441 Comments

This hits on an underlying theme of much of Matt’s writing: there’s something fundamentally unlikable about many American leftists. Figure out how to be more relatable/likable/normal and win more elections.

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Its worth trying to empathize with the spankers. Physical discipline is probably more effective in the short term. I tell my eight year old to control his voice multiple times a day. Usually, he deflects, sometimes he even makes fun of me by repeating what I say in an hysterical falsetto. I bet he wouldn’t do that if I popped him a few times! I might also extract more domestic labor from him if I used a broader spectrum of coercion.

I stick to the mildest forms of coercion because my child can “fail” safety. But if my respectability were hanging by a thread and I were afraid of social services being called if we didn’t hold the line, or I needed Charlie to do the laundry because I were working two jobs, or even if I spent much of my weekends doing chores because we couldn’t afford help, I might give more weight to the short term efficacy of spanking and worry less about modeling non-violence.

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The seasoned politician's advice to the novice:

"In a life of public service, the most important thing is sincerity.

Once you can fake that, the rest is easy."

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The subtitle to Matt’s article should be: Why Liberals Should Live in Suburban Georgia. I am friends with Christians, spankers, anti-vaxers and election deniers. They all have responsible jobs or are married to a man who does. Most of them even bathe and suckle their young. The median human brain is capable, under certain conditions, of rationalizing slavery, mass poverty, endemic warfare and even ritual suicide. Nor do most cosmopolitans values hold up that well once you dig deep. It’s easy to be anti racist when you have fancy degrees and are expecting a moderate inheritance, harder when you are scrambling for housing and health insurance.

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Aug 18, 2022·edited Aug 18, 2022

I find Americans aversion to atheism truly puzzling. Especially in recent years, when the secularization gap with Europe is fast closing down it’s kind of shocking that it’s so rare among political elites (and to a lesser extent the public) to be “out” as an atheist (indeed , that one even has to use the term “out” in this context. )

And the 2018 Bible poll is truly shocking to me. I attribute it, at least in part, to the fact that the Bible is not taught in American public schools. That’s bad. Ignorance is never the answer.

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I think the most successful way out of this problem is to pick candidates who personally and biographically over-identify with the "easy" but broadly held values, like patriotism, faith, hard work, etc. So candidates like Tammy Duckworth, or Jon Tester, or Warnock like Matt says. That's probably not enough in every case, but it seems more plausible than finding some literal creationist candidates.

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I want to be able to marry a nice partner, have kids and raise them in a stable home. To do that I'll have to work hard. But if I do work hard, I want to be able to attain my modest goal. If some catastrophe happens to me or mine, I want some underlying help from those who haven't been stricken. The goal of the government should be to make it more likely that I can reach my goal. The Dems should say this over and over.

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There was always a contempt for normie and/or working class people (that most of us felt they started!), that many on the left knew enough to keep hidden. (I say this as someone from a low SES background who, in my younger days, very much had contempt for the people I grew up around.) Especially among my fellow liberals who come from that world and felt they had to fight their way out, but certainly not exclusive to them/us. Trump caused a lot of people to bring it out in the open.

A thing that’s pointed out here that many can’t seem to grasp. Working class people of all races have more in common with one another than they do with high SES liberals, and sometimes when lefties show contempt for norms associated with “working class whites”, people of other races are identifying more with the people held in contempt than with the people who claim to be speaking for members of their race.

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I don't know if Matt is a big Orwell guy, but the end of The Road to Wigan Pier is an exhortation for just this sort of "meet people where they are" rhetoric—Orwell pleads with leftists to stop with the various faddish crankeries (vegetarianism and nudism, for instance) and to make their language more plainspoken, less academic. This critique was so painful that the Left Book Club didn't want to publish it at all; they ended up publishing it with an introduction that denounced the critical ending.

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It sounds like that Democratic Party official has perhaps unknowingly adopted a piece of Stancil-Beutler Thought. I suspect what those guys would say is that the *reason* why so many Americans have conservative values is that Democratic politicians don't speak proudly and assertively enough about progressive values - that if Democrats did that, they would change many people's minds and get them to adopt better values. That seems nuts to me but that's the root belief that needs to be debunked: that political debate is causal of people's values.

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I'm a little disappointed in the tenor of some of these comments. I'm all for empathy with the spankers of the world, but where is the sympathy for the cosmopolitans rather than the now de rigueur sneering leftward of SlowBoring comments?

Their values many not be widely shared by voters, but they are good values and deeply felt! We should try to follow the evidence and, relatedly, the Bible really is just a book a fables and ought not to shape public policy! America is in the upper quartile of places I'd like to live but it IS a bit silly to lionize it as a magical city on a hill! We really should extend equal respect to homosexual and other alternative romantic relationships as we do for the straights! Free movement of peoples across borders is a good thing! It's laudable to want to support the poorest members of society! It's generally *not* great to hit your kids!

It probably is annoying, difficult, and psychologically and morally trying to pretend to be a rube, simply because the median voter is (one of the many, many reasons I am not a politician).

I'm a libertarian crank myself, but not because I think "those silly woke-mob communist leftists" have evil values. I just don't think their policies are likely to advance those values.

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Aug 18, 2022·edited Aug 18, 2022

One huge factor is the social Darwinism aspect to these values. In terms of financial and educational success, healthy long term relationships, etc. etc. The lived experience of those with cosmopolitan values is better. The proof, as they say, is on the pudding.

That drives a lot of partisan rancor.

George Lopez has a bit in his standup routine about how white kids start talking at 8 months old. What he’s referring to is more of a class issue. Matt doesn’t spank but I bet he and his wife talk to their kid a lot - compared to working class and poor parents. They negotiate, they bargain, they plead and the end result is a more verbally precocious child. That is very beneficial in our current economic and educational environment.

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I'm pretty surprised that no one (either Matt in the article, or anyone in the comments thus far) has observed that Blacks are the highest pro-spanking demographic.

I first learned about this eight years ago via the NFL, when star running back Adrian Peterson was charged with child abuse after disciplining his four year child. This led to a fascinating debate between Charles Barkley (who's from Alabama) and Jim Rome. I'm someone who's very, very anti-spanking, but listening to Barkley here was definitely exposing me to knowledge I was not aware of.

https://youtu.be/MWpe8eONOWk?t=57

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Aug 18, 2022·edited Aug 18, 2022

I mean, don't take it from me, but if there was a single value Democrats were going to rally behind, it should be "equality" as in "all men are created equal," and then proceed to interpret that across the spectrum depending on their particular issue and constituency. Racial equality, gender equality, economic equality, equality of opportunity, equality before the law, equal compensation for work, equal policing and incarceration, equal taxation, equal representation, equal access to elections, equal lobbying ability as a workers union, equal access to education, equal access to healthcare, equal access to freedom of movement, etc.

While the Rebs want to double down on autocracy, aristocracy, and the good ole boys club, Dems can make this their banner principle in a very patriotic way. Maybe even champion the rest of the original proclamation with a focus on being "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

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Aug 18, 2022·edited Aug 18, 2022

I feel like I have this argument at least once a month with some liberal friend. The common refrain for them is “oh, so we should just lie about what we believe!?”

It’s a difficult thing to square and the virtue signaling thing has become a rip current for liberals dragging us all out to sea by our CRT fee fees. I hope more liberals see the reason in stressing the “hand up not hand out” or liberaltarian type rhetoric.

Some people want to basically point to accepted racist compromise for Democratic Party dominance in the last century and that’s partially true but it’s also true that folks like my grandad were much more pro worker while also “sounding” a lot more conservative.

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>>the values of secular cosmopolitan liberals are much more marginal than many people realize<<

Is this true, though? At any one moment in time, I think so yes, but it changes as time's arrow flies.

Take spanking. Beyond the fact that the group differences in today's post don't seem *that* large to me, what is really striking is how quickly the population is moving away from spanking as a parental tool. One study followed a very large cohort of Americans and found that their use of spanking fell more than a third (50% to 35%) over just 17 years (1993 to 2010). https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abstract/2768829

One imagines that there was at least a similar decline in the previous 17 years, and so on as we go back. The society, in Pinker-like fashion, is moving strongly against corporal punishment.

We don't really know why this is, except that liberal values have a way of permeating through all levels of society -- take gay marriage (or interracial marriage for that matter). It's probably smart for liberals not to lecture the general population about spanking during a political campaign, but at the same time what we're probably seeing is other "elites" -- your family pediatrician up to the American Academy of Pediatrics -- telling parents that it is a bad idea.

So I guess I'm in agreement with this post that liberals shouldn't tout their values which haven't (fully?) won over non-liberals *in a political campaign* but in other cases liberals should proudly assert those values and know that more often than not, doing so will help move society in the direction they see as good.

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