Category Archives: Politics

Charles Chu on Vaclav Smil

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Chu writes,

Another interesting thing about Smil is that he has principles. In particular, you can tell he that he values intellectual honesty far more than he values fame or material wealth.

. . .the danger of getting paid for your ideas: It’s easy to sell out or self-censor because you’re afraid of (a) financial or (b) status pushback.

The essay covers several interesting issues. I think that every public intellectual has to have second thoughts about writing things that challenge the views of his or her audience. But it is important to be willing to do that. I think that this is one of Tyler Cowen’s strengths.

The American right wing

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A foreign correspondent asked me about it, I presume because he found the Wikipedia entry that is based on a blog post that I wrote when I was, without realizing it, quite confused. So at this point I would say that I do not know what the term “neoreaction” means, and if I don’t, who does?

Now, I think that the central issue in American right-wing politics is nationalism. (Note, I may be overly influenced by recent exposure to Yoram Hazony.) I will get to that shortly. But a few preliminary comments.

1. I think that many Americans reject the aggressive forms of progressivism. Even many left-of-center Democrats believe that conservative speakers on college campuses are entitled to be heard. They think that people with religious faiths should have room to follow their beliefs, as long as they do not harm others. They think that the private sector is not perfect but that government is not perfect either.

2. I think that there is a set of Americans who make a big deal about what they perceive as threats to the white race, but this set is really, really tiny.

3. Progressives would like to believe that all of their opponents belong to (2). They do not want to concede that many of their opponents are respectable exponents of (1).

4. The issue of nationalism vs. transnationalism is what is most important to understand. In America, there is a long tradition of opposition to transnationalism. Many Americans are suspicious of rules made by international bodies. They are skeptical of sending American aid or American soldiers to deal with foreign problems.

5. Since World War II, American elites have been much more transnationalist than ordinary Americans. Elites on the left like international bodies that make rules and sanction military interventions. Elites on the right believe that American involvement in other countries is necessary in order to protect our national interests. For a recent statement of the elite-right view, see Robert Kagan in Saturday’s WSJ.

6. Populists on the left have taken the opposite point of view. On the Democratic side, the slogan “Come home, America” emerged durng the Vietnam War. On the Republican side, from Robert Taft through Patrick Buchanan through Donald Trump, opposition to internationalism has always had a spokesman. When George W. Bush ran for President in 2000, he used nationalist rhetoric. He ended up governing as an internationalist, especially after 9/11.

7. Mr. Trump is the first nationalist to win the Presidency since World War II. Conservative intellectuals who are in the internationalist camp are “never-Trumpers.” Conservative intellectuals who are nationalists are inclined to be Trump supporters. But Trump’s populist rhetoric turns off conservative intellectuals of all stripes.

8. Libertarians like the non-interventionist aspect of nationalism, but we hate the anti-trade, anti-immigrant aspect of nationalism. Overall, libertarians do not approve of Mr. Trump. We differ on how we think he compares with his opponents.

Russ Roberts and Yoram Hazony

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I found this one of the most interesting econtalk podcasts. Let me pick one nit. Trying to argue that nationalism is not inherently war-generating, Hazony says,

universal wars are devoted to some kind of an ideology of world domination. I the case of the 30-Years’ War, it was the theory of the universal Catholic order. In the case of the Nepolonic Wars, the theory of the new universal French liberalism. And, in the two World Wars, an attempt by two German emperors in effect to try to, uh, make Germany Lord of the Earth.

My nit is with taking the view that World War I was an attempt to create a world order. Let’s even stipulate that Germany was the most war-seeking nation in 1914. My reading of the history is that Germany did not have a goal of world domination. I buy the argument that Germany started the first World War out of fear that if it did not fight then, it would at some point have to fight on more adverse terms. It saw Russia getting stronger every decade. Its ally, Austria-Hungary, had obvious weaknesses.

After World War I, many people saw the war as a case of nationalism run amok. I still think that is an appropriate way to look at it.

Now that The Virtue of Nationalism is available, I expect I will be giving it more attention going forward.

Lukianoff and Haidt compete for my reading time

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Their latest, The Coddling of the American Mind, was released the same day as Yoram Hazony’s book. Coddling is getting plenty of media buzz. This half-hour podcast is probably worth your time.

I might have thought that I would be more inclined to resist Hazony’s defense of nationalism and to defend L-H’s resistance to political correctness on campus. But it might turn out differently after I read the two books. Lukianoff and Haidt (L-H) write,

many parents, K-12 teachers, professors, and university administrators have been unknowingly teaching a generation of students to engage in the mental habits commonly seen in people who suffer from anxiety and depression.

I think that college administrators could make a difference. My fantasy of a courageous college administrator would be one who says:

1. If you don’t want to get up in the morning regretting the sex you had last night, then stay sober and say “no.” I would be surprised to find forcible rape on campus, but if you don’t feel safe, carry pepper spray.

2. If you engage in rioting, assault, or vandalism, then you deserve to be arrested and dealt with by the criminal justice system.

3. If you don’t like what someone says, then write an essay explaining what is wrong with it, and try to get other people interested in your essay.

I am not sure I will buy the L-H story. They want to draw an equivalence between right and left, and that is fair if you are talking about the propensity to be uncharitable to those who disagree. But my sense is that the depression/anxiety parallel to political demeanor is a better fit for the left than for the right.

Another problem I have with the psychological emphasis is that it might lead someone to think that if the parents, teachers, and professors could just realize that coddling has adverse psychological consequences, then they would take a different approach. Instead, I think that problem is more deep-seated. I see parents, teachers, and professors as having intellectual weaknesses (such as a lack of appreciation for evolution as a characteristic of markets and an influence on human behavior patterns) and character flaws (such as a lack of courage to talk to students as I would like) that are much harder to correct.

But this is all preliminary to reading the book. I need to give L-H a chance to change my mind.

Is internationalism liberal or imperalist?

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Tyler Cowen writes,

In other words, it could be that the fractious and increasingly nationalistic politics of today are how things naturally are — and the anomaly is this decades-long period of cooperation and harmony.

He calls the internationalist approach “liberalism,” and he laments its inability to persist.

Contrast with Yoram Hazony.

For centuries, the politics of Western nations have been characterized by a struggle between two antithetical visions of world order: an order of free and independent nations, each pursuing the political good in accordance with its own traditions and understanding; and an order of peoples united under a single regime of law, promulgated and maintained by a single supra-national authority. . .

the imperial rulers of the ancient world saw it as their task, in the words of the Babylonian king Hamurabi, to “bring the four quarters of the world to obedience.” That obedience, after all, was what ensured salvation from war, disease, and starvation.

And yet, despite the obvious economic advantages of an Egyptian or Babylonian peace that would unify humanity, the Bible was born out of a deep-seated opposition to that very aim. To Israel’s prophets, Egypt was “the house of bondage,” and they spared no words in deploring the bloodshed and cruelty involved in imperial conquest and the imperial manner of governing

Hazony sees the quest for international order as intrinsically imperialist. He has a forthcoming book that extends these arguments.

I believe that this is an issue that is particularly challenging for libertarians. We believe that national borders restrict freedom, including the freedom to live where you want. But what if every project to get rid of national borders is one in which power is concentrated in a central authority?

Whose problems would you prefer?

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Tyler Cowen writes,

Over a period of less than five years, China will retake Taiwan and also bring much of East and Southeast Asia into a much tighter sphere of influence. Turkey and Saudi Arabia will build nuclear weapons and become dominant players in their regions. Russia will continue to nibble at the borders of neighboring states, including Latvia and Estonia, and NATO will lose its credibility, except for a few bilateral relationships, such as with the U.K. Parts of Eastern Europe will return to fascism. NAFTA will exist on paper, but it will be under perpetual renegotiation and hemispheric relations will fray.

This is not his forecast of the most likely future, but he tees it up as a pessimistic scenario.

I think that forecasting the emergence of other powers is easy if you think only in terms of the problems that the U.S. faces. But you get a different point of view if you think about other countries’ problems and ask, “Whose problems would you prefer?”

China is aging rapidly. It faces the problem known as premature de-industrialization, meaning that there is not enough demand for manufactured goods to provide a broad base of middle-class jobs for low-skilled workers. If giant cities connected by high-speed rail are the most efficient configuration, then fine. But what if that turns out to be a bad bet?

I do not agree that Turkey has a chance to be a dominant player in its region. Nobody in the region likes the Turks. The Turks don’t even like each other very much. There are major divides between urban and rural, between religious and secular. If they come to dominate, it will only be in a tallest-pygmy sort of way.

Saudi Arabia, like Turkey, has yet to show that its entire society is on board with modernization. If only a thin sliver of elite is ready to join the modern world, then it will have plenty of internal conflicts to worry about. It won’t be a dominant player.

According to David Halberstam, in the early 1960s at the height of the Cold War, the Soviet leader Khrushchev told Americans that Laos would fall “like a rotten apple” into Communist hands. Today, if we look around for rotten apples, meaning regimes that are failing to deliver for their people, we can find them in Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, and Iran. If those apples were to fall, particularly the latter two, that would make up for foreign policy problems that might emerge elsewhere.

Again, Tyler is not arguing that the pessimistic scenario is the most likely one. But I think he gives it a notably higher p than I would.

Russ Roberts on the outrage epidemic

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He writes,

What has changed is our ability to feed and indulge our tribalism, particularly with news and politics. This new-found ability is the result of the transformation of the news and information landscape. It began with cable news. The internet has taken it to a new level.

As Roberts points out, it is not just that modern media have the ability to stimulate feelings of outrage. They have a strong incentive to do so.

Roberts elaborates on these points in this podcast.

Asymmetric ruthlessness

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Suppose that the other side is willing to use ruthless tactics. Suppose that we are not willing to do so. Suppose that these ruthless tactics work. That is asymmetric ruthlessness.

For example, Niall Ferguson in a vidcast with Dave Rubin, argues that conservatives are victims of asymmetric ruthlessness in the culture war. For example, on college campuses, left-wing professors are willing to make hiring and promotion decisions on ideological grounds, and conservatives do not counter.

I tend to think that the movement to increase the status of women in economics could well turn out to involve asymmetric ruthlessness on the part of the left. That is, I think it is unlikely that it will be conservative women whose status gets raised, and it is likely that the males who are pushed out at the margin will be conservatives.

But I am inclined to be very cautious about positing asymmetric ruthlessness. I think that each side can point to asymmetric ruthlessness on the other side, and that this becomes mutually reinforcing.

So you can think of a Type I error as failing to notice real asymmetric ruthlessness. You think that Hitler won’t really do all the horrible things he indicates he might do. You fail to take proper counter measures soon enough.

You can think of a Type II error as believing in asymmetric ruthlessness that isn’t there. You needlessly escalate the conflict. Yuval Levin worries that conservatives are making this sort of Type II error. In a way, Niall Ferguson worries about it, too, because he fears that the Brexit and the Trump Presidency could set in motion forces that bring Jeremy Corbyn and his American equivalent to power.