Category Archives: Politics

Jonah Goldberg takes my side

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He writes,

For years, conservatives have quoted my late friend Andrew Breitbart’s pithy rephrasing of a very old idea: “Politics is downstream of culture.” The odd thing is that, almost overnight, many of the same conservatives now argue as if industrial and trade policy is upstream of culture.

I wrote,

Many observers emphasize economic threats posed by trade and automation. But I believe that the divide is mostly cultural.

Let me repeat something else I wrote in that essay.

In fact, I think it would be good for the Republican Party for a leading figure with a conservative agenda and a moderate tone to compete with President Trump for the nomination in 2020. The goal would not be to take Mr. Trump down but to set an example for a different Republican Party. This might give hope to those of us who wish for a political future that is less viciously tribal.

Start-ups and hardship

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Handle, who has been on a comment roll in recent weeks, wrote

it’s easy for kids to make and keep close – sometimes lifelong – friends when they see the same other kids at school, church, sports, and around the neighborhood for palling around. . .

. . .even while one thinks one is suffocating from claustrophobia and lack of privacy and just wants to bail out to the other, atomized anonymity side where the grass is greener, when people actually leave, they discover pretty quickly they feel terrible, isolated, lonely, uprooted, and aimless, and it can take a long time to adjust, and some never quite recover. Prison and the military are two good examples of that, but start-up culture seems to be similar in some respects.

The comment refers to Sebastian Junger’s claim that people derive satisfaction and meaning out of being associated with small groups under hardship. Imagine a stereotypical start-up, in which a handful of people work very long hours in an environment that is challenging, uncertain, and ambiguous.

When I started a business, I repeatedly watched The Compleat Beatles, a documentary about the iconic band. I picked up on a couple of points.

1. Because the narrator said that they were lucky to meet the right people at the right time, I made an effort to meet a lot of people (something I have not done before or since).

2. The film describes the hardship that the Beatles endured in Hamburg, where they lived in slum conditions and played exhausting marathon sets. A fellow musician said that with the long sets and tough audiences, “Either you got good or you gave up.” Taking that to heart, I often worked late into the night, even though the traffic to my site was on the order of 100 visitors a week when I got started.

Political indigestion watch

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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.

Question on marriage trends, continued

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Yue Qian says,

For analytical purpose, I classified each individual’s income by the decile he or she occupied in the income distribution of the 1980 and 2008–2012 analytic samples, respectively. My study showed that for a majority of couples, husbands were in a higher income decile than their wives regardless of the time period and the educational pairing of spouses.

Using sophisticated statistical models (log-linear models) to control for gender differences and shifts in marginal distributions of education and income, I found that the tendency for women to marry up in income was greater when they married down in education: Women were 93 percent more likely to marry men in higher income deciles than themselves among couples in which the wife had more education than the husband than among couples in which the wife had less education than the husband.

Pointer from David French. The paper itself appears to be gated. It seems pertinent to a post from a couple of weeks ago.

Advice for the Republican Party

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1. from Brink Lindsey.

2. from me, responding to a piece by Yuval Levin.

Lindsey writes,

The challenge that faces any effort to reconstruct the American right is immense. The Republican Party at present is overwhelmingly under the spell of Donald Trump and seems determined to plumb the depths of intellectual and moral self-abasement in the service of a cult of personality. Between this point and the opportunity for any real renewal likely lies sustained electoral failure at the hands of the Democrats. Only repeated repudiation at the polls can break the hold of the populist demagoguery and extreme negative partisanship that has led the Republican Party so badly astray.

Brink proposes that the Republican Party should coalesce around ideas that he calls small-r republican. In the article, he sketches out what these might look like.

I do think that the Trump Presidency puts Republicans in a deep hole intellectually. At the same time, conservative intellectuals are in a deep hole electorally.

I can feel Brink’s pain. But I don’t think he has the solution.

Brink has some nasty things to say about President Trump and some snide things to say about libertarians. That tells me who he’s prepared to subtract from the Republican Party, so that he can feel better about supporting it. But whatever this might achieve in terms of crawling out of the hole intellectually, I don’t see how it can do anything other than put Republicans deeper in the hole electorally.

The slogan I adopt in my essay is,

I would like to see the Republicans adopt a more moderate tone and a more conservative agenda.

Sebastian Junger on human connection

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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.

Question on marriage trends

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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.

Normative social analysis

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Handle comments,

Were all those people voting for Trump because of they were upset that the establishment figures weren’t “delivering effective governance”? Were they all convinced that Trump could deliver “effective governance” better than any of those other establishment figures? Um, no. That’s not what happened, and that’s not what people were thinking or complaining about.

Instead, most of them were extremely frustrated at the establishment conformity to the elite consensus that was so stiflingly uniform that no one would vigorously articulate support for what they wanted except for a brash showman outsider.

They [Niskanen Center moderates] have learned the wrong lesson from that experience. This is the “normative political science” version of the “normative economics” analysis of the [financial crisis of 2008], in which the narrative one tells always conveniently ends up implicating policies that happen to align with one’s political preferences.

Indeed, your first concern upon reading any sort of social analysis is whether the writer is articulating the desired causal model or actually has compelling empirical evidence for that model. Very often, it is not possible to definitively confirm or refute any particular causal narrative.

Martin Gurri watch

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1. Suzanne Fields writes,

The information balance of power has changed, writes Martin Gurri in a new book, “The Revolt of the Public,” which dissects with originality and depth the impact of the Internet on the political culture. “A generation ago, the public could exist only as a passive audience,” he writes of the great age when the daily newspaper was the king of the mountain and television news was dispensed on a reassuring hierarchical model, from the top down.

2. Gurri himself writes,

Populist is an elite term. It seems to imply that certain opinions are popular when they shouldn’t be. Populists of a nationalistic strain have won elections, handily and repeatedly, in Hungary and Poland. In Italy, two very different populist parties, cats and dogs together, share in running the most popular government in Europe, with 68 percent approval ratings. (By comparison, Macron’s approval numbers have plummeted as low as 23 percent.) Elites ascribe these victories to demagoguery: populists win elections by misleading the public. The reverse of this proposition is more nearly correct. Populist parties and politicians are riding, sometimes uneasily, on the wild kinetic energies surging from a mutinous public.

The post is about France. The Yellow Vests sound like they leaped right out of the pages of The Revolt of the Public.

Which political axis will emerge?

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Stephen Davies writes,

The question now is not so much that of social conservatism versus social liberalism. Instead the key issue is that of identity, and in particular the tension between globalism and cosmopolitanism on the one hand and nationalism and ethnic or cultural particularism on the other. This is often described as a polarity between “openness” and “closedness”

I call this the Bobo vs. anti-Bobo axis. Note that he applies it to several other countries in addition to the U.S.

Davies imagines a two-by-two matrix, with market-friendly and market-hostile being the other source of division. If you are cosmopolitan and market-friendly, then Davies labels you as “cosmopolitan liberal.” Sounds to me like a libertarian. If you are nationalist and market-friendly, you are a “free-market conservative.” That describes some people who comment frequently on this blog. If you are market-hostile and cosmopolitan, you are “radical left.” If you are market-hostile and nationalist, you are a “national collectivist.”

With that set-up, Davies writes,

Social democratic parties everywhere are in trouble because they have two quite different kinds of voter that are very difficult to combine into a voting coalition.[*] Center right parties face increasing challenges because they are losing voters to both national collectivists and emerging groups of liberal cosmopolitans

. . .we will soon see the emergence of a stable division. In most countries this will be between national collectivists and liberal cosmopolitans, but in some cases it will be between national collectivists and radical leftists.

*Which two? I can’t guess what he means here.

I don’t see liberal cosmopolitanism gaining as much traction as Davies envisions. I think of Macron as the most prominent leader of that persuasion, and we can see how that’s going. In the U.S., I cannot think of a single major party figure who combines the Bobo outlook with a market-friendly ideology.

I don’t think that the Republicans will be strongly market-friendly or market-hostile. The Democrats might get completely captured by the radical left, but otherwise my guess is that they will turn out to be somewhere between where they were under President Clinton and where they were under President Obama. With either party, I expect economic policy to be less about ideology and more about paying off key constituencies.

If I had to guess, in the next 6 years or so in the United States, political contests will focus on demographic identity. The Republicans will stick to a base of non-college-educated white men. The Democrats will stick to a base of college-educated white women.

In primaries, candidates will compete with one another to exploit and deepen the divisions between these two groups. In general elections, Republicans will try to convince other voters that the party of college-educated white women is a threat to everyone else, while Democrats will try to convince other voters that the party of non-college-educated white men is a threat to everyone else. The Democrats seem to do better at that game, but things could change.