Political Realities

  1. Permanent solutions to short term problems will create new problems.
  2. Reality is not optional.
  3. Our political differences often hinge on the different meanings we assign to words.
  4. Our political differences also depend on the different priorities we assign to issues.
  5. Crony capitalism is enabled by the principle of focused benefits and dispersed costs; strong motivation for rent seeking and weak motivation to block it.  This leads to regulatory capture where large organizations can influence legislation and regulation to their own benefit.
  6. The more expansive government becomes and the more involved it becomes in all aspects of our lives the more likely it serves special interests rather than the greater good. (George Will- National Affairs Magazine, The Limits of Majority Rule.)
  7. Productive activity benefits the whole society as well as the individuals engaged. Rent seeking behavior enriches the privileged few but decreases the wealth of society.
  8. One should be very reluctant to create any new source of power unless you can imagine it in the hands of your worst nightmare. The Road to Campus Serfdom.
  9.  “The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”  Thomas Sowell
  10. Good government is a reflection on human nature (Federalist #51) and can only overcome human nature with oppressive force. A government that recognizes and accepts human nature will be much less oppressive than a government that seeks to correct or overcome human flaws.
  11. It is the nature of government to promise benefits without paying for them, hiding the cost in a maze of regulations, mandates, proxies, and sketchy monetary policy.
  12. Entitlements grow by expanding benefits multiplied by expanding eligibility.  This why they dramatically exceed projections and why they are so difficult to reverse. (Cogan- The High Cost of Good Intentions)
  13. In a democracy transfer payments are more about moving money from one middle class constituency to a more influential middle class constituency than it is about moving money from rich people to poor people.
  14. Progress emanates from the work of a very few, unpredictably and often contrary to conventional wisdom. The protection of freedom and individual rights for these few benefits us all more than the rights accruing only to the majority. (Hayek- Constitution of Liberty)
  15. The perfect is the enemy of the good. There are no solutions, “only trade-offs that still leave many desires unfulfilled and much unhappiness in the world. What is needed is a prudent sense of how to make the best trade-offs from the limited options available and a realization that ‘unmet needs’ will necessarily remain.” Sowell.
  16. Being tone deaf and contemptuous are the two most unforgivable sins in politics.
  17. There is a critical distinction between liberty and democracy.  Democracy can be an important means to liberty, but if democracy is the ultimate end and the priority it can easily become destructive to liberty.
  18. In a world of probabilities and unknowns a rational decision can yield bad results.  Flexibility is important, yet it is one of the rarest virtues in politics.
  19. Any ideology explaining human action will be subject to conditions, rules, and limits.
  20. The unarticulated wisdom of time proven institutions and the dispersal of knowledge in a dynamic economy puts centralized planning at a distinct disadvantage. The power wielded by government far exceeds their knowledge.
  21. If you prioritize economic growth over social spending, over time you will have more of both.  If you prioritize social spending over economic growth, over time you will have less of both. (Cowperthwaite- Hong Kong)
  22. If you prioritize freedom over equality you will have more of both. If you prioritize equality over freedom you will have less of both.  Milton Friedman (paraphrased)
  23. There is a thin line between confidence and hubris that is only clear in hindsight.


Taming the News

Forty years ago, we all got our news from three TV stations (CBS, ABC and NBC), the same local newspapers, and a small handful of magazines (Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News). A few would supplement their reading with The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal and magazines like Atlantic or the New Yorker.  The choices were much more limited than today but the trust in journalism was much greater.  We all read the same stories and few people felt the need to ‘fact check’ anchors like Peter Jennings or Walter Conkrite. We may have reached different conclusions but we began from a common point of information.

This radically changed with the growth of cable television, the internet and social media.  The massive proliferation of choices was overwhelming. Instead of common sources we leaned toward those that confirmed our views. The left watched MSNBC and the right watched Fox News. We no longer watched the same stories with the same frequency. Our differences widened and hardened.

Social media gave everyone a big microphone and a big audience. Some independents broke major stories, but most knew little of basic journalistic standards or lacked the resources to properly vet a story. News became entertainment and sport more than information.

After years of trying to cut through the clutter I developed a few axioms and observations to focus my time better on information that is useful, meaningful, and hopefully accurate.

  1. Get the whole story. A piece of the truth can be more misleading than all of a lie. Bias is much about what is not said. Context matters.
  2. Never attribute to a conspiracy what can as easily be explained by chance or incompetence. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
  3. When you trust nothing, you will believe anything.
  4. Even the brightest are subject to cognitive biases and ignorance of probability.
  5. The more data you have the more likely you are to see patterns that only appear relevant.
  6. In the face of irrefutable evidence, it is still possible to reach the wrong conclusion.
  7. Drastic changes and discoveries are rare. We advance more from evolution than revolution. History is mostly about the exceptions.
  8. Basic journalistic standards have been undermined by a preference for narratives and competition from social media where everyone regardless of merit or qualifications gets space to vent.
  9. Successful journalism is less likely to be measured by objective truth, clarity, and illumination than by clicks and shares. Clicks and shares are generated by outrage and fear mongering. If your first response to an article is outrage or vindication, put it aside for a few days; there is a good chance you are being played.
  10. “The risk of offense is the price of clarity.” Roy Williams
  11. More people read the news for confirmation than information.
  12. “The great enemy of the truth is not the lie-deliberate, contrived and dishonest; but the myth- persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.” JFK
  13. Most issues and decisions are not between good and evil or right and wrong but involve tradeoffs. More often our choices are between good or better, or bad and worse. Life is complicated and rarely comports to any unified theory.
  14. Avoid Bulverism, the subversion of an argument’s merits or reason to the identity of the source. Demonization of dissent and differences is just intellectual bigotry.
  15. If it needs to be fact checked it is not worth your time. The mere existence of fact checking sites speaks volumes about the loss of trust in media. Stop wasting time on sites you cannot trust.
  16. Trust is not measured in percentages. It is not good enough to be accurate 95% of the time. A few errors admitted and corrected may be tolerable over a period of many years, but multiple errors always made with the same bias means it is time to find a more reliable source.
  17. A fact or a sound position must be falsifiable. If it cannot conceivably be proven incorrect it is not a fact, it is a belief.
  18. The goal is illumination. Accuracy is only the first step.
  19. In our obsession with diversity we neglected intellectual diversity, the range of ideas and experiences. When 95% of a news organization votes the same way bias is inevitable but so is misreporting.  When a story fits a common narrative, it is tempting to relax journalistic diligence.
  20. Much of our disagreements and differences can be attributed to the different meanings we assign to words.
  21. Correlation is not causation. The Phillips Curve.
  22. Don’t confuse trends with laws.  The Phillips Curve again.
  23. We are subject to emotional rationalism.  We decide quickly from emotions and then rationalize our decision.  There is a world of difference between rationalization and rational.
  24. Do not confuse confidence with competence.
  25. Be cautious with anecdotes. They can put a face on the data.  Anecdotes can be used to confirm rational conclusions or their exceptions, but they are never a substitute for the data.
  26. “Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples – while judging ourselves by our best intentions.” George W. Bush
  27. The strength of an argument is proportional to its tolerance for dissent.
  28. Crisis is the rallying cry of the tyrant.
  29. When you silence you amplify.
  30. The prevailing wisdom also includes the prevailing biases and myths. Dissent is essential to finding the truth. Dissent is respect for minority rights.  The prevailing wisdom in the time of Galileo was that the universe was geocentric.
  31. Beware of weasel words that can have very different meanings. Most, almost, and always can convey different meanings to different readers. The difference between a plurality and a majority can be substantial.
  32. Know your denominator.  The fact that 30% of drug dealers belong to a single ethnic group, does not mean that 30% of that ethnic group are drug dealers.
  33. Beware the Straw Man argument- when the debater does not address the question involved but responds to a completely different point.  For example if you speak in favor of open trade with China and your opponent says, “Oh, you are in favor of forced child labor.”
  34. You do not get more reliable information by a diversification of unreliable resources.
  35. Hitchens’ Razor- “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”  Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
  36. Most people will hear or believe what they want to or expect to, regardless of the intent or clarity of the message.
  37. It is easier to prove a point of information is wrong that to convince a person that they are wrong.



Scapegoats for Inequality

Inequality clearly exists and is even pronounced compared to other periods.  AOC, Bernie Sanders, Robert Reich and others from the left have challenged the legitimacy of the very existence of billionaires, though I wonder if this includes Taylor Swift, Oprah, Steven Spielberg, and Tiger Woods.

The assumption that the existence of billionaires is the cause of the problems of the poor and middle class is zero sum thinking.  The high price of gasoline, beef, housing, medical care, and higher ed is not the fault of the rich; it is caused by the very government they herald as the solution to the problem.  Further these problems are more pronounced in the blue states that have had one party control for decades.

Billionaires are not conspiring to drive up the costs.  Billionaires and the very wealthy are not a monolithic group; there are liberals and conservatives among them.  While the wealthy are able to influence government policy, they also have the ability to champion positive changes to it.  Fighting this influence is one of government policy more than a commentary on the morality of wealth.

Nor are the answers radical changes to the constitutional structure.  The problem is not the electoral college, the structure of the Supreme Court, or the need to add Puerto Rico and DC as new states.  The answer is policy to relieve the problems of the working and middle class.

There are changes that have merit and should be considered, but the government has little credibility and trust.  Many of the wealthy are willing to pay more taxes but have little faith it will be spent to address the problems.  The inability to bridge partisan divisions and enact meaningful reform has instead fueled class warfare, political pandering, and the search for convenient scapegoats.



Proper Bookkeeping for Tariffs

From Robert Graboyes’s excellent Bastiat’s Window, Trade Winds 2025-Seriously and Literally:

As seen in the accounting equations in the previous post (“Real-World Trade-Deficit Math-Magic,”), you can’t get rid of a trade deficit without also losing foreign investments in America. This insight was undiscovered in the age of mercantilism and unappreciated in the age of “anti-globalism.”

 

“Globalism” (a.k.a., free trade) is to those on the political right what “trickle-down economics” (a.k.a., free markets) is to those on the political left. Both are vacuous pejoratives that translate loosely into English as, “Somewhere on Earth, buyers and sellers are engaging in voluntary trade and minding their own business AND WE HAVE TO STOP THEM.”

 

“China says, ‘Our government will use sledgehammers to break the hands of 90% of China’s people to discourage them from buying American gloves.’ America responds with, ‘Oh YEAH??? Then OUR government will use sledgehammers to break the feet of 90% of AMERICANS to discourage them from buying Chinese shoes.’ China’s tariffs are self-destructive, and America’s retaliatory tariffs are equally self-destructive.”

 

By the way, this map also sheds light on the Great Depression. As I explained recently, the Roaring Twenties likely resulted from the desire of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge to keep their hands off of businesses to avoid destabilizing them; in contrast, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt were both dealmaking busybodies who constantly interfered in markets, changing the rules of the game over and over until business crawled into a shell for more than a decade.

 

Several readers said I should take Trump seriously, but not literally—which was journalist Selena Zito’s famous take on candidate Trump in 2016. Zito’s perception was razor-sharp, but my responses were threefold:

  1. “Seriously, but not literally” had its charms for an insurgent candidate but is untenable for a sitting president who has the nuclear codes and the power to vastly alter the conditions of world trade on whim—nation by nation, product by product, day by day.
  2. World markets clearly take him literally, even if his supporters don’t.
  3. Trump supporters who traffic today in this idea that the president does not mean what he says do no service to their world, country, president, party, or selves. 


When Policy Meets Reality

In every election the voters teach the candidates a lesson that they never seem to learn.  Every victory is not a mandate IN FAVOR of the victor; it can also be a mandate AGAINST the losing party.  Maybe the only mandate you really got was not to be the other party. Policy is always subject to political reality.  Trump in his radical reforms is making the same mistake his opponents made.

In the ‘woke’ world of the Democrats every 35-year-old white male listening to the indoctrination of systemic racism, toxic masculinity, and the disclaimer of meeting on native American soil from the overstaffed DEI department sat quietly to avoid losing their jobs or being sent to reeducation camps.  They knew the absurdity of it all and while they may have been quiet, they were able to express themselves in the voting booth.

The same applied to the parents of female children sharing a locker room and competing with biological men, and the parents of boys who now had tampon dispensers in their bathrooms. No matter how moral or rational this may have been to advocates the vast majority of the voting public of both parties rejected it strongly.

Trump is taking his party down the same path.  No matter how much the voters may have supported tariffs in theory they did not likely vote for the chaotic and reckless application. No matter how much or how little they understand the economics of trade, when the consequences fall on their bank accounts and 401ks, they will reject it. While Trump’s voters wanted to cut the size of government, many will react differently when the waiting line at the IRS or Social Security becomes unbearable.  And all of the government workers fired with abandon and their friends and families will react in the voting booth just as the victims of the DEI department did.

If the Democrats tac to the center, the Republicans may be toast in the midterms. But that assumes they have learned something from their defeat.   Even if Trump reversed everything on tariffs tomorrow the radical uncertainty he represents will stifle new investments as long as he is in office.

Trump’s biggest accomplishment may be turning Democrats into Milton Friedman free traders.



Expert Failure

From The Wrong Kind of Abundance by Kevin Williamson at The Dispatch.

Zweig intelligently catalogues a number of underlying factors that positioned the American expert class to make all the wrong decisions while trying to make the most of the crisis, putting it to the service of their political and social agendas and, not incidentally, their careers. Those problems include: over reliance on mathematical models that can be tweaked for ideological ends where empirical observation and measurement provide insufficient support for the preferred policy—or would militate against it if taken into account; the fetishization of technology in education, very nicely illustrated by Bill Clinton, ensorcelled by the apparent early promise of the classroom internet, repeating almost verbatim identical claims that had been made about radio in its infancy—and that were made about film and television as well; the moronizing effects of reflexive political tribalism—there was a time when the Trump campaign could complain, with some reason, that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were working to “undermine the public’s confidence in the coming coronavirus vaccine,” ironic as that complaint is to read today with Marjorie Taylor Greene in the House and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the Cabinet; the related self-censorship of the media in the service of narrow partisan interests and dogmatic progressivism; and misalignment of incentives, with policymakers (disproportionately progressive-leaning) captured by special interests (notably Randi Weingarten and the teachers’ unions) and thence producing policy agendas that did not serve the public interest, a situation that would be familiar enough to anybody who had ever read a few pages of F. A. Hayek or James Buchanan.

 (I mean the public-choice economist, not the 15th president.)

About that final point: Reading An Abundance of Caution is a little bit like reading Ezra Klein in the past few years, as ladies and gentlemen of the sort who write for the New Yorker seem to discover phenomena that have been at the center of the liberal-libertarian critique of progressivism for a century or so. When it comes to housing supply, for example, Klein and Matt Yglesias have even discovered that regulation has unintended consequences! You won’t find Hayek’s essays or The Calculus of Consent in Zweig’s index, and, what’s worse, you won’t find very much evidence that the author has read such works—which he should have, given the light a century’s accumulation of economic and political literature might have shed on his subject. .

a great deal of our economic policy debate (as about minimum-wage laws) is shaped by mathematical modeling that cannot be empirically evaluated, because doing so would require a comparison between measurable outcomes and non-measurable counterfactuals. 

“Everything that can be measured is not worth measuring, and everthing that is worth measuring can sometoimes not be measured.”

.



A Conservative Revolution

Some historians contend that the American Revolution was not a revolution readily compared to others in history.  It can be distinguished as a War for Independence or as historian H.W Brands called it, Our First Civil War in his book by that title.  Given its close proximity to our own experience The French Revolution offers insights that illuminate both.  The French and the Americans both attributed their movements to Enlightenment philosophers; the French followed the words of Rousseau and the Americans followed the ideas of Locke and Montesquieu among others. The Enlightenment was a fork in the road and the French and Americans took very different paths.

In The Wrong Kind of Abundance Kevin Williamson at The Dispatch (firewalled) considered the American experience a conservative revolution:

Of course, the political group that we now call, broadly speaking, the American right has always been convulsed by irreconcilable contradictions because the American project itself is founded in a paradox: There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as a conservative revolution, but that is approximately what the Founding Fathers carried out. And from the New Deal through to the present, the right has been torn between its conservative tendencies and its revolutionary tendencies. Dwight Eisenhower called himself a “progressive conservative”; William F. Buckley Jr. called himself a ”radical conservative” and insisted that whatever it was his new movement was going to stand for, it was against Eisenhower.

Among the founders, there were plenty of wild-eyed utopians and radicals, but the revolution ended up being led by relatively conservative figures such as George Washington and John Adams (who had originally opposed separating from England) and others of similar temperament, who made the case that they were not so much overturning a legitimate political order as restoring and securing their ancient rights as Englishmen. The American project is a marriage between the forces of conservatism (property and religion) and the forces of radicalism (majoritarianism, disestablishmentarianism, etc.), and, to the extent that the American right acts as a conservator of the American tradition, it feels those contradictions deeply.



Election Words

I confess that while I was not surprised to see Trump win I remain stunned at the degree he won and the gains he made across nearly every demographic group, especially given everything that was thrown at him.

How Trump Won:

  • McDonalds
  • Garbage
  • Joe Rogan
  • Butler, PA
  • Class politics
  • tenacity

How Harris Lost:

  • Identity politics
  • Cancel Culture
  • DEI
  • Biology
  • Critical Race Theory
  • Equity
  • Social Justice
  • Lawfare
  • Inflation
  • Land acknowledgement
  • Crime
  • Defund the police
  • FEMA
  • Peanut the squirrel
  • Pronouns
  • BLM
  • Student debt forgiveness
  • Word salads
  • Middle class
  • Afghanistan
  • Border
  • October 7

Lessons:

  • Class Trumps Race
  • Silence is consent
  • What you tolerate you teach
  • Demographics is not destiny


HKO Political Thoughts 2024 10 24

Given everything that has been thrown at Trump- two impeachments, four major indictments and convictions, mass defections from establishment Republicans, widely brandished as a fascist, and a virulently hostile media- how is he still even close to victory?

This is an important question, and the answers are revealing.  If one is unable to understand how any sane person can vote for the opposition you may be in a bubble, and this is true for both sides.  Attributing his support to Fox News, social media, racism, misogyny, ignorance, or the unfairness and anti-democratic nature of the electoral college has a common flaw; it relieves the Democrats of accepting any responsibility for the voters rejecting them.  It is like a business watching sales decline and blaming the customers.

My observations:

Most voters are rooting for a team, not a quarterback.

As Selena Zito noted in 2016, Trump supporters took him seriously but not literally.  Democrats then took him literally but not seriously.  They now take him seriously and literally.

Few take the fascist label seriously, perhaps because it has been used so much in the past that it has no meaning.  Few who use it understand it, and those who use it most are no longer trusted.

The Founders addressed a political elite with a new republican government.  With the rise of the industrial age with technology and new business forms leading to concentrations of economic power the Progressive Era addressed economic elites.  In our current post-industrial age, we are addressing a new cultural elite. DEI, systemic racism, Critical Theory, and wokism in its many forms has caused a populist revolt against a cultural elite.

The Democrats may discount the radical voices of defunding the police, the radical anti-Semitism on elite campuses, and the sexual identity beliefs that allows biological males to compete in women’s sports as minority concerns, but the absence of a majority to deny or defy it means they now own it.

The voters have lost trust in our most fundamental institutions. We can argue how much this was deserved or not, but this means that in the minds of many voters the press, our universities, our courts and other institutions have lost the moral high ground.

We are amid a political transition, moving beyond the New Deal Liberalism vs Conservatism of William Buckley. The populism of Trump is driven by an elite that has become so disconnected from the populace that they no longer understand the people they impact.  The Democrats have increasingly lost the rural and blue-collar voter since 2000. As long as they continued to win the high electoral college states, they paid no cost until the trend hit a wall and they lost.  This trend was in place a decade before Trump.

Blaming the electoral college is like blaming the rules after the game is over.  The rules will not change anytime soon, so they would be wise to just accept this and recognize that blaming the voters is a fool’s errand. Clinging to progressive purity will not win elections.

Why does January 6 not resonate the threat to the Republicans than it does with the Democrats?  Because they remember the screaming campus idiots cancelling speakers while the left did nothing.  They remember the protests and property damage when Trump was elected in 2016, and the Democrats did nothing. They remember the ‘mostly peaceful’ George Floyd riots of 2020 and the Democrats did nothing, even calling to cancel the police. They recall the screaming fools hauled from the Kavanaugh hearing and this was just democracy in action.  They now view the anti-Semitism on college campuses and the tepid responses from the Democrats.

You may think Jan 6 was different and much worse and you may be right, but that does not change that many others do not.  What you tolerate you teach.

Bill Maher on ‘Real Time’ is realistic to recognize the impact the lunacy on the left has on this election and he is doing the Democrats a great service.  The Republicans can use a Bill Maher perspective as well.

The solution to Donald Trump lies on both sides of the aisle.



Losing the Working Class

On a recent Real Time with Bill Maher, guest Batya Ungar-Sargon commented how the Democrats have lost the working class. Democrat Tim Ryan retorted how much the Biden has done for the working class with his spending programs and how Biden was the most pro union president ever.

A few comments:

As Ungar-Sargon pointed out private sector union members are only 6% of the workforce.  Ryan refused to believe this, so I looked it up and she was correct.  Total workforce is 10% union but when you remove the government employees it is only 6%.  I also checked her stat that 65% of those who make over $500,000 a year vote Democrat.  Also, true.

Ryan and Maher defaulted to the refrain that the Democrats are not ‘messaging’ effectively, that it is a marketing problem not a policy problem.  This is reminiscent of What’s The Matter with Kansas, trying to explain why the Americans in flyover country vote against their own self-interest.  Besides the arrogance of the writer claiming to understand their self-interest better than the voters themselves, they miss another key point.

Married to a binary one-dimensional interest spectrum, the Democrats only consider the economic interests at stake and even then, only consider the immediate consequences.  Perhaps the working class is responding to more than their immediate economic interests, and are reacting to cultural differences, urban crime, and the illiberalness that has infected our institutions.  Throwing money at a problem that is not economic at its source will not persuade the working class.

The shit show of the Kavanaugh hearing, the George Floyd riots, the cancel culture of the media and higher education, even the anti-Semitism that erupted after October 7 has probably influenced the working class more than mere economic issues.

The working class hold greater resentment to the lower classes than they do to the upper classes.  The fourth quintile of incomes (second to the lowest) work twice the number of hours and achieve only marginally more consumption than the lowest quintile.

Failing to understand the views of the working class, the elites respond with contempt and that only drives them further away.



An Alliance with Barbarism

From the blog No Delusions, No Despair (another good blog name), The rise of barbaric progressivism:

Shortly before he died in the late 1930s, Sigmund Freud, by then a refugee from Nazism, wrote, “We live in very remarkable times. We find with astonishment that progress has concluded an alliance with barbarism.” He was referring to the rise of fascism and communism, and their combination of the most modern forms of science, technology, economic theory, and even aesthetics with the most horrific and savage forms of violence and sadism.

Today, the most fervent believers in the power of progress in the United States are the members and supporters of the eponymous progressive movement. It is a bit difficult to fully define this movement, as it is easily confused with other movements of the left like socialism, communism, and even anarchism. It is possible, however, to say that its view of progress is the polar opposite of Freud’s. By and large, it holds that 1) Humanity can be made better and even perfected. 2) The history of humanity is the history of inexorable progress toward that perfection. 3) It is the duty of the individual and society to be on “the right side” of that history—that is, on the side of progress. 4)  Humanity’s ultimate state of perfection will take the form of a blessed society in which suffering, poverty, and oppression have been overcome. 5) Anything that opposes or retards progress is a form of metaphysical evil.

While today’s progressivism maintains its façade of upper-middle class rectitude, it barely conceals a quasi-totalitarian mentality that puts down any dissent or opposition without much compunction. At the same time, many progressives have engaged in considerable violence and allied themselves with forces that are not only violent themselves, but categorically reject the values and mores that progressives themselves claim to hold sacred. Many progressives have gone so far as to adopt ideologies they claim to oppose passionately, such as racial hierarchy and antisemitism. The cost to the moral integrity of the movement has been immense, and there are no signs that the descent is slowing, let alone reversing itself.

It is notable, for example, that the institutions ruled by American progressives, particularly academia, are by and large the least free institutions in American society. They place a great deal of value on ideological conformity and almost none on fundamental liberties like free speech and assembly. Basic legal rights do not exist in the academic disciplinary system. Those who wish to avoid being fired or expelled for alleged transgressions must often submit to humiliating Maoist-style reeducation and struggle sessions during which they are forced to confess and repent their sins in a wretched public spectacle. As a result, progressive rule suffocates independent thought and silences criticism, thus destroying two of freedom’s greatest benefits. Similar circumstances prevail in those areas of corporate culture, the arts, the media, and even sports that are dominated or ruled by progressives.

HKO

Unfortunately Progressivism has become identified with wokism and is very different from the Progressivism of Teddy or Franklin Roosevelt.  It is challenging to keep up with these changing definitions, but that is why it is necessary to define them as we use them.

It is also why it is important to remember the principle behind the divided government and intentional firewalls to democracy designed in our constitution: that human nature is permanently flawed and cannot be trusted with concentrated power, whether that power originates in the divine right of kings or the ‘will of the people’.  Where our founding came from the thinking of the Enlightenment and classical liberalism, Progressivism grew from the historicism of Hegel, Pragmatism (capital ‘P’), and social scientific thinking that thought principles of the physical sciences could be applied to the social realm.   Progressivism in the U.S. was tempered by the Constitution, but it traveled in the same boat as political ideologies that considered human nature malleable and capable of improvement, if not perfection, by the state if it is in the right hands.

Accepting human flaws and governing accordingly has proven far less oppressive than those who spoke in the name of ‘the people’ in their grand schemes to improve humanity.

I recommend reading the entire article.



The Great Lie of American Politics

Kevin Williamson writes the lead article in the Saturday WSJ Review Section, Election 2024: You Asked for It America:

For most of my life, the dominant myth that informed American politics was that there was too much “big money” in the system, that Washington lobbyists in Gucci loafers gathered with self-seeking party bosses in smoke-filled rooms to subvert the will of We the People and foist their preferred candidates and policies upon the country. The moral of the story was that the common people do not have enough of a voice.

But that’s the great lie of American politics (and of democracy at large): that the people cannot fail but can only be failed.

With the old media gatekeepers gone, right-wing content creators rushed in and filled the world with QAnon kookery on Facebook, conspiracy theories powerful enough to vault the cretinous likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene into Congress, fake news sponsored by Moscow and Beijing and fake-ish news subsidized by Viktor Orbán and his happy junta, and whatever kind of poison butterfly Tucker Carlson is going to be when he emerges from the chrysalis of filth he’s built around himself. The prim consensus of 200 Northeastern newspaper editors has been replaced by the sardonic certitude of 100 million underemployed rage-monkeys and ignoramuses on Twitter. The news was democratized, and, as such, it became corrupt, irresponsible and ugly.

Second, the same forces that disintegrated the old media cabal have radically democratized fundraising for political campaigns and committees. Whatever control those smug party bosses once lorded over candidates mostly had resided in the power of the purse. But the Internet made it possible for politicians and hustlers to go straight to the people, who don’t want to hear about the need to raise their Medicare premiums and reduce their Social Security checks to avoid a national fiscal crisis.

No, We the People want to hear more from that Marjorie lady about the Jewish space lasers and how Donald Trump is going to wreak vengeance against the “communists” and “Marxists” who run…Microsoft, and how vaccines are what gave them lumbago. The digital masses may not be dropping bundles of C-notes into the campaign contribution tip jar, but they hit that tip jar pretty often with smaller change, and there are an awful lot of them.Whatever real power big-money donors had to shape the political agenda has been dwarfed by the power—the much more thoroughly corrupting power—of small-dollar donors, who, unlike the National Association of Realtors or the AFL-CIO, do not have a long-term policy agenda or the attention spans to maintain one, because they are in this regard not citizens in a meaningful sense but only content-consumers. Spend a couple of hours reading political posts on Facebook and tell me that the smoke-filled room doesn’t look pretty good by comparison.



End DEI !

From her outstanding site Bari Weiss articulates the fundamental flaw with DEI.  It is shameful that it took the explosion in anti Semitism on our campuses to see the problem but I have long objected to the infection of this mind virus.  From her essay End DEI:

What I saw was a worldview that replaced basic ideas of good and evil with a new rubric: the powerless (good) and the powerful (bad). It replaced lots of things. Color blindness with race obsession. Ideas with identity. Debate with denunciation. Persuasion with public shaming. The rule of law with the fury of the mob.

People were to be given authority in this new order not in recognition of their gifts, hard work, accomplishments, or contributions to society, but in inverse proportion to the disadvantages their group had suffered, as defined by radical ideologues. According to them, as James Kirchick concisely put it: “Muslim > gay, black > female, and everybody > the Jews.”

I was an undergraduate back then, but you didn’t need a PhD to see where this could go. And so I watched, in horror, sounding alarms as loudly as I could.

I was told by most Jewish leaders that, yes, it wasn’t great, but not to be so hysterical. Campuses were always hotbeds of radicalism, they said. This ideology, they promised, would surely dissipate as young people made their way in the world.

It did not.

Over the past two decades I saw this inverted worldview swallow all of the crucial sense-making institutions of American life. It started with the universities. Then it moved on to cultural institutions—including some I knew well, like The New York Times—as well as every major museum, philanthropy, and media company. Then on to our medical schools and our law schools. It’s taken root at nearly every major corporation. It’s inside our high schools and even our elementary schools. The takeover is so comprehensive that it’s now almost hard to notice it—because it is everywhere.

We have been seeing for several years now the damage this ideology has done: DEI, and its cadres of enforcers, undermine the central missions of the institutions that adopt it. But nothing has made the dangers of DEI clearer than what’s happening these days on our college campuses—the places where our future leaders are nurtured.

It is there that professors are compelled to pledge fidelity to DEI in order to get hired, promoted, or tenured. (For more on this, please read John Sailer’s Free Press piece: How DEI Is Supplanting Truth as the Mission of American Universities.) And it is there that the hideousness of this worldview has been on full display over the past few weeks: we see students and professors immersed not in facts, knowledge, and history, but in a dehumanizing ideology that has led them to celebrate or justify terrorism.

It is time to end DEI for good. No more standing by as people are encouraged to segregate themselves. No more forced declarations that you will prioritize identity over excellence. No more compelled speech. No more going along with little lies for the sake of being polite.

HKO

The Free Press is a must subscription.



The Identity Trap

From a review of The Identity Trap in Commentary Magazine:

The identity synthesis has come to exert tremendous influence over public life in a remarkably short span of time. Its illiberal premises and principles are exacerbated by the sheer intolerance of its methods. It seeks not merely to narrow the circle of human sympathy by encouraging everyone to see the world through the ever-present prism of identity; it also forthrightly rejects Enlightenment values and neutral rules such as free speech. By treating innocent bystanders and other outsiders with extreme prejudice, it hopes to coerce humanity into adopting a radical vision of all that is right and good. Unsurprisingly, the growing acceptance of identitarian nostrums has been attended by an increasingly censorious culture that stifles individuals’ ability to engage in dialogue and debate about crucial social and cultural matters.

Mounk does not flinch from recognizing the past—and present—injustices that have blighted the lives of so many individuals and groups around the world, including in the most advanced Western societies. But he maintains that it’s possible to acknowledge the full force of these injustices, and earnestly attempt to remedy them, without succumbing to the identity synthesis. For our sake, it better be. The alternative would be to cede the moral high ground to a cynically regressive ideology whose view of the world denies progress and invites the conclusion that the universal values that liberal democracies revere are no more than a fig leaf for a system of rank oppression.

The fact that an ideology diametrically opposed to philosophical liberalism and the American experiment has been adopted almost overnight in the highest echelons of society is prima facie evidence that something has gone terribly wrong in the American elite.

HKO

I disagree with Mounk that this shift is sudden.  It has been ignored, tolerated, and excused for decades.  It is shameful that it took the overt antiSemitism displayed after October 7 for it to be recognized for what it is.  Identity politics was destined to end poorly.



We Have Only Seen the Tip of the Iceberg

The hearings in Congress from presidents Liz Magill of The University of Pennsylvania, Claudine Gay of Harvard and Sally Kornbluth of MIT have gone viral and are so detrimental to the reputation of their schools that Magill has already resigned.  It is shameful that it took blatant antisemitism to expose a problem that has developed over decades.

These three women making over seven figures each to run our leading universities acted like puppets of their legal and HR departments and were incapable of comprehending their blatant hypocrisy and the lunacy of their positions.  Even MSNBC and Al Sharpton were critical of their performance.  To think that merely replacing them will come close to solving the underlying problem, however, is incredibly short sighted.

These leaders are only the tip of the iceberg.  They should be held accountable but don’t stop there. They represent institutions that are deeply flawed.  It is about much more than just antisemitism. There are three fundament problems.

The universities have abandoned any requirements for civil decency from their students.  Screaming at professors, shouting down invited speakers, vandalism, and threatening students and professors has been tolerated as free speech.  Such behavior should lead to expulsion.  Entering students should sign a code of conduct and be held accountable to it.

With all of the claims for diversity the one they need the most is intellectual diversity.  It is fine to discuss critical theory and Marxism but not without the balance of constitutional democracy and free markets.  It is shameful when graduates have studied Howard Zinn, Karl Marx, or Ibram Kindi but have never heard of Gordon Wood, Friedrich Hayek, or Thomas Sowell.  Hiring practices should seek a far more balanced faculty.

And finally, end DEI.  The amount of money wasted on this is absurd.  That so much antisemitism is tolerated on campuses bloated with DEI hires makes this the Orwellian acronym of the century.

Withholding big donations certainly got their attention, but it needs to go much further.  Stop preferential hiring from these schools.  The boards that have upheld these dysfunctional institutions also need to be replaced.



Finally Reaching Their Moment of Shame

From Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Dish, The Day The Empress’ Clothes Fell Off:

Freedom of speech in the Ivy League extends exclusively to the voices of the oppressed; they are also permitted to disrupt classes, deplatform or shout down controversial speakers, hurl obscenities, force members of oppressor groups — i.e. Jewish students and teachers in the latest case — into locked libraries and offices during protests, and blocked from classrooms. Jewish students have even been assaulted — at Harvard, at Columbia, at UMass Amherst, at Tulane. Assaults by woke students used to be rare, such as the 2017 mob at Middlebury that put Allison Stanger in a neck brace — but since 10/7, they’re intensifying.

If a member of an oppressor class says something edgy, it is a form of violence. If a member of an oppressed class commits actual violence, it’s speech. That’s why many Harvard students instantly supported a fundamentalist terror cult that killed, tortured, systematically raped and kidnapped Jews just for being Jews in their own country. Because they have been taught it’s the only moral position to take. They’ve diligently read their Fanon, and must be puzzled over what the problem is. Palestinians are victims of a “colonial,” “white,” “settler-state” and any violence they commit is thereby justified.



The Road to Censorship

In George Will’s excellent essay in National Review, The Consciousness Project, he touches on the importance of three fundamental principles supporting our constitution:

  • Human nature is both flawed and permanent.  It has been interesting to note that governments based on this principle have been the most free, and those who treated human nature as malleable have been the most oppressive.
  • The centrality of natural rights limits the government to protecting rights; not granting them (or removing them).  This was a radical concept at the time often associated with the violent path taken by the French.  Our use of it was far more restrained and balanced.
  • The Constitution by design limited majoritarian democracy.

The Progressive movement while seeking to address the concentration of economic power came into conflict with all three of these principles.  The American project is about liberty more than democracy.

excerpt:

But what if there is no such thing as human nature? What if human nature is a fiction, a pre-modern superstition? What if human beings are merely creatures that take whatever shape is imposed on them by the impress and promptings of the culture in which they are situated? If so, then controlling the culture becomes imperative. And politics must saturate every nook and cranny of life. And this saturation will, inevitably, mean controlling what people say and hear and read and think and teach. Shaping the consciousness of the people — purging the people of what Marxists call “false consciousness” — becomes the great, the encompassing political project.

Once curating consciousness becomes a political project, the jurisdiction of politics becomes enormous — indeed, illimitable. And the aspiration for, the very idea of, limited government disappears. The politics of consciousness promises glittering possibilities. Therefore, muscular progressive politics must not be circumscribed by any limits on coercion. Particularly, any speech, any idea that contributes to false consciousness, must not be tolerated, lest progress be delayed. Such delay would be an intolerable harm. So, censorship is, to the censors, strictly speaking, progressive. And censorship becomes a categorical imperative when the duty to control culture is reinforced by a sense of crisis. Or, to use the adjective that nowadays is promiscuously bandied, an “existential crisis.”

The Leninist temptation — the totalitarian temptation — comes in many flavors and intensities. But it always rests on a denial of human nature. If there is no settled, fixed human nature — if human beings are always and only creatures who are created by the marks made on them by the culture in which they are raised and live — then the stakes of politics are, always and everywhere, enormous. The stakes are, literally, everything — including the sort of beings that humans will be. And everything is, inevitably, politicized. Everything: from work to leisure. What we read, what we eat, how we are entertained. And what is allowed to be said and read and thought and taught.Which brings me to my second hypothesis, which is this: People who believe that culture determines the nature of everyone and everything, and who therefore believe that politics must control culture — everything that is said and read and thought and taught — such people will necessarily believe that they are directly harmed by any speech and all ideas that retard progress, as they understand this. So, they will claim what Jonathan Turley of George Washington University Law School calls a “license to silence.”

Lincoln’s ascent to greatness began with his instant, implacable, and canny opposition to such thinking. America, he said, is not about a process, majority rule. Rather, America is about a condition, liberty. Lincoln did not say, but could have said, that a written constitution is a counter-majoritarian instrument. It circumscribes the power — the sweep — of majorities. The First Amendment says Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. No law. No matter how many people might want one.



The Aftershock

October 7 was a shock in the scale, surprise, and the sheer brutality of the attack.

The second shock was the enormous outpouring of support for Hamas and the Palestinians in Russia, European cities and even more disturbing, the colleges and universities in this country. Before WWII, before we knew the horrors that followed, there was a sellout rally in Madison Square Garden in support of the Nazi movement.

The rallies to support Hamas AFTER their depravity was available for all to see was worse; maybe not in one place, but the number of Hamas supporters and the diverse locations and the intensity and the threats was the worse display of anti-Semitism ever seen in this country. And that is not hyperbole. The hesitation to call this out for the outrage that it was, the stretch to find any moral relativism, the inability to identify evil when it explodes in your face, and the cowardly demeaner towards these new Nazis is an absolute abdication of moral leadership in too many of our colleges.

I am glad to see big donors close their checkbooks and I hope students either leave or refuse to attend these cesspools of anti-Semitism.  I hope state legislatures hold the taxpayer supported schools accountable as well.

Is this a restriction on free speech? Yes.  As it would be if they refused a Klan rally, or a Nazi rally.Calling the restriction of the oldest of hatreds a limit on free speech in light of the restrictions on free speech the woke were allowed to get away with is the height of hypocrisy.  You can get fired for using the wrong pronouns or questioning the ability of men to bear children but cheering the sadistic murder of Jews is now supposed to be protected free speech.

This has been brewing on college campuses for decades.  Phyllis Chesler, a leftist feminist, wrote of it in The New Anti-Semitism, published in 2003.  Since then, it has grown much worse, tolerated in the name of free speech, or dismissed as an insignificant minority.  But what we tolerate we teach, and the graduates indoctrinated with this poison now occupy positions in the media, government, higher and secondary education, nonprofits and even some of our corporations.

The media, apoplectic for weeks from hatred displayed in Charlottesville in 2017, lack the same outrage at the depth and scale of the hatred that followed the Hamas attack on October 7.  It is worth noting how often the cry against Zionism quickly turned to plain hatred of Jews.  It has always been a false distinction.  Jewish sympathizers for these attacks on Israel are progressive kapos, selling their soul hoping the alligator eats them last.

DEI hustlers have exposed their moral bankruptcy as well.  The same goes for BLM, blindly supported by Jewish sympathizers.

I confess that as much as I have been aware of this growing tolerance for anti-Semitism in our colleges and media institutions, I was surprised by the depth and scale of the hatred and the blind ignorance that enabled it. Hopefully this new awareness will last and dismantle the infrastructure that enabled this growth in Anti-Semitism with the same commitment Israel will show towards Hamas.

P.S.

Opinion: Nothing has prepared me for the antisemitism I see on college campuses now

Liberal Jews Have No Reason To Be Surprised By Progressive Antisemitism

I regret that the progressive label has been perverted and applied to the worst of the woke ideology.  The progressives of Teddy and Franklin Roosevelts’ era would not recognize the term as it is used today.



Cancelling Cancel Culture

I confess to a strong sense of schadenfreude at seeing the social justice warriors have their main weapon turned on them.  Big donors are withholding money from universities who tolerate real hate, not just hate speech, and not just the crocodile tears, virtue signaling, and microaggression nonsense.  Graduates are now being held to account for their views when hitting the job market.  Supporting Hamas after their savage attack on October 7 may have been the bridge too far, but the illiberal restraint on speech and the cancel culture is also being cancelled.

I always thought identity politics would end badly.  The reaction will not be just about the tolerance of anti-Semitism but will address all the other values that embraced it.  The idea that this is just a small portion of the student population and is thus an overreaction is bull shit.  The percentage of cops who assault unarmed blacks is much smaller and that did not stop nationwide riots.

Cancel all these social justice grifters, anti-Semites, and illiberal fascists.  When you live by the sword……



History Moves On

From Kevin Williamson at The Dispatch – Left Behind by History– probably firewalled and I highly recommend a subscriptiion.

The Palestinian people have legitimate grievances, and I myself have tried my very best to give a damn about them. But you only get to blow up so many pizza shops. You start beheading children and murdering young mothers and torturing people so viciously and inhumanely that parents pray that their children will be found dead rather than discovered to have been taken hostage into Gaza, then you and your legitimate grievances and any United Nations resolution you want to cite can all go rot. There aren’t two sides to this story. We ought not pretend that there are.

Before he became … whatever it is he has become … J. D. Vance wrote an interesting and useful book, which you may remember, called Hillbilly Elegy. He ended it with an exasperated but sympathetic plea to his hillbilly people: Come on, already. Get it together, people. You’ve been through hard times, I know, but now, you have to take care of yourselves and do it for yourselves. Stop making excuses. Take control of your lives. Not in those words, of course; this is my paraphrase.

You can go into any of 300 different bars in Boston and get an earful about how bad the Irish have had it. But people eventually move on—at least, the people who want to be happy, who want to thrive as individuals and as families and as nations do. That doesn’t mean that what happened to the Indians and the African Americans and the Irish wasn’t terrible, or that we should just forget about it and pretend like it never happened. It means that you can’t keep good people down. Not forever.

A former police officer in Texas who now provides security to churches tells me that his team is taking extra precautions in the coming days. And not because he is worried about resentful Irishmen or enraged Norwegians.

History moves on, and, if you get left behind—it may not be your fault, but it is still your problem. The Israeli forces should be the least of the mortal worries afflicting those Hamas killers—if the Palestinians had any self-respect, it would be them taking the lead in putting an end to the power of these monsters, who are homicidal maniacs when it comes to the Jews but who haven’t done the Palestinians a lick of good, either. But, unhappily, the one almost universally shared assumption of modern diplomatic discourse is that the Palestinian Arabs are something less than whole and complete human beings, that they are not advanced enough to be true moral actors because they do not have the strength of national character to bear the moral weight that falls exclusively upon the shoulders of the Israelis and the peoples of the other liberal democratic states. The Palestinians, according to this line of thought, just bounce around like windup toys, and only the Israelis, the Americans, and the Europeans can be expected to behave like responsible adults. Nobody ever puts it exactly that way, of course, but that’s the upshot. The Palestinians are treated by their so-called advocates and benefactors as though they were a nation of people who have no agency and, hence, no responsibility.

The mystery is why the Palestinians continue to put up with it, and have for so long. They don’t need “days of rage.” They need property rights, free enterprise, the rule of law, and decent government. And nobody would be better pleased to see them have these than the Israelis.



When Woke Broke

“Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”- Voltaire

When Generals Eisenhower and Montgomery found the death camps in Germany, they ordered crews to film the piles of bodies and emaciated survivors, fearing otherwise no one would believe the depths of depravity the enemy was capable of.  Only two generations later Netanyahu faced the same task for the same reason.  With less shame than their Nazi predecessors this generation of sadistic perpetrators posted their own savagery on Facebook.

As long as the illiberal woke crowd only engaged in their historical revisionism and preferred narratives they were tolerated, but when this led to support of wholesale slaughter of innocents it became a bridge too far.  Alumni are pulling their funds and students are avoiding schools that are plagued with such rudderless leadership.  Political lines are drawn.

Social justice grifters in all their forms were easy prey for the Jew haters.  It was just the next logical step. Periods of revisionism and moral ambiguity are breeding grounds for antisemitism and other forms of social and moral rot.  It is too soon to predict how long this recoil will last, but we are certainly clearer how far the absurdities of the left can go.

PS : Can a Donor Revolt Save American Universities