Curtis YarvinMaureen Dowd writes,
The progressives are the modern Puritans. The Massachusetts Bay Colony is alive and well on the Potomac and Twitter.
Indeed, New England Puritanism persisted, with or without churches. The descendants of the Puritans crusaded against slavery. They crusaded against liquor. They crusaded against large corporations.
You can take the Yankees out of organized religion. But it’s hard to take the religion out of the Yankees.
Reminder: Now would be a good time to order the latest edition of The Three Languages of Politics.
Unlike the implacable Puritans of history, modern puritans police behavior only within Belmont and excuse behaviors in Fishtown.
Charles Murray’s Coming Apart is a great way to frame the issue. I think there is an inverse relationship: Social conservatives police Fishtown behavior but excuse Belmont behavior.
This inversion of punishable/excusable behavior is at the heart of the issue I had with Thomas Sowell’s book A Conflict of Visions. The Constrained/Conservative vision doesn’t try to constrain Belmont and the Unconstrained/Progressive vision treats Belmont conservatism like an inheritable disease and Fishtown citizens like unthinking automatons that respond predictably to external stimuli.
I don’t think “excuse” is the best word. Maybe:
Progressives think bad behaviour in Belmont is disastrous for society at large. Bad behaviour in Fishtown is merely unfortunate. It would be nice, but not necessary, for Fishtown to behave correctly.
Conservatives think bad behaviour in Fishtown is disastrous for those individuals. Bad behaviour in Belmont is merely unfortunate. It would be nice, but not necessary, for Belmont to behave correctly.
The link is broken [thanks. fixed]
Read the 3rd edition this morning and highly recommend it. It stimulates thought and ties together a wide range of ideas into a coherent framework. The new edition includes a table of contents that was not present in the 1st or 2nd. I’ve not gone back and forth to try to estimate how much is new but I did notice the new materials from Lilliana Mason, Ben Sasse, Jonathon Haidt, Jordan Peterson and others. It did not seem to me that there had been any changes to the testing appendix. The new Afterword is reason enough to acquire this book.
The added chapter on Trump unfortunately is forgettable. Dr. Kling writes “In short, I hope that the increase in the use of languages of demonization that has taken place since I first wrote this book will be reversed shortly after the Trump era ends.” Well, one can hope. The front-runner to be the next president of the USA, Joe Biden famously claimed that Mitt Romney was going to bring back chains and slavery and now blabbers about Republicans all being white supremacists. Over-the-top hyperbole is not going away. Hate is the essence of US culture and that will not change.
I do recommend the book highly, nevertheless, I disagree with it entirely. The notion of “tribalism” is a wagon-circling exercise by the elite ruling class to denigrate the democratic mob that holds the elite ruling class in contempt. The US political system frustrates the majority of US citizens because it does not permit the inefficient, corrupt, vacuous elites to be held to account. Dismissing this frustration distracts from the constitutional reform that is necessary to advance the United States into a modern system of governance. I would assert that the primary divide in the USA today is between an entitled, over-compensated elite ruling class and average citizens who desire peace, prosperity, and progress.
Dr. Kling invites readers to keep in mind that he is a libertarian. That is wise counsel as Dr. Kling espouses a notion of libertarianism that I once held but have since concluded is hopelessly romanticized. Libertarians today seem to operate less on an axis of liberty-coercion than on one of technocratism vs democracy. The big boo for libertarians is democracy. Libertarianism today can accurately be reduced to little more than a paranoia of the ignorant, irrational masses taking matters into their own hands via the ballot box. Thus we have self-avowed libertarians admiring General Secretary Xi’s rule of China and taking China’s side in conflicts with the US. Thus we see concerted efforts to strip local governance of authority, support for technocratically administered supranationalist bodies like the EU where the smart people will ensure the dumb, little people will enjoy “free trade” whether they like it or not, and where local identities and customs will be stripped defenseless and erased by immigration. Dr. Kling, like nearly all libertarians, describes opposition to illegal immigration as being anti-immigration. Trump is characterized as anti-immigrant despite his consistent calls for increased legal immigration and reforms to the US immigration to bring it more into line with the systems of the modern democracies. Dr. Kling romantically asserts that he cannot see why non-Americans should not be allowed to work in the US, as if though the burden of special needs children in local schools, welfare benefits, and frictions due to non-assimilation were all make-believe. As he is a former CBO employee, one might hope that Dr. Kling would take a more costs-and-benefits approach to issues.
On the progressive axis, I still don’t think Dr. Kling’s refutation of Lukoff’s parental model is entirely persuasive. On the conservative axis, I don’t think that civilization-barbarism captures the essence of what attracts people to conservatism and more clearly delineates the conservative axis from the others is what I would characterize as playing by the rules vs ignoring the rules. Dr. Kling’s use of barbarism connotes irrational thought but the conservative priority of maintaining working systems is not simple-minded veneration of the old but a commitment to science as profound as that he ascribes to progressives.
Despite all that, I have consistently found Dr. Kling to be a forthright, open-minded, insightful, and original thinker. In a Conversation with Tyler, he would be deserve to described as under-rated. He has fully earned much higher status than that he is popularly accorded.
Just what would you consider to be a “modern system of governance”? Most people who talk like that consider socialism (or at least social democracy) to be the modern system of governance. The things you mention like “strip local governance of authority” and “support for technocratically administered supranationalist bodies” are what a lot of people think of as modern governance. I would like to go back to our old-fashioned constitution, which has many checks and balances built in, many of which have unfortunately been modernized away using the concept of a “living constitution”.
Who so beset him round,
With dismal Storys,
Do but themselves Confound;
His Strength the more is.
-John Bunyan
I would have thought Puritans myself until I heard this digression by Murray Rothbard on the radical evangelical pietism that arose in the US in the 1830s mostly west of Boston into the current Midwest. The shift was from liturgical to pietistic form of religion.
Rothbard summed it up thusly in his introduction to Lysander Spooner’s “Vices are Not Crimes: A Vindication of Moral Liberty” excepted at Mises Instititute:
“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.”
Rothbard describes it in a 20 minute aside in this 1986 lecture:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2ndkCvHGj4&feature=youtu.be&t=1106&ab_channel=minnesotachris
The path from mid-19th century pietist to the late 19th century Progressives, a split in the 1920s to the Evangelical and the modern secular Progressives who took up Marxism as their doctrine instead of Christianity.