The #1 housing charity in England published a policy paper stating that if done by the private sector, a ~75% increase in home construction would not improve affordability, and "evidenced" this claim with a link to a paper that doesn't differentiate between private and public building but does say that increased construction does improve affordability, and cites ~7 different papers quantifying the magnitude.
That's the level of epistemic closure that's been reached, where evidence is used for "support not illumination". You use the language and forms of evidence-based decision making, your talk about analysis and your papers have footnotes, but you're not actually doing it, and your social milieu is so uniform that no-one notices that the emperor has no clothes.
As Matt says I think this is all quite disastrous, hostility to private-sector home construction has not solved the English housing crisis, it's only helped deliver to the worst period of wage stagnation in 200 years.
EDIT: they also play this trick where if you rent housing at below-market rates, that "improves affordability" with no accounting for the cost of the subsidy and the reality that by subsidising housing demand you are actually increasing housing scarcity. Same with massive increase in regulations on landlords. No accounting for the impact on supply from a major increase in compliance costs, or indeed the costs of enforcement. Britain's jails are currently literally full to the point prisoners are being let out early and the courts are also busy, so I wonder who and how exactly will be out there enforcing all these new regulations on landlords.
Oh yeah on a global scale it's incredibly wealthy.
This is a take no one seems to want to say but it's straightforwardly true that being born in America makes you one of the luckiest people on earth, and we should be grateful for being here.
(I guess my unpopular but true opinion is that complaining about, say, having an employer-based health insurance system or having an economy that is less based on manufacturing or resource extraction is the geopolitical equivalent of sitting in first class and complaining about the plane's spotty wifi.)
"...sitting in first class and complaining about the plane's spotty wifi."
Also, the lack of Brazil nuts in the bowl of pre-warmed nuts. Why all of these walnuts and cashews? That lack of Brazil nuts is intolerable deprivation!
"Yes I know you're upset you have student loans or whatever but only by virtue of living in the west were you able to get these opportunities. You live like royalty compared to the vast majority of people who have ever lived." <--- is a message that's unequivocally true but not one people are typically receptive to
No, a CTC would have been a big good deal Schumer would have negotiated a sensible non-intrusive work requirement. And the hostility to his permitting reforms was outrageous. If we could only have had 10 more Manchins!
That's true, but my first instinct when i hear that is to think someone is about to ask or demand i engage in some display of sychophantic reverence for the country.
The right’s problem is that many of its most talented people largely reject credentialed knowledge and are therefore unable to contribute anything intellectually.
This post is illustrating the left’s problem: it launders its credibility for expertise by putting the stamp of credentialed knowledge on subpar research and thinkers. (Think about the entire disciplines of the humanities that are based entirely on obfuscation. Or the legions of social science PhDs who have only a shaky understanding of basic statistical analysis.)
analytic policy discussion as an elaborate Versailles court ritual, where the important thing is demonstrating mastery of the etiquette and shared cultural language of academics and policy nonprofits, and you can get your way by being what is essentially a type of actor
I’m a blue-state science educator who is good at crafting arguments in the required language BUT I also like to be honest. I feel seen by this comment!
Sometimes you ask for civil society to solve a problem and it turns out civil society's chief policy objective is to stick it to the other bits of civil society.
It seems like an oversimplification to portray what has happened as the GOP consolidating all the cranks. That mostly seems to be the anti-vaxxers that used to be non-partisan and now mostly aren't. There are still a lot of domains where left aligned cranks dominate. From degrowthers to Chomsky-ites to gender identity essentialists to 1619/Kendi/Saira Rao style conspiratorial race craft to Briahna Joy Gray Hamas truthers to climate alarmists that's still a whole lot of cranks. They do seem to be less directly active partisan hacks than what the GOP has become, but I feel like that's a somewhat more complicated narrative than what Matt's describing and you really can't just dismiss the way that stuff is deeply embedded in the Dem aligned institutional ether.
Very important to define what it means to dominate the party. There is no one in the democratic caucus that engages in left crankism at nearly the level that republicans do.
Slow Boring's comment section has been full of commentators complaining Warren 2020-esque policy activists have been making inroads with the current Democratic administration for years. The rising influence of what Elizabeth Warren stands in for can be easily demonstrated by looking into a backlog of examples of climate, antitrust, asylum, fiscal stimulus, and gender identity policy given by Matt and others prior to this election year.
Plenty of cranky ways to talk about the world burning up in five years, corporations conquering everything, any hawkish immigration controls being a white nationalist project, Larry Summers just hating unemployed people, etc. If you know where to look, it's easy to find.
The crankishness might also be more a matter of delivery and style, and not substance. Nothing cranky about Medicare 4 All or consumer protection, I don't think.
And walked it back when it got pushback. It could be just simple anchoring to signal that there is a concern for a common complaint and then doing something else to address it.
We saw this with student loan stuff. Vagueness and strategic ambiguity.
Not condoning it. Also this type of conduct is less common than it was in 2020.
I would contest that claim. I haven’t seen her endorse anything particularly cranky - just the first-order “expert” solutions that haven’t been fully tested.
Well, I haven't paid much attention to her in the past few years. But her 2020 primary slogan was "She Has A Plan For That." Crankery suggests incompetence. Whether or not you think her ideas are good, she's obviously incredibly knowledgeable about policy.
Liz Warren is 10% a crank compared to the median Republican politician. But she's still less of a crank than most Social Democratic politicians in Europe (where endless tarrifs, price controls, and productivity controls are the norm, not the exception).
To find ideas comparable to the median member of the GOP caucus in the industrialized world, it's like AfD and no one else
Waltz supported a bill that would allow the State to take 'temporary jurisdiction over custody' of kids from parents who did not want to participate in transitioning their children.
Edit: After a lot of conversation, especially with Dan Quail and FHW, I have revised my opinion of this law. The context is complicated for several reasons and the law is perhaps not as strong as I thought it was when I first read it. I never believed or stated that the State would take the child in order to give them medical treatment, which I think is how my comment was interpreted by some, and the verbatim letter of the law did give me reason to believe that the State would intervene if a parent chose not to participate with a transition. There are related statutes that bear on this, which Dan Quail linked, which clarify this some, and I appreciate the correction on that matter.
Honestly, believing something this ridiculous when it is so easy to verify that it is false is pure crank behavior. Just linking to the bill as proof when the bill doesn't do what you say it does is not evidence.
I'd suggest that it's because over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s child sex abuse became the ultimate trump card of evil in popular entertainment -- even characters who are literal unrepentant serial killers get to be the Good Guy in a White Hat in a story with another character who commits non-fatal child sex abuse.
This is one that does seem to have been part of the realignment. Pre-Q was very bipartisan. Hell Kamala Harris personally led a deranged crusade against backpage .com based in child sex trafficking conspiracies.
They don't have a real policy platform or real ideas that actually appeal to their base, so they have to call their political opponents pedophiles. Their entire caucus is a 2016-era bloodsports debate comment section come to life.
Transitioning for minors is an incredibly complicated, personal issue, that I don't think any party or group has a clear answer on it right now. But I'm very confident that generalized statements like yours don't help anybody.
No? It has long been believed that preventing dysphoric children, specifically the cohort who are highly likely to end up trans, from going through puberty is a highly human course of action.
Transsexual medicine has been around since the 1930s, it's not a bleeding edge field of science where nobody knows anything and everyone who supports anything that doesn't align with common sense is in the throughs of some social media-induced leftist fugue state
You also have seen Republicans embracing radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin, Catherine McKinnon, Julie Bindel, JK Rowling, et all who back in the 1990s were considered sworn enemies of conservatism. I remember when Rush Limbaugh would just decide to spend an entire show back in the 1990s making fun of and going on about the evils of Andrew Dworkin.
Now there are still fans of Dworkin in mainstream left politics like Michelle Goldberg of the NY Times but this is a smaller and smaller group as the GOP goes full Dworkinite.
FWIW, that's a bit of a rewriting of things. Dworkin and MacKinnon absolutely worked with conservatives, decades ago, on anti-porn stuff. Rush Limbaugh, of course, had his whole rap about Feminazis, but, e.g., the Hudnut in American Booksellers Ass'n v. Hudnut was the conservative mayor of Indianapolis, backing MacKinnon's anti-porn legislation.
Radical feminism may be one area where horseshoe theory has real validity, because the fact is that radical feminists do believe in some things, such as the importance and permanence of sex, the reality of sex differences, the exploitative nature of pornography, etc., that social conservatives agree with them on, even if the reasoning behind the beliefs is different.
This is mostly false--some social conservatives have a selective interest in particular views of Dworkin's and MacKinnon's (around sex work) but they have no interest in Dworkin's and MacKinnon's broader views about gender, which are deeply anti-conservative (and not anti-trans). Julie Bindel is a more complicated case and JK Rowling (who I don't really think of as a radical feminist) still more complicated.
The bill specifies “The State shall have temporary emergency jurisdiction if the child is in the state and:…“ is unable to obtain gender-related healthcare…”
Ok, can't edit on phone but this gives the court jurisdiction, not custody
My read is that if one parent brings the child here for gender medical treatment then the court has jurisdiction to grant that parent custody, not to take the child from both parents.
Yes, this confusion was what made me think the law was pretty whacky, but several others pointed to adjoining language which clarified that it is relevant to taking custody until the matter could be resolved in the other state.
I guess I'm still unclear as to if the letter of the law prohibited this section from being applied to instate parents, but I've been persuaded that it probably doesn't.
Particularly when there are real bills passed in R states that actually can result in children being taken away from their parents if they do pursue GAC.
I am not a fan of chemical or surgical intervention in children. Social and psychological interventions and accommodations are fine. (Basically do what Europeans are doing.)
The true galaxy brain take is cranks are sometimes right. William Jennings Bryan, for example, was a crank when he denounced an evolutionary textbook. He was completely morally correct about its racial worldview. Even though evangelicals like Bryan were mocked by the talented columnist H.L. Mencken and at odds with the high intellectual jurisprudence of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., it's actually an affront to God to push racialist ideas in textbooks and it's similarly evil to chemically sterilize mentally troubled (or as they called them at the time, "feebleminded") teenage girls like Carrie Buck. This remains the case even if an expert with a professorship at Harvard Law School says otherwise.
As I understand it, the position of progressives today is that they're totally different from progressives a century ago. After all, Carrie Buck is non-binary, not feebleminded. The government will enact policies to help her get sterilized to actualize her personal identity, not to enact the public health paternalism of a modern society that vaccinates, as Justice Holmes argued. But if you look past the intellectual shift from stern paternalism to therapeutic self-discovery, the net policy is going to be very similar and land hardest on roughly the same sociological cohort of people as Carrie Buck. There is a great deal of irony as California hands out reparations to previous women it sterilized while encouraging Planned Parenthood to hand testosterone to minors alongside litigation against parental authority. But for those few as for Carrie Buck, it is largely a tragedy.
A child does not have the capacity to determine if they suffer from gender dysphoria, and there is no objective test to determine that condition. So the concept of a pre-pubescent trans girl really doesn't exist.
We should really think about a child as a different person than an adult, given the massive changes in physiology to the body and brain that happen during puberty. And a child doesn't have the mental capacity to make permanent decisions based on subjective feelings.
Also, please don't turn today's post into another comment section about "TRANS."
Also also, there are parents out there who, for misguided religious reasons, want to punish their LGBT children, and those parents should absolutely meet the full power and fury of an angry State.
This isn't based in any data. But I imagine there are more LGBT children living in religious households who are scared to come out or face abuse for their sexuality, than instances of children transitioning and then regretting it.
I think that's possible, but I also think we have no idea because we really don't have good statistics on detransitioners because most of them generally stop seeing the doctors who gave them gender health care.
Now note, that point goes both ways-- conservatives who are convinced there are tons of detransitioners are also speaking without any data. Detransition rates could be much higher than reported; they also might not be. And we'd probably have to study it in a jurisdiction that has weak medical privacy laws to have any idea of the real number.
IMHO, the law (i.e., the power of the State) shouldn't supersede parental discretion regarding "gender affirming care," pro or con. After all, such power can cut both ways, depending which political faction happens to be in charge at any given time.
I’ve fought all my adult life to advance a recognition that there's nothing “Queer" about same-sex attraction. I’m attracted to guys; I’ve never hidden that fact, and (as my parents raised me) I’m proud simply to be myself.
OTOH, I never signed up to "smash cisheteropatriarchy" in the name of some Brave New World.
You have it backwards. Not giving "gender-affirming health care" is another way to establish jurisdiction, essentially raising withholding those drugs to the level of child neglect. And the law allows Minnesota to overrule the legal rights of parents outside of Minnesota, even if a court with proper jurisdiction has entered a lawful custody order. It essentially endorses one parent kidnapping their child from one state--against a court order--and bringing the child to Minnesota to seek to transition their child.
I assume you're talking about temporary emergency jurisdiction under 518D.204, not regular jurisdiction (518D.201). If the other state has a custody determination, or if there is an action pending, then temp jurisdiction is limited to " a period...adequate to allow the person seeking an order to obtain an order from the state having jurisdiction". So if the other parent is contesting the move, MN law does not ignore the other state.
Yes, I read it. I'm right and you're wrong. The legislation makes some pretty minor (and probably not very effective) changes to the baseline rules for how to determine which state's courts decide custody disputes. (They're worried about custody disputes being stuck in states that have strong public policies against transition care--while blue states have not done what you accuse Walz of doing, red states have widely banned transition care for minors even when approved by a parent with legal custody and Texas has branded approving parents as child abusers.) It doesn't make any change to the substantive law of custody or the substantive grounds for terminating parental rights. It doesn't take custody from parents at all, that's completely false.
I agree with you that it doesn't make any change to the substantive grounds for terminating parental rights, but I disagree that it makes some pretty minor changes. Long-established principles of inter-state child custody establish that one parent cannot unilaterally move the child to a new state and have that new state's courts have jurisdiction. 49 states have enacted the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act (UCCJEA), and this is a pretty dramatic departure from that. It is also in tension with the principles of the federal Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act, although I'm not sure if it conflicts with the letter of it.
I’d have to see more details on this (it’s probably a stretch of a clause letting CPS intervene when the safety of a child is the result of gender identity stuff.)
That clause applies in the case of child abandonment, safety/abuse/neglect, OR not being able to receive "gender-affirming health care." Not being able receive "gender-affirming health care" is sufficient for the clause to apply--abandonment or neglect is not required.
But the clause doesn't automatically take the kids away. It gives temporary jurisdiction in Minnesota courts over the child. It applies when, for instance, one parent brings the child to Minnesota to receive "gender-affirming health care" as part of a child custody dispute, even when a court in another state with proper jurisdiction has ordered that no such health care be applied. I think it is a pretty radical overreach as far as inter-state court jurisdiction battles go, but it does not automatically remove children from their parents for refusing to trans their child.
I think Ben's right that cranks have more dominance in the GOP.
As I say in another comment, there's some good evidence that this is fundamentally driven by the number of safe seats. That's where your MTGs, Boeberts, and Gaetzes are coming from. And that's where Trump gets his footsoldiers in Congress.
Dems have plenty of safe seats too, that's not what changed. Safe red seats have started to produce cranks in Congress because crank voters have moved to the GOP. It's mostly because of Trump.
Since the '90s, we've gone from having more Democratic to more Republican safe seats, as documented by Kustov et al. in "The Rise of Safe Seats and Party Indiscipline in Congress."
It seems that the cranks on the right are embraced and you can be a crank and still have real institutional power. I don’t think you’ll see Kamala campaign with or go on the podcast of a left wing crank.
True enough, but on the other hand someone like Robin DiAngelo or some of the crankier trans activist views (such as about putting opportunistic transitioners in women's prisons) have real clout in the Democratic Party when it comes to policy. Kamala won't campaign with such people but it doesn't mean they aren't a problem.
I’m not sure I agree. Take robin diangelo she released her work during an emotionally charged time to a receptive audience and her work was not vetted or challenged enough per Matt’s analysis on why this happens. Over time though she has become more discredited and last influence.
The number of Dem aligned normies I know who think Starbucks is shipping arms to Israel or some such nonsense is alarming. Damn near all of them read Kendi/DeAngelo/1619. The normie penetration of this stuff is a problem even if it's not taken as rigorous policy analysis.
Dave - are there any examples of any prominent mainstream democrats advocating for the Israel/starbucks thing or even allying themselves with someone who does even if they do not address the issue head on?
The public face of each party is important, but this wildly overstates their significance in a country where most of the substantive work happens behind the scenes during interactions between staffers, a country with a huge bureaucracy, and an enormous network of legal / non-governmental organizations performing para-governmental functions.
Right. There's no equivalent of Qanon in Democratic power circles. Also, the the hardcore left is enthusiastically hateful of the Democratic Party, and many will vote for Jill Stein or Cornell West. That's just not the situation on the right: the overwhelming bulk of even the most virulently radical, white supremacist hard rightists are loyal foot solider for their God-Emperor, Donald Trump.
Eventually. But she had a massive amount of influence on DEI policies in the meantime and her acolytes made policy in the agencies for Obama and Biden.
Funny thing is DEI is being cut from lots of places because it is mostly a consulting grift that doesn’t materially improve things and the economy is slowing.
Perhaps we're indeed on a downward trend toward cultural cooling - but if that's to proceed, it doesn't help matters (or decrease polarization) when an entire (surprisingly broad) range of perspectives is derided as "stupid," or when those holding any such perspectives are dismissed as "cranks."
I do think we need to be vigilant and outspoken (this was the real failure post-2016, adults being afraid to speak up), because watching nonsense gain traction has been exactly like watching Republicans in the 2000s to early 2010s.
I think both parties are vulnerable to cranky ideas and groups. The big difference is that the Democrats, unlike the Republicans, have some ability to self-correct.
Robin DiAngelo is a perfect example. In the mass hysteria following George Floyd she (along with Kendri) obtained a ridiculous amount of prominence. I would argue that both of them have seen a drastic reduction in their influence.
If that isn't sufficient evidence, well then I'll give you the 2024 Democratic National Convention. USA! USA!
Nobody doubts that Harris' speech is a useful corrective. But a lot of folks who staff Democratic administrations in key positions (including the current one, and, one assumes, a future Harris administration) believe in a bunch of that stuff and it makes it way into policy.
The thing is, the bureaucracies in Dem administrations are still being staffed with the sorts of people who think (or at least pretend to think) that GLAAD's claims about the NY Times were correct.
For instance, whatever you think of the bounce back and forth on Title IX policies between administrations, those policies are being made by the people who I am talking about.
What is the population that makes up that bureaucracy though? I suspect its filled of highly educated people who are politically and socially aligned with progressive viewpoints - of which this is a part!
I would say it’s almost the opposite. We’re talking about the epistemic worlds of the left and right, not the political worlds. The epicenter of institutional power in the left’s epistemic world is Harvard/the NYT/etc. rather than Kamala.
Viewed this way, there are *tons* of cranks with institutional power on the left. The right has no epistemically important institutions, so there are few right-wingers with power in epistemic institutions almost by definition.
Yea I mean I just don’t think it’s the same at all. I don’t think Harvard faculty and students should have free reign over government policy and have some bad ideas (as does anyone insular group) but I don’t think being a crank gets you power at Harvard or the NYT. Being more into Elizabeth Warren than then general public is not the same as retweeting Alex jones.
Plus a lot of what is studied at Harvard has no real policy implications (at least not for policies that are important to federal spending or economic/foreign policy outcomes). If an art history professor at Harvard who specializes in tapestries has some loony lefty economic beliefs, just because they're a Harvard professor doesn't mean that anyone are going to take those beliefs seriously.
And in fact it’s valuable to have loony ideas within every intellectual discipline, precisely because it enables criticism and the breaking up of groupthink. And occasionally some loony ideas are right, like the idea that humans are descended from ape like creatures, or that the continents used to touch or that the voting system we use might not be the best at representing the public interest.
And this would be bad if Harvard produced graduates who then went and defined the culture. But instead, most Harvard graduates get jobs in business consulting and finance and their only real concern is climbing the greasy money pole.
Don't they do both? A majority of Harvard grads definitely go into consulting/finance/tech/etc. But aren't Ivy leaguers also wildly over-represented in cultural institutions (media/academia/etc.)?
True, the left cranks influence Dem politics through institutional power mostly in law, media and academia. Even the most insane right wing conspiracists like Alex Jones are also basically open GOP hacks at the same time.
If they have such influence over Democrats, why won't Democrats hire or elect them to anything? Why do the nuttiest Democrats keep losing their primaries to moderates? Why can't we just judge the supposed extremism of the Democratic Party by looking at the corpus of the Democratic Party? Youve got a preferred conclusion, and you're nust nutpicking random academics or bad-take NPR clickbait to try to support it.
Vince, I'll give more credence to your disclaimer when I see more Democratic politicians denounce those academics (e.g., Kendi) and/or disavow the sorts of crap dished out by NPR.
At age 74, I'm not cruising around taking random potshots. I'm an old-style Boomer liberal (no wokester, but no Trumpster). I know where I stand -- and I'll stand by what I wrote.
To put it simply, we could stand another "Sister Souljah" moment. I'll grant you that the tone of Kamala's acceptance speech was a good start.
Obviously there are still SOME cranks on the left, but it's not just anti-vaxxers that have switched. If you said that 9/11 was an inside job in 2005 you were almost certainly a Democrat. If you say it today you are almost certainly a Republican, even though the "inside job" conspiracy is an anti-GOP belief. The same is true of a whole range of other anti-government and anti-corporation conspiracy beliefs that used to be specifically left-wing coded.
The only view there that I think is crank-y is the 10/7 denialism (which, like BJG herself, has a complicated relationship to left/right divides). Being badly wrong in how you interpret and understand facts is not the same as being a crank
Interesting. I've always viewed crankery as "combining facts with an extremely flawed Bayesian updating process to reach terrible conclusions." E.g., most 9/11 conspiracy theorists know WAY more facts about 9/11 than I do. But they wildly over-extrapolate from those facts to reach insane conclusions.
How do you view crankery? Is an element of bad faith necessary?
Crankery tends to involve a false sense of subject-matter expertise, based on shortcuts. You learn a handful of obscure facts (some of which are simply false) and use them as trump cards in any debate with a normie. "I can't believe you didn't know about the radio messages about WC7," "You don't even know about the Lancet study?," "You didn't know about the novel spike protein on SARS Cov-2?", etc. To my mind, the average crank knows, like, a half dozen facts like that, and has zero familiarity with counterarguments. Any debate turns into a mess of moving field goals and subject changes, especially if you try to get them to address the big picture.
The problem remains that what's being characterized here as an "epistemic" divergence stems from a pre-existing disparity between conceptual vocabularies and/or cosmologies.
There are always competing paradigms in every academic field, and most views that are well supported at any time turn out to be badly and fundamentally wrong, without having been crankish. The Ptolemaic geocentrists weren’t cranks, and the initial heliocentrists like Giordano Bruno were. It wasn’t about being right or wrong with the fundamental fact, but how you got there.
Interesting point. Here's how I think about it, which I grant is vague and blurry: some disputes can be resolved pretty definitively and leave no room for dispute among people who have the relevant technical skills and are operating in good faith. Other disputes require judgment calls. Having bad judgment on the judgment calls makes you wrong. Rejecting the definitive resolution where such a resolution is possible makes you a crank.
I suspect that for the vast majority of cranks the conclusion comes first, then the facts are fit to the conclusion. Facts that don't fit the conclusion are never learned or discarded.
It seems like bad faith is ubiquitous, but I figure that must just be a side effect.
Let's distinguish between cranks/crackpots and zealots/lawyers of the cause. The crank is a guy like Steve Kirsch who invents or "innovates" claims like "the ovaries get the highest concentration [of mRNA vaccine particles]"[1]. For every crank there can be up to a million+ zealots/lawyers who pick up, memorize, spread and defend the cranks' claims. But a crank will typically go on doing his thing even if he* has no followers at all (see: trisectors / math cranks).
Angela Collier has a (longwinded) video discussing physics crackpots and it seems like the key thing on her list of "crackpot theory" characteristics[2] is point #3, "respond with anger, claim physics establishment has blacklisted them, cite Galileo/Einstein/etc". They come up with a hypothesis that has serious flaws (whether they be obvious or subtle), and whenever someone points out the flaws they get angry and end up loudly complaining about how they are unfairly persecuted by the arrogant establishment and how the ivory tower's stupid mindless dogma has rotted the brains of everyone except him and his followers (if any).
Of course, this being the internet, most of the criticisms directed at the crank are themselves full of crap, but I remember stories of math cranks who kept going to mathematics professors with their ideas, and did not appreciate being corrected or understand what the professors were telling them. So I'm not sure if it matters whether the criticisms are legit or not, as the crank can't tell the difference one way or another. The very fact that most online criticism is itself pretty illogical inspires me to think that a crank is basically a normal person (just like most of the people pushing back on his nonsense) but with an extraordinary overconfidence in his own mental abilities. Then, from his perspective, everybody else is engaging in bad faith, because they conclude he is wrong when he obviously isn't, which makes him angry, which in turn justifies his own bad-faith behavior.
Cranks exist in every field, though, so the more interesting question is why large groups of people flock to cranks and eat up their every word. This I imagine stems from meme-based reasoning[3]. Meme-based reasoning leads you to assume a left-wing or right-wing worldview according to who your friends happen to be. If you grow up with right-wing friends, you get beliefs like "government bad", "ivory tower bad", "mainstream media bad" and "scientists are untrustworthy", so you look for alternatives. By now, the alternatives are centered around a bunch of cranks. If your thinking is memetic, you lack the mental tools that would ever clue you in that your life is built around cranks, and it seems like "crank" and "conspiracy theorist" are just Establishment slurs for truthtellers.
No, it really isn't. You are describing a tiny minority of people with essentially no power in modern Democratic politics. The GOP is so all-in on deeply unpopular policy that it's basically cranks all the way down at this point.
My personal skeleton key to the modern GOP is that it is an incredibly strong institution with heavily committed and effective grassroots, propaganda, and financial operations, but essentially no intellectual core. Nearly every part of movement conservativism is wildly unpopular at this point, so they are basically an army wandering around trying to find a general. They have periodic dalliances with a serious-seeming flavor of the month, but at the end of the day it's basically a shitposting coalition with no affirmative agenda that is perennially vulnerable to grifters, cranks, and weirdoes.
Yes. This piece does a good job of describing some intellectual failings of the right and left, but Matt argued that they're different in kind, and I'd argue that they're similar.
“The good news for the Federalist Society is that appellate jurisprudence is basically fake, and having judges agree with you about stuff is dramatically more important than having “highly skilled” judges (whatever that means).”
This is so incredibly true I had to thank Matt for writing it before finishing the article.
The "basically fake" claim is deeply ignorant. If the point is that some cases do not have a clearly correct answer, and hence inevitably turn on judges' various predilections, fine.
Conducting a trial involves, among other things, applying the rules of evidence on the fly. This takes technical skill.
Reading the law does not take technical skill! It’s written in English, not Greek. Matt can read the constitution every bit as well as John Roberts. He’s better at analyzing policy.
Thinking the Supreme court has special powers to squeeze meaning out of the constitution is like believing the pontifex maximus can augur the future by butchering animals and looking at their bleeding remains.
By this logic, all of mathematics is an unskilled endeavor.
You have rules (axioms). The most talented mathematicians indeed do squeeze special conclusions (theorems) out of the rules that anyone can read.
I see no reason why the law should be different. Incapable judges won’t be able to draw correct legal conclusions because they aren’t able to notice the contradictions in their own arguments, use thought experiments to probe the soundness of an argument, etc.
If the law were a set of internally consistent axioms or postulates, you would have a point. However, the law is no such thing. It is both organic and contested. The framers had their own visions [sic] of government, then the anti federalists pushed back and the bill of rights happened. The Civil War was not an exercise in applied mathematics, it was a bloody struggle that left a deep imprint upon the constitution. Modus talens won’t take you very far when the premises are indeterminate and their meaning contested
Isn't this argument inconsistent with the facts that SCOTUS decisions are rarely ever 9:0, and judge coalitions differ between cases? If law were like math, there should be unanimous consent.
I appreciate the correction. Also IIRC the stats are in any case skewed by the fact that whether SCOTUS picks up a case depends on the expected voting outcome. That said, when it comes to the law vs. math analogy, you'd need more like 99.99% unanimity rather than 67%.
I understand the rules of basketball and can dribble, pass and shoot. But Erik Spoelstra does have "special powers to squeeze meaning out of the" rules.
Expertise, education and a special mind all combine to make him (and John Roberts) more able to be successful in their field than Matt or me.
The better analogy for Spoelstra is a lawyer, not an judge. Tony Brothers is the better analogue for a judge here. And even in that case, calling things in real-time is what a trial judge does, and doing the video review is the appellate things. So to David Abbott's point above, while there is technical skill (being in the right position, seeing complicated things in real-time and making the right inference) that's fundamental to being a good on-court referee, when it comes to reviewing the tape, any monkey with an encyclopedic knowledge of the rule book can do it pretty well.
And in fact we see NBA refs regularly make wild video review decisions, typically in ways that are self-serving, such as choosing not to overturn a call unless there is no wiggle room for discretion (e.g., a player's foot is obviously out of bounds.)
I think this is deeply part of the problem. If you think Appellate Law is all vibes, then there is no incentive to make a legal argument in dissent. You end up with Sotomayor (and her clerks) in the Immunity case making tweet ready lines in the dissent rather than fighting on the merits of the Majority's understanding of the law. Some of the most important opinions in American history have their antecedents in dissents and concurrences of prior cases. But thinking the entire project is fake and only about counting to 5 neuters this incentive. Matt is 100% correct about functionally affirmative action for people who are right of center with 175+ LSATs in the federal judiciary. But pretending jurisprudence is fake while Fed Soc EXTREMELY does not think its fake does nothing but cede power to them.
"But pretending jurisprudence is fake while Fed Soc EXTREMELY does not think its fake does nothing but cede power to them."
I think Matt would argue that the Fed Soc also thinks it is fake, i.e. a mere pretext for political hardball. But part of the Fed Soc's political hardball is to pretend that it is not fake, i.e. not results-driven, so that they can cover their own political preferences behind a veil of fake high-mindedness.
I'm not saying that's right or wrong, only that part and parcel of Matt's claim that appellate jurisprudence is basically fake is to say that the Fed Soc's sanctimonious pronouncements about the majesty of the law are fake, too.
This is an issue where maybe after the election cycle dominating interest, a long form piece from Matt on this would be helpful to his many apostles here in the comments lol. Knowing Matt's general and professed penchant for literalism, I assumed fake = made up i.e. anyone could do it as suggested in the comments above, not fake as in outside of policy analysis or a mask for it etc.
I think broadly, the center left needs a new and better theory of jurisprudence and federalism in general. Matt didn't say as much but Warren Court jurisprudence was most definitely fake as in without antecedent lol. And it managed to make the country a dramatically more democratic and free place! I am grateful for it! But it wasn't law and it was just vibes, which sparked both the general conservative backlash but also the methodological rise of textualism and originalism several decades ago.
It is impossible to strip away partisan politics, but in abstract, I think what you would want is to imagine how the branches interact with one another. We should want a legislature to play offense, make big sweeping changes and be the center of where policy change happens in the country, the courts to play defense and insure those changes are constitutional to the letter of the law, and the executive to play special teams and set up both the offense and defense to do their respective jobs. We have gotten too far away from that balance.
>I think Matt would argue that the Fed Soc also thinks it is fake, i.e. a mere pretext for political hardball.
But that is precisely the problem. The fact is that there very much are people who care about jurisprudence, and about issues like the proper role of the judiciary in a liberal democracy, etc, and simply dismissing them as fakers who are simply using that to implement their political preferences is lazy and unserious.
“ The fact is that there very much are people who care about jurisprudence,….”
I am sure that there are such people, ie they exist. But the members of the SCOTUS most affiliated with the Fed Soc have thrown away any credibility they may once have had.
I used to think that, but then realized that if Matt wrote a full column on it, it would be about as good as "appellate jurisprudence is basically fake" which tells me Matt is not willing to apply intellectual rigor to something he thinks doesn't have it.
I think he mainly does this to own some people he went to college with. The #1 career benefit of becoming a generalist pundit (or an economist) is that it's like the skeleton key to owning all of your peers who went into other fields, whether it's law, medicine, education, dentistry, or whatever else.
I think part of the problem with this framing is pretending that the current SCOTUS bench is a history-destroying outlier, as if no other SCOTUS bench (right wing or left wing) has ever engaged in sloppy motivated reasoning. Or as if demonstrably bad jurisprudence never gets overturned.
And as some mentioned above, it’s a bit hard to take the critique seriously when left jurisprudence seems just as nakedly results-oriented (albeit with less underlying ideological rigor).
That said, I think in some ways public outcry *is* one of the main error correction mechanisms for SCOTUS. Trial judges make bad (whether biased or just incorrect) rulings all the time. Appellate courts correct those bad rulings all the time. Appellate courts get it wrong too, and SCOTUS often corrects those bad rulings. But SCOTUS is no more immune to bad rulings than any other court, and (as someone else already argued) overturning those requires rigorous and principled opposition, not “Chevron bad because I like regulators better than judges.”
Bad jurisprudence - whether in victory or in dissent - weakens protections and leaves your viewpoint at higher risk of being overturned or undermined. I love Obergefell, but candidly Gorsuch’s argument for LGBTQ protections in Bostock (which IIRC came from Ilya Somin) is far stronger than Kennedy’s.
Applying the rules of evidence on the fly takes technical skill only if the rules mean anything. One could easily argue that the rules of evidence are just as fake as all other laws and trial judges rule on them purely on the basis of manipulating the final outcome of the case, and thus trial jurisprudence is every bit as fake as appellate jurisprudence.
I don't see how this responds to my point. Yes, if Matt were on the Court, I am sure he would do a fine job. But the disagreement is about what the job entails, not about who can do it.
Doubting the validity of law as a vocation that ought to be engaged with seriously on a blog dedicated to embracing the undersubscribed notion that politics is a vocation that ought to be engaged with seriously.
Matt, and this is not an insult, does not understand the minutiae of like patent law, immigration law, and admiralty law. Most of us don't either. Heck, most lawyers don't have a firm grasp of law outside their specialty. There is a reason law schools exist.
I wouldn't limit it to those areas, but rather to almost all areas of the law, including "well known" areas like criminal law and constitutional law.
I recently had a discussion about recent Scotus cases with some people who have STEM PhDs. They seemed to be completely ignorant of the fact that there was been a 200+ year long debate about the proper roles of the legislature and the executive in a democracy.
And, how many highly educated people have an understanding of mens rea, and its relationship to culpability?
Once a case gets to appellate court, the facts are settled, and the arguments are about the relevant law. If Matt is saying that law is fake, then I don't know what his point is.
I'm also here to complain about this bad take. It's not 100% false and I think I know what he means, but it's exactly the kind of hyperbole for which he often scolds leftist groups. We can sanewash it - I like your version fine - but Matt has consistently pushed back against saying things in need of sanewashing. He should follow his own advice and instead say something less engaging but more accurate.
What was wrong with the judge quality comment? If you gave all left-handed lawyers judgeships and the best 1/9th right handed lawyers judgeships you'd have equal numbers of both but the right handed judges would of course on average be better, you took the best out of a larger pool. (Assuming handedness has no bearing itself on quality)
In my experience most cases turn out in pretty predictable ways, and turn more on the facts than the law. This of course does not make the headlines and remains invisible to most people. Where I believe there's a problem is that the federal judiciary increasingly comes from a small number of Ivies, where as best as I can tell the way they've learned to think is increasingly abstract and 'made up.'
Despite the presence of yale/harvard on SCOTUS, Ivy league law school is much less of an operative category than the T-14, which probably does overwhelmingly populate A.III appointments.
I love the polls that ask people to rank the top law schools in the country. Princeton is inevitably in the top five even though it has never had a law school.
Textualism and originalism are different. Textualism looks only at the text. Originalism looks to the “original understanding” and leans on things like the Federalist Papers and the acts of the first Congress to further specify the original understanding.
Neither of these projects really requires much training. Most law schools only require a single semester of constitutional law. I took an additional semester of constitutional history— which is far more interesting because it is empirical rather than metaphysical.
One thing that should probably be noted here is that the "appellate bench" is mostly state court judges who are most certainly not majority-Ivy (or T-14) educated. This entire conversation today appears to be limited exclusively to the federal appellate bench.
I don't think so. Matt's being a bit flippant here, sure. But it's not deeply ignorant to note that many jurists read whatever policy preferences they like into the constitution.
It seems like your second sentence concedes that most cases that rise to appellate review will be settled by the judge's political 'predilections', not by scholarship or "legal skill".
1. I very intentionally said "some cases", not "most cases." I also very intentionally said "various predilections" rather than "political predilections." See, eg, Justice Sotomayor's comment about "wise Latinas." Eg, I taught high school for many years in high school. Were I on the bench, I am more likely than John Robert's to think, "hm, how will this rule we announce affect urban youth?"
2. No one who has read oral argument transcripts or read many judicial opinions would conclude that judges generally do anything other than struggle in good faith with difficult issues.
So, if I understand you, Matt's charge that appellate jurisprudence is "basically fake" represents deep ignorance on his part because only some cases are settled on the basis of the judge's individual predilections, which may be political or non-political predilections. Fair enough.
I'm less impressed with the argument that judges "struggle in good faith with difficult issues," because good faith and sincerity have never prevented someone from acting in ways that reflect their deepest predilections.
>good faith and sincerity have never prevented someone from acting in ways that reflect their deepest predilections.
Perhaps, but it seems to me that judges are MORE likely to ignore those predilections than most people. Judges decide cases where they disagree with the underlying policy all the time! Justice Scalia was no fan of flag burning or criminals, after all.
Re: your last sentence, I think what you're maybe not considering is that judicial review worked better when American society was less partisan and less polarized. But its highly subjective nature functions less well when judges become simply Blue or Red team tribe members.
The SC decides virtually every major, culture-war case exactly on party lines. The appellate courts mostly do too. Judicial supremacy advocates want us to be blind and somehow ignore this reality in front of our eyes
And the oral argument point is crucial. Judges DO struggle with the implications of their decisions in future cases.
Now to be fair, some courts, like the 5th Circuit, have become so highly politicized that this isn't happening in some major cases. But that is still the exception overall.
"[G]ood faith and sincerity have never prevented someone from acting in ways that reflect their deepest predilections."
True enough, but not equally true for everyone and not equally important in all circumstances. It's good to fight these tendencies, which is what struggling in good faith is.
2. I would conclude that! Wasn't Thomas famous for many years for not asking a single question during oral arguments? Basically because he applies his bizarre (albeit sincere) political beliefs to every case that comes before him.
And FWIW, I don't think all of the conveniently forgotten donations from his billionaire buddies changed his mind so much as they kept Thomas from retiring from the SC to cash out more blatantly.
The Thomas not asking questions in oral argument canard turned out to be Thomas telling the truth about not liking the old oral argument format. They changed the format and he participates plenty.
Something that is true of nearly all political obsessives is that
- 99% of the appellate court decisions they are aware of are the ones that are reported in the New York Times, mostly on hot-button political issues.
- The cases that meet the above description are about 2% of all appellate court decisions and are not really representative of the remaining 98%.
- Even in those cases, more than 50% of the time the only thing people read are New York Times' reporters' summaries of the decisions, not the court opinions themselves.
And the reporters' summaries are usually terrible. How many people who rely on reporters' summaries think that Citizens United held that corporations are persons? Or that spending money is speech? Or that corporations have the right to freedom of speech? Or that limits on campaign contributions are unconstitutional? 95+ pct, in my experience, yet none of that is true.
It's like if one watched nothing from the NFL except for videos of replay reviews, and then determined from that, that NFL football is full of nothing but close calls that could go either way.
That is not why Thomas did not ask questions. And regardless, as you implicitly note, Thomas is an outlier. Why would you make a generalization based on an outlier?
Right, but the cases with straightforward answers probably should not have made it up to the appellate level. They do sometimes, but then that reflects genuine ignorance at the lower level. So, it seems more accurate to say that "most" appellate cases will not have a straightforward answer than merely to say that "some" will, if "some" is used to implicate "some but not most."
And yet most developed countries do not have anywhere near our level of judicial review, or the ability of judges to overturn virtually every single thing Congress does. We're the weird outlier! Your 2nd sentence has the wrong premise, and civilized life is possible without rule by law school grads
I wasn't arguing that the US system is the best and all others are inferior. Only that the statement that the law is fake is true of any man-made system of rules to govern society.
Matt's not arguing that the law is fake, I think. Rather, he's arguing that the notion of "objective" constitutional jurisprudence is fake. It's all political at a fundamental level, once we peel away the Tartuffery.
Matt said "appellate jurisprudence is basically fake." Since *every* liberal democratic country I'm aware of has appellate jurisprudence, seems like Matt is condemning a fairly broad swathe of how law operates.
Do civil law countries have jurisprudence? My understanding is court decisions are not really precedents in a civil law system, they bind only the parties, and future litigants can cite only the code, not legal precedents
Isn't that essentially the what Matt is claiming happens with our courts? That there is no actual jurisprudence, and it just depends on how the current court you're in front of decides the law on your facts based on what they think should happen.
We are also an outlier in things like Free Speech, Property Rights, Parental Rights, Religious Liberty, Due Process, etc, etc, and a whole bunch of other pesky little freedoms that our powerful judiciary defends against the whims of mobs, activists, monied interests, and legislators.
And I’m really grateful for this.
Only thing that prevents me from voting for Harris as a Never Trumper is my concern about my rights losing their guardians in the judiciary.
These are mostly left over from the Warren Court, a midcentury phenomena where a relatively left-leaning set of jurists created a bunch of extra freedoms- ones that I personally agree with! But there's no guarantee that you're always going to have liberal justices, and indeed the right-leaning shift of the court in the last few decades has started to chip away at the criminal procedure rights the Warren Court gave us. I would encourage you to take a longer view of the Supreme Court's history, and learn more about say the Lochner era, and how the courts ruled when FDR was President.
Giving an unelected group supreme power & the final word in a political system is a pretty high-variance strategy. Yes, it worked out well in the middle of the 20th century..... some Kings also did a great job when they held the throne. Doesn't mean that the next group isn't going to be substantially worse!
Here, here. Parliamentary sovereignty gets the iterative nature of government right. The Fixed Term of Parliaments Act was a monstrosity, I’m glad they ditched it.
"It is a tautology that the law is a man-made thing."
Hmmm...that seems too strong. The negation of a tautology is a contradiction. When natural law or divine law theorists say that the law is made by nature or the gods, then I think they are wrong, but I don't think that they are saying something self-contradictory.
I think that's because "law" is being used in two different senses there. "Law" as made by nature or gods is not manmade, but "law" as the interpretation and implementation by men is. The latter might be inspired by, or even identical to, the former, but it isn't the same thing even if we might use the same word for it.
I absolutely love when he writes something along these lines, and you can practically see the redness rising through the law commenters faces right through to the tips of their ears, it's very funny.
It is genuinely really important that judges understand basic statistics so can't be bamboozled. But no one cares about that. Law schools, Republican, Democrats, media etc is perfectly happy with judges not understanding stats even when it is important in their job of understanding evidence and balancing risks.
I disagree. This seems to be a clear case of someone hearing about high-visibility court decisions that touch partisan political issues, noticing that a judge's ruling often line up with the political party of the president that appointed them, and determining that judges always make decisions based on their political preferences.
Yes, if you base your analysis on the super contentious issues that get huge media attention, you will conclude that appellate jurisprudence is basically fake. Similarly, if you evaluated basketball referees on just the calls that cause TV cameras to zoom in on a shouting coach you would conclude that referees are making stuff up.
The problem here is that the vast majority of decisions made by judges are ignored. Most decisions are on boring legal issues that don't touch abortion or Trump or anything else that gets the blood pumping.
I also enjoyed this point a lot --- but I think it only applies to constitutional and political questions. most appeals do not involve these issues -- and just like it sucks when trial judges are bad, it really sucks when appellate judges are bad at things like class certification, the correct standard for summary judgment, creating clear circuit guidance for lower courts...
Funny. I was about to post about how that was a usually low quality and silly claim. For starters, most cases appellate courts hear are not the sort of politically charged and deeply contested constitutional issues on which judicial ideology is strongly predictive.
I’ve never tried apologetics, but Matt’s claim is interesting and compelling enough I’ll try.
He hedged enough to avoid opprobrium.
First of all, Matt’s fire is directed (or ought to be!!) at “appellate jurisprudence.” Appellate courts serve an important error correction function. When a trial judge violates black letter law, and the stakes are high enough to merit an appeal, they correct the appeal. If a trial judge gets pissed off and sentences someone to 15 years when the maximum is 10, they fix that. Appellate courts restraining lawless conduct by trial judges is essential to the rule of law.
“Appellate jurisprudence” seeks to be more than the mechanical application of determinate texts. The etymology betrays its ambition— adding wisdom to the grubby enactments of legislatures, where many of the actors aren’t even lawyers, much less flowers of the legal academy. This project is hubris.
There have certainly been periods in American history where the median supreme court justice was wiser than the median senator. However, there is no structural reason this will usually be the case. Federal appellate judges are the ultimate bubble dwellers. Their salaries and prestige are guaranteed for life. They are the Athenian aeropagus on steroids. Senators may be patrician, but they have to duke it out on the hustings every six years and win popular consent. As presently practiced, judicial review is an additional layer of complexity and veto upon a structure already sagging under its own gravity.
I think Matt sometimes teases his bolder takes with provocative paragraphs, looks at the tenor and popularity of the comments, and makes sure not to swim too far from shore.
As Scott Alexander pointed out years ago, this phenomenon causes a spiral.
Rightwing people leave "indigo" institutions (those that are ostensibly nonpartisan but clearly lean left) as they feel less welcome, which makes those institutions more leftwing, which causes mor rightwing people to leave, and so on.
Not sure how to fix this, because fixing institutional culture is not something that policy is capable of.
I think policy can change institutional culture. Some red state legislatures are going after their state universities for being too left and I won't be surprised at all if we start to see real changes in the ideological climate on those campuses as a result.
I think some universities secretly WANT their legislatures to put some pressure on them to step away from the stances they've taken. They need some air cover to back away from the ubiquity of DEI and the protest culture that has hamstrung their institutions.
Similarly, I think corporations want some outside pressure so they can drop their political stances and likewise focus on their core mission of serving customers and making money. Just recently, a number of companies have announced significant changes to their DEI policies in the face of what appears to be pretty weak outside pressure.
Austerity and declining enrollments will hopefully get places to focus more on the core mission of educating rather than rent seeking for administrators….
The problem is, experiences in, e.g., Florida illustrate that when red states take these moves, they're more typically concerned about the culture war BS than the actual educational missions of these institutions. If you don't take the premise of secondary education seriously, your reforms (and the folks you choose to lead them) are going to end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I spent 9 years at Texas A&M. I’m not sure I see a path for this sort of movement, unless they just gradually adjunct-ize everything other than the agriculture school.
The A&M Board of Regents is appointed by the state governor. The Board has broad powers, I believe they recently scuttled the appointment of a new head of the A&M Journalism school essentially because of concerns about her leftist politics. (The President at the time got caught in the blow-up and resigned.)
The Texas state legislature recently forced A&M to dissolve its office for diversity, stop requiring job candidates to submit diversity statements, stop requiring diversity trainings, etc.
Since Republicans can be expected to control the governorship and the state legislature for the foreseeable future, I won't be surprised if university staff and professors start to trim their sails to head off further interference.
I was in the process of moving to California when that explosion happened! The Dean of Arts and Sciences who warned the new head of Journalism to be careful about accepting the offer was a colleague in my department. Another colleague in my department was some sort of vice dean for diversity at the time they canceled the position and basically banned the word. I'm not sure that any of this will have much effect on the actual faculty and their views - though it did end the ACES faculty fellow program that was a pipeline for faculty diversity.
I'm fairly sure the President and Dean only really resigned in this process because they were already hated by the faculty for unrelated reasons, and making enemies above as well as below was too much.
In the end, my expectation is that this won't be that different from the various other things the legislature did to A&M while I was there (mandating the university to allow guns everywhere without pressurized air canisters - and mandating that faculty be willing to meet students for office hours elsewhere if their office has pressurized air canisters; treating the lack of a face mask and lack of vaccination as a protected class under DEI-like policies during the pandemic). A&M has always played the "good cop" to UT's "bad cop" when going up against the legislature - but the faculty understand that their job is to outsmart the legislature, and they can do it.
Well, I think some policies could mitigate it, like greater school choice and Civil Rights / non-discrimination protections in employment for one’s political beliefs or the unpopular use of one’s First Amendment Rights.
I think a number of people on the left were initially motivated to becoming politically active by the idea of oppression - that some bad thing was keeping people down/causing the problem etc. And certainly, throughout history and today we can find many examples of that. But seeing everything in that frame really leads you to some skewed views of things - certainly not as bad as "vaccines cause autism" - but at least in ways that are at worst just wrong and at best not helpful. I think "food deserts" were a great example of this. It's definitely true that there are poor areas of America that don't have good access to fresh vegetables. I think by now it's been pretty much accepted by most people who have looked into it that this is a demand-side issue not a supply one (that the reason why there isn't better access to fresh food is in these areas is that the people living there are often very stressed single-parent households with little time that end up purchasing mostly highly prepared and fast food because that's what they have the time to do). And indeed, there have been efforts to try and better expand access to fresh foods which just failed because the underlying problem was demand not supply.
The point isn't to shame the single-parents who are really stressed into becoming cooks - the solution is some kind of combination of trying to provide better jobs - having one better paying job with regular hours is probably more conducive to cooking for your family that juggling multiple minimum wage jobs with irregular hours - and perhaps things like Minnesota's initiative to provide free breakfast and lunch at school so at least the kids are getting more healthy meals. The point is that progressives and activists were absolutely right that poor food quality is an issue for lower-income folks. But to solve that problem, or at least make progress on it - which we should - you need to really understand it - and it just wasn't the case that the primary cause was some sort of "grocery red-lining" by by Big Food. Because if you don't understand the real causes you can't propose real solutions.
The "oppression causes everything" schema is a really good explanation for a lot of lefty pathologies, from not wanting to throw criminals (other than those coded as right wing) in prison to terrible takes on Israel-Palestine.
I still encounter people who passionately believe that food deserts are the cause of poor nutrition in low income areas. I was recently working for an organization that is very into social justice and the people I was working with were quite certain that the food deserts were the cause of low consumption of healthy foods. I didn’t say anything because believing that food deserts cause low consumption of healthy foods is really important if you’re going to signal your commitment to social justice.
I’m trying to get clear on what precisely is supposed to be the crankish view here. Thinking that making fresh food equally available everywhere would make everyone eat it just as much is certainly false. But it’s also surely true that increasing proximity would make some difference at the margin. The fact that there’s a complex cycle where poverty induces demand for easy prepared foods which then decreases availability of fresh foods which then further suppresses consumption of fresh foods seems compatible with a range of ways of talking about “food deserts”.
The crank aspect is the absolute certainty of the direction of the causation, and as the commenter points out, the 'blasphemy!!!' reaction to the suggestion that there could be *any* other cause than oppression.
The main issue is the idea that these preferences are all externally driven. I assume you agree that some poor people are poor because they have low ability and make poor choices.
Sure, but do we then make their children suffer for the bad choices/ lack of ability of their parents? As someone who is very pro personal responsibility that’s something I struggle with.
The crank realignment may have been good for the cranks. By concentrating their votes, they got to elect an authentically crank president. Degree holding scolds said this would destroy America, but the economy did pretty well, we didn’t start any wars, and cranks got the delicious pleasure of seeing liberal pieties smashed. This pleasure is very similar to the fun a 12 year old can have when he finds out that swear words are cool and don’t really hurt anyone. It should not be underestimated.
Crankishness has been so normalized that ~44% of voters want to elect a man who incited a mob to storm the Capitol. If pissing on liberal pieties is like telling your dad to fuck off, storming the Capitol is getting a girl pregnant. The cranks who want to live in interesting times have gotten their wish. Those who thought their version of common sense would make things better probably won’t.
I feel like I’m missing something in this article. Is the argument that the D party contains fewer “cranks” thanks the Rs? We just lived through 10 years of conspiracy theories, lousy science, purges, insane policy demands (“defund the police! No one is illegal!”), kangaroo courts - the Ds spent years absolutely positive that the President was a Russian agent. I’m sure everyone can think of lots of significant examples.
Matt, you’ve written about this stuff. Why is it being discounted here?
I just think it's really really important to think about how elected Democrats behave. Did any congressional legislator actually push a bill that would defund the police? Did the green new deal get any traction? Elected Republicans, in fact extremely powerful elected Republicans, are so singularly focused on crank conspiracies that it is basically the only recognizably coherent thing that they care about.
That’s the key thing. The internet gave a lot of power to cranks on both the right and left but the institutional Democratic Party corralled and limited its cranks while the Republicans were swallowed whole by them.
I disagree on the last point, we have an enormous legislative history to learn what Republicans care about from. DW-NOMINATE is pretty decent to look into. It's not hard to learn more about the Republican legislating agenda by looking at their past roll call votes and policymaking under previous trifectas, whether that agenda is good or bad I leave to the reader. So far as I can tell, reading maybe-but-after-Charlottesville-officially-not-Trumpist quarterly American Affairs in 2018 on quirky trade and government reform ideas better prepared me for understanding Republican legislative ideas in 2024. Of course, it helps knowing some of my friends who wrote for them are now in GOP Senate offices.
Will reading Ezra Klein on supply-side liberalism help prepare me for understanding the Democratic party in the coming years? I wish it would, but I doubt it. Democrats aren't a supply-side party and basically never have been, as the historian Michael Kazin has elegantly put together in a party history. California is probably the future of the center-left party, which is probably bad news if you want an affordable middle class life for Americans. A fascinating development has been reading liberals now discuss California as pessimistically as right-wingers did half a decade earlier.
But therein lies the problem. I've discussed some political intellectual trends that require going digging. What Republicans lack is a level of upper-mid-brow reporting and party magazines to articulate the party. You have to dig deeper into things, and as one man famously put it, if you're explaining you're losing. National Review is receding and doesn't do as much reporting. The Weekly Standard is gone and there is no sociological replacement for its appeal to college-educated middle class Republican readers. Meanwhile, some of Vox's best features got copied (and best writers acquired) by the New York Times. Of course, Republicans tried to solve this by acquiring a legend in 80s NYC media relations, but there are some serious downsides alongside that even as it notably gets the agenda out to some millennial and Hispanic middle class voters.
Long story short, it's more of an awkward media problem than a legislative agenda problem. There is plenty of information on how the parties will legislatively fight 2025. The odds Republicans will get tricked into supporting "anti-woke" corporate tax increases are zero. But the non-conservative press and Republicans initiated a messy divorce in 2012. Neither of them have been better off for it, and when you read between the lines, they complain about it all the time.
Your local city council, so you likely know better. But, assuming you're talking about Minneapolis here, I was under the impression that they passed budgets increasing police funding in 22/23. And I see an article showing how they approved increasing officer salaries by 20% by an 8-4 vote.
I see the race happening in 2023 and the police salary increase happening in 2024. Ilhan Omar is definitely one of the few more out there left officials in the Democratic party. But worth noting, she has tacked away from defund in recent years.
"After Omar’s close call in August 2022 came her turnabout. As detailed in the national press she worked closely with Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, a moderate Democrat, to salvage the compromise Invest to Protect Act of 2022. The law will provide more, not less, federal funding to local police departments, while emphasizing mental health support and violence de-escalation training. Other squad members — Reps. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Cori Bush of Missouri, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts — voted against it." https://minnesotareformer.com/2023/02/10/rep-ilhan-omar-makes-her-move-into-the-mainstream/
Also, wild you just had that Ilhan Omar tweet ready to drop. Was that like in a folder on your computer?
I mean ``trump is supported by russia'' is a conspiracy theory in the same way ``covid came from a lab'' is a conspiracy theory. It is a banal observation at this point, but doesn't really change much about what we do going forward.
The Trump-Russia stuff is a bit of a motte and bailey. It is absolutely true and banal, as you point out, that Russia supported Trump's election and tried to help him, and he even sought help from them. But lots of people use that as proof of deeper claims that are highly unlikely, such as that Trump is a Russian agent or the pee tape happened.
Sure I could. Its very clear that Iran would prefer to have a Harris as president over Trump. The best evidence we have is that they hacked Trump's emails and provided them to different news orgs. Now does that actually mean Harris did anything wrong - no! She just has a different policy approach* than Trump that is likely better for Iran, but also in her opinion better for the US. Some of which I agree with, and some of which I don't.
*Assuming her policy in the Middle East is similar to Biden's which I assume, but since she hasn't articulated much policy about these issues its not entirely clear.
It seems we are talking past each other. My point is that people saying "Trump is supported by Russia" are NOT just making a banal statement as suggested by the OP. They are implying way more than that, most of which has been discredited if not proven inaccurate. But to Dilan's point, when pushed on this, they motte and bailey the implications by saying "well the statement is true, Trump is supported by Russia and that's just a banal statement." My push back was to say that you can't just call a statement like that banal because its incredibly loaded and used the example of Iran's support of Biden/Harris as an example.
Trump is bad enough that we should focus on the true things instead of implying lots of other untrue things about him because when we don't, it makes it easier for his partisans to dismiss his actual bad things.
You could say whatever you want, but I don't hear people saying it and if they did (like you just did) it would sound pretty ridiculous.
On the other hand, if you talk to an older russian person or listen in on a russian talk show (i wouldn't recommend), chances are good that you will hear trump is ``their guy''. This doesn't mean any sort of formal quid pro quo or whatever, it just means they strongly believe he is the good guy, his opposition is evil and live their life accordingly.
Are you seriously telling me that Iranian media is treating harris this way?
The Iranians I know are in the US, not in Iran so with that caveat, they generally hate Trump and that he pulled out of JPA and strongly support Harris. Iranian media to the extent I've seen it, generally treats all American politicians as bad.
That being said, you don't think that the Iranian government would prefer to have Harris as president? You don't think that doesn't enter the Iranian government's calculations when deciding how to act towards Israel right now?
None of which, IMO, is a mark against Harris because she is not deciding based on what's best for Iran, but what she thinks is best for the US.
As for saying it sounding ridiculous, welcome to how many/most people feel when people say it about Trump and Russia. Hard core partisans are already on board. Everyone else, not so much.
It is not that russia``prefers'' trump in a lesser evil kind of sense, it is that a large portion of the russian public actively likes and personally identifies with trump in a quasi-religious (or maybe just literally religious) ``he is our guy'', ``he is the only one who can save us from world war 3'' kind of sense, since before the 2016 election. It is quite unusual to see a cult of personality for an adversarial foreign leader, encouraged by a one-party state! I do see why it looks ridiculous, because it is a fairly unusual situation. I vaguely remember that Obama used to have very high approval in Vietnam for whatever reason, but we weren't in any proxy wars with them at the time.
And I think there are some elements of this that are more common than we might initially think - there are parts of the US that got deeply enamored with Justin Trudeau for example. Or on the other side of the aisle, many a conservative were Margaret Thatcher fans. Meanwhile, Obama was incredibly popular across much of the world, even in countries that had an antagonistic relationship with the US.
Plenty of commenters have mentioned various crank ideas among leftists, like defund the police, fringe gender/race theory, etc. It strikes me that the Republican crank ideas are much better optimized for electora success in that they are grassroots rather than elite-driven crank ideas. If Democrats can do nothing else they should work on controlling their elite cranks.
To an extent I agree, but living in a very red area, most conservative cranks I know get all their information from conservative elites. We have no issues ever with immigration, yet this is always the number 1 issues because they are fed sensationalist stories all the time. There will be a murder that happens somewhere three states over committed by a migrant and that gets extrapolated to All Migrants Are Bad.
Yeah, it's the same way here in west virignia- gubernatorial candidates run on border security and people's main problem here seems to be with immigration despite the fact that this state is losing population. It's cranks all the way down here in West by god Virginia.
I won't quite rise to the level of taking umbrage, but I have a differing view. The problem isn't the people, it's the politicians. I am a West Virginia, spent my first 30 years there, and still go home 3 times a year. I used to BE a West Virginia Republican, back when we could hold a party meeting in a phone booth.
Cecil Underwood wouldn't run a crank campaign. Rob Capehart wouldn't. Mitch Carmichael wouldn't. Charlie Trump was a rare voice of reason in recent years. The problem in West Virginia has been people like Vic Sprouse (started with him) and Kris Warner and the parade of idiots who have cycled into the Legislature in the last 10 years who don't know how to do anything except regurgitate what they watched on Hannity last night.
Not sure if there is any way to measure it, but I would generalize to say that ELECTED Republicans (and Republican media influencers like Alex Jones, etc.) tend to be crankier than most run-of-the-mill Republican voters; elected Democrats tend to be less crankish (or at least VISIBLY SO) than their most eccentric voters, but maybe not in the same ratio. Or is this a matter of who gets the most attention in the press? The looniest Republicans in the House seem to generate a lot more stories than the far-left in the House.
As a litmus test, would you call someone who is a sincere and dedicated communist a crank?
As a political idea, I think communism has been shown to not lead to good outcomes, but I'm not sure I'd apply the "crank" label. Lots of people believe things I think are wrong, and that doesn't make them cranks. Nor does believing in fringe theories about politics or society. I think a crank is... is... well I'm having a hard time defining it beyond I know it when I see/hear it.
They're not cranks because they put a lot of work into their being "wrong". Part of crankdom is taking shortcuts. You learn, like, a half dozen facts and all of a sudden you've cracked the code that mystified the sheeple all these years.
"would you call someone who is a sincere and dedicated communist a crank"
Yes, because if someone is a "sincere and dedicated communist" that necessarily implies they believe in Marxist historical theory, which I can't begin to take seriously, even before we get to anything about economics.
I think there is a fundamental difference between believing theories that are wrong and believing fake facts. Defund the Police, gender/race theories aren't facts that can be disputed while vaccine efficacy and birth certificates and secret cabals controlling things definitely are.
"Defund the Police, gender/race theories aren't facts that can be disputed"
They often implicate fake facts though or involve ignoring objectively accurate and verifiable facts, e.g., the studies showing left-leaning poll respondents believe police kill thousands or even tens of thousands of unarmed black men every year.
Sure but you won't find prominent left-wing pundits publishing articles claiming that police do that but there's a massive coverup. It's just that coverage of police shootings doesn't do a good job of getting people to understand the magnitude (which is true for many problems).
Ehhhhh, "prominent" is doing a *lot* of heavy lifting there and even many unambiguously "prominent left-wing pundits" are basically one degree of separation from someone pushing those kinds of views and the pundit still treats them as a serious person in the subject area. See, e.g., Kimberlé Crenshaw, Ibram X. Kendi, etc.
You didn't name any political leaders - given the scope of leftists in academia you can always find someone with pretty wacko views. Naming any of them as 'prominent' without some broad endorsement by actual political leaders seems to be vastly overstated.
"Black women make up less than 10% of the population, yet when it comes to killings by police, we make up a 3rd of them, with the majority unarmed. "
It was pointed out to her that this is objectively false in multiple regards from literally EVERY source that tracks police shootings. Crenshaw didn't delete it or correct it. And that's not because she tweeted once and forgot about it -- she posted several replies to herself over most of the subsequent hour. (Last tweet in the thread: https://x.com/sandylocks/status/1818343688319164690 )
So does this explicitly state that there's a massive coverup? No. But that's the necessary implication of knowingly failing to withdraw or correct the statement after being presented with sources like WaPo and the Guardian showing the statement is colossally wrong.
To put it another way, if someone wrote that fewer than 500,000 Jews died in German concentration camps between 1939 and 1945 and then they didn't just leave that statement up but even posted further comments under it expositing about what this alleged "fact" tells us about society while ignoring well-sourced responses showing that statement is false, I have absolute no doubt that you would feel very comfortable saying that person is engaged in Holocaust denialism and all the necessarily imputed conspiracy theories that are part of that even if they never explicitly announced, "The Holocaust didn't happen."
I'd still classify exaggerated facts as materially different. And you don't see party leaders repeating those claims or getting raised to prominence by repeating those claims either.
Under-informed voters aren't the exclusive domain of either party.
True, although I also can't recall seeing any Democratic party leaders actively speaking out against such fake facts. They just refrain from repeating such thing themselves, AFAICT.
Republican politicians are routinely chided in the mainstream media for not either distancing themselves from conspiracy theorists or failing to actively tell their followers they are wrong about something.
The point is pretty obvious - completely made up stuff (COVID vax is killing more people than the virus itself) is materially different than being wrong about magnitude (cops killing young black men is true - it's not the magnitude than many would cite)
I don't know what that linked wikipedia article is supposed to be demonstrating.
I think "elite-driven" is close but not quite the right label. Random college students on Twitter bully college professors and media types, who in turn bully elected officials and companies like Whole Foods. So it's unclear to what extent elites are in the driver's seat vs along for the ride.
Democrats celebrate all the college educated people flocking to the party. Except that only 1/3 of the country has a college degree, university enrollment is dropping because there are fewer teenagers, and Democrats are hemorrhaging non-college voters.
"Supporter: 'Governor, every thinking person will be voting for you.'
Adlai Stevenson: 'Madam, that is not enough. I need a majority.'"
True, if we define "thinking" broadly enough, we can include all people and quite a few reptiles. For that matter, a substantial numbers of R voters think that reptiles are running the entire planet.
Clearly, they think the answer is to make sure that at least half of the nation becomes completely college educated, despite that being a daunting task that will likely never happen.
I mean, the Left wants to turn the entire country into a college campus, where mommy and daddy and the university (the government) pay for everything and take care of your every problem.
That does sound actually good. At least, if common problems are taken care of systematically. That has been the guiding idea of civilization from the beginning - ensuring we don’t have to individually arrange for shelter and fresh water and food availability but can instead take advantage of convenient solutions that society has provided. Let’s expand that further as our collective capabilities grow.
The deficit of human capital in the Republican Party and among non-libertarian conservatives is a real thing.
But there's also a lot of "Republicans have cranks, Democrats have expert communities with an ideological vision of the public interest" going on here. Having a graduate degree -- heck, being a whole 'expert' community of people with graduate degrees -- does not free you from being cranks. For instance, the people advocating years-long school closing and/or child masking and/or that it wasn't safe to get together at the holidays with people who were unvaccinated were mostly Democrats, and they were cranks, and they probably still are. As crank-y as the "vaccines are used to track people", no, but there weren't a lot of those people and they weren't significantly influencing the policy of major urban school systems.
If you don't think that either liberals or the Democratic Party have gotten some serious things wrong in the past few years on economic or social issues where they should have known better at the time, that's fine and you're not my audience. But if you think they have, and you're still unwilling to call that "being cranks", why?
If it has to do with the general competence level of the organizations in question (like, they have better typography and graphic design), or they seem more respectable, or they're your friends and relatives...those are bad reasons.
I know several people who believe that Covid is airborne HIV. And that 30% of cases lead to long COVID. All have college degrees, though not in public health, medical or stem fields so they’re usually citing papers that don’t say what they think they say. One is an academic. That’s a total crank idea but because they have college degrees they are less likely to be dismissed out of hand. It’s still pretty common for people to claim that the immunocompromised have no protection against the virus and are at every high risk of getting seriously ill even if vaccinated simply by being immunocompromised. They are at higher risk but they do have significant protection. Here I think that this sort of crank n belief gets a pass because the people holding it mean well
I know educated people who still believe that COVID had a 50% death rate. My only explanation is that if they stop believing that, other cracks could appear in their worldview.
I don’t know how to re-center intellectual integrity and ethics in American life, how to teach the lost art of telling people in your circle (professional or otherwise) things that they don’t want to hear, but it neeeds to happen. And I’m absolutely sure that a culture of free speech is part of it.
The difference is that many (not all) Democratic leaders and institutions are willing to look back at the mistakes / overreactions / crankery of 2020 and revise their opinions away from them. See: the new Democratic party quasi-consensus that policing is actually good, school closures were a bad idea, not every single thing is racial injustice, border reform actually needs to happen, etc.
I don't know if I see as much introspection on the right side of the aisle. Pretty much every Congressional Republican who won't strongly claim that the 2020 election was stolen has been removed from elected office, for example.
If we can grant that 2020 was an extremely anomalous year where *everyone* went crazy to some degree, why is it that one party is trying to step away from that insanity (and gets criticized as a Flip-Flopper for doing so!) and the other party seems determind to sink deeper into its delusions?
"See: the new Democratic party quasi-consensus that policing is actually good, school closures were a bad idea, not every single thing is racial injustice, border reform actually needs to happen, etc."
Any change in a good direction is positive, even if it's just vice paying tribute to virtue. But I'm withholding judgement about whether this quasi-consensus is real for a couple years at least, instead of accepting what people say during campaign season at face value.
I also think there's lots of retconning being done in the post-covid analysis that uses hindsight bias to say some of these policies were bad.
Sure, there were policies or public health declarations that were plainly nonsensical, like protesting is fine, but beaches aren't ok. OTOH, all of those policy decisions were about risk management and decision-making under conditions of deep uncertainty.
Covid was a novel virus and we didn't fully understand how dangerous it was or wasn't throughout 2020 and even into 2021. Deaths are one measure of harm, but history is loaded with viruses that cause harm in multiple stages (eg Scarlet Fever->heart damage, Chicken pox-> Shingles, Ebstein Barr-> MS, HPV-> cervical cancer).
Would we rate these "excessive" covid policies differently if we learned in 2023 that a covid infection in a child made it 100 times more likely they'd experience heart valve failure as a young adult? In 2020 there was no way to know if this possibility would turn out to be true.
Yeah, I think rightists are playing fast and loose with the definition of "crank." Believing that a longer school closing than necessary was (in retrospect...it was a new disease!) required seems a very different thing from insisting that, say, Joe Biden really didn't win Georgia. Or that Hillary Clinton was leading a child sexual abuse ring out a pizzeria in Virginia. Or that John F. Kennedy, Jr. was alive, and acting as an incognito prophet in Pittsburgh. Reasonable people could reasonably disagree about school closure policies in March of 2021. But no person with a decent grasp of reality could possibly accept the kind of foam-mouthed conspiracy rantings that now pass for mainstream ideology among vast swaths of the Republican faithful (led by their maximally crankish political leaders).
We see occasional, mild examples of crankery among liberal Democrats. But mainly what we see is hubris borne of elitism, or epistemic closure. What we see on the right is utter lunacy. And the latter gets to the highest levels of GOP officialdom. Michael Flynn was the literal National Security Advisor. MT Greene is a member of Congress. Kari Lake has been nominated twice for statewide office in Arizona. And so on.
Any argument you want to make about uncertainly around the long term effects of COVID, you can make about the long term effects of COVID vaccination. And yet, one of these was mandated by a whole range of institutions, based in part on misinformation about the vaccine being much more widely protective against infection than it actually was.
Were there genuinely difficult calls at various times? Sure. There were also wild amounts of elite misinformation that might have felt like they were reasonable to believe at the time, but that's says more about the strength of the intellectual bubble than the reasonableness of the beliefs.
I don’t think that’s right about long term effects. Vaccination without live virus means no actual infection, so all the long-term impacts are through the training of the immune system. Infections have long term impacts on immune training, but can also cause subtle damage to tissues or organs, or even leave reservoirs of virus (as we know happens with chicken pox, hpv, hiv, etc). Are there any vaccines that have ever led to long-term impacts that didn’t show up within a few months?
1) “Any argument you want to make…you can make…” Um, no, you can’t. Or, you *can*, but it’s nonsensical. Any argument about the long-term effects of anything can only be supported by longitudinal studies that carefully exclude confounding variables. We can make educated guesses based on our previous experiences with viral illnesses and vaccines, respectively, and as Kenny says below the evidence points in the direction of one having a much higher potential for long-term effects.
2) “And yet, one of these was mandated…” What does “mandating” the long-term effects of Covid look like? I sincerely don’t understand what two things are being compared here.
The problem with these precautionary principle arguments is they all go in one direction, but unknown harms can go in the other direction too. Would we rate these excessive covid policies differently if we learned in 2023 that they vastly increased traffic, drug, and gun violence deaths?
Yes. An extreme taste for risk aversion is not the same thing as being a crank. It’s the difference between recognizing a fact pattern and reacting to it (perhaps, unreasonably) and inventing a fact pattern that resonates with your psychological state.
"Republicans have become the party of conspiracy theorists who believe Bill Gates is using vaccines as a covert mind control program"
Odd I followed these topics quite closely and thought that conservatives believed:
1) The covid vaccines should not have been mandated especially on children because they didn't prevent infection or transmission and did have some potentially bad side effects like myocarditis.
2) Their viewpoints on the above were being censored by the government (essentially)
1 & 2 were *big time* Conspiracy Theories until somewhere around 2023 when both became Old News That Everyone Knows.
Cmon man, overwhelming Republican resistance to vaccines isn’t driven by principled research of any sort. Hence resistance to not only Covid shots, but a rollback of school vaccine mandates that threatens to bring back polio. Give me a break.
Wait you think DeSantis won by 20 points and blue state people couldn't move into Florida quickly enough because they have a generalized distrust of vaccines that never surfaced before 2021 and not a specific opposition to covid-era insanity that included mandates for these particularly unnecessary shots?
You think 80% of Americans stopped staying "up to date" on the mRNAs despite continued CDC policy urging them do so because they have a generalized opposition to vaccines and not a specific, first-hand experience with both covid itself and the covid shots?
Go ahead keep trying to generalize the specific derangements of the covid era because that's easier than admitting "your side" was disastrously wrong about every policy choice on that topic.
"I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate."
Clearly in that framing ("or a mask mandate") he is talking about covid era topics, that is to say covid shot mandates.
By the way in blue areas (e.g. California, DC) they *actually* passed laws to mandate the covid shots as a condition of attending public school and then these requirements never went into effect anywhere because they were so obviously unworkable and unnecessary. Good use of governance from the party of experts.
Trump says all kinds of stupid shit, and that alone should give people pause about voting for him. But when his campaign furiously backpedals to clarify that they were only talking about covid vaccines - and aren't opposed to polio vaccines - you should probably update your priors.
Vaccine mandates for schools have been around for decades. I had to prove I had my shots as a kid in the 90s. Vaccine mandates were workable before they became a partisan issue.
“ Wait you think DeSantis won by 20 points and blue state people couldn't move into Florida quickly enough because they have a generalized distrust of vaccines that never surfaced before 2021 and not a specific opposition to covid-era insanity that included mandates for these particularly unnecessary shots?”
Yes, absolutely, because opposition to vaccines, full stop, has become an ersatz religious belief (laundered through e.g. “wellness”).
Negative and positive effects of Covid vaccines for children are both extremely rare. The main effect is transferring money to the companies that developed the vaccines as a way to say thank you for doing so.
Maybe I should have phrased it better then, because I am not attacking them. I am just saying that the money is basically the only measurable effect here.
1. While most Republicans don't think that Bill Gates is using the vaccine to control people, most people who think that are now Republicans.
2. While the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines prevent infections much less than we'd like and much less than some other vaccines like measles, the way the immune system works it's basically impossible for it not to significantly prevent infections given that it prevents serious illnesses. This is even more true for transmission.
"While most Republicans don't think that Bill Gates is using the vaccine to control people, most people who think that are now Republicans."
Cue John Stuart Mill:
"I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. "
I, a blue bubbled liberal, personally know several people who believe Bill Gates designed the vaccines for population control.
My educated, Trump-loving mother was willing to lose contact with her family over this issue she believed it so strongly, so I think it’s fair to say it’s somewhat common in her world.
Going “conservatives actually believe X” and citing only your own actual opinion is pretty weak sauce.
"My educated, Trump-loving mother was willing to lose contact with her family over this issue...."
Condolences. That is genuinely sad.
Politics was not all comity when Dick Nixon and Newt Gingrich were running the show, but the widespread destruction of families is really an innovation of the Trump era.
it is really sad. we've had a difficult relationship from my teenage years onward, but in the period before Trump, things were generally on the upswing.
Then she told me Bill Gates was trying to sterilize me and I said "ok, that's all I can take for now". I guess she's talking to my brother again, so that's good, but he had cut off all contact when she refused to get vaccinated before seeing his kids.
Are you seriously claiming that covid vaccines have no impact on infection and transmission? Or are you requiring the word "prevent" to mean absolute and total 100% reduction?
The ability of people to look at a vaccine that prevents mortality by 90% and say "that's not good enough because I was promised better" never ceases to amaze and aghast me.
All 3 statements you list are true, *including* that Republicans have become the party of conspiracy theorists that are against all vaccines, not just Covid. They're still the party for cranks, they just *also* have some good points from time to time.
Trump literally invoked the "vaccines cause autism" conspiracy theory during the 2016 primary debates, which was pre-Covid. That was also the conspiracy theory that was the parent of all vaccine denialism. It used to be left-coded, but its adherents have found a more comfortable home on the Right under Trump.
"That was also the conspiracy theory that was the parent of all vaccine denialism."
Eh, I would dispute that strongly. There was vaccine denialism long before the vaccines-cause-autism panic -- Wakefield's paper on the subject was only published in 1998.
>> "The covid vaccines should not have been mandated especially on children because they didn't prevent infection or transmission and did have some potentially bad side effects like myocarditis."
For mandates enacted or enforced after about January of 2022, this argument has merit.
But there's some retconning going on around the "vaccines don't prevent transmission" talking point. Nearly everyone initially believed them to be 95% effective against infection and transmission of disease based on the results of the initial vaccine trials. Obviously, thanks to a combination or waning immunity, virus mutations, and maybe some shotty science at the outset, we later learned that this assumption was incorrect. But imo, a sincere belief that the vaccine blocked 95% of transmission was the backdrop of the original vaccine mandates.
If it had turned out to be true that a vaccine prevented infection and transmission with nearly 100% efficacy, would your view on the mandates have been different?
Was there any time in 2021 when you think that, based on the limited information we had, vaccine mandates might have been at least a possibly reasonable idea?
I don’t think we ever got very strong evidence that the vaccines are less effective at preventing transmission than preventing illness. It’s just that real-world effectiveness has almost always been less than 95%, partly because of antigen drift and evolution, and with a really contagious virus, you need to stay really close to 95% to avoid exponential growth.
Right, for example seasonal flu vaccines are significantly less effective than COVID vaccines, but no one would claim that they do not impact transmission.
> Was there any time in 2021 when you think that, based on the limited information we had, vaccine mandates might have been at least a possibly reasonable idea?
[Edit] I'll add one big caveat: there was still a lot of uncertainty about side effects of the vaccine in that timeframe. Personally, I used the heuristic "Israel has proven to be an excellent guardian of their interests" and followed them going all-in on the MRNA vaccines, but people with lower risk tolerance or different heuristics weren't wrong to be concerned. That leaves a pretty narrow window in which a mandate would have been reasonable.
> Nearly everyone initially believed them to be 95% effective against infection and transmission of disease based on the results of the initial vaccine trials.
No. We believed, based on the trials, that they were 95% effective against severe disease, defined as disease requiring hospitalization or leading to death. The initial trials *did not test* an effect on infection or transmission and carefully avoided claiming any -- until the fucking crank-ass politicians got their hands on things.
This is incorrect. The primary endpoint of the initial vaccine trials was not severe disease or hospitalization, it was any symptomatic infection at all. Trial participants were tested against the control group for COVID and the vaccine was 95% effective at preventing symptomatic infection, based on the design of the initial trial. We later learned that this efficacy wanes over time, but the trial didn't go on long enough to detect this.
I think you should contact an investigative reporter. I was a trial participant for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and I was told, as part of the study and my consent forms, that the evaluation and efficacy rates were regarding severe disease, not infection tout court. These texts you're linking are changed over from what they told us as study participants.
Twitter (and anecdotally, some IRL) is full of Trump supporters that believe the COVID vaccines range from purposefully to accidentally deadly and anyone from Jews to Gates did it all for some nefarious purpose.
As a physical scientist, my impression is that we are the most "centrist" or least partisan or least left-wing of the scientists. But if you ever find yourself in a room with us you can safely assume that there are zero Trump voters within earshot. When I was in graduate school, I was very, very opposed to the invasion of Iraq and—because I was young—I was more vocal about my political views than I am now. I also got a lot of push-back from my contemporaries and especially professors who were not right-wing Republicans, but more like whatever Matt is the modern contemporary of from 25 years ago. But also a lot of registered Republicans.
Over time, though, I feel like the GOP has actively worked to repel professional scientists, culminating in a modern MAGA movement that uses us as foils and is actively anti-science. For example, a former advisor of mine was on the short list to have a role in the George W. Bush administration (White House Science Advisor or something like that) but was dropped after they learned about a donation to a Democrat decades prior when they ran for governor. I mean, it's not like the Obama administration hired a bunch of right-wing cranks, but they also did not have such insane purity tests.
Sarah Palin made a big deal about how the government was wasting taxpayer money on fruit fly research, which was possibly the most ignorant thing a politician had said about science up to that point. (Trump outdoes her almost daily with his explanations of magnetism, buoyancy, aeronautics, etc.) Republicans in Congress later became hostile towards scientific funding, pushing stupid legislation to insert themselves into the grant-review process (to make sure no woke research was funded or whatever) and constantly threatening (and often succeeding at) cutting NSF and NIH budgets.
During the pandemic, several scientists publicly belcowned themselves by signing letters asserting pseudoscience nonsense about masking, vaccines, the origins of COVID-19, etc. because "in their capacity as scientists" they asserted that scientific method includes social justice. I sincerely hope that this particular brain disease has been cured, because science will always be political, but it is very much at risk of becoming partisan. (The broader attempts by universities to demoralize scientists is ongoing, but seems to be losing steam even as the equally harmful backlash from Republican state legislatures gains momentum.)
Your remark about Sarah Palin reminds me of my own personal example of that -- Bobby Jindal sneering about the federal government doing volcano monitoring. (My father had the best take on that incident -- he suggested the congressional delegations from Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California, and Hawaii should have refused to vote for any funding for hurricane monitoring by NOAA until Jindal publicly apologized.)
Do we know what Jindal was thinking? He went to Brown and was a Rhode Scholar and was apparently accepted to both Harvard Med and Yale Law. He’s not that stupid.
Is it just one of those facts that he learned and didn’t quite get the whole story? Like he thought volcanos were rare and exotic and not something that exists in the US.
I have a very smart and well educated friend who somehow got mixed up and was convinced the Sun went around the Earth.
There is absolutely no symmetry between the parties on science, that is clear. That being said, the Dems aren't fully aligned with scientific and professional interests, either, e.g. they are increasingly inserting "aa" (read: racist) criteria into funding and promotion of scientists, which obviously goes against the interests of doing the best science most efficiently.
I definitely got negatively polarized against the Republican Party when it turned out that every time they played hardball and shut down the government over the federal budget, scientific labs funded by the NSF and NIH effectively had to run on credit until the government got back to them.
I appreciate the part about the effect of crank polarization on the media ecosystem. At least anecdotally, having liberals be less likely to see their assumptions fact checked has made them smugger than they deserve to be. I'm not talking the far left, I'm talking the normie libs I know. They think "the science" is on their side. Conservatives tend to be aware that the line they believe on any given topic is rejected by mainstream institutions, they just don't care. When liberals are out of step with experts, I'm my experience, they don't even know.
> When liberals are out of step with experts, I'm my experience, they don't even know.
It's worse than that. The experts themselves pull punches, both for the reasons Matt states (ideological biases) as well as for fear of upsetting their self-selected group. Contrary results get buried in obfuscating language and hidden behind paywalls (certainly not in the abstract). This feeds into the lack of awareness. Anyone who dares stick their head up to disagree immediately gets branded as far-right and untrustworthy. And so it goes.
I think this point has become especially true as media consumption has siloed more and more -- for a certain demographic, if the NYT, WaPo, and a handful of other outlets didn't report it, then it's inherently "fake news" even if it's objectively accurate. (And yes, it applies to Fox News viewers too, but I'm not sure why getting to the epistemological awareness of a Fox News viewer should be considered a desirable thing.)
MY made an excellent point in a climate post on how there’s so much epistemic policing on the topic that sometimes you can only hear the truth on certain matters from the denier-ish crowd. I agree with him that this is bad which is why I read and support Roger Pielke Jr.
Is it actually true that "educated professionals" are all that less likely to believe in conspiracy theories? There are plenty of educated professionals who become cranks (RFK Jr himself, Bret Weinstein, Elon Musk) and childhood vaccine resistance is highest in places lije Marin County, if I am not mistaken.
I am referring specifically to childhood vaccination, not COVID. The claim that educated persons are substantially less likely to believe in conspiracy theories is undermined by that data, even if it is from 10 years ago. If education --> less susceptibility to conspiracy theories, that would be manifested in the data from 2014.
Not necessarily. Think about it this way: say there used to be 5% vaccine hesitancy, concentrated mainly in the educated-crunchy-hippie demographic (your previous claim). If in the last 10 years, vaccine hesitancy has risen to more like 20%, but the majority of that came from MAGA conservatives, your 2014 data could be correct but be outdated to the point where it's false to say what you're saying now.
Based on the chart I shared above, that appears to be exactly what happened.
Conspiracy theorists love knowledge, so it makes sense that they would go to college. But a conspiracy-oriented personality is not good for corporate success. The conspiracy theorist I know finished college and then quit two different jobs on principle because he was convinced his company was an evil empire, and then settled for odd jobs in the service sector instead.
This piece continually conflates conservatives with Republicans, and asserts that conservatives are increasingly cranky.
Republicans are certainly (by and large) *socially* conservative, and Republicans are (by and large) increasingly cranky. But today's Republican party has eschewed most other principles that have long been considered conservative. There is no conservative party right now.
Republican Party overwhelming polls as self identified conservative. I think on many issues, social change, government intervention (vaccines), etc. the modern Republican Party does hold conservative views.
If you're going to register for a party, and you're conservative, you're most likely going to register Republican - no argument.
But actual policy advocated by prominent Republican politicians, which is, it seems to me, whether we can call the Republican party conservative? Tariffs, industrial policy, skepticism of long-standing international institutions like NATO, tax-policy pandering (no taxation of tips, e.g.), a lack of epistemic humility - these are not traditionally conservative.
We're undergoing a major realignment for the first time in over half a century, and what's going to happen is that the definition of "conservative" in the context of American politics is simply going to change. E.g., Joe Rogan is a "conservative" despite supporting gay marriage and universal health care. This isn't unlike how a long time ago the word "liberal" used to mean among other things an opposition to government intervention in the economy; now it means virtually the opposite.
The Conservative party in countries that speak English has always been the one more hostile to social equality, redistribution, and care for the poor. This has been the case for hundreds of years. That's part of what the word conservative means in politics.
Read journals that actual conservatives embrace: the Dispatch, the Bulwark. Heck, even the conservative touchstone The National Review. These are all Republican-skeptical. On any given issue or candidate, they may prefer Republicans to Democrats, but this is often a lesser-of-two-evils calculation.
Actually the National Review is very careful not to get itself permanently put of step with the GOP. You can see that very explicitly with how they followed up their big Never Trump issue by helping Trump out a lot.
National Review is not Republican-skeptical. At least half of their concern with Trump and his followers is that they're an *electoral* deadweight, and it's quite clear that even if some of their most prominent voices dislike Trump, they're OK with him being elected because they dislike Harris and the Democrats more.
I haven't read all the comments, so I'm sure that other commenters have made this point already, but:
I agree with Matt Y's article overall. The crank realignment is real, and it is NOT spectacular! In fact, it is very bad for our society and democracy.
And yet, I don't think Matt Y pays enough attention to the crankery that took over the left/progressive side recently, and that is now, thankfully, starting to recede. To wit:
-America is fundamentally racist; racism permeates the very air in America like some unseen but all-powerful demonic force; in the infamous words of Robin DiAngelo, "When a white person and a Black person interact, the question to ask is not: Did racism occur? but How did racism manifest itself in this interaction?"
-gender identity is a mystical, irrefutable feeling you have deep in your soul that has nothing to do with either your anatomy or how others perceive you, and ought to be the basis for things like participation in women's sports or being admitted to women's shelters and rape crisis centers.
These weren't fringe, cranky views; they used to be widely accepted in left-leaning environments like academia, and people who dissented were loudly shouted down with "You're a racist" or "You literally don't want trans people to exist!!11!1!!"
Long-time commenters know that I abhor Trump with every fiber of my being, and want him to lose and go the f away forever. But I have just the teeniest-tiniest smidgen of sympathy for right-wingers and Trump supporters who perceive a double standard here: "Oh, so when we believe kooky sh*t about vaccines, we're cranks, but when credentialed academics at Ivy League institutions believe equally kooky sh*t about racism or trans people, that's just respectable orthodoxy?"
While I share your frustration with that aspect of the left, I feel like that falls more under conformity than crankery. Intersectionality, for instance, is a pretty sophisticated idea, and I think the core premise is sound. Many very smart people put a lot of energy into extending this idea in stupid and unproductive ways. I'm sure there were also brilliant alchemists.
QAnon, on the other hand, makes no sense on its face. There's no collection of smart people writing dissertations on whether Tom Hanks drinks children's blood and discussing how this can be best be incorporated into public education.
Brilliant alchemists like Newton, Priestley, and especially Lavoisier, who had the fundamental realignment of realizing that metals weren’t earth+fire but rather earths were metal+oxygen, suddenly converting the Ancient Greek theory of elements into the modern one.
The #1 housing charity in England published a policy paper stating that if done by the private sector, a ~75% increase in home construction would not improve affordability, and "evidenced" this claim with a link to a paper that doesn't differentiate between private and public building but does say that increased construction does improve affordability, and cites ~7 different papers quantifying the magnitude.
That's the level of epistemic closure that's been reached, where evidence is used for "support not illumination". You use the language and forms of evidence-based decision making, your talk about analysis and your papers have footnotes, but you're not actually doing it, and your social milieu is so uniform that no-one notices that the emperor has no clothes.
As Matt says I think this is all quite disastrous, hostility to private-sector home construction has not solved the English housing crisis, it's only helped deliver to the worst period of wage stagnation in 200 years.
EDIT: they also play this trick where if you rent housing at below-market rates, that "improves affordability" with no accounting for the cost of the subsidy and the reality that by subsidising housing demand you are actually increasing housing scarcity. Same with massive increase in regulations on landlords. No accounting for the impact on supply from a major increase in compliance costs, or indeed the costs of enforcement. Britain's jails are currently literally full to the point prisoners are being let out early and the courts are also busy, so I wonder who and how exactly will be out there enforcing all these new regulations on landlords.
https://england.shelter.org.uk/professional_resources/policy_and_research/policy_library/brick_by_brick
I believe Matt has written pretty extensively about this, elite misinformation.
The UK is hilarious. It has the housing costs of California with the wages of West Virginia.
I know this isn’t your intent but even WV is wealthy on a global scale.
Oh yeah on a global scale it's incredibly wealthy.
This is a take no one seems to want to say but it's straightforwardly true that being born in America makes you one of the luckiest people on earth, and we should be grateful for being here.
"This is a take no one seems to want to say..."
Well, not completely no one.
"...Guided by optimism and faith, to fight for this country we love.
To fight for the ideals we cherish.
And to uphold the awesome responsibility that comes with the greatest privilege on Earth. The privilege and pride of being an American."
Kamala Harris, DNC 2024
Lol fair point, you win.
(I guess my unpopular but true opinion is that complaining about, say, having an employer-based health insurance system or having an economy that is less based on manufacturing or resource extraction is the geopolitical equivalent of sitting in first class and complaining about the plane's spotty wifi.)
"...sitting in first class and complaining about the plane's spotty wifi."
Also, the lack of Brazil nuts in the bowl of pre-warmed nuts. Why all of these walnuts and cashews? That lack of Brazil nuts is intolerable deprivation!
But having employers buy health insource for their employees IS a pretty big unnecessary inefficiency. Too bad ACA did not do more to undermine it.
He wins, but the related point "this a take few people integrate into their day to day thinking" is solid
"Yes I know you're upset you have student loans or whatever but only by virtue of living in the west were you able to get these opportunities. You live like royalty compared to the vast majority of people who have ever lived." <--- is a message that's unequivocally true but not one people are typically receptive to
WV also has Biscuit World, which is delicious.
And Joe Manchin, who singlehandedly (well, he provided 2 of the 4 hands) prevented some dangerous foolishness from being enacted.
Joe Manchin has nothing on Biscuit World
No, a CTC would have been a big good deal Schumer would have negotiated a sensible non-intrusive work requirement. And the hostility to his permitting reforms was outrageous. If we could only have had 10 more Manchins!
TUDOR'S BISCUIT WORLD FTW!!
BRB, heading to WV.
That's true, but my first instinct when i hear that is to think someone is about to ask or demand i engage in some display of sychophantic reverence for the country.
All correct, and the fact that WV is richer than almost any other country only makes the dig funnier.
The Brits' NIMBYs have really screwed them.
The right’s problem is that many of its most talented people largely reject credentialed knowledge and are therefore unable to contribute anything intellectually.
This post is illustrating the left’s problem: it launders its credibility for expertise by putting the stamp of credentialed knowledge on subpar research and thinkers. (Think about the entire disciplines of the humanities that are based entirely on obfuscation. Or the legions of social science PhDs who have only a shaky understanding of basic statistical analysis.)
analytic policy discussion as an elaborate Versailles court ritual, where the important thing is demonstrating mastery of the etiquette and shared cultural language of academics and policy nonprofits, and you can get your way by being what is essentially a type of actor
I’m a blue-state science educator who is good at crafting arguments in the required language BUT I also like to be honest. I feel seen by this comment!
Hide or dismiss or overlook information that does not fit priors, stretch information to support priors, and elevate iffy stuff if it confirms priors.
Sometimes you ask for civil society to solve a problem and it turns out civil society's chief policy objective is to stick it to the other bits of civil society.
It seems like an oversimplification to portray what has happened as the GOP consolidating all the cranks. That mostly seems to be the anti-vaxxers that used to be non-partisan and now mostly aren't. There are still a lot of domains where left aligned cranks dominate. From degrowthers to Chomsky-ites to gender identity essentialists to 1619/Kendi/Saira Rao style conspiratorial race craft to Briahna Joy Gray Hamas truthers to climate alarmists that's still a whole lot of cranks. They do seem to be less directly active partisan hacks than what the GOP has become, but I feel like that's a somewhat more complicated narrative than what Matt's describing and you really can't just dismiss the way that stuff is deeply embedded in the Dem aligned institutional ether.
Very important to define what it means to dominate the party. There is no one in the democratic caucus that engages in left crankism at nearly the level that republicans do.
I would argue that Elizabeth Warren comes pretty darn close.
She is pretty tame if we are making relative comparisons and her influence has been waning for a while.
Slow Boring's comment section has been full of commentators complaining Warren 2020-esque policy activists have been making inroads with the current Democratic administration for years. The rising influence of what Elizabeth Warren stands in for can be easily demonstrated by looking into a backlog of examples of climate, antitrust, asylum, fiscal stimulus, and gender identity policy given by Matt and others prior to this election year.
But this isn’t *crank*ism. This is mainly unpopularism.
One man's unpopularity is another man's crankism.
Plenty of cranky ways to talk about the world burning up in five years, corporations conquering everything, any hawkish immigration controls being a white nationalist project, Larry Summers just hating unemployed people, etc. If you know where to look, it's easy to find.
Her views have crankish elements but they’re mostly based on plausible policy analysis
The crankishness might also be more a matter of delivery and style, and not substance. Nothing cranky about Medicare 4 All or consumer protection, I don't think.
The Democratic nominee for president has picked up Warren and Sanders invocation that the way to solve inflation is to address greed...
And walked it back when it got pushback. It could be just simple anchoring to signal that there is a concern for a common complaint and then doing something else to address it.
We saw this with student loan stuff. Vagueness and strategic ambiguity.
Not condoning it. Also this type of conduct is less common than it was in 2020.
I didn't realize she had walked it back, so good to hear. Can you point me to where she did that?
We don't make relative comparisons, or distinguish between crankism and simply being wrong about things, in here
I would contest that claim. I haven’t seen her endorse anything particularly cranky - just the first-order “expert” solutions that haven’t been fully tested.
????? Elizabeth Warren is not a crank! She created an entire federal agency! She's incredibly wonkish!
Elizabeth Warren circa 2010 was not a crank. Today's version, though....
Well, I haven't paid much attention to her in the past few years. But her 2020 primary slogan was "She Has A Plan For That." Crankery suggests incompetence. Whether or not you think her ideas are good, she's obviously incredibly knowledgeable about policy.
Her plans were all awful and based on light crankery. But republicans are a different level.
Liz Warren is 10% a crank compared to the median Republican politician. But she's still less of a crank than most Social Democratic politicians in Europe (where endless tarrifs, price controls, and productivity controls are the norm, not the exception).
To find ideas comparable to the median member of the GOP caucus in the industrialized world, it's like AfD and no one else
Waltz supported a bill that would allow the State to take 'temporary jurisdiction over custody' of kids from parents who did not want to participate in transitioning their children.
Edit: After a lot of conversation, especially with Dan Quail and FHW, I have revised my opinion of this law. The context is complicated for several reasons and the law is perhaps not as strong as I thought it was when I first read it. I never believed or stated that the State would take the child in order to give them medical treatment, which I think is how my comment was interpreted by some, and the verbatim letter of the law did give me reason to believe that the State would intervene if a parent chose not to participate with a transition. There are related statutes that bear on this, which Dan Quail linked, which clarify this some, and I appreciate the correction on that matter.
Honestly, believing something this ridiculous when it is so easy to verify that it is false is pure crank behavior. Just linking to the bill as proof when the bill doesn't do what you say it does is not evidence.
Elected Republicans engage in way more crank and conspiratorial thinking than Democrats on trans issues.
What's the obsession the Republicans seem to have of accusing major Democrats of child trafficking and child pornography? Where did it come from?
I'd suggest that it's because over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s child sex abuse became the ultimate trump card of evil in popular entertainment -- even characters who are literal unrepentant serial killers get to be the Good Guy in a White Hat in a story with another character who commits non-fatal child sex abuse.
This is one that does seem to have been part of the realignment. Pre-Q was very bipartisan. Hell Kamala Harris personally led a deranged crusade against backpage .com based in child sex trafficking conspiracies.
They don't have a real policy platform or real ideas that actually appeal to their base, so they have to call their political opponents pedophiles. Their entire caucus is a 2016-era bloodsports debate comment section come to life.
20 years ago basically everybody would agree that gender transition for kids was child abuse.
Only one party has forgotten this basic common sense
Transitioning for minors is an incredibly complicated, personal issue, that I don't think any party or group has a clear answer on it right now. But I'm very confident that generalized statements like yours don't help anybody.
No? It has long been believed that preventing dysphoric children, specifically the cohort who are highly likely to end up trans, from going through puberty is a highly human course of action.
Transsexual medicine has been around since the 1930s, it's not a bleeding edge field of science where nobody knows anything and everyone who supports anything that doesn't align with common sense is in the throughs of some social media-induced leftist fugue state
You also have seen Republicans embracing radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin, Catherine McKinnon, Julie Bindel, JK Rowling, et all who back in the 1990s were considered sworn enemies of conservatism. I remember when Rush Limbaugh would just decide to spend an entire show back in the 1990s making fun of and going on about the evils of Andrew Dworkin.
Now there are still fans of Dworkin in mainstream left politics like Michelle Goldberg of the NY Times but this is a smaller and smaller group as the GOP goes full Dworkinite.
FWIW, that's a bit of a rewriting of things. Dworkin and MacKinnon absolutely worked with conservatives, decades ago, on anti-porn stuff. Rush Limbaugh, of course, had his whole rap about Feminazis, but, e.g., the Hudnut in American Booksellers Ass'n v. Hudnut was the conservative mayor of Indianapolis, backing MacKinnon's anti-porn legislation.
Radical feminism may be one area where horseshoe theory has real validity, because the fact is that radical feminists do believe in some things, such as the importance and permanence of sex, the reality of sex differences, the exploitative nature of pornography, etc., that social conservatives agree with them on, even if the reasoning behind the beliefs is different.
This is mostly false--some social conservatives have a selective interest in particular views of Dworkin's and MacKinnon's (around sex work) but they have no interest in Dworkin's and MacKinnon's broader views about gender, which are deeply anti-conservative (and not anti-trans). Julie Bindel is a more complicated case and JK Rowling (who I don't really think of as a radical feminist) still more complicated.
The bill specifies “The State shall have temporary emergency jurisdiction if the child is in the state and:…“ is unable to obtain gender-related healthcare…”
What do you think that means?
For others to follow along.
Bill seems to be here
https://www.revisor.mn.gov/laws/2023/0/Session+Law/Chapter/29/
The section you quote references this
https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/543.23
But what I'm having trouble finding is, what does emergency custody lead to in this case
Ok, can't edit on phone but this gives the court jurisdiction, not custody
My read is that if one parent brings the child here for gender medical treatment then the court has jurisdiction to grant that parent custody, not to take the child from both parents.
Yes, this confusion was what made me think the law was pretty whacky, but several others pointed to adjoining language which clarified that it is relevant to taking custody until the matter could be resolved in the other state.
I guess I'm still unclear as to if the letter of the law prohibited this section from being applied to instate parents, but I've been persuaded that it probably doesn't.
Particularly when there are real bills passed in R states that actually can result in children being taken away from their parents if they do pursue GAC.
I am not a fan of chemical or surgical intervention in children. Social and psychological interventions and accommodations are fine. (Basically do what Europeans are doing.)
The true galaxy brain take is cranks are sometimes right. William Jennings Bryan, for example, was a crank when he denounced an evolutionary textbook. He was completely morally correct about its racial worldview. Even though evangelicals like Bryan were mocked by the talented columnist H.L. Mencken and at odds with the high intellectual jurisprudence of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., it's actually an affront to God to push racialist ideas in textbooks and it's similarly evil to chemically sterilize mentally troubled (or as they called them at the time, "feebleminded") teenage girls like Carrie Buck. This remains the case even if an expert with a professorship at Harvard Law School says otherwise.
As I understand it, the position of progressives today is that they're totally different from progressives a century ago. After all, Carrie Buck is non-binary, not feebleminded. The government will enact policies to help her get sterilized to actualize her personal identity, not to enact the public health paternalism of a modern society that vaccinates, as Justice Holmes argued. But if you look past the intellectual shift from stern paternalism to therapeutic self-discovery, the net policy is going to be very similar and land hardest on roughly the same sociological cohort of people as Carrie Buck. There is a great deal of irony as California hands out reparations to previous women it sterilized while encouraging Planned Parenthood to hand testosterone to minors alongside litigation against parental authority. But for those few as for Carrie Buck, it is largely a tragedy.
How is forcing a trans girl to go through male puberty "fine"? It seems completely non-fine to me, and is irreversible.
A child does not have the capacity to determine if they suffer from gender dysphoria, and there is no objective test to determine that condition. So the concept of a pre-pubescent trans girl really doesn't exist.
We should really think about a child as a different person than an adult, given the massive changes in physiology to the body and brain that happen during puberty. And a child doesn't have the mental capacity to make permanent decisions based on subjective feelings.
I didn’t say that. Please actually respond to the substance of the text.
Parental rights?
Please spell Coach Walz's name correctly.
Also, please don't turn today's post into another comment section about "TRANS."
Also also, there are parents out there who, for misguided religious reasons, want to punish their LGBT children, and those parents should absolutely meet the full power and fury of an angry State.
This isn't based in any data. But I imagine there are more LGBT children living in religious households who are scared to come out or face abuse for their sexuality, than instances of children transitioning and then regretting it.
I think that's possible, but I also think we have no idea because we really don't have good statistics on detransitioners because most of them generally stop seeing the doctors who gave them gender health care.
Now note, that point goes both ways-- conservatives who are convinced there are tons of detransitioners are also speaking without any data. Detransition rates could be much higher than reported; they also might not be. And we'd probably have to study it in a jurisdiction that has weak medical privacy laws to have any idea of the real number.
IMHO, the law (i.e., the power of the State) shouldn't supersede parental discretion regarding "gender affirming care," pro or con. After all, such power can cut both ways, depending which political faction happens to be in charge at any given time.
I’ve fought all my adult life to advance a recognition that there's nothing “Queer" about same-sex attraction. I’m attracted to guys; I’ve never hidden that fact, and (as my parents raised me) I’m proud simply to be myself.
OTOH, I never signed up to "smash cisheteropatriarchy" in the name of some Brave New World.
Thank you, Ben. You succinctly expressed my sentiment!!
This seems to be not true?
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2024/aug/27/jd-vance/jd-vance-misrepresents-minnesota-law-on-kids-seeki/
Reading the law does not support Lapse’s claim. It necessitates parental abandonment or CPS intervention for safety/neglect/abuse.
The law also prevents other state laws from overrule the legal rights of parents/guardians who are residents in MN.
You have it backwards. Not giving "gender-affirming health care" is another way to establish jurisdiction, essentially raising withholding those drugs to the level of child neglect. And the law allows Minnesota to overrule the legal rights of parents outside of Minnesota, even if a court with proper jurisdiction has entered a lawful custody order. It essentially endorses one parent kidnapping their child from one state--against a court order--and bringing the child to Minnesota to seek to transition their child.
I assume you're talking about temporary emergency jurisdiction under 518D.204, not regular jurisdiction (518D.201). If the other state has a custody determination, or if there is an action pending, then temp jurisdiction is limited to " a period...adequate to allow the person seeking an order to obtain an order from the state having jurisdiction". So if the other parent is contesting the move, MN law does not ignore the other state.
This is completely false.
https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bills/text.php?number=HF146&version=1&session=ls93&session_year=2023&session_number=0
Yes, I read it. I'm right and you're wrong. The legislation makes some pretty minor (and probably not very effective) changes to the baseline rules for how to determine which state's courts decide custody disputes. (They're worried about custody disputes being stuck in states that have strong public policies against transition care--while blue states have not done what you accuse Walz of doing, red states have widely banned transition care for minors even when approved by a parent with legal custody and Texas has branded approving parents as child abusers.) It doesn't make any change to the substantive law of custody or the substantive grounds for terminating parental rights. It doesn't take custody from parents at all, that's completely false.
I agree with you that it doesn't make any change to the substantive grounds for terminating parental rights, but I disagree that it makes some pretty minor changes. Long-established principles of inter-state child custody establish that one parent cannot unilaterally move the child to a new state and have that new state's courts have jurisdiction. 49 states have enacted the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act (UCCJEA), and this is a pretty dramatic departure from that. It is also in tension with the principles of the federal Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act, although I'm not sure if it conflicts with the letter of it.
No it's not.
Good edit. I appreciate it.
I’d have to see more details on this (it’s probably a stretch of a clause letting CPS intervene when the safety of a child is the result of gender identity stuff.)
https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bills/text.php?number=HF146&version=1&session=ls93&session_year=2023&session_number=0
The clause you are concerned about has state intervention in the case of child abandonment or CPS intervention due to safety/abuse/neglect.
That clause applies in the case of child abandonment, safety/abuse/neglect, OR not being able to receive "gender-affirming health care." Not being able receive "gender-affirming health care" is sufficient for the clause to apply--abandonment or neglect is not required.
But the clause doesn't automatically take the kids away. It gives temporary jurisdiction in Minnesota courts over the child. It applies when, for instance, one parent brings the child to Minnesota to receive "gender-affirming health care" as part of a child custody dispute, even when a court in another state with proper jurisdiction has ordered that no such health care be applied. I think it is a pretty radical overreach as far as inter-state court jurisdiction battles go, but it does not automatically remove children from their parents for refusing to trans their child.
You mean the clause that specifies “the child has been unable to obtain gender-related healthcare as defined….”?
I think Ben's right that cranks have more dominance in the GOP.
As I say in another comment, there's some good evidence that this is fundamentally driven by the number of safe seats. That's where your MTGs, Boeberts, and Gaetzes are coming from. And that's where Trump gets his footsoldiers in Congress.
Dems have plenty of safe seats too, that's not what changed. Safe red seats have started to produce cranks in Congress because crank voters have moved to the GOP. It's mostly because of Trump.
Since the '90s, we've gone from having more Democratic to more Republican safe seats, as documented by Kustov et al. in "The Rise of Safe Seats and Party Indiscipline in Congress."
See figure 2 on p. 10 for the data.
https://jackson.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Kustov-et-al.-2021.pdf
Also, if we want a serious discussion, to define “crank”. I know you kind of “know it when you see it” but it would still be useful.
I think there's important differences between the internal party crank dynamics and the crank idea voter alignment.
It seems that the cranks on the right are embraced and you can be a crank and still have real institutional power. I don’t think you’ll see Kamala campaign with or go on the podcast of a left wing crank.
True enough, but on the other hand someone like Robin DiAngelo or some of the crankier trans activist views (such as about putting opportunistic transitioners in women's prisons) have real clout in the Democratic Party when it comes to policy. Kamala won't campaign with such people but it doesn't mean they aren't a problem.
I’m not sure I agree. Take robin diangelo she released her work during an emotionally charged time to a receptive audience and her work was not vetted or challenged enough per Matt’s analysis on why this happens. Over time though she has become more discredited and last influence.
The number of Dem aligned normies I know who think Starbucks is shipping arms to Israel or some such nonsense is alarming. Damn near all of them read Kendi/DeAngelo/1619. The normie penetration of this stuff is a problem even if it's not taken as rigorous policy analysis.
Dave - are there any examples of any prominent mainstream democrats advocating for the Israel/starbucks thing or even allying themselves with someone who does even if they do not address the issue head on?
"Mainstream Democrats" is a red herring.
The public face of each party is important, but this wildly overstates their significance in a country where most of the substantive work happens behind the scenes during interactions between staffers, a country with a huge bureaucracy, and an enormous network of legal / non-governmental organizations performing para-governmental functions.
Right. There's no equivalent of Qanon in Democratic power circles. Also, the the hardcore left is enthusiastically hateful of the Democratic Party, and many will vote for Jill Stein or Cornell West. That's just not the situation on the right: the overwhelming bulk of even the most virulently radical, white supremacist hard rightists are loyal foot solider for their God-Emperor, Donald Trump.
The reason they believe that is because of TikTok.
Big country. Lots of dumb people.
Maybe you just know weird people?
Naw, I'm definitely the weird person that they know, not the other way around.
Eventually. But she had a massive amount of influence on DEI policies in the meantime and her acolytes made policy in the agencies for Obama and Biden.
Funny thing is DEI is being cut from lots of places because it is mostly a consulting grift that doesn’t materially improve things and the economy is slowing.
I swear so many people think we are in a 2020 world of cultural zeitgeist rather than on a downward trend towards cultural cooling.
Perhaps we're indeed on a downward trend toward cultural cooling - but if that's to proceed, it doesn't help matters (or decrease polarization) when an entire (surprisingly broad) range of perspectives is derided as "stupid," or when those holding any such perspectives are dismissed as "cranks."
I do think we need to be vigilant and outspoken (this was the real failure post-2016, adults being afraid to speak up), because watching nonsense gain traction has been exactly like watching Republicans in the 2000s to early 2010s.
I think both parties are vulnerable to cranky ideas and groups. The big difference is that the Democrats, unlike the Republicans, have some ability to self-correct.
Robin DiAngelo is a perfect example. In the mass hysteria following George Floyd she (along with Kendri) obtained a ridiculous amount of prominence. I would argue that both of them have seen a drastic reduction in their influence.
If that isn't sufficient evidence, well then I'll give you the 2024 Democratic National Convention. USA! USA!
Nobody doubts that Harris' speech is a useful corrective. But a lot of folks who staff Democratic administrations in key positions (including the current one, and, one assumes, a future Harris administration) believe in a bunch of that stuff and it makes it way into policy.
I think the general public pushback on gender-identity stuff (especially when it comes to children) have disempowered this activist lobby.
GLAAD jumped the shark when they called the NYT antitrans bigots.
The thing is, the bureaucracies in Dem administrations are still being staffed with the sorts of people who think (or at least pretend to think) that GLAAD's claims about the NY Times were correct.
Ehhh, the bureaucracy is most career people that is consistent between administrations.
Not the POLICY-making bureaucracy.
For instance, whatever you think of the bounce back and forth on Title IX policies between administrations, those policies are being made by the people who I am talking about.
What is the population that makes up that bureaucracy though? I suspect its filled of highly educated people who are politically and socially aligned with progressive viewpoints - of which this is a part!
I would say it’s almost the opposite. We’re talking about the epistemic worlds of the left and right, not the political worlds. The epicenter of institutional power in the left’s epistemic world is Harvard/the NYT/etc. rather than Kamala.
Viewed this way, there are *tons* of cranks with institutional power on the left. The right has no epistemically important institutions, so there are few right-wingers with power in epistemic institutions almost by definition.
Yea I mean I just don’t think it’s the same at all. I don’t think Harvard faculty and students should have free reign over government policy and have some bad ideas (as does anyone insular group) but I don’t think being a crank gets you power at Harvard or the NYT. Being more into Elizabeth Warren than then general public is not the same as retweeting Alex jones.
Nikole Hannah-Jones is a crank.
Plus a lot of what is studied at Harvard has no real policy implications (at least not for policies that are important to federal spending or economic/foreign policy outcomes). If an art history professor at Harvard who specializes in tapestries has some loony lefty economic beliefs, just because they're a Harvard professor doesn't mean that anyone are going to take those beliefs seriously.
And in fact it’s valuable to have loony ideas within every intellectual discipline, precisely because it enables criticism and the breaking up of groupthink. And occasionally some loony ideas are right, like the idea that humans are descended from ape like creatures, or that the continents used to touch or that the voting system we use might not be the best at representing the public interest.
Matt's article is talking about the political side of it though: he cares about the crankiness those who are going to write the policies.
And this would be bad if Harvard produced graduates who then went and defined the culture. But instead, most Harvard graduates get jobs in business consulting and finance and their only real concern is climbing the greasy money pole.
Don't they do both? A majority of Harvard grads definitely go into consulting/finance/tech/etc. But aren't Ivy leaguers also wildly over-represented in cultural institutions (media/academia/etc.)?
Half of those groups you listed hate Democrats more than Republicans do.
True, the left cranks influence Dem politics through institutional power mostly in law, media and academia. Even the most insane right wing conspiracists like Alex Jones are also basically open GOP hacks at the same time.
If they have such influence over Democrats, why won't Democrats hire or elect them to anything? Why do the nuttiest Democrats keep losing their primaries to moderates? Why can't we just judge the supposed extremism of the Democratic Party by looking at the corpus of the Democratic Party? Youve got a preferred conclusion, and you're nust nutpicking random academics or bad-take NPR clickbait to try to support it.
Vince, I'll give more credence to your disclaimer when I see more Democratic politicians denounce those academics (e.g., Kendi) and/or disavow the sorts of crap dished out by NPR.
No you won't. You'll just move on to some other rando and demand that "Democrats" disavow them.
At age 74, I'm not cruising around taking random potshots. I'm an old-style Boomer liberal (no wokester, but no Trumpster). I know where I stand -- and I'll stand by what I wrote.
To put it simply, we could stand another "Sister Souljah" moment. I'll grant you that the tone of Kamala's acceptance speech was a good start.
Obviously there are still SOME cranks on the left, but it's not just anti-vaxxers that have switched. If you said that 9/11 was an inside job in 2005 you were almost certainly a Democrat. If you say it today you are almost certainly a Republican, even though the "inside job" conspiracy is an anti-GOP belief. The same is true of a whole range of other anti-government and anti-corporation conspiracy beliefs that used to be specifically left-wing coded.
The only view there that I think is crank-y is the 10/7 denialism (which, like BJG herself, has a complicated relationship to left/right divides). Being badly wrong in how you interpret and understand facts is not the same as being a crank
Interesting. I've always viewed crankery as "combining facts with an extremely flawed Bayesian updating process to reach terrible conclusions." E.g., most 9/11 conspiracy theorists know WAY more facts about 9/11 than I do. But they wildly over-extrapolate from those facts to reach insane conclusions.
How do you view crankery? Is an element of bad faith necessary?
Crankery tends to involve a false sense of subject-matter expertise, based on shortcuts. You learn a handful of obscure facts (some of which are simply false) and use them as trump cards in any debate with a normie. "I can't believe you didn't know about the radio messages about WC7," "You don't even know about the Lancet study?," "You didn't know about the novel spike protein on SARS Cov-2?", etc. To my mind, the average crank knows, like, a half dozen facts like that, and has zero familiarity with counterarguments. Any debate turns into a mess of moving field goals and subject changes, especially if you try to get them to address the big picture.
The problem remains that what's being characterized here as an "epistemic" divergence stems from a pre-existing disparity between conceptual vocabularies and/or cosmologies.
There are always competing paradigms in every academic field, and most views that are well supported at any time turn out to be badly and fundamentally wrong, without having been crankish. The Ptolemaic geocentrists weren’t cranks, and the initial heliocentrists like Giordano Bruno were. It wasn’t about being right or wrong with the fundamental fact, but how you got there.
Interesting point. Here's how I think about it, which I grant is vague and blurry: some disputes can be resolved pretty definitively and leave no room for dispute among people who have the relevant technical skills and are operating in good faith. Other disputes require judgment calls. Having bad judgment on the judgment calls makes you wrong. Rejecting the definitive resolution where such a resolution is possible makes you a crank.
I suspect that for the vast majority of cranks the conclusion comes first, then the facts are fit to the conclusion. Facts that don't fit the conclusion are never learned or discarded.
It seems like bad faith is ubiquitous, but I figure that must just be a side effect.
Let's distinguish between cranks/crackpots and zealots/lawyers of the cause. The crank is a guy like Steve Kirsch who invents or "innovates" claims like "the ovaries get the highest concentration [of mRNA vaccine particles]"[1]. For every crank there can be up to a million+ zealots/lawyers who pick up, memorize, spread and defend the cranks' claims. But a crank will typically go on doing his thing even if he* has no followers at all (see: trisectors / math cranks).
Angela Collier has a (longwinded) video discussing physics crackpots and it seems like the key thing on her list of "crackpot theory" characteristics[2] is point #3, "respond with anger, claim physics establishment has blacklisted them, cite Galileo/Einstein/etc". They come up with a hypothesis that has serious flaws (whether they be obvious or subtle), and whenever someone points out the flaws they get angry and end up loudly complaining about how they are unfairly persecuted by the arrogant establishment and how the ivory tower's stupid mindless dogma has rotted the brains of everyone except him and his followers (if any).
Of course, this being the internet, most of the criticisms directed at the crank are themselves full of crap, but I remember stories of math cranks who kept going to mathematics professors with their ideas, and did not appreciate being corrected or understand what the professors were telling them. So I'm not sure if it matters whether the criticisms are legit or not, as the crank can't tell the difference one way or another. The very fact that most online criticism is itself pretty illogical inspires me to think that a crank is basically a normal person (just like most of the people pushing back on his nonsense) but with an extraordinary overconfidence in his own mental abilities. Then, from his perspective, everybody else is engaging in bad faith, because they conclude he is wrong when he obviously isn't, which makes him angry, which in turn justifies his own bad-faith behavior.
Cranks exist in every field, though, so the more interesting question is why large groups of people flock to cranks and eat up their every word. This I imagine stems from meme-based reasoning[3]. Meme-based reasoning leads you to assume a left-wing or right-wing worldview according to who your friends happen to be. If you grow up with right-wing friends, you get beliefs like "government bad", "ivory tower bad", "mainstream media bad" and "scientists are untrustworthy", so you look for alternatives. By now, the alternatives are centered around a bunch of cranks. If your thinking is memetic, you lack the mental tools that would ever clue you in that your life is built around cranks, and it seems like "crank" and "conspiracy theorist" are just Establishment slurs for truthtellers.
* usually a man, but consider Helen Caldicott
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7NoRcK6j2cfxjwFcr/covid-vaccine-safety-how-correct-are-these-allegations?commentId=f97bJXwj2M5toGDvt
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY985qzn7oI&t=2308s
[3] https://x.com/DPiepgrass/status/1645492780175872000
Watermelon brown shirts are voting for Jill Stein Putin Party anyways.
No, it really isn't. You are describing a tiny minority of people with essentially no power in modern Democratic politics. The GOP is so all-in on deeply unpopular policy that it's basically cranks all the way down at this point.
My personal skeleton key to the modern GOP is that it is an incredibly strong institution with heavily committed and effective grassroots, propaganda, and financial operations, but essentially no intellectual core. Nearly every part of movement conservativism is wildly unpopular at this point, so they are basically an army wandering around trying to find a general. They have periodic dalliances with a serious-seeming flavor of the month, but at the end of the day it's basically a shitposting coalition with no affirmative agenda that is perennially vulnerable to grifters, cranks, and weirdoes.
>they are basically an army wandering around trying to find a general.
this is a very good model actually, nice
Yes. This piece does a good job of describing some intellectual failings of the right and left, but Matt argued that they're different in kind, and I'd argue that they're similar.
Naw, the CIA is not in fact responsible for every bad thing that happens everywhere in the world and the Khmer Rouge were in fact the bad guys.
“The good news for the Federalist Society is that appellate jurisprudence is basically fake, and having judges agree with you about stuff is dramatically more important than having “highly skilled” judges (whatever that means).”
This is so incredibly true I had to thank Matt for writing it before finishing the article.
The "basically fake" claim is deeply ignorant. If the point is that some cases do not have a clearly correct answer, and hence inevitably turn on judges' various predilections, fine.
Conducting a trial involves, among other things, applying the rules of evidence on the fly. This takes technical skill.
Reading the law does not take technical skill! It’s written in English, not Greek. Matt can read the constitution every bit as well as John Roberts. He’s better at analyzing policy.
Thinking the Supreme court has special powers to squeeze meaning out of the constitution is like believing the pontifex maximus can augur the future by butchering animals and looking at their bleeding remains.
By this logic, all of mathematics is an unskilled endeavor.
You have rules (axioms). The most talented mathematicians indeed do squeeze special conclusions (theorems) out of the rules that anyone can read.
I see no reason why the law should be different. Incapable judges won’t be able to draw correct legal conclusions because they aren’t able to notice the contradictions in their own arguments, use thought experiments to probe the soundness of an argument, etc.
If the law were a set of internally consistent axioms or postulates, you would have a point. However, the law is no such thing. It is both organic and contested. The framers had their own visions [sic] of government, then the anti federalists pushed back and the bill of rights happened. The Civil War was not an exercise in applied mathematics, it was a bloody struggle that left a deep imprint upon the constitution. Modus talens won’t take you very far when the premises are indeterminate and their meaning contested
Isn't this argument inconsistent with the facts that SCOTUS decisions are rarely ever 9:0, and judge coalitions differ between cases? If law were like math, there should be unanimous consent.
Politifact has something showing the idea that 9-0 rulings are rare. They are common, in fact.
During the most recent term, 54% of cases were unanimous, which is the same as 2022. Earlier years (2018-2021) averaged 67% unanimity.
https://empiricalscotus.com/2024/07/01/2023-stat-review/
I appreciate the correction. Also IIRC the stats are in any case skewed by the fact that whether SCOTUS picks up a case depends on the expected voting outcome. That said, when it comes to the law vs. math analogy, you'd need more like 99.99% unanimity rather than 67%.
I do not mean to denigrate the importance of judicial skill. It is, if nothing else, a necessary exercise of power, best left in capable hands.
Therefore, judges should be men and women of intelligence, probity, and restraint. It’s hard to ask for more than that.
I understand the rules of basketball and can dribble, pass and shoot. But Erik Spoelstra does have "special powers to squeeze meaning out of the" rules.
Expertise, education and a special mind all combine to make him (and John Roberts) more able to be successful in their field than Matt or me.
How's your pickup game? Would love to ball sometime in DC with any Slow Boring commenters.
We are mostly middle aged and probably out of shape…
You are describing the exact demographic profile of the kind of person that always dominates pick up ball.
The better analogy for Spoelstra is a lawyer, not an judge. Tony Brothers is the better analogue for a judge here. And even in that case, calling things in real-time is what a trial judge does, and doing the video review is the appellate things. So to David Abbott's point above, while there is technical skill (being in the right position, seeing complicated things in real-time and making the right inference) that's fundamental to being a good on-court referee, when it comes to reviewing the tape, any monkey with an encyclopedic knowledge of the rule book can do it pretty well.
And in fact we see NBA refs regularly make wild video review decisions, typically in ways that are self-serving, such as choosing not to overturn a call unless there is no wiggle room for discretion (e.g., a player's foot is obviously out of bounds.)
exactly. refs have to be capable athletes and need excellent visual acuity
I think this is deeply part of the problem. If you think Appellate Law is all vibes, then there is no incentive to make a legal argument in dissent. You end up with Sotomayor (and her clerks) in the Immunity case making tweet ready lines in the dissent rather than fighting on the merits of the Majority's understanding of the law. Some of the most important opinions in American history have their antecedents in dissents and concurrences of prior cases. But thinking the entire project is fake and only about counting to 5 neuters this incentive. Matt is 100% correct about functionally affirmative action for people who are right of center with 175+ LSATs in the federal judiciary. But pretending jurisprudence is fake while Fed Soc EXTREMELY does not think its fake does nothing but cede power to them.
"But pretending jurisprudence is fake while Fed Soc EXTREMELY does not think its fake does nothing but cede power to them."
I think Matt would argue that the Fed Soc also thinks it is fake, i.e. a mere pretext for political hardball. But part of the Fed Soc's political hardball is to pretend that it is not fake, i.e. not results-driven, so that they can cover their own political preferences behind a veil of fake high-mindedness.
I'm not saying that's right or wrong, only that part and parcel of Matt's claim that appellate jurisprudence is basically fake is to say that the Fed Soc's sanctimonious pronouncements about the majesty of the law are fake, too.
This is an issue where maybe after the election cycle dominating interest, a long form piece from Matt on this would be helpful to his many apostles here in the comments lol. Knowing Matt's general and professed penchant for literalism, I assumed fake = made up i.e. anyone could do it as suggested in the comments above, not fake as in outside of policy analysis or a mask for it etc.
I think broadly, the center left needs a new and better theory of jurisprudence and federalism in general. Matt didn't say as much but Warren Court jurisprudence was most definitely fake as in without antecedent lol. And it managed to make the country a dramatically more democratic and free place! I am grateful for it! But it wasn't law and it was just vibes, which sparked both the general conservative backlash but also the methodological rise of textualism and originalism several decades ago.
It is impossible to strip away partisan politics, but in abstract, I think what you would want is to imagine how the branches interact with one another. We should want a legislature to play offense, make big sweeping changes and be the center of where policy change happens in the country, the courts to play defense and insure those changes are constitutional to the letter of the law, and the executive to play special teams and set up both the offense and defense to do their respective jobs. We have gotten too far away from that balance.
The Warren Court was deeply within the common law tradition. If it was vibes, basically the entire British court system is vibes.
Justice Douglas' jurisprudence was vibes but he didn't get 5 votes. Neither does Thomas.
>I think Matt would argue that the Fed Soc also thinks it is fake, i.e. a mere pretext for political hardball.
But that is precisely the problem. The fact is that there very much are people who care about jurisprudence, and about issues like the proper role of the judiciary in a liberal democracy, etc, and simply dismissing them as fakers who are simply using that to implement their political preferences is lazy and unserious.
“ The fact is that there very much are people who care about jurisprudence,….”
I am sure that there are such people, ie they exist. But the members of the SCOTUS most affiliated with the Fed Soc have thrown away any credibility they may once have had.
We need a full column on “why jurispridence is fake” —every time Matt mentions it, that dominates the comments.
I used to think that, but then realized that if Matt wrote a full column on it, it would be about as good as "appellate jurisprudence is basically fake" which tells me Matt is not willing to apply intellectual rigor to something he thinks doesn't have it.
I think he mainly does this to own some people he went to college with. The #1 career benefit of becoming a generalist pundit (or an economist) is that it's like the skeleton key to owning all of your peers who went into other fields, whether it's law, medicine, education, dentistry, or whatever else.
I think part of the problem with this framing is pretending that the current SCOTUS bench is a history-destroying outlier, as if no other SCOTUS bench (right wing or left wing) has ever engaged in sloppy motivated reasoning. Or as if demonstrably bad jurisprudence never gets overturned.
And as some mentioned above, it’s a bit hard to take the critique seriously when left jurisprudence seems just as nakedly results-oriented (albeit with less underlying ideological rigor).
That said, I think in some ways public outcry *is* one of the main error correction mechanisms for SCOTUS. Trial judges make bad (whether biased or just incorrect) rulings all the time. Appellate courts correct those bad rulings all the time. Appellate courts get it wrong too, and SCOTUS often corrects those bad rulings. But SCOTUS is no more immune to bad rulings than any other court, and (as someone else already argued) overturning those requires rigorous and principled opposition, not “Chevron bad because I like regulators better than judges.”
Bad jurisprudence - whether in victory or in dissent - weakens protections and leaves your viewpoint at higher risk of being overturned or undermined. I love Obergefell, but candidly Gorsuch’s argument for LGBTQ protections in Bostock (which IIRC came from Ilya Somin) is far stronger than Kennedy’s.
Applying the rules of evidence on the fly takes technical skill only if the rules mean anything. One could easily argue that the rules of evidence are just as fake as all other laws and trial judges rule on them purely on the basis of manipulating the final outcome of the case, and thus trial jurisprudence is every bit as fake as appellate jurisprudence.
The problem is that OUR Pontifex Maximum does not have any Vestal Virgins.
I don't see how this responds to my point. Yes, if Matt were on the Court, I am sure he would do a fine job. But the disagreement is about what the job entails, not about who can do it.
Doubting the validity of law as a vocation that ought to be engaged with seriously on a blog dedicated to embracing the undersubscribed notion that politics is a vocation that ought to be engaged with seriously.
Matt, and this is not an insult, does not understand the minutiae of like patent law, immigration law, and admiralty law. Most of us don't either. Heck, most lawyers don't have a firm grasp of law outside their specialty. There is a reason law schools exist.
I wouldn't limit it to those areas, but rather to almost all areas of the law, including "well known" areas like criminal law and constitutional law.
I recently had a discussion about recent Scotus cases with some people who have STEM PhDs. They seemed to be completely ignorant of the fact that there was been a 200+ year long debate about the proper roles of the legislature and the executive in a democracy.
And, how many highly educated people have an understanding of mens rea, and its relationship to culpability?
Not many, which is why strict liability offenses are so prevalent these days.
Once a case gets to appellate court, the facts are settled, and the arguments are about the relevant law. If Matt is saying that law is fake, then I don't know what his point is.
It's just legal realism, or at least a highly simplistic but hardcore version of it.
I'm also here to complain about this bad take. It's not 100% false and I think I know what he means, but it's exactly the kind of hyperbole for which he often scolds leftist groups. We can sanewash it - I like your version fine - but Matt has consistently pushed back against saying things in need of sanewashing. He should follow his own advice and instead say something less engaging but more accurate.
Also, I hope Matt doesn't use the same math to assess average quality of care by minority doctors as he does for federal judge quality.
What was wrong with the judge quality comment? If you gave all left-handed lawyers judgeships and the best 1/9th right handed lawyers judgeships you'd have equal numbers of both but the right handed judges would of course on average be better, you took the best out of a larger pool. (Assuming handedness has no bearing itself on quality)
In my experience most cases turn out in pretty predictable ways, and turn more on the facts than the law. This of course does not make the headlines and remains invisible to most people. Where I believe there's a problem is that the federal judiciary increasingly comes from a small number of Ivies, where as best as I can tell the way they've learned to think is increasingly abstract and 'made up.'
The Supreme Court is almost exclusively Ivy educated, but is it true that the appellate bench overall is increasingly Ivy educated?
And I don't get what you mean by increasingly abstract and made up
Despite the presence of yale/harvard on SCOTUS, Ivy league law school is much less of an operative category than the T-14, which probably does overwhelmingly populate A.III appointments.
In fact, I think you’ll find that not even a single appellate-level judge is a Princeton law grad!
I love the polls that ask people to rank the top law schools in the country. Princeton is inevitably in the top five even though it has never had a law school.
And some who went to lowly state schools that are only good at college football, like Michigan!
Convincing your parents why you should go to what they think is StateU over a lower ranked Ivy is a right of passage for t14 applying 0L's lol
There is some data here: https://empiricalscotus.com/2017/09/10/law-schools/
T-14 dn seem to be a majority, though the data includes district court judges. Appellate might be different.
For all the critiques of originalism/textualism, the opposing philosophy of law is……?
Textualism and originalism are different. Textualism looks only at the text. Originalism looks to the “original understanding” and leans on things like the Federalist Papers and the acts of the first Congress to further specify the original understanding.
Neither of these projects really requires much training. Most law schools only require a single semester of constitutional law. I took an additional semester of constitutional history— which is far more interesting because it is empirical rather than metaphysical.
One thing that should probably be noted here is that the "appellate bench" is mostly state court judges who are most certainly not majority-Ivy (or T-14) educated. This entire conversation today appears to be limited exclusively to the federal appellate bench.
Juries have taught me epistemological humility. It’s not that predictable
>The "basically fake" claim is deeply ignorant.<
I don't think so. Matt's being a bit flippant here, sure. But it's not deeply ignorant to note that many jurists read whatever policy preferences they like into the constitution.
"The "basically fake" claim is deeply ignorant."
Can you say more about why it is deeply ignorant?
It seems like your second sentence concedes that most cases that rise to appellate review will be settled by the judge's political 'predilections', not by scholarship or "legal skill".
1. I very intentionally said "some cases", not "most cases." I also very intentionally said "various predilections" rather than "political predilections." See, eg, Justice Sotomayor's comment about "wise Latinas." Eg, I taught high school for many years in high school. Were I on the bench, I am more likely than John Robert's to think, "hm, how will this rule we announce affect urban youth?"
2. No one who has read oral argument transcripts or read many judicial opinions would conclude that judges generally do anything other than struggle in good faith with difficult issues.
Thanks, gdanning.
So, if I understand you, Matt's charge that appellate jurisprudence is "basically fake" represents deep ignorance on his part because only some cases are settled on the basis of the judge's individual predilections, which may be political or non-political predilections. Fair enough.
I'm less impressed with the argument that judges "struggle in good faith with difficult issues," because good faith and sincerity have never prevented someone from acting in ways that reflect their deepest predilections.
>good faith and sincerity have never prevented someone from acting in ways that reflect their deepest predilections.
Perhaps, but it seems to me that judges are MORE likely to ignore those predilections than most people. Judges decide cases where they disagree with the underlying policy all the time! Justice Scalia was no fan of flag burning or criminals, after all.
Re: your last sentence, I think what you're maybe not considering is that judicial review worked better when American society was less partisan and less polarized. But its highly subjective nature functions less well when judges become simply Blue or Red team tribe members.
The SC decides virtually every major, culture-war case exactly on party lines. The appellate courts mostly do too. Judicial supremacy advocates want us to be blind and somehow ignore this reality in front of our eyes
Matthew Kacsmaryk, Andrew Hanen, Drew Tipton, etc are no Nino Scalia.
And the oral argument point is crucial. Judges DO struggle with the implications of their decisions in future cases.
Now to be fair, some courts, like the 5th Circuit, have become so highly politicized that this isn't happening in some major cases. But that is still the exception overall.
"[G]ood faith and sincerity have never prevented someone from acting in ways that reflect their deepest predilections."
True enough, but not equally true for everyone and not equally important in all circumstances. It's good to fight these tendencies, which is what struggling in good faith is.
2. I would conclude that! Wasn't Thomas famous for many years for not asking a single question during oral arguments? Basically because he applies his bizarre (albeit sincere) political beliefs to every case that comes before him.
And FWIW, I don't think all of the conveniently forgotten donations from his billionaire buddies changed his mind so much as they kept Thomas from retiring from the SC to cash out more blatantly.
The Thomas not asking questions in oral argument canard turned out to be Thomas telling the truth about not liking the old oral argument format. They changed the format and he participates plenty.
(And is usually an excellent questioner.)
Something that is true of nearly all political obsessives is that
- 99% of the appellate court decisions they are aware of are the ones that are reported in the New York Times, mostly on hot-button political issues.
- The cases that meet the above description are about 2% of all appellate court decisions and are not really representative of the remaining 98%.
- Even in those cases, more than 50% of the time the only thing people read are New York Times' reporters' summaries of the decisions, not the court opinions themselves.
And the reporters' summaries are usually terrible. How many people who rely on reporters' summaries think that Citizens United held that corporations are persons? Or that spending money is speech? Or that corporations have the right to freedom of speech? Or that limits on campaign contributions are unconstitutional? 95+ pct, in my experience, yet none of that is true.
Absolutely right.
It's like if one watched nothing from the NFL except for videos of replay reviews, and then determined from that, that NFL football is full of nothing but close calls that could go either way.
That is not why Thomas did not ask questions. And regardless, as you implicitly note, Thomas is an outlier. Why would you make a generalization based on an outlier?
Well gdanning did say that if *some* cases do not have a clearly correct answer then they will turn on the judges' predilections. Not *most* cases.
Right, but the cases with straightforward answers probably should not have made it up to the appellate level. They do sometimes, but then that reflects genuine ignorance at the lower level. So, it seems more accurate to say that "most" appellate cases will not have a straightforward answer than merely to say that "some" will, if "some" is used to implicate "some but not most."
it’s better to lean on “jurisprudence” to make that distinction. error correction is not jurisprudence
It is a tautology that the law is a man-made thing. It is also a bedrock part of any advanced society.
And yet most developed countries do not have anywhere near our level of judicial review, or the ability of judges to overturn virtually every single thing Congress does. We're the weird outlier! Your 2nd sentence has the wrong premise, and civilized life is possible without rule by law school grads
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_sovereignty
I wasn't arguing that the US system is the best and all others are inferior. Only that the statement that the law is fake is true of any man-made system of rules to govern society.
Matt's not arguing that the law is fake, I think. Rather, he's arguing that the notion of "objective" constitutional jurisprudence is fake. It's all political at a fundamental level, once we peel away the Tartuffery.
Matt said "appellate jurisprudence is basically fake." Since *every* liberal democratic country I'm aware of has appellate jurisprudence, seems like Matt is condemning a fairly broad swathe of how law operates.
Do civil law countries have jurisprudence? My understanding is court decisions are not really precedents in a civil law system, they bind only the parties, and future litigants can cite only the code, not legal precedents
Isn't that essentially the what Matt is claiming happens with our courts? That there is no actual jurisprudence, and it just depends on how the current court you're in front of decides the law on your facts based on what they think should happen.
We are also an outlier in things like Free Speech, Property Rights, Parental Rights, Religious Liberty, Due Process, etc, etc, and a whole bunch of other pesky little freedoms that our powerful judiciary defends against the whims of mobs, activists, monied interests, and legislators.
And I’m really grateful for this.
Only thing that prevents me from voting for Harris as a Never Trumper is my concern about my rights losing their guardians in the judiciary.
These are mostly left over from the Warren Court, a midcentury phenomena where a relatively left-leaning set of jurists created a bunch of extra freedoms- ones that I personally agree with! But there's no guarantee that you're always going to have liberal justices, and indeed the right-leaning shift of the court in the last few decades has started to chip away at the criminal procedure rights the Warren Court gave us. I would encourage you to take a longer view of the Supreme Court's history, and learn more about say the Lochner era, and how the courts ruled when FDR was President.
Giving an unelected group supreme power & the final word in a political system is a pretty high-variance strategy. Yes, it worked out well in the middle of the 20th century..... some Kings also did a great job when they held the throne. Doesn't mean that the next group isn't going to be substantially worse!
Here, here. Parliamentary sovereignty gets the iterative nature of government right. The Fixed Term of Parliaments Act was a monstrosity, I’m glad they ditched it.
"It is a tautology that the law is a man-made thing."
Hmmm...that seems too strong. The negation of a tautology is a contradiction. When natural law or divine law theorists say that the law is made by nature or the gods, then I think they are wrong, but I don't think that they are saying something self-contradictory.
I think that's because "law" is being used in two different senses there. "Law" as made by nature or gods is not manmade, but "law" as the interpretation and implementation by men is. The latter might be inspired by, or even identical to, the former, but it isn't the same thing even if we might use the same word for it.
I absolutely love when he writes something along these lines, and you can practically see the redness rising through the law commenters faces right through to the tips of their ears, it's very funny.
It is genuinely really important that judges understand basic statistics so can't be bamboozled. But no one cares about that. Law schools, Republican, Democrats, media etc is perfectly happy with judges not understanding stats even when it is important in their job of understanding evidence and balancing risks.
I disagree. This seems to be a clear case of someone hearing about high-visibility court decisions that touch partisan political issues, noticing that a judge's ruling often line up with the political party of the president that appointed them, and determining that judges always make decisions based on their political preferences.
Yes, if you base your analysis on the super contentious issues that get huge media attention, you will conclude that appellate jurisprudence is basically fake. Similarly, if you evaluated basketball referees on just the calls that cause TV cameras to zoom in on a shouting coach you would conclude that referees are making stuff up.
The problem here is that the vast majority of decisions made by judges are ignored. Most decisions are on boring legal issues that don't touch abortion or Trump or anything else that gets the blood pumping.
I also enjoyed this point a lot --- but I think it only applies to constitutional and political questions. most appeals do not involve these issues -- and just like it sucks when trial judges are bad, it really sucks when appellate judges are bad at things like class certification, the correct standard for summary judgment, creating clear circuit guidance for lower courts...
How often do appellate judges get those things wrong? Their dockets are much smaller than trial judges
Funny. I was about to post about how that was a usually low quality and silly claim. For starters, most cases appellate courts hear are not the sort of politically charged and deeply contested constitutional issues on which judicial ideology is strongly predictive.
I’ve never tried apologetics, but Matt’s claim is interesting and compelling enough I’ll try.
He hedged enough to avoid opprobrium.
First of all, Matt’s fire is directed (or ought to be!!) at “appellate jurisprudence.” Appellate courts serve an important error correction function. When a trial judge violates black letter law, and the stakes are high enough to merit an appeal, they correct the appeal. If a trial judge gets pissed off and sentences someone to 15 years when the maximum is 10, they fix that. Appellate courts restraining lawless conduct by trial judges is essential to the rule of law.
“Appellate jurisprudence” seeks to be more than the mechanical application of determinate texts. The etymology betrays its ambition— adding wisdom to the grubby enactments of legislatures, where many of the actors aren’t even lawyers, much less flowers of the legal academy. This project is hubris.
There have certainly been periods in American history where the median supreme court justice was wiser than the median senator. However, there is no structural reason this will usually be the case. Federal appellate judges are the ultimate bubble dwellers. Their salaries and prestige are guaranteed for life. They are the Athenian aeropagus on steroids. Senators may be patrician, but they have to duke it out on the hustings every six years and win popular consent. As presently practiced, judicial review is an additional layer of complexity and veto upon a structure already sagging under its own gravity.
I think Matt sometimes teases his bolder takes with provocative paragraphs, looks at the tenor and popularity of the comments, and makes sure not to swim too far from shore.
As Scott Alexander pointed out years ago, this phenomenon causes a spiral.
Rightwing people leave "indigo" institutions (those that are ostensibly nonpartisan but clearly lean left) as they feel less welcome, which makes those institutions more leftwing, which causes mor rightwing people to leave, and so on.
Not sure how to fix this, because fixing institutional culture is not something that policy is capable of.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/
I think policy can change institutional culture. Some red state legislatures are going after their state universities for being too left and I won't be surprised at all if we start to see real changes in the ideological climate on those campuses as a result.
I think some universities secretly WANT their legislatures to put some pressure on them to step away from the stances they've taken. They need some air cover to back away from the ubiquity of DEI and the protest culture that has hamstrung their institutions.
Similarly, I think corporations want some outside pressure so they can drop their political stances and likewise focus on their core mission of serving customers and making money. Just recently, a number of companies have announced significant changes to their DEI policies in the face of what appears to be pretty weak outside pressure.
Austerity and declining enrollments will hopefully get places to focus more on the core mission of educating rather than rent seeking for administrators….
It’s actually a driving force in the opposite direction
I know. Hence the ellipses. My Alma mater is going bankrupt.
The problem is, experiences in, e.g., Florida illustrate that when red states take these moves, they're more typically concerned about the culture war BS than the actual educational missions of these institutions. If you don't take the premise of secondary education seriously, your reforms (and the folks you choose to lead them) are going to end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
The same is true of the ways that California has tried to enforce equity in their school systems at the expense of outcomes.
Which policies in California are you talking about?
I spent 9 years at Texas A&M. I’m not sure I see a path for this sort of movement, unless they just gradually adjunct-ize everything other than the agriculture school.
The A&M Board of Regents is appointed by the state governor. The Board has broad powers, I believe they recently scuttled the appointment of a new head of the A&M Journalism school essentially because of concerns about her leftist politics. (The President at the time got caught in the blow-up and resigned.)
The Texas state legislature recently forced A&M to dissolve its office for diversity, stop requiring job candidates to submit diversity statements, stop requiring diversity trainings, etc.
Since Republicans can be expected to control the governorship and the state legislature for the foreseeable future, I won't be surprised if university staff and professors start to trim their sails to head off further interference.
I was in the process of moving to California when that explosion happened! The Dean of Arts and Sciences who warned the new head of Journalism to be careful about accepting the offer was a colleague in my department. Another colleague in my department was some sort of vice dean for diversity at the time they canceled the position and basically banned the word. I'm not sure that any of this will have much effect on the actual faculty and their views - though it did end the ACES faculty fellow program that was a pipeline for faculty diversity.
I'm fairly sure the President and Dean only really resigned in this process because they were already hated by the faculty for unrelated reasons, and making enemies above as well as below was too much.
In the end, my expectation is that this won't be that different from the various other things the legislature did to A&M while I was there (mandating the university to allow guns everywhere without pressurized air canisters - and mandating that faculty be willing to meet students for office hours elsewhere if their office has pressurized air canisters; treating the lack of a face mask and lack of vaccination as a protected class under DEI-like policies during the pandemic). A&M has always played the "good cop" to UT's "bad cop" when going up against the legislature - but the faculty understand that their job is to outsmart the legislature, and they can do it.
Nate Silver has his own take on the indigo idea, and we all know he has a knack of annoying people among that set:
https://www.natesilver.net/p/twitter-elon-and-the-indigo-blob
>> is not something that policy is capable of.
I doubt it. Policies are probably *causing it* but in complex indirect ways which is to say the economy is causing it, and is influenced by policy.
Well, I think some policies could mitigate it, like greater school choice and Civil Rights / non-discrimination protections in employment for one’s political beliefs or the unpopular use of one’s First Amendment Rights.
There is lots of easy stuff that they can do, for example expelling and sometimes prosecuting students and proffesors who actively harass opponents.
I think a number of people on the left were initially motivated to becoming politically active by the idea of oppression - that some bad thing was keeping people down/causing the problem etc. And certainly, throughout history and today we can find many examples of that. But seeing everything in that frame really leads you to some skewed views of things - certainly not as bad as "vaccines cause autism" - but at least in ways that are at worst just wrong and at best not helpful. I think "food deserts" were a great example of this. It's definitely true that there are poor areas of America that don't have good access to fresh vegetables. I think by now it's been pretty much accepted by most people who have looked into it that this is a demand-side issue not a supply one (that the reason why there isn't better access to fresh food is in these areas is that the people living there are often very stressed single-parent households with little time that end up purchasing mostly highly prepared and fast food because that's what they have the time to do). And indeed, there have been efforts to try and better expand access to fresh foods which just failed because the underlying problem was demand not supply.
The point isn't to shame the single-parents who are really stressed into becoming cooks - the solution is some kind of combination of trying to provide better jobs - having one better paying job with regular hours is probably more conducive to cooking for your family that juggling multiple minimum wage jobs with irregular hours - and perhaps things like Minnesota's initiative to provide free breakfast and lunch at school so at least the kids are getting more healthy meals. The point is that progressives and activists were absolutely right that poor food quality is an issue for lower-income folks. But to solve that problem, or at least make progress on it - which we should - you need to really understand it - and it just wasn't the case that the primary cause was some sort of "grocery red-lining" by by Big Food. Because if you don't understand the real causes you can't propose real solutions.
The "oppression causes everything" schema is a really good explanation for a lot of lefty pathologies, from not wanting to throw criminals (other than those coded as right wing) in prison to terrible takes on Israel-Palestine.
And no one can be responsible for their own misfortune.
I still encounter people who passionately believe that food deserts are the cause of poor nutrition in low income areas. I was recently working for an organization that is very into social justice and the people I was working with were quite certain that the food deserts were the cause of low consumption of healthy foods. I didn’t say anything because believing that food deserts cause low consumption of healthy foods is really important if you’re going to signal your commitment to social justice.
I’m trying to get clear on what precisely is supposed to be the crankish view here. Thinking that making fresh food equally available everywhere would make everyone eat it just as much is certainly false. But it’s also surely true that increasing proximity would make some difference at the margin. The fact that there’s a complex cycle where poverty induces demand for easy prepared foods which then decreases availability of fresh foods which then further suppresses consumption of fresh foods seems compatible with a range of ways of talking about “food deserts”.
The crank aspect is the absolute certainty of the direction of the causation, and as the commenter points out, the 'blasphemy!!!' reaction to the suggestion that there could be *any* other cause than oppression.
I have encountered the same thing in city planning (where that signal is also incredibly important).
The main issue is the idea that these preferences are all externally driven. I assume you agree that some poor people are poor because they have low ability and make poor choices.
Sure, but do we then make their children suffer for the bad choices/ lack of ability of their parents? As someone who is very pro personal responsibility that’s something I struggle with.
We offer them free school breakfast and lunch. I don’t think it’s practical to control the food choices they make at home.
You’re also assuming if the parents had more spare time they’d use it to make healthy meals vs. making something quick and then relaxing.
The crank realignment may have been good for the cranks. By concentrating their votes, they got to elect an authentically crank president. Degree holding scolds said this would destroy America, but the economy did pretty well, we didn’t start any wars, and cranks got the delicious pleasure of seeing liberal pieties smashed. This pleasure is very similar to the fun a 12 year old can have when he finds out that swear words are cool and don’t really hurt anyone. It should not be underestimated.
Crankishness has been so normalized that ~44% of voters want to elect a man who incited a mob to storm the Capitol. If pissing on liberal pieties is like telling your dad to fuck off, storming the Capitol is getting a girl pregnant. The cranks who want to live in interesting times have gotten their wish. Those who thought their version of common sense would make things better probably won’t.
I feel like I’m missing something in this article. Is the argument that the D party contains fewer “cranks” thanks the Rs? We just lived through 10 years of conspiracy theories, lousy science, purges, insane policy demands (“defund the police! No one is illegal!”), kangaroo courts - the Ds spent years absolutely positive that the President was a Russian agent. I’m sure everyone can think of lots of significant examples.
Matt, you’ve written about this stuff. Why is it being discounted here?
I just think it's really really important to think about how elected Democrats behave. Did any congressional legislator actually push a bill that would defund the police? Did the green new deal get any traction? Elected Republicans, in fact extremely powerful elected Republicans, are so singularly focused on crank conspiracies that it is basically the only recognizably coherent thing that they care about.
That’s the key thing. The internet gave a lot of power to cranks on both the right and left but the institutional Democratic Party corralled and limited its cranks while the Republicans were swallowed whole by them.
I disagree on the last point, we have an enormous legislative history to learn what Republicans care about from. DW-NOMINATE is pretty decent to look into. It's not hard to learn more about the Republican legislating agenda by looking at their past roll call votes and policymaking under previous trifectas, whether that agenda is good or bad I leave to the reader. So far as I can tell, reading maybe-but-after-Charlottesville-officially-not-Trumpist quarterly American Affairs in 2018 on quirky trade and government reform ideas better prepared me for understanding Republican legislative ideas in 2024. Of course, it helps knowing some of my friends who wrote for them are now in GOP Senate offices.
Will reading Ezra Klein on supply-side liberalism help prepare me for understanding the Democratic party in the coming years? I wish it would, but I doubt it. Democrats aren't a supply-side party and basically never have been, as the historian Michael Kazin has elegantly put together in a party history. California is probably the future of the center-left party, which is probably bad news if you want an affordable middle class life for Americans. A fascinating development has been reading liberals now discuss California as pessimistically as right-wingers did half a decade earlier.
But therein lies the problem. I've discussed some political intellectual trends that require going digging. What Republicans lack is a level of upper-mid-brow reporting and party magazines to articulate the party. You have to dig deeper into things, and as one man famously put it, if you're explaining you're losing. National Review is receding and doesn't do as much reporting. The Weekly Standard is gone and there is no sociological replacement for its appeal to college-educated middle class Republican readers. Meanwhile, some of Vox's best features got copied (and best writers acquired) by the New York Times. Of course, Republicans tried to solve this by acquiring a legend in 80s NYC media relations, but there are some serious downsides alongside that even as it notably gets the agenda out to some millennial and Hispanic middle class voters.
Long story short, it's more of an awkward media problem than a legislative agenda problem. There is plenty of information on how the parties will legislatively fight 2025. The odds Republicans will get tricked into supporting "anti-woke" corporate tax increases are zero. But the non-conservative press and Republicans initiated a messy divorce in 2012. Neither of them have been better off for it, and when you read between the lines, they complain about it all the time.
Your local city council, so you likely know better. But, assuming you're talking about Minneapolis here, I was under the impression that they passed budgets increasing police funding in 22/23. And I see an article showing how they approved increasing officer salaries by 20% by an 8-4 vote.
I see the race happening in 2023 and the police salary increase happening in 2024. Ilhan Omar is definitely one of the few more out there left officials in the Democratic party. But worth noting, she has tacked away from defund in recent years.
"After Omar’s close call in August 2022 came her turnabout. As detailed in the national press she worked closely with Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, a moderate Democrat, to salvage the compromise Invest to Protect Act of 2022. The law will provide more, not less, federal funding to local police departments, while emphasizing mental health support and violence de-escalation training. Other squad members — Reps. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Cori Bush of Missouri, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts — voted against it." https://minnesotareformer.com/2023/02/10/rep-ilhan-omar-makes-her-move-into-the-mainstream/
Also, wild you just had that Ilhan Omar tweet ready to drop. Was that like in a folder on your computer?
I'm not familiar with "alphanews.org" but it looks like that's where the Omar link came from.
Ah, she is not a true Scotsman. Got it. Does "tacked away from" not mean that she was actually there in the first place?
I mean ``trump is supported by russia'' is a conspiracy theory in the same way ``covid came from a lab'' is a conspiracy theory. It is a banal observation at this point, but doesn't really change much about what we do going forward.
The Trump-Russia stuff is a bit of a motte and bailey. It is absolutely true and banal, as you point out, that Russia supported Trump's election and tried to help him, and he even sought help from them. But lots of people use that as proof of deeper claims that are highly unlikely, such as that Trump is a Russian agent or the pee tape happened.
You could also say that "Harris is supported by Iran" and it would apply just as much as "Trump is supported by Russia."
Would you find that a banal observation?
You could not honestly say that though, come on.
Sure I could. Its very clear that Iran would prefer to have a Harris as president over Trump. The best evidence we have is that they hacked Trump's emails and provided them to different news orgs. Now does that actually mean Harris did anything wrong - no! She just has a different policy approach* than Trump that is likely better for Iran, but also in her opinion better for the US. Some of which I agree with, and some of which I don't.
*Assuming her policy in the Middle East is similar to Biden's which I assume, but since she hasn't articulated much policy about these issues its not entirely clear.
Trump went on TV and asked for Russia's help. Good god.
It seems we are talking past each other. My point is that people saying "Trump is supported by Russia" are NOT just making a banal statement as suggested by the OP. They are implying way more than that, most of which has been discredited if not proven inaccurate. But to Dilan's point, when pushed on this, they motte and bailey the implications by saying "well the statement is true, Trump is supported by Russia and that's just a banal statement." My push back was to say that you can't just call a statement like that banal because its incredibly loaded and used the example of Iran's support of Biden/Harris as an example.
Trump is bad enough that we should focus on the true things instead of implying lots of other untrue things about him because when we don't, it makes it easier for his partisans to dismiss his actual bad things.
If it's what you say, I love it.
You could say whatever you want, but I don't hear people saying it and if they did (like you just did) it would sound pretty ridiculous.
On the other hand, if you talk to an older russian person or listen in on a russian talk show (i wouldn't recommend), chances are good that you will hear trump is ``their guy''. This doesn't mean any sort of formal quid pro quo or whatever, it just means they strongly believe he is the good guy, his opposition is evil and live their life accordingly.
Are you seriously telling me that Iranian media is treating harris this way?
The Iranians I know are in the US, not in Iran so with that caveat, they generally hate Trump and that he pulled out of JPA and strongly support Harris. Iranian media to the extent I've seen it, generally treats all American politicians as bad.
That being said, you don't think that the Iranian government would prefer to have Harris as president? You don't think that doesn't enter the Iranian government's calculations when deciding how to act towards Israel right now?
None of which, IMO, is a mark against Harris because she is not deciding based on what's best for Iran, but what she thinks is best for the US.
As for saying it sounding ridiculous, welcome to how many/most people feel when people say it about Trump and Russia. Hard core partisans are already on board. Everyone else, not so much.
It is not that russia``prefers'' trump in a lesser evil kind of sense, it is that a large portion of the russian public actively likes and personally identifies with trump in a quasi-religious (or maybe just literally religious) ``he is our guy'', ``he is the only one who can save us from world war 3'' kind of sense, since before the 2016 election. It is quite unusual to see a cult of personality for an adversarial foreign leader, encouraged by a one-party state! I do see why it looks ridiculous, because it is a fairly unusual situation. I vaguely remember that Obama used to have very high approval in Vietnam for whatever reason, but we weren't in any proxy wars with them at the time.
I'm not sure how that should matter to us though.
And I think there are some elements of this that are more common than we might initially think - there are parts of the US that got deeply enamored with Justin Trudeau for example. Or on the other side of the aisle, many a conservative were Margaret Thatcher fans. Meanwhile, Obama was incredibly popular across much of the world, even in countries that had an antagonistic relationship with the US.
Plenty of commenters have mentioned various crank ideas among leftists, like defund the police, fringe gender/race theory, etc. It strikes me that the Republican crank ideas are much better optimized for electora success in that they are grassroots rather than elite-driven crank ideas. If Democrats can do nothing else they should work on controlling their elite cranks.
To an extent I agree, but living in a very red area, most conservative cranks I know get all their information from conservative elites. We have no issues ever with immigration, yet this is always the number 1 issues because they are fed sensationalist stories all the time. There will be a murder that happens somewhere three states over committed by a migrant and that gets extrapolated to All Migrants Are Bad.
Yeah, it's the same way here in west virignia- gubernatorial candidates run on border security and people's main problem here seems to be with immigration despite the fact that this state is losing population. It's cranks all the way down here in West by god Virginia.
I won't quite rise to the level of taking umbrage, but I have a differing view. The problem isn't the people, it's the politicians. I am a West Virginia, spent my first 30 years there, and still go home 3 times a year. I used to BE a West Virginia Republican, back when we could hold a party meeting in a phone booth.
Cecil Underwood wouldn't run a crank campaign. Rob Capehart wouldn't. Mitch Carmichael wouldn't. Charlie Trump was a rare voice of reason in recent years. The problem in West Virginia has been people like Vic Sprouse (started with him) and Kris Warner and the parade of idiots who have cycled into the Legislature in the last 10 years who don't know how to do anything except regurgitate what they watched on Hannity last night.
Not sure if there is any way to measure it, but I would generalize to say that ELECTED Republicans (and Republican media influencers like Alex Jones, etc.) tend to be crankier than most run-of-the-mill Republican voters; elected Democrats tend to be less crankish (or at least VISIBLY SO) than their most eccentric voters, but maybe not in the same ratio. Or is this a matter of who gets the most attention in the press? The looniest Republicans in the House seem to generate a lot more stories than the far-left in the House.
Except conservative elites being concerned about immigration was 100% grassroots driven in the first place?
As a litmus test, would you call someone who is a sincere and dedicated communist a crank?
As a political idea, I think communism has been shown to not lead to good outcomes, but I'm not sure I'd apply the "crank" label. Lots of people believe things I think are wrong, and that doesn't make them cranks. Nor does believing in fringe theories about politics or society. I think a crank is... is... well I'm having a hard time defining it beyond I know it when I see/hear it.
No, I wouldn't call an orthodox Marxist a crank. I also wouldn't call an ordained Catholic priest who performs exorcism a crank.
I do believe both are mistaken about some things, but they aren't cranks. No I can't explain why.
Basically, if one is wrong in a time honored way, they have chosen the wrong ideology. air their errors are idiosyncratic, they are cranks
They're not cranks because they put a lot of work into their being "wrong". Part of crankdom is taking shortcuts. You learn, like, a half dozen facts and all of a sudden you've cracked the code that mystified the sheeple all these years.
"would you call someone who is a sincere and dedicated communist a crank"
Yes, because if someone is a "sincere and dedicated communist" that necessarily implies they believe in Marxist historical theory, which I can't begin to take seriously, even before we get to anything about economics.
I am sincere and dedicated to the position that communism is an excellent idea, albeit an atrocious form of government.
I think there is a fundamental difference between believing theories that are wrong and believing fake facts. Defund the Police, gender/race theories aren't facts that can be disputed while vaccine efficacy and birth certificates and secret cabals controlling things definitely are.
"Defund the Police, gender/race theories aren't facts that can be disputed"
They often implicate fake facts though or involve ignoring objectively accurate and verifiable facts, e.g., the studies showing left-leaning poll respondents believe police kill thousands or even tens of thousands of unarmed black men every year.
Sure but you won't find prominent left-wing pundits publishing articles claiming that police do that but there's a massive coverup. It's just that coverage of police shootings doesn't do a good job of getting people to understand the magnitude (which is true for many problems).
Ehhhhh, "prominent" is doing a *lot* of heavy lifting there and even many unambiguously "prominent left-wing pundits" are basically one degree of separation from someone pushing those kinds of views and the pundit still treats them as a serious person in the subject area. See, e.g., Kimberlé Crenshaw, Ibram X. Kendi, etc.
You didn't name any political leaders - given the scope of leftists in academia you can always find someone with pretty wacko views. Naming any of them as 'prominent' without some broad endorsement by actual political leaders seems to be vastly overstated.
I didn't name any "political leaders" because I was replying to JHW who wrote, "prominent left-wing PUNDITS" (emphasis added)?
Who claims that police do that but there's a massive coverup?
Kimberlé Crenshaw wrote on Twitter on July 30, 2024 (https://x.com/sandylocks/status/1818334908382588985):
"Black women make up less than 10% of the population, yet when it comes to killings by police, we make up a 3rd of them, with the majority unarmed. "
It was pointed out to her that this is objectively false in multiple regards from literally EVERY source that tracks police shootings. Crenshaw didn't delete it or correct it. And that's not because she tweeted once and forgot about it -- she posted several replies to herself over most of the subsequent hour. (Last tweet in the thread: https://x.com/sandylocks/status/1818343688319164690 )
So does this explicitly state that there's a massive coverup? No. But that's the necessary implication of knowingly failing to withdraw or correct the statement after being presented with sources like WaPo and the Guardian showing the statement is colossally wrong.
To put it another way, if someone wrote that fewer than 500,000 Jews died in German concentration camps between 1939 and 1945 and then they didn't just leave that statement up but even posted further comments under it expositing about what this alleged "fact" tells us about society while ignoring well-sourced responses showing that statement is false, I have absolute no doubt that you would feel very comfortable saying that person is engaged in Holocaust denialism and all the necessarily imputed conspiracy theories that are part of that even if they never explicitly announced, "The Holocaust didn't happen."
I'd argue pretty much all problems - the average person is actively bad with numbers/magnitudes!
I'd still classify exaggerated facts as materially different. And you don't see party leaders repeating those claims or getting raised to prominence by repeating those claims either.
Under-informed voters aren't the exclusive domain of either party.
True, although I also can't recall seeing any Democratic party leaders actively speaking out against such fake facts. They just refrain from repeating such thing themselves, AFAICT.
I don't recall hearing any political leaders speaking out against exaggerated claims by their own side.
Republican politicians are routinely chided in the mainstream media for not either distancing themselves from conspiracy theorists or failing to actively tell their followers they are wrong about something.
It's hard to see what point you're making or how it's significant. This stuff quickly gets compressed into facthood. See, e.g., https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-prison_pipeline.
The point is pretty obvious - completely made up stuff (COVID vax is killing more people than the virus itself) is materially different than being wrong about magnitude (cops killing young black men is true - it's not the magnitude than many would cite)
I don't know what that linked wikipedia article is supposed to be demonstrating.
I think "elite-driven" is close but not quite the right label. Random college students on Twitter bully college professors and media types, who in turn bully elected officials and companies like Whole Foods. So it's unclear to what extent elites are in the driver's seat vs along for the ride.
Best comment on this article so far.
fingers crossed, we might be about to tap into the deep well of grassroots crankiness of populist economic policies...
Democrats celebrate all the college educated people flocking to the party. Except that only 1/3 of the country has a college degree, university enrollment is dropping because there are fewer teenagers, and Democrats are hemorrhaging non-college voters.
"Supporter: 'Governor, every thinking person will be voting for you.'
Adlai Stevenson: 'Madam, that is not enough. I need a majority.'"
There are plenty of non-college-educated people who are thinking persons.
And plenty of college-educated persons who are not, for that matter.
True, if we define "thinking" broadly enough, we can include all people and quite a few reptiles. For that matter, a substantial numbers of R voters think that reptiles are running the entire planet.
It’s also dropping a bit as *percentage* I believe
Clearly, they think the answer is to make sure that at least half of the nation becomes completely college educated, despite that being a daunting task that will likely never happen.
I mean, the Left wants to turn the entire country into a college campus, where mommy and daddy and the university (the government) pay for everything and take care of your every problem.
That does sound actually good. At least, if common problems are taken care of systematically. That has been the guiding idea of civilization from the beginning - ensuring we don’t have to individually arrange for shelter and fresh water and food availability but can instead take advantage of convenient solutions that society has provided. Let’s expand that further as our collective capabilities grow.
I see, being a college educated tax payer now makes you a ward of the government.
The deficit of human capital in the Republican Party and among non-libertarian conservatives is a real thing.
But there's also a lot of "Republicans have cranks, Democrats have expert communities with an ideological vision of the public interest" going on here. Having a graduate degree -- heck, being a whole 'expert' community of people with graduate degrees -- does not free you from being cranks. For instance, the people advocating years-long school closing and/or child masking and/or that it wasn't safe to get together at the holidays with people who were unvaccinated were mostly Democrats, and they were cranks, and they probably still are. As crank-y as the "vaccines are used to track people", no, but there weren't a lot of those people and they weren't significantly influencing the policy of major urban school systems.
If you don't think that either liberals or the Democratic Party have gotten some serious things wrong in the past few years on economic or social issues where they should have known better at the time, that's fine and you're not my audience. But if you think they have, and you're still unwilling to call that "being cranks", why?
If it has to do with the general competence level of the organizations in question (like, they have better typography and graphic design), or they seem more respectable, or they're your friends and relatives...those are bad reasons.
I know several people who believe that Covid is airborne HIV. And that 30% of cases lead to long COVID. All have college degrees, though not in public health, medical or stem fields so they’re usually citing papers that don’t say what they think they say. One is an academic. That’s a total crank idea but because they have college degrees they are less likely to be dismissed out of hand. It’s still pretty common for people to claim that the immunocompromised have no protection against the virus and are at every high risk of getting seriously ill even if vaccinated simply by being immunocompromised. They are at higher risk but they do have significant protection. Here I think that this sort of crank n belief gets a pass because the people holding it mean well
I know educated people who still believe that COVID had a 50% death rate. My only explanation is that if they stop believing that, other cracks could appear in their worldview.
I don’t know how to re-center intellectual integrity and ethics in American life, how to teach the lost art of telling people in your circle (professional or otherwise) things that they don’t want to hear, but it neeeds to happen. And I’m absolutely sure that a culture of free speech is part of it.
The difference is that many (not all) Democratic leaders and institutions are willing to look back at the mistakes / overreactions / crankery of 2020 and revise their opinions away from them. See: the new Democratic party quasi-consensus that policing is actually good, school closures were a bad idea, not every single thing is racial injustice, border reform actually needs to happen, etc.
I don't know if I see as much introspection on the right side of the aisle. Pretty much every Congressional Republican who won't strongly claim that the 2020 election was stolen has been removed from elected office, for example.
If we can grant that 2020 was an extremely anomalous year where *everyone* went crazy to some degree, why is it that one party is trying to step away from that insanity (and gets criticized as a Flip-Flopper for doing so!) and the other party seems determind to sink deeper into its delusions?
"See: the new Democratic party quasi-consensus that policing is actually good, school closures were a bad idea, not every single thing is racial injustice, border reform actually needs to happen, etc."
Any change in a good direction is positive, even if it's just vice paying tribute to virtue. But I'm withholding judgement about whether this quasi-consensus is real for a couple years at least, instead of accepting what people say during campaign season at face value.
I also think there's lots of retconning being done in the post-covid analysis that uses hindsight bias to say some of these policies were bad.
Sure, there were policies or public health declarations that were plainly nonsensical, like protesting is fine, but beaches aren't ok. OTOH, all of those policy decisions were about risk management and decision-making under conditions of deep uncertainty.
Covid was a novel virus and we didn't fully understand how dangerous it was or wasn't throughout 2020 and even into 2021. Deaths are one measure of harm, but history is loaded with viruses that cause harm in multiple stages (eg Scarlet Fever->heart damage, Chicken pox-> Shingles, Ebstein Barr-> MS, HPV-> cervical cancer).
Would we rate these "excessive" covid policies differently if we learned in 2023 that a covid infection in a child made it 100 times more likely they'd experience heart valve failure as a young adult? In 2020 there was no way to know if this possibility would turn out to be true.
Yeah, I think rightists are playing fast and loose with the definition of "crank." Believing that a longer school closing than necessary was (in retrospect...it was a new disease!) required seems a very different thing from insisting that, say, Joe Biden really didn't win Georgia. Or that Hillary Clinton was leading a child sexual abuse ring out a pizzeria in Virginia. Or that John F. Kennedy, Jr. was alive, and acting as an incognito prophet in Pittsburgh. Reasonable people could reasonably disagree about school closure policies in March of 2021. But no person with a decent grasp of reality could possibly accept the kind of foam-mouthed conspiracy rantings that now pass for mainstream ideology among vast swaths of the Republican faithful (led by their maximally crankish political leaders).
We see occasional, mild examples of crankery among liberal Democrats. But mainly what we see is hubris borne of elitism, or epistemic closure. What we see on the right is utter lunacy. And the latter gets to the highest levels of GOP officialdom. Michael Flynn was the literal National Security Advisor. MT Greene is a member of Congress. Kari Lake has been nominated twice for statewide office in Arizona. And so on.
Any argument you want to make about uncertainly around the long term effects of COVID, you can make about the long term effects of COVID vaccination. And yet, one of these was mandated by a whole range of institutions, based in part on misinformation about the vaccine being much more widely protective against infection than it actually was.
Were there genuinely difficult calls at various times? Sure. There were also wild amounts of elite misinformation that might have felt like they were reasonable to believe at the time, but that's says more about the strength of the intellectual bubble than the reasonableness of the beliefs.
I don’t think that’s right about long term effects. Vaccination without live virus means no actual infection, so all the long-term impacts are through the training of the immune system. Infections have long term impacts on immune training, but can also cause subtle damage to tissues or organs, or even leave reservoirs of virus (as we know happens with chicken pox, hpv, hiv, etc). Are there any vaccines that have ever led to long-term impacts that didn’t show up within a few months?
The first paragraph here makes no sense:
1) “Any argument you want to make…you can make…” Um, no, you can’t. Or, you *can*, but it’s nonsensical. Any argument about the long-term effects of anything can only be supported by longitudinal studies that carefully exclude confounding variables. We can make educated guesses based on our previous experiences with viral illnesses and vaccines, respectively, and as Kenny says below the evidence points in the direction of one having a much higher potential for long-term effects.
2) “And yet, one of these was mandated…” What does “mandating” the long-term effects of Covid look like? I sincerely don’t understand what two things are being compared here.
The problem with these precautionary principle arguments is they all go in one direction, but unknown harms can go in the other direction too. Would we rate these excessive covid policies differently if we learned in 2023 that they vastly increased traffic, drug, and gun violence deaths?
Yes. An extreme taste for risk aversion is not the same thing as being a crank. It’s the difference between recognizing a fact pattern and reacting to it (perhaps, unreasonably) and inventing a fact pattern that resonates with your psychological state.
> Making an overly cautious policy call is a different level from refusing to take a vaccine and promoting Ivermectin as a treatment.
You mean that the former is much worse, right? Because the former was vastly more damaging.
"Republicans have become the party of conspiracy theorists who believe Bill Gates is using vaccines as a covert mind control program"
Odd I followed these topics quite closely and thought that conservatives believed:
1) The covid vaccines should not have been mandated especially on children because they didn't prevent infection or transmission and did have some potentially bad side effects like myocarditis.
2) Their viewpoints on the above were being censored by the government (essentially)
1 & 2 were *big time* Conspiracy Theories until somewhere around 2023 when both became Old News That Everyone Knows.
So who are the cranks?
Cmon man, overwhelming Republican resistance to vaccines isn’t driven by principled research of any sort. Hence resistance to not only Covid shots, but a rollback of school vaccine mandates that threatens to bring back polio. Give me a break.
Wait you think DeSantis won by 20 points and blue state people couldn't move into Florida quickly enough because they have a generalized distrust of vaccines that never surfaced before 2021 and not a specific opposition to covid-era insanity that included mandates for these particularly unnecessary shots?
You think 80% of Americans stopped staying "up to date" on the mRNAs despite continued CDC policy urging them do so because they have a generalized opposition to vaccines and not a specific, first-hand experience with both covid itself and the covid shots?
Go ahead keep trying to generalize the specific derangements of the covid era because that's easier than admitting "your side" was disastrously wrong about every policy choice on that topic.
I actually don’t have to depend on intuition here, eliminating all child vaccine mandates is a literal campaign promise from “your side”‘a standardbearer https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/show/trump-vows-to-defund-schools-requiring-vaccines-for-students-if-hes-reelected
What about Trump courting and accepting the endorsement of a guy who helped spread deadly vaccine deniablism in developing African countries.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/07/how-rfk-jr-falsely-denied-his-connection-to-a-deadly-measles-outbreak-in-samoa/
His literal words were
"I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate."
Clearly in that framing ("or a mask mandate") he is talking about covid era topics, that is to say covid shot mandates.
By the way in blue areas (e.g. California, DC) they *actually* passed laws to mandate the covid shots as a condition of attending public school and then these requirements never went into effect anywhere because they were so obviously unworkable and unnecessary. Good use of governance from the party of experts.
Oh man we really don’t get very much “what Trump really meant was…..” apologetics around here. It’s like spotting a rare bird!
Trump says all kinds of stupid shit, and that alone should give people pause about voting for him. But when his campaign furiously backpedals to clarify that they were only talking about covid vaccines - and aren't opposed to polio vaccines - you should probably update your priors.
Vaccine mandates for schools have been around for decades. I had to prove I had my shots as a kid in the 90s. Vaccine mandates were workable before they became a partisan issue.
“ Wait you think DeSantis won by 20 points and blue state people couldn't move into Florida quickly enough because they have a generalized distrust of vaccines that never surfaced before 2021 and not a specific opposition to covid-era insanity that included mandates for these particularly unnecessary shots?”
Yes, absolutely, because opposition to vaccines, full stop, has become an ersatz religious belief (laundered through e.g. “wellness”).
Myocarditis is so insanely rare for children after COVID vaccines. https://www.chop.edu/news/health-tip/myocarditis-and-covid-19-get-facts
And Covid has much work cardiovascular and inflammatory risks than the vaccines…
I'm not going to dig it all up again, but at the time, I tried comparing the risks of the vaccine vs. COVID and for kids, it was roughly a wash.
Negative and positive effects of Covid vaccines for children are both extremely rare. The main effect is transferring money to the companies that developed the vaccines as a way to say thank you for doing so.
I liked this at first, but attacking the companies who developed a scifi-level vaccine in mind-boggling record time is a bridge too far for me.
Maybe I should have phrased it better then, because I am not attacking them. I am just saying that the money is basically the only measurable effect here.
And herd immunity
I don't think we got that.
1. While most Republicans don't think that Bill Gates is using the vaccine to control people, most people who think that are now Republicans.
2. While the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines prevent infections much less than we'd like and much less than some other vaccines like measles, the way the immune system works it's basically impossible for it not to significantly prevent infections given that it prevents serious illnesses. This is even more true for transmission.
"While most Republicans don't think that Bill Gates is using the vaccine to control people, most people who think that are now Republicans."
Cue John Stuart Mill:
"I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. "
Mill was not discussing American conservatives.
"Mill was not discussing American conservatives."
Wait, you mean John Stuart Mill isn't the host of the Daily Show?
I, a blue bubbled liberal, personally know several people who believe Bill Gates designed the vaccines for population control.
My educated, Trump-loving mother was willing to lose contact with her family over this issue she believed it so strongly, so I think it’s fair to say it’s somewhat common in her world.
Going “conservatives actually believe X” and citing only your own actual opinion is pretty weak sauce.
"My educated, Trump-loving mother was willing to lose contact with her family over this issue...."
Condolences. That is genuinely sad.
Politics was not all comity when Dick Nixon and Newt Gingrich were running the show, but the widespread destruction of families is really an innovation of the Trump era.
it is really sad. we've had a difficult relationship from my teenage years onward, but in the period before Trump, things were generally on the upswing.
Then she told me Bill Gates was trying to sterilize me and I said "ok, that's all I can take for now". I guess she's talking to my brother again, so that's good, but he had cut off all contact when she refused to get vaccinated before seeing his kids.
“Mom, people on the internet are lying to you for imaginary internet points.”
Are you seriously claiming that covid vaccines have no impact on infection and transmission? Or are you requiring the word "prevent" to mean absolute and total 100% reduction?
The ability of people to look at a vaccine that prevents mortality by 90% and say "that's not good enough because I was promised better" never ceases to amaze and aghast me.
All 3 statements you list are true, *including* that Republicans have become the party of conspiracy theorists that are against all vaccines, not just Covid. They're still the party for cranks, they just *also* have some good points from time to time.
You.
Trump literally invoked the "vaccines cause autism" conspiracy theory during the 2016 primary debates, which was pre-Covid. That was also the conspiracy theory that was the parent of all vaccine denialism. It used to be left-coded, but its adherents have found a more comfortable home on the Right under Trump.
"That was also the conspiracy theory that was the parent of all vaccine denialism."
Eh, I would dispute that strongly. There was vaccine denialism long before the vaccines-cause-autism panic -- Wakefield's paper on the subject was only published in 1998.
>> "The covid vaccines should not have been mandated especially on children because they didn't prevent infection or transmission and did have some potentially bad side effects like myocarditis."
For mandates enacted or enforced after about January of 2022, this argument has merit.
But there's some retconning going on around the "vaccines don't prevent transmission" talking point. Nearly everyone initially believed them to be 95% effective against infection and transmission of disease based on the results of the initial vaccine trials. Obviously, thanks to a combination or waning immunity, virus mutations, and maybe some shotty science at the outset, we later learned that this assumption was incorrect. But imo, a sincere belief that the vaccine blocked 95% of transmission was the backdrop of the original vaccine mandates.
If it had turned out to be true that a vaccine prevented infection and transmission with nearly 100% efficacy, would your view on the mandates have been different?
Was there any time in 2021 when you think that, based on the limited information we had, vaccine mandates might have been at least a possibly reasonable idea?
I don’t think we ever got very strong evidence that the vaccines are less effective at preventing transmission than preventing illness. It’s just that real-world effectiveness has almost always been less than 95%, partly because of antigen drift and evolution, and with a really contagious virus, you need to stay really close to 95% to avoid exponential growth.
Right, for example seasonal flu vaccines are significantly less effective than COVID vaccines, but no one would claim that they do not impact transmission.
> Was there any time in 2021 when you think that, based on the limited information we had, vaccine mandates might have been at least a possibly reasonable idea?
I think it would have been reasonable prior to June or July 2021, when Israel started distributing third doses because studies were already showing waning immunity. (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262423v1)
[Edit] I'll add one big caveat: there was still a lot of uncertainty about side effects of the vaccine in that timeframe. Personally, I used the heuristic "Israel has proven to be an excellent guardian of their interests" and followed them going all-in on the MRNA vaccines, but people with lower risk tolerance or different heuristics weren't wrong to be concerned. That leaves a pretty narrow window in which a mandate would have been reasonable.
> Nearly everyone initially believed them to be 95% effective against infection and transmission of disease based on the results of the initial vaccine trials.
No. We believed, based on the trials, that they were 95% effective against severe disease, defined as disease requiring hospitalization or leading to death. The initial trials *did not test* an effect on infection or transmission and carefully avoided claiming any -- until the fucking crank-ass politicians got their hands on things.
This is incorrect. The primary endpoint of the initial vaccine trials was not severe disease or hospitalization, it was any symptomatic infection at all. Trial participants were tested against the control group for COVID and the vaccine was 95% effective at preventing symptomatic infection, based on the design of the initial trial. We later learned that this efficacy wanes over time, but the trial didn't go on long enough to detect this.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8969448/#:~:text=Two%20important%20endpoints%2C%20symptomatic%20SARS,endpoints%20throughout%20all%20vaccine%20trials.
https://www.pfizer.com/science/coronavirus/vaccine/about-our-landmark-trial#:~:text=The%20primary%20endpoints%20of%20the,of%20COVID%2D19%20disease%20in
"The Phase 3 clinical trial was designed to determine if the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine is safe and effective in preventing COVID-19 disease."
I think you should contact an investigative reporter. I was a trial participant for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and I was told, as part of the study and my consent forms, that the evaluation and efficacy rates were regarding severe disease, not infection tout court. These texts you're linking are changed over from what they told us as study participants.
Twitter (and anecdotally, some IRL) is full of Trump supporters that believe the COVID vaccines range from purposefully to accidentally deadly and anyone from Jews to Gates did it all for some nefarious purpose.
As a physical scientist, my impression is that we are the most "centrist" or least partisan or least left-wing of the scientists. But if you ever find yourself in a room with us you can safely assume that there are zero Trump voters within earshot. When I was in graduate school, I was very, very opposed to the invasion of Iraq and—because I was young—I was more vocal about my political views than I am now. I also got a lot of push-back from my contemporaries and especially professors who were not right-wing Republicans, but more like whatever Matt is the modern contemporary of from 25 years ago. But also a lot of registered Republicans.
Over time, though, I feel like the GOP has actively worked to repel professional scientists, culminating in a modern MAGA movement that uses us as foils and is actively anti-science. For example, a former advisor of mine was on the short list to have a role in the George W. Bush administration (White House Science Advisor or something like that) but was dropped after they learned about a donation to a Democrat decades prior when they ran for governor. I mean, it's not like the Obama administration hired a bunch of right-wing cranks, but they also did not have such insane purity tests.
Sarah Palin made a big deal about how the government was wasting taxpayer money on fruit fly research, which was possibly the most ignorant thing a politician had said about science up to that point. (Trump outdoes her almost daily with his explanations of magnetism, buoyancy, aeronautics, etc.) Republicans in Congress later became hostile towards scientific funding, pushing stupid legislation to insert themselves into the grant-review process (to make sure no woke research was funded or whatever) and constantly threatening (and often succeeding at) cutting NSF and NIH budgets.
During the pandemic, several scientists publicly belcowned themselves by signing letters asserting pseudoscience nonsense about masking, vaccines, the origins of COVID-19, etc. because "in their capacity as scientists" they asserted that scientific method includes social justice. I sincerely hope that this particular brain disease has been cured, because science will always be political, but it is very much at risk of becoming partisan. (The broader attempts by universities to demoralize scientists is ongoing, but seems to be losing steam even as the equally harmful backlash from Republican state legislatures gains momentum.)
Your remark about Sarah Palin reminds me of my own personal example of that -- Bobby Jindal sneering about the federal government doing volcano monitoring. (My father had the best take on that incident -- he suggested the congressional delegations from Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California, and Hawaii should have refused to vote for any funding for hurricane monitoring by NOAA until Jindal publicly apologized.)
Do we know what Jindal was thinking? He went to Brown and was a Rhode Scholar and was apparently accepted to both Harvard Med and Yale Law. He’s not that stupid.
Is it just one of those facts that he learned and didn’t quite get the whole story? Like he thought volcanos were rare and exotic and not something that exists in the US.
I have a very smart and well educated friend who somehow got mixed up and was convinced the Sun went around the Earth.
The pithy retort is "you can't take the politics out of politics", which can be used to explain any political idiocy.
There is absolutely no symmetry between the parties on science, that is clear. That being said, the Dems aren't fully aligned with scientific and professional interests, either, e.g. they are increasingly inserting "aa" (read: racist) criteria into funding and promotion of scientists, which obviously goes against the interests of doing the best science most efficiently.
I definitely got negatively polarized against the Republican Party when it turned out that every time they played hardball and shut down the government over the federal budget, scientific labs funded by the NSF and NIH effectively had to run on credit until the government got back to them.
I appreciate the part about the effect of crank polarization on the media ecosystem. At least anecdotally, having liberals be less likely to see their assumptions fact checked has made them smugger than they deserve to be. I'm not talking the far left, I'm talking the normie libs I know. They think "the science" is on their side. Conservatives tend to be aware that the line they believe on any given topic is rejected by mainstream institutions, they just don't care. When liberals are out of step with experts, I'm my experience, they don't even know.
> When liberals are out of step with experts, I'm my experience, they don't even know.
It's worse than that. The experts themselves pull punches, both for the reasons Matt states (ideological biases) as well as for fear of upsetting their self-selected group. Contrary results get buried in obfuscating language and hidden behind paywalls (certainly not in the abstract). This feeds into the lack of awareness. Anyone who dares stick their head up to disagree immediately gets branded as far-right and untrustworthy. And so it goes.
I think this point has become especially true as media consumption has siloed more and more -- for a certain demographic, if the NYT, WaPo, and a handful of other outlets didn't report it, then it's inherently "fake news" even if it's objectively accurate. (And yes, it applies to Fox News viewers too, but I'm not sure why getting to the epistemological awareness of a Fox News viewer should be considered a desirable thing.)
MY made an excellent point in a climate post on how there’s so much epistemic policing on the topic that sometimes you can only hear the truth on certain matters from the denier-ish crowd. I agree with him that this is bad which is why I read and support Roger Pielke Jr.
Is it actually true that "educated professionals" are all that less likely to believe in conspiracy theories? There are plenty of educated professionals who become cranks (RFK Jr himself, Bret Weinstein, Elon Musk) and childhood vaccine resistance is highest in places lije Marin County, if I am not mistaken.
I certainly see a lot of "Bush stole the 2004 election" stuff on Twitter.
or "Stacey Abrams was cheated out of her race vs Kemp in Georgia"
Leaving aside “Jim Crow 2.0”.
Twitter is filled with Watermelon Brownshirts and also classic Brownshirts.
It is trash.
Most "educated professionals" have left Twitter at this point, so I'm not sure you're getting much of a cross-section of the group there.
Yeah, they're on BlueSky, which is even worse.
> childhood vaccine resistance is highest in places [like] Marin County
Based on this map that is not true https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html
Worst childhood vaccine coverage is in red states.
OTOH, this https://gendersociety.wordpress.com/2014/09/02/neoliberal-mothering-and-vaccine-refusal/
says, "Children who are intentionally unvaccinated are more likely to be white, have a college-educated mother, and a higher family income."
The link there alone shows you're talking about 10+ year old data. There's been a drastic realignment on anti-vaxx beliefs in the last five years.
I am referring specifically to childhood vaccination, not COVID. The claim that educated persons are substantially less likely to believe in conspiracy theories is undermined by that data, even if it is from 10 years ago. If education --> less susceptibility to conspiracy theories, that would be manifested in the data from 2014.
The point is that this has changed in the past ten years. Lack of routine vaccination is now more of a problem on the right.
Not necessarily. Think about it this way: say there used to be 5% vaccine hesitancy, concentrated mainly in the educated-crunchy-hippie demographic (your previous claim). If in the last 10 years, vaccine hesitancy has risen to more like 20%, but the majority of that came from MAGA conservatives, your 2014 data could be correct but be outdated to the point where it's false to say what you're saying now.
Based on the chart I shared above, that appears to be exactly what happened.
that's 10 years old, as pointed out. My data is from last year.
Conspiracy theorists love knowledge, so it makes sense that they would go to college. But a conspiracy-oriented personality is not good for corporate success. The conspiracy theorist I know finished college and then quit two different jobs on principle because he was convinced his company was an evil empire, and then settled for odd jobs in the service sector instead.
This piece continually conflates conservatives with Republicans, and asserts that conservatives are increasingly cranky.
Republicans are certainly (by and large) *socially* conservative, and Republicans are (by and large) increasingly cranky. But today's Republican party has eschewed most other principles that have long been considered conservative. There is no conservative party right now.
Republican Party overwhelming polls as self identified conservative. I think on many issues, social change, government intervention (vaccines), etc. the modern Republican Party does hold conservative views.
If you're going to register for a party, and you're conservative, you're most likely going to register Republican - no argument.
But actual policy advocated by prominent Republican politicians, which is, it seems to me, whether we can call the Republican party conservative? Tariffs, industrial policy, skepticism of long-standing international institutions like NATO, tax-policy pandering (no taxation of tips, e.g.), a lack of epistemic humility - these are not traditionally conservative.
We're undergoing a major realignment for the first time in over half a century, and what's going to happen is that the definition of "conservative" in the context of American politics is simply going to change. E.g., Joe Rogan is a "conservative" despite supporting gay marriage and universal health care. This isn't unlike how a long time ago the word "liberal" used to mean among other things an opposition to government intervention in the economy; now it means virtually the opposite.
I'll grant you vaccines. And I acknowledged that Republicans are socially conservative ("social change"). What other views are you referring to?
The Conservative party in countries that speak English has always been the one more hostile to social equality, redistribution, and care for the poor. This has been the case for hundreds of years. That's part of what the word conservative means in politics.
No true ~Scotsman~ conservative
Read journals that actual conservatives embrace: the Dispatch, the Bulwark. Heck, even the conservative touchstone The National Review. These are all Republican-skeptical. On any given issue or candidate, they may prefer Republicans to Democrats, but this is often a lesser-of-two-evils calculation.
Don't "no true Scotsman" me!
Actually the National Review is very careful not to get itself permanently put of step with the GOP. You can see that very explicitly with how they followed up their big Never Trump issue by helping Trump out a lot.
National Review is not Republican-skeptical. At least half of their concern with Trump and his followers is that they're an *electoral* deadweight, and it's quite clear that even if some of their most prominent voices dislike Trump, they're OK with him being elected because they dislike Harris and the Democrats more.
I haven't read all the comments, so I'm sure that other commenters have made this point already, but:
I agree with Matt Y's article overall. The crank realignment is real, and it is NOT spectacular! In fact, it is very bad for our society and democracy.
And yet, I don't think Matt Y pays enough attention to the crankery that took over the left/progressive side recently, and that is now, thankfully, starting to recede. To wit:
-America is fundamentally racist; racism permeates the very air in America like some unseen but all-powerful demonic force; in the infamous words of Robin DiAngelo, "When a white person and a Black person interact, the question to ask is not: Did racism occur? but How did racism manifest itself in this interaction?"
-gender identity is a mystical, irrefutable feeling you have deep in your soul that has nothing to do with either your anatomy or how others perceive you, and ought to be the basis for things like participation in women's sports or being admitted to women's shelters and rape crisis centers.
These weren't fringe, cranky views; they used to be widely accepted in left-leaning environments like academia, and people who dissented were loudly shouted down with "You're a racist" or "You literally don't want trans people to exist!!11!1!!"
Long-time commenters know that I abhor Trump with every fiber of my being, and want him to lose and go the f away forever. But I have just the teeniest-tiniest smidgen of sympathy for right-wingers and Trump supporters who perceive a double standard here: "Oh, so when we believe kooky sh*t about vaccines, we're cranks, but when credentialed academics at Ivy League institutions believe equally kooky sh*t about racism or trans people, that's just respectable orthodoxy?"
While I share your frustration with that aspect of the left, I feel like that falls more under conformity than crankery. Intersectionality, for instance, is a pretty sophisticated idea, and I think the core premise is sound. Many very smart people put a lot of energy into extending this idea in stupid and unproductive ways. I'm sure there were also brilliant alchemists.
QAnon, on the other hand, makes no sense on its face. There's no collection of smart people writing dissertations on whether Tom Hanks drinks children's blood and discussing how this can be best be incorporated into public education.
Brilliant alchemists like Newton, Priestley, and especially Lavoisier, who had the fundamental realignment of realizing that metals weren’t earth+fire but rather earths were metal+oxygen, suddenly converting the Ancient Greek theory of elements into the modern one.