It is more and more clear that progressive activists despite maybe having a degree are really just unintelligent people who are as out of touch as conservatives just with more professional language.
I like your breakdown of the horseshoe phenomenon into three factors, and I’d say that temperament underlies the other two factors (negative polarization and ideology) and thus the horseshoe as a whole.
Years ago, I worked with a man who declared himself a neo-Nazi. We nevertheless had many pleasant, if strange, conversations on a variety of subjects. Then I went away for a few years to do time (in the military, you understand). When I came back and looked the man up at my old workplace, I asked him how the fascism was coming along. His face clouded up, and his voice dropped to a somber register. “Oh, I’m not a fascist anymore,” he said. “No, that was a big mistake. Now I’m a socialist.”
It should be noted that there are some mathematical reasons why horseshoes appear in locally latent orderings like political spectra. The canonical reference is here:
A horseshoe is also a natural mathematical consequence of projecting a high dimensional space like political preferences onto a line. One way to think about this is that it would be a nearly impossible level of coincidence if preferences correlated perfectly enough that people on opposite ends of the line disagree about everything. Instead, the line captures a main direction of variance, but outside of that it is natural to get other correlations where the ends agree with each other but not the center. A straight line would be much more surprising than a horseshoe. This same general shape occurs frequently when projecting any high dimensional preference space with methods like PCA, t-SNE, or UMAP.
"Edward Fox and Zachary Liscow, for their part, say you could raise about $100 billion over a 10-year time horizon doing this. That amount isn’t nothing, but it’s modest relative to the scale of Democrats’ spending aspirations. "
I can't help but point out that it's also modest compared to the amount we need to move the needle on the budget deficit.
Do we only get to talk about deficit reduction between 2nd week in November and the swearing in of the next congress / Inauguration in January? Or can we keep drilling away at that hard-ass board in other times?
I think it is valid that conservatives care less about policy than progressives do, but there are some exceptions. I consider City Journal to be a policy-focused, serious journal, on economics and culture.
Progressives/liberals would never concede anything to Christopher Rufo, but I consider him to be America's most important muckraker of the last six years.
Regarding horseshoe theory I think the fundamental similarity is that the people on the extremes are fundamentally convinced that the only reason we don't have all sorts of nice things is because the people in power are evil. Maybe it's corruption from corporate lobbying, religious indoctrination or wokeism but they are convinced that all you need is to somehow purge the country of some kind of malign influence and it will be all ok.
That's why the obsession with purity -- it's the same effect you saw in many communist countries.
But I disagree that they are anti-authority. Just the opposite, they simply feel that the current authority is corrupt and want to replace it with a pure authority. Hence the tendency toward crackdowns on speech and general tyranny when they have power -- if the only reason the government is bad is X then we don't need to worry about government power targeting X. And it also explains why they feel that the government can do so many things (be it cheap good healthcare or cut the tax rate and run the administration super efficiently) because it's just the bad people who are fucking it all up.
So it leads to pretty similar views that differ mostly on what the evil keeping us from a great government all good people would support is.
I think that is what is going in with a lot of anti-Semitism in America today. I suspect the long European tradition of anti-Semitism in the middle ages simply goes back to suspicion of anyone different.
Regarding the situation with emotional support animals, part of it is simply that there are always people willing to take advantage of any policy. At the same time, I think another aspect is that even as more people want to go places with there pet there seems to be a broad failure of the free market to offer solutions that work for well-behaved animals. As part of a general trend in America we don't seem to have room for solutions anymore that require judgement.
For instance while there are pet friendly hotels they always insist the dog never be left there alone. Restaurants and bars -- perhaps out of legal concerns -- don't seem to feel they can have a policy that lets people with well-behaved animals have them under the table. At the same time even leaving a dog in a car with cracked windows gets you scolded.
Basically, there is no room anymore for solutions that depend on the pet owners behaving responsibly and that pushes people into abusing the ESA status when they can't just pay a bit more and go someplace that is fine with it -- as we see with service animals there isn't an issue having them in an airline cabin the problem is the impossibility of any rule that only allows well-trained animals.
The English seem to be pretty chill about pets although most of them don’t take their dogs everywhere. Pubs or casual places seem to be okay. No one would think to take their pet to a fancy restaurant.
On the first point about extremists having general opposition to authority:
I'd say this describes me and how and how I became more of a centrist. It probably doesn't describe much of the general electorate, but I wonder if Slow Boring readers in particular share the characteristic of being a bit anti-authoritarian but existing is spaces where centrism is kind of the rebellious thing to do.
I was in a meeting recently where this English professor said that while his new book was ostensibly about indigenous Canadian poetry, its real goal was to "end the disease of liberalism." I am now new best friends with the only other person in the room who could not hold back from audibly laughing.
It is kind of wild that Republicans had a golden opportunity to do whatever they wanted after 9/11 and they poured all of their political capital into briefly operating a global torture regime
“Politicians who are forced to pursue very moderate and incremental agendas are well-liked.” Exactly. This is why Carney is so popular. Although he is arguably not “forced,” he has been acting mostly incrementally if substantively at all. So, the CPC is mired in the low 30s in the polls. However, because Carney hasn’t been forced into moderation in the Bashear sense, he will be vulnerable to a left counter attack from the NDP once Trump is off the seen. Trump suppresses left vote splitting
Re: no SAT.
It is more and more clear that progressive activists despite maybe having a degree are really just unintelligent people who are as out of touch as conservatives just with more professional language.
I think “ineffective altruism” has been given short shrift on SB, so I'm glad to see the shout out.
Voting isn't a coordination problem, it's a poll. Just vote for the best candidate. You'll get a Democrat either way. It's a party primary!
I like your breakdown of the horseshoe phenomenon into three factors, and I’d say that temperament underlies the other two factors (negative polarization and ideology) and thus the horseshoe as a whole.
Years ago, I worked with a man who declared himself a neo-Nazi. We nevertheless had many pleasant, if strange, conversations on a variety of subjects. Then I went away for a few years to do time (in the military, you understand). When I came back and looked the man up at my old workplace, I asked him how the fascism was coming along. His face clouded up, and his voice dropped to a somber register. “Oh, I’m not a fascist anymore,” he said. “No, that was a big mistake. Now I’m a socialist.”
I don’t think his case was the first, either.
It should be noted that there are some mathematical reasons why horseshoes appear in locally latent orderings like political spectra. The canonical reference is here:
https://www.stat.uchicago.edu/~lekheng/meetings/mathofranking/ref/holmes.pdf
A horseshoe is also a natural mathematical consequence of projecting a high dimensional space like political preferences onto a line. One way to think about this is that it would be a nearly impossible level of coincidence if preferences correlated perfectly enough that people on opposite ends of the line disagree about everything. Instead, the line captures a main direction of variance, but outside of that it is natural to get other correlations where the ends agree with each other but not the center. A straight line would be much more surprising than a horseshoe. This same general shape occurs frequently when projecting any high dimensional preference space with methods like PCA, t-SNE, or UMAP.
You answered Will, partly, with
"Edward Fox and Zachary Liscow, for their part, say you could raise about $100 billion over a 10-year time horizon doing this. That amount isn’t nothing, but it’s modest relative to the scale of Democrats’ spending aspirations. "
I can't help but point out that it's also modest compared to the amount we need to move the needle on the budget deficit.
Do we only get to talk about deficit reduction between 2nd week in November and the swearing in of the next congress / Inauguration in January? Or can we keep drilling away at that hard-ass board in other times?
I think it is valid that conservatives care less about policy than progressives do, but there are some exceptions. I consider City Journal to be a policy-focused, serious journal, on economics and culture.
Progressives/liberals would never concede anything to Christopher Rufo, but I consider him to be America's most important muckraker of the last six years.
https://www.city-journal.org/
"The New World screwworm!" was the best quick answer to a toss off question Matt has given in a while. A truly nightmarish parasite
Regarding horseshoe theory I think the fundamental similarity is that the people on the extremes are fundamentally convinced that the only reason we don't have all sorts of nice things is because the people in power are evil. Maybe it's corruption from corporate lobbying, religious indoctrination or wokeism but they are convinced that all you need is to somehow purge the country of some kind of malign influence and it will be all ok.
That's why the obsession with purity -- it's the same effect you saw in many communist countries.
But I disagree that they are anti-authority. Just the opposite, they simply feel that the current authority is corrupt and want to replace it with a pure authority. Hence the tendency toward crackdowns on speech and general tyranny when they have power -- if the only reason the government is bad is X then we don't need to worry about government power targeting X. And it also explains why they feel that the government can do so many things (be it cheap good healthcare or cut the tax rate and run the administration super efficiently) because it's just the bad people who are fucking it all up.
So it leads to pretty similar views that differ mostly on what the evil keeping us from a great government all good people would support is.
This is also why extremists and losers tend to default to anti-Semitism.
I think that is what is going in with a lot of anti-Semitism in America today. I suspect the long European tradition of anti-Semitism in the middle ages simply goes back to suspicion of anyone different.
Regarding the situation with emotional support animals, part of it is simply that there are always people willing to take advantage of any policy. At the same time, I think another aspect is that even as more people want to go places with there pet there seems to be a broad failure of the free market to offer solutions that work for well-behaved animals. As part of a general trend in America we don't seem to have room for solutions anymore that require judgement.
For instance while there are pet friendly hotels they always insist the dog never be left there alone. Restaurants and bars -- perhaps out of legal concerns -- don't seem to feel they can have a policy that lets people with well-behaved animals have them under the table. At the same time even leaving a dog in a car with cracked windows gets you scolded.
Basically, there is no room anymore for solutions that depend on the pet owners behaving responsibly and that pushes people into abusing the ESA status when they can't just pay a bit more and go someplace that is fine with it -- as we see with service animals there isn't an issue having them in an airline cabin the problem is the impossibility of any rule that only allows well-trained animals.
The English seem to be pretty chill about pets although most of them don’t take their dogs everywhere. Pubs or casual places seem to be okay. No one would think to take their pet to a fancy restaurant.
in the U.S. it's health department rules. plenty of countries where you can take a well-behaved dog even into a nicer restaurant.
On the first point about extremists having general opposition to authority:
I'd say this describes me and how and how I became more of a centrist. It probably doesn't describe much of the general electorate, but I wonder if Slow Boring readers in particular share the characteristic of being a bit anti-authoritarian but existing is spaces where centrism is kind of the rebellious thing to do.
I was in a meeting recently where this English professor said that while his new book was ostensibly about indigenous Canadian poetry, its real goal was to "end the disease of liberalism." I am now new best friends with the only other person in the room who could not hold back from audibly laughing.
It is kind of wild that Republicans had a golden opportunity to do whatever they wanted after 9/11 and they poured all of their political capital into briefly operating a global torture regime
“ Instead, the worldview generally seems to be that only the left has agency and the right just sort of exists.”
This is a theme that runs through basically all political content I see, and I don’t get why it doesn’t enrage more people.
“Politicians who are forced to pursue very moderate and incremental agendas are well-liked.” Exactly. This is why Carney is so popular. Although he is arguably not “forced,” he has been acting mostly incrementally if substantively at all. So, the CPC is mired in the low 30s in the polls. However, because Carney hasn’t been forced into moderation in the Bashear sense, he will be vulnerable to a left counter attack from the NDP once Trump is off the seen. Trump suppresses left vote splitting
Go to Vegas and see all the Bourgeois walking around at the Wynn with dogs.