35 thoughts on “Fringe/center, left/right”

1. Anti global warming beliefs would seem to have spread from some far right intellectual outpost to the conservative center. Ditto for dislike (fear?) of universities and their faculties. Also, conservatives used to be rather cool towards all those socialists in Israel; there’s been a change but I won’t guess where the new sentiments originated. Japanese and other oriental immigrants have become increasingly welcome in recent years, even with people who dislike immigrants — we’ve come a long way in the past century. And I’ve a sneaking suspicion that if I were knowledgable about social trends I might point to the spread of evangelical Christianity as another growing middle conservative trait.

2. What about birtherism? Hard to argue that that isn’t fringe, and if Trump is part of the mainstream right, his record of pushing birtherism should count for your (a).

   I would say the same for many of the conspiracy theories Trump has pushed recently (e.g. Crowdstrike) but birtherism is perhaps the clearest case of the category.

   • Maybe, but I’m not convinced Trump’s support of birtherism isn’t just another example of his zero-sum world view: birtherism is just another tool to help him win something (or cause his opponents to lose).

     It is equivalent to the invocation of Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act to impose a tariff on aluminum and steel imports based on national security threats (e.g. the Canadian menace).

     Gaming a system with expectations of zero-sum gains almost always results negative-sum losses over the long term.

     • There are two uses of the term “dark marketing”.

       One is just “targeted marketing”, that is, ads that are more like small smart bombs instead of huge dumb bombs, that are delivered only to particular users or expected to circulate only in certain target audiences, and aren’t going to affect or even be noticed by non-targets, hence “dark” to them.

       But the other use is more important to understand, which is to intentionally make an ‘ad’ (or just say or do something predictably conspicuous and attention-getting) that is alike agitprop and calculated to generate controversy and provoke intensely angry passions and negatively tribal aspects of social psychology, exacerbating pre-existing acrimony and whipping up mutual antagonisms, so that whatever it is goes viral or gets repeated by major megaphones, so that the brand name gets a huge amount of free coverage.

       You could say “sure it’s free, but it’s bad!”, but logically, if there’s no such thing as bad press, then there’s no such thing as bad free press, which is just free press, and since free is good, it’s good press! Not exactly “the worse the better” for the sake of getting something to go viral, but there seems to be some optimum far into “bad” territory, especially bad since the act of stirring up widespread internal discord on a massive scale and exploiting the fallout for one’s own private advantage is classic anti-social behavior.

       Unfortunately, we’re in “don’t hate the player, hate the game” / “dog eat dog” ethical territory, where it is unrealistic to expect entities to resist the temptation to slide further down the slope so long as there is an incentive to do so in terms of private benefit, or to converge to “worst practices” out of competitive necessity or be eliminated from the game such that the “worst rise to the top” anyway.

       And since we cannot agree on how to police or set the rules of fair play for these competitions, we’re stuck with the consequences in the New Normal, commercially and politically.

       Most political commentary and advocacy is focused on Kling’s “closing the minds of members of one’s own side”, which is to convince them to “hate the player” on the other side (while giving a pass to the players on their own side). It’s much rarer to find someone who plainly advocates for hating the game itself, since the game is supposed to be uncontestably sacred.

       But the game is the problem. Imagine that some primitive form of stick-ball was evolving out of some neighborhood play, and natural ‘rules’ of nice, fair play were never formalized or written down, but emerged organically out of cultural norms associated with how to have enjoyable, friendly fun competitions with other people.

       And then someone pointed out, “You know, there’s no actual rule against fouling and intentionally colliding into someone so that they will probably get injured and get taken out of the game.” And then people started doing it.

       Someone could say, “You know what, this is a bad development. Let’s make it a rule that one can’t do things like this.” Or in the alternative, someone could say, “Not having strict rules about this is our tradition, so let’s just embrace the practice as part of the new, rougher way the game is played.”

       Perhaps we can decide what kind of game structure is better or worse for our system and try to switch one day, but, whether one hates them or not, there’s just not much sense in making winning so important and letting the game degenerate on the one hand, and then getting upset at what the players will do out of necessity in order to win on the other.

       • Someone could say, “You know what, this is a bad development. Let’s make it a rule that one can’t do things like this.” Or in the alternative, someone could say, “Not having strict rules about this is our tradition, so let’s just embrace the practice as part of the new, rougher way the game is played.”

         OR someone could say “Not having strict rules about this is our tradition, but so is non-physically aggressive play, so let’s use the tools in our informal toolbox (e.g. calling out and stigmatizing aggressive play) to reduce the new trend”.

         Kling has mentioned Clay Shirky’s idea of mental transaction costs. There is a mental transaction cost in codifying informal rules and the risk of unintended consequences.

         Fred Brooks in his book “The Design of Design” talks about the tradeoff involved in contracts for work such as house construction/architecture. The tradeoff comes from what he calls “early vs late decision binding”. Contracts and upfront detailed specifications force early decision binding and protect against gaming. Pay-as-you-Go is a form of late decision binding and allows us to defer and/or delay decisions while more feedback/information is acquired as the project progresses.

         Late Decision Binding is the ideal situation when there is total trust between the participants but falls apart when something goes wrong or one of the participants tries to game the system. Informal rules take the late decision binding route and require a level of mutual trust.

         Brooks, like all good engineers, is emphasizing the tradeoffs involved in decision making and the scenarios where they best apply.

   • On “birtherism” see the anti-Trump snopes site:
     https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/promotional-booklet/
     “A 1991 literary client list promotional booklet identified Barack Obama as having been born in Kenya.” True

     Obama accepted being identified as having been born in Kenya. Others before Trump attacked Obama on this issue; Trump attacked but has since stated Obama is a US citizen.
     Therefore, it is NOT (a) accepted by mainstream.

     The MAGA folk don’t push birtherism at all, now — because it’s mostly moot.

     Trump’s playing around with this issue before the election is part of why GOPe don’t like him, but he opportunistically attacks as much as he can, including some dishonest attacks.

     On man-made global warming, the alarmists have failed to produce any model of “climate change” which conforms to reality. Such a model would take climate data thru some year, like up to 2000, and produce a range of estimated temperatures in the future that would show a crisis coming “soon” AND that range of future temps would include the post-2001 measured temps in the US and the world. So far the alarmists, including UN, have failed to agree on any falsifiable model. It’s not scientific if it’s not falsifiable.

     CO2 is going up. Whether that means global temp is going up fast, slow, or not at all, is still not clear. A CATO specialist I heard suggested the 6 degree dangerous temp increase would be here in 300 years, not 100 — there is a huge crisis difference between such slow warming (300) and the faster warming.

     Universities are turning into Dem dominated anti-Rep, anti-Christian indoctrination centers, where conservatives can get fired for speaking the truth like: “an XY person can never be a real woman”. This biological fact is now considered both untrue and impermissible to speak of by the PC-believers who dominate colleges.

     The polarization of society is getting worse because the Universities have been allowed to secretly discriminate against hiring Reps, as professors or administrators, and have been instituting speech control in an attempt at thought control. Almost all the new elites have graduated from such anti-Rep indoctrination centers, including new Republican elites.

     With or without Trump, the polarization would be getting worse because of this. There was Bush Derangement Syndrome before; had it been Ted Cruz elected, we would see hysterical Cruz Derangement Syndrome, tho I doubt Cruz would have been elected.

     America and the West will continue to see more negative polarization as conservatives are excluded from colleges in the PC culture battles; see Roger Scruton in the UK.

     Reps should get the Feds out of funding colleges with student loans or even tax exempt status.

3. “My conclusion is that we do need to apply a filter to left-wing fringe ideas. And we cannot count on left-wing moderates to provide that filter.”

   Yes, but why not? After all, left moderates with influence over Democratic party positions and nominees have an obvious incentive to keep the platform and candidates close enough to the center (and big donors) to win closely-contested elections, such as the Presidency.

   The reason is that even the ‘moderates’ operate in the framework of progressive principles, and cannot articulate any principled reason why the fringe is ‘wrong’, only pragmatic reasons to delay doing the ‘right’ thing – that the fringers are getting ahead of the curve, that the timing is bad, that the reform should wait until it would be more feasible and expedient, etc.

   That is, there is no genuine ideological contest between the moderate left and the fringe left.

   There is only a contest between idealists and pragmatists, and pragmatists are at a fundamental disadvantage because they put themselves in the position of defending the ‘injustice’ of the status quo, which is like defending speed bumps to impatient people who are racing to get to work in a hurry. The only thing the electoral pragmatists have going for them is the democratic feedback loop between power and espoused positions (more generally, ideology or even more abstractly, ‘information’), but the populist sword is double-edged and just as often pulls the other way.

   The larger question is where do “fringe left” proposals come from. Nearly all of them are of the same character which is that advocates and ‘ideological entrepreneurs’ observe and identify some practice, feature, or institution of contemporary law or society and point out how ‘problematic’ it is, that is, that it is inconsistent with progressive principles of social justice and absolutist equality, thus evidencing some form of unjust, unfair, discriminatory oppression.

   To the extent the practice has survived until now, it is only by inertia and a lack of general enlightenment, and is what Auster called it, an “unprincipled exception”, that must now be rectified and brought into alignment with progressive principles.

   Another way to look at it is in terms of fashions (and political ideological beliefs that change rapidly are indeed intellectual fashion with its own version of the fashion industry pushing out the latest looks.) In fashion, one wants to be in the hip vanguard, and it is not at all to one’s credit if one calls oneself ‘moderate’ or ‘mainstream’. The best a mainstreamer can do is complain about some orthogonal dimension of quality such as affordability or comfort, but so long as he adheres to the general code of the latest fashions, he must concede that new styles are more ‘stylish’ (i.e., ‘fashionable’) and that any reason for not adopting them necessarily remains a deviation from maximum stylishness.

   (Aside: the use of fringe, far, extreme, and other superlative modifiers of ‘right’ is rampantly abused by people trying to associate every conservative idea with Nazis and using marketing-like influence tactics of anti-bandwagon, to make people believe that certain ideas are socially undesirable and professing them will cause one to be perceived by members their social reference group as weird and dangerous and as a person with which one should not associate.

   My proposal is that use of these terms for anything believed by at least a third of Republican voters is simple journalistic or intellectual malpractice. Reagan’s amnesty was the high water mark for pro-illegal sentiment, and didn’t suddenly shift in the last few years.

   Notice that even California voters passed proposition 187 25 years ago, way back in 1994, Clinton signed the PRWO in 1996, and multiple attempts at “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” over the last two decades crashed on the rocks of massive popular resistance. It’s really unfair to call that a ‘fringe’ position, especially when the GOP elites are actually the ones which seem to be stuck on the fringes of their own party. And, by the way, libertarians ought to step carefully around the use of such terms as extreme and fringe, because their views are indeed often absolutist in nature and unquestionably adhered to by only a small minority.)

   Notice also as in the above immigration reform attempt examples, that the moderate right is also influenced more by the moderate left than the fringe right, which is what one would expect in anything like a trickle-down fashionability hierarchy. Indeed, this influence is the main thing the purported ‘fringe’ (i.e., actual mainstream) complains about.)

   So that raises the matter of how the right (center or moderate or whatever) is supposed to filter out those fringe left wing ideas. If they are going to do that, they can’t be in the position of moderate leftists and have no real principled way to explain why what the fringe left is proposing is wrong.

   The center right has to be able to articulate a principled opposition to such proposals, that is, they have to highlight the contrast between incompatible and irreconcilable ideological positions, a clear difference in beliefs that clearly distinguishes their ideas from progressive principles and which lead to totally different logical implications for policy.

   Which is to say, they can’t do it on the basis of inertia, pragmatism, or preserving old traditional exceptions ‘just because’. If it is to be done, then an explicit rejection of fundamental tenets of progressive orthodoxy and values is unavoidable.

   As it happens, since the end of the Cold War, the intellectually elite mainstream right has been unable or unwilling to formulate or articulate such clear distinctions. It is no longer sufficient to stand athwart history yelling stop, because one can no longer stand on a foundation of shared commitments to widely revered values, institutions, or sacred-level elements of heritage such as religion or the Constitution, as progressives have been doing everything they can to denigrate and displace such commitments and replace them with an alternative, substitute arrangement of their own.

   So, given the intellectual sterility of the mainstream intellectual right, combined with its tendency to be influenced by the left (because the sad truth is that it currently shared the same basic assumptions and is just behind the curve of adjusting to uncomfortable changes), the question becomes where are such ideas and reformulations and ‘alternative fashions’ supposed to come from if not an innovative, intellectual ‘fringe’? It’s a major error to mistake ‘fringe’ for “neo-Nazi cretins on the internet”, which is of course exactly the mistake progressives try to get people to make.

   If the center right is to be put in the position of fighting a war on two fronts, it has to have an inherently defensible position and the equivalent of the ideological high ground against which its opponents on all sides must fight uphill battles. As of now, it has no such position, and can’t win anything against anyone.

   Many mainstream right-wing commentators are aware of this on some level, and seem to be in something of a hysterical panic about the collapse in influence, which they project on to Trump, who was a talented opportunist able to take advantage of a situation that will remain in place after he’s gone. If the center right is going to avoid extinction, it’s going to have to figure out what it actually stands for.

   • That is, there is no genuine ideological contest between the moderate left and the fringe left.

     There is only a contest between idealists and pragmatists…

     I think there are scenarios where this is very true but I don’t think it is a universal principle. Consider the New Atheists including Sam Harris. If you throw Bill Maher into the mix there is a serious ideological contest between those that support/oppose what we used to call “political correctness”.

     Edgar’s point about the inherent fuzziness of the “left” vs. “right” categories is somewhat true but assumes that these categories are fixed rather than fluid. In my opinion, we are going through a period where the boundaries defining these categories are being redrawn. What has emerged is two illiberal protectionist wings: 1. left-wing social justice protectionism, and 2. right-wing national protectionism (Trumpism/Brexitism) that espouse ideological positions as you (Handle) point out but they also employ the-ends-justify-the-means pragmatist tactics. The left-wing social justice protectionists have been around since the civil rights movement but national protectionism is new and ironically consists of many life-long blue-collar Democrats.

     Another idealogical contest on the left is on the topic of American/Israeli foreign policy which is exemplified with the war-of-words between Max Blumenthal (via Robert Wright) and Matt Johnson (via Quillette). Wright points out that the IDW (Intellectual Dark Web) is hypocritical about free-speech when it comes to anti-Israel sentiment. Blumenthal seems to be the modern successor to Noam Chomsky and Robert Fisk in the left-wing opposition to powerful capitalist nation-states.

     The third long time left-wing contest is the nature vs nurture debate and Noam Chomsky, Steven Pinker, Robert Wright, and Sam Harris (and all the IDW) are very much on the same page. Clean divisions are non-existent other than Social Justice Protectionism and National Protectionism. If you attend protests/rallies and carry placards then you are probably illiberal and protectionist. Everyone else is struggling to be heard.

   • What if Trump is the right center for working class conservatives? We tend to think Right Center as a Romney type but he was Right Center for wine drinking College Educated Republicans. Trump was the Right Center for beer drinking Republicans! These are the voters that put in the White House and many cases are descendants of the 1950 – 1968 Democratic Party and when thinking about Trump’s campaign message it was returning to when America was great in 1965ish. (And I would focus on how we like to remember 1965 not all the bad stuff like Vietnam or the Civil Rights battles.) Now it does come across as ‘White working class Identity Politics’ to Left Center Clinton voter but it was an effective campaign in 2016.

     But again remember,
     1) Trump promised protect Social Security! When has a Republican campaigned on that one? My memory was after Reagan that was the true goal of Republicans to weaken Social Security.
     2) The government signed terrible trade that your community its factory jobs. In fact this is the consistent politic message Trump ever had!
     3) And WWC are the ones most against Immigration from Mexico.

4. When I hear the words “left “ and “right” I instantaneously start to tune out the speaker. As part of a response to a comment on her blog this morning, Ann Althouse wisely states “putting people in groups causes harm.” And using left and right to discuss a political dynamic belittles people who have alternative logic in support of their various policy positions which in most people’s cases are like to be heterogeneous. Instead of thinking about who is fringe and who should filter who, I think aspiring to keep the Althouse vow of “cruel neutrality” makes more sense. Althouse says she will punish herself by not voting if she lapses into writing as a political partisan. Her blog is all the better to read for it.

   • No doubt it is true that, “putting people in groups causes harm.” The problem is that people do it to themselves. So as a matter of description, it makes sense to talk about groups. And often people’s opinions work backwards: they aren’t so much thinking about what is right as they are feeling what the other members of their group think is right.

     But exactly how isn’t simple. Some times it’s something like the median voter theorem: you believe what the median member of your group does (how else to explain Joe Biden as frontrunner?). Some times you are attracted to what the most passionate members of your group feel. Some times you find yourself far enough away from the group that you actually lose your loyalty to it (cafeteria Catholics v. lapsed Catholics?).

5. In terms of the Hard Right and Trump Presidency is Donald ran economically like a 2004 Democrat with the heavy complaints about trade deals, protecting Social Security/Medicare and tighter Immigration. (In 2004 Ds were more closed borders than Rs although they were more careful about language.) That said what won Trump the Nomination despite being Right Center economically what won the nomination were:
   1) A lot of conservatives liked the taunting and talk radio Trump
   2) He campaign about returning America to how we like to think about 1965 (with some 1985 in it) which was a good message to the right set of voters.

   Also what is huge left wrongness of the 1619 Project? It was modest attempt to have left historians think about the impact of slavery on the US society and they missed or did not scope out a lot. (Yes slavery was common in history, Africans did participate in slave trade and the abolitionist had a big movement.) But reading about how modern African-Americans feel about slavery history was interesting and I do wish they would include a conservative African-American viewpoint.

   • James Oakes: “Slavery made the slaveholders rich. But it made the South poor. And it didn’t make the North rich. The wealth of the North was based on the emerging, capitalist internal market that allowed the North to win the Civil War. It’s true that cotton dominated the export market. But it’s only something like 5 percent of GDP. It’s really the wealth of the internal northern market that’s decisive. That depends on a fairly widespread distribution of wealth, and that doesn’t exist in the South. There’s a lot of evidence from western Virginia, for example, that non-slaveholders were angry at the slaveholders for blocking the railroads and things like that that would allow them to take advantage of the internal market. So the legacy of slavery is poverty, not wealth.”

     Poverty, not wealth. That’s the impact of slavery.

     Slaveholding Democrats said the opposite. They claimed that their feudal, backwards, stagnant hierarchy was actually prosperous and successful, against the evidence. Fast forward two centuries and clueless infant Democrats repeat the lie. With no idea what they’re doing they repeat the claims of the slaveholders uncritically, unthinkingly, making the same arguments the slaveholders made to fool the non-slaveholders into voting for their own oppression.

     Slaveholding Democrats made the claim in the 19th century that they weren’t an exploitative elite at the very apex of the pyramid. They pretended that their exploitative feudal hierarchy was great for the economy, and great for society, whether you owned slaves or not. Which is the opposite of the truth. The New York Times blindly parrots it now, but it’s a falsehood. It was ruling class propaganda, invented to divide the rest of society and thereby conquer it.

     James Oakes: “The slaveholders dominated the legislatures in polities that were formally democratic, where property qualifications for voting were disappearing, and where the overriding need of that planter class is to protect slavery. They can’t go to the electorate and say, ‘I’m superior to you. You’re inferior to me. Vote for me.’ It’s not going to work. They have to conform to the requirements of a formally democratic polity. And they claim that ‘any man who wants to can rise up and become a slaveholder.’ But that’s increasingly tenuous.”

     • I have been dubious of slavery held back US capitalism because:

       1) The Slave Trade was huge and the value of slaves was $3.2B out of $4.32B economy. (How many merchants and guards were there profiting from the trade) And the Confederate fought a Civil War to protect slavery! (Read Primary sources in 1861 about succession not after losing the war.)

       2) Slavery ensured the US had an abundance of cheap cotton which made early clothing factories more profitable and most of the US trade to Europe was agricultural products.

       4) I believe that thriving capitalism does need cheap labor to thrive in the long run. And between slavery and immigration that is one reason why the US has had consistent capitalism.

       • The Slave Trade was huge and the value of slaves was $3.2B out of $4.32B economy.

         Assuming that is true, the first is a stock and the second is a flow. At a five percent rate of return, the stock would be twenty times the flow.

         Certainly, certain people profited from slavery and cotton brought a lot of money into the country. But that can be a pretty bad thing. Lots of countries suffer an “oil curse” or a “natural resources curse”. The oil brings money in but also brings a culture which discourages entrepreneurship, which is profoundly anti-capitalistic. The South was noticeably non-progressive in an economic/technological sense.

         I’m curious. Why do you think “thriving capitalism does need cheap labor to thrive in the long run”?

6. Yarvin has already explained all of this in his https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/05/ol7-ugly-truth-about-government/ His framework proved to be prescient.

7. The issue of Gay Marriage didn’t fall along the left-right or Democrat-Republican axis. Milton Friedman and Dick Cheney publicly supported gay marriage long Obama did and before it was an active issue. And those are just two off the top of my head. Personally, while growing up, I heard support for gay marriage from family members (active Christians, btw) who strongly identified on the right. Calling that a left-wing issue isn’t really accurate.

   The issue of immigration is really the primary crack up on the right. Kling is labeling the Open Border right as “moderate” and the restrictionist status quo as the “fringe”, which isn’t justified or reasonable. There is dispute on other issues, like spending, deficit, global trade, foreign policy, but those disputes are minor. The big bitter rivalry is over immigration and identity. When the UK Tories pivoted to support the NHS, or when Trump made pledges to keep Social Security without reforms, I see that as a political compromise rather than a sincere policy strategy. Even the pundits who passionately believe in reforming Social Security and advancing free market health care seem convinced that their issues are political losers and best to be avoided for the time being.

   Beyond immigration, and Trump’s personality and temperament and culture war engagement, I don’t see any major crack ups on the political right. I do see crack ups on the left over health care, discharging all student loan debt, free tuition for all, etc. I don’t think those fringe left ideas deserve to be mainstream.

8. Niko got to it first. Gay marriage was first advocated by the conservative wing of gay activism.

   Can M4A really be considered “fringe” if every developed country has some form of it but us?

   I’m on a phone at a dinner so idk if my link will work but check the graphic at the bottom of this page.

   https://ritholtz.com/2019/12/sunday-reads-175/

   It seems the republican party is already at the “fringe” so it would have to be ideas from so-far-right-they-would-be- left in order to equal the distance that these so called progressive fringe ideas travel to the democratic mainstream.

   • “Can M4A really be considered “fringe” if every developed country has some form of it but us?”

     They really don’t. I can’t think of a single country where the government authorizes unlimited consumption of healthcare at private facilities of varying prices at zero cost to the consumer.

     • Try to tell a senior Medicare is free.

     • There will always be limits on health care consumption. Whether it’s a price limit, or an administrative limit, they will always exist.

       There’s still a giant difference between what a Warren/Sanders president would push for and what the Trump Administration is pushing for.

   • It is a fringe idea that the NYT can credibly identify the center. Likewise fringe that anyone can do so by “analysis of manifestos.”

9. Will the fringe left ever be weakened? Is there any hope we can go back to men and women bathrooms and sports?

   • An up-to-date progressive will say that question is akin to asking, “Is there any hope we can go back to Jim Crow and anti-miscegenation laws?”

     Progressives don’t accept rationales based in mere tradition or majority preferences, “That’s the way we’ve always done it,” or “That’s what most people want.”

     To them, those are just facially weak cover stories for perpetuating oppression, privilege, injustice, and discrimination – the kind that people have always told throughout history in their attempts to stop what we now all recognize as more just circumstances and interpersonsal relations.

     So, if there is to be any hope, one must be able to articulate different, rival principles from which one can demonstrate that the distinctions and special treatments for different classes of individual are not just tolerable but, indeed, morally compulsory, and that it is the denial of differences, the pretense of universal human sameness, and the endless, insidious attempts at Procrustean leveling that are wrong, unjust, and harmful.

   • A little hope – first we need colleges to have some 20-30% of their professors being Christians and/or Republicans.

     So that the idea of absolute truth is reasonable, even if it might be unknowable, or not provably true. Then there might be acceptance of identifying XY and XX people by their physical sexual bodies, not by how they’re feeling that day.

     In Sports, “male” sports need to be changed to “open” sports, so that women and trans folk can compete. “Female” sports needs to be changed to “XX restricted” sports, including DNA tests and limits on testosterone hormone injections.

     Maybe not in my lifetime, now. Too bad.

     • first we need colleges to have some 20-30% of their professors being Christians and/or Republicans.

       A focus on equality of outcomes seems to be a core tenet of progressive policy. I’m not sure that I care how many professors are Christian, Republican, women, or minority as long as all have equal opportunity.

       In Sports, “male” sports need to be changed to “open” sports, so that women and trans folk can compete.

       I once met a (clean) competitive weight lifter that loved the idea of “the freakshow” consisting of lifters using performance enhancing drugs (PEDs).

       I guess the problem I see with a truly “open” class is that it pushes the comparative advantage of PEDs down to extended use, including during adolescent development.

       • A focus on equality of outcomes seems to be a core tenet of progressive policy. I’m not sure that I care how many professors are Christian, Republican, women, or minority as long as all have equal opportunity.

         Imagine if instead of the “two voices” model – that is, having a state prosecutor and defense counsel present their own versions of what happened and interpretations of evidence to a disinterested and neutral judge – that there was just “one voice”, for instance, a position similar to “public procurator” in which some single professional or officer was assigned to investigate what happened and produce a comprehensive report and recommendations, which would be the only thing the judging authority had to go on when making a decision (or in the alternative, the judge participates in the investigation in a similar way and can actively ask questions, hence, ‘inquisitorial’).

         Designs like the second type of system are quite common throughout the world, are much more efficient, and are used frequently in common law systems, for instance in grand-jury indictments, and in more ‘administrative’ proceedings, especially in the civil service bureaucracy and the military. They are also used to make the reports and recommendations issuing forth from various safety or investigatory commissions or boards of subject matter experts. You may remember the controversy over whether the military could use a one-voice model for prosecuting illegal enemy combatants.

         The bottom line question is whether you trust “one voice” to be sufficiently and reliably fair and accurate, and to give a fair and comprehensive presentation of various alternative interpretations of events, and of the strengths and weaknesses of evidence as regards any particular interpretation.

         There are three main elements to that question. (1) Does the voice have any motive or tendency for bias or favoritism, (2) does he have an strong incentive to be vigorous and rigorous, and (3) how reasonably contested are the underlying claims (and, related, how would one know)?

         Now, the predominant teaching model is inquisitorial, one voice from one authority figure who, one might hope, is supposed to have some kind of professional ethical duty to give honest and fair presentations of various perspectives on the matter of instruction when the matter is still contested, or, at the least, to explain the nature of the intellectual debate that occurred before the matter was considered settled – or better, to review the original arguments of those debates in the words of the advocates of that time – and to be able to relate the “winning argument” and demonstrate by rigorous proof why the settlement is indeed the superior answer.

         Unfortunately, all of the factors in our three factor test for the wisdom of relying on a one-voice model tend to be answered in the negative for any field that even remotely touches matters of ideological or political controversy.

         So, it’s not the identities of the professors so much as the need for two-voice model of instruction instead of the single authority in a position to abuse the absence of contrary argument by exclusion.

         Every class should be a debate. The thing about debate is that debaters in competition with each other naturally keep each other on their toes.

         • Every class should be a debate.

           That doesn’t work real well in a physics class. There just isn’t much to debate.

           Ideologues think that their ideas are as uncontroversial and uncontestable as Newton’s First Law of Motion.

10. Great read, first time, and seemingly quite true. Especially about the fringe-left / socialists & Open Borders & gay rights + trans rights; and pro-Palestinian anti-Israeli support.

    And against the US winning any foreign wars? This article fails to mention defense.

    But second read, what is “far right”? It seems that NYT & CNN will label anybody who opposes new gun laws as far right. Anybody who wants lower taxes, or fewer regulations. I’m pretty sure every “right/ conservative” position taken by a politician has often, or mostly, been labeled “far right” by the Dem media conversation gatekeepers.

    I think that the strongest case one might make would be with regard to anti-immigrant rhetoric. Clearly, the mainstream right-wing view has shifted since President Reagan’s day, and it has moved in the direction of the right-wing fringe.

    I don’t think so.

    The fringe view: build the wall, end all immigration, send all illegals home, high penalties on any who hire illegals, or rent homes to illegals.

    The Reagan right: amnesty for those here, tighter enforcement of the border and sending illegals back, accept a large, fixed number of legal immigrants.

    Current GOPe (Rubio?): amnesty now, higher numbers of legals including guest workers, continued low enforcement in practice but claim higher enforcement, unenthusiastic acceptance of building some more wall.

    MAGA voters: no amnesty, mixed on more or less legal immigrants, more enforcement in practice including against asylum claims and checking more businesses, mixed on more punishment for employers who hire illegals, little talk of landlords, build the Wall (the whole Wall).

    I don’t see Trump nor most Wall supporters claiming to want “NO immigration”, only “no ILLEGAL immigration”, with little actual talk of big changes in the numbers of legals, tho some more talk about better choosing.

    I see this as pretty much Reagan right plus experience that “more enforcement” has NOT worked, in practice. So it’s not clear to me there has been a shift of sentiment, enforce borders, so much as a new appreciation about how tough it is to do enforcement of laws, so let’s try a Wall. And if building the Wall doesn’t work “enough”, then a bigger focus on going after employers.

    The failure to enforce the law will usually lead conservatives to consider changes in laws. Drug legalization is partly supported by MAGA folk because it’s becoming clear that enforcing drug laws fails to stop illegal drug use, altho legalization increases use and some other problems.

    The key “far right” idea is NO immigration. The left & Libertarian idea is Open Borders. I see little advance on the “no immigration” for the MAGA folk, tho I could be wrong on this, but huge support for a Wall and better enforcement of current limits. Essentially the same as under Reagan.

11. Of course, these issues don’t simplify cleanly to a single dimension (left/right). In particular, the freedom/regulation axis is a direction where things don’t match up as well. However, if we accept the oversimplification, another explanation for this is that things just tend to be drifting leftward. Old restrictions, largely religious in origin, tend to be falling away, so many “social” issues seem to be drifting leftward as religiosity declines. However, regulation in general is increasing, it is just that the behavior which is being regulated which is changing.

    While Kling has correctly rooted much of the insanity of left-wing identity politics in the Marxist oppressor-oppressed dynamic, identity politics is not limited to a particular wing. Individualism itself is under attack again. The left-wing brand of it seems particularly stupid: fighting racism by accepting racist definitions of race and making them the most important part of one’s identity, fighting sexism by on the one hand claiming that gender doesn’t matter, but on the other hand claiming that it is very important that people be able to declare which gender they want to be.

12. I don’t thinl left or right is *capable* of filtering the fringe ideas of the other side. The way filtering works is that one person or group of people acts as a kind of moderator which decides what the overton window for acceptable ideas is within the mainstream. Only a person who is trusted by members of that “side” is capable of acting as such a moderator, and because people don’t trust members of the opposing side, they will not abide by any attempts by the opposing side to “filter” what ideas are considered acceptable in their circles. I.e. Progressives are not going to pay attention to conservatives deciding ideas on social justice should be mainstream, and likewise, conservatives are not going to listen to progressives ideas about what ideas on immigration should be mainstream. It just doesn’t work. Only progressives can filter ideas fromn the fringe left, and only conservatives can filter ideas from the fringe right. That’s why each side should spend more time policing their own than policing the opposing camp. It’s a more productive endeavor.

13. Around 2:17:30 is the money line. Your Mileage May Vary.

    = – = – = – = – =

    Regarding the Right…

    somewhere in his videos, Jordan Peterson talks about William F. Buckley drawing a line to exclude (for example) David Duke. Buckley excluded very clearly the racialist conservatives who wanted to associate with the National Review and that outlook. “Here’s the line–and you are not with us.”

    In contrast, I recall Jonathan Haidt discussing a problem with Occupy Wall Street (OWS). The fluid movement of OWS had trouble excluding those who felt comfortable advocating violence. Almost none of the OWS participants advocated violence, but it was difficult to put together a platform that said “All of us reject violence and are committed to peaceful change.”

    Both of these examples are from memory–I cannot provide links to either off the top of my head.

    • Jordan Peterson right around 3:30, here.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UVUnUnWfHI

14. > I think that the strongest case one might make would be with regard to anti-immigrant rhetoric. Clearly, the mainstream right-wing view has shifted since President Reagan’s day, and it has moved in the direction of the right-wing fringe.

    I’d be curious if Kling could elucidate what views on immigration he considers moderate and reasonable and which are fringe and unreasonable?

    Since the days of the Reagan Administration, the Overton Window of acceptable views on immigration has drastically shifted. It’s less that the immigration restrictionists have shifted their views, it’s more that their views have stayed the same, and the Overton Window of acceptability has (deliberately) moved away from them.

    Next, it’s not simply the rhetoric and the semantics surrounding that is fringe, it is the underlying views themselves.

    During the Reagan years, legal immigration was much less (plenty of stats on this), protections for illegal immigrants were much less, the idea that nations had every right to limit membership was more accepted, and the idea that large flows of people from Africa and Asia had the right to move to the US or Europe or Canada was absurd. And immigration was less of a hot public issue.

15. In other words, the fringe right is so enmeshed with the “center” right that there is little difference? I suppose that’s true.

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