FITs No. 24

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The post is here. Among other items, it mentions an essay by Richard Hanania.

Richard Hanania argues that the left is ideological while conservatives are tribal. Thus, when Democrats are in power they enact their agenda, while Republicans, whether in power or not, merely emit war whoops.

…Hanania’s thesis came up during the first meeting of our seminar, when we talked about contemporary political engagement. I plan to include my notes from the seminar in a separate essay.

33 thoughts on “FITs No. 24”

  1. The clearest lesson from the last few days: the conservatives don’t need Trump in their tribe any longer. His expiration date has passed. Maybe we start a gofundme to pay his severance?

    An interesting tidbit: Trump’s social media bans probably help conservatives more than they help the left.

    • It’s been amazing watching people who hate Trump claim this validates their worldview.

      Youngkin is certainly no Trump and didn’t want him actively campaigning, but he also accepted his endorsement unironically. He never tried to denounce Trump or his followers. And he ran on issues that have culture war significance in a way that the David French’s of the world reject (he actively endorsed parents being able to ban offensive books, literally running a TV spot about it in the final week).

      In short, he was a long way from the Romney/McCain wing of hating Trump, the base, and conservative cultural values. Let alone the #NeverTrump contingent that actively endorsed his opponent and staged false flags against Youngkin.

      Trump should go away, but not because the GOP is going back to its #Nevertrump consensus of the neocon years.

      What Virginia shows is that your opponent can run spot after spot trying to link you to Trump and Jan 6th, and voters will shake it off if they can tell its bullshit. They can tell its bullshit even if you accept Trump’s endorsement and run on Trumpian themes. There is no need to actively denounce Trump to run in a blue-ish state.

      • I have the following beliefs:

        1) Trump probably did more *good* than harm overall. I voted for him the 2nd time around because I saw the craziness of the progressive left taking over the moderates in the Democratic Party.

        2) One of Trump’s most underrated achievements was in successfully unmooring conservatism from the neocons, Lincoln Project types, etc.

        3) Trump has served his purpose. Let’s pay him off and move on. He alienates way too many college educated females that voted for Youngkin.

        4) DeSantis 2024

      • What ‘Trumpian themes?’ What distinguishes Youngkin from a typical Republican? He was decidedly not ‘Trumpy.’

      • David French was vindicated by this election in my view. He has been advocating education as a core Republican issue for some time.

    • One other tidbit:

      “All in all, it would not surprise me if the anti-CRT movement manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.”

      -Arnold 6/25/21 in an anti-Rufo post.

      Sorry, but Rufo (and many many others) know how to post Ws. The libertarians do not.

      • “… it would not surprise me if the anti-CRT movement manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.”

        I would say the opposite happened. Virginia is now a blue state, getting bluer every year, and which went strongly for Biden. McAuliffe is a DNC insider (=$) and former governor who won by a slim but still decent margin 8 years ago (though with a Libertarian ‘spoiler’), and following another Democrat governor who won by almost 9% even without a spoiler. He should have had it in the bag, and indeed, right up until the last minute, almost everybody thought he had it in the bag.

        But it seems that Ezra Klein and Shor and Yglesias and other progressive elites were not able to get the ‘popularist’ bat-signal to work, which was supposed to get all the activist types to just shut up for a single minute about all of their really unpopular ideas. Not to change or reformulate those ideas, naturally, (because, on what possible grounds?) just to keep quiet about them, and deny them if they had to.

        But they couldn’t do it, many took the anti-CRT bait and just doubled down on unpopular wokeness or made up ridiculous lies about it which were at odds with people’s own lived experiences. James Carville saw this train-wreck coming, warned them to stop, predicted this is what would happen if they didn’t, and so it came to pass.

        So, instead, it seems it was the progressive activists and officials who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

        • Bottom line: never get between a mother and her children. As a politician or teacher, you will be completely f*cked every single time even in deep blue VA.

          I’ll repeat a question that I asked a few weeks ago: have we reached peak woke yet? Please debate.

    • It’s probably safe to assume people at the American Mind believe in a positive converse of that: in the virtue inborn American pride. It’s fine and right to reject notions of collective guilt, but one can’t do so while without rejecting collective pride as well. I doubt the writer of that is a ‘radical individualist.’

        • You neglect Mark’s challenge: should you also feel guilt over your community’s past aggressions or other bad acts? I personally think you should do both, but it is up to the individual how they want to expiate their guilt, whether by washing black people’s feet or whatever.

          • if you’re gonna feel pride, you also have to feel guilt. But you have to be realistic.

            Most scientific discoveries have come from white people, but a major reason for that was the prosperity of their societies, with white people in poor societies contributing little. White people had colonies and slaves but there have been slaves and conquered peoples throughout history. As with scientific discovery, technology gave them the opportunity to do that, opportunity that other societies at the time didn’t have.

  3. “Thus, when Democrats are in power they enact their agenda, while Republicans, whether in power or not, merely emit war whoops.” This is precisely what partisans on each side claim about the other: They enact their agenda while we do nothing. But in the present moment, the opposite of the quote seems true, at least legislatively. Thus far, the Dems have legislated very little, and their agenda seems more and more like a war whoop. The Trump administration, on the other hand, enacted tax reform, managed the border, and played a prominent role in disabling ISIS. Greater than legislative issues, however, is the apparently bipartisan decision that the executive and judicial branches are more effective at advancing an agenda. Mandates without a hint of legislation are invading every crevice of American life.

    • The reality is that in the current system, 99% of actual governing and establishment, implementation, and enforcement of policy happens outside of the legislative branch. The executive and judiciary have taken over almost entirely, and their activities tend to either fly below the radar if public, or else, are done in very opaque and secretive ways which means you only hear about them at all if they are “leaks that the media wants to echo”.

      However, media coverage and thus public attention has the completely opposite ratio, with 99% focus on that 1%. The whooping ratio is probably even worse on social media. This gives off a completely skewed impression of what is really happening and the true state of affairs of underlying levels of effort and activity. Nobody actually reads the Federal Register.

      So, in reality, the Trump administration was trying to do a ton of things, and – in the few instances of not being stymied by the courts or from the lack of a appropriations – getting lots of things done.

      The Biden administration also hit the ground running and – being much less stymied by the courts – has been accomplishing hundreds of initiatives, many of them quite controversial or even arguably ‘radical’ in nature, and practically all of them extra-legislative or para-statutory (however you want to express that idea).

      So, bottom line, you just can’t take hardly anyone’s word for it regarding their assessment of who gets things done vs who is just tribally whooping, because almost nobody actually is keeping their focus on the true locus and level of activity.

    • It seems that populism is frustrated at all turns.

      The left’s economic populism is frustrated when the Democrats are in power, and the right’s social populism is frustrated when Republicans are in power.

      The populist left wants things like Medicare for All and with complete Democratic governance manages only to get Obamacare, which means high premiums going to corporate health insurers and extremely high deductibles, which (not surprisingly) a lot of people hate.

      The populist right wants things like Roe v. Wade overturned and at the very least meaningful pushback against the alphabet people. Trump managed to get three Supreme Court picks in four years, one of whom wrote the opinion expanding the civil rights act’s protections on sex to cover transgenders. Trump had some mild success with immigration but was able to get a large increase in military spending.

      Trump’s signature achievement was passing tax cuts for the woke megacorps run by people who despise Trump’s base. It’s still too early to tell, but I’ve seen signs that the Democrats are actually thinking of retaining the 21% corporate tax rate, and increasing the SALT exemption to as high as $80,000 from its current $10,000. Maybe they’ll eventually raise the 37% tax bracket back to 39%.

      • Insofar as the populist right wants things like Roe v. Wade overturned, that “want” is far lower on populists’ list of priorities, that it is on the list of the religious right.
        Immigration is a *far* higher priority for the populist right.

  4. Thus, when Democrats are in power they enact their agenda, while Republicans, whether in power or not, merely emit war whoops.

    While in power, the Republicans under Trump enacted a lot of their agenda. Off the top of my head: tax-reform (including limits on SALT and mortgage deductions), regulation reform, withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement and the Iran Nuclear Deal. Also restoring due process rights in campus sexual misconduct tribunals. Other significant actions in included Operation Warp Speed, border control measures, and — sadly — a whole lot of tariffs.

    It’s definitely a mixed bag from my point of view, but it certainly wasn’t four years of standing around whooping and ignoring policy.

  5. The URL for the Substack piece is defective: it looks like there’s a missing 4 at the end. Could Dr. Kling correct that, please?

  6. Richard Hanania argues that the left is ideological while conservatives are tribal. Thus, when Democrats are in power they enact their agenda, while Republicans, whether in power or not, merely emit war whoops.

    No. There is ideology and tribalism on both sides. It is unreasonable to claim otherwise. Much of the Democratic Party is nakedly tribal and a lot of the political right has various ideologies. Trump pushed deregulation and nationalism which was ideological. Judicial Originalism is ideological. The tax changes were ideological. And Trump did get results. He seated judges chosen by the Federalist Society. He successfully passed the Tax Act. He made lots of other executive level changes.

    • Yep. One tribe has their MAGA hats while the other tribe has their obedience masks (which I’m still seeing *outdoors*). Both sides have their irrationalities and good insights.

      Hanania‘s piece was long winded and probably not quite right.

      • Wokesters have “good insights”?
        Name major one thing they say, which is at all honest, let alone insightful.
        And, Wokesters dictate terms in the Dem party, so the other Dems are irrelevant.

        • The “wokesters” do have some good insights.

          The only problem: they can’t help but crank the volume to 11 from the outset in some crazy puritanical direction.

          E.g. I believe that there are meaningful police reforms that could be enacted at the state or federal level. See Tim Scott for more info. But, these reforms are a complete non-starter from the woke perspective, because they aren’t pure enough. So, we are left with nothing.

          • “The “wokesters” do have some good insights” that others (e.g. others, e.g. Scott) don’t have?
            Please name some.

  7. The legacy GOP had much in common with the Wokesters of today. For both, identity was/is group based and individualism the worst of sins. The legacy GOP sees each person as either a member of the unruly mob of the lower classes or of the elite whose natural station in life entitles them to rule over the benighted mob in the interest of order, beauty, sweetness, and light, as well as sinecures and state support. The ruling class Wokesters of today similarly divide the world into the unruly racist, white supremacist mob of the lower orders and the elite enlightened messiahs of color whose station in life entitles them to rule over the benighted mob in the interest of order, beauty, sweetness, and light, as well as sinecures and state support. For both the legacy GOP and the Workesters, those who would think for themselves, identify as an individual and not as a member of a category or group, and not otherwise their assigned role in the great order of things are evil anarchists who would upset and destroy all that is good in the world.

    Most of this divide can be traced back to the English Civil War and the religious division between Church of England prelatism and the separatist, non-conformist dissenters, particularly congregationalists. In the New World the Virginia colony the Church of England was officially adopted in 1619. On the other hand, of course, separatists launched their churches in the New England colonies about the same time. This profound cultural division in the New World persists today with the prelatists only being strengthened by the arrival of the Catholics in Maryland in 1632. Jews are perhaps more culturally comfortable with the prelatists (goyim feh, ptooey).

    With the passing of Anthony Downs, father of the infamous left-right continuum notion of politics, perhaps a different continuum along the lines of Three Languages of Politics can be employed to illustrate this reality. On one end of the continuum we have individualists subscribing to the Leveller doctrine that came to be espoused in the Declaration of Independence “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.” At the other end of the continuum we have what might be termed “identitarians” for lack of a better word, who reject the Declaration and espouse Burke’s ideal, of:

    “a protected, laborious, and obedient people, taught to seek and to recognize the happiness that is to be found by virtue in all conditions, – in which consists the true moral equality of mankind, and not in that monstrous fiction which by inspiring false ideas and vain expectations into men destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life, serves only to embitter that real inequality which it never can remove, and which the order of civil life establishes as much for the benefit of those whom it must leave in an humble state as those whom it is able to exalt to a condition more splendid”

    which certainly smacks of the sermonizing of a Ibram X. Kendi about how whites must pay Blacks reparations in perpetuity. Somewhere in between might be the more moderate Burke (“the whole state is bound to keep faith with its separate communities”}.

    At any rate, Trump is not the issue: the real issue is attaining a modern, civilized system of government in which authentic electoral integrity is prized and protected.

    • Most of this divide is far more recent than the English Civil War.
      It’s been hugely spurred by the rise of Sil. Valley super-wealth, and then by Wokeism.

  8. Interesting curiosity:

    The Trump Administration tried to enforce immigration law, perhaps with some success. Not all war whooping.

    The Biden Administration, war whoops or not, has effected part of its agenda by ending border control.

    The curiosity is this: Financial elites want more immigration to help bust labor costs.

    There are parallels in “free” trade as well.

    The Trump Administration was interesting in certain policy choices. Too bad Trump’s personality was always foremost.

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