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Notes -
Toward a principles-based approach to societal flourishing
The heterodox backlash to mainstream wokeness is inherently reactionary. Taibbi, Weiss, Peterson, Loury, Yarvin; even to some extent Dreher and Alexander all bemoan the current system and wish we could turn the clock back to ... 2008, or 1965, or 2015, or 1600.
There have been few real attempts to change the situation. Weiss is a small exception: she has helped contribute to the University of Austin, which, while I'm very skeptical of its success, is at least doing something. Desantis has perhaps the most success at a political level, though he is often criticized by many in the heterodox blogosphere.
Yet all these fights against wokeness whether merely verbal or actual do not propose a positive trajectory for our society; they merely reject the negative wokeness trajectory.
I want to help create a non-reactionary yet conservative vision for flourishing society. I want this vision to have the following elements:
Compelling and inspirational. I want people to be energized by the vision.
A call to action. This cannot be a passive "keep everything the same as it is right now" conservatism.
A call to a better self. I want this vision to have individual impacts even if society as a whole does not adopt this vision (yes, I know I'm channeling Peterson here).
I have articulated one such vision here: https://pyotrverkhovensky.substack.com/p/how-to-build-a-flourishing-society. I wrote it to at least provide one such vision of a flourishing society to demonstrate that I am not merely complaining but am willing to put some thought into this. I would love to have others (possibly y'all!) take the baton and make something more compelling and actionable.
Let’s see. I’m going to break down what conservative users may agree on first:
There exists vanity and distraction that captures the time and care of a lot of people in the West, and which has downstream consequences
There is a way to live morally, which involves attending to what is good, thinking rationally, and sacrificing bad habits
There are truths agreed upon by both science and major religions: the importance of close social contact, the importance of a healthy family, lowering unnecessary social stress by participating in communal experiences and rituals, living in alignment with the evolutionary grain (“what God intended”)
While historically, art worked toward a moralizing purpose to promote guideline behaviors for a community in the form of music-dramas (operas, before that “moral plays”, after that television and lyrical albums), art (especially painting and architecture), stories (myths and sermons, then literature, now shitposts on your favorite forum and empowered female authors), today art has been severed from any moralizing purpose. Similarly, communal organizations as a whole have been severed from a moralizing purpose.
Society is in desperate need of moral structures, which are not necessarily religious, but which entail many things found in religion (Freemasonry was excellent at inspiring men and yet lacked much of what is identifiable in modern religion)
The wealthy who waste their money on vanity should be shamed and ostracized so as to incentivize them to spend wisely (fine, maybe this one is just me)…
Mating games control much of human behavior, and have decreased in their ability to promote prosocial and healthy behaviors in men and women, and thus ought to be revised
Men largely devote themselves to either what is evolutionarily satisfying or what is socially reinforced. Thus, society should go back to making what is good both evolutionarily enjoyable and socially reinforced.
The idea of God, as an object that one attends to in mind and body, which represents the highest quality of all of our experiences which are placed as his attributes, who is understood socially and mythically which is most evolutionarily efficient, is vastly underrated. If we are intent on beating a dead god, we need to find a viable alternative lest He resurrect Himself.
Society is in need of something similar to a priest class, whose interest is in finding the truth about everything from health to political policy to morality, but who (significantly) do not have faulty incentives, and actually are incentivized to tell the truth, and don’t just do because its their job but because of a sincere emotionally-felt obligation
If we have a rough draft of “things we ought to come together to secure and then promote”, then all that is left is doing that, then determining the correct way to promote it (everyone uses propaganda today, even YouTubers). The “individual vision” is simply the media created which narrativizes the ethos to the individual level.
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Personally, I'd be happy for any time between 1270-1300.
You can't wag the finger about wanting to turn the clock back, then issue a manifesto that... turns the clock back.
That horse has bolted. One working parent in a family is for those who are wealthy enough to have the wife at home (or single-parent families where it's the mother working, or unemployed and on benefits). Expectations are built around couples where both are working and earning, if you want a mortgage or any kind of expense in living in today's society, there needs to be two wage-earners.
I'd like to go back to 1960 (everyone usually goes "oh the 50s is what you mean" for this view of the family, but it was something possible up to the 70s) but the economy has moved on since, and everyone is terrified to meddle with the economy because we have constructed such a house of cards around it and 'too big to fail' and the stock market and tech companies and all the rest of it, that pulling on one thread will unravel it all.
Tech layoffs right now because companies need to trim the fat and get back to profitability? Unless you have a guaranteed job to walk into as a replacement, you better hope your significant other is working and covering the bills while you try and get another job.
Also, parts of your manifesto are contradictory:
versus
So you're going to get rid of all the cleaners, porters, kitchen staff, nurse's aides, nurses, and maybe even doctors via 'automation' in order to have a more lean and efficient health service. So now what do all the unemployed health workers do? How many nurses for planting trees?
You can't say "everyone must have a job" on the one hand, while planning to do away with jobs on the other. And again, see here:
So let me get this straight. We need automation in healthcare because it is way too expensive. Automation does away with jobs. But we will make all women do two years' nursing service. Uhhhh - how you gonna pay for that, if healthcare costs have to be trimmed? And if there is a constant rota of untrained staff who then leave after two years, how do you expect your hospitals to work? I feel you have not thought this through (or you imagine that nursing just means bedpans and changing sheets).
If the mandatory armed forces/nursing service get paid via some kind of allowance, you still have not reduced your costs. You're just doing an accountancy shuffle where "we take the money for wages out of the healthcare budget and claim we've saved it, then we pay it out under a different heading".
I'm fine with "turning the clock back" if there is a first-principles based approach for justifying it. What I don't want is nostalgic wishing for the "good old days". This is neither a compelling forward-looking vision nor epistemologically sound.
I'm not here to defend my article to a great degree :). I only weakly believe in it myself. That said, this statement is not a contradiction for two reasons.
First, there are roughly 3.7-4 million nurses in the US. There are 30 million aged 18-24. Making some rough assumptions, 10 million are thus between 18-20. Half of those are women, so we have 5 million 18-20 year old nurses, which is not out of alignment with the existing nursing population.
Second, my aim is not to reduce nursing staff; it is to reduce the inordinate bureaucratic bloat in finance and health. We spend an astronomical amount of our output on health care and finance. Health care and finance are both "intermediate" activities for the economy. One keeps the working population healthy enough to work, the other provides capital for businesses. Both industries should be enablers but they are a drag instead. Reducing the bloat can free us to focus on "final" goods and services.
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This is totally false in lots of places that aren't San Francisco. Prior to the COVID run-up in house prices, the average house price in Phoenix was about $275k. Residents of working age earn in the ballpark of $70k.
https://www.point2homes.com/US/Neighborhood/AZ/Maricopa-County-Demographics.html
https://www.redfin.com/city/14240/AZ/Phoenix/housing-market
Same is true in most of the fast growing cities.
I vaguely recall there was a much more detailed AAQC about this back on the subreddit.
Let me introduce you to the concept of saving money - something that was far more popular in the 1960's than today.
One plausible way that might work is a tiered system where the 2 year staff changes sheets/bedpans while the pros restrict their efforts to things that require skills that can't be quickly acquired.
I do not know what the breakdown of work is, but it seems quite plausible - thanks to the American guild system - that a lot of work currently requiring a registered nurse could be done by a far less skilled person. We have strong evidence that many such guild-based regulations are not medically necessary, as evidenced by the lack of deaths caused by state-to-state variation between them.
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From your vision statement:
How do you expect to sustain a conservative society when your public officials will all be drawn from one of the most left-leaning classes of institution? There isn't really enough about how you'd fix the universities to makes this a safe bet.
Don't worry about left-leaning, worry about the creation of a hereditary mandarin class. We may or may not have that in practice already, but we're going back to the state examination system of mediaeval China, only less open and inclusive.
Remember what happened to progress and scientific knowledge in China when the bureaucracy was ossified in this way.
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I think the opposite is true. The current anti-woke movement has strayed too far into pushing a "positive vision," and that's why it's starting to falter. Wokism itself started as a counterculture, and it only became insufferable once it gained real power in the mid 2010s. Most people are against wokeness because it is illiberal, and America is still a liberal society at its core. Americans don't like being controlled, and they felt controlled by wokeness in the mid 2010s, just like they felt controlled by fundamentalism in the previous era. And now conservatives are making the same error that the wokes made, they are mistaking opposition to wokism as support for traditionalism.
I'm not sure there isn't a plurality of woke (or at least, who benefit from wokeism).
I live in a very conservative state, and yet many if not most of my acquaintances are woke. Admittedly, most of my acquaintances are co-workers and I work for a large company. Large companies today ubiquitously have what I consider excessive and aggressive DEI campaigns. Companies thus self-select for those who can tolerate wokeism. Yet even my acquaintances who are not woke often find their identify in being anti-woke. They have an interest in keeping wokeism around as a foil.
I feel this argument rests on two assumptions and one (implied) axiom.
The assumptions: one, that there is a large enough "middle" who just wants to be left alone; and two, that this "middle" defines "left alone" consistently. For example, one person in the "middle" might say, "What happens in someone's bedroom is not my problem, but Pride parades are silly (why not have a 'adultery' parade, or a 'cohabitation before marriage' parade?) and may have negative impacts on societal morality". Another person is the "middle" might say, "Let's have as many pride parades as draws crowds!". These two opinions are in conflict even though they are both middle "leave me alone" positions.
The axiom: traditionalism and conservatism are synonymous.
I believe your assumptions are incorrect. I think in reality (and I could be very wrong) that this middle basically no longer exists even as a large section of the population thinks they are this "middle". If lines are essentially already drawn, I'm not sure there is a false dichotomy between wokism and traditionalism.
I also don't believe traditionalism and conservatism are synonymous: indeed, I'm calling for a conservative break from "traditionalism" in a sense. Simply returning to 1600 isn't my objective. My essay certainly espoused traditional values, but that was one example of a conservative vision for the future. More broadly I'm interested in a compelling, action-oriented conservatism as opposed to simple traditionalism.
The actual long-term issue for the anti-woke is how long will the centrists deal with the excesses and weirdness of the right they're currently allied with. It's one thing to talk about you're uncomfortable with puberty blockers, girls' sports, or whatever, but are fine with adult transistion, use people's chosen pronouns and names, etc., how long are you going to put up with statements from right-wing evanglicals they want to ban even adult gender affirming care to get what you want to be done.
Now, yes, there will be a group of people who are radicalized enough on this issue they're fine, and even begin agreeing more with the Matt Walsh's of the world, on the overall issue, but the reality is, if you're in general, a center-left to centrist liberal, and unlike some people on Twitter and Substack who make money off it, you're spending your own time about this, how long until you just give up, especially if your kids are exiting high school and college themselves, and it you get tired of trying to explain why you're on the same side of people who talk about groomers, but who also want to double check menstrual cycles and the genitals of teens, because half a dozen trans kids in your state want to compete.
Same thing w/ other woke issues - because actually, even 'normal' conservatives don't care about the issue that much, as seen in post-midterm exit polling, so the people who do care are kind of weirdos about it. This is a general issue w/ the GOP at this point and part of the reason why they lost the midterms. They looked likee the weirdos obsessed with stuff you only know about if you're on Twitter and/or watch Fox News or OANN all the time. Your median voter is like, "litter boxes in schools? What - I'm worried about inflation and that you want to ban abortion. I think the Democrats are spending too much money, but at least I understand what the hell they want to spend money on."
This is also why I'm not that scared of DeSantis - he'll talk about Disney, AP College Board classes, and M&M's, an Biden will say, "OK, what I care about is what most American's care about - Social Security & Medicare, that while in Congress, Governor DeSantis voted for cut x times, while supporting massive tax cuts for the rich blah blah blah." If DeSantis is really dumb, he'll also pass a six-week abortion ban as well, as he's stayed he'd be open too.
There's an easy solution to that. Six confused children out of five hundred thousand want to compete on the sports team of the opposite sex. That's not permissible, but there is plenty of counselling available to help these kids with their mental problems.
There you go - and not a menstrual cycle in the house checked!
Supposedly transgender is about 1-2% of the population. How about a compelling explanation why the entire structure should be turned upside down for someone who will probably give up sports as soon as they get to college? See Andraya Yearwood, who seems to have given up competing on the women's team after 2019:
So after all the fuss about trans girls being permitted to compete, she - gave it all up. Maybe that's okay, but I think the cis girls who got beaten out of titles by her (and whose college applications then didn't have that "won state title" on it) may feel somewhat miffed. Maybe they wanted to continue to be athletes, but missed out on scholarships? Who knows?
Being cynical, winning easy girls' running titles got her where she wanted to be, then she dumped it as soon as it was no more benefit. To be fair to CeCé Telfer, the other transwoman in this article, she stuck with running and wants to be a professional athlete.
I agree - there is an easy solution, parents can't stop freaking out that 6 or 12 or 7 or whatever number of trans high school athletes there are is going to ruin their little Olivia or Sophia's chance at her first choice college.
The thing about high school athletics (which I'm old enough to remember when conservatives thought Title IX existing at all was "political correctness" taking money away from real sports, like football) and part of why it's a nothing burger in a national political campaign is, as we've seen truly elite female athletes don't care that much, because it doesn't really effect them so they can be woke, and the vast majority of other high school athletes are using the fact thy competed at all, as their bonus, and don't care if a trans kid means they finish 16th instead of 15th.
So, who this truly affects - basically, the strivers who think their kid doing well in swimming will mean they can get into a better college, are the only ones truly upset, outside of normal ideological conservatives, are the type of "center-left until it affects me" types that conservatives dislike because they still call themselves liberals and the rest of the center-left coalition gets kind of annoyed. I guarantee the type or parent upset their kid might not get to the college of their choosing has a lot of overlap with people who try to block apartments or even duplexes being built in their neighborhood.
I'm not saying the median voter is woke. I'm saying the median voter doesn't really care that much, and caring deeply about this makes people you're kind of weird. They get why a trans person would care, but just like people eventually found conservatives obsessed with gay people weird, it'll be the same thing. Heck, in North Carolina, in 2016, a Republican Governor lost re-election by focusing on the bathroom issue, all as Trump was winning his state.
Do you have examples of elite female athletes not caring because it doesn't affect them? Because that's not what I have seen.
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How is that different from long term issues in any other political coalition? Why should the anti-woke liberals care about the way evangelicals talk about trans people any more than pro-woke liberals care about the way black people talk about trans people?
How is that relevant? 10 years ago the pro-woke side of all these issues where considered such weirdos, that even bringing them up would get you accused of nut-picking. Now they're running the show. Various European countries are pushing through laws that would allow trans women go into women's prisons, do you think they're doing that because these policies got good numbers in exit polls?
1.) Because normie center-left liberals don't want to be in a political coalition with the Matt Walshes of the world. Again, I'm not talking about columnists or whatever, I'm talking about normal parents out there in suburbia in center-left areas, who if they try to bring up their qualms, have to deal with various right-wing media, politicians, and talking heads saying things they do heavily disagree with, but now they have to explain that's not what they mean. Now, some people push through, but the vast majority just give up because it's not worth everything else they believe in, and the vast majority of the small amount of people who continue to push on it, move to the right on everything else, just like a lot of Bush/McCain/Romney voters are solid liberals now, because of actions Trump did they dislike, and the higher valence of issues they were always more moderate on. It's just Trump being an ass in ways suburban voters in Wisconsin doesn't like is a lot bigger thing than random centrist/center-left liberals getting upset over puberty blockers, or whatever.
2.) Of course not - but smart poltiics is not talking about the things you're underwater on, then get in office, and doing them quietly. Hoping there's not too much backlash over it. Because despite how loud you think they are, most center-left politicians don't actually talk a lot about wokeness or trans issues or anything else. Go through the vast majorities of Congressional candidates or even Presidential candidates and there's not actually a whole lot of talk about that stuff in campaigning. Biden talked a lot about the soul of America, Build Back Better, and then OK'd a bunch of left-wing people in the federal government in jobs that were appointments.
Now, the GOP used to be smart about this - they'd talk a lot about jobs, America, the troops. and such, and then put some former oil lobbyists in charge of the EPA, a union-busting lawyer in charg of the NLRB, etc. and appoint 82 judges who all believe the New Deal was basically unconstitutional. Hyperbolic, slightly, but you get the point. Even on abortion, they'd talk about life in vague ways. They weren't talking about completely banning abortion, getting overly focused on stuff that's usually done by school boards, and so on.
Heck, based on post-mid-term polling, if instead of wasting tens of millions of dollars on anti-trans ads, all that money would've gone into anti-crime or anti-inflation ads, they might've pulled off a Senate win and had enough House sats not to worry about the Freedom caucus as much.
"Push through" sounds a lot more dramatic than it actually is. It's not exactly complicated to say "I just don't like the local school transing my kid behind my back", "why is everyone else pretending the 6ft tall bloke in the girl's football team is normal?", "how the fuck did puberty blockers ever get approved?", etc.
Most people know they don't have to give up anything they believe in.
Politicians are a bad model for how common people act. Politicians have to find a demographic to pander to, and go with it. Since "anti-Trump conservatives" seem to be a rounding error among GOP voters, the politicians who are anti-Trump have to bite one bullet or another. Voters can just say "this issue is important to me, and these guys are the only ones talking about it. Promise to do something about it, and I'll vote for you instead".
Right... so if the pro-trans laws have to be done quietly, instead of being campaigned on, that would therefore mean this issue is where the left-wing parties are underwater on. Doesn't it therefore follow that talking about it will bring you supporters if you oppose them?
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I think you may be a little overconfident on where the trans line will eventually fall in the mainstream. There is still a whole lot of trans discourse baggage to air out before things settle. There are perfectly cogent liberal arguments to make against the whole edifice.
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