I work in academia, and below are issues related to this article that have concerned me. I would be interested in the thoughts of Mr. Yglesias and others on them:
In recent years, it has become increasingly common for advertisements for faculty positions to require diversity statement as a part of the application materials, which contains a discussion of the candidate's commitment, experience, and plans surrounding diversity and inclusion. At this point, nearly all positions in my field require them. My concern is that requiring diversity statements further exacerbates the political polarization among faculty.
Admissions for graduate programs in my field is moving in the same direction, where an increasing number of programs are requiring diversity statements. In my department, a subset of our graduate students and faculty consider themselves to be activists and social justice warriors, and they would like to use diversity statements as a means of only admitting graduate students who feel the same way. They are largely succeeding at this point.
I consider myself to be quite liberal, and I naturally prefer to associate with others who have similar political beliefs, but I don't think that these trends are healthy for academia and society, as discussed in the above article.
(My preference for both faculty openings and graduate admissions is to ask applicants to discuss the issues that they are passionate about, with diversity as an example of a topic that they might discuss.)
Yeah, as a fellow academic this seems like the one blind spot in an otherwise good post. Faculty hiring (even in the hard sciences) now generally requires DEI statements that involve either real or convincingly feigned enthusiasm for the woke checklist of left-identitarian grievances. This effectively screens out hires with conservative, centrist, or center-left views on social issues. At the undergraduate level, I suspect the college admissions essay serves a similar function.
All this isn't to deny that the smartest young Americans have a leftward tilt (I think they very much do), but I think that it is more modest than what you see in MY's quoted numbers.
It's the shared feigned enthusiasm that worries me most right now. When few actually share these views in total (crack a keg in semi-private and find out), nobody knows when we're supposed to stop clapping and some truly wild shit can become the putative intellectual status quo.
My fairly liberal group of (mostly white) friends openly talks about how to best fake these diversity statements for job interviews/grad school applications. If it's what has to be done to get into elite positions, it's just a game to play
Yea, let's not discount these illiberal tendencies as a potential threat just because they're a joke to most of our generation. The next generation will see us pretending they're serious, and think they really are.
I intend to make damned sure to always keep a bit of a finger on the scales even as my daughter attends schools in a major blue metro.
She needs to understand that the world doesn't work the way these people think it does today, and that it won't work at all if they have their way with it.
I don't really think it's a blind spot on Matt's part. Faculty politics has been very left-wing since long before DEI statements were a thing, and in fact they wouldn't have become a thing if there were any real ideological diversity in the academy to begin with. DEI is a symptom of the problem... it's probably too late for it to be a (major) cause.
I have almost the opposite worry. These mandatory statements mean that applicants need to thread the needle of guessing whether the hiring committee is going to screen them out because their statement was not woke enough or too woke. I think at the UC system it might have the effect you worry about, because the statements are pre-screened by an administrative committee before the department gets to look at applications, but at universities where this just goes in with the rest of the file to be read by the faculty, it definitely just puts forward a minefield for *everyone*.
Lying and forced insincerity is the point. This is not a good path forward for America, and 'The Chair' with Sandra Oh is a great parody of where we are in Matt's top schools for SAT jocks. Don't think they're helping reduce the urban/rural divide or making America MAGA.
I found these statements to be incomprehensible when, as a longtime professional, I applied for an adjunct job in my field. For a start, I hadn’t a clue about why they’d ask such a “why are you pro-virtue/anti-sin” question. It was my good fortune to have a grad student child who could guide me through the maze.
I can absolutely seeing an institution requiring this. If you cannot fake being politically correct then you are likely to do something idiotic and create a lawsuit. It seems likely that it is less about screening for political views than it is for screening out the angry Conservative who is unable to control his anger.
I'm very skeptical that it effectively screens out hires. At least in my corner of STEM, I haven't seen any strong evidence that they carry any weight compared to the typical priorities of search committees, and that commitment to DEI is at best viewed as a tiny corner of commitment to good pedagogy (which itself is usually dwarfed by research in consideration).
It could be used to screen out skeptics with conviction, in the same way that a job interview could be used to screen out candidates with a certain color of eyes. Alternatively, both can be used to screen out people with antisocial behavior which would likely prove problematic at work.
If companies want to screen out people for antisocial behavior, there are better test than a diversity statement. On the other hand, if you want to provide a signal that your institution gets it without having to actually do anything- hard to find a better solution.
I am skeptical that you are close enough with Steve Jobs to know that he couldn't behave civilized on a written essay if it was a prerequisite for employment. However, if this was true, then he would be well advised to open his own business instead.
Given that I had to write a diversity statement for my kids preschool admission process (and 6 slightly different versions for kindergartner admissions), I think this ship has sailed.
I certainly can't see how this sort of absurdity could backfire electorally and do grievous and lasting harm to the disadvantaged communities we profess to care about.
But we'll be true and pure, and that's what counts, right......?
I can’t believe anyone would suggest that requiring parents to write additional short philosophical essays with high demand vocabulary wouldn’t be the optimal way to diversify a preschool!
Do swing voters in Pennsylvania care what private elementary schools in NYC have on their admissions questionnaires? And do private elementary school administrators care what swing voters in Pennsylvania think? I'm pretty sure the answer to both questions is "no."
Also, is this stuff happening in private schools in Philly as much as it is in NYC/DC/LA? I googled "'bari weiss' 'philadelphia'" but didn't find anything. I guess my assumption is that these sorts of things are downstream of educational polarization, so the school is meeting the demand of its customers
If their kids don't attend the school, it's not clear to me that they would. And if they hate this questionnaire, wouldn't they choose not to attend the school?
I don't think educational institutions are primarily motivated by the impact of their plans on electoral politics. And I don't think elected officials have that much control over the hiring policies of educational institutions - though I suppose the mandatory diversity statements at the UC schools might be the most important counterexample.
Good grief. Do you mean your child would have been penalized in the admissions process if the school decided that your political views were inappropriate?
Competitive preschool admissions has several layers of awfulness baked into it already, but surely this one ought to be illegal
Okay, so maybe I'm misunderstanding what happened. Did the school ask you to write down your personal opinions about diversity, racial justice, things like that?
I have trouble seeing how it could be legitimate to exclude a child from school on this basis, even if a parent's views were genuinely offensive
I believe the question wording is some variation on ‘explain how enrolling your family will create and contribute to a diverse school community.’ I’m always tempted to write ‘we’re gay’ and stop writing, but, you know, it’s a competitive process, so… If you can’t give an obvious answer, I assume you use that space to talk about your commitment to social justice.
I pressed the "look at our multi-racial, multi-cultural, bilingual family!" button as succinctly as I could and stopped before I worked myself into a faint rage.
Note, our preschool is 85% white, in a neighborhood that's 50% black, and most of the "diversity" is Asian/Asian-mixed kids like mine (4), not black kids (1).
That's without addressing anything resembling "diversity of thought."
I think in the United States, for a private institution, basically any sort of exclusion is legitimate unless it's directly selecting against one of the few protected classes.
What really scrambles my brain is that it’s so hard for ideologues (of which I definitely was one for many years) to see that holding absolutist views on the topic of diversity is antithetical to, you know…. diversity.
I can verify all of this. I'm a prof in STEM (large R1 state school) and these statements are required of faculty hires as well as grad student admissions. We are told by higher-ups that "we must do something for diversity everyday". I can't get carve out enough time for my "science work" every day. All of the readings and seminars we have in DEI are 100% echo Kendi, De Angelo, etc. This gives you a sense of what people are looking for in diversity letters.
Same. I was very surprised to learn recently when I was helping a postdoc with his applications that the diversity statements aren't just in California anymore.
What surprises me is that this is required of grad students. This implies we are, at least in part, to select students based on evidence of DEI activities. I use the word activities as this will incentive incoming students to do much more standard DEI work to obtain grad positions. Showing not just telling about your commitment will take precedence.
I guess most places are removing the GRE and replacing it with DEI now.
I was recently hired (mid-career) as a prof in STEM at a large R1 state school. It was the only position that did not require a diversity statement (maybe because of all the HBCUs in their university system?).
Word around the campfire is that my application did not even make it to the departments at some universities. Instead, there was a first-cut by the office of diversity and inclusion, which evaluated my diversity statement. I mean, I guess they could just be telling me that to try to make me feel better about not getting hired, but that doesn't square with the hostility towards DEIs that came out at virtually every department I visited.
As an academic, my general sense is that diversity statements are largely viewed (by even left of center folks) as a banal formulaic checkbox to dump some marginal amount of platitudes in, because nobody is vocally “anti-diversity” in a meaningful way. Throw in the standard spiel about “I strongly believe that every student, regardless of background, should be able to excel in my classes”, make some nods to universal design and that you acknowledge that all students are different and that different approaches work for different students and you’ve passed the diversity statement hoop.
Obviously, you can’t say “I think that this institute embodies the best of WASP culture, and that by catering to those sensibilities we’ll keep our white Judeo-Christian values strong into the 21st century!” but if you’re smart enough to make it to a faculty position you’re smart enough to write to the prompt.
I think it's also going to screen out some people who talk about how much of an activist they are and how much they want to shake up their discipline - at least, at the institutions where these statements are only being read by the faculty in the department.
Yeah, I don't think these diversity statements are good to require. But I can definitely imagine contexts in which screening out people with conviction on a particular issue is exactly what certain employers would want.
If it genuinely pains someone so much to type out a few paragraphs to say being inclusive is good and that they're committed to trying to make all of their students succeed, they probably deserve to be screened out.
Imagine if they put in the same requirement for patriotism - where all you had to do what extol the virtues of the United States. No one could be opposed to that...right?
The difference is that inclusion is an (uncontroversial!) pedagogical goal on its own terms. The priority placed on it might be part of a larger trend, but you have to be a legitimate white supremacist to actively say "yeah, I want my minority students to feel alienated".
Being yourself patriotic neither has a clear tie to the job, nor is it on its own terms nearly as uncontroversial. A better analogy would be if you had to write a citizenship statement explaining how you'd enhance your students abilities to become more productive citizens—no one wants "worse" citizens, but there's some controversy over exactly how much weight teachers should put towards actively instilling citizenship and you might be suspicious of the overall project—but I don't think there's anything bad about soliciting a statement about it.
"The difference is that inclusion is an (uncontroversial!) pedagogical goal on its own terms." The priority placed on it might be part of a larger trend, but you have to be a legitimate white supremacist to actively say "yeah, I want my minority students to feel alienated".
This *feels* like sophistry in that there are a multitude of pedagogical goals and you generally do not have to make a statement about any of the others. The ONLY reason you have to make a Diversity statement is part of the larger trend which is all about signaling. Thus why so many comments in this thread are about people "playing the game." If a diversity statement had any real pedagogical value, it would matter if people weren't taking it seriously, but it doesn't add any value so it doesn't matter if people are faking it.
On the second point - if the government of the United States said that to attend a university supported by public funds, you would need to make a statement of patriotic fervor, because its desirable in their citizens. Would you support that because it met a public goal? Do you think such a statement by people would actually convey anything of value?
And if you think that being patriotic is a more controversial goal than diversity, I think you are living in the twitter world.
John got there first but I’m also against loyalty oaths, even though one could say the same thing: if it pains someone so much to say a few words about how they’re not going to betray America, why should they have a job? The principle is that a declaration of conscience has no value or meaning if it’s a requirement for employment, and a lot of people don’t like making meaningless declarations of conscience.
I don't feel like I'm THAT long out of grad school, but "hi, I'm actually just here to learn and work" doesn't seem like it would have been a controversial new-student worldview ten or fifteen years ago.
Maybe that's the big state school STEM in me talking.
Sounds like Mao's cultural revolution. If you're made to write an essay at 22 about what you're passionate about and don't say 'getting hammered and laid', or maybe 'married to a billionaire' you're lying, deserve to be rejected and won't be a contribution to society in later years.
Cover letters, where 22 year olds are expected to write about their attention to detail and passion for customer service, are the worst part of Mao's cultural revolution
I would add that diversity of opinion should be the diversity that we are looking for. That is what will really challenge your mind, and make sure that any views you have are well vetted
“And would it really be so hard to throw urban libs a bone in the form of some concern for climate change?“
I’ve tried! Specifically, I advocate protecting dense areas with seawalls and making air conditioning more broadly available. Urban liberals have not appreciated my concern. They’ve called me a denialist, or acted as if I want to protect every uninhabited arctic island rather than just dense areas like New York City and Norfolk.
The problem is urban liberals view climate in moral terms, so they think mitigation is like making a pact with the devil.
Furthermore, if urban liberals want to cooperate, why don’t they kick the Paris protocol’s “1.5 degrees or death” alarmism to the curb or, at a minimum, cut out their airplane vacations and learn to like nuclear power? If they could compromise as well as they sneer we might get somewhere.
I recognize the reality or climate change, I’m willing to invest significant resources in electrification and mitigation, and yet urban libs treat me like a neanderthal for saying things like “cold causes more human misery than heat” and “carbon intensive technologies have improved agricultural yields and sharply reduced hunger.” Urban liberals are not fun to engage.
I agree with you entirely re: the attitudes of urban liberals being unproductive and generally disinterested in actual pragmatic solutions to the problem (and also their alarmist climate apocalypticism being equal parts absurd and infuriating).
But surely you must agree that your position here is considerably divergent from GOP electeds, many of whom do not recognize that climate change is even going to happen. I would really rather not be primarily aligned with the "nuclear is Bad, degrowth, no one needs to sacrifice except giant corporations, etc." crowd but there's not even a serious attempt by the GOP to advance a conservative climate agenda.
Fair enough. The GOP is keen to deny problems it has no intention of solving. See, also, covid and the American underclass.
However, the GOP stance on climate is better than those of progressive activists. Degrowth would cause economic depression (which creates hunger in poor countries) pretty quickly. At some point, conservatives will have to admit the earth is getting warmer and invest in a crash mitigation program. Seventeenth century Holland built beautiful seawalls. We can thrown them up
lickity split once we feel enough urgency to move dirt.
Nuclear power generation in the US peaked in 2012. The last reactor to open was in 2016 in Tennessee. 23 reactors meanwhile have been shuttered. Our political class and the young geniuses our elites universities are admitting aren't serious about climate change until they start throwing up nuclear power plants as fast as the Dutch did dikes.
This is a canard. The current generation of nuclear power plants don't make economic sense, even after adjusting for a generous cost-of carbon allowance. They just can't compete. On top of that, nuclear power is inherently inflexible and can't economically follow load. This makes it a terrible complement to intermittent renewables.
Sure, there are promising next-gen technologies that may be able to help out in 20 or more years, but there's nothing ready for mass deployment. For next-gen stuff, there's bipartisan support for generous research funding.
Many advocates point to France as proof that the US bungled nuclear power, but now even France is moving away from nuclear after the Flamanville debacle:
"A third reactor at the site, an EPR unit, began construction in 2007 with its
commercial introduction scheduled for 2012. As of 2020 the project is more
than five times over budget and years behind schedule. Various safety
problems have been raised, including weakness in the steel used in the
reactor.[1] In July 2019, further delays were announced, pushing back the
They can't compete because *they are forbidden to compete*. On account of ALARA laws, if you are selling power for under what your competitors are doing, you are not making radiation as low as reasonably achievable, and have to sink the surplus into more radiation avoidance.
Nuclear would cost 6-8 times as much to replace the current grid compared to solar and wind.
I don't know how many times this needs to be brought up, but it is NOT 1990 anymore. Your impression of the economics here is wildly, obscenely out of date.
Nuclear, beyond a 20% baseload or so, is no longer necessary and never will be.
I'm just a dumb liberal arts major who knows nothing about the economics of power grids, but I do have a cousin who's been a nuclear engineering professor at MIT for 45 years, and we talk from time to time. It's true if you put regulatory costs on one source of power generation and give subsidies to competing sources, the economics of what's cheapest is will swing. These are political choices, and you obviously prefer subsidies for wind and solar. I'd rather on the other hand save the planet for the benefit of future generations.
The literal definition of someone whose bread is buttered...
Aside from the initial R&D money, which nuclear received as well (in greater amounts), there's no way that the operational subsidies (small tax credits, mostly) for renewables are sufficiently large to explain nuclear power's deteriorating economic competitiveness.
It wouldn't be anything like cost-competitive even if the safety margins were reduced significantly, and they can't/shouldn't be brought down to the level of solar or wind. Wind and solar power installations are dispersed infrastructure (no individual generator is failure-critical) and have no failure modes that pose anything like the level of risk carried by the failure of a nuclear power plant.
Even if we reduce operational safety margins in the actual reactor design, the construction of its containment system will remain much the same: it cannot rupture, and the structure cannot crack, ever, under any load, including earthquake, hurricane, and direct impact by an airliner. So much of the obscene capital expense of nuclear power is tied up in construction of that containment system, and that will never be avoidable.
Sure, in the 80's nuclear was forced to accept a negative subsidy in the form of overly conservative safety margins, at the same time as fossil fuels were implicitly subsidized to hell and gone. But this isn't the 1980's.
Nuclear is not cost effective. The entire amount of subsidies extended to renewables since 1980, including upfront R&D, would suffice to cover the cost overruns to build eight (8!!) nuclear power plants. Which then have higher operating costs anyway.
We need something to power the CO2 capture machines. Maybe its nuclear. Maybe it is Geothermal. Maybe it is solar/wind. Until we get the price of net CO2 emissions right, we will never know.
The price of CO2 has nothing to do with how we remove it from the atmosphere. It only answers the question of *whether* we remove it from the atmosphere.
By which I mean, regardless of the price of CO2, so long as it's more than the lifecycle cost of removing it, I'll do so with the cheapest method available.
That's likely to be either reforestation or enhanced weathering.
In certain applications, it may be direct CSS, especially if the CO2 has value locally as an industrial feedstock.
I sincerely doubt it will ever be CSS fed by nuclear power.
You have this completely backward. As intermittent sources wind and solar require not only massive overbuilding to guarantee adequate capacity but also massive investments in grid agility and energy storage that no other energy source requires. Those aren't free. More interesting perhaps is that if you did have that scale of energy storage then it would work more efficiently with nuclear than either wind or solar.
Neither David R or Peter G should be very sure of how technology would develop if net CO2 emissions were taxed and nuclear safety/construction were regulated no more strictly than other technologies.
Yeah, this is where the ideological blinders become pretty obvious.
To throw in an anecdote, I can confidently say that I have never heard a single one of my liberal or progressive friends or family endorse "degrowth" as a solution. Some may complain about capitalism and dirty growth, but almost none want to abolish it.
What they *will* chafe at is any conservative who feigns agreement that something must be done to mitigate climate change while labeling their fears of a future where those challenges aren't met as "hysterical apocalyptism."
Only a few progressives openly advocate pastoral primitivism. Yet most advocate carbon/climate targets that can only be achieved by keeping the least developed areas of the world underdeveloped.
Mainstream progressives have advocated de growth even in North America. They killed the Keystone XL pipeline. Banning fracking or prohibiting fracking on federal lands as leases come up for renewal is a mainstream progressive demand. Limiting fracking before a material portion of vehicles are electric and the demand for oil has decreased is clearly a degrowth strategy.
"Yet most advocate carbon/climate targets that can only be achieved by keeping the least developed areas of the world underdeveloped."
Citation required.
Solar, in particular, is just running circles around coal in the developing world. There are NO ongoing coal-fired powerplant projects in Sub-Saharan Africa, India, or China that do not have extensive state backing, and even those are getting tied up in litigation or being cancelled at a breakneck pace.
>>Limiting fracking before a material portion of vehicles are electric and the demand for oil has decreased is clearly a degrowth strategy.<<
It's not "clearly" that at all. Obviously serious action to reduce carbon emissions cannot exempt the fossil fuel sector from policies liable to shrink it (that's the whole point!).
But none of the things you cite would actually shrink the economy as whole. I'd recommend Krugman on this.
There is nothing in aiming for 1.5 degrees that will prevent developing countries from becoming rich. In some sense they (at least to the extent they have a larger share of agriculture in current GDP and or more low profile seacoasts) will benefit most from preventing the rise is CO2 concentrations. This seems to be assuming that degrowth IS the only way.
Right. You can always find extremes on both right and left. But politics in the USA is embodied by the two major parties. One party's median position on climate change is: it's real, humans needs to do something about it, and we need to spend a lot of money ramping up the technology to deal with it. Nobody with a scintilla of influence in Democratic policy-making circles advocates actually shrinking the economy.
The other party's median position is: climate change isn't very harmful, and in any event doing something about it would ruin the economy so we shouldn't.
I have very mixed feelings on this, but knowing your passion around it would be curious your thoughts. Progressives have fought nuclear power for the last 50+ years and imposed much higher costs on building it out. I'm definitely not saying this was the only impediment, but it was a very large one. France has had 80%+ of its power generated by nuclear since the 80s. Had the US done the same, that would be about 80 billion tons of CO2 not released over the last 40 years (the equivalent to 2 current years of human CO2 production).
What was the comparable improvement driven by Progressives? Increased MPG standards have saved about 17.5 billion tons since 1975.
Thanks for the reply. You make some good points about how so many "little" things can add up. And to your broader point, I think progressives would have accomplished more (maybe bigger) things were the GOP not obstructing so much.
I do wish the greens in Germany hadn't been so aggressive about taking their nuclear plants out of production though. I tend to think that climate change will always be de prioritized relative to any other progressive objective. Though still hoping I'm wrong.
The astounding degree to which people on the internet take solar seriously is a good reminder of the California bubble in political discourse. It’s a big country, most of which is not known for year round sunshine. At best, it is a closet degrowth/austerity program. You are suggesting we reduce energy usage to almost zero for 9 months of the year.
Aside from maybe some scare rhetoric in isolated pockets of the left, I don't see much difference between Ds and Rs on nuclear power.
There's bipartisan support for funding research and even pilots for next-gen nuclear stuff and really it's only a handful of crony republicans who are actually in favor of throwing away ratepayer money building more current-generation plants.
What makes you say Republicans have a better stance on nuclear power than Democrats?
The refusal to support nuclear power in the face of catastrophic global heating is just infuriating. All the evidence points to it being far less dangerous than people thought back in the 80s.
They always point to nuclear waste. Why is the waste generated by used parts from wind turbines and batteries to store 'clean energy" any worse? You need to keep all your tools in your toolkit!
That's just an outright lie. Literally point # 1 on Green America's top 10 list of reasons to oppose nuclear power is "nuclear waste": https://www.greenamerica.org/fight-dirty-energy/amazon-build-cleaner-cloud/10-reasons-oppose-nuclear-energy (And point # 2 is "nuclear proliferation" for Christ's sake!) Google "objections to nuclear power" and similar search terms to find about 5 million other examples of nuclear waste being used as the leading objection to nuclear power.
"We're repeatedly and loudly pointing to cost, as in: 'This costs 4-8 times as much!'"
A substantial contributing factor to that cost is that a regulatory regime that superempowers anti-nuclear NIMBYs. Further, if global warming is an existential crisis for humanity, then the cost is hardly objectionable.
Let me rephrase: No one HERE is pointing to waste.
Additionally, "A substantial contributing factor to that cost is that a regulatory regime that superempowers anti-nuclear NIMBYs." was wrong the last fourteen times someone trotted out this stupid canard, and will be wrong the next fourteen and well beyond.
I'm a structural engineer who has been involved peripherally in nuclear projects, to the point of seeing plans for buildings, visiting construction sites, and meeting senior leaders of the companies building and operating the plants.
The construction costs of the containment structures alone ensure that no matter how much I relax the regulations on operating margins and actual reactor design, BWR and PWR reactor facilities are going to be obscenely bloody expensive as a result of construction costs. Always.
Everywhere in the world, including China, the UK, France, Bangladesh, India, and the US, has found nuclear projects overbudget by a factor of 2-5 in recent years. If that's true across half a dozen different regulatory regimes, including China, which I can assure you has exactly *no* NIMBY representation in the political system, then the problem is not the regulatory regime, it's the technology.
"Further, if global warming is an existential crisis for humanity, then the cost is hardly objectionable."
If I can accomplish the same goal at a quarter the cost, then of course the cost is objectionable!
Jesus, every single solitary nuclear fanboy/fangirl here must have been parachuted in directly from 1980 and Carter's solar cells on the White House. The economics don't work and Christ knows if they ever again will.
"I advocate protecting dense areas with seawalls and making air conditioning more broadly available."
I don't think this counts as any sort of "concern for climate change". At most it's expressing concern for how we *live* with climate change, but not any concern for how *much* climate change we end up getting. It's definitely not helpful to say "1.5 degrees or death", but it absolutely *is* helpful to say "1.5 degrees is better than 2 degrees is better than 2.5 degrees is better than 3 degrees".
But it used to be conservatives who wanted to deal with pollution (including climate change) with taxes/incentives instead of administrative measures. Conservatives used to support immigration. Conservatives used to support low deficits. Conservatives used to support freer trade. Going farther back they used to oppose foreign ventures with liberal goals like Iraq and Afghanistan. What happened?
Without a genuine course correction, we are very rapidly getting into "Uh-oh." territory.
We'll already have to mitigate and "live with it" to a very great degree, but if you think that much above 1.5 degrees is "mitigation territory," you're deluded.
2.5 degrees is "Sub-Saharan African rainfall patterns are irreversibly altered, and a few tens or hundreds of millions starve." It's also "heatwaves in the tropics kill 5 million annually."
3.5 degrees is "the monsoon fails one or two years in three, and 500 million people in South and Southeast Asia starve." It's also "Parts of the Middle East are no longer habitable."
4.5 degrees is "we're not exactly sure what's under the Arctic permafrost but we'd best hope it's not large concentrations of methane hydrates." It's also "Phoenix, Vegas, and Dallas shut down during the day for 5 months a year."
Seawalls are already likely to be necessary, as is a ton more air-conditioning in North America alone... so it's quite disingenuous to expect us to just roll over for your unwarranted, borderline-delusional optimism about adaptation.
As for nuclear... whatever. Current-generation nuclear technology would cost 6-8 times as much to build-out to replace the current grid compared to solar and wind. Any plant that gets the subsidies to be built is a net-positive, but it's just not important anymore. Sure, should have done it in the 80's. Too late now.
The good news is, market-dictated roll-out of the new generation and transportation technologies will hold us to 2.5-3 degrees on its own, unless a certain faction in a certain developed nation decides that it needs to heavily subsidize the coal and oil extractive industries.
A wee bit of subsidy to get that done faster and make sure the developing world uses clean technology instead of dirty, and we all get to have our cake and eat it too!
Your statement about our choices regarding power generation is not really correct.
I am not an expert in Nuclear technology, so I can't speak specifically to why the cost is so much higher than elsewhere, but my understanding from speaking to people who are experts is that it is primarily related to unrealistic environmental & safety standards put into place post-Chernobyl that could be easily adjusted/relaxed by a friendly DOE/EPA.
However, I do work in grid management & renewable energy, and your expectation that renewable penetration will make nuclear development unnecessary is just not a reasonable assumption in the context of what you want to achieve. The only way to build a reliable grid without baseload power (Nuclear, Coal, some Gas plants) in the US is to hope that technology improves to the point where something that doesn't exist now becomes available - existing battery storage is not even close. In the interim, existing baseload will be replaced by Natural Gas and there will be a floor on coal plant retirements. This process could take a really long time since you're just hoping that a new technology (hydrogen fuel cells? fusion? exponential battery improvement?) will come along.
If the view is that climate change is an immediate problem RIGHT NOW then policymakers should be trying to build a zero emissions grid... right now! That would mean a massive investment in nuclear energy to phase out existing baseload capacity within a decade, with renewables and batteries filling the role that gas plants occupy now.
I legitimately don't understand why you would lead your argument with the need for a "genuine course correction" paired with basically a shrug about what we should do about baseload power. It makes absolutely zero sense and is more or less what OP was saying in the first place.
"I am not an expert in Nuclear technology, so I can't speak specifically to why the cost is so much higher than elsewhere, but my understanding from speaking to people who are experts is that it is primarily related to unrealistic environmental & safety standards put into place post-Chernobyl that could be easily adjusted/relaxed by a friendly DOE/EPA."
If this is your understanding, you're getting it from someone whose bread is buttered.
It may have been largely true in the 1980's and 90's, that our red tape was so bad as to knock nuclear out of contention unfairly. But today...?
American costs are not out of line with the rest of the world. The latest projects in France are over-budget by a factor of five. The UK's Hinkley Point C project has seen its budget double and is nowhere near completion yet. I was peripherally involved in the China Taishan and Sanmen projects. They were probably both over-budget by severalfold, according to people I spoke to who were involved in their construction. Public numbers are either not available or made up from whole cloth.
"The only way to build a reliable grid without baseload power (Nuclear, Coal, some Gas plants) in the US is to hope that technology improves to the point where something that doesn't exist now becomes available - existing battery storage is not even close."
Agreed... though I'll point out that I'm not expecting to do this over the next decade, I'm expecting that depreciation of existing assets will see it done over the next three decades. And in that time, expecting battery technology NOT to substantially improve seems to be a larger stretch than expecting it to substantially improve.
What I've come to expect is that nuclear+gas will be our baseload for some time. Coal plants are going to be gone by the end of the decade, virtually everywhere in the US. Gas will stay afloat much longer, as it's more economical to operate and provides a reliable and responsive baseload.
Better transmission and storage will rapidly eat into gas's role in all this, until it's no longer necessary at all in a few decades.
That seems to be borne out by the current economic reality and the technology that exists today, as well as the rate of change in energy storage and transmission technology.
"Agreed... though I'll point out that I'm not expecting to do this over the next decade, I'm expecting that depreciation of existing assets will see it done over the next three decades."
That doesn't seem to match the urgency of your previous posts about how critical it is to avoid "Uh Oh" territory. I'm also curious your thoughts on why nuclear costs are so high?
Straight-line depreciation of existing carbon-intensive assets in electricity and transport will allow the US and Europe to hold up their end of the bargain to limit the rise in temperatures to 2-3 degrees.
I'm not saying it's what I want, it's just not "DOOM" territory, and it's what I *expect* to happen.
Any major policy intervention in the US will wait for the next Democratic trifecta in the 2030's, at which point most of the work will have already been done.
As for nuclear, there was likely a time when the answer was, indeed, regulatory arbitrage on the part of fossil fuel industries. Nuclear was held to an unreasonable safety standard after TMI relative to all the people who died of chemical spills, coal-fired air pollution, you name it.
But in the present, my opinion amounts to this: Generation using fossil fuels has fallen in cost, quite considerably in real terms, and it is implicitly heavily subsidized. More recently, lifecycles costs for solar and wind power have fallen precipitously.
That alone would ensure that nuclear is, relatively speaking, more expensive.
But the biggest problem is that nuclear pushes all of the buttons for "construction megaproject," and if you know anything about the construction industry in the US (and globally, really), you know that its productivity trends are an absolute shambles. Which means that in absolute terms the costs of building a plant have risen a ton even as the mostly off-the-shelf construction costs for green installations have fallen, and fossil fuel plant construction costs have stayed steady.
"Straight-line depreciation of existing carbon-intensive assets in electricity and transport will allow the US and Europe to hold up their end of the bargain to limit the rise in temperatures to 2-3 degrees."
This will lead the US and Europe CO2 production to continue to fall (probably, not sure how quickly). Will it keep China, India, Nigeria Indonesia from replacing that CO2 production just as fast? What are they going to use to manage baseload?
I have heard Conservative nutters dressed in rags ranting on the street corner that the "end is nigh." This is, however, not particularly relevant to the conversation....
"The good news is, market-dictated roll-out of the new generation and transportation technologies will hold us to 2.5-3 degrees on its own, unless a certain faction in a certain developed nation decides that it needs to heavily subsidize the coal and oil extractive industries."
Would you elaborate on this? My understanding is that while developed nation CO2 production has been decreasing, that has been more than made up for by the increases in developing nations. CO2 production fell in 2020 due to Covid, but most analysts I've read expect a resumption to trend shortly which is a slowing increase.
Those projections keep getting it wrong and have been ever since the steepest growth in China's capacity ended. I expect they'll continue to do so. If you follow the market at all, you'll see a bunch of fossil fuel generation projects losing bids or getting canceled in favor of renewables.
Transportation is the big challenge in the developing world, not electricity. We'll see how EV rollout goes. Good news is that much of the developing world is a ways off from car ownership, and those parts that aren't often have strong/authoritarian governments mandating a move to EVs (China, Vietnam, Malaysia frex.)
It’s very strange that you locate the “costs” of global warming in Nairobi, which is at an altitude of 6000 feet and where the average high temperature is never over 81 degrees. Even a 5 degree celsius uniform increase in temperature would leave Nairobi with a hot season comparable to Atlanta or Washington, DC.
There are two ways of discussing politics. One essentially assumes that the speaker is omnipotent, usually through the use of the word “should.” This is the preferred discursive mode of climate hawks. It gets around problems like the fact that the political will to curb US emissions simply does not exist. People want SUVs and cheap gas and politicians who oppose those things can only hang on in a handful of urban places. Developing countries want to develop more than they want climate stability. Much better to have 95 degree highs in July and air conditioning than 90 degree highs and a fan. If climate hawks can say people should give up their SUVs and car pool, I can just as easily say Canada and Russia have vast, underpopulated areas that will become more habitable as the earth warms. They should take in climate refugees. It might actually happen, both have plausible reasons to increase their populations, but politics are messy and I’m not confident how they will act.
However, I’ll admit that the prescriptive mode of discourse is pretty inane. A discussion of crime could be truncated to “people should not kill, maim, rape or steal.” That kind of thinking wishes the problem away and avoids the interesting question, which is how to deter crime and deal with criminals.
Coastal defenses and air conditioning are politically viable solutions. Rich nations will easily summon the will to implement them once climate change begins to bite. Poor and dysfunctional nations won’t do as well. There will be climate refugees and some people will die of heat stroke.
You are probably uncomfortable with the fact that Peggy Sue would rather drive her Tahoe and air condition a 3500 square foot house than give up her lifestyle to make a tiny, incremental contribution to climate equity in Nigeria and Bangladesh. I’ve made my peace with the fact that humans are pretty selfish especially when the costs of their actions fall upon strangers they never see. You can hate Peggy Sue all you want, but that won’t get you her vote and she isn’t giving up her Tahoe.
Where, pray tell, does Nairobi's food supply chain run through?
As for Peggy Sue, it's amazing that that massive hunk of a Tahoe gets better fuel efficiency than an ordinary sedan in the 1970's. I wonder how that came about, and how much it reduced American emissions? (Answer: 20+ GT, something like 10% of all emissions since we started fuel efficiency mandates)
When Rivian is producing an SUV that's cheaper to fuel and more reliable, Peggy Sue will tell GM to get fucked. And that's likely to be true by the next time she goes to buy an SUV in the mid-2020's.
It's also funny that her power consumption for air conditioning for that 3500 sq. ft. house is lower than her parents' wall unit in their 1500 sq. ft. house. And that the carbon footprint of that consumption is about a third what it was for her parents...
Again, I wonder what wonderful factor is causing all of these things?
One problem, among others, is that you actually believe the self-flagellating idiots who keep telling you you need to not drive, not fly, not eat, not that... before we can "save the world!" (TM)
I'm here to tell you: just hand the government a trillion bucks over the next twenty years to subsidize functionally identical clean alternatives, or tax the old ones. Another 200 billion in R&D expenditures, and we're good to go, mostly.
i’m perfectly happy for the US to spend $1.2 trillion on renewables over 20 years, that’s 0.2% of gdp. But I really doubt that level of expenditure will hit the 1.5 degree target. i take the self flagellating idiots seriously because 1.5 degreeea requires a lot of masochism
A couple points. First, the predictions that climate change will cause massive droughts are dubious. As a first approximation, warner places tend to get more precipitation because warm air is able to carry more moisture than cool air. Warm weather does make water evaporate more quickly, but it’s really dubious to say “the proportion of world crop lands experiencing drought will increase materially as the climate warms.”. There will certainly be fewer frosts during the growing season, which is an unambiguous win for agriculture. Agricultural yields, including those in the developing world, are at world historical highs. The climate change we have experienced so far has not prevented ag yields from exploding.
Second, Peggy Sue is not the most sympathetic character in the world. I find her SUV wasteful and am fine with a 2500 square foot house. But, if I had more money, I’d probably get a vacation home and/or go on six airplane vacations a year and my carbon footprint would be just as big if not bigger than hers.
Rich urbanites who travel a lot have huge carbon footprints. The urban precariat does have some integrity on this issue.
Fairness would be in two parts 1) In setting the tax on net CO2 emissions we (in the high-income world) take account of the harm done to people everywhere, (crop failures in India and SS Africa, sea level rise in Bangladesh) not just within our countries. This presumably means that the tax would be higher in high income countries than if only local costs are taken into account. 2) High income countries should transfer resources to poorer countries to invest in climate change mitigating investments. [It is sometime said that shifting to zero and negative CO2 technologies in response to a tax on net CO2 emissions would be more costly to poor countries than to rich countries but I'm not sure that is the case. If it is the case or for the countries in which it is the case, that would be another motive for resource transfers.]
The amusing (morbid, but amusing) thing about his post is that willingness to toss *you* overboard is just going to aid America's wealthiest in tossing *him* overboard afterward.
"What, you thought we’d just… make it stop… now that it's killing Americans? Nah. Still too expensive. *We'll* be fine. Good luck to you, sir!"
It's not like the problem will do anything but get worse if we go with his "adaptation only" strategy. If we're normed to passively watching poor folks abroad die in their millions, there is going to be damn-all that keeps us from passively watching poor folks at home die in their millions eventually, and at that point it becomes inevitable that not-poor folks will start dying too.
He seems to think that "adaptation" is a substitute for "reform" instead of a necessary compliment.
Seawalls are already baked in, I agree. So is desalinization in the SW US, evacuation of large swathes of heavily forested communities in North America, better flood control infrastructure on every major waterway in the Northern Hemisphere, road and rail reconstruction in Canada and Russia, and large population movements in the developing world.
But these are not actual "let's stop climate deteriorating any further" policies, they're "we've already done this and must live with it" policies. The point is to stop making those (already very expensive) adaptation problems even worse, as quickly as politically/economically possible, rather than just saying we'll keep adapting in increasingly more expensive ways.
Which you also seem to agree with, but wildly overestimate the difficulty of...
That’s not fair. I support electrification, I think rich societies should be willing to pay a 10-15% premium for renewables, poor countries will have more binding cost constraints
There used to be a libertarian-ish strain of intellectual conservatism ala Milton Friedman that laid claim to technocratic competency. I know growing up I’d read all sorts of conservative arguments that liberals understandably wanted things like abolishing poverty (crucially, this was always pitched sympathetically, which seems completely alien now!) but they didn’t understand that really they were doomed to immiserate everyone because they couldn’t see clearly—the sort of people who identified with the Churchill quote about you have to become a liberal by 20 if you have a heart and a conservative by thirty if you have a brain.
I suspect that losing this sort of stance (through a combination of economic knowledge objectively moving away from a Friedman-ish stance, and stronger influence of Evangelical+Fox News popularism) is as much a cause of the polarization as an effect. If you’re a smart-ass teenage boy, being able to signal your intelligence by “Well-actually-ing“ whatever your bleeding heart liberals say is a strong incentive to incorporate intellectually independent conservative into your identity and prove that that’s why you should go to University of Chicago (but you’ll settle of course for any other highly selective school). If there’s no project to incorporate conservatism into your identity as a smarter than average student, it’s unsurprising that students will give up on conservatism before they give up on proving how smart they are.
This is so true. When I started taking about politics online back in 2007, these young libertarian contrarians popped up all the time on forums and Reddit and blog comments. I was one of them at the time!
I think the aftermath of the Great Recession is also a major reason for the decline in technocratic libertarianism. Most of them predicted that Obama’s policies would lead to a debt crisis and strangle free market capitalism with over regulation. When neither happened, the whole viewpoint started to seem silly and out of date.
My sense is that now, smart contrarian young men are mostly anti-woke but liberal on non-culture war topics, or far-left new socialists.
I think for a while, libertarians could convince themselves that with just the right pitch, they could convince the Republican party to become libertarian. If nothing else, Trump disabused that notion. Its not nearly as fun to be a libertarian when its clear no one has any interest in your ideas. We'll see if the same happens for all the "youngins" that pivoted to far left socialism.
That goes back a long time online. When I started talking about politics online in 1993, USEnet's talk.politics.libertarianism was the place that it was at.
The capture of the libertarian movement by Mises and Rothbard esque goldbugs has been extremely disappointing. The Austrian school is frankly anathema to Friedman's thought. They are completely right on housing, immigration and permitting, but get dragged down by the idiotic macro of their lookalikes.
"If there’s no project to incorporate conservatism into your identity as a smarter than average student, it’s unsurprising that students will give up on conservatism before they give up on proving how smart they are."
I think the higher percentage of Howie Hawkins voters at Harvard than Trump shows this to be a strong liklihood. For a certain type of young (mostly) men, having arguments and debate is a big part of politics, and libertarianism hasn't moved away from that as much as conservatism has. Of course, the arguments are heartless but the ideology is (mostly) consistent.
Except Hawkins was the Green candidate. Based on the percentages, apparently not a single student surveyed voted for Jo Jorgensen (the Libertarian candidate).
I hope that's it. My experience is that teenage girls are always on the hunt for social status and this tool has lots of sharp edges. But maybe the woke crowd is notorious for their kind and forgiving nature and I missed it.
I grew up in a rural Republican household in the 70s and 80s, went to an urban college in 1986 and by the time I graduated I was functionally a Democrat (though registered Independent). I can't think of a single professor saying anything that made a difference in my outlook. It was fellow students who I took my cues from.
Of course, a lot has changed since then, but something tells me this is still mostly about peer effects and not professors.
Maybe it's because I studied engineering, but I don't remember my professors talking about politics at all (with the exception of one vocally conservative business professor). But I noticed strong liberal peer effects. It makes sense that young people are idealistic and excited about ambitious social change, and their politics follow from that.
There's some interesting stuff in "The Righteous Mind" but I never let anyone mention Haidt without pointing out that one of his most famous conclusions--that conservatives understand liberal thinking better than liberals understand conservative thinking--isn't valid.
The research that led to this claim was done on a non-random sample of American adults who were disproportionately young, female and self-identified as liberal. It's not clear how the study participants were chosen: the researchers said they visited a website where they could find an attitudes questionnaire to fill out. I suspect most of them were graduate students in social science, because how else would they have heard about some obscure research website?
Obviously if you study people in a very liberal peer group, the conservatives in that group will understand liberal attitudes fairly well because they're exposed to them all the time, whereas the liberals are likely to be pretty clueless about how conservatives think. Without a random sample this research is worthless.
It's important to push back against this because conservative pundits repeat this "finding" all the time, and it reinforces their view that people who voted for Trump are more open-minded than people who voted against them. If that seems hard to believe, it's because it isn't true.
I got into this with Rod Dreher two years ago and although I'm not going to dig through the research again, I believe this is the paper causing all the ruckus:
I suspect that Haidt's conclusion was true once upon a time, but is no longer true due to intellectual deterioration on the American right. (I quit hanging around right-leaning forums, discussion boards, etc. about 6 to 7 years ago, despite personally considering myself on the conservative end of the US political spectrum, because people there lost their effing minds and could no longer make reasoned critiques of the left.)
I suspect Haidt's conclusion holds true for elites for the simple fact of what is contained in Matt's post. If 80%+ of faculty and students at universities are progressive/liberals, wouldn't you expect them to understand liberals better than conservatives?
If you're talking about the random person in America - well, they typically don't have a great understanding of either because they barely think about politics.
interesting, I hadn't heard that. But it doesn't change the fact for the countries elites in the Academy, media, government etc. The ones making decisions don't understand half the country, and most of them aren't trying to.
The other side is wrong, and probably evil. Demonstrated by their lack of agreement with the left
I think that the main influence of faculty politics is on other faculty (e.g., hiring new faculty, inhibiting certain forms of faculty speech and expression) and selecting students to admit to graduate programs.
As someone who teaches in the humanities, the revelation that spending more time studying the humanities is causing students to become more absolutist and less nuanced is going to make me start day drinking.
I also teach in the humanities, but have a somewhat different view. Because the "relativism" or "tolerance" that this so-called absolutism is replacing (?) was fairly uni-directional, i.e., tolerance for the after-effects of history's great crimes, things that people long ago stopped defending on their own terms (the trans-Atlantic slave trade, wholesale eradication of native populations by European colonists, etc.). To me, what reads as "absolutism" is an attempt, however clumsy at times, to really reckon with these facts of history as intolerable and, therefore, worthy of material redress.
To be honest, in seminars, I have sometimes bridled at what I perceive as the excesses of these movements. But the pendulum is already so far in one direction on this that I really try to avoid defensiveness.
I don't know when tolerance for the slave trade or the genocide of Native Americans was a common nuanced position on college campuses, but it wasn't twenty years ago when I was in college (and notice that I didn't use the word "tolerance" anyway). The nuance I'm talking about has to do with, for instance, the distinction between being flawed and being wicked, or between disapproving of someone and expunging them. As a humanities-specific example, look at those "what's one book you read in school and hated" threads: no one has to like Catcher in the Rye, say, but people will bring up characters like Holden Caulfield as mere avatars of toxic masculinity. And you've got teachers, instructors, and professors in these threads talking about how great those readings are and how they encourage their students in them! I'd like to think we go to the humanities to discover how difficult humanity is as a subject, not how easy.
I was in college in the late '80s and there was no sugar coating of those topics. I do think some things were more nuanced then. For example, it was perfectly fine to criticize the "founders" for being slave owners while still acknowledging their accomplishments.
I think we basically agree about what's valuable in the humanities. I very much agree on your last point, and as a medievalist, I constantly work on authors whose views would not be acceptable today, for a whole variety of reasons. But what I was trying to say was that although no one would defend slavery or genocide on their own terms, we were also not being asked to face so directly the legacy of those "intolerable" historical facts or to make many sacrifices (intellectual or otherwise) as a result.
Maybe I can be clearer through an example. I would be the first to agree that human sexuality and human sexual relations are infinitely complex, allowing for all kinds of questions about perspective, consent, fantasy, etc. that could lead to genuine misunderstandings. But the pendulum was (and is) so far toward tolerating constant, everyday abuses great and small (sexual harassment, problems with misogyny is many facets of academic life), that I think we can't be too defensive now when one or another man is judged in a way that seems "absolutist." We can all come up with an anecdote or a thought experiment in which a man is treated unfairly, but what the "absolutists" are asking us to do is to face the immensity of the unfairness on the other side without averting our eyes -- and perhaps even to do something about it! I think it's worth trying to remain open to the moral demand even if my own instincts sometimes (often!) lead me to want to make an appeal to moral complexity.
Another way of saying this is that there is now a long tradition in the humanities and social sciences of calling for the inclusion of formally marginalized voices, based on the that there might be something to learn from those other perspectives, but now that that inclusion is becoming more of a reality, it can be hard to listen to what they have to say!
I guess where I get uncomfortable is that these facts of history tend to handwave the tragic suffering created by the failed communist countries ... especially as you get closer to the DSA side of our party.
The Republican party tried 'not being the party of inhuman sociopaths' when it comes to immigration policy for years by having a national leadership that was far more pro-immigration than their base, and that was part of how they put themselves in a position for Trump to take over and destroy their party.
The problem is they gave their base *nothing*. It's not that unusual for leadership to be out of step with the base on a major issue. But Republicans govern almost purely in the interests of their elites. Even once Trump supposedly "took over", the only major legislation they passed was a $2 trillion tax cut focused on multinational corporations.
If Republicans delivered for their base on other issues, they may have been able to maintain this immigration stance. That's what Tony Blair did in Britain. His base loathed him too but he delivered enough on common priorities to stay in power for over a decade.
The NYTimes had a report last year that showed Harvard's incoming class had as many students from the top 1% of households as they did from the bottom 60% of earners. Combine Trump's more downscale appeal and the general trend of the upper class toward Democratic voting and I'm not shocked at the results.
The Democratic party is clearly on the ascendency relative to the Trump-addled Republican party. But I suspect the coalition of the top 20% of earners with the traditional Democratic base of lower-earning service workers will cause some friction in the coming years.
We always get weird shit like this in the midst of a realignment.
The sad thing, both parties are within a few bullet points of "natural party of government" level dominance.
If the Democrats can get over the cultural elite's newfound fascination with how horrible non-woke people are, "Soak the rich and invest in the country" would see them through to some pretty resounding victories.
If the GOP could actually broaden its reach beyond WWC and shut down the Replacement Theory/Christian Dominionist/Stop the Steal/Just Plain Racist extremists, their "spend and don't tax" platform would likewise win almost all the time, especially combined with their geographic advantages.
One of those two outcomes is entirely likely... but in the meantime, following American politics will be like watching two people sparring in molasses.
Interestingly, in 2016, Trump's strongest group was the $50-$99,000 income bracket, while at higher brackets Clinton and Trump ran nearly equal, while in 2020, Trump did much better with the higher brackets and Biden did a lot better in that middle bracket. (Biden and Clinton both won the lower income bracket handily.)
There definitely seems to be a correlation of white collar status with vote for Clinton or Biden over Trump. But the correlation of white collar status with income is weaker than people think, given how many small business owners there are, who tend not to be white collar, and tend to be very strong Republicans.
Come to think of it, this explains trends in the Hispanic population quite well.
The main avenue of upward mobility for Hispanic immigrants has been in the trades, often at the helm of a small business.
Allowing for the fact that GOP anti-immigration sentiment and coddling of the extreme racists is a turn-off that pushes a lot of Hispanic folks away... they otherwise fall into many of the same professions and backgrounds that broadly agree with "bootstraps" traditional Republican rhetoric otherwise.
It truly is ridiculous how badly Trump has screwed over the GOP. Sure, they might be able to win the next few elections with rural/exurban white folk by trotting out "replacement theory" and the related constellation of bullshit, but the base for that strategy is in terminal demographic decline, and that sort of reaction appeals nowhere else and to no one else.
Had they pivoted to a respectable conservatism and appealed to the more diverse blue-collar and small business America that's coming into shape, the few elections in the 2020's would have been hard without as firm a rural/exurban base, but afterwards they'd be set. Just like Britain's Tories have done well out of economic moderation, promises of responsible stewardship, some degree of responsiveness to global warming, and social conservatism (while stiff-arming the reactionaries out of the party entirely).
This sounds like the kind of Democratic party I'd like to see :). And frankly think that set of policies is more unlikely with Republicans than with Democrats.
Should have said the "emerging coalition," as today's 25-34 year old with a Master's degree and a lower-level or mid-level white collar job is tomorrow's top 20% earner.
I had the benefit of being involved in a number of community projects in Somerville, MA (call back!) that got me the opportunity to take a course pro-bono at the Kennedy School at Harvard led by Hugh O'Doherty. The course was on Adaptive Leadership.
A technical problem is one that can be clearly defined, and has a definitive solution. It may be horribly complicated, but eventually there are specific ways that it can be tackled as guided by technical expertise.
An adaptive problem is one where the issue lies more with people themselves and the way they interact; with emotion. It's a problem defined by its LACK of a technical solution, simple or complex.
The left has technocratic impulses that cause it to think that every problem is a technical problem. Climate change can be addressed if we do X, Y, Z. However, the real issue with climate change is that it requires a fundamental rewiring of a current dominate human culture. That's an adaptive problem.
When you misread an adaptive problem as a technical problem, you waste your time trying to sway the skeptical with your evidence and your credentials, but with an adaptive problem there is too much emotion involved for that to ever work. The real work is not in convincing others that you and your solution are correct, but in addressed a deep sense of risk and loss and working together to dig out of that hole.
The left has hollowed out to all technical solutions to adaptive problems. The right has hollowed out to nothing but a gaping sense of loss that reacts poorly to proposed technical solutions and in their emotional void will embrace any garbage that makes them feel, even momentarily, like they are losing less.
It can be argued that aging white men had an overabundance for so many centuries, and so that sense of loss is justified and they should just get over it. It can also be argued that they aren't really losing as much as they fear, and that the only thing to fear is fear itself.
Neither one is going to work. At the same time, what's required by the would-be technocrats is empathy and working through complex adaptive problems WITH their opponents. And the more childish the right gets, the more difficult that is to do. The constant culture wars keep everyone's nerves frayed empathy is literally impossible. That part I blame entirely on the right. Not-so-cottage industries are entirely devoted to fanning the flames. Murdoch and Ailes at work.
So yes, these issues are pervasive and not going away. And it makes sense that education and occupation are major fault lines. Credentialism feeds technical thinking. At the other end the real loss of economic opportunity for the less educated in a post-industrial hyper-capitalist society provides a real baseline for other senses of loss, some real, and some entirely imaginary.
Ironically, the only path to change that I can even imagine is a rollback, to some degree, of globalization. We clearly need to rely less on imports for key components like microchips, and have a risky over-reliance on China for so much. As a matter of future national security we need to manufacture more at home. But that means paying more for things. This is an adaptive problem. And we aren't very good at those.
I was with this comment until you said the solution was a rollback of globalization. Why not frame it as a need to shift toward domestic industrial policy?
Thank you for this. I was not familiar with distinguishing technical and adaptive problems, but it seems to me to be a powerful tool that honors both aspects of human nature and clarifies the roles they play in organizations.
Because this has been the right's primary electoral strategy since Nixon, Lee Atwater, and Roger Ailes. Purposefully fanning the flames of the culture was has been the M.O. of Fox News for 20+ years. It's their bread and butter. The left does a share of it, but in my opinion, more often than not, that's poor choices of language in pursuit of worthwhile goals.
For example, we only have one word to describe the belief that certain people who have cosmetic differences are intellectually and morally inferior to others, to describe the belief that those labelled as such need to be held down and made subservient, and to describe the fact that systems that survive today that were created 60+ years ago enforce unfair and uneven outcomes.
It does no good to call the third of those "racism" when to most people what "racism" means is the first two. Yet that is what we do because we lack a separate word and because a charged word like "racism" gets the most retweets. At the end of the day, though, this is silliness in pursuit of a worthwhile causes, unlike, say, The War on Christmas or the Unite the Right rally.
I will grant you there's certainly a segment in right leaning media that makes money flaming the culture wars.
But the left has the exact same problem. Moreover, I would argue that right leaning media never would have taken off except for the glaring leftward bias of the mainstream media.
Thank you for this observation about the definitions of racism. However, it seems to me that the fact we have one word for those three things lies at the feet of academia. They took a word in common use and refined its definition, then proceeded to use it without noting that change. Specialized language is supposed to make things more clear, but here they have allowed the new definition to enter public discourse and cause confusion. The emotional baggage of "racism" as used in common speech is simply too heavy to accommodate a non-emotional meaning, even if a greater effort to clarify the meaning was made. Modifying it with "systemic" does not help, as that appears to mean implementation of intentional bias by data-driven legislation.
And, honestly, it often feels that the left uses this confusion to separate the left from the right, insulting the right and allowing the right's response to energize the left.
Yes! I agree entirely. I think there are a number of root causes of this "linguistic failure". The first is that much of what is developed in academia is never really INTENDED for mass consumption, so they don't think through the coded buzzwords because within the circle of academia they are understood. Then there is the fact that the Twitter Left is pretty horrid, and often enjoys in-group signaling with ideas picked up in academia and elsewhere more than it likes actually achieving meaningful change. Think of pushing the poor choice of terms in "defund the police". Finally there's the right wing noise machine which loves to hunt down "academic" ideas with names that they know will trigger their audiences. "Critical Race Theory" is a great example of that. "CRT" is a niche academic idea, but now it's being applied to just about any teaching having to do with race. If you teach about Jim Crow and the rise of the KKK in the 1920s, that's CRT. If you teach about red-lining for loans in the 1930s - 1960s, that's CRT. NONE of that is CRT. "Progressives" should focus on taking good ideas that come out of academia (and they are not all good ones) and crafting language around them that will make them resonate with the broader electorate, but social media has trained most activists to instead lean into the chasm that separates them and academia from the rest of America.
Agreed that academic language, as well as legal and regulatory language are intended for a specific audience. However, when academia ventures forth from its tower to share its knowledge with the world for the betterment of that world, wisdom would recognize the importance of choosing language that doesn't make the situation worse.
Agree also on your perspective on CRT. Our school system doesn't require high school students to read more than one entire book in English - and that one book is iffy - but parents groups are spending the energy on fighting masks and CRT.
Honestly, I hold the left to a higher standard because of its claimed relationship with the academy, because it claims to have a long view of human culture and experience and so should know how to advance its ideas in a way that doesn't leave fuel for the next crisis.
“The left does a share of it, but in my opinion, more often than not, that's poor choices of language in pursuit of worthwhile goals.”
Is hectoring people for not using someone’s chosen pronoun just a poor choice of language? Is persecuting someone because of their religious views just a poor choice of language? Is pushing critical race theory nonsense in public schools just a poor choice of language?
I've never seen anyone "hector" someone for not using a correct pronoun, unless the person is intentionally *themself* doing the "hectoring" by insisting on using the wrong pronoun repeatedly after having been gently corrected once. I just think a lot of people see someone correcting someone once, and then start worrying that they'll be constantly hectored.
I wouldn't use the R-word in this or other contexts, but I plausibly agree with the sentiment, that performances in that context don't exactly constitute an actual phenomenon in the world.
Pronouns, persecution of Christians, and critical race theory... these are your examples to convince me that the right wing noise machine isn't on the bleeding edge of manufactured cultural crises?
All three examples are based on how some people IMAGINE the left to act more than on actual interactions they've had.
Making space for people who are non-binary or non Christian is a worthwhile goal, yes. As is teaching actual history, which is what Fox News is currently labelling "CRT!!!!!"
"The left does a share of it, but in my opinion, more often than not, that's poor choices of language in pursuit of worthwhile goals."
If you can't see that this is a firmly held belief across the political spectrum domestically AND globally, then you should get out more. Few people if any wake up and think to themselves, "I'm going to pursue silly goals and crush a bunch of people in the process doing it." People get dangerous when they wake up and think to themselves, my goals are important enough that crushing a few people along the way is a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
Matt, you & I both know plenty of conservatives from our elite undergrad days (we'll call them "Ross Douthat Conservatives"). I'm still friends with a bunch of them (or at least "friends" in the Facebook sense). Not a single one voted for Trump. Not one. And many of them are still Christian soldiers in the way that vast swaths of Red America are -- no quarter on abortion/homosexuality, the Bible is God's inerrant Word, all of it. They're all smart and well-educated enough to see through Trump's con and have enough principles not to stand for it, not to mention love our country enough not to want to see democracy destroyed. And (though I haven't asked them), if Ted Cruz had been the nominee in 2016, I'm pretty certain they would've voted for him over Hillary without hesitation.
My point -- I'm actually surprised as many as ~6% of incoming Harvard freshmen voted for Trump. These are truly the Elise Stefanik/George P. Bush/future Federalist Society judges with no principles but serving the powerful.
You're talking about teenagers, though, and comparing them to older adults. We have no idea what their political or career trajectories are going to be. My guess would be that they voted that way because their families and communities voted that way.
Maybe? No doubt there's family/community influence as you suggest, but we're talking about Ivy Leaguers... these schools have 5-6% acceptance rates, and these teenagers have been groomed to be the future leaders of society with loads of ambition.
You can argue with this comment, but I'll reiterate my point -- these "kids" are smart enough and engaged enough to know exactly what Trump stands for. You could be willfully blind ("seriously not literally") in 2016; you most certainly could not in 2020. A vote for Trump was a vote in favor of the destruction of American democracy in service of the interest of the richest Americans.
At least 6% of 18 year olds who haven't left home yet are likely just voting how their family does, because they haven't started thinking explicitly about voting yet.
Sure, I meant to be restricting to that group. Out of *all* 18 year olds, I would say it's more like 95% of them that (if they vote) vote just how their family does with no thought about it. Out of college-bound 18 year olds, it's probably more like 60%. Maybe Harvard-bound 18 year olds are unusually thoughtful and get it down to 30% voting unthinkingly with their family, but I would be very surprised if more than 90% have already substantially formed independent political views.
Agreed. Also odd to note that anyone who would have voted for Trump is basically equivalent to Stefanik. A vote to most is a choice between candidates and whose policies will have a more positive (or less negative) impact. It doesn't mean you become Stefanik in the process of a checking a box.
Trump is seen as anathema to the idea of meritocracy. He didn't "earn" his way to the position (by some definition) and demonstrates his ignorance with many utterances. To be clear, I'm *not* saying that a president should have to pass some sort of intelligence test, but you can kind of see why educated people, who have been sold on the idea that their intelligence and credentials are the path to success, would look aghast upon a guy like him ascending to such a high office.
To be fair though, one thing his term showed me is that one does not need to have a deep policy knowledge nor be worldly to function in that role. Most of the USG seems to be able to run without much input from the president. Maybe a second term would have been worse though if certain functions started to decay though.
Half the Harvard incoming class is also anathema to the idea of meritocracy.
It's a school where (only slight exaggeration) the median freshman is a reasonably smart but not a genius wealthy person who is in the school because they are good at sailing and can be part of the sailing team.
I agree wholeheartedly with both of your points. In fact, many tried to claim Trump's position in college was also unearned (I recall his niece said he cheated on his SATs). I'm just saying why I think people who might otherwise have voted Republican turned on Trump specifically.
I understand your argument, but I disagree (and know that others will likewise disagree with me). The open borders mischaracterization of the Dems' policy is straight out of Fox News. As for abortion, yes, lots of people use this justification. I'm just telling you from my personal relationships with highly educated Christian conservatives, this wasn't enough to outweigh all of Trump's sins. Some went for Biden, some wrote in someone like Mitt Romney, some abstained, most voted for down ballot Rs, but none pulled the lever for Trump.
Not disagreeing about Hillary... I was referring more to the 2020 election than 2016. The hatred for Hillary ran deep and I was far more sympathetic to people overlooking Trump's flaws against her than against Biden.
Interesting stats on political opinion in the elite universities, but I'd really like to know the comparison between places like, say, Oklahoma State University and BYU compared to their surrounding communities. Those are the schools that will produce local elites. If they're trending relatively liberal, that suggests some interesting divisions in coming years.
But in general, this increasing polarization between college vs non-college and urban vs rural is truly the marker of our times. It's helped lead to this weird political environment where Republicans think electoral success should be indefinitely based on threading the needle of winning by losing the popular vote and squeezing their (diminishing?) advantage in political maps, whereas many Democrats think that a paper-thin victory means the conditions are perfect to pass the most ambitious domestic agenda since the New Deal. One of them is living in a dream world, though more likely both.
The NYTimes precinct map project, if its data are accurate, is useful for this. (I've heard skepticism that they can't actually have gotten the data they claim to have, because at least for 2016 they got it from a MA student in geography who claimed to have it all, and other friends that have worked at big political geography organizations said it was difficult for their teams to compile this data from 50 different states.)
Texas A&M (Zip code 77840) is mostly composed of precincts that voted about 58-40 for Biden over Trump even though Brazos county went 42-55 for Trump. I teach at this university, so I've paid attention to it - in 2016 I believe the margin around campus was much narrower, and Trump won the county by a wider margin, so there was a similar split between students and the county.
Oklahoma State (Zip code 74075) seems to have precincts that were more like 53-45 for Biden over Trump even though Payne County went 36-60 for Trump.
Brigham Young University (Zip code 84602) seems to have precincts that Trump won something like 50-45, and Trump won Utah County 68-27.
Remarkably, they all seem to have about 18 points more vote for Biden and 15 points fewer votes for Trump compared to the surrounding county, despite being at different points on the political scale.
I'm not certain I found the right precincts for each university. Most of the precincts I found had only a few hundred votes for each candidate, though there was one precinct in Brazos County that I know is full of student apartments that had several thousand votes for each candidate. The precincts I found in Brazos County probably only account for a total of 10-20,000 student votes - I'm not sure if that's the vast majority of votes from a student body of 70,000. I don't know how many students there are at the other two universities.
I wonder to what extent commuter schools differ from those where students live on or near campus: would we find that that they tend to be more like the community as a whole, or are their students also more likely to vote further left than non-students? That might give some interesting insight into peer effects, though it's likely intractable to get the data for it....
Damn, I am late to the party. As a semi-conservative, here are my thoughts.
1. I'm not sure that Trump is a good representation of conservative leanings, since... well he was a pretty horrible conservative. Assuming these Ivy League dudes are all smart (despite what we see on Twitter.... kidding), I assume that if conservative, they would be more logical conservatives, and less likely to have voted for Trump.
2. I used to call myself Republican/Conservative, but quite frankly, Trump embarrassed me so much that I don't really identify as that anymore. I was always a swing voter, but I am a lot swingier than I was pre-Trump.
3. Anyway, this whole conservative/liberal things is going to balance out sooner or later. Positions will get adjusted naturally.
4. Anyway, my daughter who is elite college bound is Vice President of the Young Democrats Club. Her best friend is the President. I've had a few conversations with them, and their liberalism doesn't run super deep. At least she will fit in with whatever University she ends up at.
5. I suspect that 20% of all Democratic Professors and students are really conservative anyway if you got them pinned down on the issues.
Hell, 20% of the time, I am pretty sure our own Matty here is conservative.
I'm only conservative by academia standards, but you'll appreciate that I kind of upset my fellow professor today by telling him that I don't support mask mandates. Note that I've been happily working in person the entire pandemic whereas he only comes in once in a blue moon.
I hate masks. People are surprised that I support vaccine mandates but not mask mandates. I justify it by saying that vaccines are way more effective, but the truth is… I just fucking hate them so much. Besides, I’m vaccinated so I really don’t care about other people. Anyone who is not vaccinated at this time yes taking their own risk. And anyone under the age of 12 is at less risk than a vaccinated adult.
I've been kind of ambivalent about them (seeing them as mostly pointless but annoying at worst), until I recently went on an in-person visit to another university. I had to wear a mask the entire day while talking to others, and I ended up hoarse and with a sore throat that took about a day to get over.
I feel your pain. I’m in Argentina, and they have 100% mask mandate everywhere. Even outside. I hate when I exert myself a little bit, it’s super hot here, it just makes me feel like I’m suffocating
I'm watching our fair host give a talk* and he just said "turns out to be hard to talk at length in a mask - I hadn't really tried it." I feel vindicated! 😂
#maskmadateprivilege The people saying its no big deal work in offices or cubicles where they can remove it when no one is around. They wear it into the restaurants and then remove it. They wear it during their 25 minute shopping trip. But they expect the servers and janitors and cooks and cashiers and stockers to wear it full time.
When they complain... wearing a mask is no big deal, it doesn't bother me.
Sorry, but anyone who uses the line “our school/company should reflect our community/nation” as justification for race-based hiring/admissions is gonna have a hard time justifying those numbers.
It's "Under Represented Minority" in some parts of the private sector now so the goal posts may be shifted according to job family. I'm an Over Represented Minority, therefore, I have nothing to fear :)
>>>The actual, concrete electoral gains to Republicans from various measures to make it harder to vote are imperceptibly small, if they exist at all. So what is the point of pushing measures that make you look like an authoritarian menace? <<<
My perception is that wide swaths of the right in America *genuinely* belief the progressive agenda (more or less social democracy) is either profoundly morally flawed or actually violates the constitution. Liberals think right wing policies are bad or ill-advised, but generally don't view things through the same sort of lens as conservatives.
So for people on the right, preventing left of center policies from being enacted and left of center politicians from winning elections equates to defending the constitution. Which sometimes means anything goes. And almost always means leaving no stone unturned (including eking out infinitesimal advantages, including of the variety mentioned by Matt here).
I agree that many on the right believe there is a moral imperitive to stopping the left and are willing to go to extremes to do so. That you don't recognize that exists on the left is somewhat astonishing.
I would actually reverse that. Its not nearly as common among the base on the left than it is on the right. However, while twitter is not real life, it does suggest there is a lot of elite support for progressive moral outrage.
>>>That you don't recognize that exists on the left is somewhat astonishing<<<
That you misquoted me isn't the least bit astonishing, regrettably.
I wrote "wide swaths" when referring to the right. I didn't indicate a similar take is *non-existent* on the left. (Still, where's the left's January 6th?)
I happen to think most policies espoused by the right (sharply smaller public sector, reducing immigration inflows, more regressive tax structure, lax gun regulation, etc) are bad for America and in general make most people's lives less pleasant and less secure. But I don't believe such policies violate the constitution. And I don't know any liberals who do. But the opposite (on the part of the right) is widespread. Hell, for all I know they're *still* probably trying to get the Affordable Care Act thrown out!
I agree that the left is less concerned with the constitutional aspects. However, the moral condemnations that the left has for the right are as intense if not more than the reverse. How many times have progressives called conservatives: misogynistic, racist, greedy, heartless, nazis, etc. just on this relatively moderate forum? Those aren't the terms of gentle disagreement.
That implies that people on the right don't actually believe elections are being "stolen" from them, they just say it to justify their anti-democratic end-around. But I think one of the things that has surprised me a lot lately is just how much they really do believe it!
Insofar as they don't want everyone to vote, I have heard the argument from some that one should have to be sufficiently informed about issues to earn the right and erecting barriers makes it more likely the voters will be.
I don't claim to be able to read the minds of the right wing masses. It certainly appears lots of MAGA foot soldiers in fact believe Biden didn't actually win.
But I don't think for a second GOP *elites* in the main believe this to be the case. And yet significant numbers of them appear willing to both spread Trump's Goebbelsian lies and lay the legal framework for elections nullification. Maybe they're just supremely machiavellian. Or perhaps they think the liberal policies Democrats try to enact violate the constitution. Or a combination of both. But something is causing them to have no use for democracy.
I'm just speculating, but I'm not sure they care enough about power (beyond their own position) to actively try to steal elections for the party; if anything, it seems the party in the minority has more fun.
Nonetheless, many feel the best way to keep their position is to play to the base and, I imagine, some are genuinely worried about threats to their lives (for example, look at the people yelling in Lindsay Graham's face at the airport after Jan. 6). That being said, so far at least, when elected officials are playing with live ammunition instead of just messaging, they've done the right thing.
I certainly don’t think the framers were trying to create a framework for democratic socialism or social denocracy. Deferring to the constitution is conservatism by default
>>>I certainly don’t think the framers were trying to create a framework for democratic socialism or social denocracy.<<<
Nor I.
I believe the framers were largely silent with respect to the economic arrangements of a society two centuries after they'd finished writing. It's clear many people on the right, though, believe the constitution as properly construed requires libertarian economic policies.
And of course, the framers left lots of levers available to rewrite the constitution. So the intent of the framers was to make it clear that they didn't really know best.
It seems to me that this is being driven by ever-growing Republican / "movement conservative" hostility to the concept of objective truth, which has been growing for decades. Go back and look at Reagan trying to prevent C. Everett Koop from publishing true results about the health harms of cigarettes, or the safety of abortion procedures. (My dad was an officer of the Public Health Service, and noted that Koop was himself a quite "morally conservative" Christian, but he was also a good doctor and a good scientist, and was unwilling to _lie_ for political allies.)
The GOP has turned itself into the capitalist equivalent of the Soviet regime that wanted to sweep Chernobyl under the rug. A disaster would embarrass the party, therefore there can be no disaster.
They like to accuse liberals of "political correctness", but that's a form of projection. They are in fact master practitioners of political correctness as practiced in the regime that originated that term. It is inconvenient for coal and oil donors that climate change is a thing? Fine, climate change is a hoax. Or maybe it's real, but it's caused by some solar cycle, not by humans. Or if it's caused by GHG emissions, then doing something about it would be economically ruinous. Oh, solar and wind are cheaper than coal now? Well, wind is responsible for the Texas blackouts. (narrator: Gas plants under-performed and wind over-performed relative to utility projections for this scenario.)
Trump turns this stuff up to eleven -- he can never fail, only be failed -- but it long pre-dates him. Conservative media outlets have long been funded by laughably dishonest marketing for snake oil, or get-rich-quick schemes. You see high ranking Republicans like Paul Ryan shilling for faddish exercise or diet plans.
It is impossible to be a person who cares about rational inquiry of any kind, and retain respect for people like this. It didn't have to be this way. Tucker Carlson is not a stupid man -- back when he was bemoaning the fact that the NYT skews liberal, and talking about founding a serious conservative media outlet, he was absolutely correct. But he _didn't_ found a conservative response to the NYT. He founded the Daily f***ing Caller, because flattering people's false assumptions, by nut-picking stories to misrepresent weird fringe cases as the norm, or just giving people outright-false information, _is profitable_. Conservative media has a "Market for Lemons" problem, or a Gresham's Law problem. A large, profitable audience has been trained to only accept outlets that confirm their biases as legitimate, so an outlet that ever lets reality intrude will be cast out in favor of something crazier, as we're seeing now with NewsMax and OANN starting to eat into Fox's market share, because Fox has not always 100% acquiesced to Trump's delusions.
I would be thrilled to see a party, and accompanying media ecosystem, that stood in meaningful opposition to the Democrats. Something that would be a comfortable fit for the Davids French, Aviks Roy, and Reihans Salam of the world. There absolutely are "conservative" ideas worth having in the public debate. Chesterton's Fence is a good principle to keep in mind! But if we cannot have a conversation in which both sides agree that their own claims are falsifiable, and everyone has to bring evidence, then what is even the point? How can academia possibly accommodate people who want to ban academics from studying things, rather than accept that their preferred policies might have costs? (It's not even like knowing the costs would be the end of the conversation -- maybe you can make an argument that the cost is worth it. But they want to just suppress the evidence, because they're afraid if people understood the stakes, they might lose.)
The bigger issue is that this type of educational polarization is happening outside the U.S. in Europe too, so there must be structural issues explaining this that are broader than the idiosyncrasies of American politics.
True, it's more about matters of degree. The right half of the political spectrum everywhere is a mix of actual conservatism (of the Burkean variety) and reactionary cultural populism.
But why in the US does the mix tilt so far towards reactionary cultural populism, unlike say Boris Johnson's Conservative Party or Conservative opposition to Justin Trudeau?
Probably partly a legacy of the civil rights movement, which is fading, and abortion providing an easy rallying point for culture warriors since the Court put actual abortion politics out of bounds, unlike say gay marriage where the right had no choice but to change with the times or pay a tangible political price.
I think the answer to your question, Allan, lies in the difference between parliamentary democracy and our winner-take-all system. We have more powerful structural incentives for “reactionary cultural populism.”
Agree there are likely structural explanations, but I wouldn't describe our system as winner-take-all in comparison to parliamentary systems, more the opposite. Winning control of the government in a parliamentary system tends to be a unitary thing - the party or coalition that wins really does take it all. But just at the federal level in our system there are effectively four independent branches of government - President, House, Senate and Supreme Court - and it's very hard to win them all.
Yes poor word choice - meant policies not politics. Crusading over the composition of the Court is at best a rough proxy for actual regulation on abortion enacted by legislatures.
Notice, all it took was the Court declining a preliminary injunction against the Texas law for the House to pass a bill codifying abortion rights in a way that is likely broadly popular. There would probably be some further adjustments through the democratic process, but battling over legislative language is less dysfunctional than battling over lifetime appointments to a nine-member court.
There's no moral difference between abortion at 9 months and very generous "stand your ground" and "castle doctrine" bills. Both allow you to be legally absolved for intentionally killing a person that you legitimately fear will cause you some discomfort and possibly economic loss or injury.
And abortions at 9 months are very rare and almost never happen except under hard circumstances where the parents are presented with no good options, possibly one of which involves making orphans of already born siblings. Better to let those closest to the situation decide. But by the same token, it's not very plausible to read the Constitution as dictating a particular answer in those cases.
I followed your link and they define "late-term" as after 20 weeks (based on Roe). There's a large gap between 20 weeks and 34-36.
I don't see where that link covers anything about 9 months.
I think it's understandable to be opposed to abortions after 12-16 weeks, but I don't think it's accurate to lump reasons for abortions at 20 weeks with abortions at 36.
I work in academia, and below are issues related to this article that have concerned me. I would be interested in the thoughts of Mr. Yglesias and others on them:
In recent years, it has become increasingly common for advertisements for faculty positions to require diversity statement as a part of the application materials, which contains a discussion of the candidate's commitment, experience, and plans surrounding diversity and inclusion. At this point, nearly all positions in my field require them. My concern is that requiring diversity statements further exacerbates the political polarization among faculty.
Admissions for graduate programs in my field is moving in the same direction, where an increasing number of programs are requiring diversity statements. In my department, a subset of our graduate students and faculty consider themselves to be activists and social justice warriors, and they would like to use diversity statements as a means of only admitting graduate students who feel the same way. They are largely succeeding at this point.
I consider myself to be quite liberal, and I naturally prefer to associate with others who have similar political beliefs, but I don't think that these trends are healthy for academia and society, as discussed in the above article.
(My preference for both faculty openings and graduate admissions is to ask applicants to discuss the issues that they are passionate about, with diversity as an example of a topic that they might discuss.)
Yeah, as a fellow academic this seems like the one blind spot in an otherwise good post. Faculty hiring (even in the hard sciences) now generally requires DEI statements that involve either real or convincingly feigned enthusiasm for the woke checklist of left-identitarian grievances. This effectively screens out hires with conservative, centrist, or center-left views on social issues. At the undergraduate level, I suspect the college admissions essay serves a similar function.
All this isn't to deny that the smartest young Americans have a leftward tilt (I think they very much do), but I think that it is more modest than what you see in MY's quoted numbers.
It's the shared feigned enthusiasm that worries me most right now. When few actually share these views in total (crack a keg in semi-private and find out), nobody knows when we're supposed to stop clapping and some truly wild shit can become the putative intellectual status quo.
My fairly liberal group of (mostly white) friends openly talks about how to best fake these diversity statements for job interviews/grad school applications. If it's what has to be done to get into elite positions, it's just a game to play
I think this is true, but I also think its what happened to Fox. They had a game to play and look where it ended up.
Yea, let's not discount these illiberal tendencies as a potential threat just because they're a joke to most of our generation. The next generation will see us pretending they're serious, and think they really are.
I intend to make damned sure to always keep a bit of a finger on the scales even as my daughter attends schools in a major blue metro.
She needs to understand that the world doesn't work the way these people think it does today, and that it won't work at all if they have their way with it.
"We are who we pretend to be, so be careful what you pretend to be."
Very Sovietesque in some ways.
I don't really think it's a blind spot on Matt's part. Faculty politics has been very left-wing since long before DEI statements were a thing, and in fact they wouldn't have become a thing if there were any real ideological diversity in the academy to begin with. DEI is a symptom of the problem... it's probably too late for it to be a (major) cause.
I have almost the opposite worry. These mandatory statements mean that applicants need to thread the needle of guessing whether the hiring committee is going to screen them out because their statement was not woke enough or too woke. I think at the UC system it might have the effect you worry about, because the statements are pre-screened by an administrative committee before the department gets to look at applications, but at universities where this just goes in with the rest of the file to be read by the faculty, it definitely just puts forward a minefield for *everyone*.
Lying and forced insincerity is the point. This is not a good path forward for America, and 'The Chair' with Sandra Oh is a great parody of where we are in Matt's top schools for SAT jocks. Don't think they're helping reduce the urban/rural divide or making America MAGA.
I found these statements to be incomprehensible when, as a longtime professional, I applied for an adjunct job in my field. For a start, I hadn’t a clue about why they’d ask such a “why are you pro-virtue/anti-sin” question. It was my good fortune to have a grad student child who could guide me through the maze.
I can absolutely seeing an institution requiring this. If you cannot fake being politically correct then you are likely to do something idiotic and create a lawsuit. It seems likely that it is less about screening for political views than it is for screening out the angry Conservative who is unable to control his anger.
Not just the angry conservative - these statements also play a role in screening out the angry woke candidate who is unable to control their anger.
Good point!
I assume the CCP uses the same logic.
Yes, I assume that the CCP also doesn't want sociopaths in the workplace.
I'm very skeptical that it effectively screens out hires. At least in my corner of STEM, I haven't seen any strong evidence that they carry any weight compared to the typical priorities of search committees, and that commitment to DEI is at best viewed as a tiny corner of commitment to good pedagogy (which itself is usually dwarfed by research in consideration).
It could be used to screen out skeptics with conviction, in the same way that a job interview could be used to screen out candidates with a certain color of eyes. Alternatively, both can be used to screen out people with antisocial behavior which would likely prove problematic at work.
If companies want to screen out people for antisocial behavior, there are better test than a diversity statement. On the other hand, if you want to provide a signal that your institution gets it without having to actually do anything- hard to find a better solution.
All grad school and faculty applications include letters of reference. Presumably if the person is antisocial, it will come through there.
I am skeptical that you are close enough with Steve Jobs to know that he couldn't behave civilized on a written essay if it was a prerequisite for employment. However, if this was true, then he would be well advised to open his own business instead.
Given that I had to write a diversity statement for my kids preschool admission process (and 6 slightly different versions for kindergartner admissions), I think this ship has sailed.
I certainly can't see how this sort of absurdity could backfire electorally and do grievous and lasting harm to the disadvantaged communities we profess to care about.
But we'll be true and pure, and that's what counts, right......?
I can’t believe anyone would suggest that requiring parents to write additional short philosophical essays with high demand vocabulary wouldn’t be the optimal way to diversify a preschool!
Do swing voters in Pennsylvania care what private elementary schools in NYC have on their admissions questionnaires? And do private elementary school administrators care what swing voters in Pennsylvania think? I'm pretty sure the answer to both questions is "no."
But do they care what private elementary schools in Philly have on their questionnaires? I should think so!
Also, is this stuff happening in private schools in Philly as much as it is in NYC/DC/LA? I googled "'bari weiss' 'philadelphia'" but didn't find anything. I guess my assumption is that these sorts of things are downstream of educational polarization, so the school is meeting the demand of its customers
It is. My kid’s preschool had literally the same question.
If their kids don't attend the school, it's not clear to me that they would. And if they hate this questionnaire, wouldn't they choose not to attend the school?
They should care, and they shouldn't send their kids to the school.
I don't think educational institutions are primarily motivated by the impact of their plans on electoral politics. And I don't think elected officials have that much control over the hiring policies of educational institutions - though I suppose the mandatory diversity statements at the UC schools might be the most important counterexample.
Good grief. Do you mean your child would have been penalized in the admissions process if the school decided that your political views were inappropriate?
Competitive preschool admissions has several layers of awfulness baked into it already, but surely this one ought to be illegal
Not sure more litigation would help. I’m pretty sure this requirement exists as legal defensibility against quotas.
Okay, so maybe I'm misunderstanding what happened. Did the school ask you to write down your personal opinions about diversity, racial justice, things like that?
I have trouble seeing how it could be legitimate to exclude a child from school on this basis, even if a parent's views were genuinely offensive
I believe the question wording is some variation on ‘explain how enrolling your family will create and contribute to a diverse school community.’ I’m always tempted to write ‘we’re gay’ and stop writing, but, you know, it’s a competitive process, so… If you can’t give an obvious answer, I assume you use that space to talk about your commitment to social justice.
I pressed the "look at our multi-racial, multi-cultural, bilingual family!" button as succinctly as I could and stopped before I worked myself into a faint rage.
Note, our preschool is 85% white, in a neighborhood that's 50% black, and most of the "diversity" is Asian/Asian-mixed kids like mine (4), not black kids (1).
That's without addressing anything resembling "diversity of thought."
Sigh.
Someday when I'm rich, I'll either have a kid or else move back to New York
I think in the United States, for a private institution, basically any sort of exclusion is legitimate unless it's directly selecting against one of the few protected classes.
:-O
Diversity statement for kindergarden... I love all colors of crayons.
These I'm in favor of because otherwise you get a lot of people colored orange.
What really scrambles my brain is that it’s so hard for ideologues (of which I definitely was one for many years) to see that holding absolutist views on the topic of diversity is antithetical to, you know…. diversity.
I can verify all of this. I'm a prof in STEM (large R1 state school) and these statements are required of faculty hires as well as grad student admissions. We are told by higher-ups that "we must do something for diversity everyday". I can't get carve out enough time for my "science work" every day. All of the readings and seminars we have in DEI are 100% echo Kendi, De Angelo, etc. This gives you a sense of what people are looking for in diversity letters.
Same. I was very surprised to learn recently when I was helping a postdoc with his applications that the diversity statements aren't just in California anymore.
What surprises me is that this is required of grad students. This implies we are, at least in part, to select students based on evidence of DEI activities. I use the word activities as this will incentive incoming students to do much more standard DEI work to obtain grad positions. Showing not just telling about your commitment will take precedence.
I guess most places are removing the GRE and replacing it with DEI now.
I was recently hired (mid-career) as a prof in STEM at a large R1 state school. It was the only position that did not require a diversity statement (maybe because of all the HBCUs in their university system?).
Word around the campfire is that my application did not even make it to the departments at some universities. Instead, there was a first-cut by the office of diversity and inclusion, which evaluated my diversity statement. I mean, I guess they could just be telling me that to try to make me feel better about not getting hired, but that doesn't square with the hostility towards DEIs that came out at virtually every department I visited.
As an academic, my general sense is that diversity statements are largely viewed (by even left of center folks) as a banal formulaic checkbox to dump some marginal amount of platitudes in, because nobody is vocally “anti-diversity” in a meaningful way. Throw in the standard spiel about “I strongly believe that every student, regardless of background, should be able to excel in my classes”, make some nods to universal design and that you acknowledge that all students are different and that different approaches work for different students and you’ve passed the diversity statement hoop.
Obviously, you can’t say “I think that this institute embodies the best of WASP culture, and that by catering to those sensibilities we’ll keep our white Judeo-Christian values strong into the 21st century!” but if you’re smart enough to make it to a faculty position you’re smart enough to write to the prompt.
Sure but it's still bound to screen out some people with the attitude "there is some shit I will not eat"
I think it's also going to screen out some people who talk about how much of an activist they are and how much they want to shake up their discipline - at least, at the institutions where these statements are only being read by the faculty in the department.
Yeah, I don't think these diversity statements are good to require. But I can definitely imagine contexts in which screening out people with conviction on a particular issue is exactly what certain employers would want.
If it genuinely pains someone so much to type out a few paragraphs to say being inclusive is good and that they're committed to trying to make all of their students succeed, they probably deserve to be screened out.
Imagine if they put in the same requirement for patriotism - where all you had to do what extol the virtues of the United States. No one could be opposed to that...right?
The difference is that inclusion is an (uncontroversial!) pedagogical goal on its own terms. The priority placed on it might be part of a larger trend, but you have to be a legitimate white supremacist to actively say "yeah, I want my minority students to feel alienated".
Being yourself patriotic neither has a clear tie to the job, nor is it on its own terms nearly as uncontroversial. A better analogy would be if you had to write a citizenship statement explaining how you'd enhance your students abilities to become more productive citizens—no one wants "worse" citizens, but there's some controversy over exactly how much weight teachers should put towards actively instilling citizenship and you might be suspicious of the overall project—but I don't think there's anything bad about soliciting a statement about it.
"The difference is that inclusion is an (uncontroversial!) pedagogical goal on its own terms." The priority placed on it might be part of a larger trend, but you have to be a legitimate white supremacist to actively say "yeah, I want my minority students to feel alienated".
This *feels* like sophistry in that there are a multitude of pedagogical goals and you generally do not have to make a statement about any of the others. The ONLY reason you have to make a Diversity statement is part of the larger trend which is all about signaling. Thus why so many comments in this thread are about people "playing the game." If a diversity statement had any real pedagogical value, it would matter if people weren't taking it seriously, but it doesn't add any value so it doesn't matter if people are faking it.
On the second point - if the government of the United States said that to attend a university supported by public funds, you would need to make a statement of patriotic fervor, because its desirable in their citizens. Would you support that because it met a public goal? Do you think such a statement by people would actually convey anything of value?
And if you think that being patriotic is a more controversial goal than diversity, I think you are living in the twitter world.
John got there first but I’m also against loyalty oaths, even though one could say the same thing: if it pains someone so much to say a few words about how they’re not going to betray America, why should they have a job? The principle is that a declaration of conscience has no value or meaning if it’s a requirement for employment, and a lot of people don’t like making meaningless declarations of conscience.
The diversity hoopla is about way more than that
I don't feel like I'm THAT long out of grad school, but "hi, I'm actually just here to learn and work" doesn't seem like it would have been a controversial new-student worldview ten or fifteen years ago.
Maybe that's the big state school STEM in me talking.
Sounds like Mao's cultural revolution. If you're made to write an essay at 22 about what you're passionate about and don't say 'getting hammered and laid', or maybe 'married to a billionaire' you're lying, deserve to be rejected and won't be a contribution to society in later years.
Cover letters, where 22 year olds are expected to write about their attention to detail and passion for customer service, are the worst part of Mao's cultural revolution
Agreed.
I would add that diversity of opinion should be the diversity that we are looking for. That is what will really challenge your mind, and make sure that any views you have are well vetted
The funny thing is that cultural / racial / class / etc diversity has long been sold as being a way of achieving intellectual diversity.
“And would it really be so hard to throw urban libs a bone in the form of some concern for climate change?“
I’ve tried! Specifically, I advocate protecting dense areas with seawalls and making air conditioning more broadly available. Urban liberals have not appreciated my concern. They’ve called me a denialist, or acted as if I want to protect every uninhabited arctic island rather than just dense areas like New York City and Norfolk.
The problem is urban liberals view climate in moral terms, so they think mitigation is like making a pact with the devil.
Furthermore, if urban liberals want to cooperate, why don’t they kick the Paris protocol’s “1.5 degrees or death” alarmism to the curb or, at a minimum, cut out their airplane vacations and learn to like nuclear power? If they could compromise as well as they sneer we might get somewhere.
I recognize the reality or climate change, I’m willing to invest significant resources in electrification and mitigation, and yet urban libs treat me like a neanderthal for saying things like “cold causes more human misery than heat” and “carbon intensive technologies have improved agricultural yields and sharply reduced hunger.” Urban liberals are not fun to engage.
I agree with you entirely re: the attitudes of urban liberals being unproductive and generally disinterested in actual pragmatic solutions to the problem (and also their alarmist climate apocalypticism being equal parts absurd and infuriating).
But surely you must agree that your position here is considerably divergent from GOP electeds, many of whom do not recognize that climate change is even going to happen. I would really rather not be primarily aligned with the "nuclear is Bad, degrowth, no one needs to sacrifice except giant corporations, etc." crowd but there's not even a serious attempt by the GOP to advance a conservative climate agenda.
Fair enough. The GOP is keen to deny problems it has no intention of solving. See, also, covid and the American underclass.
However, the GOP stance on climate is better than those of progressive activists. Degrowth would cause economic depression (which creates hunger in poor countries) pretty quickly. At some point, conservatives will have to admit the earth is getting warmer and invest in a crash mitigation program. Seventeenth century Holland built beautiful seawalls. We can thrown them up
lickity split once we feel enough urgency to move dirt.
Nuclear power generation in the US peaked in 2012. The last reactor to open was in 2016 in Tennessee. 23 reactors meanwhile have been shuttered. Our political class and the young geniuses our elites universities are admitting aren't serious about climate change until they start throwing up nuclear power plants as fast as the Dutch did dikes.
This is a canard. The current generation of nuclear power plants don't make economic sense, even after adjusting for a generous cost-of carbon allowance. They just can't compete. On top of that, nuclear power is inherently inflexible and can't economically follow load. This makes it a terrible complement to intermittent renewables.
Sure, there are promising next-gen technologies that may be able to help out in 20 or more years, but there's nothing ready for mass deployment. For next-gen stuff, there's bipartisan support for generous research funding.
Many advocates point to France as proof that the US bungled nuclear power, but now even France is moving away from nuclear after the Flamanville debacle:
"A third reactor at the site, an EPR unit, began construction in 2007 with its
commercial introduction scheduled for 2012. As of 2020 the project is more
than five times over budget and years behind schedule. Various safety
problems have been raised, including weakness in the steel used in the
reactor.[1] In July 2019, further delays were announced, pushing back the
commercial date to the end 2022.[2][3]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Unit_3
They can't compete because *they are forbidden to compete*. On account of ALARA laws, if you are selling power for under what your competitors are doing, you are not making radiation as low as reasonably achievable, and have to sink the surplus into more radiation avoidance.
Nuclear would cost 6-8 times as much to replace the current grid compared to solar and wind.
I don't know how many times this needs to be brought up, but it is NOT 1990 anymore. Your impression of the economics here is wildly, obscenely out of date.
Nuclear, beyond a 20% baseload or so, is no longer necessary and never will be.
I'm just a dumb liberal arts major who knows nothing about the economics of power grids, but I do have a cousin who's been a nuclear engineering professor at MIT for 45 years, and we talk from time to time. It's true if you put regulatory costs on one source of power generation and give subsidies to competing sources, the economics of what's cheapest is will swing. These are political choices, and you obviously prefer subsidies for wind and solar. I'd rather on the other hand save the planet for the benefit of future generations.
The literal definition of someone whose bread is buttered...
Aside from the initial R&D money, which nuclear received as well (in greater amounts), there's no way that the operational subsidies (small tax credits, mostly) for renewables are sufficiently large to explain nuclear power's deteriorating economic competitiveness.
It wouldn't be anything like cost-competitive even if the safety margins were reduced significantly, and they can't/shouldn't be brought down to the level of solar or wind. Wind and solar power installations are dispersed infrastructure (no individual generator is failure-critical) and have no failure modes that pose anything like the level of risk carried by the failure of a nuclear power plant.
Even if we reduce operational safety margins in the actual reactor design, the construction of its containment system will remain much the same: it cannot rupture, and the structure cannot crack, ever, under any load, including earthquake, hurricane, and direct impact by an airliner. So much of the obscene capital expense of nuclear power is tied up in construction of that containment system, and that will never be avoidable.
Sure, in the 80's nuclear was forced to accept a negative subsidy in the form of overly conservative safety margins, at the same time as fossil fuels were implicitly subsidized to hell and gone. But this isn't the 1980's.
Nuclear is not cost effective. The entire amount of subsidies extended to renewables since 1980, including upfront R&D, would suffice to cover the cost overruns to build eight (8!!) nuclear power plants. Which then have higher operating costs anyway.
We need something to power the CO2 capture machines. Maybe its nuclear. Maybe it is Geothermal. Maybe it is solar/wind. Until we get the price of net CO2 emissions right, we will never know.
The price of CO2 has nothing to do with how we remove it from the atmosphere. It only answers the question of *whether* we remove it from the atmosphere.
By which I mean, regardless of the price of CO2, so long as it's more than the lifecycle cost of removing it, I'll do so with the cheapest method available.
That's likely to be either reforestation or enhanced weathering.
In certain applications, it may be direct CSS, especially if the CO2 has value locally as an industrial feedstock.
I sincerely doubt it will ever be CSS fed by nuclear power.
You have this completely backward. As intermittent sources wind and solar require not only massive overbuilding to guarantee adequate capacity but also massive investments in grid agility and energy storage that no other energy source requires. Those aren't free. More interesting perhaps is that if you did have that scale of energy storage then it would work more efficiently with nuclear than either wind or solar.
Neither David R or Peter G should be very sure of how technology would develop if net CO2 emissions were taxed and nuclear safety/construction were regulated no more strictly than other technologies.
Absolutely, spend the trivial amounts of money needed to extend existing lifespans. R&D, why not, whatever, might find a use somewhere, someday.
But I'd be lying if I expected the next-generation nuclear stuff to ever be *important*.
Even LI battery mass storage is likely to be cheaper, FFS.
Yeah, this is where the ideological blinders become pretty obvious.
To throw in an anecdote, I can confidently say that I have never heard a single one of my liberal or progressive friends or family endorse "degrowth" as a solution. Some may complain about capitalism and dirty growth, but almost none want to abolish it.
What they *will* chafe at is any conservative who feigns agreement that something must be done to mitigate climate change while labeling their fears of a future where those challenges aren't met as "hysterical apocalyptism."
Only a few progressives openly advocate pastoral primitivism. Yet most advocate carbon/climate targets that can only be achieved by keeping the least developed areas of the world underdeveloped.
Mainstream progressives have advocated de growth even in North America. They killed the Keystone XL pipeline. Banning fracking or prohibiting fracking on federal lands as leases come up for renewal is a mainstream progressive demand. Limiting fracking before a material portion of vehicles are electric and the demand for oil has decreased is clearly a degrowth strategy.
"Yet most advocate carbon/climate targets that can only be achieved by keeping the least developed areas of the world underdeveloped."
Citation required.
Solar, in particular, is just running circles around coal in the developing world. There are NO ongoing coal-fired powerplant projects in Sub-Saharan Africa, India, or China that do not have extensive state backing, and even those are getting tied up in litigation or being cancelled at a breakneck pace.
>>Limiting fracking before a material portion of vehicles are electric and the demand for oil has decreased is clearly a degrowth strategy.<<
It's not "clearly" that at all. Obviously serious action to reduce carbon emissions cannot exempt the fossil fuel sector from policies liable to shrink it (that's the whole point!).
But none of the things you cite would actually shrink the economy as whole. I'd recommend Krugman on this.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/16/opinion/climate-change-republicans-economy.html
There is nothing in aiming for 1.5 degrees that will prevent developing countries from becoming rich. In some sense they (at least to the extent they have a larger share of agriculture in current GDP and or more low profile seacoasts) will benefit most from preventing the rise is CO2 concentrations. This seems to be assuming that degrowth IS the only way.
Right. You can always find extremes on both right and left. But politics in the USA is embodied by the two major parties. One party's median position on climate change is: it's real, humans needs to do something about it, and we need to spend a lot of money ramping up the technology to deal with it. Nobody with a scintilla of influence in Democratic policy-making circles advocates actually shrinking the economy.
The other party's median position is: climate change isn't very harmful, and in any event doing something about it would ruin the economy so we shouldn't.
My niece does all the time. It's a thing. Read Lionel Shriver's 'Game Control'.
I have very mixed feelings on this, but knowing your passion around it would be curious your thoughts. Progressives have fought nuclear power for the last 50+ years and imposed much higher costs on building it out. I'm definitely not saying this was the only impediment, but it was a very large one. France has had 80%+ of its power generated by nuclear since the 80s. Had the US done the same, that would be about 80 billion tons of CO2 not released over the last 40 years (the equivalent to 2 current years of human CO2 production).
What was the comparable improvement driven by Progressives? Increased MPG standards have saved about 17.5 billion tons since 1975.
Thanks for the reply. You make some good points about how so many "little" things can add up. And to your broader point, I think progressives would have accomplished more (maybe bigger) things were the GOP not obstructing so much.
I do wish the greens in Germany hadn't been so aggressive about taking their nuclear plants out of production though. I tend to think that climate change will always be de prioritized relative to any other progressive objective. Though still hoping I'm wrong.
The astounding degree to which people on the internet take solar seriously is a good reminder of the California bubble in political discourse. It’s a big country, most of which is not known for year round sunshine. At best, it is a closet degrowth/austerity program. You are suggesting we reduce energy usage to almost zero for 9 months of the year.
Aside from maybe some scare rhetoric in isolated pockets of the left, I don't see much difference between Ds and Rs on nuclear power.
There's bipartisan support for funding research and even pilots for next-gen nuclear stuff and really it's only a handful of crony republicans who are actually in favor of throwing away ratepayer money building more current-generation plants.
What makes you say Republicans have a better stance on nuclear power than Democrats?
As of late, there isn't a serious attempt by the GOP to advance ANY agenda.
The refusal to support nuclear power in the face of catastrophic global heating is just infuriating. All the evidence points to it being far less dangerous than people thought back in the 80s.
They always point to nuclear waste. Why is the waste generated by used parts from wind turbines and batteries to store 'clean energy" any worse? You need to keep all your tools in your toolkit!
No one is pointing to waste, FFS.
We're repeatedly and loudly pointing to cost, as in: "This costs 4-8 times as much!"
No one has rebutted the claim.
Sure, if we started this transition when Bush Sr. should have done it, nuclear would have been very, very important.
Today? Just not so.
"No one is pointing to waste, FFS."
That's just an outright lie. Literally point # 1 on Green America's top 10 list of reasons to oppose nuclear power is "nuclear waste": https://www.greenamerica.org/fight-dirty-energy/amazon-build-cleaner-cloud/10-reasons-oppose-nuclear-energy (And point # 2 is "nuclear proliferation" for Christ's sake!) Google "objections to nuclear power" and similar search terms to find about 5 million other examples of nuclear waste being used as the leading objection to nuclear power.
"We're repeatedly and loudly pointing to cost, as in: 'This costs 4-8 times as much!'"
A substantial contributing factor to that cost is that a regulatory regime that superempowers anti-nuclear NIMBYs. Further, if global warming is an existential crisis for humanity, then the cost is hardly objectionable.
Let me rephrase: No one HERE is pointing to waste.
Additionally, "A substantial contributing factor to that cost is that a regulatory regime that superempowers anti-nuclear NIMBYs." was wrong the last fourteen times someone trotted out this stupid canard, and will be wrong the next fourteen and well beyond.
I'm a structural engineer who has been involved peripherally in nuclear projects, to the point of seeing plans for buildings, visiting construction sites, and meeting senior leaders of the companies building and operating the plants.
The construction costs of the containment structures alone ensure that no matter how much I relax the regulations on operating margins and actual reactor design, BWR and PWR reactor facilities are going to be obscenely bloody expensive as a result of construction costs. Always.
Everywhere in the world, including China, the UK, France, Bangladesh, India, and the US, has found nuclear projects overbudget by a factor of 2-5 in recent years. If that's true across half a dozen different regulatory regimes, including China, which I can assure you has exactly *no* NIMBY representation in the political system, then the problem is not the regulatory regime, it's the technology.
"Further, if global warming is an existential crisis for humanity, then the cost is hardly objectionable."
If I can accomplish the same goal at a quarter the cost, then of course the cost is objectionable!
Jesus, every single solitary nuclear fanboy/fangirl here must have been parachuted in directly from 1980 and Carter's solar cells on the White House. The economics don't work and Christ knows if they ever again will.
"I advocate protecting dense areas with seawalls and making air conditioning more broadly available."
I don't think this counts as any sort of "concern for climate change". At most it's expressing concern for how we *live* with climate change, but not any concern for how *much* climate change we end up getting. It's definitely not helpful to say "1.5 degrees or death", but it absolutely *is* helpful to say "1.5 degrees is better than 2 degrees is better than 2.5 degrees is better than 3 degrees".
But it used to be conservatives who wanted to deal with pollution (including climate change) with taxes/incentives instead of administrative measures. Conservatives used to support immigration. Conservatives used to support low deficits. Conservatives used to support freer trade. Going farther back they used to oppose foreign ventures with liberal goals like Iraq and Afghanistan. What happened?
Without a genuine course correction, we are very rapidly getting into "Uh-oh." territory.
We'll already have to mitigate and "live with it" to a very great degree, but if you think that much above 1.5 degrees is "mitigation territory," you're deluded.
2.5 degrees is "Sub-Saharan African rainfall patterns are irreversibly altered, and a few tens or hundreds of millions starve." It's also "heatwaves in the tropics kill 5 million annually."
3.5 degrees is "the monsoon fails one or two years in three, and 500 million people in South and Southeast Asia starve." It's also "Parts of the Middle East are no longer habitable."
4.5 degrees is "we're not exactly sure what's under the Arctic permafrost but we'd best hope it's not large concentrations of methane hydrates." It's also "Phoenix, Vegas, and Dallas shut down during the day for 5 months a year."
Seawalls are already likely to be necessary, as is a ton more air-conditioning in North America alone... so it's quite disingenuous to expect us to just roll over for your unwarranted, borderline-delusional optimism about adaptation.
As for nuclear... whatever. Current-generation nuclear technology would cost 6-8 times as much to build-out to replace the current grid compared to solar and wind. Any plant that gets the subsidies to be built is a net-positive, but it's just not important anymore. Sure, should have done it in the 80's. Too late now.
The good news is, market-dictated roll-out of the new generation and transportation technologies will hold us to 2.5-3 degrees on its own, unless a certain faction in a certain developed nation decides that it needs to heavily subsidize the coal and oil extractive industries.
A wee bit of subsidy to get that done faster and make sure the developing world uses clean technology instead of dirty, and we all get to have our cake and eat it too!
Your statement about our choices regarding power generation is not really correct.
I am not an expert in Nuclear technology, so I can't speak specifically to why the cost is so much higher than elsewhere, but my understanding from speaking to people who are experts is that it is primarily related to unrealistic environmental & safety standards put into place post-Chernobyl that could be easily adjusted/relaxed by a friendly DOE/EPA.
However, I do work in grid management & renewable energy, and your expectation that renewable penetration will make nuclear development unnecessary is just not a reasonable assumption in the context of what you want to achieve. The only way to build a reliable grid without baseload power (Nuclear, Coal, some Gas plants) in the US is to hope that technology improves to the point where something that doesn't exist now becomes available - existing battery storage is not even close. In the interim, existing baseload will be replaced by Natural Gas and there will be a floor on coal plant retirements. This process could take a really long time since you're just hoping that a new technology (hydrogen fuel cells? fusion? exponential battery improvement?) will come along.
If the view is that climate change is an immediate problem RIGHT NOW then policymakers should be trying to build a zero emissions grid... right now! That would mean a massive investment in nuclear energy to phase out existing baseload capacity within a decade, with renewables and batteries filling the role that gas plants occupy now.
I legitimately don't understand why you would lead your argument with the need for a "genuine course correction" paired with basically a shrug about what we should do about baseload power. It makes absolutely zero sense and is more or less what OP was saying in the first place.
"I am not an expert in Nuclear technology, so I can't speak specifically to why the cost is so much higher than elsewhere, but my understanding from speaking to people who are experts is that it is primarily related to unrealistic environmental & safety standards put into place post-Chernobyl that could be easily adjusted/relaxed by a friendly DOE/EPA."
If this is your understanding, you're getting it from someone whose bread is buttered.
It may have been largely true in the 1980's and 90's, that our red tape was so bad as to knock nuclear out of contention unfairly. But today...?
American costs are not out of line with the rest of the world. The latest projects in France are over-budget by a factor of five. The UK's Hinkley Point C project has seen its budget double and is nowhere near completion yet. I was peripherally involved in the China Taishan and Sanmen projects. They were probably both over-budget by severalfold, according to people I spoke to who were involved in their construction. Public numbers are either not available or made up from whole cloth.
"The only way to build a reliable grid without baseload power (Nuclear, Coal, some Gas plants) in the US is to hope that technology improves to the point where something that doesn't exist now becomes available - existing battery storage is not even close."
Agreed... though I'll point out that I'm not expecting to do this over the next decade, I'm expecting that depreciation of existing assets will see it done over the next three decades. And in that time, expecting battery technology NOT to substantially improve seems to be a larger stretch than expecting it to substantially improve.
What I've come to expect is that nuclear+gas will be our baseload for some time. Coal plants are going to be gone by the end of the decade, virtually everywhere in the US. Gas will stay afloat much longer, as it's more economical to operate and provides a reliable and responsive baseload.
Better transmission and storage will rapidly eat into gas's role in all this, until it's no longer necessary at all in a few decades.
That seems to be borne out by the current economic reality and the technology that exists today, as well as the rate of change in energy storage and transmission technology.
"Agreed... though I'll point out that I'm not expecting to do this over the next decade, I'm expecting that depreciation of existing assets will see it done over the next three decades."
That doesn't seem to match the urgency of your previous posts about how critical it is to avoid "Uh Oh" territory. I'm also curious your thoughts on why nuclear costs are so high?
Straight-line depreciation of existing carbon-intensive assets in electricity and transport will allow the US and Europe to hold up their end of the bargain to limit the rise in temperatures to 2-3 degrees.
I'm not saying it's what I want, it's just not "DOOM" territory, and it's what I *expect* to happen.
Any major policy intervention in the US will wait for the next Democratic trifecta in the 2030's, at which point most of the work will have already been done.
As for nuclear, there was likely a time when the answer was, indeed, regulatory arbitrage on the part of fossil fuel industries. Nuclear was held to an unreasonable safety standard after TMI relative to all the people who died of chemical spills, coal-fired air pollution, you name it.
But in the present, my opinion amounts to this: Generation using fossil fuels has fallen in cost, quite considerably in real terms, and it is implicitly heavily subsidized. More recently, lifecycles costs for solar and wind power have fallen precipitously.
That alone would ensure that nuclear is, relatively speaking, more expensive.
But the biggest problem is that nuclear pushes all of the buttons for "construction megaproject," and if you know anything about the construction industry in the US (and globally, really), you know that its productivity trends are an absolute shambles. Which means that in absolute terms the costs of building a plant have risen a ton even as the mostly off-the-shelf construction costs for green installations have fallen, and fossil fuel plant construction costs have stayed steady.
"Straight-line depreciation of existing carbon-intensive assets in electricity and transport will allow the US and Europe to hold up their end of the bargain to limit the rise in temperatures to 2-3 degrees."
This will lead the US and Europe CO2 production to continue to fall (probably, not sure how quickly). Will it keep China, India, Nigeria Indonesia from replacing that CO2 production just as fast? What are they going to use to manage baseload?
Not sayin this is David R.’s position, but I have seen renewable nutters who claim baseload is a myth.
Also, have you heard of the recent developments of iron-air battery storage?
I have heard Conservative nutters dressed in rags ranting on the street corner that the "end is nigh." This is, however, not particularly relevant to the conversation....
"The good news is, market-dictated roll-out of the new generation and transportation technologies will hold us to 2.5-3 degrees on its own, unless a certain faction in a certain developed nation decides that it needs to heavily subsidize the coal and oil extractive industries."
Would you elaborate on this? My understanding is that while developed nation CO2 production has been decreasing, that has been more than made up for by the increases in developing nations. CO2 production fell in 2020 due to Covid, but most analysts I've read expect a resumption to trend shortly which is a slowing increase.
Those projections keep getting it wrong and have been ever since the steepest growth in China's capacity ended. I expect they'll continue to do so. If you follow the market at all, you'll see a bunch of fossil fuel generation projects losing bids or getting canceled in favor of renewables.
Transportation is the big challenge in the developing world, not electricity. We'll see how EV rollout goes. Good news is that much of the developing world is a ways off from car ownership, and those parts that aren't often have strong/authoritarian governments mandating a move to EVs (China, Vietnam, Malaysia frex.)
It’s very strange that you locate the “costs” of global warming in Nairobi, which is at an altitude of 6000 feet and where the average high temperature is never over 81 degrees. Even a 5 degree celsius uniform increase in temperature would leave Nairobi with a hot season comparable to Atlanta or Washington, DC.
There are two ways of discussing politics. One essentially assumes that the speaker is omnipotent, usually through the use of the word “should.” This is the preferred discursive mode of climate hawks. It gets around problems like the fact that the political will to curb US emissions simply does not exist. People want SUVs and cheap gas and politicians who oppose those things can only hang on in a handful of urban places. Developing countries want to develop more than they want climate stability. Much better to have 95 degree highs in July and air conditioning than 90 degree highs and a fan. If climate hawks can say people should give up their SUVs and car pool, I can just as easily say Canada and Russia have vast, underpopulated areas that will become more habitable as the earth warms. They should take in climate refugees. It might actually happen, both have plausible reasons to increase their populations, but politics are messy and I’m not confident how they will act.
However, I’ll admit that the prescriptive mode of discourse is pretty inane. A discussion of crime could be truncated to “people should not kill, maim, rape or steal.” That kind of thinking wishes the problem away and avoids the interesting question, which is how to deter crime and deal with criminals.
Coastal defenses and air conditioning are politically viable solutions. Rich nations will easily summon the will to implement them once climate change begins to bite. Poor and dysfunctional nations won’t do as well. There will be climate refugees and some people will die of heat stroke.
You are probably uncomfortable with the fact that Peggy Sue would rather drive her Tahoe and air condition a 3500 square foot house than give up her lifestyle to make a tiny, incremental contribution to climate equity in Nigeria and Bangladesh. I’ve made my peace with the fact that humans are pretty selfish especially when the costs of their actions fall upon strangers they never see. You can hate Peggy Sue all you want, but that won’t get you her vote and she isn’t giving up her Tahoe.
Where, pray tell, does Nairobi's food supply chain run through?
As for Peggy Sue, it's amazing that that massive hunk of a Tahoe gets better fuel efficiency than an ordinary sedan in the 1970's. I wonder how that came about, and how much it reduced American emissions? (Answer: 20+ GT, something like 10% of all emissions since we started fuel efficiency mandates)
When Rivian is producing an SUV that's cheaper to fuel and more reliable, Peggy Sue will tell GM to get fucked. And that's likely to be true by the next time she goes to buy an SUV in the mid-2020's.
It's also funny that her power consumption for air conditioning for that 3500 sq. ft. house is lower than her parents' wall unit in their 1500 sq. ft. house. And that the carbon footprint of that consumption is about a third what it was for her parents...
Again, I wonder what wonderful factor is causing all of these things?
One problem, among others, is that you actually believe the self-flagellating idiots who keep telling you you need to not drive, not fly, not eat, not that... before we can "save the world!" (TM)
I'm here to tell you: just hand the government a trillion bucks over the next twenty years to subsidize functionally identical clean alternatives, or tax the old ones. Another 200 billion in R&D expenditures, and we're good to go, mostly.
i’m perfectly happy for the US to spend $1.2 trillion on renewables over 20 years, that’s 0.2% of gdp. But I really doubt that level of expenditure will hit the 1.5 degree target. i take the self flagellating idiots seriously because 1.5 degreeea requires a lot of masochism
A couple points. First, the predictions that climate change will cause massive droughts are dubious. As a first approximation, warner places tend to get more precipitation because warm air is able to carry more moisture than cool air. Warm weather does make water evaporate more quickly, but it’s really dubious to say “the proportion of world crop lands experiencing drought will increase materially as the climate warms.”. There will certainly be fewer frosts during the growing season, which is an unambiguous win for agriculture. Agricultural yields, including those in the developing world, are at world historical highs. The climate change we have experienced so far has not prevented ag yields from exploding.
Second, Peggy Sue is not the most sympathetic character in the world. I find her SUV wasteful and am fine with a 2500 square foot house. But, if I had more money, I’d probably get a vacation home and/or go on six airplane vacations a year and my carbon footprint would be just as big if not bigger than hers.
Rich urbanites who travel a lot have huge carbon footprints. The urban precariat does have some integrity on this issue.
Fairness would be in two parts 1) In setting the tax on net CO2 emissions we (in the high-income world) take account of the harm done to people everywhere, (crop failures in India and SS Africa, sea level rise in Bangladesh) not just within our countries. This presumably means that the tax would be higher in high income countries than if only local costs are taken into account. 2) High income countries should transfer resources to poorer countries to invest in climate change mitigating investments. [It is sometime said that shifting to zero and negative CO2 technologies in response to a tax on net CO2 emissions would be more costly to poor countries than to rich countries but I'm not sure that is the case. If it is the case or for the countries in which it is the case, that would be another motive for resource transfers.]
The amusing (morbid, but amusing) thing about his post is that willingness to toss *you* overboard is just going to aid America's wealthiest in tossing *him* overboard afterward.
"What, you thought we’d just… make it stop… now that it's killing Americans? Nah. Still too expensive. *We'll* be fine. Good luck to you, sir!"
It's not like the problem will do anything but get worse if we go with his "adaptation only" strategy. If we're normed to passively watching poor folks abroad die in their millions, there is going to be damn-all that keeps us from passively watching poor folks at home die in their millions eventually, and at that point it becomes inevitable that not-poor folks will start dying too.
He seems to think that "adaptation" is a substitute for "reform" instead of a necessary compliment.
furthermore, given the vulnerability of manhattan and miami, i’m convinced that coastal defenses will become a mainstream priority within 30 years
So your actual position is "Yes and..."
Which is also my position.
Which means we've been bickering about semantics.
Seawalls are already baked in, I agree. So is desalinization in the SW US, evacuation of large swathes of heavily forested communities in North America, better flood control infrastructure on every major waterway in the Northern Hemisphere, road and rail reconstruction in Canada and Russia, and large population movements in the developing world.
But these are not actual "let's stop climate deteriorating any further" policies, they're "we've already done this and must live with it" policies. The point is to stop making those (already very expensive) adaptation problems even worse, as quickly as politically/economically possible, rather than just saying we'll keep adapting in increasingly more expensive ways.
Which you also seem to agree with, but wildly overestimate the difficulty of...
That’s not fair. I support electrification, I think rich societies should be willing to pay a 10-15% premium for renewables, poor countries will have more binding cost constraints
There used to be a libertarian-ish strain of intellectual conservatism ala Milton Friedman that laid claim to technocratic competency. I know growing up I’d read all sorts of conservative arguments that liberals understandably wanted things like abolishing poverty (crucially, this was always pitched sympathetically, which seems completely alien now!) but they didn’t understand that really they were doomed to immiserate everyone because they couldn’t see clearly—the sort of people who identified with the Churchill quote about you have to become a liberal by 20 if you have a heart and a conservative by thirty if you have a brain.
I suspect that losing this sort of stance (through a combination of economic knowledge objectively moving away from a Friedman-ish stance, and stronger influence of Evangelical+Fox News popularism) is as much a cause of the polarization as an effect. If you’re a smart-ass teenage boy, being able to signal your intelligence by “Well-actually-ing“ whatever your bleeding heart liberals say is a strong incentive to incorporate intellectually independent conservative into your identity and prove that that’s why you should go to University of Chicago (but you’ll settle of course for any other highly selective school). If there’s no project to incorporate conservatism into your identity as a smarter than average student, it’s unsurprising that students will give up on conservatism before they give up on proving how smart they are.
This is so true. When I started taking about politics online back in 2007, these young libertarian contrarians popped up all the time on forums and Reddit and blog comments. I was one of them at the time!
I think the aftermath of the Great Recession is also a major reason for the decline in technocratic libertarianism. Most of them predicted that Obama’s policies would lead to a debt crisis and strangle free market capitalism with over regulation. When neither happened, the whole viewpoint started to seem silly and out of date.
My sense is that now, smart contrarian young men are mostly anti-woke but liberal on non-culture war topics, or far-left new socialists.
I think for a while, libertarians could convince themselves that with just the right pitch, they could convince the Republican party to become libertarian. If nothing else, Trump disabused that notion. Its not nearly as fun to be a libertarian when its clear no one has any interest in your ideas. We'll see if the same happens for all the "youngins" that pivoted to far left socialism.
That goes back a long time online. When I started talking about politics online in 1993, USEnet's talk.politics.libertarianism was the place that it was at.
I remember those days. In the nineties a visitor from Mars who read usenet would've concluded the country was overwhelmingly libertarian.
The capture of the libertarian movement by Mises and Rothbard esque goldbugs has been extremely disappointing. The Austrian school is frankly anathema to Friedman's thought. They are completely right on housing, immigration and permitting, but get dragged down by the idiotic macro of their lookalikes.
"If there’s no project to incorporate conservatism into your identity as a smarter than average student, it’s unsurprising that students will give up on conservatism before they give up on proving how smart they are."
I think the higher percentage of Howie Hawkins voters at Harvard than Trump shows this to be a strong liklihood. For a certain type of young (mostly) men, having arguments and debate is a big part of politics, and libertarianism hasn't moved away from that as much as conservatism has. Of course, the arguments are heartless but the ideology is (mostly) consistent.
Except Hawkins was the Green candidate. Based on the percentages, apparently not a single student surveyed voted for Jo Jorgensen (the Libertarian candidate).
The libertarianish conservatives are still around, as well as non-reactionary conservatives, they are just in the political wilderness.
this explains a large part of wokeness. teenage girls want to be nice to marginalized groups and teenage boys want their approval
I hope that's it. My experience is that teenage girls are always on the hunt for social status and this tool has lots of sharp edges. But maybe the woke crowd is notorious for their kind and forgiving nature and I missed it.
I grew up in a rural Republican household in the 70s and 80s, went to an urban college in 1986 and by the time I graduated I was functionally a Democrat (though registered Independent). I can't think of a single professor saying anything that made a difference in my outlook. It was fellow students who I took my cues from.
Of course, a lot has changed since then, but something tells me this is still mostly about peer effects and not professors.
Maybe it's because I studied engineering, but I don't remember my professors talking about politics at all (with the exception of one vocally conservative business professor). But I noticed strong liberal peer effects. It makes sense that young people are idealistic and excited about ambitious social change, and their politics follow from that.
College is also much more diverse, than lower levels of education, and that can have an impact too.
A lot of people never met an openly gay person, or an openly trans person, or a Muslim, etc before going to college.
If you grew up in a homogeneous neighborhood, college can burst the bubble on a lot of stereotypes and prejudices you grew up with.
Yes Johnathan Haidt makes that point in his excellent book "The Righteous Mind" people tend to absorb their opinions from those they are around.
There's some interesting stuff in "The Righteous Mind" but I never let anyone mention Haidt without pointing out that one of his most famous conclusions--that conservatives understand liberal thinking better than liberals understand conservative thinking--isn't valid.
The research that led to this claim was done on a non-random sample of American adults who were disproportionately young, female and self-identified as liberal. It's not clear how the study participants were chosen: the researchers said they visited a website where they could find an attitudes questionnaire to fill out. I suspect most of them were graduate students in social science, because how else would they have heard about some obscure research website?
Obviously if you study people in a very liberal peer group, the conservatives in that group will understand liberal attitudes fairly well because they're exposed to them all the time, whereas the liberals are likely to be pretty clueless about how conservatives think. Without a random sample this research is worthless.
It's important to push back against this because conservative pundits repeat this "finding" all the time, and it reinforces their view that people who voted for Trump are more open-minded than people who voted against them. If that seems hard to believe, it's because it isn't true.
I got into this with Rod Dreher two years ago and although I'm not going to dig through the research again, I believe this is the paper causing all the ruckus:
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2009-05192-002
I suspect that Haidt's conclusion was true once upon a time, but is no longer true due to intellectual deterioration on the American right. (I quit hanging around right-leaning forums, discussion boards, etc. about 6 to 7 years ago, despite personally considering myself on the conservative end of the US political spectrum, because people there lost their effing minds and could no longer make reasoned critiques of the left.)
I suspect Haidt's conclusion holds true for elites for the simple fact of what is contained in Matt's post. If 80%+ of faculty and students at universities are progressive/liberals, wouldn't you expect them to understand liberals better than conservatives?
If you're talking about the random person in America - well, they typically don't have a great understanding of either because they barely think about politics.
Do you have evidence to the contrary?
interesting, I hadn't heard that. But it doesn't change the fact for the countries elites in the Academy, media, government etc. The ones making decisions don't understand half the country, and most of them aren't trying to.
The other side is wrong, and probably evil. Demonstrated by their lack of agreement with the left
There is a study that shows that college roommates have an effect on each other’s political views here’s the link below https://www.pnas.org/content/118/2/e2015514117
I think that the main influence of faculty politics is on other faculty (e.g., hiring new faculty, inhibiting certain forms of faculty speech and expression) and selecting students to admit to graduate programs.
As someone who teaches in the humanities, the revelation that spending more time studying the humanities is causing students to become more absolutist and less nuanced is going to make me start day drinking.
I also teach in the humanities, but have a somewhat different view. Because the "relativism" or "tolerance" that this so-called absolutism is replacing (?) was fairly uni-directional, i.e., tolerance for the after-effects of history's great crimes, things that people long ago stopped defending on their own terms (the trans-Atlantic slave trade, wholesale eradication of native populations by European colonists, etc.). To me, what reads as "absolutism" is an attempt, however clumsy at times, to really reckon with these facts of history as intolerable and, therefore, worthy of material redress.
To be honest, in seminars, I have sometimes bridled at what I perceive as the excesses of these movements. But the pendulum is already so far in one direction on this that I really try to avoid defensiveness.
I don't know when tolerance for the slave trade or the genocide of Native Americans was a common nuanced position on college campuses, but it wasn't twenty years ago when I was in college (and notice that I didn't use the word "tolerance" anyway). The nuance I'm talking about has to do with, for instance, the distinction between being flawed and being wicked, or between disapproving of someone and expunging them. As a humanities-specific example, look at those "what's one book you read in school and hated" threads: no one has to like Catcher in the Rye, say, but people will bring up characters like Holden Caulfield as mere avatars of toxic masculinity. And you've got teachers, instructors, and professors in these threads talking about how great those readings are and how they encourage their students in them! I'd like to think we go to the humanities to discover how difficult humanity is as a subject, not how easy.
I was in college in the late '80s and there was no sugar coating of those topics. I do think some things were more nuanced then. For example, it was perfectly fine to criticize the "founders" for being slave owners while still acknowledging their accomplishments.
I think we basically agree about what's valuable in the humanities. I very much agree on your last point, and as a medievalist, I constantly work on authors whose views would not be acceptable today, for a whole variety of reasons. But what I was trying to say was that although no one would defend slavery or genocide on their own terms, we were also not being asked to face so directly the legacy of those "intolerable" historical facts or to make many sacrifices (intellectual or otherwise) as a result.
Maybe I can be clearer through an example. I would be the first to agree that human sexuality and human sexual relations are infinitely complex, allowing for all kinds of questions about perspective, consent, fantasy, etc. that could lead to genuine misunderstandings. But the pendulum was (and is) so far toward tolerating constant, everyday abuses great and small (sexual harassment, problems with misogyny is many facets of academic life), that I think we can't be too defensive now when one or another man is judged in a way that seems "absolutist." We can all come up with an anecdote or a thought experiment in which a man is treated unfairly, but what the "absolutists" are asking us to do is to face the immensity of the unfairness on the other side without averting our eyes -- and perhaps even to do something about it! I think it's worth trying to remain open to the moral demand even if my own instincts sometimes (often!) lead me to want to make an appeal to moral complexity.
Another way of saying this is that there is now a long tradition in the humanities and social sciences of calling for the inclusion of formally marginalized voices, based on the that there might be something to learn from those other perspectives, but now that that inclusion is becoming more of a reality, it can be hard to listen to what they have to say!
I guess where I get uncomfortable is that these facts of history tend to handwave the tragic suffering created by the failed communist countries ... especially as you get closer to the DSA side of our party.
Sure, or like, whether regimes like Iran's are okay or not. Relativism comes back with a vengeance then!
The Republican party tried 'not being the party of inhuman sociopaths' when it comes to immigration policy for years by having a national leadership that was far more pro-immigration than their base, and that was part of how they put themselves in a position for Trump to take over and destroy their party.
The problem is they gave their base *nothing*. It's not that unusual for leadership to be out of step with the base on a major issue. But Republicans govern almost purely in the interests of their elites. Even once Trump supposedly "took over", the only major legislation they passed was a $2 trillion tax cut focused on multinational corporations.
If Republicans delivered for their base on other issues, they may have been able to maintain this immigration stance. That's what Tony Blair did in Britain. His base loathed him too but he delivered enough on common priorities to stay in power for over a decade.
The NYTimes had a report last year that showed Harvard's incoming class had as many students from the top 1% of households as they did from the bottom 60% of earners. Combine Trump's more downscale appeal and the general trend of the upper class toward Democratic voting and I'm not shocked at the results.
The Democratic party is clearly on the ascendency relative to the Trump-addled Republican party. But I suspect the coalition of the top 20% of earners with the traditional Democratic base of lower-earning service workers will cause some friction in the coming years.
We always get weird shit like this in the midst of a realignment.
The sad thing, both parties are within a few bullet points of "natural party of government" level dominance.
If the Democrats can get over the cultural elite's newfound fascination with how horrible non-woke people are, "Soak the rich and invest in the country" would see them through to some pretty resounding victories.
If the GOP could actually broaden its reach beyond WWC and shut down the Replacement Theory/Christian Dominionist/Stop the Steal/Just Plain Racist extremists, their "spend and don't tax" platform would likewise win almost all the time, especially combined with their geographic advantages.
One of those two outcomes is entirely likely... but in the meantime, following American politics will be like watching two people sparring in molasses.
Did Trump in fact have more downscale appeal? It looks like in both 2020 and 2016, there was a correlation of income with vote for Donald Trump:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1184428/presidential-election-exit-polls-share-votes-income-us/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/631244/voter-turnout-of-the-exit-polls-of-the-2016-elections-by-income/
Interestingly, in 2016, Trump's strongest group was the $50-$99,000 income bracket, while at higher brackets Clinton and Trump ran nearly equal, while in 2020, Trump did much better with the higher brackets and Biden did a lot better in that middle bracket. (Biden and Clinton both won the lower income bracket handily.)
There definitely seems to be a correlation of white collar status with vote for Clinton or Biden over Trump. But the correlation of white collar status with income is weaker than people think, given how many small business owners there are, who tend not to be white collar, and tend to be very strong Republicans.
Come to think of it, this explains trends in the Hispanic population quite well.
The main avenue of upward mobility for Hispanic immigrants has been in the trades, often at the helm of a small business.
Allowing for the fact that GOP anti-immigration sentiment and coddling of the extreme racists is a turn-off that pushes a lot of Hispanic folks away... they otherwise fall into many of the same professions and backgrounds that broadly agree with "bootstraps" traditional Republican rhetoric otherwise.
It truly is ridiculous how badly Trump has screwed over the GOP. Sure, they might be able to win the next few elections with rural/exurban white folk by trotting out "replacement theory" and the related constellation of bullshit, but the base for that strategy is in terminal demographic decline, and that sort of reaction appeals nowhere else and to no one else.
Had they pivoted to a respectable conservatism and appealed to the more diverse blue-collar and small business America that's coming into shape, the few elections in the 2020's would have been hard without as firm a rural/exurban base, but afterwards they'd be set. Just like Britain's Tories have done well out of economic moderation, promises of responsible stewardship, some degree of responsiveness to global warming, and social conservatism (while stiff-arming the reactionaries out of the party entirely).
This sounds like the kind of Democratic party I'd like to see :). And frankly think that set of policies is more unlikely with Republicans than with Democrats.
Should have said the "emerging coalition," as today's 25-34 year old with a Master's degree and a lower-level or mid-level white collar job is tomorrow's top 20% earner.
I had the benefit of being involved in a number of community projects in Somerville, MA (call back!) that got me the opportunity to take a course pro-bono at the Kennedy School at Harvard led by Hugh O'Doherty. The course was on Adaptive Leadership.
A technical problem is one that can be clearly defined, and has a definitive solution. It may be horribly complicated, but eventually there are specific ways that it can be tackled as guided by technical expertise.
An adaptive problem is one where the issue lies more with people themselves and the way they interact; with emotion. It's a problem defined by its LACK of a technical solution, simple or complex.
The left has technocratic impulses that cause it to think that every problem is a technical problem. Climate change can be addressed if we do X, Y, Z. However, the real issue with climate change is that it requires a fundamental rewiring of a current dominate human culture. That's an adaptive problem.
When you misread an adaptive problem as a technical problem, you waste your time trying to sway the skeptical with your evidence and your credentials, but with an adaptive problem there is too much emotion involved for that to ever work. The real work is not in convincing others that you and your solution are correct, but in addressed a deep sense of risk and loss and working together to dig out of that hole.
The left has hollowed out to all technical solutions to adaptive problems. The right has hollowed out to nothing but a gaping sense of loss that reacts poorly to proposed technical solutions and in their emotional void will embrace any garbage that makes them feel, even momentarily, like they are losing less.
It can be argued that aging white men had an overabundance for so many centuries, and so that sense of loss is justified and they should just get over it. It can also be argued that they aren't really losing as much as they fear, and that the only thing to fear is fear itself.
Neither one is going to work. At the same time, what's required by the would-be technocrats is empathy and working through complex adaptive problems WITH their opponents. And the more childish the right gets, the more difficult that is to do. The constant culture wars keep everyone's nerves frayed empathy is literally impossible. That part I blame entirely on the right. Not-so-cottage industries are entirely devoted to fanning the flames. Murdoch and Ailes at work.
So yes, these issues are pervasive and not going away. And it makes sense that education and occupation are major fault lines. Credentialism feeds technical thinking. At the other end the real loss of economic opportunity for the less educated in a post-industrial hyper-capitalist society provides a real baseline for other senses of loss, some real, and some entirely imaginary.
Ironically, the only path to change that I can even imagine is a rollback, to some degree, of globalization. We clearly need to rely less on imports for key components like microchips, and have a risky over-reliance on China for so much. As a matter of future national security we need to manufacture more at home. But that means paying more for things. This is an adaptive problem. And we aren't very good at those.
I was with this comment until you said the solution was a rollback of globalization. Why not frame it as a need to shift toward domestic industrial policy?
That is certainly a better term for it! I can get onboard with that.
Thank you for this. I was not familiar with distinguishing technical and adaptive problems, but it seems to me to be a powerful tool that honors both aspects of human nature and clarifies the roles they play in organizations.
Maybe the technocratic XYZ is the way to "rewire" culture to the extent that it needs to be rewired.
Yesssss… I’ve never quite thought of it that way but you’re spot on.
“The constant culture wars keep everyone's nerves frayed empathy is literally impossible. That part I blame entirely on the right.”
Why?
Because this has been the right's primary electoral strategy since Nixon, Lee Atwater, and Roger Ailes. Purposefully fanning the flames of the culture was has been the M.O. of Fox News for 20+ years. It's their bread and butter. The left does a share of it, but in my opinion, more often than not, that's poor choices of language in pursuit of worthwhile goals.
For example, we only have one word to describe the belief that certain people who have cosmetic differences are intellectually and morally inferior to others, to describe the belief that those labelled as such need to be held down and made subservient, and to describe the fact that systems that survive today that were created 60+ years ago enforce unfair and uneven outcomes.
It does no good to call the third of those "racism" when to most people what "racism" means is the first two. Yet that is what we do because we lack a separate word and because a charged word like "racism" gets the most retweets. At the end of the day, though, this is silliness in pursuit of a worthwhile causes, unlike, say, The War on Christmas or the Unite the Right rally.
I will grant you there's certainly a segment in right leaning media that makes money flaming the culture wars.
But the left has the exact same problem. Moreover, I would argue that right leaning media never would have taken off except for the glaring leftward bias of the mainstream media.
Thank you for this observation about the definitions of racism. However, it seems to me that the fact we have one word for those three things lies at the feet of academia. They took a word in common use and refined its definition, then proceeded to use it without noting that change. Specialized language is supposed to make things more clear, but here they have allowed the new definition to enter public discourse and cause confusion. The emotional baggage of "racism" as used in common speech is simply too heavy to accommodate a non-emotional meaning, even if a greater effort to clarify the meaning was made. Modifying it with "systemic" does not help, as that appears to mean implementation of intentional bias by data-driven legislation.
And, honestly, it often feels that the left uses this confusion to separate the left from the right, insulting the right and allowing the right's response to energize the left.
Yes! I agree entirely. I think there are a number of root causes of this "linguistic failure". The first is that much of what is developed in academia is never really INTENDED for mass consumption, so they don't think through the coded buzzwords because within the circle of academia they are understood. Then there is the fact that the Twitter Left is pretty horrid, and often enjoys in-group signaling with ideas picked up in academia and elsewhere more than it likes actually achieving meaningful change. Think of pushing the poor choice of terms in "defund the police". Finally there's the right wing noise machine which loves to hunt down "academic" ideas with names that they know will trigger their audiences. "Critical Race Theory" is a great example of that. "CRT" is a niche academic idea, but now it's being applied to just about any teaching having to do with race. If you teach about Jim Crow and the rise of the KKK in the 1920s, that's CRT. If you teach about red-lining for loans in the 1930s - 1960s, that's CRT. NONE of that is CRT. "Progressives" should focus on taking good ideas that come out of academia (and they are not all good ones) and crafting language around them that will make them resonate with the broader electorate, but social media has trained most activists to instead lean into the chasm that separates them and academia from the rest of America.
Agreed that academic language, as well as legal and regulatory language are intended for a specific audience. However, when academia ventures forth from its tower to share its knowledge with the world for the betterment of that world, wisdom would recognize the importance of choosing language that doesn't make the situation worse.
Agree also on your perspective on CRT. Our school system doesn't require high school students to read more than one entire book in English - and that one book is iffy - but parents groups are spending the energy on fighting masks and CRT.
Honestly, I hold the left to a higher standard because of its claimed relationship with the academy, because it claims to have a long view of human culture and experience and so should know how to advance its ideas in a way that doesn't leave fuel for the next crisis.
“The left does a share of it, but in my opinion, more often than not, that's poor choices of language in pursuit of worthwhile goals.”
Is hectoring people for not using someone’s chosen pronoun just a poor choice of language? Is persecuting someone because of their religious views just a poor choice of language? Is pushing critical race theory nonsense in public schools just a poor choice of language?
I could go on.
I've never seen anyone "hector" someone for not using a correct pronoun, unless the person is intentionally *themself* doing the "hectoring" by insisting on using the wrong pronoun repeatedly after having been gently corrected once. I just think a lot of people see someone correcting someone once, and then start worrying that they'll be constantly hectored.
“…insisting on using the wrong pronoun…”
Wrong by what criterion?
The same criterion we use for figuring out whether you're calling someone by the wrong name.
I wouldn't use the R-word in this or other contexts, but I plausibly agree with the sentiment, that performances in that context don't exactly constitute an actual phenomenon in the world.
Pronouns, persecution of Christians, and critical race theory... these are your examples to convince me that the right wing noise machine isn't on the bleeding edge of manufactured cultural crises?
All three examples are based on how some people IMAGINE the left to act more than on actual interactions they've had.
Making space for people who are non-binary or non Christian is a worthwhile goal, yes. As is teaching actual history, which is what Fox News is currently labelling "CRT!!!!!"
The Internet is not real life.
" As is teaching actual history"
You mean like the 1619 project that was rife with historical inaccuracy and panned by historians across the spectrum?
You want some other examples? How about gun control? Abortion? Voting laws?
Religious persecution is not a manufactured cultural crises. People are actually being persecuted.
“Making space” is, literally, nonsense.
I don’t know what you mean by “teaching actual history.” I suspect neither do you.
"The left does a share of it, but in my opinion, more often than not, that's poor choices of language in pursuit of worthwhile goals."
If you can't see that this is a firmly held belief across the political spectrum domestically AND globally, then you should get out more. Few people if any wake up and think to themselves, "I'm going to pursue silly goals and crush a bunch of people in the process doing it." People get dangerous when they wake up and think to themselves, my goals are important enough that crushing a few people along the way is a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
Matt, you & I both know plenty of conservatives from our elite undergrad days (we'll call them "Ross Douthat Conservatives"). I'm still friends with a bunch of them (or at least "friends" in the Facebook sense). Not a single one voted for Trump. Not one. And many of them are still Christian soldiers in the way that vast swaths of Red America are -- no quarter on abortion/homosexuality, the Bible is God's inerrant Word, all of it. They're all smart and well-educated enough to see through Trump's con and have enough principles not to stand for it, not to mention love our country enough not to want to see democracy destroyed. And (though I haven't asked them), if Ted Cruz had been the nominee in 2016, I'm pretty certain they would've voted for him over Hillary without hesitation.
My point -- I'm actually surprised as many as ~6% of incoming Harvard freshmen voted for Trump. These are truly the Elise Stefanik/George P. Bush/future Federalist Society judges with no principles but serving the powerful.
You're talking about teenagers, though, and comparing them to older adults. We have no idea what their political or career trajectories are going to be. My guess would be that they voted that way because their families and communities voted that way.
Maybe? No doubt there's family/community influence as you suggest, but we're talking about Ivy Leaguers... these schools have 5-6% acceptance rates, and these teenagers have been groomed to be the future leaders of society with loads of ambition.
You can argue with this comment, but I'll reiterate my point -- these "kids" are smart enough and engaged enough to know exactly what Trump stands for. You could be willfully blind ("seriously not literally") in 2016; you most certainly could not in 2020. A vote for Trump was a vote in favor of the destruction of American democracy in service of the interest of the richest Americans.
At least 6% of 18 year olds who haven't left home yet are likely just voting how their family does, because they haven't started thinking explicitly about voting yet.
But it's not a random sample of 18 year olds... it's approximately 100 Harvard freshmen.
Sure, I meant to be restricting to that group. Out of *all* 18 year olds, I would say it's more like 95% of them that (if they vote) vote just how their family does with no thought about it. Out of college-bound 18 year olds, it's probably more like 60%. Maybe Harvard-bound 18 year olds are unusually thoughtful and get it down to 30% voting unthinkingly with their family, but I would be very surprised if more than 90% have already substantially formed independent political views.
Agreed. Also odd to note that anyone who would have voted for Trump is basically equivalent to Stefanik. A vote to most is a choice between candidates and whose policies will have a more positive (or less negative) impact. It doesn't mean you become Stefanik in the process of a checking a box.
“…I'm actually surprised as many as ~6% of incoming Harvard freshmen voted for Trump.”
Why, because Biden was such a strong candidate?
Trump is seen as anathema to the idea of meritocracy. He didn't "earn" his way to the position (by some definition) and demonstrates his ignorance with many utterances. To be clear, I'm *not* saying that a president should have to pass some sort of intelligence test, but you can kind of see why educated people, who have been sold on the idea that their intelligence and credentials are the path to success, would look aghast upon a guy like him ascending to such a high office.
To be fair though, one thing his term showed me is that one does not need to have a deep policy knowledge nor be worldly to function in that role. Most of the USG seems to be able to run without much input from the president. Maybe a second term would have been worse though if certain functions started to decay though.
Half the Harvard incoming class is also anathema to the idea of meritocracy.
It's a school where (only slight exaggeration) the median freshman is a reasonably smart but not a genius wealthy person who is in the school because they are good at sailing and can be part of the sailing team.
I agree wholeheartedly with both of your points. In fact, many tried to claim Trump's position in college was also unearned (I recall his niece said he cheated on his SATs). I'm just saying why I think people who might otherwise have voted Republican turned on Trump specifically.
“Trump is seen as anathema to the idea of meritocracy.”
So is Harvard, apparently. Otherwise they’d admit more Asians and fewer legacies.
Or Harvard is the pinnacle of meritocracy. Thus the elite can have their children assured entrance even years after their passing.
I understand your argument, but I disagree (and know that others will likewise disagree with me). The open borders mischaracterization of the Dems' policy is straight out of Fox News. As for abortion, yes, lots of people use this justification. I'm just telling you from my personal relationships with highly educated Christian conservatives, this wasn't enough to outweigh all of Trump's sins. Some went for Biden, some wrote in someone like Mitt Romney, some abstained, most voted for down ballot Rs, but none pulled the lever for Trump.
Not disagreeing about Hillary... I was referring more to the 2020 election than 2016. The hatred for Hillary ran deep and I was far more sympathetic to people overlooking Trump's flaws against her than against Biden.
Interesting stats on political opinion in the elite universities, but I'd really like to know the comparison between places like, say, Oklahoma State University and BYU compared to their surrounding communities. Those are the schools that will produce local elites. If they're trending relatively liberal, that suggests some interesting divisions in coming years.
But in general, this increasing polarization between college vs non-college and urban vs rural is truly the marker of our times. It's helped lead to this weird political environment where Republicans think electoral success should be indefinitely based on threading the needle of winning by losing the popular vote and squeezing their (diminishing?) advantage in political maps, whereas many Democrats think that a paper-thin victory means the conditions are perfect to pass the most ambitious domestic agenda since the New Deal. One of them is living in a dream world, though more likely both.
The NYTimes precinct map project, if its data are accurate, is useful for this. (I've heard skepticism that they can't actually have gotten the data they claim to have, because at least for 2016 they got it from a MA student in geography who claimed to have it all, and other friends that have worked at big political geography organizations said it was difficult for their teams to compile this data from 50 different states.)
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/upshot/2020-election-map.html
Texas A&M (Zip code 77840) is mostly composed of precincts that voted about 58-40 for Biden over Trump even though Brazos county went 42-55 for Trump. I teach at this university, so I've paid attention to it - in 2016 I believe the margin around campus was much narrower, and Trump won the county by a wider margin, so there was a similar split between students and the county.
Oklahoma State (Zip code 74075) seems to have precincts that were more like 53-45 for Biden over Trump even though Payne County went 36-60 for Trump.
Brigham Young University (Zip code 84602) seems to have precincts that Trump won something like 50-45, and Trump won Utah County 68-27.
Remarkably, they all seem to have about 18 points more vote for Biden and 15 points fewer votes for Trump compared to the surrounding county, despite being at different points on the political scale.
I'm not certain I found the right precincts for each university. Most of the precincts I found had only a few hundred votes for each candidate, though there was one precinct in Brazos County that I know is full of student apartments that had several thousand votes for each candidate. The precincts I found in Brazos County probably only account for a total of 10-20,000 student votes - I'm not sure if that's the vast majority of votes from a student body of 70,000. I don't know how many students there are at the other two universities.
I wonder to what extent commuter schools differ from those where students live on or near campus: would we find that that they tend to be more like the community as a whole, or are their students also more likely to vote further left than non-students? That might give some interesting insight into peer effects, though it's likely intractable to get the data for it....
Great info!
Damn, I am late to the party. As a semi-conservative, here are my thoughts.
1. I'm not sure that Trump is a good representation of conservative leanings, since... well he was a pretty horrible conservative. Assuming these Ivy League dudes are all smart (despite what we see on Twitter.... kidding), I assume that if conservative, they would be more logical conservatives, and less likely to have voted for Trump.
2. I used to call myself Republican/Conservative, but quite frankly, Trump embarrassed me so much that I don't really identify as that anymore. I was always a swing voter, but I am a lot swingier than I was pre-Trump.
3. Anyway, this whole conservative/liberal things is going to balance out sooner or later. Positions will get adjusted naturally.
4. Anyway, my daughter who is elite college bound is Vice President of the Young Democrats Club. Her best friend is the President. I've had a few conversations with them, and their liberalism doesn't run super deep. At least she will fit in with whatever University she ends up at.
5. I suspect that 20% of all Democratic Professors and students are really conservative anyway if you got them pinned down on the issues.
Hell, 20% of the time, I am pretty sure our own Matty here is conservative.
I'm only conservative by academia standards, but you'll appreciate that I kind of upset my fellow professor today by telling him that I don't support mask mandates. Note that I've been happily working in person the entire pandemic whereas he only comes in once in a blue moon.
I hate masks. People are surprised that I support vaccine mandates but not mask mandates. I justify it by saying that vaccines are way more effective, but the truth is… I just fucking hate them so much. Besides, I’m vaccinated so I really don’t care about other people. Anyone who is not vaccinated at this time yes taking their own risk. And anyone under the age of 12 is at less risk than a vaccinated adult.
Mask mandate privilege
I've been kind of ambivalent about them (seeing them as mostly pointless but annoying at worst), until I recently went on an in-person visit to another university. I had to wear a mask the entire day while talking to others, and I ended up hoarse and with a sore throat that took about a day to get over.
I feel your pain. I’m in Argentina, and they have 100% mask mandate everywhere. Even outside. I hate when I exert myself a little bit, it’s super hot here, it just makes me feel like I’m suffocating
I'm watching our fair host give a talk* and he just said "turns out to be hard to talk at length in a mask - I hadn't really tried it." I feel vindicated! 😂
*https://www.gvsu.edu/hc/module-events-view.htm?siteModuleId=2C5125A7-B7A9-5FEB-4D1655B86DF0EF04&eventId=1A5FFED8-9EBB-8E55-A06414DFD971D67C
#maskmadateprivilege The people saying its no big deal work in offices or cubicles where they can remove it when no one is around. They wear it into the restaurants and then remove it. They wear it during their 25 minute shopping trip. But they expect the servers and janitors and cooks and cashiers and stockers to wear it full time.
When they complain... wearing a mask is no big deal, it doesn't bother me.
Sorry, but anyone who uses the line “our school/company should reflect our community/nation” as justification for race-based hiring/admissions is gonna have a hard time justifying those numbers.
It's "Under Represented Minority" in some parts of the private sector now so the goal posts may be shifted according to job family. I'm an Over Represented Minority, therefore, I have nothing to fear :)
As a white female engineer, I get to count as an underrepresented majority :)
Or a unicorn.
I mean, there’s 10 or so of us.
In the world, yes, I know. I'm a semiconductor design engineer and I haven't seen one since uni.
I feel like being in a group that's polarized creates a feedback loop where it polarizes its members even further.
https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/law_and_economics/542/
very interesting! thanks
How do you spell “swath”?
>>>The actual, concrete electoral gains to Republicans from various measures to make it harder to vote are imperceptibly small, if they exist at all. So what is the point of pushing measures that make you look like an authoritarian menace? <<<
My perception is that wide swaths of the right in America *genuinely* belief the progressive agenda (more or less social democracy) is either profoundly morally flawed or actually violates the constitution. Liberals think right wing policies are bad or ill-advised, but generally don't view things through the same sort of lens as conservatives.
So for people on the right, preventing left of center policies from being enacted and left of center politicians from winning elections equates to defending the constitution. Which sometimes means anything goes. And almost always means leaving no stone unturned (including eking out infinitesimal advantages, including of the variety mentioned by Matt here).
I agree that many on the right believe there is a moral imperitive to stopping the left and are willing to go to extremes to do so. That you don't recognize that exists on the left is somewhat astonishing.
It exists, but it’s not as prevalent and certainly doesn’t have nearly as much elite support.
I would actually reverse that. Its not nearly as common among the base on the left than it is on the right. However, while twitter is not real life, it does suggest there is a lot of elite support for progressive moral outrage.
>>>That you don't recognize that exists on the left is somewhat astonishing<<<
That you misquoted me isn't the least bit astonishing, regrettably.
I wrote "wide swaths" when referring to the right. I didn't indicate a similar take is *non-existent* on the left. (Still, where's the left's January 6th?)
I happen to think most policies espoused by the right (sharply smaller public sector, reducing immigration inflows, more regressive tax structure, lax gun regulation, etc) are bad for America and in general make most people's lives less pleasant and less secure. But I don't believe such policies violate the constitution. And I don't know any liberals who do. But the opposite (on the part of the right) is widespread. Hell, for all I know they're *still* probably trying to get the Affordable Care Act thrown out!
I agree that the left is less concerned with the constitutional aspects. However, the moral condemnations that the left has for the right are as intense if not more than the reverse. How many times have progressives called conservatives: misogynistic, racist, greedy, heartless, nazis, etc. just on this relatively moderate forum? Those aren't the terms of gentle disagreement.
That implies that people on the right don't actually believe elections are being "stolen" from them, they just say it to justify their anti-democratic end-around. But I think one of the things that has surprised me a lot lately is just how much they really do believe it!
Insofar as they don't want everyone to vote, I have heard the argument from some that one should have to be sufficiently informed about issues to earn the right and erecting barriers makes it more likely the voters will be.
I don't claim to be able to read the minds of the right wing masses. It certainly appears lots of MAGA foot soldiers in fact believe Biden didn't actually win.
But I don't think for a second GOP *elites* in the main believe this to be the case. And yet significant numbers of them appear willing to both spread Trump's Goebbelsian lies and lay the legal framework for elections nullification. Maybe they're just supremely machiavellian. Or perhaps they think the liberal policies Democrats try to enact violate the constitution. Or a combination of both. But something is causing them to have no use for democracy.
I'm just speculating, but I'm not sure they care enough about power (beyond their own position) to actively try to steal elections for the party; if anything, it seems the party in the minority has more fun.
Nonetheless, many feel the best way to keep their position is to play to the base and, I imagine, some are genuinely worried about threats to their lives (for example, look at the people yelling in Lindsay Graham's face at the airport after Jan. 6). That being said, so far at least, when elected officials are playing with live ammunition instead of just messaging, they've done the right thing.
I certainly don’t think the framers were trying to create a framework for democratic socialism or social denocracy. Deferring to the constitution is conservatism by default
>>>I certainly don’t think the framers were trying to create a framework for democratic socialism or social denocracy.<<<
Nor I.
I believe the framers were largely silent with respect to the economic arrangements of a society two centuries after they'd finished writing. It's clear many people on the right, though, believe the constitution as properly construed requires libertarian economic policies.
And of course, the framers left lots of levers available to rewrite the constitution. So the intent of the framers was to make it clear that they didn't really know best.
It seems to me that this is being driven by ever-growing Republican / "movement conservative" hostility to the concept of objective truth, which has been growing for decades. Go back and look at Reagan trying to prevent C. Everett Koop from publishing true results about the health harms of cigarettes, or the safety of abortion procedures. (My dad was an officer of the Public Health Service, and noted that Koop was himself a quite "morally conservative" Christian, but he was also a good doctor and a good scientist, and was unwilling to _lie_ for political allies.)
The GOP has turned itself into the capitalist equivalent of the Soviet regime that wanted to sweep Chernobyl under the rug. A disaster would embarrass the party, therefore there can be no disaster.
They like to accuse liberals of "political correctness", but that's a form of projection. They are in fact master practitioners of political correctness as practiced in the regime that originated that term. It is inconvenient for coal and oil donors that climate change is a thing? Fine, climate change is a hoax. Or maybe it's real, but it's caused by some solar cycle, not by humans. Or if it's caused by GHG emissions, then doing something about it would be economically ruinous. Oh, solar and wind are cheaper than coal now? Well, wind is responsible for the Texas blackouts. (narrator: Gas plants under-performed and wind over-performed relative to utility projections for this scenario.)
Trump turns this stuff up to eleven -- he can never fail, only be failed -- but it long pre-dates him. Conservative media outlets have long been funded by laughably dishonest marketing for snake oil, or get-rich-quick schemes. You see high ranking Republicans like Paul Ryan shilling for faddish exercise or diet plans.
It is impossible to be a person who cares about rational inquiry of any kind, and retain respect for people like this. It didn't have to be this way. Tucker Carlson is not a stupid man -- back when he was bemoaning the fact that the NYT skews liberal, and talking about founding a serious conservative media outlet, he was absolutely correct. But he _didn't_ found a conservative response to the NYT. He founded the Daily f***ing Caller, because flattering people's false assumptions, by nut-picking stories to misrepresent weird fringe cases as the norm, or just giving people outright-false information, _is profitable_. Conservative media has a "Market for Lemons" problem, or a Gresham's Law problem. A large, profitable audience has been trained to only accept outlets that confirm their biases as legitimate, so an outlet that ever lets reality intrude will be cast out in favor of something crazier, as we're seeing now with NewsMax and OANN starting to eat into Fox's market share, because Fox has not always 100% acquiesced to Trump's delusions.
I would be thrilled to see a party, and accompanying media ecosystem, that stood in meaningful opposition to the Democrats. Something that would be a comfortable fit for the Davids French, Aviks Roy, and Reihans Salam of the world. There absolutely are "conservative" ideas worth having in the public debate. Chesterton's Fence is a good principle to keep in mind! But if we cannot have a conversation in which both sides agree that their own claims are falsifiable, and everyone has to bring evidence, then what is even the point? How can academia possibly accommodate people who want to ban academics from studying things, rather than accept that their preferred policies might have costs? (It's not even like knowing the costs would be the end of the conversation -- maybe you can make an argument that the cost is worth it. But they want to just suppress the evidence, because they're afraid if people understood the stakes, they might lose.)
The bigger issue is that this type of educational polarization is happening outside the U.S. in Europe too, so there must be structural issues explaining this that are broader than the idiosyncrasies of American politics.
True, it's more about matters of degree. The right half of the political spectrum everywhere is a mix of actual conservatism (of the Burkean variety) and reactionary cultural populism.
But why in the US does the mix tilt so far towards reactionary cultural populism, unlike say Boris Johnson's Conservative Party or Conservative opposition to Justin Trudeau?
Probably partly a legacy of the civil rights movement, which is fading, and abortion providing an easy rallying point for culture warriors since the Court put actual abortion politics out of bounds, unlike say gay marriage where the right had no choice but to change with the times or pay a tangible political price.
I think the answer to your question, Allan, lies in the difference between parliamentary democracy and our winner-take-all system. We have more powerful structural incentives for “reactionary cultural populism.”
Agree there are likely structural explanations, but I wouldn't describe our system as winner-take-all in comparison to parliamentary systems, more the opposite. Winning control of the government in a parliamentary system tends to be a unitary thing - the party or coalition that wins really does take it all. But just at the federal level in our system there are effectively four independent branches of government - President, House, Senate and Supreme Court - and it's very hard to win them all.
Trying to get conservative justices is “actual abortion politics” n’est pas?
Yes poor word choice - meant policies not politics. Crusading over the composition of the Court is at best a rough proxy for actual regulation on abortion enacted by legislatures.
Notice, all it took was the Court declining a preliminary injunction against the Texas law for the House to pass a bill codifying abortion rights in a way that is likely broadly popular. There would probably be some further adjustments through the democratic process, but battling over legislative language is less dysfunctional than battling over lifetime appointments to a nine-member court.
There's no moral difference between abortion at 9 months and very generous "stand your ground" and "castle doctrine" bills. Both allow you to be legally absolved for intentionally killing a person that you legitimately fear will cause you some discomfort and possibly economic loss or injury.
And abortions at 9 months are very rare and almost never happen except under hard circumstances where the parents are presented with no good options, possibly one of which involves making orphans of already born siblings. Better to let those closest to the situation decide. But by the same token, it's not very plausible to read the Constitution as dictating a particular answer in those cases.
I followed your link and they define "late-term" as after 20 weeks (based on Roe). There's a large gap between 20 weeks and 34-36.
I don't see where that link covers anything about 9 months.
I think it's understandable to be opposed to abortions after 12-16 weeks, but I don't think it's accurate to lump reasons for abortions at 20 weeks with abortions at 36.
double plus like!