Still, all these areas—the media, the academy, the churches, sports—are basically volitional. You don’t have to watch Monday Night Football; you can cancel your newspaper subscription; if your rabbi is too much of a social justice warrior, you simply switch synagogues. Most of us, however, have to do one thing every weekday: go to work. Ever since Adam bit the apple and God told him that henceforth “by the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread,” we have gotten up almost daily, put on overalls, a uniform, or a tie, and set forth to make a living.
He is reviewing The Dictatorship of Woke Capital, by Stephen R. Soukup.
When the topic of resistance to Wokeism is discussed these days, I see issues of exit and voice being raised in many places, including the comments on this blog. For example, see Handle.
Exit means choosing a different institution. A prominent member quit my synagogue a few months ago when he became fed up with its wokeness. There is a lot of talk about home schooling. People have speculated about boycotting Google or Amazon.
Voice means advocating for a different point of view within institutions. See Heterodox Academy or the Academic Freedom Alliance. Or supporting laws that ban government support for CRT training.
I think it helps to explicitly classify different approaches as exit-oriented or voice-oriented. I thought that Angelo Codevilla’s American Exodus essay suffered by failing to employ this distinction.
The question of whether conservatives/libertarians should seek regulation of big tech turns on this exit/voice issue. If we think that we have enough choice available in the private sector, then we are likely to oppose government regulation. But if we think that Woke Capital is indeed becoming a dictatorship, then we probably want to think in terms of using the political process to resist.
I am in the “exit” camp. I want to develop and promote entrepreneurial ideas that allow people to get away from Wokeism, particularly in K-12 education and higher education.
I am not fully buying the exit issue.
Let me make an analogy. Should we see it as a problem if one’s spouse is verbally abusive or commits adultery? After all, marriage is consensual, and one can always walk away from one’s spouse and marriage.
To say there is “exit” misses the point. People form relationships to be happy. If someone hurts the relationship, we have a right to complain and object and ask for reform. Exit is expensive and painful.
So with, say, baseball and basketball, or elementary school, or performing arts. We have a relationship with sport teams, schools, and art organizations, similar to marriage. We don’t want to be abused or betrayed. Saying, “well, just leave” misses the point. These are parts of culture and society we hold in common. We think there are social rules. When one faction of society takes over the institutions and says it is running the show, it is like the enclosure of the commons. Those who used to have access to the commons and no longer do, have lost something valuable.
Societies survive by having a cultural, educational, and religious commons. I mourn the loss of the commons, which has been expropriated by the “woke” and leaving the rest of us landless, so to speak. Historically, the expropriation of the commons led to political upheaval. So it goes, and will go again.
The relevant question isn’t “can I exit this situation” but “at what price”. Even a totalitarian state, I can exit from any demand by exiting this world. A price some have been willing to pay, but not many.
Anyone can exit K-12 public education…if they have five figures per kid per year in post tax dollars lying around. How many people have that? Not many.
Anyone can exit woke capital…if they are willing to flip burgers for a living.
Everyone can move to another state tomorrow if they want to give up their job and pay about 10% of their homes value in selling and moving expenses.
When people talk about exit, they always seem to talk about people with “fuck you money” having options. But most people don’t have fuck you money, they have to take what they can get.
Really? Codevilla seems to be advocating exit here:
Over the past few decades, Republicans have generally been fighting for “school choice” which is what Kling is calling “exit” and neutrality. Democrats have been fighting against choice/exit and for more overt control to inject explicitly partsian political views into educational institutions. The Democrats have been crushing those in the choice or “exit” camp.
This battle reminds me of slatestarcodex (Scott Alexander) talking about the battle over supposedly neutral political media institutions:
That sounds like right-of-center people in both K-12 and higher ed in recent years.
Justice Thomas just a few days ago addressed this voice versus exit issue in his concurring opinion in Biden v. Knight, the President Trump Twitter case. See https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/20-197_5ie6.pdf
Justice Thomas points out the enormous power that woke capital institutions have, and says: “It changes nothing that these platforms are not the sole
means for distributing speech or information. A person always could choose to avoid the toll bridge or train and instead swim the Charles River or hike the Oregon Trail. But in assessing whether a company exercises substantial market power, what matters is whether the alternatives are comparable. For many of today’s digital platforms, nothing is.”
Libertarians are often no fans of nationalism and even in the mainstream (as opposed to paleo) Libertarian Legal Movement there is at best a kind of lukewarm regard for old-school federalism, hence the kind of “14th Amendment Libertarianism” which, in practice, has left most local American jurisdictions all but helpless to deal with many pressing local problems in a traditional or common sense manner.
This seems to me to be in tension with the emphasis many of them place on the importance of the availability of low-cost opportunities for exit. For that kind of exit you would want a lot of small, radically diverse, independent, and sovereign nations with the kind of internal solidarity to resist the homogenizing pressures of a global ranking in prestige, which is already entrenched as characteristic of the views among the Davos-tier international elite.
Bingo. Strict libertarians should completely respect borders, co-op boards, condo associations, etc. — it’s just private property + consensual agreements. Not too many Libertarians arguing the right to trespass in a gated community. Weird that the ambiguous status of nations (not a classic capital L organization) made most Ls go all-in on the countervailing approach. In the early 90s, you’d still see Libertarians occasionally quote Friedman on the tension between unrestricted immigration and the welfare state. No longer
Look, I like this place and your stuff a lot – I think that’s obvious. And I disagree with plenty of things you say, but will concede that you almost always make a strong case and make it well. I greatly admire your attempt to raise the standards of rigor and discourse in general. This is one of the best places on the whole damn internet, full stop.
But I gotta say, every time you talk about this issue, it’s pretty disappointing. There are more mere declarations than arguments. In my very friendly opinion, you are just not living up to your own high standards on this one. You are going to say that’s just because my view is different from yours. Maybe so, and I won’t even protest that’s not the most charitable interpretation of what I’m saying, or that it would be asymmetric insight into my mental state.
But I’m asking you to consider for a moment that even correcting for whatever my bias is here, I have a point. Now, I know one is playing with nuclear fire with these topics, and so maybe it’s asking too much. I get it. We are all afraid. We see what happens to people. It’s terrible. (Maybe this is the actual problem.)
But I am still waiting for the Arnold Kling Steel-manning of the “voice” position, the position which says it would be better for people like us to be even a little less afraid. Would that be cancel-bait?
Where are the Caveats to the exit position? Will you win points for being Open-minded about switching positions? Do you want to Pair-off in a debate about it (I would prefer text, but can do voice or video with appropriate masking, because … well, ‘the thing’.) Are you willing to Bet about how things go for some measurable attempts at exit? Etc. These are your standards.
How about this for FIT3.0: Consistency of Specified Principle. Conservatives often feel held to hypocritical double standards, and will say things like “If you substituted white for black … ” or “If it were Bush …” to illustrate the point. If the matter were one of old liberal principle indifferent to details of identity, then why do we observe disparate treatment for disparate identity? The progressives finally dropped the mask and *specified* that the new illiberal principle was one which *did* depend on identity, after all.
What I see a lot with talk of exit from wokeism is the not-so-curious but palpable absence of the equal and equivalent talk of exit from racism. Rand Paul actually did it 11 years ago so try it out. Something like:
Yes? No? Why?
We are not to have new laws to protect from wokeist discrimination but we are not interested in talking about the already existing laws that protect from every other kind of discrimination? Well, is the principle to favor exit and be against these anti-discriminatory laws – in which case there is inconsistency – or is there are critical difference between the two situation that justifies one and doesn’t justify the other – in which case it isn’t articulated and there in insufficient specificity. “They get voice and state protection, you get exit and good luck with that. And that’s cool because … ”
For a decent “good luck with that exit, buddy” blog post, see Charles Murray’s “A case study in the government as enemy.” That was 8 years ago and the “naked display of power” was about which teachers the quasi-private school had to fire. Almost a decade later, do we expect the naked displays of power in furtherance of wokeism to be any more gentle and timorous?
So, for example, if you want to take a shot at that steel-manning, you could start with Bernstein’s attempt at a libertarian defense of anti-discrimination law and all you need to do is do the right substitutions.
I’m blaming Bernstein for jinxing it:
Oof.
Here is Bernstein’s ‘cartel theory’ of racist discrimination (at least in the bad old days, still today?) which may permissibly be countered via state anti-discrimination laws consistent with libertarian principle given attitudes about regulating effective ‘monopoly’. Again, it’s easy to do the substitutions:
Tell me more about the inescapable ubiquity of the implicit threats of extralegal harassment. Tell me more about local officials helping out, by, for example, firing teachers who step out of line to criticize the system.
David was not really all that keen on antidiscrimination laws, so he goes soft of them later. But if antidiscrimination laws can’t help a minority if the majority really hates them, and if they follow public attitudes instead of influence them to change, then we can just get rid of them all overnight and nothing bad will happen, right?
Why wouldn’t protection from wokeism also be similarly benign and un-troubling?
Well, it is obviously very, very low on the libertarian priority list when the legislation concerns progressive client groups of members of protected classes. But not so low, otherwise?
Here’s another possibility for FIT3.0, “Thinking In Tipping Points”. Or maybe “Laying down markers of reasonableness.” This is related to Caveats and Open-Mindedness, also incorporates “Bayesian Updating”, but is prospective and so distinct.
It seems to me that we want public intellectuals to be more reasonable. If they are going to advocate for a position no matter the cost, context, details, trade-offs, etc., then they are not arguing at all, they are pushing a dogma and tenet of a new faith. And the point of the discourse is to influence not by argument, evidence, logic, analysis, or even by appeal to instinctive emotion, but by a tacit leveraging of superior social position and signals of support.
I think it’s valid to say that there are only really two kinds of argument those with tipping points – for which dialectic is potentially productive – and those without tipping points, which are just low level manifestations of religious war and about showing which side one is on, and that side’s strength. If there are tipping points, then there is always a way to argue about where the tipping points ought properly to be, or at least to clarify the “relative complement” between two positions and thus bring the substance of the disagreement into focus.
So, what is ‘reasonableness’ in this context. Such a question comes up routinely in courts in which one has to explain to jurors what “beyond reasonable doubt” means. I don’t remember where I heard it, but I like to use the “method of opposition”, when it’s more clear what it means for someone to do the opposite, in this case, to be unreasonable.
We all know unreasonable people. To be *un*-reasonable means to be so stubborn, inflexible, and uncompromising that there’s nothing I can say to change your mind, and no change in the evidence or in the situation will sway you from your position. There is not even a hypothetical extreme scenario of change in which you would agree in those circumstances that you would flip views.
By opposition, reasonableness then is at least in part about being open to changing one’s mind at some point down the line once the weight of contrary evidence or countervailing factors goes past some point, so that one is willing to admit it has become untenable to maintain the same position with sufficient confidence to exclude alternative theories.
Additionally, there is a lot of “fake-reasonableness” out there, in which people want to pretend they are arguing about the weight of evidence because that is a more prestigious and intellectually respectable form of discourse, but in reality they are just using it as a cover for obstinate commitments. If someone who is opposed to the death penalty says, “It costs much more to execute someone than to just keep them in prison for life”, one could ask, “So you would be opposed to life in prison and for capital punishment if the execution was cheaper?” – “Uh, no.” “Sounds like cost has nothing to do with it for you.”
But if people “think in tipping points”, the norm would compel them either to lay down markers of what circumstances would make them change their minds, or else to simply admit their faith-like commitments.
There is also the problem of strategically inscrutable vagueness that forces arguments into dead ends because key details are inaccessible. If someone mere declares or asserts “things would be worse”, what does that mean? In their subjective opinion according to their personal or ideological preferences? By some objective standard? Which standard? How do they know? How confident are they, and how good is their case for this projection? Thinking if tipping points discourages such evasions and creates paths towards productive engagement.
Ok, how could “thinking in tipping points” work on this subject.
Well, I could say that I would oppose and legal or political reforms to mitigate wokeist discrimination if it turned out that by doing so it became the case that – liberated from some of the consequences of violating typical rules of interpersonal etiquette and interactions – most people just went Full Twitter in real life in a full-scale cultural nervous breakdown. (Not the one we are actually having, I mean a different one.) And, as a result, it became impossible to successfully join and institution or run any organization with sufficient good order and discipline to cohere and fulfill its purposes and functions, because the internal social dynamic would be incurably toxic, in every group, and anywhere you go. (Not in the way most places are currently toxic, I mean a different way.)
So, as a result of this hypothetical breakdown in norms and etiquette, everyone now openly and constantly says nasty and unwelcome things to everybody else all the time. They always wanted to, and it was only the fear of getting fired or excommunicated that held them in check. If you relax that fear, it won’t be a 10% or 50% increase in general social tensions, pathology, and tensions, but a dam-break flood and opening of Pandora’s box. And such social problems would manifest in a breakdown of the functioning of the key economic institutions that enable cooperation and coordination and underpin our prosperity. It would take a noticeable bite out of GDP.
Notice, by the way, that if this hypothetical is true, it tends to track with the conservative language of politics and is not very compatible with the classical libertarian conception of a society of individuals liberated from as many coercive pressures as possible. Indeed, it would mean the problem with Twitter and the internet in general is precisely all the liberty, and if we trash humans got that in real life too, look out!
But in that situation, to be reasonable, I would have no choice but to suck up the current awful state of affairs as a less bad option to the alternative. It is because I don’t believe anything like that hypothetical scenario would actually happen – because real life is not like Twitter in more ways than that – that I maintain my current position. But it isn’t dogma.
For Bernstein and anti-discrimination law, maybe it was something like the existence of a “social equivalent of a local or general cartel from which exit is prohibitively costly.” In those circumstances, he could say the central government can and should “bust the trust” in the metaphorically appropriate way, and absent those circumstances, the feds should get out of the game.
Ok, where is the tipping point for Arnold Kling in terms of favoring such measures? Is there such a point? “If it turned out that people were getting X’d all over Y for Z … then …”
Tom Swift in the Caves of Nuclear Fire
By the way, at the time, Bryan Caplan made a critique regarding Bernstein’s argument.
I prefer exit over voice…but ain’t nothing wrong with some voice.
From our former home state of California, which we gladly exited in 2017.
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CFER Submits First Ever Civil Rights Complaint against San Diego Unified School District for Unlawful Critical Race Theory Training
https://cferfoundation.org/cfer-submits-first-ever-civil-rights-complaint-against-san-diego-unified-school-district-for-unlawful-critical-race-theory-training/
Speech is special. We are not talking about voice in, say, the matter of criminal justice policies for the community. This voice is about the right to have voice itself, making it different and indeed sui generis as a self-defensive capacity.
Sometimes to get exit, you’ll need to use your voice. Preferring exit over voice is fine and even makes sense when one has a choice. The problem is when one doesn’t have a choice.
Let’s say one wants exit, but exit is blocked.
You could define ‘blocked’ as something like a state intervention that creates a social equilibrium which makes exiting much more costly than it otherwise would be in the absence of the intervention. Example: homeschooling is illegal in Germany, Sweden, and other European countries; Bryan Caplan would be a criminal forced to see his genius kids “taken into care“.
If you have a voice, you could try to advocate for a change in the law. If you don’t, because mere advocacy also means the state or coercive social destruction machine coming down on top of you like a ton of bricks, well, what do you do? You’re stuck.
I am all in favor of allocating lots of effort, thinking, and resources into innovations which can generate new alternatives and lower-cost ways to exit, especially if those ways are also hard for the state (or its ‘private’ allies) to counter in predictable reaction to these new developments. That’s two problems. My personal belief is that the former is a hard problem, while the latter is borderline impossible given potential state capacity, when the state actually really cares about something and takes it incredibly seriously. Like Germany does.
It’s fine to favor exit, even to pin most of your hopes on it, but it is a strategic error of the highest severity to put all your eggs in that basket and let the right to voice wither on the vine. Without voice, you will have a hard time removing blocks to exit. But more importantly, without voice, you will have an impossible time getting voice back.
Without Exit you can’t have Voice. As every communist country has shown, if you can’t leave the restaurant the restauranteur has no need to care what you say about the food.
Americans want immigration severely restricted. It is opened up instead.
Americans don’t want gays to be able to marry. The measure failed the vote even in California. They’re allowed to marry.
Etc.
The fundamental rule of crime control is that 90-95% of humans will do what they can get away with. If the other player can’t exit the game, you can get away with anything.
Americans already don’t have Voice, because Lincoln made sure they don’t have Exit.
Exit is only hard because State orthodoxy is to run a parasite regime and for some reason parasites don’t like it when the host declines to donate their blood.
For Lent 2021, we decided to fully migrate our household dollars away from Amazon (including Whole Foods), ESPN, Nike and the NBA.
It went well and will continue indefinitely. Now also includes MLB…see ya!
Will it make a difference? Depends on whether 74+ million other voters will decide to make similar decisions.
Does it matter? At a personal level, absolutely. Exit feels amazing! If Amazon wants to cancel Justice Clarence Thomas, then we want nothing to do with them.
Is it difficult? Not really. Find the most egregious vendors that consume the bulk of your household dollars and then find the least bad alternative at the lowest migration cost.
You got any better alternative? Voice your concerns with customer service…lol. Exit > voice.
Kurt,
The last time we talked about this you were quite insistent that the right way to think about your choices here was not as a boycott but rather simply as a decision to support businesses that you preferred.
I can’t help noticing that every time you bring up the topic you put far more emphasis on the businesses you are leaving rather than those you are migrating to. And you are encouraging others to stop supporting the businesses you are leaving as well.
Looks like a boycott. Walks like a boycott. Quacks like a boycott. (Not that there is anything wrong with you choosing to boycott anything you want.) Why resist calling it a boycott then?
I was actually hoping that you would invite me to be a co-owner in a bi-partisan dream team for FITs 2.0. We would dominate and just imagine the grimace on Arnold’s face after having to cut us a check for taking home the trophy.
Instead, we are stuck on the semantics of boycotts. If you like Amazon, then by all means, continue to use them. No love loss from me. As a consumer, my preference is to purchase from apolitical corporations and not those that actively suppress alternative points of view or those that spread blatant misinformation. If you wanna call that a boycott, then I’m ok with that. Just curious, you ok supporting corporations that use slave labor, pollute the environment or do you draw a line somewhere? Planning on buying a blood diamond anytime soon?
Well, I would be happy to provide whatever benefit I can to a team that you would own Kurt but I am too lazy to commit to the full responsibilities of ownership. No one has ever had a hard time getting my opinion about anything. If you are serious I would encourage Arnold to share my e-mail with you through e-mail. Or are we just fantasizing about fantasy sport? OK with either one here.
I’ve never really been into fantasy sports of any kind but I do like the idea that this project will likely provide me and many other people with some new and healthy influences.
I suspect I am supporting any number of corporations I would boycott if I knew more about them and felt more militant about my views. Never been much of a jewelry buyer of any kind.