For years, conservatives have quoted my late friend Andrew Breitbart’s pithy rephrasing of a very old idea: “Politics is downstream of culture.” The odd thing is that, almost overnight, many of the same conservatives now argue as if industrial and trade policy is upstream of culture.
Many observers emphasize economic threats posed by trade and automation. But I believe that the divide is mostly cultural.
Let me repeat something else I wrote in that essay.
In fact, I think it would be good for the Republican Party for a leading figure with a conservative agenda and a moderate tone to compete with President Trump for the nomination in 2020. The goal would not be to take Mr. Trump down but to set an example for a different Republican Party. This might give hope to those of us who wish for a political future that is less viciously tribal.
a conservative agenda and a moderate tone to compete with President Trump for the nomination in 2020.
Remember voters thought Trump was more centrist than HRC in November 2016 and I believe voters thought this more because of his position on Social Security & Medicare while campaigning as a dealmaker. (And Romney fit your definition as a culture candidate above.)
I guess at the heart of this conservative discussion is we can free society as long as we can ensure all people to marry young, stay married and go to church.
How do you fix culture without direct economic incentives?
I wonder what would happen if we just let the Republican party be what it wants to be – that is the Trump kind of Republican party. Would it survive, or would it wither and die, and if so, might not whatever comes after be better?
I don’t believe that the Democratic Party would take over as a one-party monopoly. Our system is too driven towards two-party polarities. Some other party would rise to replace it. Maybe not the Libertarian Party, but something. The Greens might rise to take over the far left of the Democratic party, with the Democrats shifting into the center right. If the Republicans survive as a populist workers party, the Democrats might shift in a more libertarian direction. Someone is always going to want to snap up every voter block that can be absorbed. Trying to “fix” the Republican party may be a fools errand. We’re had an alliance with the Republicans for decades, maybe it’s time to try something different.
California is a one part state. I’m not sure why you find a one part state equilibrium untenable. There are lots of examples throughout the country.
It seems to me that what happens is that the primary for that particular party becomes the “election”. If I was going to run for Mayor in Baltimore, I wouldn’t run as a republican, I would try to win the democratic primary.
Occasionally you might get some member of the other party whose positions are almost identical to the primary party, and who talks about how much they don’t like their own party, that wins based on some personal charisma or circumstance. Governance wise not a whole lot changes though, since their agenda is almost a carbon copy of the democratic agenda.
New York State is rapidly tilting toward one party status.
The instapundit blog drew attention to this in part by linking to the mercurial, not-always-sensible, and almost never politically correct Bob Lonsberry.
According to the economist Edward Glaeser, the phenomenon probably could be classified under the “Curley Effect,” named after the Boston Mayor.
Lonsberry is here
http://www.lonsberry.com/writings.cfm?story=4236&go=4
Glaeser is here.
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/glaeser/files/curley_effect_1.pdf
State parties are supported by the national party. If the Republicans in California had no outside support, they would either die off or be forced to expand their coalition. That doesn’t happen because they are bound by the policies espoused by the national party. As long as the national party is still able to get 51% of the EC, it will keep the state parties alive.
What positions could the California Republicans take if they weren’t being “held back”.
Look, we have Larry Hogan here in deep blue Maryland. So we elected a Republican and he is deeply popular. What did it get us?
1) Maryland Taxes are still very high, and I don’t see that changing in a substantial way under Hogan.
2) Maryland doesn’t appear to have made strides toward fiscal soundness under him outside the general economic improvement. We still have state pension issues like most other blue states.
3) He hasn’t done anything to ease my concerns over schools. Baltimore County schools continue to degrade. I don’t see him stopping things like the Catonsville redistricting. I don’t see him stopping Montgomery County from adding racial AA quotas to its gifted child programs.
4) Nothing has happened related to the spike in crime in Baltimore.
Perhaps some of these are local “county” issues, but the point is electing a Republican to state office didn’t really do anything. Perhaps he didn’t implement even wackier ideas a Democrat might have proposed, I guess there is that, but it seems to me that the kind of “moderate Republican” that wins in blue states is essentially, “charismatic guy with good story that basically lets the status quo roll on.”
Yes.
My whole point is that the ideological composition of the parties will *move* to attract just enough voters to form a viable coalition. If not for the national party, California Republicans would probably be more socially liberal. If you don’t like that well, your problem is not that California is one-party but that you can’t convince 51% of the voters to vote for a party that is anti-gay-marriage.
Is the California Republican Party anti-gay marriage (I honestly don’t know). Do they emphasize it?
Larry Hogan is socially liberal. He’s also economically liberal, or at the very least he doesn’t do anything to chip away at existing leftist economics or deal with slow rolling issues (pension liabilities). So again, what difference does it make.
There is some idea that if only the GOP would abandon all social conservatism in blue states, then they could like cut taxes, balance the budget, and make other non-superficial conservative economic changes that really move the needle if only those social conservatives weren’t holding them back. I’m not seeing it.
Well, maybe some of the positions they would have to abandon wouldn’t purely be “social conservative” ones. There’s certainly a component of “what the voters will actually go for”, and if you can’t convince the voters to vote for lower taxes, than maybe that would be one of those things.
Anyway, I’m not exactly advising the Republicans to do anything. I’m simply arguing that there will always be two parties because of how our political system works. Those two parties might both be on the “left” of the current political spectrum by some definitions. But they will find some sort of political axis to define their differences over, like the current naionalist vs. internationalist dynamic.
I just think that allowing this process to play out might be better in the long run than trying to hold the traditional Republican coalition together.
“One Party State” isn’t about partisan labels because mere labels don’t matter. It’s about where on the current political axis the local competitive tipping point is for elections.
When people complain about someplace being a “One Party State”, they are saying that anything resembling either mainstream conservatism or progressivism has no chance in local elections.
So, it’s about the electoral tendencies of the voting population of a particular jurisdiction, in the context of, and compared in relation to, the tendencies of the overall national population. If California elected 100% “Republicans” who were indistinguishable from the set of Illinois “Democrats”, it would still be a be a 100% One Political Ideology State.
If political party labels were really that locally flexible, then in a heavily progressive voting district, there is zero functional difference between someone calling themselves a “Republican” and adopting the same policy positions of the more “moderate, centrist” Democrat in the primary, if that is the position needed to win the day.
If you think that everything lies along a one-dimensional spectrum then that makes sense. The Republicans can only win by moving left, so what difference does it make.
But if you think of the political spectrum as a multi-dimensional arena in which the parties comprise shifting coalitions it’s entirely possible for the Republicans to abandon some positions and embrace others in order to expand their coalition. That doesn’t involve moving “left” or “right”. It just means moving somewhere else in the space of possible coalitions. Which also forces the other party to move around in the space of possible coalitions.
In other words, it makes a difference. You’re not just shifting to be identical to the other party, but allying with a different, more viable, coalition of interests.
I would think the last two years would’ve safely dispelled any notion that the Democrats were going to become more libertarian. They have – and all signs indicate will continue to – become more socialist, more racist, more sexist, and more illiberal. That’s hard to dispute at this point.
“Someone is always going to want to snap up every voter block that can be absorbed.”
Actually, no they won’t. Just the opposite, I’d say. Democrats only need to win a plurality to win elections. The less palatable Republican candidates are, the more extreme the Democrats can afford to get (in order to satisfy their core base) while still being perceived as the lesser evil by, say, middle and upper class professionals offended by Trump.
The parties race together. If one party goes toward the center, the other party has to do likewise to stay competitive. But if one party moves toward the fringe, the other party can afford to move toward the fringe as well while staying competitive. Keep in mind that the goal of a party is to get just enough votes to win, no more. Every vote above what’s necessary to win is a compromise they made with some interest group or demographic at the expense of the pre-existing coalition that wasn’t necessary.
So, if the Republicans decline, at least in the short term, the Democrats would indeed become a one-party ruler, and could rule from further left by virtue of non-Democrats being more divided.
Really? There is significant polling saying that they have become more pro-free-trade. I realize this is a position that certain “libertarians” have decided is no longer important, (in favor of I’m not sure what, complaints about how unfair it is that white people can’t use the N-word?), but to the libertarians I knew 10-20 years ago, that would have been a huge deal. I remember when the Democratic base was protesting the WTO in Seattle.
Democrats only need to win a plurality to win elections. The less palatable Republican candidates are, the more extreme the Democrats can afford to get (in order to satisfy their core base) while still being perceived as the lesser evil by, say, middle and upper class professionals offended by Trump.
Yes. That’s exactly what will drive the formation of a *different* party. Lets say case (A), the Republicans start losing elections badly, and the Democrats are winning with big majorities. As the Democrats narrow their focus (cause they only need to get a plurality) there will people, like middle and upper class professionals, who will be casting about looking for an alternative. Either the R’s will shift back into a more moderate position to snap those voters up, OR some other party will come along to fill the void, and probably replace the Republican party in the process (because a three-party dynamic is not possible given the way the EC works).
The other thing that may happen, case (B), is that IF the Trump coalition remains viable, keeps winning elections, that means working class white labor keeps voting Republican. But that also means they are not voting Democratic. Then the Democrats have to shift to absorb some votes in order to win again. They could try to woo working class whites back from the Republican party, but they could also try to woo people who want more trade and immigration, who are now in conflict with the core Republican coalition. So that could result in Democrats becoming more libertarian on trade – because they could snap up constituencies that benefit from freer trade.
The point is, No matter which side is winning, politics will drive the winning side to narrow it’s coalition, and the losing side to try to shift it’s positions to absorb any disaffected voter group, so the system is always pulled back into a two-party dynamic. They may comprise different coalitions and have different ideological premises, but there will always be TWO. If the Republicans can’t ideologically shift to appeal to 51% of voters for some reason, then it WILL collapse, and some other party WILL replace it.
“Really? There is significant polling saying that they have become more pro-free-trade.”
Ah, the polls! That must explain why congressional Democrats enthusiastically embraced TPP and Chuck Schumer has scolded Trump’s trade policies, rather than calling on him to double down… Polls are pretty close to being totally meaningless. Let me know when ‘free trade Democrats’ start enjoying a resurgence in electoral success, as opposed to the current wave of Democratic socialists.
“like middle and upper class professionals, who will be casting about looking for an alternative…”
You’re still assuming the Democrats *need* to appeal to such groups. As long as the alternative major party is, to these groups, bad enough to drive them to vote not vote, vote third party, or vote Democrat despite misgivings, then Democrats can ignore them. The Democrats only have a reason to care what these groups ‘in the middle’ think if the Republicans start caring as well. Otherwise, there’s no reason for them to move in a centerward or libertarian direction. Just look at the mid-terms: did Democrats win Orange county by being more moderate or more libertarian? The problem with your theory is that the very people they could woo by being more pro-trade are already going to shift toward the Democrats even if they stay hostile to trade. And Trump’s purported coup with the white working class is thoroughly over-hyped. He lost the popular vote by a decent margin and owes his victory largely to a convenient electoral map and his opponents incompetent campaigning. It’s doubtful this represents a permanent coalitional acquisition for the GOP.
I think you dearly want a socially left-wing pro-free-market party, but I think that’s clearly wishful thinking. The trajectory of American politics is toward a European style binary, socialists on one hand and populists on the other. I see no rising economically libertarian wing in the national Democratic party. Hillary Clinton ironically is now likely the closest thing to that.
You may be right that I am *hoping* things will move in that direction. And I think that you are probably right that the US is moving towards a European style populist vs. socialists dynamic.
What I’m engaged in here is not so much prediction but attempting to craft a strategic approach by which libertarian policy ideas, might have the best chance of being implemented. One way to do that is to try to swing one of the parties in a libertarian direction.
The way small political factions can do that is by becoming swing voters. In other words, if libertarians are going to have any influence, we must be seen to more than willing to quit voting Republican and start voting Democrat (or vice versa) if one party or the other promises to enact those policies. If the Democrats think they might pick up just enough votes to swing a state in the EC by becoming more free-trade oriented, then they might just do that.
It has been really surprising to me the way things have gone, though. In the 90s it seemed like the Democrats had finally conceded that they had been too far left and had to move toward the center to win. But then, in the last 10 years they have completely repudiated that, and are moving back to the left very strongly. Your example of free trade is part of that; in the recent past, the Democrats have been much more pro-free-trade, but recent developments don’t look that way at all. Bernie Sanders is not pro-free-trade.
Free trade is very unpopular. It would be quite ironic to complain about the Republican ‘betrayal’ of Libertarians on the subject – that is the result of them giving up on a good but hopelessly unpopular cause in a desperate effort to expand their coalition – while giving precisely the same rationale for abandoning other positions.
Hillary was explicit: “I will stop any trade deal that kills jobs or holds down wages, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership. I oppose it now, I’ll oppose it after the election, and I’ll oppose it as President.”
Yet I guess her supporters assume she was flat-out lying?
The same thing happens in reverse if you’re Boris Johnson when he’s out promoting “a fantastic, all-singing and all-dancing, UK-Japan free trade agreement” and the need to “militate ceaselessly for free trade deals” and “taking the referendum and using it as an opportunity to rediscover some of the dynamism of these bearded Victorians; not to build a new empire, heaven forfend, but to use every ounce of Britain’s power, hard and soft, to go back out into the world in a way that we had perhaps forgotten over the past 45 years: to find friends, to open markets, to promote our culture and our values.”
And yet:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/05/10/americans-are-generally-positive-about-free-trade-agreements-more-critical-of-tariff-increases/
Tribal identification often has this strange effect of making people change their minds about stuff.
that is the result of them giving up on a good but hopelessly unpopular cause in a desperate effort to expand their coalition – while giving precisely the same rationale for abandoning other positions.
On the plus side, free trade is actually a very good policy that has all sorts of positive effects on the economy. While some of those other positions they should abandon, don’t. If it’s the economy, stupid, then pursuing positions that have long run positive effects on economic growth will reap electoral rewards. See Bill Clinton.
Conservatism and Libertarianism have both failed as ideologies. Conservatism (as practiced in the US) because it’s fundamentally defensive and relative and so has failed to conserve anything. Libertarianism because it can’t function as a stand-alone ideology, especially in a broadly democratic society in which the majority that fail under that ideology can vote themselves the property of those that win.
If the Republicans survive as a nationalist/populist party then the Democrats will continue their trajectory to a globalist/socialist party.
The by-any-means necessary war against Trump engaged in by both never-Trumpers like Goldberg and the radical left now controlling the House is a war on democracy pure and simple. It is undermining any remaining faith the average American may have in US institutions and the US establishment class, both of which are fundamentally corrupt. Reform will come regardless. Any support that Trump has, he owes is due to the fact that he has a stated, non-platitudinous agenda, to which he is sticking. Harris may speak in platitudes but the radical left’s agenda is clear and there is no doubt they are sticking to it and they are also winning support. When the never-Trumpers articulate an agenda other than “orange man bad” and demonstrate that they will do what they say, then maybe somebody will pay attention to them. The absence of a never-Trumper legislative agenda speaks volumes. They are about shutting out change and preserving a comfortable status quo.
that “radical left controlling the House” was democratically elected, was it not?
As was Trump
You nail it. Disagree with Trump any little bit and you are a communist declaring war on democracy.
“Any support that Trump has, he owes is due to the fact that he has a stated, non-platitudinous agenda, to which he is sticking”
You win the internet today.
Yes. But they have vowed to impeach Trump regardless of the constitution’s “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” language.
They have? Pelosi doesnt seem to be in a hurry….
a few radicals have been elected to the House, but I don’t see any indication that they are controlling it
Institutionally, the radicals like Sanders and Cortez are pretty impotent, which is why their play has been to appeal to popular sentiment. And it’s largely worked. People like Sanders and Cortez now have incredible influence on the Democratic agenda. Ideas like ‘medicare for all’ went from the fringe to party’s de facto position (the Democratic nominee in 2020 will most likely be someone who supports it) because of their efforts. Everyone’s now debating Cortez’s ‘Green New Deal’, rather than whatever the party leadership’s agenda is, because she’s doing interviews with major networks and running around on social media, and thereby bypassing leadership and appealing to the public.
She’s running around on social media exactly like Trump, appealing to the public, and she’s openly post-truth. Imagine if this was him, not her: “I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.”
One day she says “we have ten years left to plan and implement a Green New Deal before cataclysmic climate disaster.” Another day she says, more sensibly, “the world is going to end in twelve years.” But it doesn’t matter what she comes out with, there’s never any pushback on the order of something like a “Never Cortez” line in the sand.
There’s no movement of Democrats so embarrassed about her lack of interest in plausibility that they’re going to say out loud that facts are important in her case too, and not just when Trump pulls a Cortez, when Trump makes up fantasy numbers the way she makes up fantasy numbers.
She makes an obvious hypocrite of every Democrat at the Washington Post who inserts the word “falsely” into their reporting about Trump’s tweetstorms. Her falsehoods and his falsehoods are going to cancel each other out, except to Democrats.
If you’re a Democrat you’re going to agree that being morally right is an all-purpose license to lie. But she’s given Republicans another opportunity to point out the hypocrisy of Democrats in the media and congress. Democrats will keep saying that lying is wrong when Trump does it, and when Cortez does it, nothing. Not a word.
I think it is a mistake to view the relationship of politics and culture as upstream or downstream. There are obvious cross-currents, but politics has enough of its own particular dynamics to create its own behaviors. You can’t just explain what happens in our politics by understanding cultural trends, or vice versa.
I’d also point out that over time our economic development forces relentlessly greater specialization of labor, and drives us all to think more and more marginally. I’d say the cultural divide is driven by the economic divide.
Edgar – There is surprising little “by any means necessary” opposition to Trump given the circumstances. If you actually spent any time reading or listening to Goldberg, you would know that he does not respect that kind of opposition to Trump.
Trump does have a strategy for wielding power through base support, and that does force some consistency of purpose. Some of his ideas are crazy and some are not, but most of the uproar is a reaction to his stupendous incompetence and disruptiveness, driven by his unstable disposition, much more than his broader political positions. His decision to leave Syria is a perfect example. The longer term policy position was highly defensible. The way the President acted on the issue was terrifying.
Yes, I read Goldberg regularly. I even read that hot mess of a book he published last year. He attacks Trump relentlessly and maybe about 30% of the attacks are reasonable. I have no problem with people disagreeing with Trump. But just this week he wrote a column dismissing criticism of the FBI’s extra-constitutional and unprofessional behavior as being Trump’s fault. Goldberg may be reasonable at times but his continuous stream of cheap shots undermine any credibility he might otherwise deserve. The Republicans had the House and Senate for two years and all they could do was confirm Trump-nominated judges and cut taxes as Trump promised. I don’t see any big ideas for the types of reforms for which disillusioned voters are looking coming from the moderate establishment Republicans. What would a moderate Republican agenda even look like? Offering 50% of the tax and spending increases the Democrats demand? If there is anyone out there who can articulate a non-platitudinous Republican Party agenda for 2020 and who seems the least bit likely to actually act consistent with that agenda, by all means, run them in the primary and let the best person win. Anything but a return to “Read my lips, no new taxes” establishment types telling the base one thing and governing completely opposite.
Edgar-
“The by-any-means necessary war against Trump engaged in by both never-Trumpers like Goldberg”
So now you mean he just disagrees with Trump a lot?
“But just this week he wrote a column dismissing criticism of the FBI’s extra-constitutional and unprofessional behavior as being Trump’s fault.”
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/donald-trumps-fbi-problem-a-character-problem/
Again, you are being a tad loose with the language.
He blamed the extra-constitutional issues related to the FBI investigation on the basic structure of the FBI and how Congress has delegated its investigative responsibilities to it. He did not blame Trump for that. There was no mention of FBI’s unprofessional behavior, of which there has been some. That is unfortunate, but that behavior was no where near enough to cause all this.
Congress wasn’t going to just ignore Trump’s problematic behavior towards Russia. Perhaps the FBI is the wrong instrument, but it is an inherently dicey problem to investigate a sitting President. One way or another, Trump’s behavior was going to force an investigation.
Wasn’t Trump the first Republican in decades to promise to protect Social Security and Medicare? Didn’t Trump promise a healthcare system that would cost less and protect everybody? (See Midterms as well.) And didn’t Trump sound a Midwest Democrat on Free China Trade? Where Trump was strong ‘conservative’ was Immigration (and insulting libs) not economic issues.
So saying Trump was a strong conservatives misses these realities not one wonders if Romney announced Social Security and Medicare protections in the primary, that might have changed his prospects.
Hoping that the Republican Party detribalizes itself sounds like hoping for unilateral disarmament in a cold civil war.
How so? I don’t think ‘tribality’ is a weapon; rather, it’s a liability; or perhaps more accurately, a form of political consumption. Parties act tribally, IMO, because that’s what the base wants them to do, if they can get away with it. De-tribalizing, in this environment, is the equivalent of eating one’s vegetables. It’s not that it’s harmful; it’s beneficial in the long run. It’s just not what the tribe wants.
Tell, Mr. Kling, in what ways were George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney not “leading figures with a conservative agenda and a moderate tone”? In what way did any of the three not lead to increasingly tribal politics?
The simple truth is right in front of everybody here- the Democrats can see the demographics clearly, the Republicans continue to delude themselves- we are only two or three elections away from the Democrats being unbeatable at the national level. Virginia has already slipped into the blue column pretty much permanently. Florida and North Carolina will be there within a decade. Trump figured out a way around that by actively courting the still heavily white midwest, but I think it pretty damned clear that he is the only Republican that could have won WI, MI, and PA at all, and the only one that could have won IA and OH so handily.
Economically at least, Bush, McCain, and Romney were all pretty moderate. Or maybe I’m just a particularly extreme libertarian.
On demographics, I think Trump’s coalition is actually more of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Over time, more and more ethnic minorities – Asians and hispanics in particular – would’ve started thinking of themselves as basically white. Suburbanites would’ve kept voting according to their economic interest rather than identifying themselves with metropolitan cultural ideals against ‘backwards’ rural ones. Even urban hipsters would eventually start paying taxes.
I think Trump has actually caused many demographic factors that are supposed to work against the Republicans (they’ve failed to produce the permanent Democratic majority that’s been eagerly predicted for decades now) to crystallize. Winning the midwest is ultimately likely a Pyrrhic victory. Irreparably declining economies, stagnant or declining populations, and still prone to abandon you for not merely a Democrat but one as far left as Sherrod Brown at the drop of a hat.
This runs counter to the evidence provide by every single election run prior to 2016 and since 1988- every single one. Like it or not, Hispanic-Americans and Asian-Americans largely pull the lever for Democrats, and always have. There is literally no reason to expect that change in the next 20 years. Republicans have bent over backwards to court Hispanics with amnesties (86)- George W. Bush actively campaigned on a second amnesty, and guess what- a white fop from Massachusetts won Hispanics by 10%- and Kerry won Asian-Americans by 13%.
Seriously, if what you wrote were even remotely true, California wouldn’t have become a 1 party state in the last decade.
It was true of every other ethnic group that immigrated to the US in large numbers (except maybe Jews). Irish, Italians, Polish were all staunchly Democratic. Over time, as they assimilated and their cultural identities diluted and they became increasingly ‘just American’, their voting habits began to reflect the general population.
The fact that large numbers of new (and poor) Latin Americans are still immigrating pushes the overall Latino population pattern toward the Dems, but English-speaking, American-born Latinos are more likely to vote Republican than their foreign-born parents. (http://fortune.com/2016/10/29/hispanic-voters-generation-divide/)
This suggests that if new immigration were to stop, as assimilation continues, the natural tendency would be for the descendants of immigrants to increasingly resemble the general public, i.e., become more Republican.
You don’t win a lot of elections with 41% of the vote…
It’s also worth digesting this statement:
“Ninety percent of Hispanics who primarily speak Spanish identify as Democrats, but of those who mostly use English that number drops to 59%, according to a Pew Hispanic Center survey released earlier this month.”
So it’s not necessarily a generational measure, but a language measure. That will have some correlation with generation, but not perfect.
For instance, class measures will impact English usage, with higher class Hispanics speaking more english. People further up the class ladder trend republican.
Also, within Hispanic there are “White Hispanics” and much browner Hispanics (including many people from the Caribbean Islands that have African slave heritage). Often measures of immigrants excludes people from Puerto Rico (who are on the browner side) since they are technically citizens through a colonial loophole, even though millions of them radically changed the complexion of the Northeast and have some pretty bad social statistics (Ron Unz always tries to exclude these people from his numbers on this technicality). So I get that White Cubans that fled Castro speak English and vote more republican, while brown Puerto Ricans that live in wash heights and speak Spanish many generations in will vote democrat. It’s not clear to me that the people from the PR are about to change their allegiance based on this information.
Also, white ethnics, including my own the Irish, didn’t necessarily assimilate completely. They still don’t vote as GOP as other whites, the Irish were even split fairly evenly in the last election. Maybe some of this has to do with the concentration in the Northeast, but I don’t have enough data to segment them out by geography.
Trump did do a lot to win over Italians, but he is the personification of Staten Island.
Just read Tyler Cowen’s new column on Kamala Harris and her specific policy proposals (which includes great much deserved recognition of Dr. Kling’s thoughts on subsidizing demand and restricting supply). Unlike Goldberg, he apparently sees more to Harris than platitudes.
The tribalization is totally from the Dem side. Let’s be honest here. The Reps want people to be judged as individuals. The Dems want to be judged, and to judge, based on group membership. That’s what tribalism is.
The “Trump hate” is not against Trump. It’s against all Republicans by too many Dems.
It’s Democrat Derangement Syndrome. They hate a 16 y.o. teen; they hate an almost lily white justice; they hate Cruz at restaurants; they hated Romney; they hated McCain, and even more Palin; they hated Bush. It wasn’t Bush Derangement Syndrome – it’s Dem Derangement Syndrome.
So Arnold is missing the point when he writes:
If they move in the direction of civility and respect for their political adversaries, then they risk being viewed as soft on the cultural enemies of their voters.
Being soft is not the problem, losing is the problem, and accepting the changes the Dems demand means losing.
“Civil” Reps have been losing and/or, if winning like Bush won, the GOPe has failed to conserve the good American culture of independence, Free Speech, honesty, and personal responsibility.
Trump has been tweeting as POTUS for two years. In every single month, his tweets have been more honest than the Dem media.
Arnold sees populist resentment as coming from a sense of cultural resentment that is strongest among non-college-educated males. I see the cultural resentment, but look at the strength of the Dem tribalist hate against Kavanaugh. There is nothing from Trump supporters, especially his Tea Party support, that comes anywhere close.
Look at the Dem media tribalist outrage against the Nick Sandmann. There’s nothing nearly as strong from any Rep side.
The Dems dominate the culture, drive the culture, and are driving the polarization and the irrational hate.
It will be necessary, tho probably not sufficient, to withdraw tax-exempt status from all Universities which have been discriminating against hiring Republicans. This “open secret” discrimination has aided and abetted the current demonization against Reps and those who wear a MAGA cap. It is illegal, but such laws have not been enforced in any anti-PC way.
Reps need to be doing a lot more lawfare. I hope the Covington Catholic School students who were libeled and slandered get started and get big BIG million $$ settlements.
It’s gonna get worse before it gets better.
Holy Toledo.
An interesting thought experiment.
Ask a “free trader”: “Are there any empirical results that could happen in the next 20 years, or have happened in the last 20 years, that could alter your views on “free trade”?
Of course, the answer is “no.”
The free trade theory has been sacralized into a free-trade theology.
No matter what happens to US living standards, free traders will believe in “free trade” and open borders.
It is a faith.
“Free traders” start with a conclusion, and then work back the data to support their conclusion.
Jonah’s pushing back against the idea, as he puts it, “that ‘elites’ have rigged the system for their own benefit and that they have done so deliberately.”
But people don’t do things “deliberately” or “for their own benefit.” They can’t help what they do. They act blindly, ineffectually, in perfect ignorance of the consequences. Unaware of their motivations. People are helpless.
People carry out tasks. Like robots. And the great example of this is robots.
All the brilliant geeks working on building better robots are going to put themselves out of work. That’s the long run.
You can make a lot of money now building fantastic, genius robots. But when robots can build robots, what will a geek do for work? The future of unemployment is going to include a lot of technically-minded coders and tinkerers, because they’re not going to be able to compete with their own technology.
A friendly and empathetic hairdresser will always be able to get work. If you’re a good listener and have a good bedside manner, you can work as a nurse or a caregiver. But if you’re a programmer or an engineer, what can you do that a robot can’t?
We can’t reason with words if we can’t be clear about what those words mean. He’s making an error here because he’s using two different meanings of both “politics” and “culture”, which makes any appeal to the authority of some maxim completely confused and invalid.
What Breitbart meant is that public opinion with regard to political and ideological questions is “cultural” in that it is extremely flexible, malleable, and sensitive to environmental cues about what is socially respectable and compatible with high status on the one hand, and disreputable and likely to get one in big trouble on the other. The role of particular ‘mass information dissemination’ cultural institutions (mostly media, entertainment, and academia in this context) in creating the impression of common knowledge of modal social perceptions and manipulating these spontaneous social-psychological reactions by influencing this environment therefore is absolutely critical.
It is like a strong current, and if two ships wish to head in opposite directions, one suffers a headwind while the other benefits from a tailwind. And so no one who is trying to contest any political space via democratic processes can compartmentalize that effort away from the necessity of trying to neutralize the current advantage by putting up an equally competitive fight in the space of cultural influences. For every advantage your opponents have, you need to have an equal and opposite response, as indeed Breitbart News was conceived as “the Huffington Post of the right.”
Which, I have to say, is pretty obvious, and indeed “a very old idea” that conservatives have been complaining about (and trying, and mostly failing, to address) constantly for generations.
And the trouble with Jonah Goldberg’s claim is that, none of those conservatives has rejected any of that, or denied it’s central importance, in favor of some alternative theory. Instead, they have merely pointed out what is equally obvious:
1. The right has been doing about all it can in terms of successfully competing for influence over public opinion via the channels of media, academics, and entertainment (i.e. ‘culture’), given its serious structural disadvantage in these domains, and, unfortunately, it’s neither doing very well nor is there any reason to be optimistic that it could ever do much better with the poor information-culture tools it has. So, one goes to war with the army one has, and the most powerful tools at ones disposal, as the least worst option, and for better or worse the only powerful tools conservatives have left are state policy tools they can deploy when in charge. And also,
2. These are hardly the only things that influence public opinion or people’s political views, because if that were everyone would converge within a narrow range of views, which, well, if you want evidence that is false, circumspice.
Another major influence over those views are the interests, desires, aspirations, opportunities, needs, and anxieties, regarding economic matters, social status, and so forth, which arise out of one’s life circumstances. The most clear example of this is the “marriage gap” in political views.
When people are single and childless, they have a certain set of interests and priorities, but when they get married and have children, they have new priorities and very suddenly encounter different incentives and difficulties, which lead them to want to shape the social and policy environment to suit their new situations and circumstances.
That is, married people in stable nuclear family households with children are more “naturally conservative” than single and childless people, all else being equal. And if you can shape the overall social and economic environmental conditions to encourage more marriages of that sort, you will generate a higher proportion of conservative voters in the population.
Which is precisely to say that deployment of certain policies to encourage family formation by making it desirable, feasible, and affordable will indeed “change the culture”, by changing the modal, normal preferences of the voting population.
This has been a circulating “Republican Party Grand Strategy” proposal for some time. Ignoring this phenomenon is just as dangerous as ignoring the information-cultural influence.
Furthermore, conservatives are keen to point to the collapse in family formation and stability as being correlated with a host of other social pathologies and erosion of norms of bourgeois virtues of thrift, self-reliance, independence, civil participation, charity, prudence, propriety, discipline, deferred gratification, and so forth.
This is the other meaning of “culture” in terms of moral-culture and the social norms and good habits that are common in and emphasized by a population.
And the question is through what avenues can Republicans work to effect an internal “mission civilisatrice” of American moral culture and reclamation of huge swaths of lost territory in the last several generations of degeneration and depletion of social capital.
And again, the answer is that there just aren’t any powerful tools on the table except those state economic and migration policies, which can shape the incentives for, and invest in, individuals to allow them to transition to lifestyles they cannot currently achieve, and which will in turn repay political dividends by putting those people in life circumstances where they will find the conservative perspective and its ideas more appealing and personally beneficial.
That is to say that we are are transitioning to a Clientalist political equilibrium, and no party can have any hope of survival without either explicitly or implicitly offering its voters some kind of perceived benefit. Married people with children belonging to identity groups ineligible to receive special preferences are more likely to become Republican clients, if being Republican means it’s easier to begin and maintain that sort of lifestyle.
Now, which state policy levers one should pull and in what ways to make family formation as affordable and likely as possible – whether it is with trade, industrial, and migration policies, child-rearing subsidies of various kinds, or completely different actions – is an interesting question. But the point is that it’s well past time for Republicans and conservatives to start exploring that question, instead of just recoiling from it reflexively and having some allergic reaction to what is likely the only means left available to ensuring their political survival.
You write this as if the people on this blog were primary concerned with advancing the socially conservative agenda of the Republican party. But we’re largely not. Libertarians are (have been) in a temporary coalitional alliance with social conservatives via the vehicle of the Republican party. A vehicle which has recently betrayed us on important issues such as trade policy. To be more explicit, how exactly will encouraging family formation thus leading to more socially conservative voters advance free trade policies, if the Republican party no longer advocates free trade policies? This is a very roundabout mechanism to achieve our policy goals, at best.
For the record after getting married and had kids, i think I became somewhat more socially liberal, since I want my kids to live in a racially harmonious society, not one riven by divisions between identity groups competing for clientalist advantages via the mechanism of redistributive government programs.
if there’s some sort of cultural norms that I would like to advance via the mechanism of government policy, it would be getting the population to be *less* driven by identity politics, and *more* adherent to the concept of universal equality and social inclusion.
“You write this as if the people on this blog were primary concerned with advancing the socially conservative agenda of the Republican party.”
No I didn’t. I wrote it as an analysis of whether Jonah Goldberg’s statement makes sense in the context of the current debate among conservative intellectuals on assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the current situation and regarding various different paths for the future of the movement and the Republican party. And his statement didn’t make sense.
None of that analysis has anything to do with what you, or I, or the usual commenters on this blog think, or what our anecdotal experiences and preferences may be, as we are nearly all outliers on the spectrum of the things that matter to mainstream American politics.
As for whether the Republicans should give up on social conservatism to become more popular, if that advice were valid, then it would apply double for genuinely free market policies of all kinds, including trade, where are very unpopular.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-24/free-trade-opposition-unites-political-parties-in-bloomberg-poll
If we believe David French, many white parents are watching the media’s treatment of the Covington kids wondering if that could happen to their kids, and becoming less ‘socially liberal’ by the day. I think a key point is that even people are willing to nobly take upon themselves the cross of atoning for whatever collective historical wrongs on their minds, they’re going to be less willing to impose that original sin on their children. If it’s a foregone conclusion that there’s going to be a color bar, it’s reasonable that people will scramble to make sure their kids and grandkids aren’t the ones on the bottom. I expect having kid makes people less altruistic regarding what we call ‘society’ and more inclined to worry about the lot of people who look like you and come from where you came from, because now you have kids you care about more than yourself that also look like you and came from where you came from.
Time preference and public goods are the big differentiators with families.
On time preference things that will happen 10, 20, 30+ years out just aren’t important to non-families. I mean the fact that the USA gets a little more non-white each year isn’t going to result in disaster for me in my adult lifetime, but it could mean disaster for my kids. Same with pension obligations and other long term trends. If you don’t have a family, who cares.
The second is that families rely on public goods. Namely public safety and public schools. The vast majority of people can’t afford private schools and private security. Nor can they just punt and say it doesn’t matter like those that don’t have kids. The dysfunction in a place like Baltimore is an annoyance to a single young professional. its an untenable situation for a family. When you need to use public goods and public spaces, all sorts of things “become your business”, and you’re needs come into conflict with the desires of others far more often.
Unfortunately, these days the people who are nominally socially liberal are the ones who are promoting a society riven by divisions between identity groups and redistributive government programs.
It’s actually both, at the moment, in my opinion.
The alt-right/Trump wing of the Republican party represents white identity politics. Maybe it’s push-back against left-wing identity politics, but it’s still identity politics.
What has been lost is the classically liberal concept of having one inclusive society of equal individuals.
(Inclusive in the sense of having a common cultural intersection of that is open to people of all races and ethnic/religious groups. You’re not going to get people to drop out of their identity groups if there isn’t a common identity group they are able drop out into. )
Of course you’re right, especially the second paragraph. However… I don’t particularly want to argue about this, but I don’t see white identity politics as anything but a very small niche group. But as I see it, the left-wing type of identity politics has taken over the universities and is expanding outward from there at an alarming rate.
The alt-right/Trump wing of the Republican party represents white identity politics.
Seriously? That is as stupid and hateful as writing “The Stalinist/Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wing of the Democratic Party represents totalitarian politics.” There’s a smidge of truth and an ocean of hate.
I think the right has actually been pretty successful at expanding its influence over public opinion via social (and other ‘new’) media; not in the sense that it was devised by conservative strategists, but that new media has created outlets that do not recapitulate the under-representation of right-leaning views that persists in the old media. There are now a myriad of conservative (or anti-leftist) youtube channels that dwarf some of the most prestigious newspapers in terms of audience.
On the left, there are more and more calls for regulation of social media to clamp down on putatively harmful views. Even social media companies – deferring to their politics over their economic interests – are calling for more regulation of social media companies. And the right, meanwhile, is increasingly demanding ‘fairness doctrine’ type legislation and anti-censorship laws for social media. It would seem that there’s something of a consensus that the right has had unprecedented success in influencing opinion with social media. Of course both sides may be wrong, but it seems to be what they both largely believe.
And yet, it’s the right that complains the most loudly about other people’s speech on social media. They not only want to be not banned from Twitter, they want other people on Twitter to not be allowed to call them names.