Politics

[Whiskeyjack]

TAC's Alan Jacobs just published an article titled "The Outgroup and Its Errors":

One of the most troubling features of our current political and social climate is how powerfully it is shaped by sheer animus.

A couple of years ago, Scott Alexander wrote a post titled “I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup.” I strongly recommend that you read the whole thing, but essentially Alexander sets out to answer a question: How is it that, say, straight white men can be gracious and kind to, say, lesbian black women while being unremittingly bitter towards other straight white men? What has happened here to the old distinction between ingroups and outgroups? His answer is that “outgroups may be the people who look exactly like you, and scary foreigner types can become the in-group on a moment’s notice when it seems convenient.”

Then Alexander gives a powerful example. He mentions being chastised by readers who thought he was “uncomplicatedly happy” when he expressed relief that Osama bin Laden was dead.

Of the “intelligent, reasoned, and thoughtful” people I knew, the overwhelming emotion was conspicuous disgust that other people could be happy about his death. I hastily backtracked and said I wasn’t happy per se, just surprised and relieved that all of this was finally behind us. […]

Then a few years later, Margaret Thatcher died. And on my Facebook wall – made of these same “intelligent, reasoned, and thoughtful” people – the most common response was to quote some portion of the song “Ding Dong, The Witch Is Dead”. Another popular response was to link the videos of British people spontaneously throwing parties in the street, with comments like “I wish I was there so I could join in.” From this exact same group of people, not a single expression of disgust or a “c’mon, guys, we’re all human beings here.”

Even when he pointed this out, none of his readers saw a problem with their joy in Thatcher’s death. And that’s when Alexander realized that “if you’re part of the Blue Tribe, then your outgroup isn’t al-Qaeda, or Muslims, or blacks, or gays, or transpeople, or Jews, or atheists – it’s the Red Tribe.”

Since Alexander wrote that post, an article has appeared based on research that confirms his hypothesis. “Fear and Loathing across Party Lines: New Evidence on Group Polarization,” by Shanto Iyengar and Sean J. Westwood, indicates that Americans today do not simply feel animus towards those who disagree with with politically, but are prepared to act on it. Their research discovers a good deal of racial prejudice, which is to be expected and which is likely to grow worse in the coming years, but people seem to think that they shouldn’t be racists or at least shouldn’t show it. However, people of one Tribe evidently believe, quite openly, that members of the other Tribe deserve whatever nastiness comes to them — and are willing to help dish out the nastiness themselves. “Despite lingering negative attitudes toward African Americans, social norms appear to suppress racial discrimination, but there is no such reluctance to discriminate based on partisan affiliation.”

That is, many Americans are happy to treat other people unfairly if those other people belong to the alien Tribe. And — this is perhaps the most telling finding of all — their desire to punish the outgroup is significantly stronger than their desire to support the ingroup. Through a series of games, Iyengar and Westwood discovered that “Outgroup animosity is more consequential than favoritism for the ingroup.”

One of my consistent themes over the years — see, for instance, here and here — has been the importance of acting politically with the awareness that people who agree with you won’t always be in charge. That is, I believe that it is reasonable and wise, in a democratic social order, to make a commitment to proceduralism: to agree with my political adversaries to abide by the same rules. That belief is on its way to being comprehensively rejected by the American people, in favor of a different model: Error has no rights.

What is being forgotten in this rush to punish the outgroup is a wise word put forth long ago by Orestes Brownson: “Error has no rights, but the man who errs has equal rights with him who errs not.”

 

[NDVirginia19]

Here's an article just published by the Cardinal Newman Society titled "Wendy Davis Hypes Abortion at Notre Dame on Feast of the Annunciation":

It was a standing ovation, albeit a standing ovation to a half filled auditorium in Debartolo. That being said the Q/A section was an absolute joke, you had to text in your questions so nobody could ask her any difficult questions or followup and just let her stand on her soapbox. The "Moderator" would, while asking Davis the questions, dismiss any challenges to Davis in the questions while reading them. I texted in "How can you justify that there is a "War on Women" that the GOP is waging when about 45% of Women identify as pro life and you lost the women vote in your Gubernatorial race?" And Candida Moss just paraphrased it, laughed it off and said it was a ridiculous question while going on to ask her some bs question like "why are you such an amazing woman" or that jazz.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

It was a standing ovation, albeit a standing ovation to a half filled auditorium in Debartolo. That being said the Q/A section was an absolute joke, you had to text in your questions so nobody could ask her any difficult questions or followup and just let her stand on her soapbox. The "Moderator" would, while asking Davis the questions, dismiss any challenges to Davis in the questions while reading them. I texted in "How can you justify that there is a "War on Women" that the GOP is waging when about 45% of Women identify as pro life and you lost the women vote in your Gubernatorial race?" And Candida Moss just paraphrased it, laughed it off and said it was a ridiculous question while going on to ask her some bs question like "why are you such an amazing woman" or that jazz.

I need to learn more about her, but based on what I know now, it's outrageous that someone with her views is allowed to teach at a prestigious Catholic university.

 

[connor_in]

It was a standing ovation, albeit a standing ovation to a half filled auditorium in Debartolo. That being said the Q/A section was an absolute joke, you had to text in your questions so nobody could ask her any difficult questions or followup and just let her stand on her soapbox. The "Moderator" would, while asking Davis the questions, dismiss any challenges to Davis in the questions while reading them. I texted in "How can you justify that there is a "War on Women" that the GOP is waging when about 45% of Women identify as pro life and you lost the women vote in your Gubernatorial race?" And Candida Moss just paraphrased it, laughed it off and said it was a ridiculous question while going on to ask her some bs question like "why are you such an amazing woman" or that jazz.

What? You didn't bring whistles and placards and shout her down and try to take over the lectern? Not even stage a die-in?

 

[NDgradstudent]

Blackfish is 25% outdated information and 75% lies.

First of all, the trainers that the whales have killed are 100% dead. Even if the interests of the whales are not taken into account, it is dangerous to humans to have insanely strong, potentially violent animals constantly interacting with them.

Second, I believe that the interests of the animals should be taken into account. These are not domesticated animals. They evolved in a particular way, for life in a particular environment. Sea World simply cannot provide that environment.

Thirdly, Sea World splits up whale families, both in the process of capturing whales and through their breeding program (which they are now ending). This is completely immoral. Human entertainment and profits do not justify this sort of treatment of highly intelligent creatures such as orcas. It is a scandal that keeping whales in captivity is legal.

 

[wizards8507]

First of all, the trainers that the whales have killed are 100% dead. Even if the interests of the whales are not taken into account, it is dangerous to humans to have insanely strong, potentially violent animals constantly interacting with them.

Second, I believe that the interests of the animals should be taken into account. These are not domesticated animals. They evolved in a particular way, for life in a particular environment. Sea World simply cannot provide that environment.

Thirdly, Sea World splits up whale families, both in the process of capturing whales and through their breeding program (which they are now ending). This is completely immoral. Human entertainment and profits do not justify this sort of treatment of highly intelligent creatures such as orcas. It is a scandal that keeping whales in captivity is legal.

Are you prepared to make the same argument for elephants, dolphins, rhinos, hippos, etc.? The conservation and education benefits of zoos and aquariums is well-documented. Nobody would give a rip about whales if they didn't experience them in person. Eliminating these programs is a quick way to dry up those conservation dollars.

 

[IrishLion]

First of all, the trainers that the whales have killed are 100% dead. Even if the interests of the whales are not taken into account, it is dangerous to humans to have insanely strong, potentially violent animals constantly interacting with them.

Second, I believe that the interests of the animals should be taken into account. These are not domesticated animals. They evolved in a particular way, for life in a particular environment. Sea World simply cannot provide that environment.

Thirdly, Sea World splits up whale families, both in the process of capturing whales and through their breeding program (which they are now ending). This is completely immoral. Human entertainment and profits do not justify this sort of treatment of highly intelligent creatures such as orcas. It is a scandal that keeping whales in captivity is legal.

I realize that going to the zoo is much more of an educational experience, but it's the same situation in terms of your beliefs on keeping large, intelligent animals in captivity. Should all zoos be illegal? Or just exhibits for large animals? Where do you draw the line on what a large animal is, and how much space they need?

 

[wizards8507]

I realize that going to the zoo is much more of an educational experience, but it's the same situation in terms of your beliefs on keeping large, intelligent animals in captivity. Should all zoos be illegal? Or just exhibits for large animals? Where do you draw the line on what a large animal is, and how much space they need?

There's also a robust accreditation process in place by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. Those people are animal people and the AZA guidelines are very strict when it comes to animal welfare.

 

[Buster Bluth]

Nobody would give a rip about whales if they didn't experience them in person. Eliminating these programs is a quick way to dry up those conservation dollars.

Says who?

 

[wizards8507]

Says who?

http://szb.org.br/blog/conteudos/bi...ing-role-of-zoos-to-conserve-biodiversity.pdf

An Error Occurred Setting Your User Cookie

http://endangeredspecies.about.com/...f-Zoos-In-Endangered-Species-Conservation.htm

 

[wizards8507]

Rush Limbaugh is doing his annual Leukemia and Lymphoma Society telethon today if any conservatives (or liberals) are interested in contributing.

https://www.radiothon.org/rush/

 

[Buster Bluth]

None of that pertains specifically to SeaWorld though. There are a bazillion different species on the planet, most of which you won't see in zoos. Visiting zoos hopefully gives someone reasons to support environmental policies for animals they have seen in person.

Your statement is doubly silly because I "give a rip" about whales and can't recall ever seeing them in person. I don't think I've ever even had a conversation about SeaWorld with any friends either.

 

[wizards8507]

None of that pertains specifically to SeaWorld though. There are a bazillion different species on the planet, most of which you won't see in zoos. Visiting zoos hopefully gives someone reasons to support environmental policies for animals they have seen in person.

https://www.aza.org/current-accreditation-list/

Your statement is doubly silly because I "give a rip" about whales and can't recall ever seeing them in person. I don't think I've ever even had a conversation about SeaWorld with any friends either.

It's not about you PERSONALLY seeing a whale. It's about zoos and aquariums putting these animals into the collective social consciousness. You can't film "Free Willy" without captive whales. There's a conservation principle known as "charismatic megafauna." These are the animals that serve as "ambassadors" for broader conservation efforts. The African "big five" game are good examples, along with whales and pandas. They get people to care about conservation in general, and a big part of that is the outreach and education provided at zoos and aquariums.

 

[Buster Bluth]

It's not about you PERSONALLY seeing a whale.

So when you said "Nobody would give a rip about whales if they didn't experience them in person" you meant not personally experiencing them in person?

It's about zoos and aquariums putting these animals into the collective social consciousness. You can't film "Free Willy" without captive whales. There's a conservation principle known as "charismatic megafauna." These are the animals that serve as "ambassadors" for broader conservation efforts. The African "big five" game are good examples, along with whales and pandas. They get people to care about conservation in general, and a big part of that is the outreach and education provided at zoos and aquariums.

I'm not arguing against zoos. I'm arguing against the idea that if people didn't see whales in zoos or SeaWorld then they wouldn't care to preserve them. I think it's crazy talk considering how accessible footage of whales is today on YouTube, etc, and the general effect zoos have on conservation. People see animals at zoos and want to help all animals.

 

[RDU Irish]

So Bruce Springsteen just cancelled his concert scheduled for this Sunday in Greensboro to protest NC House Bill 2.

I really look forward to him changing his name to Caitlyn Springsteen to back up his conviction on this issue.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

The NYT's David Brooks just published an article titled "How to Fix Politics":

In the middle of this depressing presidential campaign I sometimes wonder, How could we make our politics better?

It’s possible to imagine an elite solution. The next president could get together with the leaders of both parties in Congress and say: “We’re going to change the way we do business in Washington. We’re going to deliberate and negotiate. We’ll disagree and wrangle, but we will not treat this as good-versus-evil blood sport.” That kind of leadership might trickle down.

But it’s increasingly clear that the roots of political dysfunction lie deep in society. If there’s truly going to be improvement, there has to be improvement in the social context politics is embedded in.

In healthy societies, people live their lives within a galaxy of warm places. They are members of a family, neighborhood, school, civic organization, hobby group, company, faith, regional culture, nation, continent and world. Each layer of life is nestled in the others to form a varied but coherent whole.

But starting just after World War II, America’s community/membership mind-set gave way to an individualistic/autonomy mind-set. The idea was that individuals should be liberated to live as they chose, so long as they didn’t interfere with the rights of others.

By 1981, the pollster Daniel Yankelovich noticed the effects: “Throughout most of this century Americans believed that self-denial made sense, sacrificing made sense, obeying the rules made sense, subordinating oneself to the institution made sense. But now doubts have set in, and Americans now believe that the old giving/getting compact needlessly restricts the individual while advancing the power of large institutions … who use the power to enhance their own interests at the expense of the public.”

The individualist turn had great effects but also accumulating downsides. By 2005, 47 percent of Americans reported that they knew none or just a few of their neighbors by name. There’s been a sharp rise in the number of people who report that they have no close friends to confide in.

Civic life has suffered. As Marc J. Dunkelman writes in his compelling book “The Vanishing Neighbor,” people are good at tending their inner-ring relationships — their family and friends. They’re pretty good at tending to outer-ring relationships — their hundreds of Facebook acquaintances, their fellow progressives, or their TED and Harley fans.

But Americans spend less time with middle-ring township relationships — the PTA, the neighborhood watch.

Middle-ring relationships, Dunkelman argues, help people become skilled at deliberation. The guy sitting next to you at the volunteer fire company may have political opinions you find abhorrent, but you still have to get stuff done with him, week after week.

Middle-ring relationships also diversify the sources of identity. You might be an O’Rourke, an Irish Catholic and a professor, but you are also a citizen, importantly of the Montrose neighborhood in Houston.

With middle-ring memberships deteriorating, Americans have become worse at public deliberation. People find it easier to ignore inconvenient viewpoints and facts. Partisanship becomes a preconscious lens through which people see the world.

They report being optimistic or pessimistic depending on whether their team is in power. They become unrealistic. Trump voters don’t seem to realize how unelectable their man is because they hang out with people like themselves.

We’re good at bonding with people like ourselves but worse at bridging with people unlike ourselves. (Have you noticed that most people who call themselves “connectors” are actually excluders because they create groups restricted to people with similar status levels?)

With fewer sources of ethnic and local identity, people ask politics to fill the void. Being a Democrat or a Republican becomes their ethnicity. People put politics at the center of their psychological, emotional and even spiritual life.

This is asking too much of politics. Once politics becomes your ethnic and moral identity, it becomes impossible to compromise, because compromise becomes dishonor. If you put politics at the center of identity, you end up asking the state to eclipse every social authority but itself. Presidential campaigns become these gargantuan two-year national rituals that swallow everything else in national life.

If we’re going to salvage our politics, we probably have to shrink politics, and nurture the thick local membership web that politics rests within. We probably have to scale back the culture of autonomy that was appropriate for the 1960s but that has since gone too far.

If we make this cultural shift, we may even end up happier. For there is a paradox to longing. If each of us fulfill all of our discrete individual desires, we end up with a society that is not what we want at all.

The highest level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, self-actualization, is actually connected to the lowest level, group survival. People experience their highest joy in helping their neighbors make it through the day.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

The NYT's John Tierney just published a compelling article titled "Recycling is Garbage". It's too long to reconstruct here, but it's well worth your time if you have any interest in the subject.

And here's a First Things' article by Pete Spiliakos titled "Kempism is Dead":

The results of the New York Republican primary should be the final proof that conservatives should move beyond the Jack Kemp model of politics. But you shouldn't listen to me. You should listen to Jack Kemp's former constituents.

Jack Kemp brought a great deal of optimism to the often dreary and defeatist world of conservative politics. He believed that conservatives could win over ancestral working-class white Democrats and nonwhites to free market politics. Kemp’s own career in upstate New York indicated that this was possible (at least among working-class whites.)

But Kemp wasn't just about an attitude. Kemp was about a policy agenda where lower taxes could spur greater economic growth and even larger government tax revenues. Kemp believed in a version of immigration reform that combined upfront amnesty with expanded low-skill immigration.

Kemp was also a great believer in the benefits of free trade. Al Gore is famous for defeating Ross Perot in a 1993 debate about the North American Free Trade Agreement, but Jack Kemp also defeated Pat Buchanan in a debate on the same subject.

And while he was a tax cutter, an immigration expander, and a free trader, Kemp sold himself as a pro-labor union, pro-worker, conservative. Kemp believed that his policies were the way for conservatives to get over the idea that they were the dour bagmen for the monied interests. Lower taxes would lead to higher wages for everyone. Expanded immigration would mean that more work would be done and everybody would be better off. Americans would win from free trade (as would everyone else.) To believe anything else was to be a pessimistic Herbert Hoover Republican.

Trump has promised larger tax cuts than any Republican candidate, but nobody voted for Trump because of his promised tax cuts. Earlier in the campaign, Trump had suggested raising taxes on the rich and it did not seem to hurt him among Republican poll respondents. On immigration, one could hardly imagine anything farther removed from Kempism than Trump's promises to build a wall and mass deport our current population of unauthorized immigrants. On international trade, Trump argues that Mexico is “destroying us in terms of economic development” and has promised to punish companies that shift production out of the United States.

Well, Herbert Hoover looks to be having a bit of a comeback. In 1980, the year when Ronald Reagan was elected president—and the year when Reagan embraced Kemp's across-the-board tax cuts—Kemp represented the 38th New York congressional district. This district contained parts of Erie County. Trump won over sixty-five percent of the Republican vote in Erie County.

What happened? For one thing, a great deal has changed since 1980. Back in 1980, Kemp's across-the-board tax cuts offered relief to many wage-earners. Today, such tax cuts would primarily go to high-earners. Recent evidence indicates that free trade has done lasting harm to some regions of the US. The relatively high unemployment rate and low labor force participation rate among the lowest-skilled fraction of America's labor force would seem to put the lie to the idea that we need more low-skill workers from abroad.

And yet, we still find people clamoring for a 2016 reenactment of this earlier Kempism. You will find people arguing that we need “pro-growth” tax cuts on the wealthy to spur the economy. You will find politicians inserting expansions of low-skill guest worker programs into end-of-the-year legislation in the hopes that the public will not notice.

What has changed is the social basis for these policies. Kempism started as an opening to the working-class. Kempism argued—somewhat persuasively under the circumstances of the late-1970s—that the needs of entrepreneurs and wage-earners overlapped. Today, Kempism has degenerated into a rationalization for the interests and priorities of the affluent.

Kempism speaks for a Wall Street Journal editorial page that prioritizes tax cuts for businesses and high-earners above everything else. Kempsim speaks for the employers who want to make it easier to find workers (and to pay those workers less) as the labor market finally heats up after the Great Recession. The social basis of Kempism is now the business lobbies, and politicians like Paul Ryan whose experiences with the world of conservative think tanks are utterly alien to those of most American wage-earners.

That doesn't mean that we should abandon international trade and close our borders. It does mean, though, that we should start a serious conversation about what a pro-worker conservatism looks like under our current conditions. It means that we should start with the problems of our current population of low-skill workers (both the native-born and the foreign-born.) The Kempism of 1980 does not speak to the concerns of America's workers. America's workers have already turned their backs on the degenerate Kempsim of 2016—and they were right to do so.

 

[IrishLax]

My Governor (who I voted for) just enfranchised 200k felons because it'll make the state go blue... wait... I mean it was the "right thing to do."

Somewhere, Buster is very happy. I continue to believe that empowering criminals to make important decisions probably isn't the best way to run a government. But in general, people seem to think that Virginia's restrictions were out of line with the norm in this country and needed reform.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...-will-now-have-the-right-to-vote-in-november/

 

[Legacy]

My Governor (who I voted for) just enfranchised 200k felons because it'll make the state go blue... wait... I mean it was the "right thing to do."

Somewhere, Buster is very happy. I continue to believe that empowering criminals to make important decisions probably isn't the best way to run a government. But in general, people seem to think that Virginia's restrictions were out of line with the norm in this country and needed reform.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...-will-now-have-the-right-to-vote-in-november/

Informative article. I did not know that:
-- only eleven states remain which disenfranchise felons of the right to vote (map)
-- about 5.85 million Americans with felony convictions (and misdemeanors in several states) cannot vote.
-- the Sentencing Project estimates that 1 in 13 African Americans are prohibited from voting
-- across the country, 13 percent of African-American men have lost their right to vote due to a criminal conviction, which is seven times the national average.

I also learned that:
--- in Florida, an estimated 1.5 million Florida citizens, or 10.42% of the state’s voting-age population, are disenfranchised because of a criminal conviction.
--- the Maryland legislature this year overrode the Governor's to give felons the right to vote, affecting 40,00 people
--- Republican Governors in Florida, Iowa and Kentucky have recently recinded previous executive actions to prevent felons from voting, and
--- 17 states will have new voting restrictions in place for the first time in a presidential election. The new laws range from strict photo ID requirements to early voting cutbacks to registration restrictions.

Those 17 states are: Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

 

[irish1958]

My Governor (who I voted for) just enfranchised 200k felons because it'll make the state go blue... wait... I mean it was the "right thing to do."

Somewhere, Buster is very happy. I continue to believe that empowering criminals to make important decisions probably isn't the best way to run a government. But in general, people seem to think that Virginia's restrictions were out of line with the norm in this country and needed reform.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...-will-now-have-the-right-to-vote-in-november/

We need to respect the founding father's guidelines as espoused by Jefferson: restrict the vote to white male landowners who are current in their taxes. That would put a stop to all this nonsense by the Democrats of trying to rig the elections!

 

[Polish Leppy 22]

How we will know when America has been "fundamentally transformed."

1. Texas is a blue state

2. Soccer is more popular than football

3. Dudes are wearing leggings at the gym

4. Transgender bathrooms

5. Singing the National Anthem is racist

 

[woolybug25]

My Governor (who I voted for) just enfranchised 200k felons because it'll make the state go blue... wait... I mean it was the "right thing to do."

Somewhere, Buster is very happy. I continue to believe that empowering criminals to make important decisions probably isn't the best way to run a government. But in general, people seem to think that Virginia's restrictions were out of line with the norm in this country and needed reform.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...-will-now-have-the-right-to-vote-in-november/

While I don't think this is the kind of decision that shouldn't be made in an election year, for obvious reasons. That being said, voting is a fundamental right of citizenship. If we want be real about rehabilitating criminals, not just punishment of them, then it's important to reintroduce them back into society. If they have served their time, then taking away constitutional rights is counterproductive.

I think there could be a happy medium here though. I think politicians could negotiate (gasp) a system where felons earn their voting privileges back through a merit system or something.

 

[woolybug25]

How we will know when America has been "fundamentally transformed."

1. Texas is a blue state

2. Soccer is more popular than football

3. Dudes are wearing leggings at the gym

4. Transgender bathrooms

5. Singing the National Anthem is racist

Did you come up with that all by yourself or did you steal that from some weirdo on Instagram?

 

[Polish Leppy 22]

As many of us predicted in 2009-2010:

1) Obamacare will fail

2) By the time it starts falling apart, Obama will be out of office. Here we are:

ObamaCare Suffers Three Major Blows In One Week | Stock News & Stock Market Analysis - IBD

Marilyn Tavenner, CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans, revealed that she expects ObamaCare premium hikes “to be higher than we saw previous years,” including last year, which saw double-digit rate increases across the country.

...the ObamaCare exchanges have failed to attract enough young and healthy people needed to keep premiums down.

Finally, we learned on Tuesday that UnitedHealth Group (UNH) is planning to drop out of almost every ObamaCare market it currently serves after losing $1 billion on those policies.

 

[pkt77242]

Whiskey (and anyone else in AZ) what do you think of prop 123?

 

[Whiskeyjack]

Whiskey (and anyone else in AZ) what do you think of prop 123?

Far from perfect, but there's no politically plausible alternative at the moment.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

The NYT's Ross Douthat's Sunday column was titled "The Reactionary Mind":

OVER the last year, America’s professional intelligentsia has been placed under the microscope in several interesting ways.

First, a group of prominent social psychologists released a paper quantifying and criticizing their field’s overwhelming left-wing tilt. Then Jonathan Haidt, one of the paper’s co-authors, highlighted research showing that the entire American academy has become more left-wing since the 1990s. Then finally a new book by two conservative political scientists, “Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University,” offered a portrait of how right-wing academics make their way in a left-wing milieu. (The answer: very carefully, and more carefully than in the past.)

Meanwhile, over the same period, there has been a spate of media attention for the online movement known as “neoreaction,” which in its highbrow form offers a monarchist critique of egalitarianism and mass democracy, and in its popular form is mostly racist pro-Trump Twitter accounts and anti-P.C. provocateurs.

I suspect these two phenomena are connected — the official intelligentsia’s permanent and increasing leftward tilt, and the appeal of explicitly reactionary ideas to a strange crew of online autodidacts.

For its opportunistic fans, neoreaction just offers a pretentious justification for white male chauvinism and Trump worship. But the void that it aspires to fill is real: In American intellectual life there isn’t a far-right answer to tenured radicalism, or a genuinely reactionary style.

Our intelligentsia obviously does have a conservative wing, mostly clustered in think tanks rather than on campuses. But little of this conservatism really deserves the name reaction. What liberals attack as “reactionary” on the American right is usually just a nostalgia for the proudly modern United States of the Eisenhower or Reagan eras — the effective equivalent of liberal nostalgia for the golden age of labor unions. A truly reactionary vision has to reject more than just the Great Society or Roe v. Wade; it has to cut deeper, to the very roots of the modern liberal order.

Such deep critiques of our society abound in academia; they’re just almost all on the left. A few true reactionaries haunt the political philosophy departments at Catholic universities and publish in paleoconservative journals. But mostly the academy has Marxists but not Falangists, Jacobins but not Jacobites, sexual and economic and ecological utopians but hardly ever a throne-and-altar Joseph de Maistre acolyte. And almost no academic who writes on, say, Thomas Carlyle or T. S. Eliot or Rudyard Kipling would admit to any sympathy for their politics.

Which is, in a sense, entirely understandable: Those politics were frequently racist and anti-Semitic, the reactionary style gave aid and comfort not only to fascism but to Hitler, and in the American context the closest thing to a reactionary order was the slave-owning aristocracy of the South. From the perspective of the mainstream left, much reactionary thought should be taboo; from the perspective of the sensible center, the absence of far-right equivalents of Michel Foucault or Slavoj Zizek probably seems like no great loss.

But while reactionary thought is prone to real wickedness, it also contains real insights. (As, for the record, does Slavoj Zizek — I think.) Reactionary assumptions about human nature — the intractability of tribe and culture, the fragility of order, the evils that come in with capital-P Progress, the inevitable return of hierarchy, the ease of intellectual and aesthetic decline, the poverty of modern substitutes for family and patria and religion — are not always vindicated. But sometimes? Yes, sometimes. Often? Maybe even often.

Both liberalism and conservatism can incorporate some of these insights. But both have an optimism that blinds them to inconvenient truths. The liberal sees that conservatives were foolish to imagine Iraq remade as a democracy; the conservative sees that liberals were foolish to imagine Europe remade as a post-national utopia with its borders open to the Muslim world. But only the reactionary sees both.

Is there a way to make room for the reactionary mind in our intellectual life, though, without making room for racialist obsessions and fantasies of enlightened despotism? So far the evidence from neoreaction is not exactly encouraging.

Yet its strange viral appeal is also evidence that ideas can’t be permanently repressed when something in them still seems true.

Maybe one answer is to avoid systemization, to welcome a reactionary style that’s artistic, aphoristic and religious, while rejecting the idea of a reactionary blueprint for our politics. From Eliot and Waugh and Kipling to Michel Houellebecq, there’s a reactionary canon waiting to be celebrated as such, rather than just read through a lens of grudging aesthetic respect but ideological disapproval.

A phrase from the right-wing Colombian philosopher Nicolás Gómez Dávila could serve as such a movement’s mission statement. His goal, he wrote, was not a comprehensive political schema but a “reactionary patchwork.” Which might be the best way for reaction to become something genuinely new: to offer itself, not as ideological rival to liberalism and conservatism, but as a vision as strange and motley as reality itself.

 

[pkt77242]

What Would Happen If We Just Gave People Money? | FiveThirtyEight

I find the concept of a basic income very intriguing.

 

[IrishLax]

What Would Happen If We Just Gave People Money? | FiveThirtyEight

I find the concept of a basic income very intriguing.

I'm for it, if done correctly. I got very intrigued by the "prebate" concept of Fair Tax Bill. In general, I think there are some practical issues that you see with current welfare models (or equivalent "allowance" type programs in the military, etc.) but I do believe it can be done correctly. If we could get rid of the concept of progressive income taxes, compensate for that with basic income, and move towards VAT (and/or sales) + property taxes that's what I'd want.

 

[Irish YJ]

While interesting, I find it utopian.... it assumes all people want to be productive. Personal experience of managing large workforces the last 20+ years will refute that premise. There will always be good and bad, and there will always be driven people and folks who would prefer to sit on their @ss.

Some talk in there about Switzerland... people unhappy about potentially losing their jobs. jeesh, join the f'ing crowd. Switzerland has one of the highest if not highest income pp in the world. Lots of folks point to Switzerland as a model for this or that while ignoring the demographics, size, and other factors.... anyway, that point just struck a nerve....

loved the stack chart.