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Scott Alexander is hysterically overrated just because he actually criticized wokes a bit back during the era where the spineless techies that make up his fandom were busy cowering and licking progressive boots.
That's not fair, he used to be a good writer that used to be able to show he properly understood the arguments he disagreed with.
He's a college educated white man and college educated white men have moved away from the Republican Party over the last decade. See Hanania and Spencer for other examples. On the other hand, the Right has gained no-college whites like Tim Pool and Joe Rogan.
Maybe, instead of complaining about being betrayed, you could modify your political platform to make it more appealing to high-income, educated white people?
I don't want either of them to be Republican. Hanania actually is ridiculously overrated and, in contrast to Scott, always has been. Having him on my side would be a liability.
As for Scott, I just want his arguments to be as high quality as they used to be. He was never on my side, but he used to be able to show that he understands it. Maybe it's the Republican party platform that caused the severe drop in his competence, even though he was always a Democrat, but I think we should look for causes elsewhere.
That's true for me as well, but I really liked "The Colors of her Coat" a lot, and do enjoy seeing aesthetic takes from Scott, more than political lately.
Makes sense. I remember hearing that back in the Soviet days some artists working on children's animation happily traded in any prestige that might have come from on working on something more serious, precisely because the field's lack of political importance meant you didn't have to justify yourself to a political commissar all the time, and could enjoy the art for what it is.
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Has he ever been a Republican?
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Isn't Scott jewish?
Moldbug is half Jewish and his writings did more for reaction than most people around him.
The logic here being that, since Scott wrote a lot of nice things, he can claim a different ethnicity?
Or is this just some kind of kneejerk ethnocentric defense mechanism that was accidentally triggered?
I'm an out and out reactionary and have seen people summon da joos anytime anything get bad, to the point where any discussion can be halted and sanity excused by blaming them for everything under the sun.
I apologise if I came off strong, I'm used to twitter.
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He used to be a somewhat ordinary young man with an eclectic reading habit, allowing him to mix weird rationality ideas while still understanding the opposite perspective. Then he became an incredibly successful and popular writer and moved to San Francisco where he now lives with his wife, children and mistress.
No matter how much he tries, if he does still try, he can’t really empathise with the people outside the blessed circle. They’re just too different from him now. At the same time, general political polarisation has continued to the extent that I doubt he ever meets any right wingers any more, even the weird kind.
It’s the same problem that’s occurred since time immemorial and is the reason why (as I understand it) Republican politicians were discouraged from spending too much time in Washington.
When Scott was taking Moldbug that seriously, I don’t think he was living next door. The whole point of the Internet is that discourse happens at turbo-speed regardless of distance.
Right, but this is my point: times changed. The kind of places where left-wingers might occasionally bump into right wingers have mostly ceased to exist, online and offline.
I don’t think this is strictly true. Especially not for somebody as motivated as Scott. His “Bay Area House Party” series is parody, but San Francisco is ridiculously high-variance. It attracts all sorts of weirdos, especially if they’re making a lot of money.
All sorts of weirdos, as long as they aren't conservative
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Berkeley, actually, but yeah.
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Wait, mistress?
Quote from Highlights From the Comments on Polyamory:
Every time I'm reminded of that quote, I'm reminded of a person who insisted with a straight face that they were mature enough to sleep with a subordinate without it compromising their leadership of their team.
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Wait, there's only one mistress? I thought it was mistresses, but maybe it's serial bigamy instead of of polygamy
Last I heard there happened to be one but I don’t think this is a matter of principle.
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I mean from where I'm standing the opposite has happened - he has been pretty resoundingly cancelled (mostly for the lukewarm HBD support) and is pretty permanently persona non grata in actual leftist spaces. I don't know what sort of people make up his social circles these days - other techie libertarians, probably - but it's very unlikely to be anyone actual leftists, let alone wokes, would recognize as allies they'd give the time of day to.
I don’t mean he spends time in left-wing activist spaces as an ally, I mean that I imagine his friends mostly take cultural left-wing fundamentals as a given. Trans stuff, race stuff*, homelessness, etc. I would be very surprised if he had friends who were actually right of center, let alone someone like Moldbug or Diseach. So he isn’t exposed to those perspectives any more except when he wants to be, and he’s made it pretty clear he doesn’t want to be.
*Yes, he hid his stance on HBD for a long time but even now he’s more open I doubt it actually makes any difference to his day-to-day behaviour.
Has it ever been different? The change in Scott's attitude is pretty clearly because liberals(ok, progressives[ok wokes]) were the main people who could hit him and then Trump started going after progressives, which he is and always was.
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Again, I'm just not sure how his friends could take the mainstream left-wing view of e.g. race and remain his friends. The mainstream left-wing view of race demands that you cut off anyone who gives the time of day to race science. And defines anyone who does as right-leaning by definition. Anyone who goes to parties with Scott is either not paying attention, or a very heterodox leftist indeed. I think accepting the premise in the original Red Tribe Vs Blue Tribe post that the Grey Tribe is a third, neutral entity is the only real way to describe what Scott's friends are like. He might very well be living in a tighter bubble than before, but it's not a left-wing bubble, because no actual left-wing bubble would tolerate his presence within itself.
(It's not just race, either, though that's the most prominent Schelling point. A mainstream leftist does not tolerate a friend who is outspokenly well-disposed toward capitalism - or indeed, one who casually, openly criticizes "wokeness", by that name. As an actual heterodox. This isn't to say all leftists are actively anti-capitalist and pro-cancel-culture, but nevertheless they treat it as a point of etiquette that the reverse opinions should not be embraced in public, for fear of looking like Those People. Scott, as a good Grey Triber, happily takes potshots at wokeness's illiberalism while taking it as a given that Capitalism is Good.)
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That was part of the 1994 Republican Revolution under Newt Gingrich. It wasn't just 'discouragement' either- it was a organizational-restructuring, as the rules of Congress were changed to facilitate frequent travel out of DC. Most notably, Congressional business workflows were centered on the mid-week, so that key votes were Tuesday-Thursday, to make Monday/Friday travel days more viable.
It was part of 'proving independence from Washington' and 'staying in touch with your constituents.' It is the oft-forgotten root of regular complaints that Congress spends too little time in Washington compared to the past, and the associated complaints that Congress gets less done (because they are present less) and don't know eachother as well. On the other hand, it arguably contributes to the dynamic of voters loving their congressperson but hating congress.
It was also, critically, a period where Republicans were also incentivized to not bring their families to D.C., which in turns means the wives and children who stay behind aren't culturally socialized into the blue-tribe-dominated national capital region. But it also means, by extension, that Democratic representative families under the same dynamics aren't socializing with more red-leaning counterparts, and are free to be even bluer influences on their Congressional-spouses.
This is an oft-forgotten / underappreciated rules-level dynamic of national-level political centralization and elite-consensus.
Keeping key elites spending time together and away from their own power-bases that could foster a sense of disconnect from the central authority has been a national cohesion strategy since before Louis XIV and Versailles. This helped political centralization by giving the monarch an easier time keeping an eye on everyone if they were in one part. But it also allowed for political homogenization/consensus-building/shared-identity cultivation of a common French identity amongst elites, as the French nobility were forced by proximity (and tactical political interests) to get along and socialize. Court politics is infamous in fiction for political infighting and drama, but it does create paradigms for collective understandings, interests, and identities, hence the divide of the french estates leading to the French revolution. Nobles infight against eachother, but unite in common cause against challenges to their collective interests and privileges.
Congressional committee placement politics isn't an exact analog to the French Monarchy making appointments dependent on remaining at court, but there are more than a few parallels. If you're not missing key votes because you're spending time with constituents- because Congressional workflows are focused on Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday execution- then you're not losing your chance at valuable appointments to powerful Congressional committees. The lower the opportunity cost of not-being in the capital, the greater the opportunity-gains of being elsewhere for fundraising / political events / etc. And, again, you're away from your family less if you're free to return to them more often.
These are changes that the Congressional Democrats have kept even when they recaptured Congress. They get many of the same benefits as well. And as the D.C. area is something like 90% Democratic for a variety of reasons, it's hard to see them convincing (or, frankly, forcing) the Republicans to revert to the pre-Gingrich status quo in the name of homogenizing them in an expected blue direction.
Interestingly, it's also a dynamic being actively pursued in the reverse by the movement of property, and not just people.
You can arguably see an implicit effort-to-reverse Federal consensus-centralization ongoing right now, as Trump attempts to push the federal bureaucracy away from the capital region.
One of the less-commented efforts the Trump administration is pursuing is moving federal agencies outside of the DC area and to other states. This has been overshadowed by the media coverage of the personnel management, but the property management is (almost) as important.
Among the earliest executive orders was a direction for agencies to propose relocations away from DC and to other states. This purportedly on cost-reasons. DC property is expensive to maintain, employee allowances are higher to make up for the regional cost of living, etc. The actual cost of moving has to be balanced against savings are likely to provide, but states have an incentive to take some of that cost for their own long-term gain in getting the relocated agencies.
Almost as importantly, Congress persons have an incentive to approve federal agency relocations to the benefit of their own state. Even Democratic politicians who might personally hate Trump. Which is to say, Federal government divestment from DC offers bargaining chips / horses to trade in the upcoming year(s) of budget negotiations.
That this is also is likely to have an employee-composition impact, as the hyper-blue DC environment those agencies recruit and socialize and network within get replaced with more purple environments that are geographically dispersed, is probably not going to be a publicized or recognized until it's as locked-in as the Gingrich Congressional travel changes.
As has been seen with some shutdowns like the USAID shutdown, DC-based federal employees have often indicated they want to stay in the DC area. This is natural. Even if they were offered an opportunity to keep their jobs if agencies were relocated instead of shutdown, some percent would refuse and seek other employment in DC. This is just a matter of statistics. It is also an area of precedent. In the Trump 1 administration, nearly 90% of DC-based Bureau of Land Management employees retired or quit rather than relocated to Grand Junction, Colorado.
That's bad if you think an equivalent dynamic to, say, the DC Headquarters of the Justice Department would lose vital experience and expertise and informal coordination with other agencies. On the other hand, if you don't think the headquarters of the US Justice Department should be rooted in the swamp that is 90% blue, and less than a mile from where a 'Black Live Matter' mural used to be maintained on the street...
And once departments are separated, the sort of informal coordination that can occur if you and a friend/ally you know in another part of the government can meet in the same town also goes away. Inter-government lobbying is a lot harder if you are cities apart. Inter-department coordination is also, and almost as importantly, a lot harder to do without a document trail.
And this is where one could infer a non-stated motive for the resistance-shy Trump. One of the only reasons the US electorate learned that the Biden administration white house was coordinating with the Georgia anti-Trump case despite denials was because one of the Georgia prosecutor assistances invoiced the White House for the travel expenses for in-person engagements. In-person meetings, in turn, are one of the ways to avoid Freedom of Information Act requests or Congressional subpoenas for communications over government systems.
This is where the Versailles metaphor comes back, but as an inverse of sorts. It was easier for Louis the XIVth to keep an eye on and manage the nobility when they were in one place. They were scheming, sure, but he could keep watch of them in a single physical location where he controlled the coordination contexts. Trump / the Republicans do not control the coordination context of DC. They can, however, increase political control over the bureaucracy by physically separating it across multiple physical locations, where they have easier means to monitor inter-node coordination.
It is also an effort that will be exceptionally hard for the Democrats to reverse, if they try to. It is a lot easier to divest and reorganize government institutions when you have a trifecta than when you don't. It is also much easier to give up federal property in DC to the benefit of states than it is to get state Congressional representatives to vote to strip their states of jobs and inflows for the sake of DC.
Which means that federal agencies that depart DC will probably not return in the near future. And the longer they stay away, the longer that local employment hiring filters into organizational cultures at the lowest levels. The more that Federal employees have their spouses and children shaped by the less-blue-than-DC environments, and thus shape them in turn. The less engaged, and involved, they can be in the beltway culture.
The Trump administration DC divestment are arguably going to have long-term effects on affected parts of the federal bureaucracy on par with Newt Gingrich's Republican Revolution affects on Congress in the 90's. Affected agencies will be less compositionally composed of, less socially exposed to, and less culturally aligned to Blue-dominated DC in ways that will only become apparent decades from now.
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I think people were literally warning him this would happen if he moves back to California.
There are plenty of us in California who are capable of understanding, and even believing, modern right-wing arguments. We just don't mix in San Francisco techie society.
But putting aside the relative bubbles, I think the background temperature matters a lot for determining what stuff you have to engage with.
As you get older and get more power over your personal life, you tend to stereotype yourself. In practice people rarely choose to encounter things that make them feel uncomfortable. So if the background temperature is ‘bringing up right wing arguments is socially awkward’ and the bubble is ‘comfortable techie’ then it’s not a surprise that Scott isn’t hearing right wing ideas even if the possibility theoretically exists.
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They did. But it worked for him, he’s fine. He doesn’t need influence with conservatives and frankly I don’t think he wants it.
I think also that he just made his peace with woke. It’s less confrontational than it was, and he agreed with most of it to start with, and the main issue he had with it (feminism) is no longer an issue for him.
Based on my life experience I think there's a good chance that if he sends his kids to school (as opposed to homeschooling) that he may again confront issues. (Or maybe not, he seems to have done fine in school despite hating it...)
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In other words, he betrayed us once it was no longer in his interest to oppose the woke.
He got rich and famous enough that he managed to get married despite being a textbook beta nice guy; what does he care now about the plight of the incel? He makes his money in the normie-ville of substack and his psychiatry clinic; what use does he have now for cultivating a following by spreading heresies? Being controversial now would only threaten all he has.
Telling heterodox truths is a game for anonymous young single men who have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Established men become assimilated into the system.
Betrayed? The man wrote hundreds of pages of content and gave them out completely for free. I guess you could make a case that he owes something to the people who defended him against being cancelled. But I figure that giving people hundreds of pages of writing for free has already paid for that. I don't see why Scott would owe anything to his readers at this point.
Also, as far as I know, Scott has never claimed any sort of alliance with either other anti-wokes or with incels, so there is no alliance to betray.
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The eternal problem of a theoretical incel revolution: anyone with the get-up-and-go to be of any kind of value will get laid.
You’re half right.
It’s not about value, it’s about status. Lots of virgins have incomes that make it clear what kind of value they provide.
Leading a movement makes you a leader, and leaders get laid. They have or acquire a certain level of confidence and extroversion by the nature of the thing - I’ve seen people change quite drastically just from a promotion. They also become famous: someone well-known enough in any group of a good size is also well-known enough to be a catch of a sort.
It’s the eternal problem of all male solidarity, not just incels. The socialists had exactly the same problem - trade union leaders where constantly accepting knighthoods and buying grand houses with union money. Male status comes mostly from power and experience, and doesn’t start degrading until your 70s so potential leaders always evaporate off the top.
All-male solidarity sounds hella-gay; there’s no problem with it because why would anyone want it?
Mencken preemptively dismissed the incels and feminists when he noted there would never be a winner in the battle of the sexes, as there’s too much fraternizing with the enemy.
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Who's "us"?
I agree Scott got soft, but stability and family making you more mellow and less of a firebrand is an eternal cycle, it's how things are supposed to be. It's why Kulak in his incessant calls for violence never actually talks about building things, starting families, falling in love, having children. Men who have lives and families to care about don't want to burn down the world.
I think it may be more nuanced than this. As a man with a life and a family, I don't want to burn down the world, but neither would I piss on it were it on fire. I'm content to let it burn and there are many areas I think would benefit from a swift hot fire.
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I don't think that suggesting that the SCOTUS should have the power to summarily execute people (because that's what his suggestion amounts to) counts as being "mellow and less of a firebrand".
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I would broadly define ‘us’ as some amalgam of ‘those who have had the pointy end of wokeness shoved up our rectum at some point’ and ‘readers of Radicalising the Romanceless’.
Especially as the latter, I’m pretty disappointed. Scott wrote a set of articles saying, “here’s a massive problem that makes lots of young men miserable, why don’t we discuss it, and can we at least agree on not accusing these young men of being entitled proto-rapists?”. Ten years later, having achieved fame and fortune on the back of his fans, and a wife and mistress thereby*, he writes another essay saying pretty clearly that, okay, nothing has changed, lots of young men are still unhappy, but ultimately he likes the system the way it is and thinks it would be inhuman to change it.
It’s not like he was ever a firebrand. He was never a Kulak-style writer, he never did anything as a young man he couldn’t do now that he has more stability. But when he was unhappy he wrote about young men’s problems, and now that he’s happy he’s decided that everything is fine even though nothing has changed except his own personal welfare. That’s just pure intellectual cowardice. If you’re going to ‘mellow’ as you get older, either you have to admit that your original beliefs were wrong and explain why, or else you have to admit you hold beliefs purely because they’re convenient for you and that you’re okay with letting your less fortunate peers sink.
To take an example that goes in my favour, it’s very common for young socialists to become capitalists when they become rich. But this means that either you have to be aware you really fucked up when you were younger, and understand why socialism actually doesn’t help the poor, and try some other way instead. Or else it means that you’re a coward who cared about the poor when you had no money and became willing to disregard them the moment it became convenient for you. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to call the latter ‘betrayal’.
*he mentions somewhere that he explicitly dates by going to meet-ups and having eager young women come up and say “wow, are you Scott Alexander?!”.
Which essay is that?
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I'm not sure what follow-up to Radicalizing the Romanceless you're talking about, but from the summary I don't see the inconsistency. Recognizing that a problem is real, but disagreeing with its strongest activists' proposed solution and throwing your hands up helplessly, is a very common and coherent position on all sorts of controversial issues. (For example, I agree the plight of the Palestinians is worthy of sympathy, but have some pretty unsolvable disagreements with Hamas on what ought to be done about it. Surely I can express these two points even if I have no alternative miracle-solution to put forward?)
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I think this has always been Scott.
I came to SSC because I liked his writing and he sometimes had some good insights. But he's always been the guy you're seeing today.
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Your general point is valid, but you're going off track with this. I don't recall Scott ever wanting to burn the world down. It's more that if he couldn't even stand the heat when he was single, there's no way he'll risk exposing his family to the psychos that came after him.
I'm not saying Scott used to be a firebrand. But it shouldn't be surprising that getting married and establishing a career means he's not as willing to stick his hand into the fire. Hence everyone complaining about him losing his edge and not writing bangers like he used to.
That said, I never thought he was courageous or even particularly principled. He's always been a squish and something of a coward, and it surprises me that people are surprised by this now.
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He did? Did he make us any promises?
Disappointed would be a preferable phrase, indeed.
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We supported him. We defended him against his critics. We evangelized his articles.
When you catch your buddy fucking your girlfriend, do you feel mollified if he excuses himself by pointing out that, actually, he never promised to not sleep with her?
The degree of parasocial relationship here is absolutely remarkable to me. He's fucking your girlfriend? Really?
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He stopped doing his thing from ten years ago and we stopped supporting, defending and promoting him.
Calling this a betrayal seems very overdramatic.
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To put it in the vernacular, “dance with the one that brung ya”. Of course, which one this is is a question with more than one answer (e.g. one plausible answer is ‘Paul Graham’) but I think that readers of ‘Untitled’ and other ‘things I will regret writing’ are not small among them.
He had me at “Radicalizing the Romanceless”
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That’s where I was going with that, yes. I have no illusions that I wouldn’t do the same but it does kind of make me feel used. I wrote to the NYT on his behalf - I can’t imagine modern day Scott returning the favour.
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