From the standpoint of the postliberal Right, the liberal view of the state as a keeper of the peace and preserver of individual liberties—the view of most American conservatives before Trump—is not an adequate answer to the present situation. A correction in the direction of the state is needed. . .
The way to view this movement is that a maintenance or increase of state power in the United States is going to continue. The question is simply whether the Right is willing to use power when it has access to it, and use it for the sake of the common good. Twentieth-century conservatives’ devotion to unregulated markets and libertarianism has now contributed to a series of financial crises, the loss of U.S. manufacturing, and a completely demoralized society. Yet many conservatives continue to speak as though libertarianism is the solution.
This is in American Affairs. The latest issue includes a long article by a progressive professor/politician who thinks that Jeremy Corbyn and Ilhan Omar have been unfairly vilified for their positions on Jews and Israel. That same issue also includes an article describing Israel as a truly conservative country (meaning that this is a good thing). I would be surprised if the authors of both of these articles would get along very well.
The issue also includes a couple of interesting critiques of neoclassical economics in the age of the Internet. Both articles are from a left-wing perspective, but they echo some of my own views. Meanwhile, the professional mainstream pays little attention to new features of the economy. I am sure that it will continue to increase its focus on the economics of race and gender.
My problem with this is that we haven’t had anything remotely resembling “unregulated markets and libertarianism.” If only it were so!
The use of terms such as regulated and unregulated, left and right, liberal and conservative complicate debate because each can mean many things. “Regulation,” like “diversity,” is neither good nor bad in itself. For example, a baseball team needs the “good” diversity of nimble infielders, fast pitchers, and big hitters–but they don’t need for diversity’s sake to include slow or clumsy ball handlers. Similarly governments must impose “good” regulations and avoid “bad” regulations. Our business world needs regulations but not bad ones.
The solution to such confusion from vague terminology is to agree on what we are trying to accomplish: It should be obvious that a nation needs a fair, open, and just marketplace. That is how the free market functions best. Throughout history people enjoying a free market have gained the widest and highest level of prosperity. That means rules and regs should be aimed at maintaining a fair and open marketplace and avoiding regs that restrict some actors or benefit others. No theories or abstractions required!
We should also recognize that ideologies and labels operate primarily as diversions. The free market dates from when cave men first swapped sharpened flint stones for fresh game or bananas. Nothing has changed except for the extent of government regulation and the size of the participants. Walmart and Amazon function the same as the Phoenician traders did 2500 years ago except they have substituted computers, robotics, and air planes for ledgers, stock clerks, and sailing vessels.
The problem is that elites–those who find a way to exert power–the overeducated, the connected, the wealthy– always seek to twist the fair and open marketplace to help themselves and keep those beneath them in line. That is why America’s marketplace now operates in a “crony capitalism” fashion. It is grossly unfair–the elites have twisted the tax law, the regulations, and the opportunities to benefit themselves. No wonder many disaffected individuals and groups are unhappy. No wonder Bernie Sanders has an energized following. Both political parties agree on keeping the elites happy. That is why so many of the establishment want to dump Trump. They don’t like either the message or the messenger.
Gender, race, and religion have little to do with it. We are all a minority. The elites include blacks, whites, and Hispanics. The oppressed include all races and religions also. It’s simply a matter of selfish elites vs. the people, a big controlling government vs a fair well managed administration, and equal application of the law vs. a corrupted judicial system.
The current election cycle reveals how far we have descended: Powerful special interest are spending billions to corrupt the voting, the media is in a frenzy of partisan mis-information, violent gangs are being encouraged and in some cases paid to disrupt civil society, politicians are doing their best to confuse and convince the public, and many of the real people are simply turned off and avoiding those disgraceful antics. What’s the average voter to do? It’s democracy run amok–the inevitable result of greedy elites gaining control.
Ironically, the movement for a big government nationalist conservatism was launched by two Never Trumpers back in 1997.
“In other words: What’s missing from today’s American conservatism is America. The left has always blamed America first. Conservatives once deplored this. They defended America. And when they sought to improve America, they did so by recalling Americans to their highest principles, and by calling them forward to a grand destiny. What is missing from today’s conservatism is the appeal to American greatness.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB874276753849168000
“Meanwhile, the professional mainstream pays little attention to new features of the economy. I am sure that it will continue to increase its focus on the economics of race and gender.”
An interesting quote from the Winegard post yesterday in terms of why this might be:
“The new class war is not between the proletarian and the capitalists; it is between the hyper-educated and everybody else. And the Democrats have become the party that promotes the interests of the hyper-educated by allowing them to signal their moral and cultural superiority over average Joes.”
“Much of wokism, I believe, is a signaling system, a series of ‘luxury beliefs’ that function to distinguish white educated elites from other people. And so the left has become more and more alien to average Americans. It promotes ludicrous beliefs that even many liberal people who are not among the initiated find distressingly bizarre.”
Lastly, look how Tyler virtue signals to his friends that he is woke against lower class white males (the paper was obviously bogus from the outset):
“We conclude that the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally generated public health costs of as much as $12.2 billion.”
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/09/monday-assorted-links-271.html
Do you have a link to the “Winegard post”?
Greetings fellow Texan! Here you go:
https://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/some-are-teachable/
Thanks! Brilliant article.
The culture wars really change some of the dynamics. The difference between progressives and libertarians roughly is the number of regulations and the force used to implement them. The culture wars bring into high relief that different people believe that certain laws which one group believe to be good are in fact evil, and vice versa. This isn’t about how many laws – the question is which set of laws are right and which are actually a perversion.
But as Gurri discusses, the one thing nearly everyone has in common is a belief that the existing system is (in one way or another) illegitimate. Without legitimacy, the system has few defenders and is resisted with increasing blatancy. There is a need for additional support for the system because it seems like there is a significant chance that our society will tumble into anarchy (Portland, but on a much larger scale and effectively permanent).
“populist voters—those liberal (i.e., Left) on economic issues and conservative on social questions and matters of identity. Most strikingly, populists made up 28.9 percent of the American electorate in 2016, whereas libertarian voters—those conservative on economics and Left or liberal on social questions—were only 3.8 percent of the electorate.”
Although this seems to accurately assess the popularity of the libertarian view, it greatly understates what it ascribes to populism. According to Pew:
“Nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults (73%) say major corporations in the country have too much power; far fewer (22%) say they have the right amount of power and just 4% say they have too little power.
There is some bipartisan agreement in views of corporate power. A majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (62%) say major corporations in the U.S. have too much power; an even larger majority of Democrats and Democratic leaners (83%) also hold this view.”
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/12/17/views-of-the-economic-system-and-social-safety-net/
But race identity is much more important to traditional left wing demographics than it is to the populists one would presume the author is attempting to smear as white identitarians. Pew finds:
“When asked how much what happens to blacks, whites, Hispanics and Asians in the United States affects their own lives, U.S. adults say that what happens to their own racial or ethnic group affects them the most. This is most pronounced among black adults: 44% in this group say that what happens to other blacks impacts their own lives a lot. And it is especially true for black adults with a bachelor’s degree or more education, 58% of whom say that what happens to other black people affects them a lot compared with 49% of those with some college and 33% with a high school diploma or less education. There are no gender or age differences among black people in this regard.
Conversely, only about a quarter of whites (23%) say that what happens to other white people in the country affects them a lot. This sense of linked fate with other whites does not vary by gender. “
The USA has a mediocre intellectual caste very prone to projection and over-rationalizing. Convoluted essays like this tell us more about the author than anything else.
A much simpler way to understand the Trump’s current political support is to look at the measures of his performance that matter most such as household income.
Median U.S. household income increased 6.8% to $68,700, the U.S. Census Bureau said Tuesday. That followed advances of 3.1% in 2016, 1.8% in 2017 and 0.9% in 2018. On an inflation-adjusted basis, median income last year was the highest on records dating to 1967.
A typical populist might see the 6.8 percent growth as vindication of Trumpist pro-energy, anti-regulation, immigration law enforcement, and pro-growth policies. A populist likely wants more.
A libertarian might be indifferent to household income growth because it just transfers income from other countries to the USA and that is bad because we are highly intellectual globalist cosmopolitans don’t you know and live to put the little people in the USA in their place.
Romney Republicans may be indifferent
to household income growth because it means that the little people are taking money away from corporate profits and degrading class boundaries which is bad because they live to keep the little people in their place.
And Democrats see it as more evidence of systemic racism because even though median income rose 10.6% for Asians to $98,174; 7.9% for Blacks to $45,438; and 7.1% for Hispanics to $56,113, it also rose 5.7% for whites to $76,057 and this is bad because whites are bad and need to be put in their place.
Biden appeals to the libertarians, Romney Republicans, and Democrats by insulting little people, especially whites. Following Obama’s Joe the Plumber example, Biden has been going around insulting little people who question him, calling them names and getting. Sure he is a worse boor than Trump, but he is our boor.
Until one of the parties exhibits anything other than hate for the little people, the USA will remain starkly polarized.
“devotion to unregulated markets and libertarianism as now contributed to”
Amazing. This used to be the shallow nonsense that progressives would say. As Michael Malice is fond of saying, “conservatism is progressivism driving the speed limit”. I did not fully buy that at first, but it becomes more apparent every day.
Sorry, Arnold, but the noise about what Conservatives should change makes nonsense. The big battle in the continuous war against the Radical Left (including the remnants of the Dem Party) will be about secession. Regardless of how long and tense the election process is, on January 21, 2021, the President will have to deal with growing pressures for secession.
If Trump is re-elected, the RL will have to choose one of two strategies. One implies the secession of the few large states in which they have a clear majority and the other the resort to open violence to grab power in states in which they don’t have that majority. If Trump is re-elected, the collapse of the Dem Party’s Old Guard will take a short time, at most a year (just review their grotesque reaction to the death of Justice Ginsburg) and the RL will complete the takeover of the Anti-Conservative movement (as Trump says to Conservatives “I am the only one between them and you”, acknowledging something that too many NeverTrumpers reject). The timing can be slowed by the internal fighting within the RL, a collection of factions of people trained to cancel America but incompetent to build a new one based on the few seceding states (AOC will not be the founding mother of a new Ex-America, at best she will continue mimicking Groucho Marx). In this scenario, Trump should let them secede quickly from the Union to minimize the cost of the disruption while keeping total control of the military complex and facilitating migration between the old and new 45+states Union.
If Biden is elected, many Conservatives at state level will realize that the price to pay for keeping the Union together is too high and make nonsense to tolerate RL. Conservatives will start to migrate from RL-controlled states to other states and will join local forces in their new states to repress RL’s local branches. The emigration will accelerate after the RL dismiss Old Joe and Kamala (she will try to negotiate a Decorative Role of Queen but to no avail). Although the emigration will be spontaneous, the success of the secession will depend largely on the Republican governors of the seceding states, in particular, on their ability to protect the immigrants from the plundering of the RL forces in their home states and later on their ability to protect the RL minorities that remain in their new 40+states Union to prevent the Conservative majority to repress them unlawfully.
There can be no secession because there are no clear boundries with which to do secession. I live in a red exurban town in a blue county in a historically red state that has recently gone blue. Where would I secede to?
Partial solutions might be:
1) Putting more issues, especially public school issues, at the town level rather then the county level (as is done in the Northeast, but not in the mid-atlantic).
2) Doing more county/city splits (Baltimore City and Baltimore County being separated jurisdictions takes a lot of pressure off).
3) Re-drawing county lines to reflect cultural realities.
Sorry, too late to redraw boundaries. The only relevant boundaries in the next 4 years are the ones defining the 50 states (+DC). Indeed, the state boundaries are arbitrary, in the sense of being accidents of history, but they are well-known and define political jurisdictions that would greatly facilitate negotiations. I insist on my main point: regardless of who becomes President, after 1/21/21, the very high political tension can lead to an open fight and perhaps to a civil war, and (only?) negotiated truces can bring on a non-violent solution based on the secession of some states.
There is a 99% chance of a non-violent resolution because everyone knows who would win in a violent encounter. There is a 1% chance that a violent encounter that is resolved quickly and overwhelmingly in one direction happens.
*1% is too high, solely for illustration
The age where some dude with a rifle has military value is over.
Your assumptions that “everyone knows” and “the dude with a rifle is over” are too strong. In the past 70 years, I learned how much idiocy (and therefore stupidity according to Cipolla’s definition) still condition human behavior. Today there are still too many idiots that think they can extort others with impunity and too many that think that the bad guys can be easily appeased.
Just after writing my last comment, I read this
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-09-20/california-burnin-a-warning-against-one-party-rule?sref=ZMFHsM5Z
I could add several personal stories confirming what NF says in his column because since 1990 I have been visiting relatives in the Bay Area, LA, and SB (my last visit was last February/March). My point, however, is the pervasive idiocy of so many rich and powerful people.
State-level secession doesn’t necessarily help you to stay where you are, but does make it easier to move. Moving to California or Texas or New Hampshire because you prefer the values of the state is easier than moving to Taiwan or Finland and having to learn a new language, culture, tax system, and law code.
“Twentieth-century conservatives’ devotion to unregulated markets and libertarianism has now contributed to a series of financial crises,”
As long as this continues to be the consensus, we don’t stand a chance of seeing broad economic progress.