I am confused by the conservative libertarian laments of the French and US realities. . .why are conservatives lamenting the towns so much? I think there is a degree of nostalgia for a better time and these towns better represent small c conservatism, but according to creative destruction doctrines we should let them fail.
I think that libertarians take exactly the “let them fail” position. And I think that most libertarians fall on the Bobo side of the Bobo vs. anti-Bobo axis. Don Boudreaux offers an almost daily dose of anti-Trump posts, strictly on the trade and immigration issues.
On the other hand, many conservatives are focused on lowering the status of progressives. You will notice that I am often in that camp. I hate the smugness of progressives so much that I do not wish to partake in the Trump-bashing that Don and my other libertarian friends dish out.
One of my progressive friends posted a picture of herself on Facebook carrying a sign at a demonstration that read, “Climate change is not an alternative fact.” I have adopted a rule of not commenting on politics on Facebook, but I was so-o-o tempted to write, “Indeed, it is an alternative religion.”
Smugness is indeed a problem.
In his book _The blank slate_ Steven Pinker has one of his chapters entitled “Man is a sanctimonious animal.”
As we know or should know, it’s a old theme. “Man is a rational animal…man is a political animal…Walker Connor actually said ‘Man is a national animal.’ You can do a lot with the proposition, looking for different words to insert.
Man is a _________ animal.
= – = – = – =
When I first read _the blank slate_ I was thinking, “Yes…ok…but you do you really need to dedicate a chapter to it?” Apparently it’s big factor, and Pinker is justified in having sanctimoniousness as one of his five chapter themes or starting points.
More and more I notice it–the preening, smug tone of “I’m better than you are because of my beliefs” which are better than yours. Not just “I’m richer or prettier” but my beliefs are better. It’s not just disagreement, or “I see things a little bit differently.”
I have not read read Simon’s new book on moral narcissism. it just came out. He’s probably got good details / examples / anecdotes, even if the book is a polemic.
It seems that 50 years ago conformism was promoted. Somehow we got to a point where narcissism is promoted instead.
I wonder if it’s because we are more and more in bubbles, and a lot of people don’t know us that well. Media factors and image management promote narcissism?
It’s the people who knew me 30 years ago who know what deep reserves of ignorance, cluelessness, and poor judgement lie beneath whatever surface poise I can exhibit.
= – = – = – =
Twenge’s research on narcissism is good. She’s on to something. It’s increasing. It has increased. It’s not just our imagination.
Complaints about smugness from a libertarian? Too funny!
Steve
I’ve never seen Arnold as being smug.
I have never seen Arnold as being smug, either. One of the first things that drew me to this blog was Arnold’s curiosity paired with…humility?…and his charity toward other thinkers. Ok, enough hagiography.
Prof. Arnold periodically displays impatience, which is different.
Perhaps Prof. Arnold might initiate a blog post on merits and demerits of smugness and of impatience.
Smugness seems to involve self-satisfaction.
Impatience can be consistent with a quest for something (truth or understanding), along with frustration at slow progress and at obstacles. The frustration is prompted by notions that get in the way of of progress toward understanding the truth or objective reality as we seek to apprehend it.
You are conflating two different things, which is the heart of comedy! What Arnold is talking about is how you can lose your job for opposing gay marriage, but nowhere will you lose your job for supporting it, even though it was not allowed some months ago. The progressive agenda never even gets debated. Libertarians debate anybody, even if they don’t want to.
If you don’t want people to get fired for opposing gay marriage, you form a political power block and fight to win. It’s the only way.
I think Arnold is against the idea of political power blocks. I consider this naive. Only within homogenous communities can you have the sort of liberties he desires. In diverse communities you have power blocks, period. Ignoring this reality just means you get steamrolled.
No, you sell your principles and them you still lose. I consider that foolish.
Do you have anything to back this up other then a speculation?
I can look out on the world and find examples of how things are likely to be if progs continue to get their way.
I can also point to alternative real world examples of what I want that work.
Where is Galt’s Gulch? What can you look on and say “see, these principles can work.”
Yes. I can back what I’M SAYING. Elect a typical Republican so you get the Supreme Court nominee from the Republican side and you are more likely to get someone that does damage than someone who would make progress. And what makes it worse, is the other side calls these people conservatives.
“I can also point to alternative real world examples of what I want that work.”
I think you think you can. Go ahead and I’ll tell you why I think you are wrong.
“Elect a typical Republican so you get the Supreme Court nominee from the Republican side and you are more likely to get someone that does damage than someone who would make progress. ”
Wasn’t noticing this pattern part of why we got Trump.
Being I asked the question, I believe this is not just a Bobo versus anti-Bobo axis. Quick who won the higher income voters and lower income voters? Again, you notice that Trump won more voters with incomes over $75K and greater while HRC won voters under $75K or less. (Now this Party disparity was less than a traditionally Romney & Obama battle.) So a lot of so called Bobos voted Trump, dentist in WI, and anti-Bobos, Compton CA, voted HRC.
I have noticed the strangest reality the last 4 years is the status of minority working class has vastly improved compared white working class. The latest drug epidemic is hitting white rural communities as compared to inner city minorities. Additionally the real wages of Hispanic-, African- have grown the most since 2014. (See below on Hispanic) So for the first time in our history, the potential biggest struggling group is not a minority group and so I believe we are seeing Party dynamics change here.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/21/latinos-made-economic-strides-in-2015-after-years-of-no-gains/
Additionally, let us say Ross Douthat is a conservative Bobo and yet he is Trump-interested and moving closer to Pat Buchanan nationalism axis. So I don’t believe his goal is the demotion of Progressives but a stronger place for small c conservative institutions like religion.
The Hispanic poverty rate is twice the average (which includes blacks) despite mostly living in higher per capita urban areas. I wouldn’t call these people a success by any stretch of the word. They are a dependent class.
Anyway, its a high-low versus middle. The very rich and the very dependent vote D. The middle trying to work for a living vote R. Even amongst the WWC you’ll notice that the poor and out of work vote D, while the lower middle class is with jobs are the ones that swung more R under Trump.
The most R voting person in the world is a white person that completed a two year vo-tech degree and works in a trade.
The most R voting person in the world is a white person that completed a two year vo-tech degree and works in a trade. True today but not in the past elections.
Wasn’t this the Democratic base 50 years ago? Didn’t a fair number of these voters go for Bubba (WJC) or Perot in 1992 or 1996? Even, Obama did win most of the Rust Belt states both elections. It was Trump campaign that won these highest R voters. (And won higher Latino-American than Romney from most election experts.) And yes there is a fair amount of poverty with Hispanic-Americans but their rates have fallen the most the last 4 years. Again, the number of Hispanic-Americans in the SW (CA, AZ, NM, TX, NV) has always been over 20% for decades and they have done the lower wage jobs in these growing economies. And I am sure the Maid Union in Las Vegas is 70% Hispanic-Americans (citizens), many of which are borderline poverty, seem really important to the Nevada economy. (Also in Southwest, the two year Tech working a trade is dominated by Hispanic-Americans as well.)
Leaving aside the illegal immigration debate, it does seem like the working class of Southwestern states and the rest of the nation have a lot of common interest. As I have noticed Trump has had issue with rolling back Obamacare due to winning a different set of voters than Romney did in 2012.
These patterns have been in place awhile, they have just solidified over the past few decades.
Trump traded UMC votes on the coast for LMC votes in the Rust Belt, because a quick look at the electoral college tells you which votes mean more. Steve Sailer hawked that strategy for twenty years before somebody was willing to pick a $100 bill off the sidewalk.
The bigger switch worth noting is the Scots-Irish switch, who went from voting for Bill Clinton (he won Appalachia) to voting massively against Hillary. This has led to a lot of jokes about toothless hillbillies, but the actual hillbilly trash is still voting D for their welfare. It’s the WWC that is sick of paying for dropouts on oxy and being called deplorables that switched over.
Obama won the Rust Belt in part due to high black turnout. There is a high black population in Rust Belt cities and Obama lost the white vote in those states every time.
In terms of the WWC, HRC should have more concerned that Obama was able to get enough WWC in Ohio and Michigan votes because of the 2009 auto bailout. (Osama dead and GM still alive.)
Although IMO it made sense at 2009 time and he did make GM & Chrysler go through bankruptcy, that did a lot for WWC in those states.
Conservatives care because they are their constituents. Radical, huh.
Progressives care about their constituents. Those constituents don’t include non-elite whites or libertarians.
Libertarians care only about themselves, in the most selfish and short term of ways. Saying so would be unpleasant, so some smokescreen in the guise of “muh principles” is required. Libertarians never seem to defend many of those principles in the long run though.
Somebody didn’t understand the libertarian critique. Everyone cares about themselves. Libertarians are the ones who can think rationally about it.
Then why are you importing an army of people that hate both you and your ideals. That doesn’t seem rational.
I think libertarians tend to think more abstractly. In theory, immigrants should be just as open to libertarianism as the natives. In practice, however, I think asdf is correct that most immigrants are not going to support libertarianism.
Not that the natives are overly excited about libertarianism either. Buchanan was on to something with ” Afraid to be Free”.
I’m not importing anything. Why do you think I’m in charge?
It’s annoying that you guys can’t have an adult conversation. If I were in charge, they’d be able to come, work, not vote, pay their own way, etc.
And I’m for the wall, but it’s not going to happen. Not my fault. I’m just telling you what’s up.
I don’t think the brown people hate me or my ideals, btw. I just think they are ignorant and pragmatic.
Half the white people on the other hand, you know, the ones who actually run the country most of the time? Yeah, they would oppose anything I want.
To be clear, I think they immigrants are just as pragmatically ignorant about political principles as the citizenry. But a larger proportion of the citizenry has WRONG principles despite me doing my best to educate them.
I don’t understand what you think I can do. And if you think the solution is for me to throw in with the Republicans my whole thing is disagreeing with you on that.
I have seen the primary issue of libertarians as being the images of Jon Galt and Laura Wilder when in reality the Jon Galts throw the Laura Wilders off their land. (Which is closer to the truth as Laura Wilder move a lot.)
Otherwise, I also believe the other problem of libertarians is the Jon Galts turn into the Taggarts very quickly. And didn’t Bill Gates quality as a Jon Galt in the 1990s and now a Taggart? Fred Trump was a Galt in the 1960s and now we have Taggart Trump!
You realize that was a book?
“Haha! 1984 was so unrealistic that one might assume it was hyperbolic allegory to illustrate an underlying truth! I mean, how ridiculous…your government in perennial war and spying on you through your Television!…Oh wait….D’oh!”
Could you guys please try to have an adult conversation?
Atlast Shrugged was a response to opportunistic jawboning for blood offerings of other people at the sacrificial altar of altruism and offering objective progress and individualism as an alternative.
When you come back and say “Seeeeeee, Libertarians are selfish!” It tells me you don’t understand, and are probably engaging in Whiggish thinking. We live in the reality that was shaped by the impact of Atlas Shrugged.
If progressives and conservatives offered their 10 best ideas, I’d probably take 5 to 7 from each list. But it seems like they just win and then try to cram through their most offensive ideas.
“On the other hand, many conservatives are focused on lowering the status of progressives. You will notice that I am often in that camp. I hate the smugness of progressives so much that I do not wish to partake in the Trump-bashing that Don and my other libertarian friends dish out.”
how can you not be embarrassed to say this out loud? it’s one thing to be focused on this during the obama years, but this is 2017. you really should talk to a psychiatrist about this deranged focus. despite your hatred for the smug progressives, trump is one of the few people who can make a charles murray protester look wise and reasonable by comparison, much like he makes the average politician seem moral and honest. both pretty impressive achievements.
from a moral standpoint, i don’t even need to make the case.
from a practical standpoint, anti-anti-trumpers will never regain their credibility. The Federalist will never again be respected by intellectual conservatives. it’s not worth joining them in their shame.
after ~15yrs, and buying and reading all of your books, i finally took you off my RSS today.
Somebody isn’t paying attention. When you are playing a 3 person game, you always gang up with the other underdog. Progressives have been on the offensive and they have over-extended. It may soon come a time to switch allegiances, but it’s not right now.
Where we are right now is progressives have completely jumped the shark while claiming Trump is Hitler.
I mean, we barely knew ya’, so buy bye. But you aren’t aware of the Scott Adams narrative about Trump?
You don’t have an excuse. I’ve been making myself look insane here telling people.
And the only reason the Trump bombast worked is because progressives jumped the shark and he provided the counterpoint.
He had to say he was going to build a wall, even though he’s not going to build a wall. Think about this, please.
How did we get to a point where being mildly America First is viewed as Hitlerism?
You simply don’t recognize how crazy progressives have become. Not that they are actually doing anything practical with it, just claiming that borders are racist and gendered bathrooms are hate. And they don’t brook any dialogue on it. They destroy.
Trump didn’t legitimize the Charles Murray rioters, progressives did. Trump just says “hold on a minute” and they went completely nuts. Blaming that on Trump is just part of the delusion. Trump is an effect.
But why would an Kling reader be so concern trolly about disagreeing with that?
Name 3 progressives who lost their jobs because of progressing a progressive opinion. Aaaaaaaaaaaand go.
Name 3 progressives who have been denied access to give a talk. Aaaaaaaaaaand go…
I agree with seanm. Not trying to be ad hominom here, but the strategic withholding of any criticism of Trump because progressive smugness makes you mad strikes me as sort of pathetic.
Not that you need to blog about Trump daily like Boudreaux or Scott Sumners, but to me the Bryan Caplan approach (where he responds to people who are angry at him for not being angry enough about Trump) seems a bit more grown up:
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2016/11/why_im_not_frea.html
While conservatives would certainly like to lower the status of progressives, I don’t think that’s the main difference. I would say that the major difference is how they treat costs.
Libertarians seem very wedded to cost-benefit analysis. If the benefit is greater than the cost, the policy is good. If not, it isn’t. Conservatives, meanwhile, seem to apply a multiplier to costs, especially on costs to people who are closer to them, and on costs which are “deeper” and not shallow. (Progressives, on the other hand, seem to deny that costs even exist.)
For example, if you have 2 thieves. Thief A steals $1 from a million people. Thief B steals $100,000 from a single person. I believe that most Libertarians would say Thief A committed the worse crime, while most Conservatives would say Thief B did. (And for Progressives it would probably depend on the race/gender/sexuality of the thief and victims.)
I think that Trump’s great breakthrough has been to convince Conservatives that the costs of many of the policies held since the 1990s have been higher and sharper than they realized, and dis-proportionally levied on specific communities. Libertarians, as Boudreaux is constantly pointing out, simply feel that since the net benefits to humanity are still positive, everything is fine.
Eh, some libertarians are consequentialists and some are deontological. You may be right about the tendencies of various groups though.
Climate Change: “Indeed, it is an alternative religion.”
I think the biggest thing “climate change” is, is it is a “no true Scotsman fallacy.”
Few people don’t think CO2 absorbs radiation. But they don’t ever really debate it, they throw up fallacies like appeal to authority, Pascal’s wager, etc. If you ever do nail them down the definitions change. They primarily use it as a strawman to claim that the opposition should not even be listened to. It took the role evolution used to play.
“Climate change is not an alternative fact” and “Indeed, it is an alternative religion” are not even necessarily mutually exclusive. I’d like to order a base of facts with a healthy serving of sanctimonious alternative facts/hyperbole on top, please…and hold the pesky facts that don’t help my narrative please, I don’t like those.
To be fair, most actual researchers I know (though I know there are exceptions…and who knows if my circle is representative anyway) are only moderately religious, e.g., they will happily accept and discuss the “net” cost/benefit of climate change (that, for instance, includes new deaths from heat waves but also offsets them by saved lives from less freezing to death).
They certainly can be smug. Supporting Trump is a mortal sin, of course…but so is not consuming the “right” brand of Brie. It really is strange to me, realizing that so many Democrats now viscerally hate poorer folk, when the little guy used to be its base. You get a pass if you have an offsetting “oppressed identity card”, e.g., poor minorities. But even then, many who give you a pass will not, in a million years, risk ever actually coming into contact w/ you, e.g., by buying a frying pan splash screen for $6 at Family Dollar instead of paying $26 for the exact same product at Target or, gasp, allowing their kids to attend the same schools as their kids.
The other 97% are wrong? Now who is smug? Whenever you think of something negative about the opposition, your first question should be “Why am I like that?” so common is projection among humans. It is a defense mechanism to avoid having to face it in ourselves.
What other 97%?
I hope you don’t think it is who I think you are thinking…
I think one answer to “who is smug” is anyone who cites the 97% without having any idea where it really comes from.
Those who cite the 97% and do have an idea where it really comes from aren’t smug: they are liars.
Excellent comment.
Actually, I think they are neither smug nor liars. They are taken in by a piece of excellent psychological persuasion. Think about what “97%” means. It is designed to have a snowball effect. Obviously you want to be in the 97% of smart people. But if you do that, then you aren’t being smart, you are following the herd. Except that because you are following the smart herd, you get to claim anyone not with you is stupid, so you never have to question your belief. The best part is that this was never even designed. It became a self-propagating meme because it is so effective.
Scott Adams might say that it is a fool’s errand to try to debunk the “97%” meme with facts and logic. What you need is a competing persuasion technique.
So, maybe something like “9 out of 10 scientists are skeptical of the party line on global warming.” It would help if there was a survey where you asked scientists “Do you believe the party line global warming alarmist view or are you somewhat skeptical?”
The smugness runneth over.
Which I take it means you don’t know how the 97% was constructed.
I don’t know which is worse — unquestionably parroting the position of your side or knowingly propagating unsupportable narratives.
When there is competition on free markets, say for manufactured goods or consumer electronics or food, libertarians do consistently endorse the “let it fail” model of creative destruction and net win-win competition.
In the linked article on France, there is competition for government housing and government privileges and physical neighborhoods that is obviously on ethno-religious tribal grounds. That highlights a strictly win-lose aspect to immigration that has genuinely divided libertarians.
Another libertarian view of creative destruction and “let it fail”: If a majority of Syria wants to move to Europe or a majority of Mexico wants to move to the US, it is obvious that Syria/Mexico have “failed” in the market of governance, culture, and national identity, and it makes more sense for Syria to be voluntarily annexed as a colony of Europe or Mexico to be annexed as a colony of the US. If one group should be pressured to make sacrifices in terms of national identity and sovereignty and ideas of a homeland, it should be the failed state whose people are desperate to choose to flee.
If you want to lower the status of progressives, a good way to start may be by declining to indulge their desire to be called by such a self-congratulatory label.
In what meaningful sense are they progressive? Many of their economic policies impede progress.
In The Complacent Class Tyler Cowen described the problem(s) as arising out of a kind of coordination problem, that is, people of that class are pursuing individually rational strategies which are leading to a collective problem that will leave everyone worse off in the long term. Choosing Cowen-Complacency is thus like a kind of invisible ‘cultural pollution’ for which it is effectively impossible to strike any remedial Coasian bargain.
In What Price Fame? he also described the rat-race problems involved in zero-sum tournament markets when competing for social status and the ability to signal prestige, leading to a lot of wasteful and inefficient efforts and expenditures with probably no benefit in terms of human welfare or utility.
Hanson has also described a commonly observable form of time-inconsistent preference with major, long-term, collective demographic consequences, which is high achieving females waiting too long to get pregnant and then going childless to their regret. This leads to the “Urban IQ Shredder” selective-population-sink effect, with modern elite-heavy, quasi-city-states, thriving economically but only at the cost of eating all the broader population’s accumulated human capital seed corn in a generation, without planting any more. See Get Eggs Froze and Why Not Egg Futures?.
In my own experience, I’ve known many more formerly married men and women who regret their decision to divorce than are happy with it.
The trouble is that the destruction isn’t always creative. Sometimes it’s just a regretted mistake when you can’t uncrack the egg, as it were. Banks and companies are different enough from communities and individuals that ‘let them fail’ logic does not simply extend. And of course we don’t even let banks fail.
Hyper-individualist Libertarians get very uneasy when discussing the tendency of humans in a modern economy to paint themselves into bad corners in these ways, because it only takes another mental chess move or two to see that there’s no hope of any ‘corrective influence’ without the boogeymen of state coercion or strong social constraints on the individual.
The rhetorical strategy (or psychological defense mechanism?) typically becomes a hand-waving rationalization of dismissiveness. Either (1) We don’t know these are really ‘problems’ because of subjective preferences, (2) The regrets are stated preferences, but the choices were more reliable revealed preferences, (3) The market and price system tell us what things are really worth and will take care of the social equilibrium, (4) It would be worse for utility to impose the restrictions on individual liberty, (5) Moral hazard and dependency, or (6) Any attempt to correct these problems – especially with the state – would definitely be worse, because of public choice, the knowledge problem, enabling progressive mission-creep, etc.
There’s some truth in all of these, especially (6) for the central state, but also not enough truth to justify the dismissal of the problem.
I’ll observe that many Libertarians are willing to let their own kids ‘learn the hard way’ when it comes mild lessors, but will go out of their way to prevent their kids from walking off the various cliffs that modern life sets up for them.
I would argue that a lot of conservative instincts emerge out of an ’emergent paternalism’ or what you might call ‘enlightened individualism’ that some forms of pressure on the individual will be better for the average individual’s welfare overall, and that certain restraints on liberty and preservative interventions can thus be justified. Ask a Libertarian, “Should we do anything about opioids?” If one gets a “yes”, it will emerges out of similar logic. Indeed, it sometimes seems like we have been going through the beginning of just such an intellectual era of generating another “reconstructed conservatism”.
Of course progressivism makes similar justifying claims for its interventions, but there are several important differences, key among them being that progressives focus on targeting and restraining culpable and intentional ‘oppressors’, while conservatives often pin the blame on human nature itself.
Arnold et. al., I seek to open your mind. Starting with your excerpt:
“One of my progressive friends posted a picture of herself on Facebook carrying a sign at a demonstration that read, “Climate change is not an alternative fact.” I have adopted a rule of not commenting on politics on Facebook, but I was so-o-o tempted to write, “Indeed, it is an alternative religion.””
What did your friend do, and what did you do? Your friend posted a picture of Facebook holding a sign. You responded here to the words on her sign. Please don’t jump to any conclusions about what I might be insinuating here. My point is the picture of herself with her sign is not about the words on her sign. The words don’t even make any sense. By responding to her words, did you make an error? No, because by going with the “AGW is like a religion” meme, you hit the spot for your readers and you didn’t alienate your friend. So far, you know all this already. I think you sense that your response is to your allies and tends to close our minds. You taught us this.
Here is the part I think we all need to learn: How to respond to your friend effectively. Trump is teaching it, which is why so few people are learning it. You can’t respond to her with disagreement, for one thing it doesn’t work, and for another, she has already framed any disagreement as “alternative facts,” i.e., lies. Your friend is fully polarized. She cannot be reached by the opposition. We need to come up with the synthesis to bridge the intractable dielectic, and only libertarians have the motive, means, and opportunity do do that. This is why, IMHO, libertarians are the only hope for our country (more on that to come). We need to craft a persuasive meme that brings the two opposing sides together. Polarized individuals in the 2-party system have no reason to do it.
Arnold, would you do a social experiment for me/us? Ask your friend this “What do you want to do about climate change?” or something like that. We could crowdsource the wording. The words are not what is important, it is whether the combination of words get your friend out of the left-right paradigm.
(For bonus points, can anyone figure out the 4D chess move I’m TRYING to play here?)
“What do you want to do about climate change?”
Actually, this probably won’t work, because your friend could just say “follow the Kyoto protocol” or something. It doesn’t make her have to think outside of the 2-party system. So, maybe something like this (but better) “What do you think we need to do about climate change that would be effective and feasible?”
That doesn’t quite fit on a bumper sticker. I think the point is to trigger the cognitive dissonance in her mind. She won’t want to answer “elect democrats.” And by having that struggle, she might realize that the climate change debate is really (about?) polarizing.