Category Archives: books and book reviews

The agony of the conservative intellectual, 2016

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I review a Never Trump, by Robert P. Saldin and Steven M. Teles. The book does well in capturing conservative intellectuals’ thought process in 2016.

Before November, opposition to Mr. Trump could be thought of as having little cost. Because no one expected him to win, the question for intellectuals was how best to position themselves for the aftermath of his defeat.

In 1965, Robert Novak wrote a book called The Agony of the GOP, 1964. It was about the Goldwater movement’s takeover of the Republican Party that year. That resulted in an immediate electoral disaster, but without long-term damage to the Republicans. 2016 may have been the reverse.

The four political types, a follow-up

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Yesterday’s post drew a variety of comments and criticisms.

I think I need to clarify my view of how conservatism relates to Mr. Trump. I see Mr. Trump in populist terms, exemplifying the honor culture. A pure conservative recoils from Mr. Trump. But conservatives live in a world in which he represents the main alternative to progressives, to which they also recoil.

The Saldin and Teles book, NeverTrump, captures the anguish that conservatives felt as they chose how to resolve this issue. You can think of them as adopting one of three positions.

1. Nevertrump. Do not reconcile with him. He is bad for conservatism and bad for the country.
2. Accept Mr. Trump as the best current alternative to progressivism.
3. Fully endorse Mr. Trump as spokesman for a future conservatism that is done with free-market ideology and globalization.

I myself feel most comfortable with those who chose (2), next most comfortable with those who chose (1), and least comfortable with those who chose (3). But all three positions have problems.

A big problem with (2) is that it goes in the direction of making conservatism a group identity, defined by its opposition to progressivism. The main problem with (1) is that it does not offer a constructive way forward. And I cannot go along with (3) because I still favor free markets and globalization.

The way I see it, Mr. Trump took some voters away from progressives, but he took many more voters–and most Republican elected officials–away from conservatives. Now conservatives are in the same place as libertarians, on the outside of the political process looking in.

Peter Zeihan watch

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I have an essay reviewing Peter Zeihan’s Disunited Nations.

Suppose that Tyler Cowen (The Great Stagnation) and Ross Douthat (The Decadent Society) are correct that we have gained affluence but lost our innovative edge in recent decades. Zeihan would say that these developments both reflect the Order. And he predicts that this will soon change. But he would focus on the loss of well-being from the collapse of the Order rather than on any possible benefits that might come from a more fragmented state power system, with societies perhaps placing a higher priority on innovation and having more tolerance for risk than is the case today.

I also recommend this podcast with Zeihan and Anthony Pompliano. In the podcast, Zeihan says that the coronavirus, by lower the demand for oil, makes it easier for Saudi Arabia to drive the price down, forcing some countries to shut down oil wells that cannot easily be re-started. Zeihan argues that this will be particularly hard on Russia, Venezuela, and Iran, but not so hard on the United States.

And in this essay, he lists many ideas (not his) for government spending, at least some of which are likely to be enacted.

A book review

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AEI’s Michael Strain weighed into the debate over whether living standards stagnated in recent decades with The American Dream is Not Dead, which I reviewed. In the end, I wrote

In the 1950s, the ideal for young Americans was to marry, have children, and move to a house in the suburbs. Today, marriage rates are low, fewer children grow up with married parents, and many young people are urban renters.

The decline of the Fifties Dream raises questions that go beyond Strain’s statistical analysis. Has the Fifties Dream lost its appeal? Or has it become harder to obtain, and if so, what are the cultural or economic impediments that are standing in the way?

Visions of moderation

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Steve Teles and Robert Saldin wrote,

there is no politically viable future for moderates outside the Democratic and Republican parties. And within those parties, moderates will only get the power that they desire by organizing as a coherent bloc, recruiting attractive candidates, mobilizing moderate voters in each party to participate in partisan politics, and developing ideas to inspire their base and provide opportunities for policy change. Without strong, durable, organizationally-dense factions, individual moderates or even entire state parties will not be able to distinguish themselves from their national brand or fight for leverage in national politics. In other words, what influence moderates will have in the coming years will only emerge as a result of organizing as coherent minority factions within the Democratic and Republican parties.

As a thought experiment, imagine a 1990s moderate today. What policies that are in place now would appear right-wing to such a moderate? What policies would appear left-wing?

I have just started to read the authors’ new book that takes a look inside the Never Trump movement. It could be a scholarly work or a vehicle for gossip. But if it turns out to be too scholarly, I’ll be disappointed. That would be like getting old issues of Playboy with nothing but the articles.

My review of Kevin Mitchell

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[Note: askblog had an existence prior to the virus crisis. I still schedule occasional posts like this one.]

At some point, take time to read my review of Kevin Mitchell’s Innate. The book really influenced my thinking about nature and nurture. I think that Mitchell’s ideas are something missing in Charles Murray’s work.

I took away two main lessons from Innate. The bumper-sticker versions of these lessons are:

a) gestation matters; and
b) humanity is a set of individual mental disorders.

How we lose the culture war

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[Note: askblog had an existence prior to the virus crisis. I still schedule occasional posts like this one.]
Titus Techera writes,

Monopoly over the sources of shame makes our elites superior to the rest of us, and Caldwell analyzes it in terms of the courts, administrative agencies, and business. This monopoly is why they can do anything and get away with it. No one will ask the Clintons or anyone around them or like them about their relationship to Harvey Weinstein or Jeffrey Epstein; it’s perfectly okay—because they are elite liberals who demonstrate their virtue by regularly calling the rest of us racist. In doing so, they remind us that it’s their privilege to slap us, the necessary punishment for our lack of enlightenment.

…The Republican Party is not without its victories—remember 2016, when the people gave them victory in all elections throughout the land? But Republicans almost never follow through by using their electoral victories to practice politics. They refuse to cripple the power of Progressives to ruin decent citizens’ private lives. Every year, conservatives become more scared about even voicing their opinions on college campuses or at work or on social media, living in fear of Progressives and ashamed of themselves for being so afraid—and you may imagine how they feel about the elites who don’t even seem to want to protect them. We will get Progressives to stop when more citizens act to stop them with support from their own institutions and their own elites. We will get citizens to act when we make them angry at the humiliations Progressives inflict on them, and we will generate that anger only if we force our own elites to act on our behalf

The essay reacts to Christopher Caldwell’s controversial new book, The Age of Entitlement.

John Ellis talks his book

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John Ellis writes,

We have here a classic vicious circle: the minority high school deficit leads to preferences in college admissions, preferences lead to political radicalism on campus, campus radicalism leads to a deterioration in the education of high school teachers, more poorly educated high school teachers increase the minority deficit, and that leads to even greater demands for preferences. Though the intent of college admissions preferences is to provide upward mobility for minorities, what they really do is reduce the quality of a college education by promoting a force that cripples it.

Note that this goes against the Null Hypothesis. In this case, the null hypothesis offers hope: if it is true, then education isn’t really causing this much harm.

His book is called The Breakdown of Higher Education.

Ross Douthat talks his book

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with Richard Reinsch. Douthat says,

So I start the story in 1969, in part because that particular peak of achievement, the leap to the moon also coincided with the moment or the period when the trends that I’m describing as decadence really began in earnest. So it coincides with the slowdown of economic growth that began in the ’70s and has defined the American economy, with a few exceptional periods ever since. It coincides with the first great wave of public disillusionment with government that peaked with the Watergate scandal, but then has sort of defined the country’s relationship to its government ever since. It coincides with the beginning of the birth dearth, with the Baby Boom generation giving way to a period of the low replacement fertility that has again, extended itself across the developed world ever since.

I recommend the interview. You might get more from reading it than from reading The Decadent Society as a whole.

Near the end comes this:

There’s more discontent, there’s more ferment, I think, than there was five or seven years ago. The question is, can that escape the internet and really affect the real world? Or is the internet itself just a great machine for taking people’s creativity and perversity and making sure that neither of them have that much effect on the actual institutions of society? And the Trump presidency I think has somewhat suggested that it’s more that, and if we get a Sanders presidency, we’ll get another test of the hypothesis.

…But, a Biden presidency will just be sustainable decadence all the way. I think that’s fair to say.