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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8887 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024

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To set the stage: apparently David French is a progressive liberal, now? I had heard he endorsed Kamala Harris based on his own personal cafeteria Christianity. But on Thursday he also wrote a flagrantly false-consensus-building article for the New York Times, arguing that the Supreme Court needs "reform" in the form of term limits--and furthermore, that this could even be done through legislation without being blatantly unconstitutional.

Dan McLaughlin then took him to task over at National Review, in one of the better discussions I've seen on this issue.

First, to call the Democrats’ proposals “reform” is to take partisan sides by parroting one side’s loaded talking points. . . . Second, these proposals are not “in the air.” They are not emanating from multiple sources in different places on the partisan and ideological spectrum. They are not generated by an impersonal History, before which we must simply stand aside. We would not say that building a wall across the Mexican border is “in the air.” These are the specific ideological demands of one political party. They have been pushed by a particular coterie of activists, all of whom have essentially the same desired policy ends in mind. They arose out of one party’s presidential primaries and its Senate Judiciary Committee members. They were on nobody’s agenda until after Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh were appointed to the Supreme Court. We heard a quite different tune in 2016 when Mark Tushnet was arguing for a triumphal march of liberal and progressive ideology through the courts on the premise that “right now more than half of the judges sitting on the courts of appeals were appointed by Democratic presidents. . . . Those judges no longer have to be worried about reversal by the Supreme Court if they take aggressively liberal positions.”

An honest accounting would be frank about the fact that these proposals came about for only one reason: There’s a conservative majority on the Court for the first time since 1930, and liberals and progressives don’t think it’s legitimate for our side to ever get what their side has enjoyed in the past.

The sole reason we are talking about restructuring the Supreme Court is that liberals and progressives are unhappy with the outcomes of its decisions. That’s the thing. It’s the whole thing. It’s the only thing. It’s the entirety of the thing. It’s 100 percent of the thing. There’s no other thing. And if you are endeavoring now to make a purportedly conservative (or at least non-ideological) case for restructuring, you need to first explain why it is that liberals and progressives being unhappy with outcomes is, in and of itself, a crisis. Why is it not a permissible result of a political process that liberals and progressives get something they dislike? Why is that not legitimate? Why, specifically, does it change the legitimacy of a system that was acceptable when it delivered outcomes that liberals and progressives liked?

French speaks of “instability and anger that harm the court and threaten the rule of law.” Whose anger? Why is the anger of progressives an infallible sign that something must be given to them to assuage it? Do we treat conservatives, let alone MAGA Republicans, as if the mere fact of their anger requires a restructuring of the existing rules to let them win? French typically treats the anger of Donald Trump’s devotees as a problem for the system to resist, not a cause for it to give them more of what they want.

Sorry for the length of that quote, by the way, I'm trying to not just cut-and-past the whole article, but it's really, really great. In particular, something he doesn't say outright but which I noted recently is that Democrats are "doing everything they can to disassemble any part of the system that doesn't guarantee their victory and continued ideological dominance."

Are Republicans doing the same, in reverse? I think I see as much at the state level; state legislatures, (R) and (D), seem to do their damnedest to gerrymander permanent majorities while flying just beneath the radar of watchdog authorities. But something that does not get discussed often enough, concerning the Supreme Court, is that while the Supreme Court has been dominated by progressive justices for almost a hundred years, it has also been overwhelmingly controlled by Republican-appointed justices since Nixon was in office. But for some reason, moving to Washington D.C. and taking a lifetime sinecure tends to shift people's politics leftward. Or, stated a little differently--these people are highly prone to losing what Rudyard Kipling once called "the common touch."

So here's my wonkish take for the morning: The United States of America is drowning in historically unprecedented wealth. This makes governance too easy. Keeping people happy enough to not revolt ("bread and circuses") is trivially achievable. Somehow, you can mismanage cities to the point of transforming San Francisco into an open-air sewer and still maintain total ideological dominance over the voting population. This sort of thing suggests to me that political competition just isn't happening at the object level. Party politics is approaching 100% meta--which could help to explain how a turn-of-the-century Democrat became the darling of Republican populism circa 2024. Politicians no longer offer competing visions from which voters can select--indeed, too clear a vision can be a liability to "big tent" rhetoric! The goal is not to demonstrate one's merits as a leader, a visionary, or an intellect; it is all pure meta.

Here's where someone slaps me with an "Always has been" .jpg, right? But I think that's not quite right, though I'm not sure I have anything original to say about it. I think that, throughout American history, we have had a fair number of politicians of vision and intellect, who established their merit and provided real leadership. Televised debates were probably the beginning of the end of that, but maybe just "mass media generally." We have become a nation in which politics has become the practice of demanding consensus on issues of real disagreement, even when that consensus is flatly contradictory with some other portion of the consensus.

Fake "term limits" where a lifetime appointment becomes "de jure" but not "de facto" justices is not a legitimate Constitutional approach; I suspect it is only being floated because the Constitutional approaches are politically unpopular. While Court packing (or, even more aggressively, Court impeachments) is a legitimate Constitutional approach to reforming the Supreme Court, doing do for nakedly political reasons is politically risky. People may in general be okay with politics at the meta, but if you make it too obvious, people demanding object-level politics start to look less crazy, which threatens to upend the apple cart.

So in an attempt to be the change I wish to see in the world here's an object-level take: I feel bad for David French. I would say he has lost the common touch. I definitely don't go out of my way to read his essays the way I have sometimes done in the past. I think circa 2015 I enjoyed most of what he had to say. His criticism of Trump in 2016 was not unwarranted. But the right-wing meta reacted very strongly against him, and he also gained some wealth and notoriety; he has been on a steady leftward trajectory ever since (not unlike the trajectory of some Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices)--though he maintains that it is others who have changed, not him.

Well, it's possible for two things to be true at the same time.

while the Supreme Court has been dominated by progressive justices for almost a hundred years, it has also been overwhelmingly controlled by Republican-appointed justices since Nixon was in office. But for some reason, moving to Washington D.C. and taking a lifetime sinecure tends to shift people's politics leftward.

Is it that? Or is it that for decades, there were tremendously few years where Republicans controlled the Senate, and therefore any candidates nominated by a Republican president had to be those that would appeal to the Democratic senators?

Or, stated a little differently--these people are highly prone to losing what Rudyard Kipling once called "the common touch." [...]So in an attempt to be the change I wish to see in the world here's an object-level take: I feel bad for David French. I would say he has lost the common touch.

There's something kind of funny to me about accusing French of losing "The Common Touch" because of a disagreement on what is ultimately a pretty arcane constitutional provision. Seriously, I'm anti-term limits, but if some future Gibbon wrote the history of the decline and fall of the American empire, I can already feel the bored teenagers of some future century, their eyes glazing over trying to understand why this obscure fight over the appointment for certain bureaucrats was so pivotal to world history. It would be like trying to explain the intricacies of doctrinal disputes in medieval Christianity, the kind of thing that just seems monumentally obscure.

This isn't to say that liberals haven't lost The Common Touch, it takes a real galaxy brain to explain why the people burning down a Target are fighting for equality or something, you just can't explain that to a peasant. But it sorta feels like The Common Touch as you use it just means "agrees with me." The American common men are definitionally Conservative, and if they aren't then they aren't really American common men. The common touch is talking about immigration and inflation. It's talking about the constitutional right to bear arms. It ain't term limits.

They were on nobody’s agenda until after Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh were appointed to the Supreme Court. We heard a quite different tune in 2016...An honest accounting would be frank about the fact that these proposals came about for only one reason: There’s a conservative majority on the Court for the first time since 1930, and liberals and progressives don’t think it’s legitimate for our side to ever get what their side has enjoyed in the past.

This feels off to me. Term limit proposals for SCOTUS were a debate in my AP US Gov textbook in 2008. They were picked up as a major policy proposal in 2020. But there's a long history of proposals for reform of SCOTUS terms.

I'm glad you acknowledged that Republican appointees have held the majority since 1970. Once again, a Conservative majority is defined by McLaughlin as "agrees with me." Particularly, agrees with McLaughlin on social issues to the extent he'd like them too. Ignoring the various other rulings made on a thousand other issues. As you note, Republican justices have historically drifted over time...which would be a really good argument for term limits? It would allow Republicans to refresh their appointees with fresh blood, rather than allowing a Kennedy to remain on the Court making mushy-headed legislation until he dies.

But at what point does ideological drift become a skill issue for the other major party? When you say:

Somehow, you can mismanage cities to the point of transforming San Francisco into an open-air sewer and still maintain total ideological dominance over the voting population. This sort of thing suggests to me that political competition just isn't happening at the object level.

Why are you granting the Democrats hyper-agency and turning the GOP into NPCs? The GOP held the Governor's mansion in California as recently as 2011. They've held the presidency for the majority of the last 70 years. Fox News, their partisan outlet, has been the top rated cable news channel for 22 consecutive years, and the top basic cable channel period for 8. And yet, let's rephrase your question:

Somehow, in a two party system, your opponents can mismanage cities to the point of transforming San Francisco into an open-air sewer and still maintain total ideological dominance over the voting population while you continue to lose every election. This sort of thing suggests to me that political competition just isn't happening at the object level.

Why is the GOP so incompetent that they can't get wins out of the supposed rank incompetence of Democrats? Is that Mr. McLaughlin and the National Review's fault, or are they just helpless passengers over at one of the major ideological organs of one of the two major political parties?

Then again, the NR folks have sure seemed to be helpless passengers against a certain short fingered vulgarian, so perhaps when they talk about conservatives finding themselves helpless against the least dirty trick from Dems, they're just describing themselves.

There's something kind of funny to me about accusing French of losing "The Common Touch" because of a disagreement on what is ultimately a pretty arcane constitutional provision.

This seems like a pretty aggressive way to miscast what I wrote in that paragraph, which concerned the arc of French's ideological evolution over the last decade. I guess I don't really associate "New York Times Columnist" with "the Common Touch," but I suppose YMMV. Ditching your congregation over political disagreements and then later publicly shaming them for ditching you over political disagreements is also pretty lofty stuff. His bad take on the Supreme Court is in this context just the latest capitulation to his new social group, for whom he seems to serve as a highly convenient "token conservative."

But it sorta feels like The Common Touch as you use it just means "agrees with me."

Not at all. Very roughly, I'd say it means that the grounding of your beliefs is noticeably more substantial than "whatever the Cathedral is saying today." As far as I have been able to determine, French--who has a lot of published positions!--has somehow never thought to endorse term limits on SCOTUS justices until it became a talking point for the Democrats in this election cycle. Even if term limits for SCOTUS justices is a fantastic idea, getting conspicuously behind it now seems like a pretty clear (and potentially even costly) signal, not that you believe anything in particular about the structure of our government, but that you are Team Blue.

As you note, Republican justices have historically drifted over time...which would be a really good argument for term limits? It would allow Republicans to refresh their appointees with fresh blood, rather than allowing a Kennedy to remain on the Court making mushy-headed legislation until he dies.

Indeed. And yet even though it would have been politically beneficial for them to do so, conservative presidents and legislators declined to exercise any authority, Constitutional or otherwise, to undermine the Court. They continued to accept their defeats, eventually won some control of the Court through the usual means (and a whole lot of luck), and then it became a good idea to reform the judiciary? I feel like you have to be giving McLaughlin a shockingly uncharitable read to characterize his problem as merely "these people don't agree with me."

Somehow, you can mismanage cities to the point of transforming San Francisco into an open-air sewer and still maintain total ideological dominance over the voting population. This sort of thing suggests to me that political competition just isn't happening at the object level.

Why are you granting the Democrats hyper-agency and turning the GOP into NPCs?

I didn't do that at all. If I wanted to attribute a lack of agency to the GOP, I would have said so. My point was precisely that political competition isn't happening at the object level, and your flipping of the hypothetical to "GOP electoral incompetence" instead of "Democrat managerial incompetence" only illustrates the same point in a different way: political battles are no longer about governance, or at least they are less about governance than they once were (and ought more to be). They are about the meta, they are about tribes, they are about picking a winner and ensuring that the loser never gets a chance to make a comeback. And I think that all of these criticisms apply very well to a great many Republicans, too, such that your closing paragraphs are, at best, ill-targeted rhetoric.

Very roughly, I'd say it means that the grounding of your beliefs is noticeably more substantial than "whatever the Cathedral is saying today."

Fair enough, that's not at all how I'd read that Kipling line. I would read The Common Touch as referring to the ability to speak and relate to the common man, the ordinary sort of citizen, the "crowds" referenced in the prior line. After all, it makes little sense to oppose retaining the common touch to

talk[ing] with crowds and keep[ing] your virtue,

If the common touch is the ability to keep your virtue when the crowd is going the other way.

Properly, I'd probably contend that French (and most conservative justices) didn't lose the common touch recently, he was never in the same zip code as the common touch. Writers for the National Review are no closer to the common man than is the NYT editorial page.

Which I think is where we're at cross understandings.

I would read The Common Touch as referring to the ability to speak and relate to the common man, the ordinary sort of citizen, the "crowds" referenced in the prior line.

Yes, exactly. People who take their cues from the Cathedral cannot do that, because "the ordinary sort of citizen" has their views grounded in a mix of practical reality and community ingroup signalling, rather than taking their cues from universities, corporate news media, and DC elites.

Properly, I'd probably contend that French (and most conservative justices) didn't lose the common touch recently, he was never in the same zip code as the common touch.

For starters, "never" can't possibly be right. The first particularly stand-out thing French ever accomplished was to attend Harvard Law School, and even after that he did a lot more public interest work than most Harvard grads deign to undertake. I never got the impression, in 2015, that French was taking his cues from universities, corporate news media, and DC elites. Today, he is clearly taking his cues from the Cathedral, as McLaughlin articulates.

Writers for the National Review are no closer to the common man than is the NYT editorial page.

That may have been true in the era of William F. Buckley, Jr. but I don't think it has been true for, oh, three decades? By the mid 1990s at the latest, National Review was much, much closer to the "common man" than anything the New York Times had on offer. Fittingly, I think that becomes less the case around 2016, for much the same reasons that French goes off the reservation.

That may have been true in the era of William F. Buckley, Jr. but I don't think it has been true for, oh, three decades? By the mid 1990s at the latest, National Review was much, much closer to the "common man" than anything the New York Times had on offer. Fittingly, I think that becomes less the case around 2016, for much the same reasons that French goes off the reservation.

Thanks for picking that year, as that is the earliest Press Kit I can find for NR easily available online. It gives a breakdown of what their readership looks like* for the purposes of selling advertising. The NR audience is nearly three quarters men. 5% of their subscribers live in DC, less than a fifith of one percent of Americans do. The median NR reader is 66 years old, and 82% of them are over 55, as compared to numbers for America of 38 and ~30%. A little under 40% of Americans have college degrees, while 80% of NR Online readers have one. 43% of NR readers have a net worth over $1mm, only 5% of Americans meet that number. The NR represents a group that is vastly richer, older, more educated, more politically active than the Common American.

And that's what has made the NR an important publication! They've represented an alternative to the tides of mass opinion AND to the Cathedral. But the common man? They are not and haven't been. There are multiple ideological alternatives to taking orders from The Cathedral. A Catholic bishop does not represent "The Common Touch," and he doesn't take orders from that Cathedral; rather he follows his own intellectual tradition. Following any intellectual tradition ("If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue") in the face of popular opposition is admirable, and important for a publication to maintain intellectual integrity. But imagining that the National Review represents the common man's viewpoint is a very common error in assumptions that will produce bad conclusions.

To imagine that the Common Man looks like an NR reader requires excluding from your definition the vast majority of actual Americans, it makes "salt of the earth" an honorific rather than a description.

*I found a similar breakdown for the NYT here. Unfortunately, they don't use the same numbers in their statistics, so I'm not sure how to parse the comparison accurately. They list the number of 18-34 print subscribers (29% as compared to 20% nationally) and the median net worth for all subscribers ($508k, 54th percentile nationally). The gaps in the data are such that I'm not sure the two groups couldn't look more or less identical but reported differently, so I don't want to push the contrast analysis too far. It's reasonable to assume that both groups are wealthier, more educated than the median American, though the NYT numbers look much closer to "normal" there is some portion of their subscriber base that is looking for local NYC news, one can even imagine a guy who buys it primarily for the sports page, where the NR is essentially just the NYT Sunday magazine.

They've represented an alternative to the tides of mass opinion AND to the Cathedral.

That seems like a nicely succinct way of saying it talks with crowds but keeps its virtue, and walks with kings but keeps the common touch.

Retaining the "common touch" doesn't mean "to be the modal person." It means retaining an ability to relate to, and communicate with, people of no particular importance. Some examples of having lost the "common touch" in policy debates might be, say, pushing new identity terms on people who don't want them, or pretending that student loan forgiveness isn't a handout to the wealthy.

I don't know what I said to inspire such tenacious contrarianism in you, but like... at minimum, you could try disagreeing with me without putting words in my mouth.

Thanks for picking that year, as that is the earliest Press Kit I can find for NR easily available online. It gives a breakdown of what their readership looks like* for the purposes of selling advertising

You probably could have saved yourself some time, if you agreed on this metric ahead of time. Personally, it seems like a pretty bad approach to measuring who's more in touch of the common man.

Huh?

I might be misunderstanding the intentions in your previous comment, but I was under the impression you're trying to come up with some objective measure to see if this statement from Naraburns is true:

By the mid 1990s at the latest, National Review was much, much closer to the "common man" than anything the New York Times had on offer.

If that's what you're going for, looking at the demographics of each paper seems like a pretty bad approach.

More comments

I think the partisanship and the entrenched powers points in the other direction— hypernormalization. The hyper-normalizing simply means that most people have simply accepted that this is how it is and ever will be because the people in charge simply have no solutions to the issues at hand. This goes for democrats and republicans, and I think it explains the Cult around MAGA and Trump. Trump is popular because he’s giving hope of a world actually better than what we have now, and doing so in a way that’s very concrete. Not “slow the growth of inflation by X% over the next Y months” but “I want you to be able to afford groceries and gasoline again.” Not “we’re going to deal with the root causes of X,” but “we’re going to actually fix this.” Not “well, we should give illegals a court date,” but “we’re throwing them out.” It’s a similar appeal to other populist candidates— they’re addressing the real needs of real people with a promise that they can actually fix it, and of course they get very popular with ordinary people who want things to be more like the past where one income would feed and house a family (in an actual house even if it was small), where social deviance was not taught as normal to elementary school kids, where walking down the streets in major cities was not an open invitation to be assaulted and robbed, and where you didn’t see drug dealers selling openly on the streets.

I don’t think any party can actually deliver on getting us back to the turn of the last century where such things were possible. It’s the slow decline of the western world into moral decadence, sloth, corruption and decay. Such has been the way of every other civilization to exist. We’re in the late empire stages of decline. And unless we right the ship, she’s going to sink into darkness until some other civilization pulls up from the ashes of the Rules Based International Order to create something brand new.

Although it's true that the USA is "drowning in historically unprecedented wealth", I think there's more to it than that, I'm not sure that is even the main reason. As someone coming from a nation (Brazil) in the opposite situation, that is, "drowning in poverty", the polarization is still very similar to what's happening in the USA. The current left-wing president Lula was one decade ago (after operation car wash exposed massive corruption schemes) considered by the vast majority of the population as unredeemable scum (I don't have time to link sources but I would anedoctally put it in upwards of 80%), the idea that he would come back to compete in elections was laughable and many of his current supporters were criticizing him (incluiding Alexandre de Moraes for example).

What really changed from then to now was the mass adoption of internet social media and the posture of big media (TV, Journals, etc) that began to increasingly villanize right-wing candidates. I think what we're really presencing is how absolutely powerless the average person's mind is to propaganda. The level of groupthink by the average member of both political sides is extremely high, you can usually tell what they think about everything with 1 to 3 statements (I think it's more severe in the leftwing sphere but you can call me biased).

To summarize it, I think social media created spaces where people can consume propaganda 24/7 (not to mention be recommended even MORE propaganda therefore creating an isolated bubble of content to be consumed), and as internet threatened the monopoly of information from old big media, they escalated their levels of partisanship.

The way our voting systems works also helps polarization, cardinal voting is of utmost importance to help fixing this in my opinion.

I feel like Brazil has some odd similarities to the US that go underrated. Both are very large nations, by far the largest (in population) in our respective continents. Both rather spread out, with large chunks of wilderness. And we are both former slave-owning, plantation socities, which imported huge amounts of slaves and had a weird legal code for hundreds of years regarding race. That kind of thing leaves an impact. I feel like Brazilian politics are more similar to the US than Canada is.

Yeah, I do personally think of Brazil as sort of a "Tropical USA", other than the weird fact we once had a monarchy the other big difference is demographics/ethnicity which as a consequence reflects in each respective nation's economy. Outside of the rest of LATAM I would pick USA as the most similar when it comes to politics, we even had our own "Trump" (Bolsonaro) and the idea of "government interference on the rest of society should be minimal" seems to be increasingly unpopular with young american voters (it was never popular in Brazil I think).

I almost consider American problems as part of my problems because I know whatever ideas becomes popular there will eventually be imported here, if you look up the first flag of the Brazilian Republic it's basically the USA flag with green/yellow.

So here's where someone slaps me with an "Always has been" .jpg, right? But I think that's not quite right, though I'm not sure I have anything original to say about it.

I don't think it has "always been" like this.

I am usually the one who contradicts the catastrophizers, the doomers, and accelerationists by bringing up whatever American history book I have most recently read to point out that we had extremely hot culture wars in the past, with politicians literally assaulting each other on the floor of Congress, with ideological camps deriding each others' partisan cures for epidemics, with very real, widespread and sometimes laughably blatant voter fraud, etc.

But at least in my lifetime, we mostly grew up with the idea that we might live in a two-party system with drastically opposing ideas, but nobody actually wanted to delegitimize and disenfranchise the other side. If you lost an election, that sucked and you could be unhappy about it, but you set about trying to win the next one.

The Motte being the place it is, most people perceive the Democrats to be the villains here, and right now, they are, because they are in power and because the left has the upper hand in the culture wars. But it was during the Clinton years when I first noticed a radical shift amongst right wingers; Clinton was not just a bad president, he was illegitimate. He was a monstrous, degenerate, nation-ending catastrophe. Liberals were traitors. Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter rose to prominence on the strength of their invective.

This wasn't a particularly unique period in American history and I am not (quite) saying "Republicans started it," but I am saying that was about the time when I noticed, in the modern era, an end to our civic-minded Schoolhouse Rock version of American politics where Republicans and Democrats could still grill together. I know for certain that Congress was a more congenial and bipartisan body (and a lot of people criticized it for that, arguing that bipartisanship was bad because it meant making compromises and concessions with the enemy - well, those critics got what they wanted).

So I feel what you are saying, and what your National Review article is saying. I feel it every time I talk to my liberal friends. I feel it when I visit my hobby boards which have become essentially a chorus of daily agreement about leftist talking points. That someone could be a good person and still vote Republican is basically unthinkable. That you could be a liberal and remain friends with a Trump supporter is considered a logical contradiction, like saying you're a Jew who's friends with a Nazi.

I have seen liberals arguing that packing the court is a perfectly legitimate measure, that controlling free speech on the Internet is essential to combat disinformation, that the Constitution is fake and gay, and it's very clear that:

liberals and progressives are unhappy with the outcomes of its decisions. That’s the thing. It’s the whole thing. It’s the only thing. It’s the entirety of the thing. It’s 100 percent of the thing. There’s no other thing.

This makes me sad and frustrated and gloomy, but while I am not going to say Republicans started it, I'm not not saying that either.

No, seriously, you can probably pick whatever ideologically-motivated starting point fits your narrative, but it didn't used to be like this.

On one hand, there's a fun discussion about how this stuff does genuinely seem to ebb and flow, both at large scale and at small ones, such that people can point to different cruxes and changes and be genuinely correct.

On the other hand, there's a certain tendency for this to be... hard to discuss. It's easy to fall prey to a Great Man of History argument -- you yourself jump from "delegitimize and disenfranchise" in general to Clinton specifically -- in ways that obfuscate the comparisons you're making (eg, for gunnies, Clinton opened his Presidency with Ruby Ridge and the Waco Siege, then jumped over a controversial and painful assault weapons ban, all while ). That's true even where it limits your own political aisle! (eg, the early 90s gay politics were Not Great Bob)

On the gripping hand, it's worth discussing the extent political power has grown from this sort of delegitimization. In the Dubya and early Obama era, there were long and compelling arguments about the tradeoffs between helpful persuasion -- hoping for political change by providing the best arguments and understanding and respecting opponents -- against change as churn -- where political success comes from emphasis on recruiting incoming players while the opponents age out.

And the answer pretty resoundingly has become neither, to such a point that the question is an obvious Morton's Fork and false dilemma today: whether gay marriage, trans rights (from the right and left!), public education (ditto!), college debt, the Affordable Care Act, statues, public protests (ditto again!), it's not just possible but obvious that victory could and did come by persuading people not that your cause was correct, but that opposition or even caution to it was so evil that it could not be tolerated in even hushed whispers. Whatever concern backlash might once have had, it's wrapped up around situations like BLM or school vouchers where the 'backlash' to (sometimes literal) arson was at worst not maximizing territorial gains, or matters like the rise of Trump or Coates that justified only more and harder.

It's Dan Savage's world -- bullying kids as part of your anti-bullying campaign, smearing your opponent's name in literal shit, and all. We're just stuck living in it.

((On the other gripping hand... this is a post where it's really hard for me to resist pulling quotes from the past. Really, Clinton?))

I think the information age is what hypercharged it. Kojima_was_right.tiff

"Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds, leaking whatever "truth" suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large."

"The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right."

Thanks to the internet, people found out for the first time what others really talk like, think about, and do, and the conclusion was that this is intolerable. It's trivially easy to find the lizardman's constant online. Here's a guy who believes we should have sex with toasters. Here's a woman who thinks that left-handed people are instruments of the devil. Here's an engineer who doesn't believe in melting points. Here's a teenager who thinks everyone who isn't him should die, etc. And people are wireheading this, mainlining it, sipping this crackhead energy direct from the source. A million howling voices screaming to be heard...

...and what follows is curation. You have to do it in order to remain sane in 2024, if you are connected to the internet in any way at all. You have to pick and choose. People build their own bubbles.

Within the bubble, everyone outside looks fucking crazy or evil or both. Gas 'em all, shoot em, whatever. If they were worthwhile, they'd already be in the bubble, where the Good People are. If you were Good, you'd be in the bubble, which means you're not Good if you're outside it. Of course, the alternative explanation for this phenomenon is that you are simply bad at curation and you can't tell, or your bubble has become sufficiently isolated that you've actually managed to push away reality.

We can hang reality, it's alright.

This wasn't a particularly unique period in American history and I am not (quite) saying "Republicans started it," but I am saying that was about the time when I noticed, in the modern era, an end to our civic-minded Schoolhouse Rock version of American politics where Republicans and Democrats could still grill together.

Of course, it wasn't a particularly long period; families were at daggers drawn over culture war and political activism in the 60's and 70's (famously, thanks to Bryan Burroughs' Days of Rage, with actual bombings and shootings), and even Reagan had quite a lot of dedicated haters in the more progressive parts of the country.

that was about the time when I noticed, in the modern era, an end to our civic-minded Schoolhouse Rock version of American politics where Republicans and Democrats could still grill together.

Rush Limbaugh came to prominence by imbuing his show with the concept that the Democrats were not just eroding the bedrock of America, but using civility itself as a mask to hide their deeds in plain sight.

Thus, we right-wingers were to investigate any calls for civility as if they were cover for nefarious deeds being planned. Trump took this to the next level in his Tweets from 2012 onward. And here we are.

Where are your hobby boards though? Reddit?

Nice try. ;)

we mostly grew up with the idea that we might live in a two-party system with drastically opposing ideas

Where by "we" you mean the first world, anyway. I saved this pamphlet excerpt explaining the idea as soon as I read it for the first time:

"One of the most difficult concepts for some to accept, especially in nations where the transition of power has historically taken place at the point of a gun, is that of the "loyal opposition." This idea is a vital one, however. It means, in essence, that all sides in a democracy share a common commitment to its basic values. Political competitors don't necessarily have to like each other, but they must tolerate one another and acknowledge that each has a legitimate and important role to play. Moreover, the ground rules of the society must encourage tolerance and civility in public debate.

When the election is over, the losers accept the judgment of the voters. If the incumbent party loses, it turns over power peacefully. No matter who wins, both sides agree to cooperate in solving the common problems of the society. The opposition continues to participate in public life with the knowledge that its role is essential in any democracy. It is loyal not to the specific policies of the government, but to the fundamental legitimacy of the state and to the democratic process itself." - "What is Democracy?", U.S. Department of State

Great lesson to teach the democratizing developing world, but we might want to start printing up extra copies to hand out to other Americans too.

I like to think of it in terms of a multi-generational cultural-economic debt model:

  1. Greatest Generation: Inherits the economic memory of the depression and prosecutes WW2. Their just reward is the American economy 1958-1968. 20 years of "it's raining money". They also inherit the traditional culture of their parents - WW1 veterans and earlier - who grew up in a highly localized and federated political system mostly because technology and communication meant that Washington D.C. injecting itself into the daily concerns of say, Tulsa, Oklahoma, was impossible.

  2. Baby Boomers - Inherits amazing economy, prosecutes Vietnam - but this is the start of "War is for the poors" and objecting to military service (unthinkable in all previous generations) is hailed. They inherit just enough of their parent's traditional cultural norms that monogamy and family-as-center-of-political life maintains, but, combined with the sexual revolution and the pill, that starts to fade in strength considerably. The top 20% of them end up getting a bonus 30 years of economic prosperity (being a white collar worker 1968-1998 was like 30 years of being a FAANG engineer).

  3. Gen X / Elder millenials - Problems start. They don't inherit much of the economy prosperity of their parents because the 1970s inflation makes it difficult and the aforementioned top 20% of baby boomers capture a lot of the wealth generation as Gen X / Elder-M begin their careers. Culturally, there is no Big War - Gulf War 1? That was like, one summer, right? The last frayed stands of traditional family are exploded by 1970s welfare programs etc. Feminization of the culture is in full swing.

  4. Mainline Millenials - They come into their teens / early adulthood with 2008. 8 Years later, half of them sincerely believe Trump is Hitler. Economically, it's not just that the top 20% capture some of the wealth being generated, it's that they're capturing all of it. There are no more families, there's a decent change you grew up in a divorced household. Religious and community based institutions are non-existent. The babyboomers are now retiring and their built up national debt is now your concern.

So, no, there isn't a single "starting point" but you can see the accumulation of degeneration economically and culturally. Do I blame this on the baby boomers? You bet your ass. Winning World War 2 created such an advantageous structural position for the US on a planetary scale that not engaging in decadent behavior was close to impossible. It wasn't winning the lottery - It was the Super Bowl champion quarterback being made president of the world's biggest company with an unlimited credit line from the rest of the human species.

The failure mode began in the 1960s but really compounded in the 1970s. I don't know what was in the water, but there seems to have been so many concurrent social, political, and economic moments of "what the actual fuck?" in those 10 years. 1990s Republicans (Newt, in particular) based a lot of their macro-strategy on trying to roll back 1968-1978.

This is ridiculous. Being a white collar worker from 1968 to 1998 was nothing like 30 years of being a FAANG engineer, and I speak as someone who was in both positions (though not for 30 years). And the boomers only "prosecute[d]" Vietnam in the sense that they got sent there to kill and to die; they weren't running the country at the time. The 1970s inflation hit the boomers more than the Xers, who were children at the time. The earliest Gen Xers in fact graduated into the start of the Reagan Boom; later Xers weren't so lucky.

Being a white collar worker from 1968 to 1998 was nothing like 30 years of being a FAANG engineer.

You're right - it was probably better. You still had company provided pensions for tenure of service. Company cars, relocation assistance, mortgage assistance was somewhat common.

And the boomers only "prosecute[d]" Vietnam in the sense that they got sent there to kill and to die;

This is correct. But @jeroboam and @hydroacetylene did a much better job of highlighting my shortcomings to this point.

The 1970s inflation hit the boomers more than the Xers, who were children at the time.

Children don't experience inflation?

The earliest Gen Xers in fact graduated into the start of the Reagan Boom; later Xers weren't so lucky.

Much like their millennial counterparts 20 years later, Gen Xers walking into the workforce in the Reagan years found obstinate Boomers hogging all of the upward mobility. Again, the economic miracle of the 1980s and 1990s went disproportionately into the pockets and accounts of boomers, often in indirect ways; real estate prices going up for ever, the wealth transfer scheme of subsidized college loans.

This is ridiculous.

This makes me feel bad. And I feel like it's on purpose. You and I don't get a long much. Sometimes you are right. Sometimes I am right. Please be cordial.

You're right - it was probably better. You still had company provided pensions for tenure of service. Company cars, relocation assistance, mortgage assistance was somewhat common.

Did you miss the part where I did both? It wasn't. Company-provided defined benefit plans were on their way out already, and 401ks from FAANG are superior. Company cars were a workaround for super-high taxes and the concomittant low salary. Relocation assistance exists in FAANG companies if you move for them. Mortgage assistance was another workaround for super-high taxes.

The 1970s inflation hit the boomers more than the Xers, who were children at the time.

Children don't experience inflation?

It generally does not affect their career progression.

Much like their millennial counterparts 20 years later, Gen Xers walking into the workforce in the Reagan years found obstinate Boomers hogging all of the upward mobility.

The oldest Boomer was 42 at the end of the Reagan presidency and 44 when the 1990 recession hit. It's "obstinate" for people of that age to stay in the workforce? All those Boomers moving up were replaced by younger people. It's true that the Boomers got more benefit in dollars from the Reagan expansion, since they were in later, more lucrative parts of their careers, but it was still pretty good for the younger Xers. Real estate values did not go up forever in this time; there was a slight drop, then a boom, followed by a bust.

Baby Boomers - Inherits amazing economy, prosecutes Vietnam - but this is the start of "War is for the poors" and objecting to military service (unthinkable in all previous generations) is hailed.

Previous iterations of the draft were widely dodged, to the point that wealthy men weren’t expected to serve at all. There were often explicit wealth disqualifications- the civil war, for example, granted exemptions to men who could pay for a substitute. Being an officer was often high status but joining the army as a private is more common and accepted for middle class boys now than in 1900. The difference is that before ~1960 everybody was poor.

Previous iterations of the draft were widely dodged, to the point that wealthy men weren’t expected to serve at all.

Yeah, it's not so much that today's situation is uniquely bad as the previous era (say 1900–1950) was uniquely good in a lot of ways.

In WWI and WWII, the upper classes participated in the dying just as much as the lower classes.

That is rare (although not unprecedented) in history. Nevertheless, we are retreating from the high water mark of class unity. And, when it comes to perceptions, it's the direction of change not the absolute level that matters.

People are absolutely right to be concerned that elites avoid military service while still supporting wars abroad. Dick Cheney (he of five deferments) exemplifies that trend.

@jeroboam @hydroacetylene

Fair points! I didn't know some facts, and also didn't understand context. Thanks!

No, seriously, you can probably pick whatever ideologically-motivated starting point fits your narrative, but it didn't used to be like this.

Yeah, I suspect that which "starting point" people lean to will be a combination of their ideology and their age. I tend to reflexively regard the Bork hearing as the major inflection point in today's political partisanship, but that couldn't have happened without the Warren Court, and that couldn't have happened without... (on ad infinitum) There are not really events, only points along a process continuum. "Nothing ever happens."

But I agree! It didn't used to be like this. One suspicion I have is that our values pluralism has gotten the best of us. "Values pluralism" for most of our country's history has meant "you can live out any flavor of the European Christian good life imaginable!" When most of the nation shares fundamental values--even the people who opt to live differently, in an "I know I'm a bad person but I just can't help myself" sort of a way--then political parties aren't existential threats, they're just competing visions for implementation. Somewhat boring, really--"we're all welfare statists arguing about the optimal balance between taxation and redistribution." The retreat from values-oriented politics to identity-oriented politics did not happen all at once, but I think it has certainly happened, and the rise of the "alt-right" was just the inevitable result of certain "conservatives" finally getting the message that the time for discussion and compromise was over, and that a new age of tribalism was upon us.

I would like to find a way to reverse that trend, but the Motte is one of the few places I can even discuss it without encountering an outright refusal to engage on the merits.

One thing I noticed about politics Now vs 2000 is that basically politics itself has become much more of a lifestyle than it used to be. There are entirely different default activities, and different fashion sense and different music and so on. And now there are political themed shopping — bulletproof coffee and the like. And I think that’s making polarization worse, as it makes almost every decision made at least potentially political. I find it kind of exhausting tbh to have so much be political when it doesn’t matter that much.

You can't really win. Once your side starts winning, the people interested in only power and status switch sides. They then morph and corrupt your "principles" into excuses to pursue their power and status. They may fly the same flag and use the same phrases and words to justify their actions, but none of the symbols or words mean the same thing for them. But this process of curruption takes time, and for a while it can seem like your winning. Eventually, you're going to have to switch to another team and begin the whole thing over again, but once your new side starts winning, well ...

Power in general is like a bug zapper lamp to flies.

Can’t we purge these entryists? Do they belong to an identifiable demographic?

To add to @faceh's point, entryists can sometimes even do a switcheroo and use a purge originally intended for them to get rid of newcomers that are loyal to the old ideals. It's not impossible to wrangle them, but it's often much safer to stay under their radar and not allow them to get a hold in the first place.

Imo something like this has happened in science as well, where we enjoyed a few decades of science/scientists having a good reputation, but nowadays it's gotten so bad that "the science says" is just run-of-the-mill partisanship.

They look and sound just like you!

By their nature they tend to be those who are exceptionally good at blending in, at 'hypnotizing' the masses, at deflecting blame, and navigating social environments to favorable ends.

So just because you manage to identify them doesn't mean you can rally enough support/power to keep them out or to oust them. They're the ones who will sacrifice virtually every other value to maintain power, and you, as a normal person, have people and things you value which can be attacked or threatened to get you to back off.

Yeah. “Humans.”

I really want to contradict you and drop a lizardman joke, but even at my tinfoiliest I have to admit you're right on this one.

There's something at the core of this all, from progressives, that I fundamentally have a hard time wrapping my head around.

I grew up in the 80s and 90s in the South in a conservative religious family in a conservative community. The view of the Supreme Court was overwhelmingly that it had behaved as an unelected, anti-democratic, civilization wrecking dictatorship for half a century. If you valued freedom of religion and freedom of association in a more traditional, de Tocqueville-ian sense (with a strong emphasis on the ability of people to form and police their own communities with their own values and their own norms and their own boundaries), the Supreme Court had behaved as a wrecking ball. And particularly if you were sensitive, as most smarter conservatives I knew were, to the ubiquity of second order effects in society, the Supreme Court came across constantly as a body that was totally indifferent to, and totally insulated from, the disastrous second order effects of its dictates and airy social engineering.

BUT... well, Reagan won in a landslide, and the country had turned back to the right, and with that level of political domination, at some point the Supreme Court was going to have to reflect that political reality... or so we thought. And besides, conservatives value authority and institutions and fear chaos. There's a very deep awareness of Chesterton's Fence on a gut level. So despite those wide spread, deeply held beliefs about the Supreme Court, we just marched ahead, accepted their rulings, and tried to steer our lives around the damage they inflicted. (Also, the federal government had made it clear earlier that they would send in Federal troops from time to time to enforce Supreme Court rulings at gun point, and most people were ready just to move on with their lives)

But of course, over time, all the pipeline issues about the judiciary did become more apparent - the political domination of Reagan conservatives really SHOULD have resulted in a much more conservative judiciary than actually resulted, with much, MUCH more radically conservative rulings on all sorts of things like abortion and affirmative action and disparate impact back in the 80s and early 90s, if you were going by the feelings of voters at the time. But it took too long for conservatives to recognize the problems about where you get those judges from, and by that point, the country had moved on... or so it seemed until Mitch McConnell played the hardest of hard ball, fate intervened, and former Democrat Donald Trump got 3 supreme court picks after not winning the popular vote.

Anyway, that's my baseline for how people I grew up around viewed the Supreme Court.

And so when I see enraged public progressives and fellow travelers like David French railing against the current Supreme Court and its legitimacy, the thing I keep thinking is, the progressives I'm thinking of have built their ENTIRE moral universe around other citizens respecting all sorts of previous (as their opponents see it) destructive Supreme Court rulings from roughly the 1940s to the 2010s. Much of their moral progress stories require other citizens to simply bow down and accept and actively prop up those other rulings. They gain from the legitimacy of the Supreme Court in a way that the traditionalists I grew up around absolutely don't. Given that, it's very difficult for me to imagine a future where people upset by the current Supreme Court manage to publicly delegitimize it and mess with it AND also their opponents still accept the legitimacy of previous generations rulings. And if I'm right about that, it seems like progressives have vastly more to lose by having a much more weakened Supreme Court.

I've noted before that I often get a "born on third, thought they hit a triple" vibe from progressives when it comes to the institutions they've inherited, and their overwhelming sense that it's just natural for different institutions to lean their way - and the Supreme Court is absolutely a place where I think that is true.

Another way of putting is is that for more than a century, the Supreme Court has been the primary instrument of transforming the federal government and its sphere of influence following the progressive program. Conservatives only in our lifetimes wised up enough to set up the pipeline, as you put it, and it has only just borne any fruit in the form of walking back a bare handful of the most extreme points of that program.

We shouldn't be surprised that progressives would turn on it so quickly, because it has always been a question of what means would achieve the necessary end of transforming America and being on the right side of history. The Supreme Court was their darling because it was the most effective tool, not because of any underlying principles about the primacy of the judiciary over other branches of government.

Pre-Reagan, there was no conservative pipeline to set up. Not a lot of libertarian lawyers, after all.

It was the aftereffects of Roe that gave the federalist society ammo. When Catholics broke with the democrats there was suddenly a source of lawyers who had gone to the kinds of law schools judges go to. Before all this, there simply weren’t strongly conservative lawyers to appoint as judges.

It's a great point that the conservative judicial pipeline is almost exclusively Catholic and that Roe v Wade had a huge role in motivating intellectual Catholics to rethink their progressive association.

In Latin America, where abortion was simply off the table until quite recently, the Catholic Church tended to be associated with either the authoritarian right or center left.

This is largely because the center right is a ‘free markets first’ phenomenon, which jives poorly with Catholic teaching. Both authoritarian right wing priorities and the broad centrist center left do much better. In the USCCB there’s a division between bishops that align themselves as extremely moderate democrats and the currently dominant wing which is basically eccentric right wing republicans. Neither are particularly libertarian.

not unlike the trajectory of some Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices

Let's talk about this.

Thomas and Alito don't seem to be on a leftward trajectory. Roberts, of course, seems to love being the middle, or the counterbalance to the right. Kavanaugh seems cut from the same mold, thus far. Barrett I expect to swing leftward on everything and anything not abortion, and in particular I expect her to undermine any anti-immigration or tough-on-crime policies that come before the court, especially given the makeup of her family.

And then there's Gorsuch. Neil "We will abide by the treaties" Gorsuch. Neil "Butt-for Bostock" Gorsuch. Is he shifting to the left as he moves from Colorado to DC? Or is he simply ornery and stubborn in his own interpretation of the laws? To me, it comes down to his rulings on gun rights. There's no way you can read the Civil Rights Act as guaranteeing protections for transsexuals, but not read "Shall not be infringed" as forbidding pretty much every gun law in the land.

Of course, none of them have tried to take an axe to the FISA courts or curtail the massive surveillance state on third or fourth amendment grounds, so I'm not actually hopeful that I'll see a constitutionalist on the court in my lifetime.

Speaking as a left-leaning social democrat who dislikes all the Republican judges for obvious reaosns, Gorsuch is the only one who actually seemingly has an identifiable philosophy ala Scalia (except actually better) that I can at least respect, even though I think it's personally terrible. Maybe Thomas did 20 years ago, but he's fallen into a FOX News brained duo alongside Alito for basically the entirety of the Trump era.

Man, I've been a Thomas fan since Law School, and I think what we're seeing now is a guy who has almost all the same convictions he did 30 years ago, but he's finally gotten to implement them rather than just writing terse and pithy dissents.

There HAS been an uptick in reporters and other platforms attempting to make Alito and Thomas' conduct off the bench out to seem somehow abberrant and worthy of removal, though.

Gorsuch hates the administrative state. There he is quite strident.

-though he maintains that it is others who have changed, not him.

That article is not very beleivable. I am thoroughly reminded of the many many 'hate crime' hoaxes that turn out to be just that. Those anecdotes of continuos in-person racism sound so incredibly made up, and exactly what an echo-chambered yankee would think sounded real about 'southern racists'.

A teacher at the school asked my son if we had purchased his sister for a “loaf of bread.”

I guarantee this never happened.

I notice that the accusastions of racism serve as a convenient reason not to engage with actually well made disagreements with him as a panelest. It reads like he's got a victim complex, and a huge sore spot about not being accepted and praised for his wisdom, and he's using made up or exaggerated stories about racism as a shield for his ego.

I guarantee this never happened.

I don't know, there are a lot of people in the world who say a lot of things. This sounds like a really weird thing to say so maybe in context it made more sense? I tend to believe it, I just don't think it actually matters, doubt there was any animus behind it, and overall think that hypersensitivity to microagressions tends to make racial relations worse.

David French's current views overall are garbage, though.

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