What the right gets right

Markets, patriotism, and the brutality of human history

For the first post in this series, I explained what I think is admirable about the left: high, egalitarian moral ambitions that lead to a commitment to at least try to be objective and systematic about our commitments.

So what does the right get right?

Well, sitting here in the capital city of the mightiest empire known to human history, I think one thing the right gets right is a patriotic attitude toward The United States of America.

I have read and re-read and wrestled with Alasdair MacIntyre’s essay “Is Patriotism A Virtue?” many times over the years. He says that most people think patriotism is a virtue, but that liberals struggle to develop a coherent explanation of why that should be. He sees civic patriotism founded in the abstract values of the Declaration of Independence as phony, and argues that real patriotism is grounded in the specifics of your country rather than in these abstract values. My current take on this is that I’m an American, goddamnit, and I have no idea whether Scottish people like MacIntyre should be patriots. But I am patriotic about my country, and the abstract values of the Declaration of Independent are part of our particularist heritage, so anyone who tells me that doesn’t count can fuck off.

But one thing MacIntyre gets right is that most people on the contemporary American left are skeptical of, if not outright hostile to, the idea of patriotism. If you picture someone with an American flag bumper sticker on their vehicle, you’re probably picturing a conservative guy and his truck. Personally, I’m glad that Joe Biden tries to avoid ceding patriotism to the right, but I do think the reality of the situation is closer to “Joe Biden agrees with conservatives about patriotism” than “the left is into patriotism, too.” The longstanding mild partisan gap here grew under Trump and has stayed wide under Biden.

I don’t really want to do a whole “patriotism is good” take here (try Noah Smith or read One Billion Americans), but I think American conservatives come out better on this score in part because I think conservatives have a generally clearer sense of history.

The brutality of history

I don’t think the various fights over the content of K-12 history curricula are particular important on their own terms. But they are kind of telling.

Progressives typically characterize their stance on this as being that it’s important to tell people about the darker aspects of history. And they’re right — it is a good idea for people to learn about those things. But I think the standard progressive read of this gets the figure and the ground backwards. The implication of a lot of these takes on episodes of violence, bigotry, displacement, and cruelty in American history is that these episodes are what’s distinctive about the United States of America.

But if you read the history of anywhere, you’ll see that it’s not like there’s some other country where you wouldn’t say “it’s important for people to learn about the darker aspects of our history.” History is dark! In the winter of 1069-70, William the Conquer and his fellow Normans put down a rebellion in northern England by burning rebellious villages and deliberately destroying food stockpiles, inducing famine and mass death.

Here’s the introduction of historian Ivo Schoffer’s article “The second serfdom in Eastern Europe as a problem of historical explanation:”

“While the German peasant is driven afield to gather snails and wild strawberries for his lord, is plundered and harried and tortured without hope of redress, his English brother is a member of a society in which there is, nominally at least, one law for all men.” With this remark, Tawney proceeds to describe and explain the process of commutation in sixteenth century England. It is proposed here to tackle this problem in its reverse form at the other end of Europe. Why had the German peasant — or for that matter, why had the peasant in Eastern Europe — lost his social position? Why could he be “plundered and harried and tortured?” By the sixteenth century serford had virtually disappeared in England, the Low Countries, Scandinavia, Switzerland, Italy and Spain and was well on the way to disappearance in Western Germany and France. On the other side of the Elbe — in Silesia, Eastern Germany, Poland, Livonia and Lithuania — serfdom had become a firm institution, spread over the whole of the vast agrarian area.

The snail thing is a reference to one of the grievances that led to the German Peasants’ Revolt of 1524-25, which was brutally suppressed in a way that led to the slaughter of maybe 100,000 peasants.

The First and Second Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 had two distinct phases. In the first, Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria teamed up against the Ottoman Empire. In the second, Bulgaria fought against its former allies. In the end, “Bulgarian, Serbian, Greek, and Ottoman forces committed mutual acts of violence including large-scale destruction and arson of villages, beatings and torture, forced conversions and indiscriminate mass killing of enemy non-combatants.”

Those are just a few things I’ve read about recently, along with the Bronze Age Collapse.

Conservatives have their own flawed tendency to lapse into nostalgia for the recent past, but I do think they typically have a more clear-eyed view of the reality that the whole of human history is littered with atrocity and cruelty. It’s naive to view our sociocultural antecedents here in the United States as flawless, shining heroes, but it’s also naive to think the violence and brutality of American history is what’s unique about it, rather than the fact that we’ve settled into a prosperous and liberal status quo.

The right side of history

The related thing that conservatives get right is a sense that good things are vulnerable and it’s worth worrying about wrecking everything.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s mantra, paraphrasing Theodore Parker, that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice” is a nice bit of motivational speaking. But this often leads progressives to the view that there is a strong and inherent directionality to history, and thus that any noisy movement for reform with adequate progressive branding must be good. You hear a lot with regard to the Gaza protests that the people complaining are just the same as the people who complained about every good and virtuous social movement of the past. Implicit is the sense that there is no such thing as a social movement that was bad.

But Communism, to cite probably the most important example, was really bad!

And it was really bad even though a lot of earnest and well-meaning Communists were involved in good causes like civil rights and union organizing and opposition to apartheid. The fact that many people with good ideas and good intentions were also Communists and Communism killed millions of people and impoverished hundreds of millions just goes to show that sometimes really bad ideas get mixed in with worthy reforms. A century ago, eugenics had sterling progressive credentials. More recently, and less dramatically, thousands of people were murdered as a result of progressive over-enthusiasm for de-policing.

The thing that conservatives get right about this isn’t just that far-left activists are sometimes wrong about things, but that mainstream liberals are, by disposition, too indulgent of far-left activists. In recent years, it’s become common to hear things like:

• If Israel is being cavalier in its treatment of Palestinian civilians, it’s wrong to complain about the substantive ideas of anyone involved in organizing anti-Israel protests.

• If police departments are in need of reform, it’s wrong to criticize the rhetoric and demands of reform movement leaders, even if specific claims they are making about police funding or the role of preventative policing in reducing crime aren’t true.

• If trans people are under attack from from bigots, it’s wrong to raise questions about edge cases involving prisons or high-level sports competitions.

• If climate change is a serious problem, it’s wrong to nitpick apocalyptic rhetoric or false claims about the adequacy of existing technology.

The view here is that the important thing is to position yourself on the side of reform, rather than to ask too many questions about the precise contents of the reform.

But while I do think it’s true that you shouldn’t miss the forest for the trees, it’s actually very important for a reform plan to be based on true facts and workable ideas. The fact that Black lives do matter makes it more, rather than less important, to propose criminal justice reforms that save rather than cost lives. The fact that burning fossil fuels has harmful externalities makes it more, rather than less important, to accurately understand energy economics. Conservatives often err by being excessively skeptical of reform efforts, but they are correct to say that one should be somewhat skeptical, and I think correct that center-left circles sometimes get too squeamish about saying no.

In the present-day American context, I think this relates to both patriotism and history — conservatives are right to think that, in the context of history, we have things pretty good and that we should be cautious about overturning the apple cart without being quite rigorous in our thinking.

Human nature

As any good patriot knows, “all men are created equal.”

I think everyone is also aware that it is not literally the case that everyone is created equal. When a baby is born in the hospital, the doctors measure the length and weight, and there is variation in these stats. They tell you if it’s a boy or a girl. Some babies are premature. Some special needs are known right at the moment of birth or even before.

Some things are obvious to the eyeball — you are almost certainly not tall enough to play basketball like Nikola Jokic. But part of Jokic’s greatness is that he’s a great rebounder, and some of the great rebounders in NBA history have been guys like Charles Barkley and Dennis Rodman, who aren’t particular tall by pro basketball standards. What makes them so good at rebounding? It’s a mental skill. Skilled rebounders are incredibly good at guesstimating whether a shot is going to go in. As with most things in life, you can improve with practice. But it’s also the case that, with rebounding and basically everything else, some people’s effort/reward function has higher payoffs than others’.

Everyone knows this. As stated, it’s not really controversial.

Still, those with strong egalitarian normative commitments tend to shy away from making inegalitarian factual assessments of people. This is annoying, because nothing about the fact that people aren’t equal undermines the idea that their interests deserve equal consideration. If you read John Rawls, he acknowledges the “natural facts” of human inequality that are beyond the reach of justice. But in a practical sense, there is considerable pressure to talk as if everyone is literally equal. Daniel Chandler’s new book on the contemporary application of Rawlsian ideas talks about the natural facts point explicitly. But then he offhandedly cites the fact that “in countries like the UK and USA, for example, someone whose parents earn £10,000 more than their friend’s parents will, on average, go on to earn £5,000 more than their friend” as an illustration of how material inequalities unfairly perpetuate across generations. He doesn’t ask how much of this is about material resources and how much is genetic. Surely the answer is “some of both,” but especially if you want to undertake a big drive for fair equality of opportunity, you need to delve into the issues — issues that progressives are reluctant to engage with in any real way.

You also see this in the fairly perverse impulse on the left to look at each individual example of a rich businessman who doesn’t want to pay higher taxes or comply with stricter regulations and decide that the person in question is stupid or secretly a fraud. It would be convenient if every single rich person who prefers lower taxes was also a moron who succeeded in life purely through dumb luck. But is that remotely plausible? It’s certainly not the official case for egalitarian policy — it just follows nicely from an egalitarian ethic. And unfortunately, it leads to a whole twisted worldview around economic growth.

The prosperity gospel

All kinds of people, both liberal and conservative, have incorrect anti-market intuitions that lead not only to bad policy choices, but to bad anti-pricing norms.

One important virtue of conservative politics, though, is that official doctrine on the right is that markets are good. So when some right-wing suburban NIMBYs are pounding the table about how they hate apartment buildings, you can come at them with some points about property rights and economic growth. Will you convince them? Maybe not, convincing people is hard. Nevertheless, there is a strong conceptual anchor on the right that letting people conduct business transactions (sell land, hire builders, lease what they built) is good. There’s much more to building a prosperous economy than saying nice things about successful business people, but if you are in the business of saying nice things about successful business people — as conservatives generally are — then “these successful businesses help power economic growth” is a pretty obvious argument.

Once upon a time, of course, socialists argued that central planning would make for a more prosperous economy than capitalism. Or else they argued that socialism would emerge only after capitalism had solved all problems of objective scarcity and triggered a crisis period of overabundance. But at a certain point, people started suggesting that degrowth could be a virtue of socialism. Or that the real solution to our ecological problems is for everyone to be poor.

This is dumb, and plenty of people on the left (even the far left) know that degrowth is dumb, but the fact is, it’s a live controversy on the left in a way that it is not on the right. There is, of course, more to life than the monolithic pursuit of economic growth, but it’s a genuinely massive conceptual error to see growth as undesirable or to be indifferent toward it. I prefer egalitarian values to hierarchical ones, and I think paying attention to the scientific understanding of pollution and ecology is a good idea. But there are real tradeoffs in this space, because a growing and vibrant economy is genuinely very important. Conservatives have this right, while progressives are mired in disagreement about it. And the correct progressive faction is the one that can appreciate these conservative insights.