I like the list. A lot to unpack here. Two things I look forward to hearing more from Matt about:
1. The "policy ratchet" literature, in item 11: "This is not how politics works, it defies all the conventional wisdom, and in the case of the CTC, it involved violently misreading the 'policy ratchet' literature in a way that almost defies comprehension"
2. The question of how the South African experience influences Thiel / Sacks / Musk is really interesting along a couple of axes of interpretation. The one you mention -- how electoral democracy can lead to bad economic outcomes -- and also in terms of how to navigate a multicultural society that contains **dramatically** different cultural norms.
I totally understand how white south africans could find Democracy threatening. When your group is begins with 20% of the electorate and the other group is growing faster, you’re gonna lose, and, best case, there will be really stiff taxes, worst case reparations and expropriation. But America is completely different. Whites are 65% of the electorate and, while this share is decreasing, Latinos are assimilating and inter marrying about as quickly as their numbers are increasing. There’s a very good chance America can slowly become multiracial without upheaval.
I am not totally sure why, but America seems supernaturally gifted at assimilation. The term "multicultural" feels almost misleading because it understates the extent to which new cultures just get absorbed into the whole.
I assume it has something to do with that quote about how you can’t become French, Japanese, etc, but you can become American. If the end goal is actually achievable, there’s something to work at.
There are a number of small but significant things that add up to this. We say the Pledge of Allegiance every morning in school, for instance. This is important to us because without America as a country there's no such thing as an American; whereas without the country of Sweden (for instance) there's still the concept of a Swedish person.
I think this is largely just the result of a few things happening in the right order:
1. The British Empire established English as arguably the most important international language by the end of WWI and made their culture known to basically the whole planet.
2. Anglophones unified in one country got control of the entire contiguous US, an enormously overpowered geographic advantage that let their population and economy grow enormously.
3. WWII decimated much of the world right as mass media and international communications were taking off.
This firmly established a huge population of Anglophones, English as the default and most useful language worldwide, and American/British culture as understood worldwide.
This inherently makes the US good at assimilation because it requires few changes on the part of Americans: The people who come in are going to learn English fluently no later than the second generation and they're mostly going to be OK with bits of culture like Christmas and secular rule of law and blue jeans. The other FIVEYES countries of course get a similar effect.
Canada has the best immigrants, because it gets them carefully. They get industrious, hard working, law abiding types from throughout the Commonwealth. Yet even Canada is slowing down, probably because the rent in Canada is way too high.
It depends what you mean by getting the best immigrants. If you're only interested in, "of the most impressive people who move to a country they weren't born in, where do they go?" then the USA wins hands down, it has the best opportunities for impressive and successful people to become superstars or super-rich, or to work in very prestigious organizations or on very exciting projects.
But "getting the best immigrants" could also mean "how appealing is the median immigrant, as seen by existing citizens?" or "can we successfully exclude immigrants who have little to recommend them to the citizens?" By those measures, the USA's long border with a much poorer country and its overloaded immigration system are disadvantages, whereas Canada has the luxury of being inaccessible by land except from a huge country that is slightly richer per capita, puts a lot of distance between Canada and land migrants, and absorbs those migrants or deports them in the opposite direction of Canada. This means that while not being as attractive as the USA for future Nobel laureates, startup founders etc., Canada also gets fewer "low-quality" immigrants because they can't walk in.
The US is very gifted at assimilation compared to "Old Europe" (France seemed to have been doing a good job with immigration from other parts of Europe, mostly Italy and Spain, in the 19th C, although Captain Dreyfus would disagree).
It's not clear to me (YMMV) that the US is particularly standout compared to other emigrant/settler nation-states like Australia, Brazil, Mexico, even Canada**. I confess that I say that based more on anecdata and "vibes" much more than having solid time series, but e.g. the on the ground change from the White Australia of 2-3 generations back and today is pretty striking.
** the asterisk on Canada having to do with the ongoing and not really settled (from what I can tell) battles over how Francophony cashes out, both within Quebec and at the Federal level.
The French have the closest thing in Europe to the civic identity that America has achieved. There is a greater value on french culture (language and norms) than french ethnicity. Liberté, egalité, fraternité.” Maybe laïcité too.
It's the inexorable force of American pop culture. A child of immigrants will want to be an American teenager, no matter how much their parents try to stop it. Local cultural enclaves will hold the first immigrant generation. The second generation will visit and feel guilty that their kids no longer speak the language of the old country.
I have talked to a number of white South Africans who find democracy threatening, but it is not this sort of abstract principle. It's more like, worrying that if Malema and the EFF party gain power there will be anti-white-person violence. Their political theme song is all about killing white people, it's a very reasonable thing to be worried about. And I think this drives a lot of people to emigrate which I think is a totally reasonable response. (Especially if you are a skilled professional who would make more money in the US or Europe.)
In some sense, this is reaping what you sow, right? You shouldn't be surprised if a government built on racist violence falls, and then there's more political violence later. But that doesn't really reassure people like, a white woman who grew up in Cape Town and had nothing to do with any apartheid government because she was 2 years old when that fell and now is thinking hey maybe she should bring up her children elsewhere and she is just a bit worried about the effects of South African democracy in general.
And also the EFF doesn't look like it will gain power in the near future, the current coalition government seems promising IMO. So maybe it will just work out.
Just to set the facts down, in 1996 the percentage of white SAs relative to total population was 10.9%. Today it’s 7.3% and emigration is a big component of that loss. I can’t tell you if I’ve talked to the avg white SA (probably not) but the sense I get is that there continues to be a deep recognition that that apartheid was wrong. However it is also very unfortunate that Mandela was succeeded by a progressively more incompetent and corrupt Presidents of SA. Horrifically high crime rates (tho slight trending down), a murder rate about 7.5x greater than the US.
And so there is a sense that in several easy to measure ways, SA has become a much weaker economic entity, much less safe and deteriorating capital base over time.
In fact a diaspora of SA (white and black, but mostly white ) can be found in both major English speaking population centers in the, US, UK and Asia Pacific (especially Australia) and also the Netherlands.
I am sure there is a great sense of loss and disappointment and that would permeate the thinking of powerful emigrants.
The British empire and its afterglow were totally awesome for privileged white people. They were often better for no whites than the Belgian congo or dutch east indies, but ymmv.
I suspect Elon Musk would strongly agree America is different, and one could argue cutting the asylum immigration is a part of accelerating that process of assimilation and inter-marrying[1]. Separate from Musk but similar to his views, it is unsurprising Latino voters have trended less Democratic as Republicans become more of their early 20th century form on the immigration issue. Desire for social mobility within a national citizenry and desire for higher immigration are not obviously the same thing, and in some ways, can directly conflict.
At any rate, South Africa is simply a very different country from the US with very different problems (deterioration of electrical grid, potable water, air force, things we take for granted as capabilities of developed countries[2].) It seems like a basic error for leftists to analogize South Africa before and after apartheid when trying to argue with Israeli citizens about the (real) injustice of the West Bank occupation. But that's a whole other thing.
There was an NYT hit-piece on Musk's childhood that iirc was pretty bad and became a cause célèbre among people who complain about the Times self-editing. (The reporter tweeted: "Elon Musk grew up in a South Africa that saw the dangers of unchecked speech: Apartheid govt propaganda fueled violence against Black people. Musk didn't experience that. He grew up in a bubble of white privilege. @lynseychutel & I explored his early life") It was a bit rich to suggest that the problem with Apartheid SA was "unchecked speech," and the article promised a lot more than it delivered (white fellow students said he was standoffish and stood out because he would go to Black kids birthday parties, which doesn't exactly make him look bad). But I bet there's more material for better reporters.
No, he *did* go, and his white classmates who avoided Black kids their age said that Musk didn’t have many friends that they knew. It is one of the only things I’ve read that made me think well of Musk, although it isn’t meant to
While Matt's point about the connection between electoral majoritarianism and "bad" economic policy is definitely right in terms of Musk/Thiel/Sacks' thinking, I really think there's something even broader where these guys link politics-as-such to societal decline.
None of the three are supporters of apartheid, really I think all three found and still find their country of origin to have been depressing and hopeless, and that leads them to find the idea of a mass polity governing itself and working through its disputes at the ballot box to be unserious and naive in a way more intense than people from the historically and culturally democratic NATO sphere would ever feel.
That Trumpism is a cheap and cartoonish anti-politics easily pushed to the will of oligarchs is precisely the appeal. Gangsterism reads to them as more serious than the "fantasy" of self-government. Racism per se is a bit of a red herring.
British TV shows aside, every South African I have met in America has been quite friendly. Heck, my middle school principal was an immigrant from South Africa, and he was pretty cool.
Yeah I'm glad he mentioned the South Africa angle. It has really been striking this year that all these uber-rich villains (in my view) come out of this single place that I, and I think essentially all Americans, know fairly little about. It has also been striking that the specific way in which I see them as malignantly wrong is this fundamental skepticism of democracy they seem to all share.
Or maybe it just one of the new ethnicities, like Israeli, Russian and Cuban-American, that you are openly able to disparage because it codes as racist to progressives.
I honestly thought so at first, but I've found it increasingly striking that these specific people (who don't even really get along with each other at all!) have all decided at different times over the last few years to start pushing a very similar brand of authoritarian democracy-skeptical politics.
Really seems like something cultural going on there, to me. Probably doesn't extend to *many* South Africans, but it's just striking that all the most visible ultra-wealthy ones seem to have landed in this place.
And it's not just a "tech billionaire" thing. Their politics strike me as notably different than other tech billionaires. People like Mark Cuban and Paul Graham really do come out of the same milieu as these guys, but have totally opposite worldviews on politics. Even the ones closer to their politics, the Calacanises for example, still strike me as being quite different, more focused on specific policies they don't like (Biden's FTC, taxes, etc.), and much less focused on keeping the rabble from exercising power.
I dunno, maybe it's racist, but it never previously occurred to me to be racist toward white South Africans in the past - I just never thought of them at all! - but there seems to be an interesting phenomenon going on here.
I think it makes sense to consider the democracy-skeptical angle of a South African given that South Africa represents one of the great economic development setbacks of any world nation in the past 50 years. The economy writ large collapsed and has essentially not grown since the ‘90s, and it is no longer a leader among African bloc economies. Overlapping energy crises have exacerbated this trend. Crime rates soared and for several years were among the highest in the world. Dissatisfaction with the govt has been sky-high during this time but corruption continued unabated for decades. It’s all very Argentina-esque albeit even more dramatic in some ways. I find it to be a tragedy. The nation had so much potential after the end of apartheid; virtually no one expected the next decades would be so calamitous.
Luckily the current coalition seems slightly more stable and considerably more competent than previous governments, but they have a long road ahead of them if they want to regain their status as the preeminent African economy south of the Sahel.
Yeah. Interestingly Namibia, where Thiel is from, has had a much more stable transition to democracy. Of course, there are only a few people there and there are tons of racial disparities, but it’s avoided the malgovernment of SA.
Totally. This is why I think it's more interesting than "just one of the new acceptable kinds of racism". I think it seems more likely to have something to do with reaction to this kind of history.
If so, I think they've drawn the wrong conclusion, something like "strongmen are good as long as they are white dudes", rather than "corruption is incredibly toxic".
Was the Mandela government corrupt? I had the impression that the policies put in place to correct racial injustice were poorly structured. Which I understand. It's got to be hard to successfully make over a society so dramatically.
Who doesn't get along here? Musk, Sacks, and Thiel are all part of the PayPal mafia, and while they may not be the best of friends, they certainly influence each other.
I'm aware of the falling out back then but thought they'd somewhat patched it up or had others as go between, but TBH I'm not really sure. Thiel and Sacks are definitely part of the same group of PayPal Republicans though.
You definitely see disparaging remarks made about Cuban-Americans in progressive circles. That even crops up in snarky replies to Matt on Twitter because the commenters presume Matt's Cuban ancestors were fleeing Castro, rather than fleeing Batista in an earlier wave of refugees.
It's an interesting commentary on how everyone has a different level of engagement (or "online"-ness) that I've literally never once seen this kind of comment.
Over the last five years a very vocal group of progressives have sought to shout down any discussion of Democrat's weakness with South Florida Latinos by suggesting their weakness is simply the result of much higher levels of anti-black racism among the Cuban-American community.
It's telling that Cuban-Americans like Matt and George Zimmerman are now "white Latinos" but Puerto Ricans like AOC and Bad Bunny aren't.
What do people mean by "all of these"? Isn't it just Thiel and Musk? What other billionaire South Africans are there that I'm missing? Do we need a geopolitical theory to explain 2 egomaniacs who happen to be from the same country?
For South Africa, you can probably start with the documentary Lethal Weapon 2, it covers some of the history of the apartheid period and illustrates some examples of race relations in the culture there at the time.
I watched Lethal Weapon 2 for the first time last year. In a day and age of Tom Cruise in Top Gun 2 battling “the enemy” it sure was a (pleasant) surprise to see how anti-South Africa Hollywood was willing to be in the late-80s!
Also the George Harrison song during the credits rips.
Everyone was anti-South African. Paul Simon took a ton of heat for making Graceland, even though he was working with blacks performing black African music.
I work with a few guys from South Africa and they’re great guys, charismatic and fun. The other common denominator is that they’re cowboys; very comfortable with risk, impatient with playing it safe. For whatever that’s worth, which is probably nothing. But I see something similar with the rich guys supporting Trump.
Agree the specifics about the policy ratchet would be good to hear more about as Matt was a big proponent of some version of CTC expansion as I recall.
The South Africa question is very interesting. They have a huge unauthorized immigration problem, in part because many in the ANC see keeping out people from neighboring countries as having echoes of apartheid and Bantustans.
The last time I was in Joberg was at least 8-10 years ago. At the time, there was a huge influx of Nigerians into the country. The corners of most streets had groups of Nigerians hanging around all day (or so my driver and the people I talked to). It had a look that you would find familiar in Chicago or Baltimore, but at a much larger scale. Black and White SAs both were blaming a whole bunch of social ills on the newcomers.
But we do NOT have a society with dramatically different cultural norms. Republicans _claim_ that Democrats have dramatically different cultural norms, but it's not true. The problem of electoral democracy are the same as always, people want contradictory things. Not worse now than in 1789.
For context, he's among the most respected names in tech as the founder of YCombinator and Sam Altmans former boss. Great argument that will appeal to moderates in tech, including those highly suspicious of Democrats economic policy. Here's the message:
Why Moderates Should Vote for Harris
People on the far left and the far right have already decided who to vote for in the next election. Voting for the other party would be unthinkable. But what if you're a moderate?
I'm a moderate, and I'm voting for Harris. The reason is not that I love the Democrats' policies. Both parties' policies seem a roughly equal mix of good and bad. The reason I'm voting for Harris is that this election is about character.
As far as I can tell, Harris is a typical politician. That may not seem much of a recommendation. But Trump is something far worse. He seems to be completely without shame.
We saw that the last time he was president. He ran the White House like a mob boss, choosing subordinates for loyalty rather than ability. No one knows that better than the people who worked for him. Almost half the cabinet-level appointees from his previous administration have refused to endorse him. They're warning us what he's like.
The worst thing he did, in my opinion, was when he tried to remain in power after he lost the 2020 election. He knew he'd lost, but he called Mike Pence and tried to get him not to certify the election. Thank God Pence had the character to stand up to him. I don't like to think what might have happened if he hadn't.
Trying to remain in power after losing an election is banana republic stuff. You don't do that in America. Conceding gracefully when you lose an election is more important than any policy a politician might have, because it's only this principle that allows us to get rid of politicians whose policies don't work.
So sure, Harris is a typical politician. But Trump is a crook. You can't have that sort of person as president. It's too risky.
To add some more context, he's written numerous essays defending tech, capitalism, and even economic inequality. He's solidly on the right with respect to economics and has the billions to back that up. Eg, his 2005 article, "Inequality and Risk", https://www.paulgraham.com/inequality.html
ChatGPT summarizes this better than I could (because I haven't read it in nearly 20 years) as:
> Paul Graham’s essay "Inequality and Risk" argues that reducing economic inequality through wealth redistribution dampens people’s willingness to take risks, which he sees as crucial for startup innovation. He suggests that high potential rewards encourage risk-taking necessary for venture funding and founding startups. He emphasizes that attacking inequality by limiting wealth stifles economic growth, advocating instead to address corruption and the links between wealth and power. Graham concludes that societies should focus on transparency to limit power abuses, rather than reducing inequality itself.
Thanks! Yeah, life got too crazy in the mornings, I miss sitting with a cup of coffee and reading/commenting…. But I do still read and scan the comments when I can! Usually too late in the day to jump in the fray much :)
"It's much easier to bomb a family's home. The system is built to look for them in these situations."
Built to look for them at home. Built to. And yet the person saying this is not a critic of the Israeli regime. It's an intelligence officer describing business as usual.
Paul Graham is a sort of avatar of the “normie”* opinion among Silicon Valley elite, so this is mostly expected but nonetheless welcome news.
*”normie” in the sense that he is not associated with the countercultural elitist intellectual circles that form a kind of nebulae of contrarianism in the valley… including the Yarvin/Thiel/Musk crowd, but also those whose politics are dominated by EA, the e/acc fringe, etc
Graham's opinion that the problem is Americans don't take enough risks and need to be offered unlimited financial rewards in order to get them to do it is kinda weird to me, but understandable(self-interested) given his position.
It's nice to see somebody of that class not quoting Moldbug.
I completely agree that Trumps norm breaking, corruption, and (at best) quasi criminality is the worst thing about him, and are why I voted against him despite my dislike of many of Biden’s policies. I think he has personally and permanently increased what politicians will be able to get away with. Flabbergasting that he doesn’t even TRY to not get caught in lie and avoid scandal.
I still remember when conservatives were (rightly!) critical of Obama pushing the envelope on an unbound executive. Trump is that times about a thousand, plus he’s the most corrupt president since Grant. Can’t have that in office, even if it saves you taxes and is better in regulation.
If he were running against Sanders or something I’d have a hard decision to make. Against Harris it’s very easy, if unpleasant.
This is why I don't completely blame Dems for focusing so much on bashing Trump. You need to be strategic about it and meet people where they are at, but the dude is such an obvious conman. I agree with Matt substantively that focusing on policy is probably better but I think we have to admit that it's kind of counterintuitive and doing what feels counterintuitive is often quite hard to square mentally/emotionally!
It's so frustrating, because we *want* to be focused on other stuff, but it's just unclear how to do that without downplaying corrupt and outright criminal behavior.
For example, I really didn't *want* to see Trump prosecuted, it's such a terrible precedent to prosecute ex- heads of state, but it was the least bad of the bad options.
Trump does this all the time, making all the options bad.
I think you might have better said something more like "most corrupt Presidential Administration since Grant**". AFAIK, unlike Trump, there are no claims of personal corruption on Grant's part (correction welcome).
** The Harding administration _might_ need a word. I'm not sure whether there are any ANSI standard Z-scaled corruption metrics [especially metrics based on data rather than surveys and vibes like Transparency International], although I'd be quite interested to know of any.
I listened to a BBC podcast on Grant a few years back and got the strong sense that contemporary scholars generally agree that he wasn't personally corrupt- it was more that he had a fierce soldier's loyalty to the sometimes sketchy people that he'd fought with and didn't give them enough oversight, and the circumstances after the Civil War made it very hard to police corruption anyway.
The various scholars agreed that his reputation for extreme corruption was mostly due to a confederate black legend-type effort.
This seems like a really low value endorsement in practice: almost everyone who cares about Paul Graham's opinion, or even knows who he is, lives outside of any remotely competitive state (maybe a few in TX?). The tech donor class definitely respects his opinion, but swaying their donations and influence a week before the election, when a third of ballots have already been dropped off, seems like too little and too late.
he was the first person whose prediction that biden would be out after the debate actually rang true to me, basically saying ``this is not my crowd, but the lack of people lining up behind biden means there is a rebellion, and once they've done that it is hard to go back''. also has a beef with sacks.
>But for the record, I agree. The odds of American democracy collapsing, conditional on Trump winning, are below 50 percent.<
It seems to me there's possibly a gray zone where American democracy hasn't truly "collapsed" as such, but it's become (1) weakened almost beyond recognition, and (2) in that weakened state has been substantially highjacked by the right so as to make progressive policy outcomes in the foreseeable future incredibly difficult to attain. That's where I think we're headed if Trump wins next week.
I like the list. A lot to unpack here. Two things I look forward to hearing more from Matt about:
1. The "policy ratchet" literature, in item 11: "This is not how politics works, it defies all the conventional wisdom, and in the case of the CTC, it involved violently misreading the 'policy ratchet' literature in a way that almost defies comprehension"
2. The question of how the South African experience influences Thiel / Sacks / Musk is really interesting along a couple of axes of interpretation. The one you mention -- how electoral democracy can lead to bad economic outcomes -- and also in terms of how to navigate a multicultural society that contains **dramatically** different cultural norms.
I totally understand how white south africans could find Democracy threatening. When your group is begins with 20% of the electorate and the other group is growing faster, you’re gonna lose, and, best case, there will be really stiff taxes, worst case reparations and expropriation. But America is completely different. Whites are 65% of the electorate and, while this share is decreasing, Latinos are assimilating and inter marrying about as quickly as their numbers are increasing. There’s a very good chance America can slowly become multiracial without upheaval.
I am not totally sure why, but America seems supernaturally gifted at assimilation. The term "multicultural" feels almost misleading because it understates the extent to which new cultures just get absorbed into the whole.
I assume it has something to do with that quote about how you can’t become French, Japanese, etc, but you can become American. If the end goal is actually achievable, there’s something to work at.
There are a number of small but significant things that add up to this. We say the Pledge of Allegiance every morning in school, for instance. This is important to us because without America as a country there's no such thing as an American; whereas without the country of Sweden (for instance) there's still the concept of a Swedish person.
I think this is largely just the result of a few things happening in the right order:
1. The British Empire established English as arguably the most important international language by the end of WWI and made their culture known to basically the whole planet.
2. Anglophones unified in one country got control of the entire contiguous US, an enormously overpowered geographic advantage that let their population and economy grow enormously.
3. WWII decimated much of the world right as mass media and international communications were taking off.
This firmly established a huge population of Anglophones, English as the default and most useful language worldwide, and American/British culture as understood worldwide.
This inherently makes the US good at assimilation because it requires few changes on the part of Americans: The people who come in are going to learn English fluently no later than the second generation and they're mostly going to be OK with bits of culture like Christmas and secular rule of law and blue jeans. The other FIVEYES countries of course get a similar effect.
Canada has the best immigrants, because it gets them carefully. They get industrious, hard working, law abiding types from throughout the Commonwealth. Yet even Canada is slowing down, probably because the rent in Canada is way too high.
This is almost certainly false at the high end of the spectrum. Might be true to some extent at the mid or lower end of the spectrum.
Attracting high-end immigrants depends mostly on having high-end jobs for them, no? In that regard, you can't really beat the USA.
Obviously the US gets the best immigrants. How is this even debatable?
It depends what you mean by getting the best immigrants. If you're only interested in, "of the most impressive people who move to a country they weren't born in, where do they go?" then the USA wins hands down, it has the best opportunities for impressive and successful people to become superstars or super-rich, or to work in very prestigious organizations or on very exciting projects.
But "getting the best immigrants" could also mean "how appealing is the median immigrant, as seen by existing citizens?" or "can we successfully exclude immigrants who have little to recommend them to the citizens?" By those measures, the USA's long border with a much poorer country and its overloaded immigration system are disadvantages, whereas Canada has the luxury of being inaccessible by land except from a huge country that is slightly richer per capita, puts a lot of distance between Canada and land migrants, and absorbs those migrants or deports them in the opposite direction of Canada. This means that while not being as attractive as the USA for future Nobel laureates, startup founders etc., Canada also gets fewer "low-quality" immigrants because they can't walk in.
The US is very gifted at assimilation compared to "Old Europe" (France seemed to have been doing a good job with immigration from other parts of Europe, mostly Italy and Spain, in the 19th C, although Captain Dreyfus would disagree).
It's not clear to me (YMMV) that the US is particularly standout compared to other emigrant/settler nation-states like Australia, Brazil, Mexico, even Canada**. I confess that I say that based more on anecdata and "vibes" much more than having solid time series, but e.g. the on the ground change from the White Australia of 2-3 generations back and today is pretty striking.
** the asterisk on Canada having to do with the ongoing and not really settled (from what I can tell) battles over how Francophony cashes out, both within Quebec and at the Federal level.
The French have the closest thing in Europe to the civic identity that America has achieved. There is a greater value on french culture (language and norms) than french ethnicity. Liberté, egalité, fraternité.” Maybe laïcité too.
France has worse race riots than Britain, Spain or Germany
It got an assist from having a slate wiped blank to start from...
It's the inexorable force of American pop culture. A child of immigrants will want to be an American teenager, no matter how much their parents try to stop it. Local cultural enclaves will hold the first immigrant generation. The second generation will visit and feel guilty that their kids no longer speak the language of the old country.
I have talked to a number of white South Africans who find democracy threatening, but it is not this sort of abstract principle. It's more like, worrying that if Malema and the EFF party gain power there will be anti-white-person violence. Their political theme song is all about killing white people, it's a very reasonable thing to be worried about. And I think this drives a lot of people to emigrate which I think is a totally reasonable response. (Especially if you are a skilled professional who would make more money in the US or Europe.)
In some sense, this is reaping what you sow, right? You shouldn't be surprised if a government built on racist violence falls, and then there's more political violence later. But that doesn't really reassure people like, a white woman who grew up in Cape Town and had nothing to do with any apartheid government because she was 2 years old when that fell and now is thinking hey maybe she should bring up her children elsewhere and she is just a bit worried about the effects of South African democracy in general.
And also the EFF doesn't look like it will gain power in the near future, the current coalition government seems promising IMO. So maybe it will just work out.
Just to set the facts down, in 1996 the percentage of white SAs relative to total population was 10.9%. Today it’s 7.3% and emigration is a big component of that loss. I can’t tell you if I’ve talked to the avg white SA (probably not) but the sense I get is that there continues to be a deep recognition that that apartheid was wrong. However it is also very unfortunate that Mandela was succeeded by a progressively more incompetent and corrupt Presidents of SA. Horrifically high crime rates (tho slight trending down), a murder rate about 7.5x greater than the US.
And so there is a sense that in several easy to measure ways, SA has become a much weaker economic entity, much less safe and deteriorating capital base over time.
In fact a diaspora of SA (white and black, but mostly white ) can be found in both major English speaking population centers in the, US, UK and Asia Pacific (especially Australia) and also the Netherlands.
I am sure there is a great sense of loss and disappointment and that would permeate the thinking of powerful emigrants.
The British empire and its afterglow were totally awesome for privileged white people. They were often better for no whites than the Belgian congo or dutch east indies, but ymmv.
Aren’t there a lot of vultures from India robbing South Africa too?
im genuinely curious what this means
Referring to these guys: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/03/how-the-gupta-brothers-hijacked-south-africa-corruption-bribes
I suspect Elon Musk would strongly agree America is different, and one could argue cutting the asylum immigration is a part of accelerating that process of assimilation and inter-marrying[1]. Separate from Musk but similar to his views, it is unsurprising Latino voters have trended less Democratic as Republicans become more of their early 20th century form on the immigration issue. Desire for social mobility within a national citizenry and desire for higher immigration are not obviously the same thing, and in some ways, can directly conflict.
At any rate, South Africa is simply a very different country from the US with very different problems (deterioration of electrical grid, potable water, air force, things we take for granted as capabilities of developed countries[2].) It seems like a basic error for leftists to analogize South Africa before and after apartheid when trying to argue with Israeli citizens about the (real) injustice of the West Bank occupation. But that's a whole other thing.
[1] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/01/halting-immigration-wont-stop-the-u-s-from-becoming-a-majority-minority-nation.html
[2] https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/gangs-corruption-and-collapse-the-slow-and-steady-demise-of-south-africa-a-7ed1fcd1-a2e8-446a-9ff9-074718215281
I also found the South African MAGA cabal quite an interesting and unexplored point. I would read a book or long form article on it.
Kind of shocking there hasn't been a New Yorker long form feature on it.
They could title it “The Neo-apartheidists bankrolling the MAGA GOP” or something similar.
"From Pretoria to Palo Alto: The South African stagehands behind Trump's MAGA movement"
There you go
There was an NYT hit-piece on Musk's childhood that iirc was pretty bad and became a cause célèbre among people who complain about the Times self-editing. (The reporter tweeted: "Elon Musk grew up in a South Africa that saw the dangers of unchecked speech: Apartheid govt propaganda fueled violence against Black people. Musk didn't experience that. He grew up in a bubble of white privilege. @lynseychutel & I explored his early life") It was a bit rich to suggest that the problem with Apartheid SA was "unchecked speech," and the article promised a lot more than it delivered (white fellow students said he was standoffish and stood out because he would go to Black kids birthday parties, which doesn't exactly make him look bad). But I bet there's more material for better reporters.
https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/its-crazy-that-major-media-outlets
A NYT reporter complaining about unchecked speech is the most 2020s thing ever.
How anybody, let alone a reporter based in SA, could claim that the Apartheid government embodied "the dangers of unchecked speech" is hard to fathom.
They censored books and newspapers and locked up people who disagreed with them!!
[Me doing the DiCaprio pointing in "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" meme.]
Isn't it bad that he wouldn't go to black kids birthday parties?
No, he *did* go, and his white classmates who avoided Black kids their age said that Musk didn’t have many friends that they knew. It is one of the only things I’ve read that made me think well of Musk, although it isn’t meant to
Hasn’t there? They’ve certainly done long form pieces on Thiel and Musk
While Matt's point about the connection between electoral majoritarianism and "bad" economic policy is definitely right in terms of Musk/Thiel/Sacks' thinking, I really think there's something even broader where these guys link politics-as-such to societal decline.
None of the three are supporters of apartheid, really I think all three found and still find their country of origin to have been depressing and hopeless, and that leads them to find the idea of a mass polity governing itself and working through its disputes at the ballot box to be unserious and naive in a way more intense than people from the historically and culturally democratic NATO sphere would ever feel.
That Trumpism is a cheap and cartoonish anti-politics easily pushed to the will of oligarchs is precisely the appeal. Gangsterism reads to them as more serious than the "fantasy" of self-government. Racism per se is a bit of a red herring.
It's also a classic libertarian talking point. "Democracy is two wolves and a sheep arguing on what's for dinner."
"I've travelled this old world of ours from Barnsley to Peru
I've had sunstroke in the arctic and a swim in Timbuktu
I've seen unicorns in Burma and a yeti in Nepal
And I've danced with ten-foot pygmies in a Montezuma hall
I've met the king of China and the working Yorkshire miner
But I've never met a nice South African"
Charlize Theron seems pretty cool. Also, to be pedantic, so did Nelson Mandela. Never met either of them, though
To be pedantic, "South African" in the song refers to Afrikaners. (It was the '80s!) So Theron is a counterexample but Mandela is not.
Her career depends on seeming to be pretty cool. Ellen Degeneres seemed really cool and likable too.
Ellen is South African? I thought she was from Louisiana.
I mean you can’t really tell about a lot of people from their persona.
British TV shows aside, every South African I have met in America has been quite friendly. Heck, my middle school principal was an immigrant from South Africa, and he was pretty cool.
I have. I also have talked about politics there. What a place.
Trevor Noah seems nice and funny. Go to one of his comedy shows.
Still salty over the Second Boer War?
Yeah I'm glad he mentioned the South Africa angle. It has really been striking this year that all these uber-rich villains (in my view) come out of this single place that I, and I think essentially all Americans, know fairly little about. It has also been striking that the specific way in which I see them as malignantly wrong is this fundamental skepticism of democracy they seem to all share.
Or maybe it just one of the new ethnicities, like Israeli, Russian and Cuban-American, that you are openly able to disparage because it codes as racist to progressives.
I honestly thought so at first, but I've found it increasingly striking that these specific people (who don't even really get along with each other at all!) have all decided at different times over the last few years to start pushing a very similar brand of authoritarian democracy-skeptical politics.
Really seems like something cultural going on there, to me. Probably doesn't extend to *many* South Africans, but it's just striking that all the most visible ultra-wealthy ones seem to have landed in this place.
And it's not just a "tech billionaire" thing. Their politics strike me as notably different than other tech billionaires. People like Mark Cuban and Paul Graham really do come out of the same milieu as these guys, but have totally opposite worldviews on politics. Even the ones closer to their politics, the Calacanises for example, still strike me as being quite different, more focused on specific policies they don't like (Biden's FTC, taxes, etc.), and much less focused on keeping the rabble from exercising power.
I dunno, maybe it's racist, but it never previously occurred to me to be racist toward white South Africans in the past - I just never thought of them at all! - but there seems to be an interesting phenomenon going on here.
I think it makes sense to consider the democracy-skeptical angle of a South African given that South Africa represents one of the great economic development setbacks of any world nation in the past 50 years. The economy writ large collapsed and has essentially not grown since the ‘90s, and it is no longer a leader among African bloc economies. Overlapping energy crises have exacerbated this trend. Crime rates soared and for several years were among the highest in the world. Dissatisfaction with the govt has been sky-high during this time but corruption continued unabated for decades. It’s all very Argentina-esque albeit even more dramatic in some ways. I find it to be a tragedy. The nation had so much potential after the end of apartheid; virtually no one expected the next decades would be so calamitous.
Luckily the current coalition seems slightly more stable and considerably more competent than previous governments, but they have a long road ahead of them if they want to regain their status as the preeminent African economy south of the Sahel.
Yeah. Interestingly Namibia, where Thiel is from, has had a much more stable transition to democracy. Of course, there are only a few people there and there are tons of racial disparities, but it’s avoided the malgovernment of SA.
Totally. This is why I think it's more interesting than "just one of the new acceptable kinds of racism". I think it seems more likely to have something to do with reaction to this kind of history.
If so, I think they've drawn the wrong conclusion, something like "strongmen are good as long as they are white dudes", rather than "corruption is incredibly toxic".
Was the Mandela government corrupt? I had the impression that the policies put in place to correct racial injustice were poorly structured. Which I understand. It's got to be hard to successfully make over a society so dramatically.
Who doesn't get along here? Musk, Sacks, and Thiel are all part of the PayPal mafia, and while they may not be the best of friends, they certainly influence each other.
Musk and Thiel notoriously dislike each other. They had a falling out (or multiple) back in those PayPal days.
But yes, they do seem to influence each other.
I'm aware of the falling out back then but thought they'd somewhat patched it up or had others as go between, but TBH I'm not really sure. Thiel and Sacks are definitely part of the same group of PayPal Republicans though.
(Also, I think Cuban-American is a weird inclusion in this list.)
You definitely see disparaging remarks made about Cuban-Americans in progressive circles. That even crops up in snarky replies to Matt on Twitter because the commenters presume Matt's Cuban ancestors were fleeing Castro, rather than fleeing Batista in an earlier wave of refugees.
It's an interesting commentary on how everyone has a different level of engagement (or "online"-ness) that I've literally never once seen this kind of comment.
Over the last five years a very vocal group of progressives have sought to shout down any discussion of Democrat's weakness with South Florida Latinos by suggesting their weakness is simply the result of much higher levels of anti-black racism among the Cuban-American community.
It's telling that Cuban-Americans like Matt and George Zimmerman are now "white Latinos" but Puerto Ricans like AOC and Bad Bunny aren't.
Seems like Florida specific stuff I have no exposure to!
I've heard no one disparaging random Russian Americans. Cubans engender hostility from lefties because they vote conservatively.
What do people mean by "all of these"? Isn't it just Thiel and Musk? What other billionaire South Africans are there that I'm missing? Do we need a geopolitical theory to explain 2 egomaniacs who happen to be from the same country?
David Sacks. I agree, if it was two guys I'd just consider it a coincidence. It might still just be a coincidence.
For South Africa, you can probably start with the documentary Lethal Weapon 2, it covers some of the history of the apartheid period and illustrates some examples of race relations in the culture there at the time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkJnc0mlhIw
I watched Lethal Weapon 2 for the first time last year. In a day and age of Tom Cruise in Top Gun 2 battling “the enemy” it sure was a (pleasant) surprise to see how anti-South Africa Hollywood was willing to be in the late-80s!
Also the George Harrison song during the credits rips.
Everyone was anti-South African. Paul Simon took a ton of heat for making Graceland, even though he was working with blacks performing black African music.
Hey, Rogue Nation did nothing wrong!
I work with a few guys from South Africa and they’re great guys, charismatic and fun. The other common denominator is that they’re cowboys; very comfortable with risk, impatient with playing it safe. For whatever that’s worth, which is probably nothing. But I see something similar with the rich guys supporting Trump.
Agree the specifics about the policy ratchet would be good to hear more about as Matt was a big proponent of some version of CTC expansion as I recall.
The South Africa question is very interesting. They have a huge unauthorized immigration problem, in part because many in the ANC see keeping out people from neighboring countries as having echoes of apartheid and Bantustans.
The last time I was in Joberg was at least 8-10 years ago. At the time, there was a huge influx of Nigerians into the country. The corners of most streets had groups of Nigerians hanging around all day (or so my driver and the people I talked to). It had a look that you would find familiar in Chicago or Baltimore, but at a much larger scale. Black and White SAs both were blaming a whole bunch of social ills on the newcomers.
But we do NOT have a society with dramatically different cultural norms. Republicans _claim_ that Democrats have dramatically different cultural norms, but it's not true. The problem of electoral democracy are the same as always, people want contradictory things. Not worse now than in 1789.
Big New: Paul Graham came out in support of Harris with a very persuasive argument to appeal to techie moderates, https://x.com/paulg/status/1851200055220306378
For context, he's among the most respected names in tech as the founder of YCombinator and Sam Altmans former boss. Great argument that will appeal to moderates in tech, including those highly suspicious of Democrats economic policy. Here's the message:
Why Moderates Should Vote for Harris
People on the far left and the far right have already decided who to vote for in the next election. Voting for the other party would be unthinkable. But what if you're a moderate?
I'm a moderate, and I'm voting for Harris. The reason is not that I love the Democrats' policies. Both parties' policies seem a roughly equal mix of good and bad. The reason I'm voting for Harris is that this election is about character.
As far as I can tell, Harris is a typical politician. That may not seem much of a recommendation. But Trump is something far worse. He seems to be completely without shame.
We saw that the last time he was president. He ran the White House like a mob boss, choosing subordinates for loyalty rather than ability. No one knows that better than the people who worked for him. Almost half the cabinet-level appointees from his previous administration have refused to endorse him. They're warning us what he's like.
The worst thing he did, in my opinion, was when he tried to remain in power after he lost the 2020 election. He knew he'd lost, but he called Mike Pence and tried to get him not to certify the election. Thank God Pence had the character to stand up to him. I don't like to think what might have happened if he hadn't.
Trying to remain in power after losing an election is banana republic stuff. You don't do that in America. Conceding gracefully when you lose an election is more important than any policy a politician might have, because it's only this principle that allows us to get rid of politicians whose policies don't work.
So sure, Harris is a typical politician. But Trump is a crook. You can't have that sort of person as president. It's too risky.
To add some more context, he's written numerous essays defending tech, capitalism, and even economic inequality. He's solidly on the right with respect to economics and has the billions to back that up. Eg, his 2005 article, "Inequality and Risk", https://www.paulgraham.com/inequality.html
ChatGPT summarizes this better than I could (because I haven't read it in nearly 20 years) as:
> Paul Graham’s essay "Inequality and Risk" argues that reducing economic inequality through wealth redistribution dampens people’s willingness to take risks, which he sees as crucial for startup innovation. He suggests that high potential rewards encourage risk-taking necessary for venture funding and founding startups. He emphasizes that attacking inequality by limiting wealth stifles economic growth, advocating instead to address corruption and the links between wealth and power. Graham concludes that societies should focus on transparency to limit power abuses, rather than reducing inequality itself.
Based.
Hi Marie! Haven’t seen you around here for a while. Welcome back!
Thanks! Yeah, life got too crazy in the mornings, I miss sitting with a cup of coffee and reading/commenting…. But I do still read and scan the comments when I can! Usually too late in the day to jump in the fray much :)
FWIW, he's also been very supportive of Palestinians and human rights in general (which unfortunately is surprising for a VC), and this apparently goes back at least ten years (https://www.timesofisrael.com/snippy-twitter-exchange-exposes-tech-tension-over-gaza/). He's also written about the importance of recognizing and questioning "moral fashions" (https://paulgraham.com/say.html).
https://moguldom.com/454177/silicon-valley-legend-paul-graham-called-anti-semite-for-highlighting-massacre-of-3600-palestinian-children/
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1775854515922628684
"It's much easier to bomb a family's home. The system is built to look for them in these situations."
Built to look for them at home. Built to. And yet the person saying this is not a critic of the Israeli regime. It's an intelligence officer describing business as usual.
Paul Graham is a sort of avatar of the “normie”* opinion among Silicon Valley elite, so this is mostly expected but nonetheless welcome news.
*”normie” in the sense that he is not associated with the countercultural elitist intellectual circles that form a kind of nebulae of contrarianism in the valley… including the Yarvin/Thiel/Musk crowd, but also those whose politics are dominated by EA, the e/acc fringe, etc
Graham's opinion that the problem is Americans don't take enough risks and need to be offered unlimited financial rewards in order to get them to do it is kinda weird to me, but understandable(self-interested) given his position.
It's nice to see somebody of that class not quoting Moldbug.
I completely agree that Trumps norm breaking, corruption, and (at best) quasi criminality is the worst thing about him, and are why I voted against him despite my dislike of many of Biden’s policies. I think he has personally and permanently increased what politicians will be able to get away with. Flabbergasting that he doesn’t even TRY to not get caught in lie and avoid scandal.
I still remember when conservatives were (rightly!) critical of Obama pushing the envelope on an unbound executive. Trump is that times about a thousand, plus he’s the most corrupt president since Grant. Can’t have that in office, even if it saves you taxes and is better in regulation.
If he were running against Sanders or something I’d have a hard decision to make. Against Harris it’s very easy, if unpleasant.
This is why I don't completely blame Dems for focusing so much on bashing Trump. You need to be strategic about it and meet people where they are at, but the dude is such an obvious conman. I agree with Matt substantively that focusing on policy is probably better but I think we have to admit that it's kind of counterintuitive and doing what feels counterintuitive is often quite hard to square mentally/emotionally!
Well put!
It's so frustrating, because we *want* to be focused on other stuff, but it's just unclear how to do that without downplaying corrupt and outright criminal behavior.
For example, I really didn't *want* to see Trump prosecuted, it's such a terrible precedent to prosecute ex- heads of state, but it was the least bad of the bad options.
Trump does this all the time, making all the options bad.
I think you might have better said something more like "most corrupt Presidential Administration since Grant**". AFAIK, unlike Trump, there are no claims of personal corruption on Grant's part (correction welcome).
** The Harding administration _might_ need a word. I'm not sure whether there are any ANSI standard Z-scaled corruption metrics [especially metrics based on data rather than surveys and vibes like Transparency International], although I'd be quite interested to know of any.
I listened to a BBC podcast on Grant a few years back and got the strong sense that contemporary scholars generally agree that he wasn't personally corrupt- it was more that he had a fierce soldier's loyalty to the sometimes sketchy people that he'd fought with and didn't give them enough oversight, and the circumstances after the Civil War made it very hard to police corruption anyway.
The various scholars agreed that his reputation for extreme corruption was mostly due to a confederate black legend-type effort.
Buck stops with Grant etc., but still fair.
Agreed that it was Grant's choice to defend the indefensible. Commander in chief and all that.
This seems like a really low value endorsement in practice: almost everyone who cares about Paul Graham's opinion, or even knows who he is, lives outside of any remotely competitive state (maybe a few in TX?). The tech donor class definitely respects his opinion, but swaying their donations and influence a week before the election, when a third of ballots have already been dropped off, seems like too little and too late.
+ eleventy million
Thank you Mr. Graham!
he was the first person whose prediction that biden would be out after the debate actually rang true to me, basically saying ``this is not my crowd, but the lack of people lining up behind biden means there is a rebellion, and once they've done that it is hard to go back''. also has a beef with sacks.
> Paul Graham came out in support of Harris... For context, he's...
I was really hoping for: '... Billy Graham's son' or something. Not just some tech guy. Lol.
Agree and I really like Matt’s points #22 and 26.
>But for the record, I agree. The odds of American democracy collapsing, conditional on Trump winning, are below 50 percent.<
It seems to me there's possibly a gray zone where American democracy hasn't truly "collapsed" as such, but it's become (1) weakened almost beyond recognition, and (2) in that weakened state has been substantially highjacked by the right so as to make progressive policy outcomes in the foreseeable future incredibly difficult to attain. That's where I think we're headed if Trump wins next week.