison is equal to the marginal cost of imprisoning the criminal for another day (including the cost to the criminal himself).
It’s about the money.
The rich can afford to double pay. Pay for public and private. Regular people can’t afford to double pay. So if they get a private solution, it has to come out fo the public unions.
I am feeling radicalized, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with my conservatism. Bipartisan Enlightenment values are under assault…how am I supposed to feel about that?
Here is the latest example:
‘I Lost My Job, But I Still Have My Integrity’: Brooklyn Center City Manager Who Was Fired For Calling For Due Process Speaks Out
https://dailycaller.com/2021/04/13/job-integrity-brooklyn-center-city-manager-curt-bogany-fired-calling-due-process-speaks-out/
I’m glad Kling “gets it” with regards to the first paragraph.
I agree with Kling’s organizing principle, but: him and what army? That’s nice and good to have a clean solid principle to work from, but then what? It seems that will be on the losing side of any real contest for power.
I never considered myself a radical until I read “A New Radical’s Guide to Economic Reality” 50 years ago.
Yes indeed, “oxymoron” is a good characterization of “Conservative radicalism”.
The Jan 6 protest, which actually WAS “mostly peaceful”, show this:
0 bystanders killed by protesters; 0 police killed by protesters.
1 protester, Ashi Babbit, was killed by the Secret Police (who killed her? name?).
1 policeman, Officer Sicknick, died the next day without any head trauma, despite 2 secret police lies to the NYT dishonestly claiming, without evidence, that protesters used a fire extinguisher to beat him. (There are videos of some protesters hitting police, including with poles. But not of Sicknick)
2 protesters died from natural heart problems, Kevin Greeson, 55, and Benjamin Phillips, 50.
If you don’t know what killed the fourth protester who died, you don’t know what happened. See https://www.thenewneo.com/2021/04/07/the-death-of-roseanne-boyland-at-the-capitol-on-january-6th-not-what-had-been-previously-reported/
Still, conservatives do NOT hate America, nor even most govt elites nor the secret police who lie and sometimes even kill them. Not yet. But many DO hate the PC-Nazis, the Femi-Nazis, the Woke-Nazis, who are using violence, lies, and official & company bureaucratic/ administrative pressure to reduce Freedom, especially Free Speech but also Free Thought.
While the Democrats said “Trump is Hitler”, and nobody is saying “Biden is Hitler”, there are an increasing number of folk who are noticing that Democrat activists are acting like 1930s Nazi activists.
Yet normal conservatives mostly want to be left alone, not bothered – and do NOT want to be bothered by other people’s problems. The conservatives will almost all agree that everybody should have a way:
to escape progressive policies,
to enjoy reasonable police protection,
to choose a private-school,
to fearlessly express their political beliefs.
But most conservatives are more interested in their own families and companies and churches, than in “changing the world”. So they less often run for organizational power positions as do the social activists in the companies and schools and organizations.
Getting more conservatives to run for local offices, local school boards, local union or organizational representative – is needed, yet is also asking them to be, essentially, less conservative. Ain’t gonna happen soon, nor so easily from either side – conservatives don’t want the work, and Democrats with any influence or power don’t want to lose it.
Free speech and honest elections are going to be the “hill to die on” for conservatives. They have mostly lost the culture war, and are now losing Free Speech. Without becoming radical, conservatives in America will be treated by US elites increasingly like Nazis in the 30s treated German Jews; tho with slower reductions in freedom and status.
You … better get used to the idea. It’s not going to be changing anytime soon.
90% chance of more and stronger cancel culture until the 2022 elections.
“Etc.”
I concur.
But not just with equality relative to progressive institutions of power but equality with conservative institutions of power as well.
This agenda of equality recalls The Levellers of the English Civil Wars and later the agenda of equality advanced by Thomas Paine in promulgating the USA colonial war of independence. For a brief introduction to the sort of egalitarianism I am referencing here, I commend Christopher Hitchen’s slim volume Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man.
For the uninitiated, Levellers promoted the doctrine later incorporated into the USA colonial Declaration of Independence stating:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. “
The Levellers were for equality of rights and individual standing before the law. The were not redistributionists. They split with the Diggers who were the redistributionist advocates of what is being called “equity” today. Both, however, were secondary to the Parliamentarian Round Heads and the Monarchist Cavaliers.
So what would a neo-Leveller agenda look like? Here is a what I would propose.
Starting with taxation, the neo-Leveller should look aghast at “progressive taxation.” Fund the government with a VAT. No income tax. No social engineering by tax code. The purpose of taxes should only be to raise revenue. One rate for everyone. This of course provokes horror but no one can sensibly explain why people who earn more should be punished with higher tax rates.
That is not to say that care should not be extended by the federal government to people in need. Replace the multitude of social programs with a means qualified basic income program. Everybody who Eliminate all the federal departments and agencies administering the current plethora of programs and cap the total number of federal employees and contractors at 250,000. Let states and localities decide what they wish to augment the basic income with.
Eliminate all federal health programs and direct that 20 percent of gross federal receipts be block granted to states to administer health programs for all residents including military, veterans, and the elderly.
Return responsibility for national defense to the states.
Replace the Supreme Court with a body of 200 justices randomly drawn from pools of candidates who score in the top 10 percent on an examination of knowledge of law, economics, literature, math, and history. Panels of 5 randomly drawn to decide cases. Federal common law replaced by civil law. Bi-annual citizen initiated referenda to review and control for judicial misbehavior as well as legislate.
A unicameral legislature of 1000 representatives, 10 per state and 500 selected by proportional representation on a national basis. President replaced by a prime minister.
Such a modest, common sense agenda has much to commend it, if I do say so myself, and would be preferred to the status quo by an ample majority of the population.
Unsurprised that no one has pointed out that everyone has the right to choose private school. They just have to pay for it.
Arnold wants a) public funds spent on private school and b) probably private schools forced to admit everyone (otherwise, not everyone has the right).
Which isn’t terribly libertarian and would normally be considered very much the fascist left.
Fund the student not the school is much less fascist and much more libertarian than the status quo. The new annual child payment is the perfect vehicle for putting our failed government school out of its misery and to offer children a meaningful opportunity to learn rather than be indoctrinated in NEA dogma.
The government school system hasn’t failed, and an annual child payment is a pittance compared to the actual cost.
The thing is, you all want to insist that public schools are utter failures, instead of incredibly popular (see the moron below), when the logical thing to do is stop trying to kill them and simply ask that private school be deductible. But deductibles won’t achieve your goal. You don’t want private school. You want to kill public schools, which can only occur (you hope) by taking money away from them. So you don’t fight for the much more logical deduction, and look like morons pretending that public schools aren’t popular.
“an annual child payment is a pittance compared to the actual cost”
Why?
Take the current money being spent on public education, divide it by school age children, and send everyone a check. We both know that is more than enough for most people to afford a modest private school. It’s our money. We paid the taxes.
“pretending that public schools aren’t popular”
Then what are you afraid of? If they are popular why do you need force to keep people in. You’re terrified of people getting back their tax dollars and being free to pick an alternative, because you know what people will do.
On the 2019 NAEP, 30 percent of 12th graders were found to be not proficient at reading, up from 28 percent in 2015.
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/reading/2019/g12/
How is that anything but abject failure and an existential crisis for the republic? The only possible solution is the complete defenestration of the entire rotten system and the myriad goldbricking incompetents from top to bottom who are cheating children out of a real education.
The government school system has completely failed at all educational objectives, because it is not an educational facility. Every intervention to raise IQ-linked outcomes such as test scores reverts to the mean after two years, and that includes school. There are studies: if you skip every day of school for five years, you get a fourth-grade education.
It’s there to train children in the slave mindset, at which it is extraordinarily effective.
Arnold wants tax dollars returned to tax payers so they can do what they wish with them. These aren’t public funds. They are theft.
I doubt Arnold believes that private schools should be forced to admit everyone.
Nobody wants to buy what you are selling and only private theft backed by violence can fund it.
If Arnold doesn’t believe it, then he shouldn’t say everyone has a right to private schools.
And you’re wrong, but then you’re always wrong. I’m not selling public schools. Don’t have to.
If $ followed students, we’d find out how popular public schools are. My guess, still fairly popular overall. But in some areas, the public schools are not popular — at least if families queuing up for charters is any evidence.
“If $ followed students, we’d find out how popular public schools are.”
He’s terrified of people’s revealed preference here. You can tell he knows he’d lose if people were free.
Our counties schools were closed this year, we didn’t even get public schools and no parents around here really wanted them open.
It has paid agents in each school that monitor students, staff, and parents for any deviation from CRT and keep up lists on whom blacklisting and punishment are enforced.
I’m well aware that a lot of people here are very dissatisfied with the local public schools in spite of being “good” schools that people moved here to attend way back when. They have nowhere to go. They can’t afford to double pay, and Edrealist will not give them back their money so they can Exit this insanity.
I think afdc pointed it out April 14, 2021 at 9:53 am:
It’s about the money.
The rich can afford to double pay. Pay for public and private. Regular people can’t afford to double pay. So if they get a private solution, it has to come out fo the public unions.
Ed is right that public schools are popular. asdf has actually pointed out one reason various times in the past. Lots of parents move away from areas that they perceive to have “bad” schools–and pay a substantial premium to do so (higher rent or house price). They then like the schools where they are.
(And now for my cynical take) Schools also do a wonderful job of assessing and grading so that most students pass. Since teachers make up and grade their own tests and projects, this is one of the essential skills for teachers, usually picked up in the first year or two of actual teaching. We saw what happened when states tried to enforce their state standards (“Students must know A, B, C …; students must be able to do X, Y, Z …”). Hordes of students failed and parents hated that. So the passing scores were lowered, the tests were made easier, or they were discontinued altogether.
But let me add, in regard to edgar April 15, 2021 at 11:09 am, the state standards are impossibly high. They simply cannot be achieved (Cf. Arnold’s Null Hypothesis). And, yes, having all students be “proficient” in reading is an impossible standard. By their professed goals, many schools are terrible failures. But on any reasonable standard, they are successes. They really can’t do much better.
I know that sounds awful. It’s an awful truth. Mediocre isn’t good but it’s better than bad.
A conservative – to be radical in this environment – could take any of a number of stances against progressive politics. Failing to bow will be met with the furnace.
“As a libertarian/conservative, you feel like dealing with the mainstream media is like playing basketball with the refs on the other team.”
BREAKING: Twitter suspends Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe
After a scathing series of exposés dropped by Project Veritas about CNN’s anti-conservative bias this week, Twitter has suspended the outlet’s founder, James O’Keefe.
https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-twitter-suspend-project-veritas-founder-james-okeefe
Hence, it is tempting for conservatives to radicalize.
I’m not a conservative, but other peoples’ bad behavior does not mean I will behave badly. Why would I let something like the radical left cause me to become something I don’t want to be?
Everyone, not just the wealthy, should be able to enjoy the same level of police protection that the rich enjoy in their gated communities.
I’m not wealthy, but I have adequate protection without putting up with a gated community or omnipresent police. Maybe we should really be asking why we hand responsibility for our safety to someone else.
Everyone, not just the wealthy, should be able to choose a private-school rather than be forced to deal with the teachers’ unions.
Anyone can home school, and there are far more resources to do it well than the straw men would have you believe.
Everyone, not just the elite Woke, should be able to express their political beliefs without fear of retribution on the job or in selling a product.
While this is generally true, if you feel you must speak your mind and do not because you are afraid for your job, then that’s not on anyone else. If it’s important enough to do, then it’s important enough to do without fear. Others can, and will, react as they please. “The wise man regards the reason for all his actions, but not the results. The beginning is in our own power; fortune decides the issue, but I do not allow her to pass sentence upon myself.”