Kind of related, but I am strangely comforted by the gains the GOP/Trump made with non-college non-whites. I think conservative gains in those groups serves two functions - 1, it defangs some of the progressive anti-racism narrative which I think is unproductive, and 2, I think it genuinely leads to a dash more racial empathy in conservative circles.
If I had to pick which divide is most existentially dangerous to a democracy, race or education, I'd pick race. If we were hopelessly polarized around race, I could see things really flying apart, but if we see a decrease in racial polarization, I think the parties can re-align in a way that's less existentially bad to the American experiment.
Interesting point, though I somewhat disagree. Educational polarization is quite bad because educated voters are the ones who are more concerned with process issues. If you have a completely educationally polarized electorate, you greatly reduce the electoral penalty for delegitimizing the opposition and basically cheating to stay in power.
If I could wave a wand and eliminate racial polarization in exchange for education polarization, I would. I don’t think that describes current trends, though. There has been a small decrease in racial polarization, but not enough to fundamentally alter the narrative on either side. Anecdotally, white conservatives I know are still very angry about BLM and the summer 2020 protests. And the non-white people who have shifted to the GOP seem fine with a harsh criminal justice system and quasi-authoritarian politics as long as they don’t come with explicitly racist rhetoric. On the flip side, few ordinary “SJW”-leaning people I know seem to have done any reconsideration of their views in response to Trump’s gains with non-whites.
Right now, education polarization makes our political situation more perilous. Less educated people of all races are more sympathetic to authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism, so the GOP has moved in that direction. At the same time, we’re still racially polarized. So you get the toxic mix of anti-intellectual authoritarianism and culture war.
"[GOP] can try to recapture suburban college Whites by unloading more of its "ballast" of issues like Trump did with Social Security - abandoning the anti-LGBTQ fight, embracing Medicare/Medicaid expansions, etc."
Why are these the things that will drive suburban voters away and why would abandoning them would draw suburban voters back into the arms of the GOP? Urban voters maybe, though I think for the GOP to have major pull on urban areas you would have to see a major policy realignment between the parties, or more likely for crime to become THE issue in cities. But why would you say these are the big issues for suburban voters?
That's an interesting perspective. My takeaway is that you think that the Democrats max out at 53-55% of the vote and would be very unlikely/unable to get above that. Republican's at currently 45-47% of the vote can countermove to get back up to and above 50%. Do you think they can go further than Democrats can or is the playing field just very small right now?
Semi-relatedly, the inverse of the above — the piling in of university-educated voters under the Democratic Party banner — may begin to help the party in its midterm struggles, in that education attainment correlates with propensity to vote. Perhaps we'll see a test of this next year. (One of the people interviewed in the E. Klein article mentioned this possibility; not sure if we saw evidence of this in 2018 or not).
Wasn't 18 a blue wave, albeit a minor one? Seems like that's as good a piece of evidence as we're likekly to get. I guess it could have been read as an anti-Trump wave, but Trump himself was on the ballot in 2016 and 2020 and fared better both times.
My best guess for 2022 is it's somewhere between 2018 and 2020 with the direction of the economy being the biggest currently unknown X factor.
Its hard to say since there are a lot of confounding variables and not a lot of midterm elections, but Democrats actually won the house popular vote by more in 2018 than Republicans won by in 2010 or 2014 (and an even larger margin than 2006 which was considered a huge bloodbath at the time and preceded Obama's '08 landslide). So I think 2018 is at least suggestive that Democrats will have less of a midterm handicap. That said incumbent party in a midterm is a huge disadvantage, much bigger than any turnout gains Democrats might have made through educational polarization.
It was certainly a good election for Democrats. Capturing legislative chambers doesn't happen too often. As to whether in 2018 we saw a "less turnout volatility for Democrats flowing from their increased popularity with college grads" effect, I haven't looked into it. The idea raised by the person in question in the Klein piece (some pollster, name escapes me, but he's a colleague of Shor's in the field) was part of a counterargument to Shor-ism. The dude was suggesting that Shor's take on the state of the Dems' political fortunes might be off a bit, precisely because of this issue. IOW some of the weakness flowing from the party's increasing reliance on college grads (still a minority of the electorate, after all, and one that is distributed inefficiently for their purposes) may be counterbalanced by the fact (if it is indeed a fact) that this cohort shows up to vote in midterms pretty reliably.
Agree, educational, aka class, polarization does have a rational correspondence to actual material differences in interests - what politics is legitimately about - whereas racial polarization is just irrational and poisonous, with no redeeming value.
It may have been racial backlash in the decades after the Civil Rights movement that caused non college educated whites to leave the Democratic Party, but in the process the Democratic Party became the party of educated elites, which even in a non racially polarized post-Civil Rights world is a sufficient and independent reason to repel less educated whites from returning. The question now is whether the Republican Party can sufficiently put its Southern strategy days behind it to induce less educated nonwhites also to leave the Democratic party.
I would think that the best progressive argument against popularism is that there's a lot of popular support, across the political spectrum, for "throwing progressives from helicopters".
One takeaway from minimum wage and Medicaid expansion ballot measures running so far ahead of Democrats in the last few elections is that progressive ideas are a lot more more popular than progressives themselves, and perhaps that should prompt some soul-searching.
I think this is where people get mixed up a bit. Progressives advance a number of different ideas. I think some are very popular and some are very unpopular. So you can have some states passing medicaid expansion and minimum wage increases while shooting down tax increases and affirmative action initiatives.
The challenge for most partisans is they confuse popularity for a few things with popularity for the entire agenda. They also tend to take something that is mildly popular and think its very popular - especially when using issue polls done before any significant opposition.
Further compounding the last point is that they take positive polling for general policy ideas as indicating that there will be similar levels of support for every technocratic detail of whatever plan is developed for how to get to the policy.
If there are three progressive policies, and for each of them, two thirds of the public finds it pretty appealing, while one third of the public hates it, then you could easily have a situation where each of these issues polls very strongly popular, while the public will strongly vote for the person who promises none of them over the person who promises all three.
This is a good point, and it definitely works out like this sometimes, but I think it's more often that progressive economic policy is more popular in general than progressive cosmopolitan social views.
That's more of an argument against electoralism. Not so much an argument against popularism that accepts electoralism as a necessity. Which could be an interesting topic for another article.
"Electoralism" basically means democracy. There are some leftists who use "electoralism" as a somewhat derisive term to describe people who think power must be obtained and policy made via elections, rather than non-electoral means.
It’s Monday, and I’m am sick, chilling in a Hotel in Argentina, so here is a rambling by Rory. Probably completely off-topic.
The other day, Noah Smith put up a tweet asking what are the top five things about America. Then I think he also put up another tweet asking who is the most innovative conservative thinkers today?
Ever since then, I’ve had this question in my head.. Is America exceptional? By exceptional, I mean that are there things that the US can do better than anyone else. Things like entering World War II and turning the tide of the war against Germany and Japan. Things like sending a rocket to the moon. Things like giving birth to Tesla and Google and Apple.
Then, if you agree that America is exceptional, What is it about America that makes it exceptional?
I’ve been thinking about this. Is Americas inequality, and relative lack of social support system a key? Is there something about inequality that makes the culture more competitive than other places?
Sure, America is one of the leading western nations in the world. We are also a nation with untamed wilderness. We still have people in Alaska homesteading. We have people in the northwest living off grid, hunting for their food. And it’s not even that rare.
I was raised in New Zealand till I was 10 years old. My brother and I were fascinated by American Cowboys. We had these embossed books about the American west. We dressed up like cowboys and Indians all the time. To us, America was Cowboys. And, I this view is shared by many in the world. Why is it so many immigrants want to move to the United States even though the progressives like to point out that we’re shit at healthcare and welfare and all these other things. It’s my thinking, that these immigrants want the adventure and risk that America represents.
So let me circle around to the point. When Matt talks about the thermostatic theory of politics. Isn’t he just talking about conservatism. Conservatism is basically you don’t want things to change. We would like things to get marginally better, but we also don’t want any great disruption. When I say we here, I mean us sort of moderates in the middle.
I’ve actually had the same political theory myself. When Democrats were talking that they were going to dominate because of demographics, I just rolled my eyes. The problem is once you take control of the government,you are responsible for the government. And sooner or later shit is going to go bad. You’re gonna have a recession. There’s going to be a war, no matter who is in power. And who are people going to blame. They’re going to blame the party in power. It doesn’t even matter if the Democrats made life better by improving healthcare. Whenever things get better, people just reestablish a new norm. So that when something gets less better, its viewed as worse. For example, last year’s surge in violence. The murder rate is not nearly as bad as it was in the early 90s, but people feel like it is. There is no permanent winning in politics. History is too random and unforgiving.
I remember when the labor party was in charge of the UK. I remember reading articles about how labor was going to dominate, and the conservative Torres had no chance in the future. Now look where we are at.
Now I know the above paragraphs might make me sound pretty conservative. I don’t think I am. I do want things to be better. I am 100% in support of the child tax credit. I would like a minimum level of national healthcare. My gut feeling is somethings like a national health insurance policy to compete against the private insurance industry. But at the same time, I don’t want the United States to be like Scandinavia or Germany. I love those countries. I lived in Europe for 12 years. Great place. But you’re not going to convince me that these semi socialist European countries are exceptional.
Anyway, I know I’m probably way off target. But he starts of been bouncing in my head for a couple of days so I just wanted to put them out there.
Once again, forgive any grammatical errors. I literally dictate this shit on my iPhone. Also, I fully acknowledge that at least 90% of you are way smarter than I am. Go easy on me.
Let's run down a tangent on Germany real quick ...
I was there just ~ 2 years so I'm very much operating at the surface level but one of my hot takes is their super strong worker protections are absolutely crippling for long term career growth. I think the inability to churn your workforce makes hiring SO impossibly risk averse. The program I was in with Siemens took months of interviews including independent behavioral assessments. It was treated very much like an interview would for a lifetime of employment. The time and cost of interviewing dampens voluntary turnover and limits career potential. All these just normal jobs become deep groove tracks. IMO, one of the main reasons you don't see a vibrant start-up scene there.
Don't get me started on the idea of tracking children's educational path at 10-12 years old! That is absolute fucking nonsense.
That’s so ironic, since I work with Siemens Energy now (USA)… And we go through a lot of employee churn. But between you and me, there’s a big cultural difference between Siemens USA and Siemens Germany.
Yeap. I'm talking here more the corporate headquarter Siemens AG jobs in Munich. Totally agree that Siemens USA operates differently. I have a hilarious story about needing to write detailed work instructions to the transfer the rail propulsion production assembly from Nuremberg to the US and the German Ops. team LOST THEIR MINDS that I was writing what they called "IKEA instructions". Took them some time to understand our factory production teams operates with <4 years of tenure and we constantly need to train new employees while their production team can read electrical schematics and has like 18 years on average of experience.
Lol. Yep. You need the USA for creativity, and then the Germans to implement everything. Just don’t expect them to work overtime to do it, or do anything that appears to be multitasking
Super funny you say that Rory, both this comment and your response to David Rye.
I work for Henkel USA, and your description of the differences between Siemens US and Germany are identical at Henkel. I would say the Germans never seem...rushed. They will always, always, always take their time. We Americans light our hair on fire and run like madmen, but the Germans....they definitely "work" fewer hours, but they're so steady it's golem-like. We Americans are much more subject to conflating "busy" and "productive". Both definitely have pros and cons.
So... with the acknowledgement that we love our German overlords and fellow employees (I'm working with three super talented German machinists here in Argentina)
Do your German friends take the opportunity to point out how only they do it the "right" right way?
Do you have some evidence that the tracking gets it wrong to a significant degree? When it gets it right do the kids who aren’t college material do better than their counterparts in the US?
So here is conflicting thoughts. I actually like the German system of tracking, or apprentice ship/technical trade that starts early in life.
Also, many many Germans who work in skilled technical trades are college material. I’m here in Argentina working with three Machinists they’re all easily bright enough to have gone to college and gone into some other career. Germany just doesn’t have the you have to go to college mentality.
However, at the same time it does make me wonder if the German system loses out a bit with its safety system, and does it discourage the hyper competitiveness we see in the United States. And is this what contributes to American exceptionalism.
I think it gets it wrong - only to the degree the entire system must operate within a space constraints. As Rory mentioned - those three machinists would have gone through college in the US ... for better (e.g., maybe a more flexible career path with higher upside) and worse (e.g., debt, more uncertainty).
Their vocational programs are the best in the world. They're skill-sets are so impressive. I just couldn't shake the sense that there was a lot more potential. That the entire system put a glass-ceiling on their economy. But with a much higher floor.
How does this explain Germany becoming a pretty decent startup hub in tech. Berlin in particular?
Seimens probably did that because they have a ton of free cash flow and are likely around for a lifetime. Otoh, if you loaf at a seed stage startup, you might drive it out of business… causing you to lose all your colleagues jobs too!
A decent start up hub for a nation like Germany is actually a disappointment. I suspect Berlin’s success has more to do with it being a hip city. And start ups don’t equal exceptionalism. In every large country you’re going to have some success and some failure. But I just can’t think of any German start ups that have had the same impact as Google or Apple or Tesla.
Yeah, not a ton of German Unicorns, much less larger exits at the 500M+ scale. Being a hub for them is relative to even less activity across the rest of EU
I would explain it just with your word "decent". That's a disappointment for such an industrial powerhouse. It's been a minute since I benchmarked it but their early stage scene was best characterized as a look-alike model (e.g., the Groupon clone CityDeal).
I would totally concur that for a place with extraordinary tech talent, they've underperformed their potential.
I've heard some folks in that market talk about the valuations being so low compared to comparable US companies that they often get acquired by US companies before you've ever heard of them. That + copycat copies of similar US startups in cases where (e.g. payroll) there is enough country specific nuances where the company probably has to be domestic.
Let me add this. The progressive ideas I support are the ones that make competition more fair. I like the child tax credit because I want all children to have a basic level of support from which to be successful. I want a basic level of healthcare, because I feel like that could encourage more risk taking. No I want to get rid of legacy admissions for all schools and get federal money, because fuck nepotism. I want schools to be funded equally across the nation, because you never know when the next cowboy or genius is going to come from. I guess I’m in the equality of opportunity not equality of outcome camp.
Every time I read one of these comments from you Rory, I can't help but recall the "I'm just a simple caveman lawyer" sketch / "I'm just a simple country lawyer" trope.
I don't mean that in a snotty way; it took me a while (longer than it should have). I remember even in college (a LONG TIME AGO) leftists confidently predicting that after the next election, the demographic tide would turn their way. This despite what I considered to be a remarkable level of pro-Reagan/Bush sentiment in Ann Arbor (!), even after various scandals etc.
Then, every time something unexpected happens (say, the 1994 House elections), there's this "end of history" assumption to accompany it. DLC/Clintonism. Compassionate conservatism. Mission accomplished. Post-racial coalition. For a longer time than I'd like to admit, I fell into the "end of history" trap myself, especially when "my side" was down (I always have been and still am a registered D, although I dislike much about the party today). I still do it sometimes, especially when I make the mistake of wallowing in Twitter/the news.
But then I remember what came of all the previous "realignments" and "paradigm shifts." When I'm thinking clearly, I take everything--political prognostications, predictions about The Future of Work, whatever--with a whole shaker of salt. And I think much more clearly when I just avoid most or all of it and wait to see what actually happens.
I don’t think modern media, or mass media makes that possible. No matter how successful someone was doing, CNN and Fox News is still going to blow up whatever bad news there is.
I think American dynamism and exceptionalism comes from 1) being a nation built by successive generations of immigrants and 2) extraordinary natural resources. The sort of people who leave their own country to start a new life are also the types of people who start new companies and work hard and the US is filled with those people for generations. Combine that with the fertile plains, oil, and coal and you get a 20th century superpower. I think the idea that a bad social net helps drive forward this dynamism is wrong (though it’s possible there is a causal relationship in the other direction). After all, it’s pretty straightforward to imagine how starting a company in a country with guaranteed health insurance feels a lot less risky than a country where leaving your job could endanger your child’s health.
I don’t disagree with you. Obviously, I think you’re absolutely right that the United States historically has been a place where adventurous immigrants come. If you look at my clarifying comments below I acknowledge that I think a certain level of safety net is helpful.
But to be a devils advocate. Perhaps the comfort of knowing that you have a safety net might make some people less likely to risk it all. Does comfort make people less likely to dream big.
One of the arguments for Obamacare was that by so closely linking healthcare to your job, it would discourage people from striking out on their own. The availability of (subsidized) healthcare on the exchanges was supposed to lessen that death grip.
It would be interesting to know if anyone has studied this and might shed light on the ACA's impact on startup creation and voluntary quits.
I can actually see that. I’ve had a couple of friends that I’ve worked with who say that they would quit if it wasn’t for their healthcare. But at the same time, I don’t want nationalized healthcare
For an entrepreneur, the safety net is exactly what what enables them to take big risks. It’s no coincidence that many famous entrepreneurs come from wealthy families who can bail them out of trouble. But our lack of social programs probably does help encourage a culture of hard work among lower income brackets. So if we really want to play devils advocate, maybe Amazon wouldn’t be as big a success without its hard working warehouse laborers who wouldn’t be working so hard if their life didn’t depend on it.
But there’s a difference between enabling and incentivizing. Just because somethings easier, doesn’t mean that more people are actually going to try and do it. End it is possible, that people might give up easier. I know that there’s probably people who would argue differently.
Maybe the difference is that safety nets enable dynamic risk taking behavior like creating companies, switching careers, moving to new places etc but they also give people less incentive to work hard in whatever situation they currently are in. I can risk making it big when I know there’s a net to catch me but if I don’t care about making it big maybe I’ll lounge in that net instead. Just like how current children of rich folks are given opportunity to do crazy impressive stuff or just mooch off their parents money.
I can't speak for others, but the idea of starting my own business has always been in the back of my mind. However, I have a couple medical conditions, so the risk of abandoning a cushy big-business medical plan is just too high. If healthcare were decoupled from employment, I'm pretty sure I would have taken a stab at starting a business. Would I have been successful? Who knows. At least I would have been a datapoint fighting back against the decline of American entrepreneurship.
Yes, but a overly generous safety net surely is a disincentive to work. Given the option of sitting around playing video games and getting high, surely a portion of the population will choose that option.
“Conservatism is basically you don’t want things to change.“
That is a fundamental misunderstanding of what conservatism is, particularly for American conservatism.
Among the aspects of American conservative philosophy are,
- The tenets of classical liberalism and natural law
- Moral universalism
- A republican form of government
- Federalism and subsidiarity
- That political freedom is inherently tied to economic freedom
- Adherence to the Constitution
And for many American conservatives,
- Judeo-Christian morality
An American conservative looking at the state of the country today would want a great number of things to change. That is to say that conservatism is *not* merely resistance to change.
I’m talking about simple middle America conservatism. The sort of conservatism where people don’t like when prices change, or a new process is put in place. Sort of the fear of to rapid change conservatism. Which is ironic coming from me, since I consider myself like that, but I’ve also led a pretty adventurous life.
"American conservativism" has been noticeably different from "classical conservativism" (and really is more a form of classical liberalism with a religious edge) for over a century and arguably since the country's founding (at least outside of the South).
I'd say that's true of High Church Conservatism of the sort you'll find in the Federalist Society but not the rank and file of movement conservative politics
"Conservatism is basically you don’t want things to change. We would like things to get marginally better, but we also don’t want any great disruption. When I say we here, I mean us sort of moderates in the middle."
I think that what people want most as they age, even progressive people, is change in the direction they favor, but at a speed that is predictable or manageable. Even if you're the sort of person who is amenable to radical changes in the structure of society (defunding police, universal healthcare, etc), once you have kids you want to have some measure of confidence that the world you are preparing them for is going to partially resemble what you imagine it will.
That is a very good point. So I have a few old are very radical progressive relatives. Most of them don’t have kids. The one exception is my mom, who is a hard-core left-wing liberal progressive type.
WRT if the USA has (or at least had) some special mojo, I think that it does, and at least some of it is due to self selection: the majority of Americans are descended from people who voluntarily uprooted themselves and moved far away to seek opportunity. That's not an easy thing to do!
I interact with a fair number of immigrants, and in particular, watching European immigrants interact with friends/family/colleagues in their home countries is fascinating. Those who immigrated often find those who didn't immigrate to be painfully slow and indecisive. That generally jives with my observation --- that Americans tend to have more hustle than Europeans.
Interestingly, I think you can even see this in the cuisine. In the USA, there's so much food that's enclosed in bread: hamburgers and sandwiches put meals between two pieces of bread; burritos wrap a meal inside a piece of flatbread; pizza puts a meal on top of a piece of bread, etc. The reason food in the USA is so bread-encrusted is because it's faster to eat, which is useful if you have shit to do. (It's also arguably unhealthy. That's a separate issue.) I've heard many Europeans question why Americans eat so many bread-encrusted things instead of sitting down and having a proper meal. Well, you get less done if you sit around eating meals.
(That's not to say that I endorse the get-shit-done-at-all-costs-even-if-it-ruins-your-health approach. I'm just saying that it's a thing.)
>>I mean that are there things that the US can do better than anyone else. Things like entering World War II and turning the tide of the war against Germany and Japan.<<
I'm in the middle of reading Vasily Grossman's incredible duology on the battle of Stalingrad ("Stalingrad" and "Life and Fate") so on behalf of all the people from the then-Soviet Union who broke the back of the Nazi army, let me say "tsk tsk."
But is there a difference between fighting on your own soil when you’re back is against the wall, compared to the United States flying hundreds of thousands of troops thousands of miles away from home to effect effectively two different wars simultaneously on opposite sides of the globe?
It’s not that I don’t admire what the Russians did, but did they have the capability to preemptively achieve the same global response that the United States did. Via soldiers and technology and manufacturing (The unglamorous war on the homefront).
This is a bit of a hobby of mine, so I'll haggle a bit on that topic.
The ability of the American industrial engine to simultaneously produce tonnage equivalent to four IJNs, armored units and artillery equivalent to two Wehrmachts, the entire sea- and landborne logistics chain for the British Army, Red Army, US Army, and Marines, and enough food to feed half the USSR and Britain for three years was crucial to the ultimate victory.
Without that production, damned near freely given, the USSR is unable to simultaneously feed, arm, and fuel itself to sustain high-intensity mechanized warfare. They can and would beat the Germans to a standstill, but come May of 1945 they're still wading towards Kiev and Minsk the old-fashioned way amidst a sea of infantry blood, and the entire generation born from 1919 to 1929 is dead in the sea of blood they expended on the way there.
Of course, the corollary of that... Absent the Red Army in the East tying down 70% of the Wehrmacht's combat power, the only way the US and UK are breaking into the Continent at all is atop a carpet of incinerated German cities and 15 million people reduced to ash in a mass atomic offensive in May 1947.
To say nothing of the fact that such a "atomic surprise" strategy requires strangling the Japanese Home Islands the hard way, starving at least 15 million Japanese people. Primarily their children, as is always the outcome of such horrors.
None of the Big Four were dispensable. Absent any one of them, the others (at best) win a Pyrrhic victory and inherit a bled-out, shattered husk of a global society.
Every denizen of the modern world should thank whatever god they believe in that we all got it mostly right, the one damned time it counted most.
Until about a year ago, my understanding on the Eastern Front was still stuck in "human wave tactics". It was really eye-opening to read about just how innovative the Red Army really was.
There's a great scene in Grossman's "Stalingrad" early in the German attack on the city when Stalin issues his "not one step back" order, with anyone retreating to be shot. The head of artillery in the fight goes to the Front commander and says he needs to pull all his artillery out of the city to the east bank of the Volga where it will be safer and much more easily target the German attacks (while also demanding that the artillery commanders stay in the city in order to direct the attacks). The Front commander says "No way! Not one step back!" He goes ahead and pulls the artillery out; it does exactly what he thought it would in thwarting German thrusts, after which the Front commander calls him into his office and says "Good thinking!"
Now you guys are gonna make me add something more to my reading list. I feel a little guilty lately… I was on a nonfiction kick, but lately I’ve been in to Sci Fi.
I read the first one and am starting on the second. Spoiler alert: the two combined are two thousand pages.
Grossman, who was a reporter for Red Star during the war, was *everywhere* the Soviet army was fighting, including Stalingrad. He writes that the only thing he could read for the four years of the war was "War and Peace" which he read through multiple times. As is obvious, he set out to write a War and Peace for WWII, and models his story accordingly.
Oh thanks for remembering John. She had the sniffles for a couple of days, did her quarantine, and return to school. The weirdest thing is her sister who she hangs all over and shares a room with never tested positive and never got sick.
I think well functioning societies need both a conservative impulse, and a progressive one.
More specifically as it relates to America, yes there are things that could be changed for the better. But in general we've got a pretty good system (hence the millions of people wanting to immigrate here each year).
You want a generally free market system to provide dynamism. It's good to have a safety net for when bad things happen, but it shouldn't allow people to slack off.
And while we do need regulation, it should be limited and targeted as much as possible. And it should be reviewed periodically because red tape has a tendency to grow way beyond what is useful.
Elizabeth Holmes’s trial has gotten me thinking about how much of the success of Silicon Valley is due to a tolerance for bending the rules. Theranos’s idea was never going to work because among other things, blood from a finger stick isn’t the same as blood from a venous draw and tests on small volumes just aren’t reliable. And if they hadn’t endangered patients it’s possible that the government would have passed on prosecuting Holmes and Balwani.
And some of the companies we think of as important do have shady histories or their founders have engaged in shady behavior in the past. It makes me wonder if tolerating the “fake it till you make it” behavior might be part of why the US is so dynamic and innovative. And it probably is a net benefit. If so, I have no idea where we should draw the line on acceptable faking it. That’s for smarter people than me to figure out.
Instead of a cause, I wonder if it’s a result. Perhaps Americans expect so much exceptionalism, that when people come up with these harebrained ideas, We are more likely to believe him because we think… Hey were Americans… Of course we can do that shit.
It’s odd: the people in my life who talk about fascism regularly aren’t progressives, they’re previously centrist MSNBC viewers.
The progressives themselves aren’t hurting us as much as the media and everyone else on the left being afraid of raising their ire. Look at why Shor got fired. Look at how the post-Floyd protests/riots were covered. Absolutely everyone became captive to the progressives’ messaging, whether from sympathy, fear or some combination of the two.
It makes it look like every institution, every liberal-adjacent group, is sold on defund the police, for example, because the people who had misgivings wouldn’t speak up (or had to go start a Substack). People on our side need to speak up when they think these things are crazy or even just a little overboard, but there has been a real fear, often justified, of doing so.
People think that nutty progressives are the left, because almost no one says otherwise and anyone who did got exiled or abused.
This seems to me to be the flip side of the “Progressive Mobilization Delusion” piece.
Progressives genuinely believe that if they keep “pushing”, they can alter the fundamentals.
Unfortunately, they’re right, just not in the way they expect or want.
They *want* to make certain policies so non-controversial that they can’t help but be enacted. This is delusional.
They’re *succeeding* at raising the salience of a series of unpopular positions and getting them treated as litmus tests in and out of politics, and thus provoking a reaction from the 80-90% of the electorate that doesn’t like the stupid positions in the first place.
They’re basically setting up a situation in which the “fundamental” paradigm is increasingly hostile to them.
This is the latest piece I've seen from our host that doesn't seem too concerned about a Trump/fascism connection. I guess I'm quite a bit more worried than MY about us losing our democratic system of government:
1. We have one really specific failure point, our ridiculous Electoral College/certification system, where Trumpy Republican governors or legislators could not 'certify' that Democrat has won their state
2. I doubt we'd get a full-on fascist takeover because Americans would be extremely not resigned to it, but I could see escalating protests, violence, repression and then more protests & violence kind of cycles in response to a rigged election. Where that ends up is anyone's guess
3. I know not being concerned about stuff is an important part of looking one of the Cool Kids, but our government collapsing is a tail risk, and worrying about extremely bad things with a 10-15% probability seems prudent?
I guess the counterpoint is 2020 was THE stress test for this systemic risk and we passed. So some - I think Ezra Klein even laid the arguments out well, even if he doesn't agree completely - would place the risk more like 1%. Whether you think it's prudent or not to focus on likely just depends on your probability assessment. I personally find the concerns hyperbolically overblown but I've probably listened to too much Pod Save America.
I'm not an engineer but I don't think that's how a stress test works. It reminds me of Feynman's analogy of a bridge rated for 3000 pounds that cracks when a 1000-pound truck drives over it: the bridge doesn't have a safety factor of 3 (as NASA said about the Challenger O-rings), but of 0, because the bridge just isn't supposed to crack. Our democracy is not supposed to depend on a quick-thinking security guard leading rioters up a certain staircase, or on the Vice President getting honest, prudent advice from Dan Quayle. We're just supposed to keep humming along, not crack in that fashion.
Kind of related, but I am strangely comforted by the gains the GOP/Trump made with non-college non-whites. I think conservative gains in those groups serves two functions - 1, it defangs some of the progressive anti-racism narrative which I think is unproductive, and 2, I think it genuinely leads to a dash more racial empathy in conservative circles.
If I had to pick which divide is most existentially dangerous to a democracy, race or education, I'd pick race. If we were hopelessly polarized around race, I could see things really flying apart, but if we see a decrease in racial polarization, I think the parties can re-align in a way that's less existentially bad to the American experiment.
Interesting point, though I somewhat disagree. Educational polarization is quite bad because educated voters are the ones who are more concerned with process issues. If you have a completely educationally polarized electorate, you greatly reduce the electoral penalty for delegitimizing the opposition and basically cheating to stay in power.
If I could wave a wand and eliminate racial polarization in exchange for education polarization, I would. I don’t think that describes current trends, though. There has been a small decrease in racial polarization, but not enough to fundamentally alter the narrative on either side. Anecdotally, white conservatives I know are still very angry about BLM and the summer 2020 protests. And the non-white people who have shifted to the GOP seem fine with a harsh criminal justice system and quasi-authoritarian politics as long as they don’t come with explicitly racist rhetoric. On the flip side, few ordinary “SJW”-leaning people I know seem to have done any reconsideration of their views in response to Trump’s gains with non-whites.
Right now, education polarization makes our political situation more perilous. Less educated people of all races are more sympathetic to authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism, so the GOP has moved in that direction. At the same time, we’re still racially polarized. So you get the toxic mix of anti-intellectual authoritarianism and culture war.
"[GOP] can try to recapture suburban college Whites by unloading more of its "ballast" of issues like Trump did with Social Security - abandoning the anti-LGBTQ fight, embracing Medicare/Medicaid expansions, etc."
Why are these the things that will drive suburban voters away and why would abandoning them would draw suburban voters back into the arms of the GOP? Urban voters maybe, though I think for the GOP to have major pull on urban areas you would have to see a major policy realignment between the parties, or more likely for crime to become THE issue in cities. But why would you say these are the big issues for suburban voters?
That's an interesting perspective. My takeaway is that you think that the Democrats max out at 53-55% of the vote and would be very unlikely/unable to get above that. Republican's at currently 45-47% of the vote can countermove to get back up to and above 50%. Do you think they can go further than Democrats can or is the playing field just very small right now?
Semi-relatedly, the inverse of the above — the piling in of university-educated voters under the Democratic Party banner — may begin to help the party in its midterm struggles, in that education attainment correlates with propensity to vote. Perhaps we'll see a test of this next year. (One of the people interviewed in the E. Klein article mentioned this possibility; not sure if we saw evidence of this in 2018 or not).
Wasn't 18 a blue wave, albeit a minor one? Seems like that's as good a piece of evidence as we're likekly to get. I guess it could have been read as an anti-Trump wave, but Trump himself was on the ballot in 2016 and 2020 and fared better both times.
My best guess for 2022 is it's somewhere between 2018 and 2020 with the direction of the economy being the biggest currently unknown X factor.
Its hard to say since there are a lot of confounding variables and not a lot of midterm elections, but Democrats actually won the house popular vote by more in 2018 than Republicans won by in 2010 or 2014 (and an even larger margin than 2006 which was considered a huge bloodbath at the time and preceded Obama's '08 landslide). So I think 2018 is at least suggestive that Democrats will have less of a midterm handicap. That said incumbent party in a midterm is a huge disadvantage, much bigger than any turnout gains Democrats might have made through educational polarization.
It was certainly a good election for Democrats. Capturing legislative chambers doesn't happen too often. As to whether in 2018 we saw a "less turnout volatility for Democrats flowing from their increased popularity with college grads" effect, I haven't looked into it. The idea raised by the person in question in the Klein piece (some pollster, name escapes me, but he's a colleague of Shor's in the field) was part of a counterargument to Shor-ism. The dude was suggesting that Shor's take on the state of the Dems' political fortunes might be off a bit, precisely because of this issue. IOW some of the weakness flowing from the party's increasing reliance on college grads (still a minority of the electorate, after all, and one that is distributed inefficiently for their purposes) may be counterbalanced by the fact (if it is indeed a fact) that this cohort shows up to vote in midterms pretty reliably.
Agree, educational, aka class, polarization does have a rational correspondence to actual material differences in interests - what politics is legitimately about - whereas racial polarization is just irrational and poisonous, with no redeeming value.
It may have been racial backlash in the decades after the Civil Rights movement that caused non college educated whites to leave the Democratic Party, but in the process the Democratic Party became the party of educated elites, which even in a non racially polarized post-Civil Rights world is a sufficient and independent reason to repel less educated whites from returning. The question now is whether the Republican Party can sufficiently put its Southern strategy days behind it to induce less educated nonwhites also to leave the Democratic party.
I would think that the best progressive argument against popularism is that there's a lot of popular support, across the political spectrum, for "throwing progressives from helicopters".
One takeaway from minimum wage and Medicaid expansion ballot measures running so far ahead of Democrats in the last few elections is that progressive ideas are a lot more more popular than progressives themselves, and perhaps that should prompt some soul-searching.
I think this is where people get mixed up a bit. Progressives advance a number of different ideas. I think some are very popular and some are very unpopular. So you can have some states passing medicaid expansion and minimum wage increases while shooting down tax increases and affirmative action initiatives.
The challenge for most partisans is they confuse popularity for a few things with popularity for the entire agenda. They also tend to take something that is mildly popular and think its very popular - especially when using issue polls done before any significant opposition.
Further compounding the last point is that they take positive polling for general policy ideas as indicating that there will be similar levels of support for every technocratic detail of whatever plan is developed for how to get to the policy.
If there are three progressive policies, and for each of them, two thirds of the public finds it pretty appealing, while one third of the public hates it, then you could easily have a situation where each of these issues polls very strongly popular, while the public will strongly vote for the person who promises none of them over the person who promises all three.
This is a good point, and it definitely works out like this sometimes, but I think it's more often that progressive economic policy is more popular in general than progressive cosmopolitan social views.
That's more of an argument against electoralism. Not so much an argument against popularism that accepts electoralism as a necessity. Which could be an interesting topic for another article.
"electoralism"? Haven't heard that one before. Help me out?
"Electoralism" basically means democracy. There are some leftists who use "electoralism" as a somewhat derisive term to describe people who think power must be obtained and policy made via elections, rather than non-electoral means.
thx.
It’s Monday, and I’m am sick, chilling in a Hotel in Argentina, so here is a rambling by Rory. Probably completely off-topic.
The other day, Noah Smith put up a tweet asking what are the top five things about America. Then I think he also put up another tweet asking who is the most innovative conservative thinkers today?
Ever since then, I’ve had this question in my head.. Is America exceptional? By exceptional, I mean that are there things that the US can do better than anyone else. Things like entering World War II and turning the tide of the war against Germany and Japan. Things like sending a rocket to the moon. Things like giving birth to Tesla and Google and Apple.
Then, if you agree that America is exceptional, What is it about America that makes it exceptional?
I’ve been thinking about this. Is Americas inequality, and relative lack of social support system a key? Is there something about inequality that makes the culture more competitive than other places?
Sure, America is one of the leading western nations in the world. We are also a nation with untamed wilderness. We still have people in Alaska homesteading. We have people in the northwest living off grid, hunting for their food. And it’s not even that rare.
I was raised in New Zealand till I was 10 years old. My brother and I were fascinated by American Cowboys. We had these embossed books about the American west. We dressed up like cowboys and Indians all the time. To us, America was Cowboys. And, I this view is shared by many in the world. Why is it so many immigrants want to move to the United States even though the progressives like to point out that we’re shit at healthcare and welfare and all these other things. It’s my thinking, that these immigrants want the adventure and risk that America represents.
So let me circle around to the point. When Matt talks about the thermostatic theory of politics. Isn’t he just talking about conservatism. Conservatism is basically you don’t want things to change. We would like things to get marginally better, but we also don’t want any great disruption. When I say we here, I mean us sort of moderates in the middle.
I’ve actually had the same political theory myself. When Democrats were talking that they were going to dominate because of demographics, I just rolled my eyes. The problem is once you take control of the government,you are responsible for the government. And sooner or later shit is going to go bad. You’re gonna have a recession. There’s going to be a war, no matter who is in power. And who are people going to blame. They’re going to blame the party in power. It doesn’t even matter if the Democrats made life better by improving healthcare. Whenever things get better, people just reestablish a new norm. So that when something gets less better, its viewed as worse. For example, last year’s surge in violence. The murder rate is not nearly as bad as it was in the early 90s, but people feel like it is. There is no permanent winning in politics. History is too random and unforgiving.
I remember when the labor party was in charge of the UK. I remember reading articles about how labor was going to dominate, and the conservative Torres had no chance in the future. Now look where we are at.
Now I know the above paragraphs might make me sound pretty conservative. I don’t think I am. I do want things to be better. I am 100% in support of the child tax credit. I would like a minimum level of national healthcare. My gut feeling is somethings like a national health insurance policy to compete against the private insurance industry. But at the same time, I don’t want the United States to be like Scandinavia or Germany. I love those countries. I lived in Europe for 12 years. Great place. But you’re not going to convince me that these semi socialist European countries are exceptional.
Anyway, I know I’m probably way off target. But he starts of been bouncing in my head for a couple of days so I just wanted to put them out there.
Once again, forgive any grammatical errors. I literally dictate this shit on my iPhone. Also, I fully acknowledge that at least 90% of you are way smarter than I am. Go easy on me.
Let's run down a tangent on Germany real quick ...
I was there just ~ 2 years so I'm very much operating at the surface level but one of my hot takes is their super strong worker protections are absolutely crippling for long term career growth. I think the inability to churn your workforce makes hiring SO impossibly risk averse. The program I was in with Siemens took months of interviews including independent behavioral assessments. It was treated very much like an interview would for a lifetime of employment. The time and cost of interviewing dampens voluntary turnover and limits career potential. All these just normal jobs become deep groove tracks. IMO, one of the main reasons you don't see a vibrant start-up scene there.
Don't get me started on the idea of tracking children's educational path at 10-12 years old! That is absolute fucking nonsense.
That’s so ironic, since I work with Siemens Energy now (USA)… And we go through a lot of employee churn. But between you and me, there’s a big cultural difference between Siemens USA and Siemens Germany.
Yeap. I'm talking here more the corporate headquarter Siemens AG jobs in Munich. Totally agree that Siemens USA operates differently. I have a hilarious story about needing to write detailed work instructions to the transfer the rail propulsion production assembly from Nuremberg to the US and the German Ops. team LOST THEIR MINDS that I was writing what they called "IKEA instructions". Took them some time to understand our factory production teams operates with <4 years of tenure and we constantly need to train new employees while their production team can read electrical schematics and has like 18 years on average of experience.
Lol. Yep. You need the USA for creativity, and then the Germans to implement everything. Just don’t expect them to work overtime to do it, or do anything that appears to be multitasking
Super funny you say that Rory, both this comment and your response to David Rye.
I work for Henkel USA, and your description of the differences between Siemens US and Germany are identical at Henkel. I would say the Germans never seem...rushed. They will always, always, always take their time. We Americans light our hair on fire and run like madmen, but the Germans....they definitely "work" fewer hours, but they're so steady it's golem-like. We Americans are much more subject to conflating "busy" and "productive". Both definitely have pros and cons.
So... with the acknowledgement that we love our German overlords and fellow employees (I'm working with three super talented German machinists here in Argentina)
Do your German friends take the opportunity to point out how only they do it the "right" right way?
Do you have some evidence that the tracking gets it wrong to a significant degree? When it gets it right do the kids who aren’t college material do better than their counterparts in the US?
So here is conflicting thoughts. I actually like the German system of tracking, or apprentice ship/technical trade that starts early in life.
Also, many many Germans who work in skilled technical trades are college material. I’m here in Argentina working with three Machinists they’re all easily bright enough to have gone to college and gone into some other career. Germany just doesn’t have the you have to go to college mentality.
However, at the same time it does make me wonder if the German system loses out a bit with its safety system, and does it discourage the hyper competitiveness we see in the United States. And is this what contributes to American exceptionalism.
I think it gets it wrong - only to the degree the entire system must operate within a space constraints. As Rory mentioned - those three machinists would have gone through college in the US ... for better (e.g., maybe a more flexible career path with higher upside) and worse (e.g., debt, more uncertainty).
Their vocational programs are the best in the world. They're skill-sets are so impressive. I just couldn't shake the sense that there was a lot more potential. That the entire system put a glass-ceiling on their economy. But with a much higher floor.
How does this explain Germany becoming a pretty decent startup hub in tech. Berlin in particular?
Seimens probably did that because they have a ton of free cash flow and are likely around for a lifetime. Otoh, if you loaf at a seed stage startup, you might drive it out of business… causing you to lose all your colleagues jobs too!
A decent start up hub for a nation like Germany is actually a disappointment. I suspect Berlin’s success has more to do with it being a hip city. And start ups don’t equal exceptionalism. In every large country you’re going to have some success and some failure. But I just can’t think of any German start ups that have had the same impact as Google or Apple or Tesla.
Yeah, not a ton of German Unicorns, much less larger exits at the 500M+ scale. Being a hub for them is relative to even less activity across the rest of EU
Just a terminology note, a unicorn would mean a 1B+ exit.
Yes. As my own seed investors are not shy of reminding me 😂
I would explain it just with your word "decent". That's a disappointment for such an industrial powerhouse. It's been a minute since I benchmarked it but their early stage scene was best characterized as a look-alike model (e.g., the Groupon clone CityDeal).
I would totally concur that for a place with extraordinary tech talent, they've underperformed their potential.
I've heard some folks in that market talk about the valuations being so low compared to comparable US companies that they often get acquired by US companies before you've ever heard of them. That + copycat copies of similar US startups in cases where (e.g. payroll) there is enough country specific nuances where the company probably has to be domestic.
The dark side of American Exceptionalism
Let me add this. The progressive ideas I support are the ones that make competition more fair. I like the child tax credit because I want all children to have a basic level of support from which to be successful. I want a basic level of healthcare, because I feel like that could encourage more risk taking. No I want to get rid of legacy admissions for all schools and get federal money, because fuck nepotism. I want schools to be funded equally across the nation, because you never know when the next cowboy or genius is going to come from. I guess I’m in the equality of opportunity not equality of outcome camp.
“There is no permanent winning in politics. History is too random and unforgiving.”
+1. This summarizes everything I have learned about politics from decades of being an engaged person who votes in every election.
I always love your comments Linda. Anyone who thinks they’re going to permanently hold power is diluting themselves.
Perhaps also deluding themselves. ;)
I was going to make this correction earlier but I didn't want to be accused of watering down the discussion.
If you take it on yourself to correct every typo you see, you'll soon be spread too thin.
Especially if you read my comments
The secret to making the correction is to make it into a joke like Michael Sullivan did up there. Lol
I think everyone who reads my comments realizes that I’m not the most educated person in the comments.
Oh I believe in making jokes when correcting! Read my comment again. :)
Every time I read one of these comments from you Rory, I can't help but recall the "I'm just a simple caveman lawyer" sketch / "I'm just a simple country lawyer" trope.
You're clearly selling yourself short.
I wish they had an edit button. I actually saw that I wrote that, and then left it because perhaps there deluding themselves as well. Lol
Though perhaps we are biased by the last few decades. Going further into history there really are long stretches of party dominance.
True! But this is what I meant by "learned."
I don't mean that in a snotty way; it took me a while (longer than it should have). I remember even in college (a LONG TIME AGO) leftists confidently predicting that after the next election, the demographic tide would turn their way. This despite what I considered to be a remarkable level of pro-Reagan/Bush sentiment in Ann Arbor (!), even after various scandals etc.
Then, every time something unexpected happens (say, the 1994 House elections), there's this "end of history" assumption to accompany it. DLC/Clintonism. Compassionate conservatism. Mission accomplished. Post-racial coalition. For a longer time than I'd like to admit, I fell into the "end of history" trap myself, especially when "my side" was down (I always have been and still am a registered D, although I dislike much about the party today). I still do it sometimes, especially when I make the mistake of wallowing in Twitter/the news.
But then I remember what came of all the previous "realignments" and "paradigm shifts." When I'm thinking clearly, I take everything--political prognostications, predictions about The Future of Work, whatever--with a whole shaker of salt. And I think much more clearly when I just avoid most or all of it and wait to see what actually happens.
I don’t think modern media, or mass media makes that possible. No matter how successful someone was doing, CNN and Fox News is still going to blow up whatever bad news there is.
I think American dynamism and exceptionalism comes from 1) being a nation built by successive generations of immigrants and 2) extraordinary natural resources. The sort of people who leave their own country to start a new life are also the types of people who start new companies and work hard and the US is filled with those people for generations. Combine that with the fertile plains, oil, and coal and you get a 20th century superpower. I think the idea that a bad social net helps drive forward this dynamism is wrong (though it’s possible there is a causal relationship in the other direction). After all, it’s pretty straightforward to imagine how starting a company in a country with guaranteed health insurance feels a lot less risky than a country where leaving your job could endanger your child’s health.
I don’t disagree with you. Obviously, I think you’re absolutely right that the United States historically has been a place where adventurous immigrants come. If you look at my clarifying comments below I acknowledge that I think a certain level of safety net is helpful.
But to be a devils advocate. Perhaps the comfort of knowing that you have a safety net might make some people less likely to risk it all. Does comfort make people less likely to dream big.
One of the arguments for Obamacare was that by so closely linking healthcare to your job, it would discourage people from striking out on their own. The availability of (subsidized) healthcare on the exchanges was supposed to lessen that death grip.
It would be interesting to know if anyone has studied this and might shed light on the ACA's impact on startup creation and voluntary quits.
I can actually see that. I’ve had a couple of friends that I’ve worked with who say that they would quit if it wasn’t for their healthcare. But at the same time, I don’t want nationalized healthcare
For an entrepreneur, the safety net is exactly what what enables them to take big risks. It’s no coincidence that many famous entrepreneurs come from wealthy families who can bail them out of trouble. But our lack of social programs probably does help encourage a culture of hard work among lower income brackets. So if we really want to play devils advocate, maybe Amazon wouldn’t be as big a success without its hard working warehouse laborers who wouldn’t be working so hard if their life didn’t depend on it.
But there’s a difference between enabling and incentivizing. Just because somethings easier, doesn’t mean that more people are actually going to try and do it. End it is possible, that people might give up easier. I know that there’s probably people who would argue differently.
Maybe the difference is that safety nets enable dynamic risk taking behavior like creating companies, switching careers, moving to new places etc but they also give people less incentive to work hard in whatever situation they currently are in. I can risk making it big when I know there’s a net to catch me but if I don’t care about making it big maybe I’ll lounge in that net instead. Just like how current children of rich folks are given opportunity to do crazy impressive stuff or just mooch off their parents money.
Now you’re showing off. Basically took my jumbled thoughts and put them into a succinct paragraph that explains exactly my thoughts.
If I could, I would steal your paragraph, and paste it into my initial comment.
It occurs to me that parents have the same dilemma with their children.
And you could basically summarize the political divide between where people fall on the spectrum on this issue.
I can't speak for others, but the idea of starting my own business has always been in the back of my mind. However, I have a couple medical conditions, so the risk of abandoning a cushy big-business medical plan is just too high. If healthcare were decoupled from employment, I'm pretty sure I would have taken a stab at starting a business. Would I have been successful? Who knows. At least I would have been a datapoint fighting back against the decline of American entrepreneurship.
Yes, but a overly generous safety net surely is a disincentive to work. Given the option of sitting around playing video games and getting high, surely a portion of the population will choose that option.
“Conservatism is basically you don’t want things to change.“
That is a fundamental misunderstanding of what conservatism is, particularly for American conservatism.
Among the aspects of American conservative philosophy are,
- The tenets of classical liberalism and natural law
- Moral universalism
- A republican form of government
- Federalism and subsidiarity
- That political freedom is inherently tied to economic freedom
- Adherence to the Constitution
And for many American conservatives,
- Judeo-Christian morality
An American conservative looking at the state of the country today would want a great number of things to change. That is to say that conservatism is *not* merely resistance to change.
I’m talking about simple middle America conservatism. The sort of conservatism where people don’t like when prices change, or a new process is put in place. Sort of the fear of to rapid change conservatism. Which is ironic coming from me, since I consider myself like that, but I’ve also led a pretty adventurous life.
That’s senior citizen conservatism. You probably won’t get over it.
Not to quibble semantics, but calling that "conservatism" is misnomer. According to the dictionary at least.
"American conservativism" has been noticeably different from "classical conservativism" (and really is more a form of classical liberalism with a religious edge) for over a century and arguably since the country's founding (at least outside of the South).
That is why I called it “American conservatism.”
Adjective modifies noun, and it's still the wrong noun. :)
Hint: He’s trying to avoid the word “reaction”.
What’s the definition you are using?
I needed to be five seconds faster on hitting "Post."
I'd say that's true of High Church Conservatism of the sort you'll find in the Federalist Society but not the rank and file of movement conservative politics
"Conservatism is basically you don’t want things to change. We would like things to get marginally better, but we also don’t want any great disruption. When I say we here, I mean us sort of moderates in the middle."
I think that what people want most as they age, even progressive people, is change in the direction they favor, but at a speed that is predictable or manageable. Even if you're the sort of person who is amenable to radical changes in the structure of society (defunding police, universal healthcare, etc), once you have kids you want to have some measure of confidence that the world you are preparing them for is going to partially resemble what you imagine it will.
That is a very good point. So I have a few old are very radical progressive relatives. Most of them don’t have kids. The one exception is my mom, who is a hard-core left-wing liberal progressive type.
WRT if the USA has (or at least had) some special mojo, I think that it does, and at least some of it is due to self selection: the majority of Americans are descended from people who voluntarily uprooted themselves and moved far away to seek opportunity. That's not an easy thing to do!
I interact with a fair number of immigrants, and in particular, watching European immigrants interact with friends/family/colleagues in their home countries is fascinating. Those who immigrated often find those who didn't immigrate to be painfully slow and indecisive. That generally jives with my observation --- that Americans tend to have more hustle than Europeans.
Interestingly, I think you can even see this in the cuisine. In the USA, there's so much food that's enclosed in bread: hamburgers and sandwiches put meals between two pieces of bread; burritos wrap a meal inside a piece of flatbread; pizza puts a meal on top of a piece of bread, etc. The reason food in the USA is so bread-encrusted is because it's faster to eat, which is useful if you have shit to do. (It's also arguably unhealthy. That's a separate issue.) I've heard many Europeans question why Americans eat so many bread-encrusted things instead of sitting down and having a proper meal. Well, you get less done if you sit around eating meals.
(That's not to say that I endorse the get-shit-done-at-all-costs-even-if-it-ruins-your-health approach. I'm just saying that it's a thing.)
I’m in Argentina and there is a lot of bread drive cuisine here. The breakfast alone is carb city.
>>I mean that are there things that the US can do better than anyone else. Things like entering World War II and turning the tide of the war against Germany and Japan.<<
I'm in the middle of reading Vasily Grossman's incredible duology on the battle of Stalingrad ("Stalingrad" and "Life and Fate") so on behalf of all the people from the then-Soviet Union who broke the back of the Nazi army, let me say "tsk tsk."
Otherwise, great post!
But is there a difference between fighting on your own soil when you’re back is against the wall, compared to the United States flying hundreds of thousands of troops thousands of miles away from home to effect effectively two different wars simultaneously on opposite sides of the globe?
It’s not that I don’t admire what the Russians did, but did they have the capability to preemptively achieve the same global response that the United States did. Via soldiers and technology and manufacturing (The unglamorous war on the homefront).
Oh true, but to be literal, the battle for Stalingrad turned the tide of the war.
This is a bit of a hobby of mine, so I'll haggle a bit on that topic.
The ability of the American industrial engine to simultaneously produce tonnage equivalent to four IJNs, armored units and artillery equivalent to two Wehrmachts, the entire sea- and landborne logistics chain for the British Army, Red Army, US Army, and Marines, and enough food to feed half the USSR and Britain for three years was crucial to the ultimate victory.
Without that production, damned near freely given, the USSR is unable to simultaneously feed, arm, and fuel itself to sustain high-intensity mechanized warfare. They can and would beat the Germans to a standstill, but come May of 1945 they're still wading towards Kiev and Minsk the old-fashioned way amidst a sea of infantry blood, and the entire generation born from 1919 to 1929 is dead in the sea of blood they expended on the way there.
Of course, the corollary of that... Absent the Red Army in the East tying down 70% of the Wehrmacht's combat power, the only way the US and UK are breaking into the Continent at all is atop a carpet of incinerated German cities and 15 million people reduced to ash in a mass atomic offensive in May 1947.
To say nothing of the fact that such a "atomic surprise" strategy requires strangling the Japanese Home Islands the hard way, starving at least 15 million Japanese people. Primarily their children, as is always the outcome of such horrors.
None of the Big Four were dispensable. Absent any one of them, the others (at best) win a Pyrrhic victory and inherit a bled-out, shattered husk of a global society.
Every denizen of the modern world should thank whatever god they believe in that we all got it mostly right, the one damned time it counted most.
Until about a year ago, my understanding on the Eastern Front was still stuck in "human wave tactics". It was really eye-opening to read about just how innovative the Red Army really was.
There's a great scene in Grossman's "Stalingrad" early in the German attack on the city when Stalin issues his "not one step back" order, with anyone retreating to be shot. The head of artillery in the fight goes to the Front commander and says he needs to pull all his artillery out of the city to the east bank of the Volga where it will be safer and much more easily target the German attacks (while also demanding that the artillery commanders stay in the city in order to direct the attacks). The Front commander says "No way! Not one step back!" He goes ahead and pulls the artillery out; it does exactly what he thought it would in thwarting German thrusts, after which the Front commander calls him into his office and says "Good thinking!"
Thanks for writing this about Grossman. This is finally going to nudge his book to the top of my list.
Now you guys are gonna make me add something more to my reading list. I feel a little guilty lately… I was on a nonfiction kick, but lately I’ve been in to Sci Fi.
I read the first one and am starting on the second. Spoiler alert: the two combined are two thousand pages.
Grossman, who was a reporter for Red Star during the war, was *everywhere* the Soviet army was fighting, including Stalingrad. He writes that the only thing he could read for the four years of the war was "War and Peace" which he read through multiple times. As is obvious, he set out to write a War and Peace for WWII, and models his story accordingly.
get well soon Rory..btw, you said a few comments ago now one of your kids was sick, hope your fam is all well. Always enjoy your thoughts.
Oh thanks for remembering John. She had the sniffles for a couple of days, did her quarantine, and return to school. The weirdest thing is her sister who she hangs all over and shares a room with never tested positive and never got sick.
I think well functioning societies need both a conservative impulse, and a progressive one.
More specifically as it relates to America, yes there are things that could be changed for the better. But in general we've got a pretty good system (hence the millions of people wanting to immigrate here each year).
You want a generally free market system to provide dynamism. It's good to have a safety net for when bad things happen, but it shouldn't allow people to slack off.
And while we do need regulation, it should be limited and targeted as much as possible. And it should be reviewed periodically because red tape has a tendency to grow way beyond what is useful.
Nunzio had a great reply up above to all ne of my comments that describes this dilemma.
Elizabeth Holmes’s trial has gotten me thinking about how much of the success of Silicon Valley is due to a tolerance for bending the rules. Theranos’s idea was never going to work because among other things, blood from a finger stick isn’t the same as blood from a venous draw and tests on small volumes just aren’t reliable. And if they hadn’t endangered patients it’s possible that the government would have passed on prosecuting Holmes and Balwani.
And some of the companies we think of as important do have shady histories or their founders have engaged in shady behavior in the past. It makes me wonder if tolerating the “fake it till you make it” behavior might be part of why the US is so dynamic and innovative. And it probably is a net benefit. If so, I have no idea where we should draw the line on acceptable faking it. That’s for smarter people than me to figure out.
Instead of a cause, I wonder if it’s a result. Perhaps Americans expect so much exceptionalism, that when people come up with these harebrained ideas, We are more likely to believe him because we think… Hey were Americans… Of course we can do that shit.
It’s odd: the people in my life who talk about fascism regularly aren’t progressives, they’re previously centrist MSNBC viewers.
The progressives themselves aren’t hurting us as much as the media and everyone else on the left being afraid of raising their ire. Look at why Shor got fired. Look at how the post-Floyd protests/riots were covered. Absolutely everyone became captive to the progressives’ messaging, whether from sympathy, fear or some combination of the two.
It makes it look like every institution, every liberal-adjacent group, is sold on defund the police, for example, because the people who had misgivings wouldn’t speak up (or had to go start a Substack). People on our side need to speak up when they think these things are crazy or even just a little overboard, but there has been a real fear, often justified, of doing so.
People think that nutty progressives are the left, because almost no one says otherwise and anyone who did got exiled or abused.
This seems to me to be the flip side of the “Progressive Mobilization Delusion” piece.
Progressives genuinely believe that if they keep “pushing”, they can alter the fundamentals.
Unfortunately, they’re right, just not in the way they expect or want.
They *want* to make certain policies so non-controversial that they can’t help but be enacted. This is delusional.
They’re *succeeding* at raising the salience of a series of unpopular positions and getting them treated as litmus tests in and out of politics, and thus provoking a reaction from the 80-90% of the electorate that doesn’t like the stupid positions in the first place.
They’re basically setting up a situation in which the “fundamental” paradigm is increasingly hostile to them.
Well done, we’ve changed the fundamentals…?
This is the latest piece I've seen from our host that doesn't seem too concerned about a Trump/fascism connection. I guess I'm quite a bit more worried than MY about us losing our democratic system of government:
1. We have one really specific failure point, our ridiculous Electoral College/certification system, where Trumpy Republican governors or legislators could not 'certify' that Democrat has won their state
2. I doubt we'd get a full-on fascist takeover because Americans would be extremely not resigned to it, but I could see escalating protests, violence, repression and then more protests & violence kind of cycles in response to a rigged election. Where that ends up is anyone's guess
3. I know not being concerned about stuff is an important part of looking one of the Cool Kids, but our government collapsing is a tail risk, and worrying about extremely bad things with a 10-15% probability seems prudent?
I guess the counterpoint is 2020 was THE stress test for this systemic risk and we passed. So some - I think Ezra Klein even laid the arguments out well, even if he doesn't agree completely - would place the risk more like 1%. Whether you think it's prudent or not to focus on likely just depends on your probability assessment. I personally find the concerns hyperbolically overblown but I've probably listened to too much Pod Save America.
I'm not an engineer but I don't think that's how a stress test works. It reminds me of Feynman's analogy of a bridge rated for 3000 pounds that cracks when a 1000-pound truck drives over it: the bridge doesn't have a safety factor of 3 (as NASA said about the Challenger O-rings), but of 0, because the bridge just isn't supposed to crack. Our democracy is not supposed to depend on a quick-thinking security guard leading rioters up a certain staircase, or on the Vice President getting honest, prudent advice from Dan Quayle. We're just supposed to keep humming along, not crack in that fashion.