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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   31616 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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Classical liberalism vs. The New Right

Tyler Cowen responds to the ‘New Right’-

There is also a self-validating structure to New Right arguments over time. You can’t easily persuade New Right advocates by pointing to mainstream media reports that contradict their main narrative. Mainstream media is one of the least trusted sources. Academic research also has fallen under increasing mistrust, as the academy predominantly hires individuals who support the Democratic Party.

Most classical liberals are uncomfortable with the New Right approaches, and seek to disavow them. I share those concerns, and yet I also recognize that hard and fast lines are not so easy to draw. The New Right is in essence accepting the original classical liberal critique of the state and pushing it a few steps further, adding further skepticism of elites, a greater emphasis on culture, and a belief in elite collusion rather than checks and balances. You may or may not agree with those intellectual moves, but many common premises still are shared between the classical liberals and the New Right, even if neither side is fully comfortable admitting this.

The New Right also tends to see the classical liberals as naïve about power (the same charge classical liberals fling at the establishment), and as standing on the losing side of history. Those aren’t the easiest arguments to refute. Furthermore, the last twenty years have seen 9/11, a failed Iraq War, a major financial crisis and recession, and a major pandemic, mishandled in some critical regards. It doesn’t seem that wrong to become additionally skeptical about American elites, and the New Right wields these points effectively.

The major thing he misses, or perhaps only elides to, is that the individualist framework that libertarianism was built on has been utterly obliterated by technological, political, and demographic shifts. The future is now, old man, and it’s all about groups, and Kaldor-Hicks efficiencies. Given our degenerate institutions there is no way any particular set of losers can actually expect compensation for their damages, and so all one can hope for is that our particular sect wins out in the scrum of sectarian squabbling.

Yet, listening to a recent interview of his, I was struck by his (likely correct) bone-deep cynicism towards grand reform. His marginal revolution is lower variance than a monarchy or integralist state, and so intrinsically less ambitious. X-risks seem to demand a serious response, but Cowen just shrugs and hopes we have a nice few centuries before we destroy ourselves.

The characterization of the New Right as being liberals but with added elite skepticism makes me wonder to what extent this demographic actually overlaps strongly with the supposedly far-left pro-communist anti-institutional "all cops are bastards" camp. Or, to put it more bluntly, I'm wondering what exactly about this 'New Right' demographic is even still right.

If the belief is essentially that free trade cannot work because 'checks and balances' don't exist, resulting only in centralization of power, corruption and impression - haven't you just made the case for the anti-capitalist / anti-market left?

Both groups are populist, though that's less of a statement that "therefore, they are close to each other" and more "populism is a really broad category, in terms of policy preferences."

See also: the Gilets Jaunes, I guess.

Yes, very much so.

Conservatives do not need to articulate a coherent vision of society - by their nature they like things the way they were or at least the way they were when they were kids. Though few really desire a return to the 1950s or the 1920s anymore, I'd say the median right-voter longs for the 90s - peace, prosperity, American power, gays out of the closet but not by much, jokes about transsexuals on TV, and a cordial racial dialogue. If this desire is not articulated by a visionary intellectual vanguard, it's because visionary intellectuals think it's silly and beneath them. Imagine wanting a society that you actually know is possible and desirable because you lived through it! Everyone knows the correct way to reform society is to dream up some ludicrous science-fiction scenario and then try to enforce it on an unwilling majority that just wants to grill.

It might be true of any ideology that the people who manage to actually get elected are social climbers, whereas the people with coherent visions live on the fringes.

Thiel and Bannon have coherent visions. From what I can tell, so do a few paleoconservatives like Paul Ryan and Ron Paul (though those are obviously not "new right"), as do those rare legitimate racists.

But from what I've read about Meloni, I'm not sure that being a single unmarried mother (though partnered to the father of her child) is in any real contradiction to her views. She seems like an Italian Nationalist, who thinks Italy and Italian culture is great, and that it's something which should continue in the world as opposed to getting blended into the Euro-globo-homogenization. This is a view informed by (Italian) Christianity, but it's not Christian nationalism - so criticisms of her for her typical Italian lifestyle don't really land.

Paul Ryan is not a paleoconservative, or at least was the furthest thing from it when he was in office.

What are Thiel and Bannon's visions? Where can I read them?

I guess if you want to read, try to find transcripts of their speeches.

Yeah listening to speeches is too slow. I've read zero to one but there wasn't a coherent vision outlined.

And Karl Marx was an bourgeois wannabe who lived on handouts from his parents and Engels and never worked a day of real labour in his life. And neither was he able to fully articulate what the ideal communist state would look like.

Just because their personal lives don't perfectly reflect their stated ideological preferences doesn't mean their preferences aren't real or don't resonate with a lot of people.

Karl Marx had the advantage of positioning his potential society as an inherent outcome of impersonal forces. He believed it would be a good society, but the inherent virtue of the average prole had nothing to do with it. To Marx - and to Marxists I've known - his own personal virtue or even his own personal dedication to labouring had nothing to do with the truth-value of his ideology because Marxism (qua Marx, not, uh, the new kind) doesn't demand personal virtue as a prerequisite to its outcomes.

Modern conservatives often do, which is why the "homophobic Republican politician fucks men" headline is so particularly juicy.

I think there's a difficulty to preaching "we should do X" and then not doing X, whether it's conservatives living in what they should consider sin or socialists in mansions. It's why I find it difficult to take either ideology seriously much of the time.

Marx may have advocated a proletarian revolution and "dictatorship" but he didn't believe that a working class existence in a capitalist state was particularly desirable. It seems consistent with his ideology that he would want to avoid it.

You say this as if it were an argument in support of the, you know, those ideological preferences.

No, I'm saying that simply pointing out that people aren't the perfect paragons of the ideology they support isn't actually a rebuttal of that ideology or their arguments. It's the textbook definition of ad hominem.

Perhaps it is exactly because these 'New Right' live in a modern liberal society and have modern liberal lives they can articulate their dissatifaction with it. Someone like Meloni would probably agree that raising a child as a single mother is not ideal despite being one herself, and probably supports (and does to my knowledge) support traditional social institutions that would make it less common.

Why do you think that ad hominem is necessarily a fallacy?

Suppose you meet a guy at a party who explains in detail why modern plumbing sucks and how to improve on it vastly. You're intrigued and ask how his elegant mutations and cunning annihilations worked out in practice--only to discover that not only he never tried them ever, but also never did any plumbing at all, modern or otherwise. Is it wrong to disregard his special plan for your toilet with extreme prejudice? I don't think so, because there are vastly more completely deranged plans than actually good ones, one can't end up with a good one without actually trying them in the real world, a lot, and it's not worth your time to debunk a theory that was never put into practice.

Similarly, OK, we can accept it when someone says "it sucks" about a situation they are not themselves necessarily in, or in but having never experienced something different. Marx complaining about labor conditions, a single mother complaining about single motherhood, yeah sure. But when they start proposing their fixes that they have no experience living with whatsoever, then it's entirely valid to ad hominem them.

I think what 2rafa was saying was most popular rightists don’t have a vision for the future of the world. Whether or not people without vision are hypocritical or can change the world it is a shame no public figure seems to have a beautiful vision for everyone’s future.

The radical right in America is unable to articulate a coherent vision of the kind of society it wants to live in. This is the problem with many modern Western conservatives: they live modern, liberal lives and then preach against it. Georgia Meloni is a single unmarried mother with a bastard, to provide one illustration. The parliamentary leader of the AfD is a transnational lesbian with a wife who prefers living in Switzerland to Germany. That’s not very trad of them.

Maybe, but when the opposition is a Luciferian death cult that wants to fuck our children while drinking their essence, anyone will do. At least that's where my friends on the New Right go when pushed. I had one explain to me his support for Russia v Ukraine as follows, "I know we [The West] are evil. I don't know that Putin is evil." In the battle between literal demons (or Nephilim, more like it) and flawed strongmen, they pick the strongmen. And they don't care if civilization gets destroyed in the process, because civilization has been ruined by gays, Jews, and gay Jews. The best case is that a strongman can put all the gay jews in prison, so we can build something better. This feels like a strawman as I write it, but it seems to be the essence of their private views. And they really do believe that the World Economic Forum/Democrats/RINOs/Neoliberalism is literally Satanic.

"I can't spare this man - he fights"

I do know that Putin is to a degree evil (or at least partly a self-serving sociopathic careerist at best, which is essentially the same thing), but I also am nearly 100% sure that he still doesn't intrinsically despise my skin color, my natural expression of my secondary sex characteristics and masculinity itself, etc. and also probably doesn't hate or want to eradicate my heritage, culture, and traditions too much (minus the parts of it that have been hijacked by glob‍ohom‍o to destroy his).

Putin is just banally evil, a simple, corrupt apparatchik qua autocrat of the Russian security state who just wants to be free to L‍ARP as Diet Stalin, take his share of the illicit cut off the top, and restore a bit of the Russian national pride he's made himself a venerated mascot of (and he probably genuinely, as genuinely as he can anyway, believes in it all some decent amount too, which is a majorly redeemable quality). Perhaps the world would be better overall if such people didn't exist (which they might not if glob‍oho‍mo didn't constantly put heterodox cultures under siege, causing them to desperately turn to perceived strongmen in self-defense), but they hardly ruin the planet.

Some 13 year old Iranian girl out there isn't tw‍erking to vulgar and nonsensical din‍du rap on TikTok and causing her anguished father to question every life decision he's ever made and contemplate suicide because of Putin. Some 10 year old boy in Venezuela isn't wearing women's clothing and dreaming of his future lifetime paid subscription to the proper functioning of his own endocrine system via synthetic pharmaceutical hormones because of Putin. Some decent enough 27 year old British lad wasn't guilt-tripped and shamed into having a h‍eart atta‍ck leading to death from "SA‍DS" sponsored by Pfiz‍er™ because of Putin. Whatever problems Putin causes, he at least has the courtesy to almost always keep them in Russia (or in the case of a certain recent special operation, Russia Jr.). His flaws don't spread like a virus.

I still don't believe the WEF etc. is literally Satanic, because I don't believe in a literal Satan, but they do match most descriptions of the classic nefarious tempter archetype. With that being said, the whole hating my basic demographic characteristics stuff and constantly spreading society-eroding degeneracy stuff weighs more heavily on my mind, so I would say that either I'm heterodox among my fellows here or you're either strawmanning a bit or interpreting hyperbole (I've made a few "I HATE THE AN‍TICH‍RIST" posts in my day in response to the latest glo‍b‍oho‍m‍o affront, but it's just a me‍me.) a bit too literally.

Though you're right about Jews ruining society, especially the gay ones! (Or should I want them not to breed?)

din‍du rap

constantly spreading society-eroding degeneracy stuff

Though you're right about Jews ruining society, especially the gay ones! (Or should I want them not to breed?)

This is a place for discussing culture wars, not waging them. Yes--I'm aware how rarely it ends up working that way! Nevertheless--it is our aspiration. This is just way too much "boo outgroup" in one post. Your substantive point can be made without a parade of weak man examples. Don't do this.

The last line is literally just a mostly humorous rephrasing of a part of the post it's responding to:

And they don't care if civilization gets destroyed in the process, because civilization has been ruined by gays, Jews, and gay Jews.

Even if I were 100% serious (which I'm not by any means, as again, it's simply a reflection of its source material), if it's a weakman, then surely so is reducing your opponent's views to "because civilization has been ruined by gays, Jews, and gay Jews."

Other than that, saying that rap is one of the essential exports of Western society is not a weakman. I think any music industry statistic, whether it's listens on Spotify, sales, award show nominations, or anything else, clearly demonstrates that to the point of making it common knowledge.

As for "society-eroding degeneracy stuff", I will admit that is a vague phrase, but I provided concrete examples of it already above and "weighs more heavily on my mind" right after it makes clear that is simply me restating my primary concerns in regards to evaluating geopolitical competitors, not making an accusation that would require further support.

So no, it is not a "parade of weakman examples". Your post strawmanning and mischaracterizing mine is. (If cutting a two word phrase, a six word phrase, and two sentences out of a multi-paragraph post with no context, slapping them with a few buzzwords, and ending with a "Don't do this." admonishment fit only for a grade schooler (a communication habit (that you might consider changing as has been suggested to you or other mods dozen of times) that is very disrespectful by the way to the adults who choose to contribute to your now exiled community even though at this point without Reddit you need every one of us by far more than we need you) isn't fundamentally weak, then I don't know what is.)

Is it "boo outgroup"-y? Maybe a bit, but I don't see how it's overly so, given that it all serves to directly explain a perspective previously commented on (by someone not of that perspective), which is valuable, and because the general outgroup of this sub based on its common commentary seems to those who aren't entirely anti-Putin (like me). That is, I am the outgroup in this case.

The misbehavior of others does not excuse your own. We don't always catch every rule violation, or always take the time to address them, because, well, there are actually too many for us to manage that. So you should never take a lack of moderation as a sign of anything at all.

Your nested parenthetical remarks is nonsense wrapped in nonsense. This is simple: if you do not wish to be admonished as a grade schooler, then do not argue like one.

That is, I am the outgroup in this case.

Everyone is someone's outgroup, though. The goal is light over heat. Your approach was too much heat, not enough light. Do better. Or don't, and we'll ban you. And if that means the community dies, like--I've already noted elsewhere that the mods of this space do not hold its perpetuation as a terminal goal. So, you know. Don't threaten me with a good time.

Putin predates wokeness.

Wokeness isn't globohomo, just its current face with the mask slipped further down. Russia's been dealing with globohomo since at least Yeltsin.

That remains to be seen. He's certainly toying with the idea of nuclear escalation.

If globohomo didn't want nuclear escalation, then maybe they shouldn't have tried to boiling frog a fellow nuclear power with far more vile and underhanded kinds of escalation.

...and Georgia, Moldova, Syria, Belarus...

Moldova, Georgia, and Belarus also count as Russia Jr. (Stalin was even Georgian), and I don't see how he did anything negative in Syria. Or would it have been better for them if the US had succeeded in illegally couping Assad and turning the whole country into Libya? I'd definitely rather live under the relatively moderate Assad than under whatever random warlord moved into town that day. If I were a Syrian I'd like Putin even more.

...and a lot of Europeans weren't too happy about the grain and gas prices recently. We'll have to see how the winter goes.

Putin didn't do that to Western Europe. Western Europeans (to be fair more the governments than the average people) did that to themselves to try to own le heckin' Putler by... dying, I guess? All they had to do was admit that Big P has a point about NATO expansion and say they'd very much so like to keep purchasing his fine natural resources in a mutually beneficial economic relationship. There's no indication Putin would have been the one to say no. They played themselves here.

Since I assume you're asking about online materials, I read here, CWR, /pol/ on various imageboards, various random Substacks, etc., stuff I'm assuming most people here already know about. What are you most interested in? I'm not sure I have any ultra-obscure links to share.

I am sorry that you can't find yourself intellectually open to opposing views at this time. Have a lovely day.

Can we have a sensible right that also is not concerned with people's private sex lives? If that lesbian can decrease how many economic migrants are let into Germany, who cares about her Swiss wife? This new right may be incoherent, or maybe they are taking a page from the libertarians and not caring about strictly personal matters of strangers. As shocking as that would be to a 1950s conservative.

What has Donald Trump done that was concerned with people's private sex lives? (Not counting anything anti-trans, which isn't really about private lives anyway)

He appointed the judges who overturned RvW.

Can we have a sensible right that also is not concerned with people's private sex lives?

I would love to be able to not care about other people's sex lives, but it seems like there is a direct line from "well we'll let gay people be gay" through to "we are prescribing puberty blockers to your son/daughter and cutting his/her dick/tits off" and "we're fucking your kids and there's nothing you can do about it"

Pretty ominous in light of California SB145. Always get a chuckle from their unintentional mask off moments like: The bill would put an end to “blatant discrimination against young LGBT people engaged in consensual activity,”.

I think it’s morally consistent to care about people’s sex lives as part of caring about people’s happiness. It’s something most people want to take care of itself so they don’t have to think about it except when it’s personal, but if sexual dissatisfaction were way up and procreation was in mortal danger it could be reasonable to hash out sexual ethics publicly.

Given that it took less than fifteen years to go from "get the government out of our bedrooms" to "we're coming for your kids", I'd expect future movements to become even more concerned with people's personal lives--seeing demands for "privacy" or "live and let live" as nothing more than evil ploys by a group that isn't (yet) powerful enough to impose their will on the majority. A right that embraces "the personal is political" will not become more tolerant of private immorality.

The left's whole "we pulled that 'free speech' trick on you, we're not about to let you pull it on us now we have power" thing has been a more important lesson than people currently appreciate. When they're being directly told by the gloating winners that's how culture war works, reactionaries and even some conservatives are smart enough to realize: "Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice... I won't be fooled again."

I expect the upcoming culture war curbstomp of conservative resistance by "minor attracted persons" activists will solidify that, if nothing else does. Watching that swing into low gear has been fascinating.

The left's whole "we pulled that 'free speech' trick on you, we're not about to let you pull it on us now we have power" thing has been a more important lesson than people currently appreciate. When they're being directly told by the gloating winners that's how culture war works, reactionaries and even some conservatives are smart enough to realize: "Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice... I won't be fooled again."

TBH I'm shocked that rightists stick by liberal principles at this point. If you're a conservative Jew like Ben Shapiro I guess you feel you have no choice since, as a minority religion, you want the strong minority protections of liberalism.

But any conservative Christian who watches not only the short-term - where the Left basically suckered them that LGBT matters weren't going to be a big imposition - but the greater sweep of history in liberal countries where Christianity (after 2,000 years of resiliency) is facing demographic eclipse and destruction, not to mention legal restrictions on Christians (it's your business but you can't decide to not support a fundamentally unChristian activity)...

By their fruits will ye know them, surely?

Rightists don't stick by liberal principles when they can get away with not. Sure, it isn't illegal to be gay in hungary and poland, but gay propaganda is totally illegal.

The US is different because the civil cold war isn't yet in full swing, and aside from Texas(whose reactionaries both very much exist and are very, very procedural in a way of slowing down the implementation of their agenda) there isn't really a political jurisdiction which is both big and rich enough to do whatever it wants and dominated by conservatives enough to try.

I think this is only a partial answer, but in some cases, people broadly on the right picked up some liberal principles and then grounded them in right-oriented justifications. On the face of it, there was then agreement on the point across the aisle, but via different paths. Roll the clock forward, those liberal principles fell out of favor on the left, and the right looks confused because they thought that point was settled. One example: "colorblindness" as a rejection of racism. This fits in well with the universalist aspects of Christianity, and was adopted by much of the American right as such.

Were elites of the trad past good Christians? Or did they play by Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi rules? Trump is a less impressive man than an average king, but hardly less moral.

But kings weren't elected, of course.

a natural aristocrat of noble lineage, raised from birth with the kind of education necessary to rule in a traditional society, even if there was a little philandering on the side.

That's what we have now, except that the people in these roles are selected by virtue not of lineage or skill, but depravity.

If you’re going to fight to have a country ruled by plebs then they rather ought to be held to the same standards as others of their class. They’re not ‘above’ anything, or anyone.

I wanted to say this explicitly, but isn't this precisely the problem? Reactionaries aka radical right-wingers aka trads are anti-egalitarian elitists (Tucker is flirting with them, incidentally). Mainstream republicans are, unironically, egalitarian democrats who believe rulers ought to depend on the consent of the governed and abide by the same rules as the hoi polloi; that they, normal people, must be represented in power by a champion as close as possible to their exact class, upbringing and attitude – sans, perhaps, minor adaptations to the Washington biome.

You ask for a coherent vision. There's no shortage of shitposting Twitter pseuds with half-decent academic chops who can do that. But it won't differ a lot from this scene, and in a democracy that sort of vision, frankly stated, is a political suicide attempt.

They were not particularly moral, but they didn't pretend that they were equal to the lower classes and that the lower classes could freely do what they did without suffering extra consequences. Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi is a good thing because it stops people who can't handle the consequences from doing things that will damage them with very high probability. This meant that the lower classes mostly kept to values that were better long term for someone who doesn't have a huge safety net.

One of the biggest problem with modern elite "liberals" (note they aren't really liberal) is that they treat the lower classes as equal to themselves, or at least their words say that. Then they tell the lower classes that they too can do what the upper classes do without suffering extra consequences but that is very much not true. The elite liberals have their safety net which means that even with the degeneracy they still come out fine in the end, the lower classes are not so lucky though and society slowly disintegrates.

The radical right in America is unable to articulate a coherent vision of the kind of society it wants to live in.

The "radical right" in the US is largely an outgrowth of the progressive left and thus has difficulty defining itself in terms other than thier opposition to their parents.

This is much less of a problem for the "old right"

Even assuming this is true for the New Right as a diagnosis of cause, rather than merely symptom, I don't think it's very true for the 'old right', even as a diagnosis of symptoms. The general vague fuzzy incoherence of Reaganite behaviors is one of the long-standing criticisms of that alliance from both the right and the left, and it's not like it's exactly a weak or unfounded one, and a sufficiently political asshole could write a similar spiel as the AfD complaint citing Reagan's treatment of AIDS-crisis era homosexuality. Or divorce and the breadth of Baptist politics.

It's not incoherent though, it's just wasn't rational and technocratic.

a sufficiently political asshole could write a similar spiel as the AfD complaint citing Reagan's treatment of AIDS-crisis era homosexuality.

Funny story there...

Yea. But by far I put most of the weight of that on technology, which doesn't exactly lead one to New Right territory.

It has become increasingly clear that the political Right in America is not what it used to be. In particular, my own preferred slant of classical liberalism is being replaced. In its stead are rising alternatives that don’t yet have a common name. Some are called “national conservatism,” and some (by no means all) strands are pro-Trump, but I will refer to the New Right. My use of the term covers a broad range of sources, from Curtis Yarvin to J.D. Vance to Adrian Vermeule to Sohrab Ahmari to Rod Dreher to Tucker Carlson, and also a lot of anonymous internet discourse. Most of all I am thinking of the smart young people I meet who in the 1980s might have become libertarians, but these days absorb some mix of these other influences.

These people have been around for at least a decade. There is nothing new about them, nor are they part of the political right or that right wing.

I don’t like the status quo either, but I also see a world where the most left-wing majors – humanities majors – are losing enrollments and influence. Furthermore, the internet is gaining in intellectual influence, relative to university professors.

It's more like the intellectuals, such as university professors, are gaining influence online, not that the internet is replacing intellectuals. Tyler's article got 350 comments, which is nuts. That's comparable to influencers on on YouTube. University professors are not losing influence at all.

The New Right also overrates the collusive nature of mainstream elites. Many New Right adherents see a world ever more dominated by “The Woke.” In contrast, I see an America where Virginia elected a Republican governor, Louis C.K. won a 2022 Grammy award on a secret ballot and some trans issues are falling in popularity. Wokism likely has peaked.

This is not evidence of it having peaked. DEI is still a big deal.

Similarly, the New Right places great stress on corruption and groupthink in American universities.

This has been the basic conservative view for decades. It's not a new thing.

The New Right also seems bad at coalition building, most of all because it is so polarizing about the elites on the other side.

That's because it's not so much as a political movement as it's an online or pundit movement. People like Tucker or Yarvin do not aspire to public office.

The pandemic response, such as shutdowns, quarantines, and mask mandates (which were of at best dubious efficacy) was a major blow to the status quo. This was their own doing. Then the inflation surge, which none of the experts saw coming. These events made the public lose faith in experts.

That's because it's not so much as a political movement as it's an online or pundit movement. People like Tucker or Yarvin do not aspire to public office.

Trump? Greene? Boebert? De Santis (who’s at least very influenced by it)? All the people running for office under a Trumpist Republican type banner?

I think Tyler indirectly makes a distinction between my examples and yours. Your examples are core right-wingers involved in politics and check the boxes on the core issues important to the base, whereas Tyler's examples are a different type of conservative of a more intellectual or artsy bend, not involved in politics and may have flirted with the left. "Sohrab Ahmari", "Curtis Yarvin", and "Rod Dreher" are not at all like Boebert or Greene.

I think he was intentionally going for the intellectual leaders of the movement to make his case and deeper point.

Which is why he says at one point:

The best New Right thinkers will avoid those mistakes, but still every political philosophy has to be willing to live with “the stupider version” of its core tenets.

It’d be hard to argue that the figures I list are not part of the same wave of political thinking which Cowen is describing, IMO. I don’t see any tenet in which they fundamentally differ.

Then the inflation surge, which none of the experts saw coming

Lawrence Summers, who is about as mainstream an expert you can think of, was predicting high inflation as early as Feb of 2021.

hmm here he is in Dec. 2020 advocating for inflationary policy https://www.marketwatch.com/story/larry-summers-says-deficit-reduction-would-be-catastrophic-argues-for-new-government-debt-yardstick-11606863495

An all-star panel of economists implored Congress to pass a major new coronavirus stimulus package, with former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers making the argument that Washington politicians should become much more comfortable with large deficits and a growing national debt.

During a virtual event staged Tuesday afternoon by the Brookings Institution to advise the incoming Biden administration and Congress on fiscal policy, Summers attacked the conventional wisdom behind the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles fiscal responsibility commission created by former President Barack Obama 10 years ago, when both Democrats and Republicans largely agreed that deficit reduction was urgently needed.

and again here https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/summers-u-s-government-should-spend-whatever-it-takes-to-control-virus

"Summers: U.S. government should spend ‘whatever it takes’ to control virus"

but then 5 months later he does a 180:

http://larrysummers.com/2021/05/24/the-inflation-risk-is-real/

This was after inflation already spiked.

So it's hard to say if he was right or not. Inflation already began to spike when he made his warning, but the problem was, it was too late. Maybe interest rates should have gone up sooner.

I don't think we yet have an adequate explanation for why inflation spiked so much. Stimulus played some role but so did possibly other factors.

Summer's argument is that the output gap at the beginning of the Biden administration was much smaller than the scale of the stimulus bill the administration was attempting to pass. It's possible to say, "We need some stimulus, but not that much, which will be inflationary".

Your second link is March 2020.

And Summers was warning about the scale of the stimulus package in February, 2021.

I don't think anyone expected this to be different.

The point is that he did. They have like, models that let them distinguish between situations.

I don't think the stimulus is main the cause though, because the inflation has persisted long after the stimulus was spent, and a good chunk of the money was saved/invested anyway.

So, this is getting a bit into the weeds on the question, but the way to think of the relationship between fiscal stimulus and inflation is by thinking of the stimulus as just the same as anyone with a sufficiently large credit card. The path of monetary policy that achieved low, steady inflation prior to the over-sized stimulus at the beginning of the Biden administration probably looked something like slow rate hikes over the course of late 2021 and 2022 that eventually brought rates up to some point lower than they are going to end up being in our current timeline. The monetary stimulus of 2020 had been enough to prevent the lockdowns from causing serious, deep, long-lasting depression and opening up would have brought total spending back into line with the non-pandemic growth path of 2019 without the Fed having to slam on the breaks.

Then a huge amount of additional spending happened. The Fed suddenly had to change stances to a tighter policy sooner in order to stave off inflation but, importantly, they didn't. Inflation started to spike long before the Fed even started talking about tightening. Then they took most of a year before they started actually tightening.

So, it's still monetary policy causing the inflation (as only monetary policy can cause sustained inflation), but it's the stance of monetary policy being suddenly far too loose as a result of a change in the environment, rather than a change in the policy instrument. If the Fed had followed a policy path similar to its path in real life in a hypothetical world where the 2021 stimulus didn't happen or was much smaller, there probably wouldn't have been any inflation or it would have been much milder. If the Fed had appropriately offset the 2021 stimulus by moving forward and scaling tightening plans from the second half of the year or the next year to the first half of 2021, there probably wouldn't have been any inflation or it would have been much milder.

The Fed suddenly had to change stances to a tighter policy sooner in order to stave off inflation but, importantly, they didn't. Inflation started to spike long before the Fed even started talking about tightening. Then they took most of a year before they started actually tightening.

That is what I said, which for some reason people disagreed with, and my post was downvoted a bunch of times so i deleted it .

here is what I wrote:

With perfect hindsight, interest rates should have started going up after the stock market made new highs, which was in late 2020 instead of waiting until q2 of 2022. But this would have caused a market crash anyway.

Yes, but the political right was predicting high inflation from 2020.

Yeah, but the political right is constantly predicting high inflation A stopped clock, etc ...

yeah, peter schiff has been saying this forever , and was wrong about the dollar falling

a major pandemic, mishandled in some critical regards.

Hah, I think that's a fair phrasing in context but holy cow does it undersell the damage this mishandling did to institutional trust across the board.

The pandemic became politicized almost immediately, the government seemed to have very little plan for a structured response once "two weeks to flatten the curve/stop the spread" was done, guidance from the CDC was ambiguous or flat-out contradictory at times, the FDA was responsible for delaying all kinds of reasonable measures for responding to the crisis, and at no point did anyone in any position of authority admit to making a mistake or otherwise being incorrect about it.

And that last point I think is where the focus should be. Because across all of those previous grievous institutional failures he mentioned, you'd be hard pressed to name any authority figure who paid any significant personal cost for their role in the events. The Iraq war, the 2008 crisis, the botched Afghanistan withdrawal just last year. A point of comparison I sometimes seen brought up is Iceland, which actually put bankers on trial for fraud stemming from the 2008 meltdown and put many in jail, vs. in the U.S. where they got bailouts and golden parachutes. I have no clue as to how justifiable those convictions were, I just note that they happened.

It really starts to look like the task of classical liberalism is mostly spreading around blame and responsibility enough that no particular individual need be held accountable for any failures. And in the process, giving cover to the people who made the mistakes, or lied, or otherwise created huge failures and yet.... were allowed to continue to hold power and continue to make mistakes.

"Oh but you can vote out politicians and hold them accountable that way." Sure. And then they retire to a cushy lifestyle often paid millions for book deals and speaking tours and may even get to continue to have a say in public affairs. And classical liberals find this just peachy because 'peaceful transition of power' is important and once someone exits the political arena they are free to enrich themselves, right?

I think the "New Right" seems to get one thing correct, albeit by accident: its the need for reintroducing serious skin in the game for the powers that be. In their mind this seems to imply mass arrests, trials, and hopefully prison or possibly execution of 'traitors' to the country. I think this implies a government that is a bit more tyrannical than we'd like.

If I thought there was one solution that might actually improve our existing institutions and MIGHT be within the real of political reality, it would be the introduction of actual consequences for malfeasance on the part of public officials. Some personal stakes that actually makes them have to care about the actual impacts their policies have and that they can't escape merely by leaving or switching offices.

Note, he is using a fairly broad definition for his "New Right" concept:

In its stead are rising alternatives that don’t yet have a common name. Some are called “national conservatism,” and some (by no means all) strands are pro-Trump, but I will refer to the New Right. My use of the term covers a broad range of sources, from Curtis Yarvin to J.D. Vance to Adrian Vermeule to Sohrab Ahmari to Rod Dreher to Tucker Carlson, and also a lot of anonymous internet discourse. Most of all I am thinking of the smart young people I meet who in the 1980s might have become libertarians, but these days absorb some mix of these other influences.

Maybe Classical Liberals need to absorb a bit in return. After all, I thought the great strength of the classical liberals was the ability to identify and implement good or innovative ideas from elsewhere. I don't see how implementing rules, procedures, or institutions that hold authority figures directly accountable for their decisions violates any of the rules of liberalism.

The big problem in the west now is that senior bureaucrats are never held accountable. There's been a steady growth in power of the managerial class combined with a diffusion of responsibility.

Part of it is what Watergate established.

Reporters get big stories by having powerful friends in the bureaucracy. They need to protect those friends to keep the stories coming.

Any reporter who openly blames a senior bureaucrat will be blacklisted by all of the others.

Trump's Schedule F appointment system was the best idea I've seen to try to fix things, but it came too late to do any good.

The pandemic response was so obviously, monstrously incompatible with the ideas of Classical Liberalism that it's questionable whether someone who merely describes the failings as "mishandled in some critical regards" even meaningfully qualifies as a Classical Liberal. The state can do whatever the fuck it wants as long as it says "because pandemic" at the end of it? That ain't anything-Liberal.

The role of government is to provide [...] protection against pandemics.

Not by any pre-2020 definition of the word classical liberalism. Did the government protect you against the 1918 pandemic? No. The median action was nothing. Did the government protect against the mid-century flu pandemics? No. Again, median action was nothing. HIV? Any Classical Liberal I can name would have strongly opposed recriminalizing homosexuality. As someone in the comments over there already put it, it's recency bias. The position of Classical Liberals pre-2020, to the extent they even had a position, would have been that the government is not meaningfully placed to outright prevent pandemics, just as it's not able to prevent e.g earthquakes, and thus it should not even have the power to attempt this. They could even point to the parable of King Canute and the tide.

To be fair we understand viruses far better than we used to. I wish there could be a coherent position around yes we can have lockdowns but only if the virus is literally civilization ending.

To be fair we understand viruses far better than we used to.

Do we, in a way that's meaningful for what many governments sought to do in 2020? We might know more on paper, but it's not clear to me that any of this knowledge had an impact for the goal of "protection against pandemics", which is distinct from mitigation. The information overload and the delusion that modelling would be accurate made things worse, not better. And for the more cynical, if covid was a result of gain of function research, then instead of protecting against pandemics, this additional understanding instead caused the pandemic.

yes we can have lockdowns but only if the virus is literally civilization ending

Governments can define what viruses are civilization ending. We know this because they already did this sort of redefinition before, not just for covid-19 but also for swine flu.

Then you get the "experts" declaring the next flu season as civilization ending.

Yeah correct course of action is caution in the beginning - as we learn it's weak just ignore it. Problem is 'experts' apparently are unwilling or unable to publicly admit being wrong.

And that last point I think is where the focus should be. Because across all of those previous grievous institutional failures he mentioned, you'd be hard pressed to name any authority figure who paid any significant personal cost for their role in the events. The Iraq war, the 2008 crisis, the botched Afghanistan withdrawal just last year. A point of comparison I sometimes seen brought up is Iceland, which actually put bankers on trial for fraud stemming from the 2008 meltdown and put many in jail, vs. in the U.S. where they got bailouts and golden parachutes. I have no clue as to how justifiable those convictions were, I just note that they happened.

Neocons will still tell us Iraq and Afghanistan were not failures. Liberals will say that flatten the curve and masks still worked or were not done correctly. Part of the problem is that it's impossible to remove the bias inherent in humans and politics when determining if or when something works. Sunk costs fallacy is another problem. This could explain why policy makers are inclined to not abandon bad policy. Admitting failure means losing reelection and credibility, whereas continuing bad policy still means the possibility things could get better.

Neocons will still tell us Iraq and Afghanistan were not failures.

I think they often go the extra mile and tell us that Americans wanted and voted for these wars and our leaders were evidently unable to decisively withdraw because that would have dismayed voters too much.

Not an exaggeration:

Tom Nichols: "Afghanistan is Your Fault."

Afghanistan was different. This was a war that was immensely popular at the outset and mostly conducted in full view of the American public. The problem was that, once the initial euphoria wore off, the public wasn’t much interested in it. Coverage in print media remained solid, but cable-news coverage of Afghanistan dropped off quickly, especially once a new adventure was launched in Iraq.

and

But as comforting as it would be to blame Obama and Trump, we must look inward and admit that we told our elected leaders—of both parties—that they were facing a no-win political test. If they chose to leave, they would be cowards who abandoned Afghanistan. If they chose to stay, they were warmongers intent on pursuing “forever war.” And so here we are, in the place we were destined to be: resting on 20 years of safety from another 9/11, but with Afghanistan again in the hands of the Taliban.

Which he might have a point on if there was ever an actual declared war in Afghanistan. But no, we got an Authorization for Use of Military Force that received effectively ZERO congressional debate year after year. Pretty much no President made it a campaign issue.

How were voters to express any opinion on the situation other, perhaps, than electing Ron Paul in 2012?

But this is ultimately what I'm saying. They hang the blame for the debacle on 'us' since diffusing responsibility and shuffling blame for political outcomes to 'the people' who ostensibly voted for it is, as mentioned, the primary purpose of Classical Liberalism these days.

They're definitely not advancing the classically liberal principals that ensure free speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of association anymore. They sure as hell ain't making free markets a priority.

But this is ultimately what I'm saying. They hang the blame for the debacle on 'us' since diffusing responsibility and shuffling blame for political outcomes to 'the people' who ostensibly voted for it is, as mentioned, the primary purpose of Classical Liberalism these days.

One of the purposes of a representative democracy, rather than a direct democracy, is that the buck stops with the representatives, not the voters. Legal responsibility for a government's actions fall on them, not the general public.

Surely that's only true until the next election? If an elected representative makes a decision, and his electorate decide to re-elect him, that looks to me like ratification of his decision.

Sure, representatives make a lot of decisions, so re-electing them is more aggregate approval than specific approval, and then there's the factor of "is he better than the alternatives," but at some point, accountability has to go back to the electorate. It's the people who are sovereign, and responsibility comes with that.

Is this essentially the poltical version of that "borrowing the jack" parable one of our mods linked once? Our leaders never bothered to pull us out of Afghanistan until last year because they thought they could read our minds and decided inaction was better?

Cowen has a lot of good points, but he ultimately turns a blind eye to the race problem which is the fatal flaw of classical liberalism (a flaw which was not shared by their 18th century counterparts- who failed in their own way, but they did not deny the problem like classical liberals of today). Cowen even acknowledges "the Brazilianification of the United States... Brazil being a paradigmatic example of a low trust society and government."

But he invokes Brazilianification as purely a political failure of trust rather than an outcome of a race problem. This is what Brazilianification looks like Mr. Cowen, and it's not caused by pessimism from would-be classical liberal idealists. It's caused by the type of power dynamics that the "New Right" appreciates and accepts as being a premise that any aspiring ideology must operate within.

There does seem to be a growing influence of Alt-right/dissident-right/New Right/Deep Right/Whatever right on the more mainstream right discourse which is very interesting to see. Cowen does seem to grasp the big picture, he just leaves out a few pieces of the puzzle.

Cowen's best point is that "the stupider version" of the New Right could threaten to be worse than the status quo:

Very recently we have seen low trust lead to easily induced skepticism about the 2020 election results, and also easily induced skepticism about vaccines. The best New Right thinkers will avoid those mistakes, but still every political philosophy has to be willing to live with “the stupider version” of its core tenets. I fear that the stupider version of some of the New Right views are very hard to make compatible with political stability or for that matter with public health.

But I think this argument could have been made 15 years ago, where anxiety over Obamacare or something was the most polarizing issue of the day. But political polarization has gone so far that these values have lost credibility. If more intelligent people like Cowen accept the core tenets of the New Right then that would reduce the risk of "the stupider version" having a monopoly on crucially important premises in the political discourse.

Ultimately though it's encouraging to see classical liberals acknowledge the criticisms that have created this demand for an "alternative" Right.

Brazil's problem is not. Race is only a problem in so far as one subscribes to Marxist (or more accurately post-Marxist) models of class interest. Sadly Brazil, much like academia is rife with current and former Marxists.

This is not anything new, this is just the Trad-Right's old warnings about rootless cosmopolitans and dangers of identity politics coming to pass.

But I think this argument could have been made 15 years ago, where anxiety over Obamacare or something was the most polarizing issue of the day. But political polarization has gone so far that these values have lost credibility.

Tell me you're under the age of 25 without using those words. Look kid, I'm old enough to remember the OKC Bombing and there being serious discussion in about whether McVeigh had actually done anything wrong.

Ah yes, who could forget the mid-90s. Truly the peak of political polarization and Brazilianification. I'm glad the country is so much more unified in comparison to those dark times.

Ah yes, who could forget the mid-90s. Truly the peak of political polarization and Brazilianification. I'm glad the country is so much more unified in comparison to those dark times.

You might think you're dunking on me right now but I'm dead fucking serious. As bad as the the current state of polarization is, the early-mid 90s were arguably a lot worse. At the very least sectarian violence was producing a lot more bodies than it is today. Ruby Ridge, Waco, the Rodney King Riots, OKC, Abortion Clinic Bombings, Church Bombings, University Bombings, the DC Sniper Attacks, need I go on?

I think you are right. Back then , the unrest was the real thing, not like the AstroTurf stuff we see now. They were playing for keeps, not just making noise. There has been an uptick in mass shootings though. But people seemed as divided during the Clinton era, such as Hillarycare, which was a huge deal at the time, as they are now. Same for the Lewinsky scandal, which was polarizing. Or the 1995-1996 government shutdowns. The difference now is social media has an amplifying effect on discourse.

The past decade has its own list of similar tragedies and shocking, violent acts. But if we're talking about political polarization, we have ways we can measure that and the notion that the country is more politically united today than it was in the mid-90s is clearly not true.

The past decade has its own list of similar tragedies and shocking, violent acts.

Sure, but scale matters. The Blue tribe media basically lost their minds over Kenosha Kyle, imagine their response if there had been multiple running gunfights between "right wing neighborhood militias" and "anti-racism activists" in the way that used to be the norm.

Likewise I don't think that anyone is going to deny that academia and the media have become hopelessly polarized but at the same time academia and the media have been becoming less and less representative of the nation at large so what is actually being measured?

Not DC Sniper, that's off by a decade (2002). The bombings might be a wash; in the wake of Dobbs, there were a number of arson attacks on churches and crisis pregnancy centers by pro-abortion radicals. Did the 90s bombings have higher body count? Unabomber killed two people in the early-mid 90s.

Eh my bad, you hit middle age and everything that happened before you were 30 just starts to blend together. It came to mind because the political angle of that one (a pair of hardcore Anti-fa types trying to start a race war) always seems to get conveniently memory holed if/when the incident is mentioned at all. My recollection is that abortion activists and anti-abortion activists killed about a dozen between them.

Edit to Add: For such a smart guy Kazinsky was really bad at actually building bombs and as someone who actually kind of sympathizes with his manifesto, I feel dirty for occasionally wishing he'd had more "success".

done in by ego, really . for someone so smart and principled, he was was not immune to these sins.

But he invokes Brazilianification as purely a political failure of trust rather than an outcome of a race problem. This is what Brazilianification looks like Mr. Cowen, and it's not caused by pessimism from would-be classical liberal idealists. It's caused by the type of power dynamics that the "New Right" appreciates and accepts as being a premise that any aspiring ideology must operate within.

Many countries that are more ethnically homogenous than the US have had unrest/crisis over the past decade, worse than the US. Moreover, most unrest, such as protests, tend to be homogenous. I think more diversity may lower social trust but it paradoxically engenders societal stability.

The major thing he misses, or perhaps only elides to, is that the individualist framework that libertarianism was built on has been utterly obliterated by technological, political, and demographic shifts.

Has it?

The major thing he misses, or perhaps only elides to, is that the individualist framework that libertarianism was built on has been utterly obliterated

I think this is the key difference. I also think there's a racial angle here. Whites in the US (and in the West more generally) have been the most ardent defenders and practitioners of individualism. The people who told them to do this were using arguments very similar to the ones employed by Jordan B. Peterson.

How did that go? The right has been losing on nearly everything. The only area where the right has won is on economics, but even here there's a question to what extent we should treat neoliberal victory as "right-wing". Previous incarnations of US conservatism (think late 1800s, early 1900s) were deeply critical, if not outright hostile, to capitalism. Those intellectuals viewed capitalism as uprooting traditional ways of life, destroying the countryside and spoiling nature.

It was only with Reaganism (about the time when Cowen was a young lad) that the shift towards equating rampant capitalism somehow became associated with being "right-wing". Perhaps there is a generational divide here.

So to me, the two big differences with the New Right are: A) understanding that working collectively, including using state power, is necessary and dogmatic individualism has failed to reap benefits together. B) neoliberalism is less important than cultural and social issues and can in fact work against you, e.g. many corporations are very woke and have done next to nothing to push back at social trends that the New Right views as harmful or unwanted.

How did that go? The right has been losing on nearly everything.

Are we watching the same movie?

Because from where I'm sitting it doesn't look like the right is loosing at all. We're watching 60 years of progressive academic dogma implode before our eyes in exactly the way that old school Republicans have been predicting it eventually would. The Gods of the Copybook Headings have returned and this is somehow supposed to be a strike against Kipling? I don't buy it.

Sure the Libertarians are loosing but that is as was expected. Their alliance with the wider right wasn't so much a matter of shared values and ideology as it was an accident of history. The US' founding as a frontier state allowing many who were anarchists by temperament to kinda-sorta paint themselves as "conservatives". In any other democratic nation they'd be caucusing with the rest of the utopian radicals.

Are we watching the same movie?

Clearly we're not, because in the film I'm watching, conservatives are losing basically every culture war battle: race, religion, drugs, sexual mores, abortion, immigration, LGBT. Rural America is dysfunctional and dying. The soft power of conservative communities has never been lower, with conservatives basically reduced to trying to secede from civil society because they're completely unable to gain any traction. Instead of going to church the kids keep moving to the big city, turning gay, and engaging in unmarried cohabitation with a trans atheist who immigrated illegally from Mexico, and there's no indication that this is reversing.

These political defeats are not totally unqualified. Gun rights have been entrenched, the post-Dobbs status quo remains to be seen (though I am fairly confident that it will highly unsatisfying to most pro-life activists), economic and environmental policy are much more of a fight, and conservatives still enjoy a tremendously favorable position when it comes to the exercise of hard power. But the idea that we're witnessing a liberal implosion seems pretty dubious.

Social conservatism is politically dead, but the Right is not -- but it does need to grow past social conservatism. We can never go back; we can make something new.

In the film I'm watching the woke are exercising greater and greater control over a rapidly shrinking sphere. There is broad agreement amongst members of both sexes that the "liberation" of the sexual revolution was nothing of the sort. The idea of rational technocratic rule by academics and experts has been utterly discredited. and at least where I'm at, church crowds are growing and skewing younger, lots of couples with kids.

Accordingly I say "stay the course" and "Go with God".

Not to mention abortion wins.

That's the thing, from where I'm sitting the the right is winning on economics, winning on, gun rights, winning on abortion. The trans/groomer stuff has proven hilariously unpopular and has rendered a bunch of formerly "safe" progressive seats competitive for conservative candidates for the first time in decades, ditto the "defund the police" nonsense. While I would advise against getting cocky I think it's indicative of the current state of the Democratic party that Biden is already a lame-duck less than half way through his first term.

The right is winning on economics only in as much as we're not headed towards actual Communism. The right is winning on gun rights and abortion only in red states. And for gun rights, not at the Federal level in particular -- NFA1934 and GCA1968 stand unencumbered, as does ATF and its burdensome variety of regulations. The "defund the police" nonsense is unpopular but happening (just not as much as the left would like), as are DAs who don't want to charge crimes.

You're kidding me right? Gun Rights advocates have not just been winning but winning decisively for the last 15+ years. 94 AWB repealed, 2nd Amendment incorporated against the states, magazine bans struck down, may-issue permitting struck down, transport bans struck down. "Constitutional carry" has gone from being legal in 3 states to 24 states, and gun-control is viewed as electorally toxic in all but the bluest of blue enclaves.

Far from being evidence of impending defeat, the fact that things like national permit reciprocity and the possibility of amending or repealing the NFA are even in the conversation is a mark of just how far we've come.

One could argue that there's a difference between winning de facto and de jure; pistol braces, bump stocks and triggers, 3d printing, general fabrication tech proliferation and the cultural effects of these have been quite successful on a de facto basis. It's true that ink on paper can't bind willful humans, and the willful have never been better-armed.

De jure, as you note, significant progress has been made on a number of fronts. Concealed carry is steadily marching its way through the states. There have been court decisions that should, in principle, be decisive.

Only, the court decisions are not, in fact, decisive. Blue states and orgs have proven themselves willing to simply thumb their noses at court decisions they don't like, and the courts have not, to date, been willing to actually call them on it with sufficient penalties to make the gamesmanship cost-prohibitive. Heller still can't have his gun. Changing this would require the SC to actually lay down the law, and lesser courts to fall in line. The former is questionable, the latter seems very unlikely. The SC certainly has come farther than I expected, but whether it can deliver a true social victory on the scale of Roe or Obergefell remains to be seen.

Self-defense took a horrible hit in 2020. Every case of armed self-defense that rose to prominence in the riots saw the defendant scapegoated and pilloried by the entire force of society and government, frequently to disastrous effect. Blues might not be able to stop you from defending yourself, but they are willing and able to fuck your entire life up if you try in a way they disapprove of, and law and norms be damned.

Likewise, I see no evidence that Blues have given up on confiscation, and think it entirely probable that they'll push for it at the federal level the exact moment they think they can. I don't think they care about the logistical problems. My guess is that they'll simply start ruining lives in as messy and public a way as possible, and then just keep doing that at whatever rate the system can generate, indefinitely, until the public either caves or things come unglued. that's been their strategy in other situations, so why expect different here?

One can, again, argue that none of this matters, because our choices remain as open as they ever have. But "you can exercise your rights if you're willing to have your life ruined" is not a central definition of "winning", and that does seem to be what we're moving toward.

Self-defense took a horrible hit in 2020. Every case of armed self-defense that rose to prominence in the riots saw the defendant scapegoated and pilloried by the entire force of society and government, frequently to disastrous effect. Blues might not be able to stop you from defending yourself, but they are willing and able to fuck your entire life up if you try in a way they disapprove of, and law and norms be damned.

You and I see 2020 very differently. If anything i think the 2020 riots helped our case. The blue tribe base was forced to face what many in the opposition have been telling them for years, guns are already pretty well regulated, and when seconds count the cops are only minutes away. Yes the media and the democratic party establishment did their best to pillory who stood up to their shock-troopers, but they are also becoming increasingly irrelevant. Their attempts ultimately failed further damaging their credibility in the process. They might still be stupid enough to attempt to confiscation but my confidence in public willingness to resist and their subsequent failure has never been higher.

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I have the last +10 round magazines that can legally be imported into my state. When I die they must be destroyed. This happened the year after "sensible liberals" in this very community told us "fun control is a dead issue after 2020, don't worry about voting (D) because nobody's trying to take your guns you paranoid hicks".

What's this "winning", and who's it happening to?

94 AWB repealed

Sunsetted, and effective only in red states because blue states went and outlawed all that stuff anyway.

2nd Amendment incorporated against the states

In theory only.

magazine bans struck down

NJ magazine possession ban upheld at the appeals level. Case vacated and remanded by Bruen but not overturned.

transport bans struck down

So maybe 10 years after getting "caught" transporting a gun through an anti-gun area you'll clear the felony charges hanging over your head. Unless they decide the gun was too readily available (and thus not subject to the safe transport law) because you could have lowered the rear seat to access the trunk.

If there was a real win here, I could go to a gun store tomorrow -- in my home state of New Jersey or in New York or Pennsylvania or any other -- plunk down some cash, get a gun and ammo and a holster, strap that gun to my hip, and take that gun to my office in New York City without breaking any gun laws. I cannot do most of that. I cannot buy a gun in New Jersey because there is an onerous permitting system to buy a gun; I need to disclose some information I do not know and get two unrelated adults to swear I'm moral enough to buy a gun. I cannot buy a gun in New York or Pennsylvania because interstate sales of guns are forbidden. I can buy the ammo in Pennsylvania, at least, though what good it does without a gun I don't know. If I strap a gun to my hip, that's a felony; there's ANOTHER onerous permit system in New Jersey (THREE unrelated adults now to swear I'm moral enough to carry a gun) and yet another in New York (and one in PA which I believe is less onerous). And even if I had the permit, the various restrictions on carry would make it impossible to get to my office without violating some gun law or another.

Consider what a real win looks like. Obergefell. All the gays could get married, everywhere in the country, almost immediately. Officials who resisted (and I only know of one) were punted aside like nothing.

Sunsetted, and effective only in red states because blue states went and outlawed all that stuff anyway.

Sunsetted because every attempt to renew or extend it went down in flames. Likewise when you say "effective only in red states" what you actually mean is "effective in 43 states out of 50", the 7 exceptions being California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York. (Fun aside, a lot of cold-war era battle rifles are over 50 years old now and can be exempted as antiques )

California's magazine ban has been struck down so if New Jersey's ban was upheld as you claim we now get to see the supreme court rectify the disagreement between the circuits.

As an aside, we've been going back and forth on this and other topics for 10 years now (since summer 2012), and that whole time your schtick has always been that wokeness is all powerful, wokeness is omnipresent, the right is doomed, resistance is futile, etc... etc... Has it occurred to you that it only seems that way because you keep seeking it out? Like I get that a FAANG job in NYC is a big status boost, but you were ultimately the one who made the choice to step into the lion's den.

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There was a recent district court ruling using the Bruen standard that found 18 U.S.C. § 922(k) unconstitutional and dismissed a federal indictment for violating the statute, wasn't there? Section 922 is from the 1968 GCA.

Through who's action is that occuring?

The left retains the initiative, through all it's panic the right hasn't actually done anything.

The attacker always holds the initiative. That is just the nature of warfare. Furthermore repulsing your enemy's attacks, exposing their weaknesses, and forcing their withdrawal is not "nothing" it's how you win a defensive action.

The whole post-war post-modern "rule by experts" intellectual edifice.

What implosion would that be?

"It failed, but still, nobody's going to stop it" is not an implosion.

What makes you think there's a difference?

It doesn't make sense to count something as having imploded unless as a result it's not there, or at least drastically cut down, or gotten weak enough that outside forces could cut it down. There's no sign of any "implosion" like this.

Infighting that doesn't weaken the group is not an implosion.

Infighting has absolutely weakened the group. Like i said wokism is deeply unpopular and has made a bunch of formerly safe seats competative, and partisan Infighting has effectively ensured that there are no "young up and comers" in a position to take over on the democratic side when Pelosi inevitably kicks the bucket. Who are the democrats going to run in 2024? Who are the going to run in 2028. Lightfoot? Coumo? Cortez? Who else do they have under the age of 75?

Hlynka is confusing purity spirals with implosions of the whole movement.

How did that go? The right has been losing on nearly everything. The only area where the right has won is on economics, but even here there's a question to what extent we should treat neoliberal victory as "right-wing". Previous incarnations of US conservatism (think late 1800s, early 1900s) were deeply critical, if not outright hostile, to capitalism. Those intellectuals viewed capitalism as uprooting traditional ways of life, destroying the countryside and spoiling nature.

It depends how you define 'right' or 'won'. Politically, the right has held its own in the courts and major branches of government. The House is spilt, and Republicans and Democrats have held executive office roughly same amount of time. Roe v. Wade was overturned. The left has faced enormous resistance regarding gun rights. In the private sector, except for low taxes, the left has won (such as DEI). The left obviously won the universities. THe right is winning in terms of sentiment, such as anti-woke backlash on YouTube and on Twitter, I think, but this is not enough to secure power.

Roe v. Wade and gun rights are due to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court got that way because of Trump and is still like that because it can "hold its own" just by having the justices stay alive, bypassing the political process.

The only area where the right has won is on economics, but even here there's a question to what extent we should treat neoliberal victory as "right-wing".

In what sense did the right win there? Government social spending has pretty much been a straight line up for eight decades in the United States.

Probably in regard to taxes. Trump slashed corporate taxes considerably. The left has been pushing for a wealth tax for a long time.

Abortion, that is a major win.

I would consider it the only major victory of the right.

Previous incarnations of US conservatism (think late 1800s, early 1900s) were deeply critical, if not outright hostile, to capitalism.

"After all, the chief business of the American people is business. "

I can't think of a time where a recognizably conservative movement in the US was anti-capitalist. The WJB style populists might, in some sense, be called conservatives (them being as much a religious revival movement as a political movement) but, I think, instead they just demonstrate the difficulty of applying modern categories too closely to the past. After all, one would hardly call Grover Cleveland, whose faction WJB drove out of power in the Democratic Party, the left of the contemporary Democrats!

It was only with Reaganism (about the time when Cowen was a young lad) that the shift towards equating rampant capitalism somehow became associated with being "right-wing". Perhaps there is a generational divide here.

This is really just absolute nonsense. The association of capitalism with the American right-wing is about as old as the country itself, depending on exactly what you mean by capitalism and 'right-wing'. It's telling that the modern left thinks of the Jeffersonians as the 'conservatives' in the First Party System but really both parties in that era were pro-capitalism. The Federalists were an alliance of commercial and incipient industrial capitalists in the Atlantic port cities and the Republicans were agrarian capitalists more interested in trade and export. As you trace the lines forward, probably the only really thorough-goingly anti-capitalist sentiments you'll get are from the pro-slavery apologists like Fitzhugh but, even then, in practice the pro-slavery faction of the Democrats just wanted the same kind of export oriented commercial capitalism that the Old Republicans had. The post-Civil War Republicans were very pro-capitalism, so was the Conservative wing of the Democratic party. As the left-leaning labor wing of the Democrats developed and the various flavors of the original Progressive movement came into being you got anti-capitalism showing up again in American politics, but always invariably from the Left. Some of the more elitist strains of Progressivism are arguably more right-leaning than left but they just show useless the scale can become in the margins.

Honestly, the anti-capitalism of the New Right comes more from a deep-seated leftism at its heart. It's mostly young people who come from a youth cultural milieu that is extremely left wing (both socially and economically) and it just kind of swaps in a cultural conservatism (although one that honestly feels weirdly different from the Christian conservatism of decades ago) while maintaining the anti-market prejudices of their roots. In that way they're kind of like the original Populists, but they're not usually particularly closely related to the actual cultural roots of 19th century populism: few people who consciously identify as 'New Right' have an agrarian, Christian background and are instead usually suburban or urbanites from more-or-less de facto secular backgrounds.

This is really just absolute nonsense. The association of capitalism with the American right-wing is about as old as the country itself, depending on exactly what you mean by capitalism and 'right-wing'.

Indeed, the stereotype of "the yankee trader" predates the declaration of independence. Its a running joke along the gulf-coast that the US national pastimes prior to baseball were bootlegging and piracy.

Yeah, and even the ultra-wealthy Southern plantation owners were the analogical poor cousins of European nobility, who were forced by markets and circumstances to take an unseemly level of interest in the day to day management of their farms, ie. they were rural capitalists subject to market pressures.

Their favorite pastime was even bitching about their Scottish factors.

Whites in the US (and in the West more generally) have been the most ardent defenders and practitioners of individualism

Really, they're more remarkable not for individualism (which would presumably manifest as no significant difference in attitude towards different racial groups), but instead for flipping the old tribal paradigm on its head and concluding that their racial ingroup is uniquely wicked.

How did that go? The right has been losing on nearly everything

This is a telling argument only if one believes that classical liberalism in general, and civil liberties in particular, are valuable only because they tend to lead to preferred policies. It is not so telling if one believes that civil liberties are intrinsically valuable.

That's a contradiction that just exposes classical liberalism as self-defeating.

If:

  • you believe that civil liberties are intrinsically valuable

  • and you are an individualist

  • but individualism loses the culture war and loses political power to groups that cooperate to achieve power

  • and losing in turn compromises the civil liberties you care about

How is the classical liberal going to respond? He could maintain faith that individualism will win, despite the fact that individualism is an asymmetrically-distributed personality trait predominantly held by the declining demographic of white men, and not a universal value. Or, he could just decide to lose gracefully. But there's no path to victory there.

That's a contradiction that just exposes classical liberalism as self-defeating.

If:

you believe that civil liberties are intrinsically valuable

and you are an individualist

but individualism loses the culture war and loses political power to groups that cooperate to achieve power

and losing in turn compromises the civil liberties you care about

If by "individualist" you mean complete loner who cannot work with and stand anyone else, you are right. There are such people, but they are few in number and do not tend to care about politics.

Actual classical liberals were, in their time, succesfully organizing on large scale and did not saw it as compromising of their principles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Corn_Law_League

Voluntary organization and the whole concept of a 'civil society' is actually central to classical liberal philosophy and practice.

I think that's a false choice. Many people cherish free speech. Indeed, if we had true free speech, I suspect the right would notch a lot more cultural victories as there would be far more pushback on social media etc. Why are most of us even here to begin with? Censorship on major platforms like reddit.

So the issue isn't civil liberties. It's that classical liberalism has failed utterly to safeguard the principles that it wishes to uphold. In short, it's not enough to want something. You must also actively create the space for it. This is where the differences from the old, libertarian-leaning right that Cowen belongs to and the New Right begin to emerge.

Many on the New Right wouldn't even blink twice about using the state to force private companies to censor less, or to mandate viewpoint diversity in universities by using state power. But that would be sacrilege if you're a classical liberal. So you "lose beautifully" instead. Such an approach has been an utter failure for the past few decades and the New Right has drawn the appropriate conclusions.

far more pushback on social media

Expecting this to cash out into culture war victories is rather optimistic.

As long as “true free speech” doesn’t supersede exit rights, people will quietly self-select away from the witches. Most of them will quite openly seek out the likeminded. The filter bubble doesn’t rely on top-down censorship, even though it can benefit from it.

China’s social credit is an attempt at the converse. Speech isn’t free at all, but interaction with the party line is mandatory. Participants are thus subjected to the filter. This is intolerable to the classical liberals, as well as the libertarians (and thus some of the New Right). Others among the neoreactionaries and traditionalists, not so much. Creating their own sphere is only worthwhile if they can keep people in it.

But that would be sacrilege if you're a classical liberal.

Would it? It would certainly be sacrilege to a modern libertarian, who tend to not be overly concerned with threats to individual liberty from powerful non-state actors. But I am not sure if that is necessarily 100% true of classical liberals.

Edit: Eg, Mill wrote at length about the threat to liberty from non-state actors, esp society at large, and Adam Smith was far more friendly to the welfare state than are libertarians. So, libertarian beliefs are not entirely congruent with classical liberal beliefs.

Many people cherish free speech.

Almost no one cherishes "free speech" -- most people cherish free speech for themselves, but not so much for those with whom they disagree. They cherish free speech instrumentally, not intrinsically. Which is really not cherishing free speech at all.

Almost no one cherishes "free speech" -- most people cherish free speech for themselves, but not so much for those with whom they disagree. They cherish free speech instrumentally, not intrinsically. Which is really not cherishing free speech at all.

That's probably correct and a depressing thought.

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