Peggy Noonan writes,

But an end to political correctness in the arts and entertainment cannot come from the right. It can come only from the left. All the organs of entertainment and art in America, from Broadway to Hollywood, through Netflix , the museums and onward, are entities of the cultural left. They are run and populated by the cultural left.

They have the pertinent power. When conservatives write or speak against limits on free speech, what they say is heard by the left as mere reaction, a cover for intolerance, and so dismissed.

. . .The turnaround might begin—just one idea—when some powerful cultural entity produces a documentary featuring great figures of entertainment and the arts saying how they feel about limits to artistic expression. What their personal experience with political correctness is, how it has limited what they do, what the implications are. It would require significant cultural figures who are not identified with the right to speak their peace.

That hypothetical scenario would be part of what I call vomiting the Social Justice authoritarianism out of the system. Meanwhile, those on the left who agree with Noonan on this issue end up in the Intellectual Dark Web.

An excellent podcast with Russ Roberts. One excerpt:

When you deprive people of the chance and the necessity of acting heroically and generously for other people, you deprive them of a fundamental part of what it means to be human, what it means to have a meaningful life; and a fundamental way of feeling content and happy in your life.

All sorts of interesting thoughts in the conversation. I may be tempted to annotate it.

In general, we can see Russ expanding into more non-economic topics. I think this may be right.

When Russ and I were students, professors taught us to defend capitalism as an economic system. The neoclassical model of factor rewards was a defense of the distributional aspects of capitalism. Macroeconomics was a claim that economic downturns, rather than reflecting ever-deepening systemic crises, could be managed and contained.

What we are seeing now is a much broader assault on our entire social system and its values. Does liberal democracy suffer from a spiritual void which new ideologies are trying to fill?

Straight economics does not seem sufficient to answer the contemporary progressive left. The Intellectual Dark Web is where we are groping for better approaches.

from a commenter:

Half a century ago, men earned roughly 60% of college degrees. Today, women earn roughly 60% of college degrees. And the gap seems to be growing, as women outpace men in formal education.

2)Matching by educational attainment in the marriage market — marrying someone at a similar formal education level — is increasing.

Have you any insights or conjectures about how the seeming tension between these two trends eventually might shape politics?

Well.

On politics, assuming these trends lead to an increase in unmarried college-educated women and unmarried men without a college degree, it would seem to favor the Democrats. The women will vote ardently for Democrats, but a lot of the men will take out their frustration in other realms.

I would not count on the trends continuing. The bargaining power that college-educated men have enjoyed is probably not conducive to a healthy society. One indication of that is the backlash that has emerged as the #MeToo movement. But at some point college-educated women will discover that to restore their bargaining power exit works better than voice, as it were. They could create more competition among males by finding alternatives to the college degree as ways of qualifying men as marriage material. The process of coalescing around such alternative signals may take a while, but it is something to watch for.

She writes,

In both markets and culture, the blue-collar values of loyalty, solidarity, security, and physical production, have largely given way to the creative-class values of creativity, self-expression, risk-taking, and brains. It’s the revenge of the nerds. The winners are symbolic analysts. The losers are guys good with their hands. For those who adhere to the old values, the shift can be infuriating. Many people suddenly feel not merely economically insecure but culturally disrespected.

Near the end, she poses some questions.

What can a liberal analysis tell us about cultural change? Do institutions of experimentation and feedback work to correct errors in cultural systems as they do in economics? Are there significant differences that might affect outcomes? Are the time scales similar or different? Are there institutions that might limit the collateral damage—a worthwhile question in the case of economic dynamism as well?

Culture is too important to be left to the sociologists.

Tage Rai wrote,

Across all cases, perpetrators are using violence to create, conduct, sustain, enhance, transform, honour, protect, redress, repair, end, and mourn valued relationships.

Individuals and cultures certainly vary in the ways they do this and the contexts in which they think violence is an acceptable means of making things right, but the goal is the same. The purpose of violence is to sustain a moral order.

I’ve linked to this essay before. More recently, Charles Chu reminded me of it.

I speculate that personality and culture interact when it comes to violence. Culture signals when violence will be approved. Some violent practices have been greatly reduced over the last few hundred years, because they now meet with widespread disapproval.

But I believe that individuals differ in their attraction to violence. If you are inclined to violence, you are likely to seek out situations in which violence meets with widespread approval; or you may come up with ways to justify violence even when most people in your society would not condone it.

I suspect that there is a vicious cycle. A movement or cause that justifies violence will attract people who are inclined to violence. They will engage in violent acts, which the leaders of the movement or cause will feel a need to justify. The more that they rationalize violence, the more their movement will attract violent supporters. And so on,