If a cognitive identity is based on adherence to a set of opinions (that is, publicly expressed or endorsed beliefs) that are felt to generate prestige, to justify a collective and internalized sense of approval and admiration towards their adherents, then opinions which contradict those prestige opinions cannot also generate prestige. They must generate negative prestige. If X generates prestige, then Contrary-X must generate negative prestige and so be subject to the opposite of public admiration (within that cognitive milieu), which is stigmatization. Indeed, avoiding such stigmatization can become a powerful reason to engage in affirming the prestige opinions (or, at least, not openly contradicting them).
Pointer from Lorenzo himself, who did me the honor of leaving a comment on yesterday’s post. In the first part of the essay, he argues that the term “piety display” is more accurate than “virtue signaling.” Read the essay to see why.
The three-axes model would say that conservatives and libertarians also engage in piety displays. When conservatives speak of the fragility of civilization and describe it as threatened by barbarism, that can be thought of as a piety display. When libertarians highlight the encroachment of the state on liberty, that can be thought of as a piety display.
Lorenzo argues that in a time of rapid change, conservatives are at a disadvantage.
visions of the imagined future naturally gain increased power. In particular, politics based on a moralized vision of the future have an inherent advantage that was greatly magnified. For the problem of the past was not only that it now looked so different, but that the past (being sequences of human striving) is inevitably morally messy. Conversely, the imagined future can be as pure as one wants. So, if one wants opinions that provide some guarantee of cognitive status, those based on the politics of the imagined future have a near unbeatable cachet. Especially as it is easy to confuse moral intensity with moral superiority, and even use the former as a marker of the latter.
The perennial appeal of socialism feeds on the information-economizing purity advantage of the imagined future. Rarely precisely defined, socialism becomes a righteous catch-all for the aspiration to attain some profoundly better society, without grappling with practical difficulties or past failures along the path.
The essay concludes,
Given that the underlying drivers of the demand for prestige opinions that generate and protect status-asserting cognitive identity are not likely to go away soon, the prognosis for the health of freedom of thought, science, public debate and democracy in Western societies, or for the competent functioning of institutions, is not good.
I think that the symmetry among libertarians, progressives, and conservatives breaks down when it comes to what I call intimidation. Conservatives and libertarians do not seek to de-platform people with different ideas. They do not seek to get CEOs fired for having the “wrong” opinions. They do not seek to stamp out intellectual diversity in higher education or journalism.
There has been a fascist left for a long time. We saw it in the Soviet Union, in China, in Cuba, and in Venezuela. But until recently, the Anglosphere has rebelled strongly against it. When I was young, Newsweek Magazine alternated columns by Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman. College faculty voted Democrat more than Republican, but conservatives did exist in academia, and no professor was driven off campus for teaching while white.
When I was growing up, the people who might be de-platformed or intimidated were on the left, if they could be connected in some way to the Communist Party. My mother was brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1957 for her Communist associations in the 1930s.
Back then, the term for abusive personal attacks was “McCarthyism,” referring to a Republican. Back then, the left was against McCarthyism. Now it practices it. Back then, the left read George Orwell’s 1984 as a warning. The SJWs read it as a how-to manual.
A few years back, I discovered Murray Rothbard’s thoughts on the impact of the rise of radical Pietism in the 19th century on the Civil War, and subsequently. The succinct description from a Rothbard’s forward to Lysander Spooner’s ‘Vices are Not Crimes’ is a good summary. The shift to the pietistic use of government to enforce “morality” is quite evident and fits with the decline in conflicts over liturgical emphasis “creed and rituals”. Although as always with religion, dogma and busybody control blurs. The pietistic use of government to enforce the dominant “morality” independent of creed explains why secular politics are so vicious but leaving people alone is never a political goal.
https://mises.org/library/lysander-spooner-libertarian-pietist
Here Rothbard spends about 20 min in this rough recording of a 1986 lecture outlining his thoughts on radical pietism’s role in the Civil War.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2ndkCvHGj4&feature=youtu.be&t=1106&ab_channel=minnesotachris
“There has been a fascist left for a long time.”
Fascism was founded by syndicalist socialists, so there has been a fascist left since the beginning.
I’m not sure if I can agree with Dr. Kling’s statement, “Conservatives and libertarians do not seek to de-platform people with different ideas.” I suspect that if they don’t engage in such de-platforming attempts, it’s only because they realize that such attempts aren’t likely to succeed.
Consider the Courtney Lawton affair, at the University of Nebraska in the fall of 2017. Lawton, an adjunct faculty member, took exception to a student’s recruiting for conservative organization Turning Point USA. Lawton’s protest, admittedly, did not take the form of calm and reasoned argument, but of shrieking slogans and waving signs. Nonetheless, from all of the accounts I’ve read, she didn’t engage in physical force, nor did she threaten to use her terrifying adjunct-faculty powers against the student in question, who wasn’t enrolled in her class.
The student demanded that Lawton be expelled from the campus; various conservatives, and the single registered Libertarian in the Nebraska legislature, called for likewise. The arguments that they gave for this were the very sort that we’d rightly decry when they’re wielded by leftists against non-leftists: that Lawton’s speech was emotionally distressing to the student, that she felt threatened by the presence of a loud protestor, etc. Several of these conservatives appealed to FIRE for support, and were astonished and distressed when FIRE stood up for Lawton’s position.
In sum, here we’ve got a situation where conservatives and a Libertarian have the power to de-platform an obnoxious leftist, and they don’t hesitate to use it. I fear that if they haven’t done so more widely, it’s only because they’ve felt that their efforts would be doomed to failure, and not because of any principled commitment to free and open discussion.
“There has been a fascist left for a long time.”
By definition there can’t be. Any illiberal measure to combat fascism is to be celebrated. The biggest critics of fascism aren’t radical liberals (who may even have anarchist politics), but communists. You have to be willingly to engage in a kind of high-level arguably generic fascism (authoritarianism, ideological extremism, censorship) to fight object-level fascism (hating trans people and Muslims etc.).
I wrote on this some years ago: https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/the-intellectual-origins-and-application-of-militant-democracy/
There has been a fascist left for a long time. We saw it in the Soviet Union, in China, in Cuba, and in Venezuela. But until recently, the Anglosphere has rebelled strongly against it.—AK
There still is a fascist left (and rapidly growing worse) in China and probably Cuba too.
But when the Communist Party of China decided to open up a low-cost manufacturing platform for multinationals, then the Anglosphere decided that communism wasn’t so bad.
John Brennan is not a young man. He’s not a recent graduate. But he’s as much of a McCarthyite as any of the unwrinkled faces in the Democratic Party. And this is Brennan: “Frequently, people who are on a treasonous path do not know they’re on a treasonous path.” Likewise Adam Schiff. Likewise Harry Reid.
Warby’s piece is excellent and important. It gives an insightful picture of what is going on in the US today socially and politically. “Piety display” is indeed more accurate than “virtue signalling” in the technical sense. I look forward to reading more of his work.
In the case of communism, the threat the US faced, and still faces, was and is real. I may be completely off base here but the difference between communism and socialism is that the former allows only one political party and allows private property only at the convenience of the state. Socialists may provide for state ownership or fused control of the means of production but theoretically allows for multiple parties and for private property. Fascism is socialism with the third and fourth elements of having nationalist personal indentity: “The State not only is authority which governs and molds individual wills with laws and values of spiritual life, but it is also power which makes its will prevail abroad,” and a recognized national leader having a more or less permanent hold on paper. Thus, I would argue that China and Venezuela are more fascist than socialist.
Either way, “socialist” seems to be a popular slur for conservatives and libertarians, much as “fascist” is for progressives. Just as progressives are sloppy and lazy in labeling everything that they disagree with fascist, so too are conservatives and libertarians pretty lazy and sloppy when they consistently point to Venezuela as “socialism” and use “socialist” as a slur.
Of course many people who use “socialist” as a slur have a deep understanding of what they are critiquing and can provide the proper analysis to meaningfully argue the merits and flaws of the various decisions and tradeoffs reflected in a particular system of government. The more that they articulate their analysis, the more persuasive they will be.
They would be even more persuasive if they turned their attention to the developing world and offered paths forward for the poorest countries that are nominally capitalist. How can Haiti achieve progress and overcome its corrupt government? What choices and tradeoffs do countries like Bangladesh and Ghana face, relative to say Vietnam, in growing their economies? What have been doing right? Where could they go wrong? There is a whole world out there and conservatives and libertarian discourse would be much richer and persuasive if Ghana’s strong democratic tradition and Bangladesh’s popular support for capitalism, were recognized and lauded and discussed as frequently as Venezuela gets tossed around.
Nice comment.
It’s my experience that there are a lot of “free floating labels” that are tossed around without it being clear what they refer to.
“Socialism” means Denmark or Sweden, not the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia or Cuba or Vietnam.
I am guessing that a lot of it can be explained by a few things.
1. To understand a country you have to live in it for while–and most of us haven’t lived anywhere else. A lot of people who pontificate don’t know much, they just have the right opinions, which means the ones that raise their social status.
2. To understand how a country can be “wrecked,” for lack of a better word, you have to watch it happen, or know enough history to know the paradigmatic examples–Argentina is not Canada, for example. Or Burma was expected to be rich and flourishing. Or it’s good to know even neighboring contrasts–Dominican Republic is better off than Haiti, or Costa Rica is better off, calmer, more civil and peaceful and rich than its neighbors.
3. Oddly, a lot of people don’t even know examples in their own country. They can’t explain how Newark and Detroit got to be the way they are, or how it could have been stopped or at least slowed.
4. A lot of people with bright ideas have “no skin in the game.” They never had to flee Venezuela when it collapsed, or exit Cuba on a raft, or get out of Yugoslavia during the wars of its dissolution (What could go wrong with identity politics?).
One more thing…
5. No sense of the possible–no sense of what things are actually possible and workable because they have been demonstrated, compared to what sort of bright ideas sound good but tend to fail endlessly.
and another thing…
6. In Crawford Young’s _Ideology and Development in Africa_ he made a distinction between three sorts of ideological stances in the newly independent states.
a. Capitalism (Kenya, Nigeria, Cote D’Ivoire).
b. “African Socialism” or Populist Socialism which was essentially a Fabian Socialism with the state as “Big Daddy” where everyone would pull together and the benefits of development would be shared equally. This often led to stagnation, corruption, failed grandiose projects, loss-making public enterprises, and disappointment–but it wasn’t Marxist-Leninist in basis or orientation. It was a veneer for patronage machines to keep the current ruler in power, or a cover for what the political scientists came to call “neo-patrimonialism,” or “big man rule” in the vernacular. But the inspiration wasn’t Leninist.
c. There a were handful of African states with clear Marxist-Leninist inspirations, at least in theory. Ethiopia especially under Mengistu after the Revolution, Guinea under Sekou Toure, arguably Benin, French Congo (Brazzaville), and some of the Portuguese colonies after the Portuguese finally pulled out.
These last, which I believe Young called Afro-Marxist, had a clear Leninist theory, complete with a vanguard party, an energetic secret police, and a deeper commitment to following Marxist dogma (rather than just using it as a smoke screen to manage a patronage machine adequate to stay in power).
If I’m making any sense, I’ll put it like this. A lot of commentators can’t distinguish between (1) Marxist-Leninist socialism/communism with class warfare and a vanguard party, and (2) a mixed economy with an ever growing welfare state that is the historical fruition of Fabian Socialism and Bismarckian reforms. It seems to me that (2) is the natural endpoint of OECD countries anyway, and we are already there–the challenge is to keep the government sector from growing so big that it kills the market capitalism that generates wealth.
A lot of commentators also don’t have a sense for how easily you can screw up an economy adequate to provoke a currency crisis and cascade of sectoral collapses. Even Mitterand’s France had a short currency crisis.
Thanks for listening. Too early in the morning, but I tried.
I don’t think we should equate something like the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, a government organization with the capacity to bring federal charges against people, with campus student organizations, which have no power other than what people choose to give them by caring about what they think.
To the extent that “SJWs” have caused people to be fired, you can lay the blame squarely on their corporate managers for being wimps in the face of criticism.
Ironically, people parodoxically increase the power of SJWs by arguing that their criticism drives significant market reactions. For example, let’s take Chick-Fil-A – subject of widespread SJW attacks in 2012 and today over their alleged support for anti-gay causes. And yet Chick-Fil-A sales actually rose in response to the controversy, indicating that despite the appearance of broad public outrage – the vast majority of people did not care, there was no negative market impact. Similarly, it is likely that most of the SJW protests on college campuses are largely toothless – if administrators simply refused to give in to the groups demands, there would be far less cost to doing so than is believed. And yet opponents of SJWs instead of breaking down the image of these groups as being something administrators should fear, tend to build them up.
Again, they have no legal power. Their only power lies in whether other people listen to them and care what they think. If you want to deprive them of power, the way to do that is to stop caring what they think and convince others to do the same. Fearing them and building them up as a power that should be feared is the exact opposite of that.
But if “corporate manager” “wimps” will enforce SJW’s demands, then the SJWs do have power.
There is the big question of how you convince the corporate manage wimps to stop caring, especially when many of them agree with the SJWs–or at the very least, believe that they are on the cutting edge of positive social change, and thus should be followed.
This is also to a certain extent just the market in action. Businesses have the right to employ who they want, and if they don’t want people that hold certain unpopular opinions, that’s their business. Some other business can turn a profit by employing those people at a discount. Just like with racial minorities, right?
Thank you very much for the plug. Also, I have loved your “three axes” model since I first read it and have cited it more than once on my blog.
And “Orwell as a how-to manual” is a line I like using myself because it seems so sadly apt.