Martin Gurri writes,
No less a figure than Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York, waved the white flag. “You don’t need to protest,” he said. “You won. You won. You accomplished your goal.” Then, plainly baffled, Cuomo added, “What do you want?”
Here is an exercise. Try to write the ending to the following story.
Once upon a time, people fleeing religious persecution came to the New World and built a nation that would have no nationally established religion. True, the nation would experience political movements that included religious impulses: anti-slavery; temperance; eugenics; civil rights; environmentalism. But none of these movements embraced persecution of heretics.
Recently, unlike any of these movements, the social justice movement has become animated by the thrill of identifying and persecuting heretics. The end result will be. . .
I don’t know how to fill in the ending. In the near term, demographics favor the social justice religion. Its most vociferous opponents are almost all over 50. Among people under 40, it seems to be a juggernaut.
As Gurri points out, it is the nature of the religion not to accept victory. It seems likely that no matter how many heretics it cancels, there will still be more to be rooted out.
But neither will it accept defeat. The temperance movement faded with the failure of Prohibition. The eugenics movement faded because it became linked in the popular mind to the bad guys in the World War II movie.
So what will happen?
Oh didn’t it. Anti-slavery in particular involved a whole holy war on the heretics, with a decade of persecution of defeated heretics to follow. And the first sentence is false. “People fleeing religious persecution” came to the New World and built theocratic states, and engaged in quite a lot of persecution of heretics: Quakers and Spiritists (Anne Hutchinson) are two examples I know of without having to look it up. The First Amendment to US Constitution was adopted because no individual state was going to go along with another state imposing their established religion, or just recently nominally disestablished religions. E.g. the State of Massachusetts legally required all citizens of the state to belong to and pay tithes to their parish church until 1824. It must not be forgotten that state governments and state constitutions were an incomparably bigger deal in the late XVIII-early XIX century than they are now. Anti-Catholic feeling ran high, occasionally rising to persecution, through most of the XIX century, and even in the XX century it arguably formed part of the motivation for the forced dispersal of compact urban settlements of European immigrant Catholics. So the current moment is, far from being “unlike these movements”, completely in keeping with them.
There is almost certainly a fascinating story hiding behind the passive voice here. E.g., I wonder what did the World Council of Churches think about eugenics.
Right. The puritans weren’t even fleeing persecution. They *had* fled Archbishop Bancroft’s purges, to refuge in Leiden in the Calvinist Netherlands, which tolerated them just fine.
But they didn’t like Dutch language or culture and they were worried that it was corrupting their children. Which it probably was, by Puritan standards, but at the same time, it definitely wasn’t *persecuting* those children.
The Puritans wanted to be Brownists but just as much they also wanted to be *English*, and they couldn’t do that in either Holland or England. So the only option was to make a new England. Which they did.
And the New England they set up was an inflexible theocracy an order of magnitude less tolerant than the Britain they had left 13 years prior.
Rothbard goes over this whole history in the first volume of his impressive Conceived in Liberty (the lost final volume of which was finally resurrected from his piles of scrawl and just recently published!). Even though this history was undisputed it was still ‘controversial’ in terms of being likely to provoke hot passions, as it went against the grain of the mythological framing and narrative of the American Founding which was taught to everyone in schools. And so you wouldn’t want to correct people at the bar on these points if they had already emptied a few glasses.
As Moldbug recently pointed out, however, the progressives have now denigrated American history with their own, even more inaccurate story, when they bother teaching anything to the kids at all, to the point where one can speak openly about these issues and criticize the pilgrims and the basis for the revolution without anyone batting an eye.
The religious wars in Europe became so horrific that the Protestants and Catholics finally decided that the least bad option was to call a truce. Perhaps after enough “woke” people have been battered, fired from their jobs, and “cancelled” because yesterday’s mainstream PC statements magically became “racist” today, they’ll decide that the game just isn’t fun anymore. As the old saying goes: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged.
In many places, one side won total victory over the other and sought to violently eradicated the other side for generations to come. E.g. in France Catholics were brutalizing the defeated Protestants well into the 18th century, over a century after the wars of religion. In Spain too. The persecution only ended when secularism gradually began to erode the fervor of the dominant religion. And that took a very long time.
To begin to answer this important question, it is useful to remember the roots of the current extremist passions. In 2014, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was calling for laws to punish climate skeptics among whom he numbered the Koch brothers: “Do I think the Koch Brothers are treasonous – yes, I do. They are enjoying making themselves billionaires by impoverishing the rest of us. Do I think they should be in jail – I think they should be injuring three hots and a cot at the Hague with all the other war criminals. Do I think the Koch brothers should be tried for reckless endangerment? Absolutely, that is a criminal offense and they ought to be serving time for it.” Others have called for the execution of climate skeptics. And it is the certainty of thethat the case is overstated and doubt is indeed warranted, that has infected every other issue, all of which are tied to climate change in one way or another. Those who might want to alter the trajectory of the heretic hunting religion might do well to acknowledge recent research that has found that natural climate variability is real and significant, and, not meekly bend the knee to the imagined consensus.
The extreme conformism of the contemporary progressivism and its authoritarian calls for total submission in all things to the new religion bears a strong resemblance to radical Islamism. One possible ending to the story is that the USA follows the Turkish trajectory with Biden as Erdogan. Erdogan originally ran on infrastructure jobs. But just as Erdogan went on to suppress the media and exert authoritarian control, so too we can see the outline of a similar pattern in Biden’s proposals to create new Department of Justice police agencies devoted to the green religion.
I righteousness of this cause, despite all the mounting evidence n other countries in which cults gained popularity among elites, we have seen democratic backsliding. A typical pattern for a government to overemphasize a national security threat to create fear and foment panic thus allowing the government to condemn critics as unpatriotic and defenders of traditional institutions as uncaring elitists. We see this prominently today especially in the academic world where white supremacy is promoted as a dire and imminent threat against which must be fought by any means possible, and, where the voicing of any concern about collateral damage is indicted as white supremacy as well.
In the long run, demographics may rescue us from the progressive dystopia to which we have sentenced ourselves. Open borders may permit millions of Africans to migrate to the USA and with luck, they will bring their authentic inclusiveness with them. I was just reading in Arend Lijhphart’s excellent second edition to his Patterns of Democracy (highly recommended), a quote from Adebayo Adedeji, “Africans are past masters in consultation, consensus, and consent. Our traditions abhor exclusion. Consequently, there is no sanctioned and institutionalized opposition in our traditional system og governance. Traditionally, politics for us has never been a zero-sum game.” And in rescuing us from a religion of hate, so too we can hope that we will be rescued from the curse of our winner-take-all political system.
Baltimore is majority black and I wouldn’t say its defined by consultation, consensus, consent, and an absence of zero sum thinking.
Heck, the whole African continent is rife with inter-tribal wars and bloody civil conflicts. Colonial powers left half a century ago. Did they really draw the borders with such superlative foresight and cunning that the very world masters in consultation, consensus, consent and inclusiveness can make no headway for 50 years?
Progressive political theory is inconsistent on this point, and if anyone actually cared about intellectually rigorous debate anymore, one could try to heighten the contradiction.
On the one hand progressive historians used to place substantial weight on fallout of the reckless errors of European colonial powers in drawing arbitrary lines that did not sync up perfectly with the demographic profile of the territory. They blam all kinds of wars and tensions on the *lack* of disaggregated ethno-nationalism, which, when one is criticizing colonialism, is apparently a wonderful source of peace and security.
In every other context, borders are dumb and such ethno-nationalism is backwards and evil and also the source of all wars and tensions which are all really pointless and tragic, and diversity is strength, not a source of friction and disharmony.
Maybe the colonial powers could have taught those diverse tribes sharing the same states to lose consciousness of their distinct group identities so they could kumbaya together later, and some kind of tried, but no, that turns out to be a huge human rights no-no too.
It’s almost like you just can’t win with these people.
Well Africa does indeed have a diversity of political systems, some not without their problems. But what are we comparing them to? The idealized USA or the reality we are facing?
Paul Krugman announced the other day that the only way in which Trump could win re-election would be fraud. Biden has already hired 600 lawyers to litigate his way to the White House. There is a very real chance that we will relive Florida again this year and the election will be decided by the Supreme Court, which given Roberts performance, means a Biden victory.
In contrast, Botswana, Mauritius, Cape Verde, Senegal, Tunisia, Ghana, Nigeria, Sao Tome and Principe, Namibia, South Africa, and Benin are all free, functioning democracies. Given the backsliding in the US with respect to speech rights, associational autonomy, and political corruption, if the US were to be ranked on the Ibrahim Index of African Governance, it would definitely not come out at the top.
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Botswana is run by De Beers and its traditional tribal king. Namibia is run by mining companies and its local socialist commie party (which is also by curious coincidence the majority tribe party) who take 2/3 of the vote: by this standard China is also a multi-party democracy (check out the seats in the National People’s Congress). Mauritius, Cape Verde and ST&P are tax havens masquerading as countries. Touting South Africa as a free, functioning democracy… um. Tunisia isn’t black to begin with. Other countries I know nothing about.
In general, US blacks are not considered equivalent to black Africans, so a non-immigrant black from Baltimore is likely to be genetically differentiated as well as culturally differentiated from actual black African immigrants. Nigerian immigrants in the USA regularly outperform native whites and blacks on a wide range of metrics. Afro-Caribbeans are similarly differentiated. Indeed, when adjusted for socioeconomic status, all immigrants to the USA outperform natives on the PISA.
US blacks have suffered from living disproportionately in Democrat Party controlled urban areas where any sense of agency is crushed and have been subjected to schooling in institutions run by Democrat Party affiliated teacher unions.
When we look to cities like Paris in a color-blind country like France where the government is banned from collecting race statistics and everyone is equal, we see that Africans flourish and have a culture much different than that of blacks in the neo-apartheid USA where differential standards are applied by race in everything from college admissions to law enforcement.
You are comparing apples and oranges.
Social justice purges aren’t truly unprecedented. They are compared to McCarthy’s anti-communist purges for good reason. Didn’t McCarthyism end when at long last, to borrow the phrase, people stood up to him and refused to blacklist his targets? McCarthy, at least, had at least some power as a Senator. Campus and Twitter Social Justice Warriors have no actual power if college administrators, corporate executives, and the like stop indulging them just as children throwing a temper tantrums have no actual power if the parents stop indulging them.
The answer to social justice cancel culture is to Just Say No. Don’t apologize, don’t concede that one might have to check one’s privilege, don’t resign or force someone to resign, stand one’s ground. Especially on college campuses, the whole point of tenure is that faculty can Just Say No without losing their jobs. Walter Block seems to know how to Just Say No: https://www.econlib.org/walter-block-defends-his-academic-freedom/.
It makes one think that they don’t “just say no” because they really want to do what the students are demanding anyway… (i.e., the adults are the real problem, not the students)
McCarthy outed actual treasonous individuals (cf. Alger Hiss vs Whittaker Chambers). To this date it is still not illegal to be a racist so long as you don’t excercise this in a public service. It is still not illegal to say racist things.
The Woke have already torn down more statues and incited more harmful riots than ever McCarthy got away with. They have changed language and history to suit their aims. They impugn all whites and they impugn the totality of American history. And given the actual spies in the administration of the 40s and 50s, what was wrong was McCarthy’s excess but not the seriousness of the need to root out the communist spies. To date the woke have not outed a single person who has committed an actual crime. And McCarthy never singled out any group for the socialistic nature of their ancestors 3-4 generations earlier.
In reference to Cuomo, I think what they want, to the extent they want anything concrete, is that nobody, and especially no black people, should be arrested via force. I.E. if someone resists arrest they should basically be allowed to flee.
Honestly, I think of that scene in Demolition Man were they try to arrest the bad guy.
This may (has) lead (led) to increased crime both violent and petty. The non-murder crime can possibly be fudged in the statistics, though murder will be harder. I think the advocates are willing to accept this higher black on black murder rate to achieve lower cop on black violence, even if the trade off is rather lopsided (say 50:1).
That might not be exactely what a suburban soccer mom trying to be “right thinking” wants, but I do think it’s in line with the activist class. When my wife was on jury duty for an assault case they had one of those types, and he basically seemed to be of the opinion that the cops shouldn’t be arresting people and we shouldn’t have jails.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kb21_qI90pE
The real parallel to Social Justice activism is the Chinese Cultural Revolution, a successful persecution carried out entirely by ignorant “students.” And whether or not any of the theories about who’s behind today’s activism are true, it is certainly an attempt to wreck our civilization and replace it with an order very much like China’s.
The cultural revolution was the brainchild of Mao after his botched Great Leap Forward killed tens of millions. The dumb teenagers were a way to win an inter party dispute with the people that didn’t want China to starve. Once they had accomplished this goal he had the army ship them off the The countryside by force Night Of The Longknives style because they were too disruptive, though kept a little of the old magic behind to keep power till he died.
Lesson: If the Red Guard are getting away with crazy shit, it’s because the people with the guns are OK with it.
The “woke” religion is more crazed against heretics than others because the core tenet it is trying to uphold, human equality as a sacred moral absolute, is utterly at odds with visible reality. Individuals vary enormously in their personality traits, abilities, and social behavior and there are large average group differences as well. So the “woke” faith is continually threatened by empirical disconfirmation. Older traditional faiths held tenets that pertained to what was beyond empirical verification (life after death, God in his heaven, etc.).
The “woke” religion tries to deal with obviously disconfirming fact by inventing complicated theories of putative oppression to explain away difference, and then mobilizing social pressure to enforce at least nominal acknowledgment.
The egalitarian mania is probably a concomitant of democracy. No leader dares speak out against the way it is pushed to absurd extremes.
The future may or may not be a boot stomping on a human face, but the past certainly was basically almost all the time. It is reasonable to expect the future to be the same.
We should expect that some time, this decade, or next decade, what we think of as “civilization” will return to some flavor of boot stomping on faces.
In other words, things like the CCP, and occasional violent overthrow of such entities, is the norm of human history, and we should’t be surprized any level of destruction arising from group think and status warfare.
One likely possibility:
1. The left makes giant gains in public power.
2. The left starts to enact disastrous policy and punish dissent ruthlessly.
3. Regular people on the left start to get hurt, they realize this, and the existing left-wing coalition will fracture in a big way.
Additionally, immigration is kind of a one way door. Explosive surges in immigration and corresponding demographic and political upheaval seem likely sooner or later. That will likely spell the permanent end for the existing Republican Party and the Democratic Party will fracture into two.
Look back at Tyler Cowen’s early 2020 summary of the radical changes proposed by Elizbeth Warren:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/01/the-economic-policy-of-elizabeth-warren.html
Note that Tyler Cowen expresses shock and horror at the policy ideas, he still gives Warren his full support against Trump. In other words, the worst policy ideas on Earth couldn’t persuade academics like Cowen to ally with conservatives or moderate a single inch. And some variation of those policy ideas probably will happen and they will hurt people on the left as well as the right and provoke a coalition fracture.
At least some of the disastrous policy decisions have already been made by the Fed, Treasury, and Congress. They’ve baked a monetary crisis into the future. Biden is going to inherit that.
I disagree about the demographic trajectory. There are a lot of more young people who value liberty than you’d expect. They, like myself, are just quieter and operate under pseudonyms on the internet. If you follow Bronze Age Pervert and his followers, you’ll be surprised by how many of these people are young people of color.
“So what will happen?”
There are a lot of possibilities, but they all end in tears. Here is what usually happens as a historical matter:
Whatever the ideological “Cause” at a time or place happens to be, preaching it provides a useful way for outsider elites to undermine the legitimacy of the power held by insider elites. The trouble is, it never stops being useful. When it works, the former outsider elites become insider elites, but that only means there is a new set of outsider elites, and they are always going to try the same trick. So long as no one puts a firm stop to this mechanism, it goes on and on until things get to a breaking point. And breaking points are never fun.
The Cause always provides a theory, explicit or tacit, of the legitimate uses and ends of power: that is, to further The Cause. The subconscious calculation that the power play described above has a chance of working is what makes The Cause so inspiring of hot passions in the first place. It is the answer to that perennial question of why all the intellectuals are always so disproportionately on the left. The baseline attractiveness may be riding the wave of fundamental human impulses and desires which make it seem compelling, but the energy and enthusiasm is derived from the chance at power plays.
I’ll put theological and supernatural matters to the side, but it really doesn’t matter. The trouble is, even purportedly materialist, secular, and “scientific” Causes still don’t line up with physical and human reality. That’s because they can’t: reality is by nature too messy and complicated and inconvenient and ugly and unsatisfying. “Life isn’t fair.” The universe is made of hard choices and trade-offs and opportunity costs, but ideals don’t lend themselves to cost-benefit analysis and reasonable balancing of competing objectives. In such areas, human political social-psychology always favors maximizing, not optimizing. You have to be able to signal you are always *more* of whatever it is than the next guy, so anyone who tries to find “the right balance” is setting themselves up to get out-bid.
This isn’t necessarily a recipe for catastrophe so long as you have a kind of “ideological separation of powers” and competing and equally powerful blocs dedicated to opposing ideological principles and keeping each other checked in a balance of terror which leads to balanced policy. But no one has yet implemented such a novel institutional design for *ideals*, and so usually the logic of power ends up favoring one ideal and one Cause, the same way an epidemic tends to become dominated by the most contagious strain of a virus.
So, the minute The Cause starts taking aim at maximizing some particular feature of human reality, it has set for itself what is in reality an impossible task, and thus there is really no end to chain of dissatisfying incompleteness and to the next steps one can propose, demand, or implement to be even more faithful to it.
And so, no matter how loyal and enlightened and dedicated someone in a leadership positions thinks himself to be, to the extent society is able to function and get by at all, it is always by allowing some exceptions or compromises and shortfalls, and it is these exceptions which make him vulnerable to attack for insufficient faith, as some new outsider elite starts gunning for his job by accusing him of heresy.
What makes it all particularly toxic and dangerous is that the power plays require muscle or majorities or market power or whatever it is that by strength of numbers is sufficient to threaten and provide the intimidating backing for the power play. So, whatever The Cause happens to be at the beginning, it tends to be corrupted and warped by the need to pay off these client supporters with a promise to use power to give them something they want, and evolves along the lines of the latest shape of that context.
At some point things start spin really out of control and become chaotic and unstable and no one is safe in any position for a minute, because there is always *something*, some kind of heresy, infidelity, sin, or ideological kompromat someone can use to drag the new guy back down. Everything becomes like crabs in a bucket.
Which reaches the breaking point.
Eventually, and inevitably if you don’t get a total collapse or foreign invasion, you will get to the guy who has been seeing all the happen and who knows he can’t live with that kind of insecurity, especially when things start to get bloody, in which case he *literally* won’t live with it. He wants the room for maneuver to use the mechanism to get the top job, but only *one last time*, so that it can’t then used against him. Which means taking that room for maneuver away, from everyone else, forever.
And so, as soon as he can, he throws all the power he has at making sure no one can do this any longer. He replaces one decentralized reign of terror with his centralized reign of terror, but at least his has a chance of stabilizing the situation and ending the madness.
And if one is going to do that there is really no alternative to making oneself both the center of power *and* high priest of The Cause, with whom no one is allowed to disagree on either the right *or* the left without getting “re-educated”, at best. There might be some room for open discussion on a few trivial or technical matters, but never, ever on anything that even comes close to threatening the absolute legitimacy of the dictator’s secure hold on power.
If one is very, very lucky, The Party will eventually find a way to quietly relax policies based in furthering The Cause in this or that instance when they are really and obviously interfering with the basic needs of governance and statecraft, for instance, getting richer in order to pay for more power. After all, besides the domestic threat, there are also foreign outsiders to worry about, who are usually less easy to terrify into submission.
The “Strongman Scenario” is not fun, but is still better than the “No Man Scenario”, in which no one can be in charge or powerful enough to stop the slide into degeneration.
But why does it keep sliding? Again, because nothing is ever enough. When The Cause is corrupted to give its troops and clients what they want, eventually it comes to the point where it *can’t* give them what they want, in part because they all want the same thing, in another part because they all have demons on one shoulder.
The is the heart of the trouble we’re in now, because, as Cuomo asked, “What do you want”. Remember when people asked the Occupy Wall Street people, “What do you want? What exactly are your demands?” and it was a total mess? Or when people try to get serious specifics on “What does BLM want? What happens when I call 911?” it similarly devolves into just a general lashing out and whining session? They cannot articulate what they really want because it is primal thus sub-verbal and ineffable and doesn’t sell well.
And the intellectuals desperately revising and refining The Cause cannot catch up to such urges with anything approaching intellectual coherence and consistency until they finally give in and realize that they should just be unashamedly advocating total domination and murder of their rivals who deserve it because they are the cause of the all the problems and thus damn well have it coming to them.
If one avoids societal suicide, the one gets to the strongman breaking point, who is not going to let anyone have freedom of thought or expression, because this Social Failure Mode is a Pandora’s Box that is simply too dangerous to ever open back up. Even in the Peaces of Augsberg and Westphalia, the answer was “local strongman”, “cuius regio, eius religio”.
But while we are on our way, we are not anywhere close to that breaking point ourselves, “Quantilla prudentia mundus regatur?”
Unfortunately the game theoretic aspects of the situation do not allow for acceleration of the final outcome so that we can avoid all the unpleasantness in between now and then.
Wouldn’t that be a nice way to fight wars? After the capture of New Orleans the Confederacy realizes the terminal weakness of their strategic position and that they will lose a war of attrition and so sues for peace instead of fighting for three more years, costing hundreds of thousands more lives? That was Winfield Scott’s goal with his Anaconda, “so as to envelop the insurgent States and bring them to terms with less bloodshed than by any other plan.”
Unfortunately that’s not how wars of attrition go.
The best outcome for progressives themselves would be for them to agree to a non-strongman compromise which can stop the slide right now, instead of those who are still alive surrendering unconditionally to the future strongman in a weaker and poorer country. The best outcome for non-progressives would be to form a bloc that is strong and scary enough to convince progressives to agree to that compromise right now, instead of acquiescing to becoming the helpless grass that loses in the fight between elephants until the strongman comes.
But politics is war, and again, that’s not how wars go.
“And the intellectuals desperately revising and refining The Cause cannot catch up to such urges with anything approaching intellectual coherence and consistency…”
Trump is a one-man mob. His intellectual followers desperately try to translate his endless incoherent mouthings and tweets into something coherent and consistent, but his next mouthing, his next tweet, shatters their Rube Goldberg creations. Trumpism is an empty cause, there is only Trump “lashing out and whining.”
The Left has a cause that is vaguely plausible, self-contradictory, and unstable. But Trump is a void and they will replace the void with their cause.
The breakdown on the right is related to, but of a completely different nature and character than the breakdown on the left.
There is no ‘Trumpism’ and never has been.
Trump’s primary win only revealed the ideological vacuum at the heart of the GOP, and a zero can win when everybody else is a negative who is more interested in respectability than voters and winning. The links that are barely holding the Republican Party together are so weak that it cannot pass an Ideological Turing Test *on itself*.
There were a literal handful of smart people who took a serious stab at “reformulation” of a New Conservatism reminiscent of the old Reform Conservatism effort, and who tried to pull the various strands of interest groups together in some coherent concept that overlapped to the greatest extent possible with whatever Trump showed was necessary to win elections.
None of those efforts cares about making an accurate diagnosis of what was happening, so they never made any sense and tended to simply reflect the preexisting idiosyncratic preferences of the individual. They thus collapsed and were abandoned almost immediately, without anyone changing their minds about anything or learning any lessons.
I can tell you how to win against the Social Justice Warriors and against 90% of us social problems:
Tight labor markets and loose property markets.
How does that solve the problem?
The modern Progressives have returned to their radical pietist roots, but now without icky Christianity. Sooner or later, people will grow tired of the pietists and some number of them will have to be killed as they can’t be reasoned with.
Murray Rothbard gave a good description of the start of the radical pietists in the decades before the Civil War, and how they, the Damn Yankees, were the impetus for the bloodiness of the war. Simply look at Bloody Kansas for example. [See ‘Lysander Spooner: Libertarian Pietist’ at Mises Institute]
“Briefly, the pietist tends to hold that to be truly religious, a person must experience an emotional conversion; the convert, in what has been called “the baptism of the Holy Spirit,” has a direct relationship to God or to Jesus. The liturgical, on the other hand, is interested in either doctrinal belief or the following of prescribed church ritual as the key to salvation.
“Now, it might seem as if the pietistic emphasis on the individual might lead to a political individualism, to the belief that the State may not interfere in each individual’s moral choices and actions. In seventeenth-century pietism, it often meant just that. But by the nineteenth century, unfortunately, such was not the case. Most pietists took the following view: since we can’t gauge an individual’s morality by his following rituals or even by his professed adherence to creed, we must watch his actions and see if he is really moral.
“From there the pietists concluded that it was everyone’s moral duty to his own salvation to see to it that his fellow men as well as himself are kept out of temptation’s path. That is, it was supposed to be the State’s business to enforce compulsory morality, to create the proper moral climate for maximizing salvation. In short, instead of an individualist, the pietist now tended to become a pest, a busybody, a moral watchdog for his fellow man, and a compulsory moralist using the State to outlaw “vice” as well as crime.”
These were the fire and brimstone preachers who led slaughters of slave owners. The radical pietists of the mid-19th century became the Progressives of the late 19th century. In and around the 1920s, the movement split into Evangelicals who continued on with Christianity and the modern Progressives who took up Marxism as their creed. Now they’ve taken the Marxism but swung back to the fire and brimstone headed toward slaughtering the impure.
I think the market may solve this problem. Having such a decentralized movement wielding so much power is pretty chaotic and inefficient. Right now the level of chaos is pretty manageable, but the big test will be when it starts to impose serious costs on people who matter. So I suspect as the social justice movement continues to accumulate power and cultural influence, it may become more formal and centralized.
The big technology corporations are already creating “Trust and Safety” committees staffed by people pulled from various SJ-activist groups. Eventually, there may be a network of large social-justice organizations with a reputation for working well with Corporate America/ media orgs/ government, etc. These respectable SJ groups would get a lot of money from corporate/charitable donations and in turn be expected to police the SJ movement for renegades who step out of line and cause issues for organizations or individuals who have paid the required protection money. They could do this by coordinating to make sure that renegades get blacklisted.
So the market may solve this problem, at least for the people who can afford to pay. For everyone else, there is always the option of never expressing any opinions publicly.
That didn’t work for the labor unions that drove industry to move to right-to-work states. The incentives of union leaders were never aligned with either workers or industry.
There is no equivalent of a right-to-work state for Social Justice. I suppose you could invest in countries without an active SJ presence, but that rules out most of the most lucrative consumer markets.
For the most part, the leaders of big businesses are not afraid of losing workers or losing employees; they’re afraid of facing personal attacks in the media and becoming a pariah in their own social circles.
The SJW free “states” are: China, India, Vietnam, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Mexico, …
These are not exactly lucrative markets. From a business perspective, SJW is more of a demand problem than supply problem.
In other words, they can sacrifice some efficiency to help maintain power and prestige. And if they all sacrifice the same amount of efficiency, they stay still in the Red Queen race.
If it shows up anywhere, it shows up in lower societal productivity growth over the long term, but in the long run we are all dead.
Except that the companies that opt out of the SJW’s protection racket and move to Mexico, outcompete their, now dysfunctional, U.S.-based rivals.
Eh, I don’t know about a lot of those except maybe China.
Indeed, when societies end up in exponential dysfunction cycles it often proceeds until a peer competitor smacks them down. That’s how Germany and Japan came out of their escalation cycles. Whether China could play for us the role America played for them whose to say. Not in most of these people’s relevant timelines.
On the one hand, companies will need to pay a certain kind of SJW tax. They will become less efficient, but maybe they will all become equally less efficient together.
On the other hand, if everyone and everything is “racist” and that’s a firing offense, corporations have essentially made every single job completely “at-will” to the MAX.
Corporate whistleblower? Just find out something (it not matter what) that SJWs wouldn’t like and fire under pretense.