In case you haven’t noticed the list in the right sidebar, I have converted several classic posts to pages, for ease of access. Some have new names; many combine several posts on the same subject:
Constitution: Myths and Realities
Economic Growth Since World War II
From Part I:
Economists defend free trade and open borders because, in the aggregate, such things — in the long run — lead to greater economic efficiency and thus to greater total output (measured in constant dollars). And they are right about that. I have no doubt of it. But, to paraphrase John Maynard Keynes, in the long run we are all dead, and in the meantime some of us pay for the betterment of others.
Moreover, there are economists and others who like to conjoin the economic truth about the long-run consequences of free trade and open borders with statements about liberty: People ought to be free to exchange goods and services voluntarily. People ought to be free to live where they like.
Only a jejune anarchist will take such pronouncements as absolutes. Murder for hire is almost almost universally disapproved, as are many other crimes, even in this “enlightened”age. And I am unaware of a movement among affluent leftists to open their living rooms to the homeless, nor to repeal laws against trespass.
The question is, as always, where to strike a balance between the interests of those who benefit from free trade and open borders, and the interests of those for whom such things mean loss of income or higher taxes. How do the gains that accrue to some (e.g., less-expensive Lexi and abundant, low-priced nanny services) offset the burdens borne by working-class taxpayers whose jobs move overseas and whose school taxes rise to cover the costs of educating migrant children?
I ask these questions in connection with a broader issue: the purpose of our national government….
To put it bluntly but correctly, the national government exists not for the benefit of the people of the whole world or any part of it outside the United States, but for the benefit of the citizens of the United States.
From Part II:
[T]here will be in the short run (and sometimes even in the long run) a downward shift in the demand for labor in some sectors of the economy due to actions taken by foreign governments. Those actions [include] direct subsidies to industries that export goods to the U.S., … indirect subsidies in the form of tariffs and quotas on goods imported from the U.S. [, and the manipulation of exchange rates to make foreign goods cheaper relative to U.S.-made goods].
I have seen “libertarian” economists justify direct subsidies because they benefit American consumers. (The same economists are glaringly silent about the disbenefits to American workers whose jobs are lost because of the subsidies.) It is jarring to read justifications of that kind from “libertarians”, who are usually quick to put Americans and foreigners on the same plane; for example, by promoting and praising “open borders” despite considerable disbenefits to some Americans. (I am thinking of those whose neighborhoods are threatened by gangs of illegals. I am also thinking of those who pay higher taxes to subsidize the education, shelter, sustenance, and schooling of illegals — but who, unlike more affluent Americans, don’t engage the services of low-priced nannies and yard workers.)
And I must point out that those foreign-government subsidies aren’t free. They’re paid for, one way or another, by the citizens of foreign countries. Why would a “libertarian” transnationalist overlook such a thing? To justify “free trade” I guess.
It’s only fair to note that the U.S. government subsidizes American industries in ways that harm foreigners, that is, through direct subsidies, tariffs on imports, and import quotas. But any gains to workers in the industries thus subsidized do not offset the harm that foreign-government subsidies do to workers in other American industries.
All in all, international trade is a real mess. (So is domestic trade, given the myriad distortions wrought by taxes and regulations.) But it’s fair to say that some American workers are harmed by what can only be called unfair practices in international trade. The harm to them isn’t offset by the gains to other Americans. Only an economist or socialist would think otherwise.
In sum, I have come around to Mr. Trump’s view of this issue. Trade should be conducted on a level playing field. Given that that won’t happen soon — if ever — what should be done for American workers who are harmed by unfair trade? Stay tuned.
One thing that shouldn’t be done for American workers is to establish government-run “retraining” programs, which would enable civil servants and contractors to feed at the public trough while doing little or nothing for workers. What would the workers be retrained to do? Government entities are notoriously good at stasis, and notoriously bad at responding to market signals.
Then there is the challenge of identifying and quantifying the effects of unfair trade on specific American workers. I can see it now: quotas for persons of color, persons with gender dysphoria, persons of the female persuasion, etc., etc., etc. All of which would add up to another vast misallocation of resources.
What about vouchers instead of government programs? See the preceding paragraph.
Here’s how I would do it:
All other trade would be unencumbered, excepting:
Selective tariffs, based on actual costs of production, would encourage the efficient use of resources and protect American workers who would otherwise be victimized by unfair trade. But that’s it. Sweeping tariffs on imports — just to “protect” American workers — do more than protect them. They also penalize American consumers, most of whom are also workers.
No “solution” can be perfect in an imperfect (i.e., real) world. That’s the best I can do for now.
Roger Scruton, in Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition, makes this observation:
Many accuse conservatism of being no more than a highly wrought work of mourning, a translation into the language of politics of the yearning for childhood that lies deep in us all.
Conservatism is more than nostalgia. It is, as I have written,
a disposition, that is, a temperament or tendency….
The conservative disposition is cautious, but not stuck in the mud. As Michael Oakeshott puts it,
a disposition to be conservative in respect of government would seem to be pre-eminently appropriate to men who have something to do and something to think about on their own account, who have a skill to practise or an intellectual fortune to make, to people whose passions do not need to be inflamed, whose desires do not need to be provoked and whose dreams of a better world need no prompting. Such people know the value of a rule which imposes orderliness without directing enterprise, a rule which concentrates duty so that room is left for delight. [“On Being Conservative” in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, New and Expanded Edition]
A conservative (by disposition) will respect — or at least inspect — the views of others. A conservative’s default position is to respect prevailing social norms, taking them as a guide to conduct that will yield productive social and economic collaboration. Conservatism isn’t merely a knee-jerk response to authority. It reflects an understanding, if only an intuitive one, that tradition reflects wisdom that has passed the test of time. It also reflects a preference for changing tradition — where it needs changing — from the inside out, a bit at a time, rather from the outside in. The latter kind of change is uninformed by first-hand experience and therefore likely to be counterproductive, that is, destructive of social and economic cohesion and cooperation.
Yes, childhood is often remembered as a golden time. But I doubt that golden memories of childhood, or even mourning for its passage, are unique to conservatives. Take Paul Krugman, for example. He is a “liberal” in the modern, fascistic sense, and he waxes nostalgic for the 1950s, when he was a child.
Krugman’s nostalgia is probably rooted in golden memories of his childhood in a prosperous community, though he retrospectively supplies an economic justification. The 1950s were (according to him) an age of middle-class dominance before the return of the Robber Barons who had been vanquished by the New Deal. This is zero-sum economics and class warfare on steroids — standard Krugman fare.
There is, nevertheless, something to the idea that the years between the end of World War II and the early 1960s were something of a Golden Age. (See this post, for example.) But it was that way for reasons other than those offered by Krugman.
Civil society still flourished through churches, clubs, civic associations, bowling leagues, softball teams and many other voluntary organizations that (a) bound people and (b) promulgated and enforced social norms.
Those norms proscribed behavior considered harmful — not just criminal, but harmful to the social fabric (e.g., divorce, unwed motherhood, public cursing and sexuality, overt homosexuality). The norms also prescribed behavior that signaled allegiance to the institutions of civil society (e.g., church attendance, veterans’ organizations) , thereby helping to preserve them and the values that they fostered.
Yes, it was an age of “conformity”, as sneering sophisticates like to say, even as they insist on conformity to reigning leftist dogmas that are destructive of the social fabric. But it was also an age of widespread mutual trust, respect, and forbearance.
Those traits, as I have said many times (e.g., here) are the foundations of liberty, which is a modus vivendi, not a mystical essence. The modus vivendi that arises from the foundations is peaceful, willing coexistence and its concomitant: beneficially cooperative behavior — liberty, in other words.
The decade and a half after the end of World War II wasn’t an ideal world of utopian imagining. But it approached a realizable ideal. That ideal — for the nation as a whole — has been put beyond reach by the vast, left-wing conspiracy that has subverted almost every aspect of life in America.
Related reading:
Fred Reed, “Decline in the Fall (or Late Summer Anyway): by Fred Gibbon“, Fred on Everything, August 15, 2018
Gilbert T. Sewall, “1968: Freedom without License“, The American Conservative, August 16, 2018
Related pages and posts:
Leftism
Social Norms and Liberty
Liberty and Society
The Eclipse of “Old America”
Genetic Kinship and Society
Well-Founded Pessimism
America: Past, Present, and Future
IQ, Political Correctness, and America’s Present Condition
The Barbarians Within and the State of the Union
The View from Here
The Culture War
O Tempora O Mores!
A Home of One’s Own
Surrender? Hell No!
Decline
Two-Percent Tyranny
1963: The Year Zero
Society
How Democracy Works
“Cheerful” Thoughts
How Government Subverts Social Norms
Turning Points
The Twilight’s Last Gleaming?
Society, Polarization, and Dissent
My Platform
How America Has Changed
Civil War?
Red-Diaper Babies and Enemies Within
Death of a Nation
Down the Memory Hole
“Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?”
Mass Murder: Reaping What Was Sown
“Democracy” Thrives in Darkness — and Liberty Withers
Whence Polarization
There is much wailing and gnashing of teeth among the faithful because of the latest (and perhaps worst) sex scandal in the Church’s history. To compound matters, the scandal has come to public attention during the ruinous papacy of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who is more interested in Caesar than in God.
But the Church isn’t its hierarchy or its priests. It is its members:
A man’s body is all one, though it has a number of different organs; and all this multitude of organs goes to make up one body; so it is with Christ. We too, all of us, have been baptized into a single body by the power of a single Spirit, Jews and Greeks, slaves and free men alike; we have all been given drink at a single source, the one Spirit. — 1 Corinthians 12: 12-13
Those who have betrayed the Church have left it, in spirit if not in name. The Church lives on in the hearts of the faithful.
I have invoked the electorate’s “squishy center” in several posts; for example:
If a left-wing Democrat (is there any other kind now?) returns to the White House and an aggressive left-wing majority controls Congress — both quite thinkable, given the fickleness of the electorate — freedom of speech, freedom of association, and property rights will become not-so-distant memories. “Affirmative action” will be enforced on an unprecedented scale of ferocity. The nation will become vulnerable to foreign enemies while billions of dollars are wasted on the hoax of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming and “social services” for the indolent. The economy, already buckling under the weight of statism, will teeter on the brink of collapse as the regulatory regime goes into high gear and entrepreneurship is all but extinguished by taxation and regulation.
All of that will be secured by courts dominated by left-wing judges — from here to eternity.
And most of the affluent white
enablersdupes of the revolution will come to rue their actions. But they won’t be free to say so.Thus will liberty — and prosperity — die in America. Unless … the vast, squishy center of the electorate takes heart from Trump’s efforts to restore prosperity (and a semblance of constitutional governance) and votes against a left-wing resurgence. The next big test of the squishy center’s mood will occur on November 6, 2018.
How big is the squishy center? I estimated here, based on popularity ratings for Obama and Trump, that about one-third of the electorate is hard left and about one-third is staunchly conservative; thus:
Derived from presidential approval ratings compiled by Rasmussen Reports for Obama and Trump. Current as of February 8, 2019.
I concluded on this note:
Left and right — the hard left and staunch conservatism, in particular — are irreconcilable. They are in fact locked in a death-struggle over the future of America. The squishy center is along for the ride, and will change its tune … and allegiance opportunistically, in the hope that it will end up on the “right side of history”.
As for the size of the squishy center: It may comprise about one-fifth of the electorate, rather than one-third, judging by electoral oscillations since the advent of the modern Republican Party around 1920. Hyper-active Teddy Roosevelt captured the party upon his ascendancy to the bully pulpit in 1901. Though TR’s presidency ended in 1909, the GOP remained in his thrall through 1916. TR’s “Bull Moose” (Progressive) candidacy in 1912 swung the election to Woodrow Wilson — the father of the administrative state. Charles Evans Hughes, the GOP nominee in 1916, was a TR man.
The GOP returned to “normalcy” in 1920, with the election of Warren G. Harding and his running mate-cum-successor, Calvin Coolidge. By “normalcy” I mean that Harding and subsequent GOP nominees have paid lip service, and sometimes actual service, to the project of limited, constitutional government. In any event, GOP presidential candidates, whatever their platforms and programs, have been consistently to the right of their Democrat opponents.
Given that, the division of the popular vote between the two major parties gives a first-order approximation of the ideological divide:
(I attribute the dampening of the fluctuations since 1984 to the generally uninspiring character of the post-Reagan candidates. Clinton’s weak surge in 1992 and 1996 reflects his GOP opponents — Bush I and Dole. Obama’s weaker surge in 2008 reflects McCain’s bumbling performance, and a temporary burst of enthusiasm among blacks and misguided whites who wanted to send a “message” to George W. Bush.)
A similar but more precise estimate of the ideological divide can be obtained by counting the votes cast for third parties. Drawing on Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, I assigned votes to two camps, which I call Federalist and Nationalist. Federalist for the idea of a confederation where States are co-sovereign with a limited, central government; Nationalist for the idea of a strong central government of almost unchecked power, ruling over subservient States.
On the Federalist side are the GOP; the Southern Democrats of 1948 and 1968; and the Libertarians of 2016. (I count the Southern Democrats as favoring the Federalist side because of their stance on States’ rights, however ignoble the cause it served. But their inclusion does not taint the GOP, as I explain here.)
On the Nationalist side are the Democrat Party; the Socialists of 1920 and 1932; the Progressives of 1924 and 1948; the Independent/Reform parties of 1980, 1992, and 1996; and the Greens of 2000.
There are other third parties, of less consequence, that could be labeled Federalist or Nationalist — the Libertarians before 2016 and the Greens of 2016, for example. But assigning them wouldn’t make a significant difference in the picture of the ideological split, which looks like this:
The Federalist surge in the 1920s is less impressive than the GOP surge of that decade, while the Nationalist surge in the 1990s is more impressive than the Democrat surge of that decade. But the bottom line remains the same: The electorate swings between 40-60 percent in the GOP/Federalist camp and 40-60 percent in the Democrat/Nationalist camp.
That is to say, there’s a hard core Republican/Federalist vote of 40 percent and a hard-core Democrat/Nationalist vote of 40 percent. The other 20 percent can’t make up its collective mind. But it’s the decisive 20 percent.
There is a long-standing charge that the Republican Party’s electoral success in the South is due to racism. When the charge was levied 11 years ago by Paul Krugman, I addressed it here. Though my response was correct in the main, I would change some of it.
Dinesh D’Souza has given me the perfect opening. His recent article at American Greatness, “The Switch That Never Happened: How the South Really Went GOP” (July 29, 2018), addresses several recent variants on the thesis propounded by Krugman (and many others). D’Souza’s article is a very long adaptation of his new book, Death of a Nation. What follows is just a sample of D’Souza’s key points (the bracketed headings are mine):
[The Donkey in the Room: The Democrat Party as the Party of Theft]
Let’s begin with a critical question: Did the two parties switch platforms? In other words, is the GOP still the party of Lincoln or, as progressives insist, would Lincoln today be a Democrat?…
It should be obvious from [Lincoln’s own statements] that Lincoln’s basic ideology that people have a right to the fruits of their labor, and that government, if it gets involved at all, should merely provide idlers and indigents with the means to become self-supporting, is even today the basic ideology of Republicans. And it is equally clear that the confiscatory principle “You work, I eat” is even today the basic ideology of Democrats. The entire welfare state, from the New Deal through the Great Society to contemporary Democratic schemes, are all rooted in the same plantation philosophy of legally-sanctioned theft that Lincoln identified more than a century and a half ago.
[A] majority of blacks became Democrats in the 1930s. This was at a time when the Democratic Party was manifestly the party of segregation and the Ku Klux Klan. FDR, who got less than one-third of the black vote in 1932, got 75 percent of the black vote in 1936.
Why would blacks leave the party of emancipation and resistance to segregation and lynching and join the party of bigotry and white supremacy? The depressing answer is that blacks did it in exchange for the crumbs that they got from FDR’s New Deal. We have seen earlier how FDR designed the New Deal to exclude African-Americans and preserve Jim Crow. How delighted and amused FDR must have been to see blacks coming over to his camp even as his administration worked closely with racist Democrats to screw them over…..
So FDR bought off the African American vote at a bargain-basement price in the 1930s. Yet this secured the Democrats a decisive, but not unanimous, black vote. Democrats had around 75 percent, and they remained in that range from the 1930s through the 1960s. Then LBJ consciously directed a large portion of his Great Society benefits to blacks, and bought off another big chunk of the black vote for the Democratic Party.
Since LBJ, blacks have voted for Democrats in the 90 percent range. This second generation of blacks in overwhelming numbers gave their electoral consent to becoming part of LBJ’s Democratic plantation….
[T]he timing and motivation of the black switch is a decisive refutation of the progressive lie that blacks wisely left the Republican Party because they recognized it as the party of white supremacy, and joined the Democratic Party because they knew it had become the party of civil rights. That wasn’t the perception; neither was it the reality.
[What about Goldwater and Nixon?]
Nixon lost [Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia in 1968]. Goldwater won [four of those] states [plus South Carolina] in 1964, the only states he carried other than his native Arizona. Not that Goldwater was a racist—he was a founding member of the Arizona NAACP and had pushed to integrate the Arizona National Guard and the Phoenix public schools. He had supported the Civil Rights Act of 1957 which established a Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department, as well as another civil rights bill in 1960.
Goldwater objected to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on libertarian grounds; he did not believe the federal government was constitutionally authorized to regulate discrimination in the private sector. Sadly, Goldwater’s principled stand was misunderstood by many African-Americans, who saw Goldwater as a racist and his party, the GOP, as the party of racism.
These sensitivities on the part of blacks were, of course, understandable. Unfortunately for the GOP they cost the party dearly. Previously, Martin Luther King, Jr., had maintained his independence from both parties; now he joined the Democratic camp. And Goldwater paid not only with a disastrous election loss but also with the loss of his reputation: the characterization of Goldwater as a racist, although false, has endured as a staple among today’s progressives….
[Kevin] Phillips argued [in The Emerging Republican Majority] that Nixon understood that he could never win a majority by appealing to the Deep South. He had just seen Goldwater win the Deep South and lose the rest of the country in considerable part because of his position on the Civil Rights Act….
What Nixon did, according to Phillips, is appeal to the Sun Belt, “a new conservative entity stretching from Florida across Texas to California.” The Sun Belt reflected a modernizing economy grounded in defense, manufacturing, technology, and services and was—and still is—the fastest growing part of the country. Phillips argued that whoever wins the Sun Belt wins the presidency….
In the South itself, Nixon targeted the urban population of the Outer or Peripheral South. Nixon was not after the Deep South states of Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina or Alabama; he barely campaigned in those states. Rather, he was after the Peripheral South states of Florida, Texas, Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia…. And within these states, Nixon’s campaign focused on cities: Tampa, Atlanta, Dallas, Little Rock, Norfolk, Raleigh, Nashville.
… Nixon appealed to these Peripheral South voters not on the basis of race but rather on the basis of Republican policies of entrepreneurial capitalism and economic success. In other words, he went after the Peripheral South’s nonracist, upwardly mobile voters, leaving the Deep South racists to the Democratic Party. And sure enough, in 1968 Nixon won Virginia, Tennessee, and Florida in the Peripheral South and the entire Deep South went to the racist Dixiecrat George Wallace.
How the South Became Republican
… This question is taken up in political scientists Byron Shafer and Richard Johnston’s important study, The End of Southern Exceptionalism….
… Shafer and Johnston show, first, that the South began its political shift in the Eisenhower era. Eisenhower, who won five Peripheral South states in 1956, was the first Republican to break the lock that the FDR Democrats had established in the South. Obviously, this early shift preceded the civil rights movement and cannot be attributed to it….
[T]he increasingly industrial “new South” was very receptive to the free market philosophy of the Republican Party. Thus Shafer and Johnston introduce class as a rival explanation to race for why the South became Republican. In the 1960s, however, they cannot ignore the race factor. Shafer and Johnson’s ingenuity is to find a way to test the two explanations—race and class—against each other, in order to figure out which one is more important.
Shafer and Johnston do this by dividing the South into two camps, the first made up of the wealthier, more industrial, more racially integrated South—this is the New South—and the second made up of the rural, agricultural, racially homogeneous South; this is the Old South that provided the historical base of the Democratic Party. Shafer and Johnson sensibly posit that if white Southerners are becoming Republican because of hostility to blacks, one would expect the Old South to move over first.
But, in fact, Shafer and Johnson find, through a detailed examination of the demographic data, this is not the case. The wealthier, more industrial, more integrated New South moves first into the Republican Party. This happens in the 1950s and 1960s. By contrast, the rural, agricultural, racially homogeneous Old South resists this movement.
[The Fault Is on the Left]
Eventually, the Old South also transitions into the GOP camp. But this is not until the late 1970s and through the 1980s, in response to the Reaganite appeal to free-market capitalism, patriotism, pro-life, school prayer, family values. These economic and social issues were far more central to Reagan’s message than race, and they struck a chord beyond—no less than within—the South. In 1980, Reagan lost just six states; in 1984 he lost only Walter Mondale’s home state of Minnesota. Obviously, Reagan didn’t need a specific Southern Strategy; he had an American strategy that proved wildly successful.
Reagan’s success, however, was made possible by the sharp leftward move by the Democratic Party starting with the nomination of George McGovern in 1972 and continuing through the 1970s. This swing to the left, especially on social and cultural issues like school prayer, pornography, recreational drugs and abortion, receives virtually no mention by progressive scholars because it disrupts their thesis that the trend in the South to the GOP was motivated primarily by race.
As far as congressional House and Senate seats are concerned, the South didn’t become solidly Republican until 1994. Again, this was due to the Newt Gingrich agenda that closely mirrored the Reagan agenda….
… The South has now become like the rest of the country. Southerners are Republican for the same reason that other Americans are Republican. And black Southerners vote Democratic for the same reason that blacks everywhere else vote Democratic. For whites no less than blacks, economic issues are predominant, foreign policy and social issues count too, and race has relatively little to do with it.
We can sum up by drawing two lines in the South, the line of racism and the line of Republican affiliation. When we draw these lines we see that they run in opposite directions. Survey data show that racism declines dramatically throughout the second half of the 20th century, and precisely during this period the South moves steadily into the GOP camp. Thus as the South becomes less racist, it becomes more Republican. The progressive narrative is in ruins.
Much of D’Souza’s narrative is captured in a simple graph, which I must explain before introducing and discussing it:
Here is the result:
The proximity of the means and medians attests to their validity as measures of the Confederacy’s political alignment with the rest of the nation. Values below 100 percent mean that the States of the Confederacy were less prone than other States to vote for GOP candidates. Values above 100 percent mean that the States of the Confederacy were more prone than other States to vote for GOP candidates. There was something like parity in only five elections: 1868, 1872, 1960, 1980, and 1984.
As Reconstruction ended in the South, Democrats gradually reasserted political control and began to suppress the black vote, which had been heavily Republican. The suppression of the black vote was, by the early 1900s, as complete as it would be. As a result of racist Democrat policies, the South had become overwhelmingly Democrat, and would remain so through the 1940s. (The only exception came in 1928, when the Democrat candidate was Al Smith, a Roman Catholic.)
D’Souza’s explanation for what happened after that is compelling and needs no elaboration. The South has become the North in reverse, growing strongly Republican (as the North has become strongly Democrat) for reasons of political ideology, not of race.
The real complaint of Krugman and other “progressives” is that Republicans have been winning elections far too often to suit them. They have a case of Republican Derangement Syndrome which is so severe that they can only attribute the GOP’s success to racism. That is because they are unwilling to attribute it to the inferiority of the “progressive” agenda.
The charge of racism is misdirected by 180 degrees. Racist “progressives” — theirs is the bigotry of low expectations — are conjoining psychological projection and an outdated stereotype of Southerners to paint Southern Republicans as knuckle-dragging racists.
Related reading: Dinesh D’Souza, “LBJ’s Democratic Plantation“, American Greatness, September 2, 2018
Related page and posts:
Leftism
“Intellectuals and Society”: A Review
The Left’s Agenda
The Left and Its Delusions
Politics, Sophistry, and the Academy
The Culture War
Ruminations on the Left in America
Academic Ignorance
The Euphemism Conquers All
Superiority
God-Like Minds
Non-Judgmentalism as Leftist Condescension
An Addendum to (Asymmetrical) Ideological Warfare
Retrospective Virtue-Signalling
Leftist Condescension
“Tribalists”, “Haters”, and Psychological Projection
is not an historical period, but a process of social, psychological or spiritual development, unbound to time or place. Immanuel Kant defines “enlightenment” in his famous contribution to debate on the question in an essay entitled “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” (1784), as humankind’s release from its self-incurred immaturity; “immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.” Expressing convictions shared among Enlightenment thinkers of widely divergent doctrines, Kant identifies enlightenment with the process of undertaking to think for oneself, to employ and rely on one’s own intellectual capacities in determining what to believe and how to act. Enlightenment philosophers from across the geographical and temporal spectrum tend to have a great deal of confidence in humanity’s intellectual powers, both to achieve systematic knowledge of nature and to serve as an authoritative guide in practical life. This confidence is generally paired with suspicion or hostility toward other forms or carriers of authority (such as tradition, superstition, prejudice, myth and miracles), insofar as these are seen to compete with the authority of one’s own reason and experience. Enlightenment philosophy tends to stand in tension with established religion, insofar as the release from self-incurred immaturity in this age, daring to think for oneself, awakening one’s intellectual powers, generally requires opposing the role of established religion in directing thought and action. The faith of the Enlightenment – if one may call it that – is that the process of enlightenment, of becoming progressively self-directed in thought and action through the awakening of one’s intellectual powers, leads ultimately to a better, more fulfilled human existence.
The Enlightenment’s great flaw — probably fatal to Western civilization — is found in the contrast between the two passages that are highlighted in bold, italic type. I will not go on at length about the Enlightenment because I have addressed it elsewhere, directly and by implication (e.g., here, here, here, here, eighth item here, here, here, and here).
Suffice it to say that the Enlightenment is fixated on “reason”, which all too often is flawed logic applied to false “facts” and piled upon prejudice. It rejects, when it does not ignore, the wisdom that resides in tradition. It scorns the civilizing norms represented in tradition, norms upon which liberty depends, despite the false and contrary “logic” of “enlightened” thinkers like John Stuart Mill.
Here is an apt passage from Richard Fernandez’s review of Michael Walsh’s The Fiery Angel:
Deleting God, patriotism, heroic myths and taboos and all the “useless stuff” from Western culture turns out to be as harmless as navigating to the system folder (like C:\Windows\System32), “selecting all,” and pressing delete. Far from being clever, it leads to consequences far greater than anyone anticipated.
The Enlightenment reminds me of O.J. Simpson’s bloody glove. A single “fact” — that the glove seemed tight on O.J.’s hand — was instrumental in the acquittal of Simpson in the murder of his ex-wife and a friend of hers. This sliver of unreasonable doubt obscured the overwhelming evidence against Simpson. Later, he was found responsible for the murders in a civil trial, and then all but admitted his guilt in a book.
And so it is with “reason” and Western civilization. The pillars that have supported it and given it great economic and social strength are being destroyed, one at a time. Each move, as it is made, is portrayed (by its advocates) as “logical” and “reasonable” — and even consistent with liberty.
As I wrote 11 years ago,
Robin Hanson makes a mistake [here] that is common to “rationalists”: He examines every thread of human behavior for “reasonableness.”
It is the fabric of human behavior that matters, not each thread. Any thread, if pulled out of the fabric, might look defective under the microscope of “reason.” But pulling threads out of a fabric — one at a time — can weaken a strong and richly textured tapestry.
Whether a particular society is, in fact, a “strong and richly textured tapestry” is for its members to determine, through voice and exit. The “reasonableness” of a society’s norms (if they are voluntarily evolved) should be judged by whether those norms — on the whole — foster liberty (as explained here), not by the whether each norm, taken in isolation, is “reasonable” to a pundit inveighing from on high.
UPDATE (11/01/07): Hanson has updated his post…. But he digs himself a deeper, rationalistic hole when he says
I’ll now only complain about [Russ Roberts’s] bias to hold his previous beliefs to a lower standard than he holds posssible alternatives.
He should complain, rather, about his own, too-easy willingness to reject the wisdom of inherited beliefs on the basis of statistical analysis.
The Age of Enlightenment is the age of empty logic and the nirvana fallacy.
Related reading: Nathaniel Blake, “Why Reason Turned Into A Dead End For Enlightenment Philosophy“, The Federalist, September 24, 2018
In “Rescuing Conservatism” I distinguish between “true” conservatives — persons who are conservative by disposition, not ideology, — and faux conservatives — bloviators like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and Michael Savage.
I go on to say that
[in] the conservative view, government would … be limited to making and enforcing the few rules that are required to adjudicate what [Michael] Oakeshott calls “collisions.” And there are always foreign and domestic predators who are beyond the effective reach of voluntary social institutions and must be dealt with by a superior force.
By thus limiting government to the roles of referee and defender of last resort, civil society is allowed to flourish, both economically and socially. Social conservatism is analogous to the market liberalism of libertarian economics. The price signals that help to organize economic production have their counterpart in the “market” for social behavior (which really encompasses economic behavior). Behavior which is seen to advance a group’s well-being is encouraged; behavior which is seen to degrade a group’s well-being is discouraged.
Taking a stance about the proper scope of government might seem to be an ideological position. And it is one, in the hands of anarchists, who imagine that their “ought” — no government (of any kind) — can be transformed into an “is”. The conceit of anarchism is that human beings are always peacefully cooperative and never driven by power-lust.
Government of some kind is as inevitable as conflict and the urge to control others. It is therefore better to form an accountable state — and strive to keep it accountable — than to have one thrust upon you.
The argument for government, as I have just posed it, isn’t ideological. It doesn’t begin with a particular view about the need for government, or the lack of such a need. It simply takes human nature into account and argues that government is inevitable. Given its inevitability, it is better to take the bull by the horns and shape it in a way that serves the interests of the persons subject to it.
Most sentient beings of the human persuasion, having better or more urgent things to do with their time, skip over the argument for government and go directly to the power it ought to have. Again, this isn’t necessarily a matter of ideology, a prefabricated belief in what “ought” to be. But it has become primarily a matter of ideology, for the reasons given by Joseph Sobran in his “Pensees: Notes for the Reactionary of Tomorrow“. (Sobran, despite his egregious blind spot regarding the Holocaust, was a brilliant thinker and writer.) Sobran writes:
Most of the world is a mystery. Consciousness is a little clearing in a vast forest; every individual has his own special relation to the area of mystery, his own little discoveries to impart. Discovery is by definition unpredictable, and it is absurd for the state to foreclose the process of learning. There are moods when we are too exhausted to imagine that there is still more to be learned; an ideology is a system of ideas that wants to end the explorations we are constantly making at the margin of consciousness, and to declare all the mysteries solved. This is like the congressman who introduced a bill a century ago to close the U.S. Patent Office, on the ground that every possible invention had already been invented.
And so, as a result of the system of indoctrination known as public education — with reinforcement from the internet-media-academic complex — most Americans (like most human beings) have adopted this ready-made belief: Government exists not just to protect citizens and their beneficially cooperative behavior, but also to “solve their problems” — as those problems are defined by government officials and parties with vested interests in the adoption of certain “solutions”. (This is nothing new, of course. Go here and read “The Framers’ Fatal Error”.)
The ready-made belief is an ideology. Or, rather, it is a meta-ideology which has been sliced and diced into a range of specific ideologies (many of the inchoate) about the proper scope of government power.
The range of ideologies includes some that have been called conservative. That is to say, there are conservative ideologies, as distinct from conservatism, which is a disposition. James Burnham addresses that distinction, and others, in Suicide of the West (1964):
As a rule it is not the several values (ideals, goals) to which a man adheres that reveal most about his character and conduct, but rather the order of priority in which the values are arranged. It tells us little about John Doe to know that for him life is an important value. So it is for nearly all men; not quite all, but nearly all. But we will have learned much about John if we find out whether life is for him a value more important than any other; or, if not, what other value is more important than life. Better Red than Dead? . . . Liberty or Death? . . . Death before Dishonor? . . . My life, that another may live? . . .
Suppose that we use the term “Liberty” to designate national independence and self-government — the meaning that was presumably in Patrick Henry’s mind; “Freedom,” to designate the freedom, or liberties, of the individual; “Justice,” to mean distributive justice of a more or less social welfare sort — that is, a reasonable amount of material well-being for everyone along with an absence of gross exploitation or discrimination; 1 and “Peace,” to signify the absence of large-scale warfare among major powers.
Liberty, Freedom and Justice are the three primary social values or goals that have been approved or at least professed by nearly everybody — not quite everybody, but nearly everybody — in Western civilization, whatever the political philosophy or program, since the Renaissance. The fourth — Peace — has moved into the front rank during the present century, especially since the advent of nuclear weapons.
Most people want, or think they want, all four of these values; but, the way the world goes, it is not possible to realize the four equally on all occasions. One value must be subordinated or sacrificed to another, or others. Whether we wish to or not, each of us is compelled for practical purposes to arrange the four values in a certain hierarchy — if liberals will permit the word — or order of priority.
For the older liberalism of the nineteenth century [as epitomized by John Stuart Mill], the standard order, starting with the value that was regarded as the most important, was:
Freedom
Liberty
Justice
PeaceFor twentieth-century liberalism up to a decade or so after the First World War [i.e., Progressivism], the order became:
Justice
Freedom
Liberty
PeaceFrom that time until after the Second World War, the last two tended to shift positions, so that the liberal ranking became:
Justice
Freedom
Peace
LibertySince the coming into being of full-scale nuclear systems, the standard liberal order has become:
Peace
Justice
Freedom
LibertyThis evolution expresses summarily the rise in the relative importance, for liberalism, of the ideas of social reform and the Welfare State, and the gradual shift of stress from national sovereignty to internationalism.
The significance of these ratings becomes more marked when we contrast them with non-liberal orders. For example, the form of contemporary self-styled conservatism that is really a kind of right-wing anarchism [i.e., standard libertarianism] accepts an order that is the same as that of nineteenth-century liberalism, except for a displacement of Peace:
Freedom
Peace
Liberty
JusticeHowever, this ideology (for this form of conservatism is also an ideology) grades the last three so much below the first that they must almost be thought of as belonging to a different scale; and it tends to interpret Freedom primarily in terms of laissez faire economics.
The form of contemporary conservatism that might be called traditional — which is not an ideology [emphasis added] — would not judge, or feel, that there is any fixed order of priority for the major social values. Under the specific circumstances of this specific time, it would probably rate the four here under consideration as:
Liberty
Freedom
Peace
Justice
I would say that this is now the standard leftist (“liberal”) ordering of the four values:
Justice – Peace
Freedom – Liberty
With a huge gap between the first pair and the second pair.
Burnham’s ranking of the values of ideological “conservatism” (i.e., standard libertarianism) seems to fit today’s “libertarians”. (The “sneer quotes” are explained in some of the posts listed below.)
Most important, Burnham correctly characterizes conservatism as a non-ideology and hesitantly ranks the values of conservatives of the day (early 1960s). Speaking for myself, he has it right, and not just for the early 1960s. Burnham’s ranking aligns with what I call right–minarchism. It is an ideology that seems to fit the conservative disposition comfortably.
As argued in many of the items listed below, conservatism is true libertarianism. Indeed, many so-called libertarians seek to impose particular values on the populace, even going so far as to enlist the power of the state to that end.
Related page and posts:
Social Norms and Liberty
Pseudo-Libertarian Sophistry vs. True Libertarianism
More Pseudo-Libertarianism
Understanding Hayek
Why I Am Not an Extreme Libertarian
What Is Libertarianism?
True Libertarianism, One More Time
Liberty and Society
The Eclipse of “Old America”
Genetic Kinship and Society
Liberty as a Social Construct: Moral Relativism?
Defending Liberty against (Pseudo) Libertarians
Defining Liberty
Modern Liberalism as Wishful Thinking
“Liberalism” and Personal Responsibility
My View of Libertarianism
More About Social Norms and Liberty
Social Justice vs. Liberty
Liberal Nostrums
Liberty and Social Norms Re-examined
“Liberalism” and Leftism
Disposition and Ideology
My View of Mill, Endorsed
Order vs. Authority
Suicide or Destiny?
The left, in its drive to impose its agenda on the nation, has become censor-at-large. (See, for example, this, this, this, this, this, and this. Also, this, which addresses Google’s slanting of search results about climate research. YouTube is at it, too.)
If you have followed this blog for many years, you will know that I am not a free-speech absolutist. (See this, this, and this, for example.) Nor do I subscribe to the conceit that the “best” ideas will emerge triumphant in the so-called marketplace of ideas. (See this and this.) The “marketplace of ideas” ensures only that the most popular ideas or those with the strongest political backing will prevail. Nor is science immune to persistent error.
Regarding freedom of speech, I draw on James Burnham‘s The Struggle for the World:
Democracy in practice has never, and could never, interpret the right of free speech in an absolute and unrestricted sense. No one, for example, is allowed to advocate, and organize for, mass murder, rape, and arson. No one feels that such prohibitions are anti-democratic….
We may generalize as follows. The principles of an organized society cannot be interpreted in practice in such a way as to make organized society impossible. The special principles of a special form of government, in this case democratic government, cannot be interpreted in practice in such a way as to make that form of government impossible.
Here is Burnham again, in Suicide of the West:
Liberalism [of the kind that prevailed in the early 1960s] defines free speech and the related freedoms of assembly and association, as it does “peace” and “disarmament,” in abstraction, without tying them to specific persons and circumstance. For liberalism, these freedoms are the procedural rules sustaining a democratic society that rests on the will of the majority and solves its internal conflicts of interest and opinion through continuous discussion, negotiation and compromise. But this meaning of free speech and the related freedoms is significant and operable only for those who share the wish or at least willingness to have and preserve some sort of free and constitutional society. For those others— and they are not few among us— whose aim is to subvert, overthrow and replace free and constitutional society, these freedoms of speech, assembly and the rest are merely convenient levers to use in accomplishing their purpose.
The liberal ideologue is thus caught in the inescapable dilemma of his own making that we have previously examined. If he extends the freedoms to the subverters, they will use them, as they have done in one nation after another, to throw the free society into turmoil and in the end to destroy it. But if he denies the freedoms to anyone, he will feel, does feel, that he has betrayed his own principles, “imitated the methods of the enemy,” and thus joined the company of subverters. So, when a showdown with the subverters comes, as it comes from time to time to all nations, the liberals are demoralized in advance, if they do finally forget ideology and decide to resist, by the guilt generated from this feeling of self-betrayal. Let us note that this is a purely ideological trap. Common sense, unlike ideology, understands that you can play a game only with those who accept the rules; and that the rules’ protection does not cover anyone who does not admit their restrictions and penalties.
Bear in mind that Burnham was writing when “liberals” actually subscribed to the notion of unfettered speech — in principle, at least. The ACLU, a leading “liberal” institution, had consistently defended the speech rights of so-called hate groups and political figures deemed unpalatable by the left. I say “had” because the ACLU has joined the ban-wagon against “hate” speech, that is, speech which offends the sensitivities of “liberals”.
If there is one idea that today’s “liberals” (leftists) share with conservatives, it is that absolute freedom of speech can undermine liberty. The rub is that leftists mean something other than liberty when they use the word. Their idea of liberty includes, among many anti-libertarian things (e.g., coerced redistribution of income), the rejection and suppression of facts and opinions just because they are disagreeable to the left. (In addition to the items linked to in the first paragraph, see this item about the reaction to the mayor of Chicago’s statement about the cause of the high homicide rate in his city, and this small sample of relevant posts: here, here, here, here, here, and here.)
In sum, the left’s stance on freedom of speech has nothing to do with the preservation of liberty and everything to do with the advancement of an anti-libertarian agenda.
Here’s the game plan:
- Define opposition to illegal immigration, Islamic terrorism, same-sex marriage, transgenderism, and other kinds violent and anti-social behavior as “hate“.
- Associate “hate” with conservatism.
- Watch as normally conservative politicians, business people, and voters swing left rather than look “mean” and put up a principled fight for conservative values.
- Watch as Democrats play the “hate” card to retake the White House and Congress.
With the White House in the hands of a left-wing Democrat (is there any other kind now?) and an aggressive left-wing majority in Congress, freedom of speech, freedom of association, and property rights will become not-so-distant memories. “Affirmative action” (a.k.a. “diversity”) will be enforced on an unprecedented scale of ferocity. The nation will become vulnerable to foreign enemies while billions of dollars are wasted on the hoax of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming and “social services” for the indolent. The economy, already buckling under the weight of statism, will teeter on the brink of collapse as the regulatory regime goes into high gear and entrepreneurship is all but extinguished by taxation and regulation.
All of that will be secured by courts dominated by left-wing judges — from here to eternity.
The left’s game plan is threatened by those who speak against illegal immigration, Islamic terrorism, etc.; for freedom of association, property rights, etc.; and for the right to speak about such things. Thus the left’s virulent, often violent, and increasingly conspiratorial attacks on conservatives and the suppression of conservative discourse.
This all came to pass because of free-speech absolutism. Unfettered speech isn’t necessary to liberty. In fact, it can undermine it, given that liberty, properly understood, is not a spiritual state of bliss. It is, as I have written,
a modus vivendi, not the result of a rational political scheme. Though a rational political scheme, such as the one laid out in the Constitution of the United States, could promote liberty.
The key to a libertarian modus vivendi is the evolutionary development and widespread observance of social norms that foster peaceful coexistence and mutually beneficial cooperation.
Unfettered speech, obviously, can undermine the modus vivendi. It can do so directly, by shredding social norms — the bonds of mutual trust, respect, and forbearance that underlie the modus vivendi that is liberty. And it can do so indirectly by subverting the institutions that preserve the modus vivendi. One of those institutions, in the United States, is the rule of law under a Constitution that was meant to limit the power of government, leaving people free to govern themselves in accordance with the norms of civil society. The steady rise of governmental power has in fact shredded social norms and subverted civil society. Which is precisely what the left wants, so that it can remake “society” to its liking.
It follows, therefore, that liberty can be rescued only by suppressing the left’s anti-libertarian actions. If that seems anti-libertarian, I refer you back to James Burnham.
Winning and preserving liberty is not for the faint of heart, or for free-speech absolutists whose rationalism clouds their judgment. They are morally equivalent to pacifists who declare that preemptive war is always wrong, and who would wait until the enemy has struck a mortal blow before acting against the enemy — if then.
The left is at war against liberty, and has been for a long time. Preemptive war against the left is therefore long overdue. If the left wins, will there be freedom of speech and a “marketplace of ideas” (however flawed)? Of course not.
Ironically, leftists subscribe to the view that “extremist ideas” should be suppressed. This is from a piece at The Verge by Laura Hudson (writing before Twitter joined the ban-wagon against Alex Jones):
While many, including [Jack] Dorsey [co-founder of Twitter] seem to fear that striking Jones down from media platforms will only make him more powerful, media manipulation research lead Joan Donovan at the research institute Data & Society tells The Verge that throughout her work, she has observed the opposite: once you remove the biggest megaphones from bad actors, their power diminishes and their ability to attract larger audiences and sow disinformation decreases. Instead of promoting no-holds-barred speech, he might instead embrace the principle suggested by Boyd and Donovan in their case for quarantining extremist ideas: “all Americans have the right to speak their minds, but not every person deserves to have their opinions amplified, particularly when their goals are to sow violence, hatred and chaos.”
The second link in that quotation leads to an article at The Guardian by Arwa Mahdawi. She begins with the American Nazi Party of George Lincoln Rockwell:
Campus by campus, from Harvard to Brown to Columbia, [Rockwell] would use the violence of his ideas and brawn of his followers to become headline news. To compel media coverage….
Contemporary Jewish community groups challenged journalists to consider not covering white supremacists’ ideas. They called this strategy “quarantine”….
In regions where quarantine was deployed successfully, violence remained minimal and Rockwell was unable to recruit new party members….
Strategic silence is not a new idea. The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s considered media coverage their most effective recruitment tactic and accordingly cultivated friendly journalists. According to Felix Harcourt, thousands of readers joined the KKK after the New York World ran a three-week chronicle of the group in 1921. Catholic, Jewish and black presses of the 1920s consciously differed from Protestant-owned mainstream papers in their coverage of the Klan, conspicuously avoiding giving the group unnecessary attention. The black press called this use of editorial discretion in the public interest “dignified silence”, and limited their reporting to KKK follies, such as canceled parades, rejected donations and resignations. Some mainstream journalists also grew suspicious of the KKK’s attempts to bait them with camera-ready spectacles. Eventually coverage declined….
The emphasis of strategic silence must be placed on the strategic over the silencing. Every story requires a choice and the recent turn toward providing equal coverage to dangerous, antisocial opinions requires acknowledging the suffering that such reporting causes. Even attempts to cover extremism critically can result in the media disseminating the methods that hate groups aim to spread, such as when Virginia’s Westmoreland News reproduced in full a local KKK recruitment flier on its front page. Media outlets who cannot argue that their reporting benefits the goal of a just and ethical society must opt for silence.
Newsrooms must understand that even with the best of intentions, they can find themselves being used by extremists. By contrast, they must also understand they have the power to defy the goals of hate groups by optimizing for core American values of equality, respect and civil discourse. All Americans have the right to speak their minds, but not every person deserves to have their opinions amplified, particularly when their goals are to sow violence, hatred and chaos [emphasis added].
I agree completely with the italicized passage. Leftists are violent and hateful toward those who disagree with them. Their return to power and the success of their agenda, which may not be far away, will result in the complete destruction of the social norms and civilizing institutions that held this country more or less together between the end of the Civil War and the 1960s. The left’s return to power will result in the suppression and criminalization of anything and anyone standing in the way of its destructive agenda.
Will a new (shooting) civil war result if (when) the left takes full control of the central government? There is much talk about the possibility, accompanied by inflated rhetoric about the people with guns (mainly conservatives) “kicking ass” of the people without guns (mainly leftists). But that is wishful and possibly suicidal thinking. If a new (shooting) civil war comes it will come only after the left has assumed control of the central government and begun its reign of terror. It will then control surveillance systems, troops, and weapons for which a mostly untrained “army” of rifle-toting patriots will be no match. Terrorist acts by the patriots, unless carefully aimed at government installations and troops actually engaged in suppressive operations, will only backfire and cause the silent majority to scurry into the protective arms of the central government.
I counsel a step back from the brink of civil war. But it’s a step that can be taken only while there is a Republican president in the White House. The left is right about strategic silence. And it works both ways. The left’s censorious ways must be , for liberty’s sake. Here is how to do it, constitutionally.
I am reading the real Suicide of the West (1964), by James Burnham — as opposed to Jonah Goldberg’s ersatz (2018) version. I will in due course publish a review of Burnham’s book. It will be a long review because the book if chock-full of wisdom and spot-on observations.
Burnham’s book is subtitled An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism, though it is far more than an essay. By “liberalism” Burnham means the modern kind that gradually replaced the “classical” kind in the 19th and 20th centuries. (See my post, “Inventing Liberalism“.) Burnham’s explanation of the change is one of the topics I will take up in my review.
In the meantime, I can’t resist quoting Burnham on the subject of virtue-signaling. He doesn’t use that term, which seems to be of recent vintage, but he describes the phenomenon perfectly:
Let us consider the situation of a member of our affluent society, and let us assume him to be from the more rather than less affluent half, who is no longer deeply committed in spirit to the interlocked Christian doctrines of Original Sin, the Incarnation and Redemption, which constitute the Christian solution. His guilt nevertheless exists; he is conscious of it, and feels the anxiety that it generates. What is he going to do about it, and think about it?
Liberalism permits him to translate his guilt into the egalitarian, anti-discrimination, democratist, peace-seeking liberal principles, and to transform his guilty feeling into that “passion for reform” of which Professor [J. Salwyn] Schapiro speaks [in Liberalism: Its Meaning and History]. If he is an activist, he can actually sign on as a slum clearer, Freedom Rider, Ban the Bomber or Peace Corpsman, or join a Dr. Schweitzer or Dr. Dooley in the jungle. But activists of that literal sort are always a minority. The more significant achievement of liberalism, by which it confirms its claim to being considered a major ideology, is its ability to handle the problem of guilt for large numbers of persons without costing them undue personal inconvenience. This it does by elevating the problem to representational, symbolic and institutional levels. It is not necessary for me to go in person to the slum, jungle, prison, Southern restaurant, state house or voting precinct and there take a direct hand in accomplishing the reform that will unblock the road to peace, justice and well-being. Thanks to the reassuring provisions of the liberal ideology, I can go about my ordinary business and meanwhile take sufficient account of my moral duties by affirming my loyalty to the correct egalitarian principles, voting for the correct candidates, praising the activists and contributing to their defense funds when they get into trouble, and joining promptly in the outcry against reactionaries who pop up now and then in a desperate effort to preserve power and privilege.
“Liberalism”, as Burnham defines it in Suicide of the West, has changed in some particulars since 1964, particulars that I will address in my review. But, in the main, Burnham has nailed it, as “they” say nowadays. If you are in the market for a sound analysis of “liberalism”, skip Goldberg and go with Burnham.
Regarding the claim that there are more wildfires because of “climate change”:
In case the relationship isn’t obvious, here it is:
Estimates of the number of fires are from National Fire Protection Association, Number of Fires by Type of Fire. Specifically, the estimates are the sum of the columns for “Outside of Structures with Value Involved but no vehicle (outside storage crops, timber, etc)“ and “Brush, Grass, Wildland (excluding crops and timber), with no value or loss involved”.
Estimates of the global temperature anomalies are annual averages of monthly satellite readings for the lower troposphere, published by the Earth Science System Center of the University of Alabama-Huntsville.
This is a long-overdue entry; the previous one was posted on October 4, 2017. Accordingly, it is a long entry, consisting of these parts:
Censorship and Left-Wing Bias on the Web
Evolution, Intelligence, and Race
Will the Real Fascists Please Stand Up?
CENSORSHIP AND LEFT-WING BIAS ON THE WEB
It’s a hot topic these days. See, for example, this, this, this, this, and this. Also, this, which addresses Google’s slanting of search results about climate research. YouTube is at it, too.
A lot of libertarian and conservative commentators are loath to demand governmental intervention because the censorship is being committed by private companies: Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, et al. Some libertarians and conservatives are hopeful that libertarian-conservative options will be successful (e.g., George Gilder). I am skeptical. I have seen and tried some of those options, and they aren’t in the same league as the left-wingers, which have pretty well locked up users and advertisers. (It’s called path-dependence.) And even if they finally succeed in snapping up a respectable share of the information market, the damage will have been done; libertarians and conservatives will have been marginalized, criminalized, and suppressed.
The time to roll out the big guns is now, as I explain here:
Given the influence that Google and the other members of the left-wing information-technology oligarchy exert in this country, that oligarchy is tantamount to a state apparatus….
These information-entertainment-media-academic institutions are important components of what I call the vast left-wing conspiracy in America. Their purpose and effect is the subversion of the traditional norms that made America a uniquely free, prosperous, and vibrant nation….
What will happen in America if that conspiracy succeeds in completely overthrowing “bourgeois culture”? The left will frog-march America in whatever utopian direction captures its “feelings” (but not its reason) at the moment…
Complete victory for the enemies of liberty is only a few election cycles away. The squishy center of the American electorate — as is its wont — will swing back toward the Democrat Party. With a Democrat in the White House, a Democrat-controlled Congress, and a few party switches in the Supreme Court, the dogmas of the information-entertainment-media-academic complex will become the law of the land….
[It is therefore necessary to] enforce the First Amendment against information-entertainment-media-academic complex. This would begin with action against high-profile targets (e.g., Google and a few large universities that accept federal money). That should be enough to bring the others into line. If it isn’t, keep working down the list until the miscreants cry uncle.
What kind of action do I have in mind?…
Executive action against state actors to enforce the First Amendment:
Amendment I to the Constitution says that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech”.
Major entities in the telecommunications, news, entertainment, and education industries have exerted their power to suppress speech because of its content. (See appended documentation.) The collective actions of these entities — many of them government- licensed and government-funded — effectively constitute a governmental violation of the Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of speech (See Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944) and Marsh v. Alabama, 326 U.S. 501 (1946).)
And so on. Read all about it here.
Not quite as hot, but still in the news, is Spygate. Collusion among the White House, CIA, and FBI (a) to use the Trump-Russia collusion story to swing the 2016 election to Clinton, and (b) failing that, to cripple Trump’s presidency and provide grounds for removing him from office. The latest twist in the story is offered by Byron York:
Emails in 2016 between former British spy Christopher Steele and Justice Department official Bruce Ohr suggest Steele was deeply concerned about the legal status of a Putin-linked Russian oligarch, and at times seemed to be advocating on the oligarch’s behalf, in the same time period Steele worked on collecting the Russia-related allegations against Donald Trump that came to be known as the Trump dossier. The emails show Steele and Ohr were in frequent contact, that they intermingled talk about Steele’s research and the oligarch’s affairs, and that Glenn Simpson, head of the dirt-digging group Fusion GPS that hired Steele to compile the dossier, was also part of the ongoing conversation….
The newly-released Ohr-Steele-Simpson emails are just one part of the dossier story. But if nothing else, they show that there is still much for the public to learn about the complex and far-reaching effort behind it.
My take is here. The post includes a long list of related — and enlightening — reading, to which I’ve just added York’s piece.
Less “newsy”, but a hot topic on the web a few weeks back, is Jonah Goldberg’s Suicide of the West. It received mixed reviews. It is also the subject of an excellent non-review by Hubert Collins.
Here’s my take:
The Framers held a misplaced faith in the Constitution’s checks and balances (see Madison’s Federalist No. 51 and Hamilton’s Federalist No. 81). The Constitution’s wonderful design — containment of a strictly limited central government through horizontal and vertical separation of powers — worked rather well until the Progressive Era. The design then cracked under the strain of greed and the will to power, as the central government began to impose national economic regulation at the behest of muckrakers and do-gooders. The design then broke during the New Deal, which opened the floodgates to violations of constitutional restraint (e.g., Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, the vast expansion of economic regulation, and the destruction of civilizing social norms), as the Supreme Court has enabled the national government to impose its will in matters far beyond its constitutional remit.
In sum, the “poison pill” baked into the nation at the time of the Founding is human nature, against which no libertarian constitution is proof unless it is enforced resolutely by a benign power.
See also my review essay on James Burnham’s Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism.
EVOLUTION, INTELLIGENCE, AND RACE
Evolution is closely related to and intertwined with intelligence and race. Two posts and a page of mine (here, here, and here) delve some of the complexities. The latter of the two posts draws on David Stove‘s critique of evolutionary theory, “So You Think You Are a Darwinian?“.
Fred Reed is far more entertaining than Stove, and no less convincing. His most recent columns on evolution are here and here. In the first of the two, he writes this:
What are some of the problems with official Darwinism? First, the spontaneous generation of life has not been replicated…. Nor has anyone assembled in the laboratory a chemical structure able to metabolize, reproduce, and thus to evolve. It has not been shown to be mathematically possible….
Sooner or later, a hypothesis must be either confirmed or abandoned. Which? When? Doesn’t science require evidence, reproducibility, demonstrated theoretical possibility? These do not exist….
Other serious problems with the official story: Missing intermediate fossils–”missing links”– stubbornly remain missing. “Punctuated equilibrium,” a theory of sudden rapid evolution invented to explain the lack of fossil evidence, seems unable to generate genetic information fast enough. Many proteins bear no resemblance to any others and therefore cannot have evolved from them. On and on.
Finally, the more complex an event, the less likely it is to occur by chance. Over the years, cellular mechanisms have been found to be ever more complex…. Recently with the discovery of epigenetics, complexity has taken a great leap upward. (For anyone wanting to subject himself to such things, there is The Epigenetics Revolution. It is not light reading.)
Worth noting is that that the mantra of evolutionists, that “in millions and millions and billions of years something must have evolved”–does not necessarily hold water. We have all heard of Sir James Jeans assertion that a monkey, typing randomly, would eventually produce all the books in the British Museum. (Actually he would not produce a single chapter in the accepted age of the universe, but never mind.) A strong case can be made that spontaneous generation is similarly of mathematically vanishing probability. If evolutionists could prove the contrary, they would immensely strengthen their case. They haven’t….
Suppose that you saw an actual monkey pecking at a keyboard and, on examining his output, saw that he was typing, page after page, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, with no errors.
You would suspect fraud, for instance that the typewriter was really a computer programmed with Tom. But no, on inspection you find that it is a genuine typewriter. Well then, you think, the monkey must be a robot, with Tom in RAM. But this too turns out to be wrong: The monkey in fact is one. After exhaustive examination, you are forced to conclude that Bonzo really is typing at random.
Yet he is producing Tom Sawyer. This being impossible, you would have to conclude that something was going on that you did not understand.
Much of biology is similar. For a zygote, barely visible, to turn into a baby is astronomically improbable, a suicidal assault on Murphy’s Law. Reading embryology makes this apparent. (Texts are prohibitively expensive, but Life Unfolding serves.) Yet every step in the process is in accord with chemical principles.
This doesn’t make sense. Not, anyway, unless one concludes that something deeper is going on that we do not understand. This brings to mind several adages that might serve to ameliorate our considerable arrogance. As Haldane said, “The world is not only queerer than we think, but queerer than we can think.” Or Fred’s Principle, “The smartest of a large number of hamsters is still a hamster.”
We may be too full of ourselves.
On the subject of race, Fred is no racist, but he is a realist; for example:
We have black football players refusing to stand for the national anthem. They think that young black males are being hunted down by cops. Actually of course black males are hunting each other down in droves but black football players apparently have no objection to this. They do not themselves convincingly suffer discrimination. Where else can you get paid six million green ones a year for grabbing something and running? Maybe in a district of jewelers.
The non-standing is racial hostility to whites. The large drop in attendance of games, of television viewership, is racial blowback by whites. Millions of whites are thinking, that, if America doesn’t suit them, football players can afford a ticket to Kenya. While this line of reasoning is tempting, it doesn’t really address the problem and so would be a waste of time.
But what, really, is the problem?
It is one that dare not raise its head: that blacks cannot compete with whites, Asians, or Latin-Americans. Is there counter-evidence? This leaves them in an incurable state of resentment and thus hostility. I think we all know this: Blacks know it, whites know it, liberals know it, and conservatives know it. If any doubt this, the truth would be easy enough to determine with carefully done tests. [Which have been done.] The furious resistance to the very idea of measuring intelligence suggests awareness of the likely outcome. You don’t avoid a test if you expect good results.
So we do nothing while things worsen and the world looks on astounded. We have mob attacks by Black Lives Matter, the never-ending Knockout Game, flash mobs looting stores and subway trains, occasional burning cities, and we do nothing. Which makes sense, because there is nothing to be done short of restructuring the country.
Absolute, obvious, unacknowledged disaster.
Regarding which: Do we really want, any of us, what we are doing? In particular, has anyone asked ordinary blacks, not black pols and race hustlers. “Do you really want to live among whites, or would you prefer a safe middle-class black neighborhood? Do your kids want to go to school with whites? If so, why? Do you want them to? Why? Would you prefer black schools to decide what and how to teach your children? Keeping whites out of it? Would you prefer having only black police in your neighborhood?”
And the big one: “Do you, and the people you actually know in your neighborhood, really want integration? Or is it something imposed on you by oreo pols and white ideologues?”
But these are things we must never think, never ask.
Which brings me to my most recent post about blacks and crime, which is here. As for restructuring the country, Lincoln saw what was needed.
The touchy matter of intelligence — its heritability and therefore its racial component — is never far from my thoughts. I commend to you Gregory Hood’s excellent piece, “Forbidden Research: How the Study of Intelligence is Crippled by Ideology“. Hood mentions some of the scientists whose work I have cited in my writings about intelligence and its racial component. See this page, for example, which give links to several related posts and excerpts of relevant research about intelligence. (See also the first part of Fred Reed’s post “Darwin’s Vigilantes, Richard Sternberg, and Conventional Pseudoscience“.)
As for the racial component, my most recent post on the subject (which provides links to related posts) addresses the question “Why study race and intelligence?”. Here’s why:
Affirmative action and similar race-based preferences are harmful to blacks. But those preferences persist because most Americans do not understand that there are inherent racial differences that prevent blacks, on the whole, from doing as well as whites (and Asians) in school and in jobs that require above-average intelligence. But magical thinkers (like [Professor John] McWhorter) want to deny reality. He admits to being driven by hope: “I have always hoped the black–white IQ gap was due to environmental causes.”…
Magical thinking — which is rife on the left — plays into the hands of politicians, most of whom couldn’t care less about the truth. They just want the votes of those blacks who relish being told, time and again, that they are “down” because they are “victims”, and Big Daddy government will come to their rescue. But unless you are the unusual black of above-average intelligence, or the more usual black who has exceptional athletic skills, dependence on Big Daddy is self-defeating because (like a drug addiction) it only leads to more of the same. The destructive cycle of dependency can be broken only by willful resistance to the junk being peddled by cynical politicians.
It is for the sake of blacks that the truth about race and intelligence ought to be pursued — and widely publicized. If they read and hear the truth often enough, perhaps they will begin to realize that the best way to better themselves is to make the best of available opportunities instead of moaning abut racism and relying on preferences and handouts.
WILL THE REAL FASCISTS PLEASE STAND UP?
I may puke if I hear Trump called a fascist one more time. As I observe here,
[t]he idea … that Trump is the new Hitler and WaPo [The Washington Post] and its brethren will keep us out of the gas chambers by daring to utter the truth (not)…. is complete balderdash, inasmuch as WaPo and its ilk are enthusiastic hand-maidens of “liberal” fascism.
“Liberals” who call conservatives “fascists” are simply engaging in psychological projection. This is a point that I address at length here.
As for Mr. Trump, I call on Shawn Mitchell:
A lot of public intellectuals and writers are pushing an alarming thesis: President Trump is a menace to the American Republic and a threat to American liberties. The criticism is not exclusively partisan; it’s shared by prominent conservatives, liberals, and libertarians….
Because so many elites believe Trump should be impeached, or at least shunned and rendered impotent, it’s important to agree on terms for serious discussion. Authoritarian means demanding absolute obedience to a designated authority. It means that somewhere, someone, has unlimited power. Turning the focus to Trump, after 15 months in office, it’s impossible to assign him any of those descriptions….
…[T]here are no concentration camps or political arrests. Rather, the #Resistance ranges from fervent to rabid. Hollywood and media’s brightest stars regularly gather at galas to crudely declare their contempt for Trump and his deplorable supporters. Academics and reporters lodged in elite faculty lounges and ivory towers regularly malign his brains, judgment, and temperament. Activists gather in thousands on the streets to denounce Trump and his voters. None of these people believe Trump is an autocrat, or, if they do they are ignorant of the word’s meaning. None fear for their lives, liberty, or property.
Still, other elites pile on. Federal judges provide legal backup, contriving frivolous theories to block administrations moves. Some rule Trump lacks even the authority to undo by executive order things Obama himself introduced by executive order. Governors from states like California, Oregon and New York announce they will not cooperate with administration policy (current law, really) on immigration, the environment, and other issues.
Amidst such widespread rebellion, waged with impunity against the constitutionally elected president, the critics’ dark warnings that America faces a dictator are more than wrong; they are surreal and damnable. They are what amounts to the howl of that half the nation still refusing to accept election results it dislikes.
Conceding Trump lacks an inmate or body count, critics still offer theories to categorize him in genus monsterus. The main arguments cite Trump’s patented belligerent personality and undisciplined tweets, his use of executive orders; his alleged obstruction in firing James Comey and criticizing Robert Mueller, his blasts at the media, and his immigration policies. These attacks weigh less than the paper they might be printed on.
Trump’s personality doubtless is sui generis for national office. If he doesn’t occasionally offend listeners they probably aren’t listening. But so what? Personality is not policy. A sensibility is not a platform, and bluster and spittle are not coercive state action. The Human Jerk-o-meter could measure Trump in the 99th percentile, and the effect would not change one law, eliminate one right, or jail one critic.
Executive Orders are misunderstood. All modern presidents used them. There is nothing wrong in concept with executive orders. Some are constitutional some are not. What matters is whether they direct executive priorities within U.S. statutes or try to push authority beyond the law to change the rights and duties of citizens. For example, a president might order the EPA to focus on the Clean Air Act more than the Clean Water Act, or vice versa. That is fine. But, if a president orders the EPA to regulate how much people can water their lawns or what kind of lawns to plant, the president is trying to legislate and create new controls. That is unconstitutional.
Many of Obama’s executive orders were transgressive and unconstitutional. Most of Trump’s executive orders are within the law, and constitutional. However that debate turns out, though, it is silly to argue the issue implicates authoritarianism.
The partisan arguments over Trump’s response to the special counsel also miss key points. Presidents have authority to fire subordinates. The recommendation authored by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein provides abundant reason for Trump to have fired James Comey, who increasingly is seen as a bitter anti-Trump campaigner. As for Robert Mueller, criticizing is not usurping. Mueller’s investigation continues, but now readily is perceived as a target shoot, unmoored from the original accusations about Russia, in search of any reason to draw blood from Trump. Criticizing that is not dictatorial, it is reasonable.
No doubt Trump criticizes the media more than many modern presidents. But criticism is not oppression. It attacks not freedom of the press but the credibility of the press. That is civically uncomfortable, but the fact is, the war of words between Trump and the media is mutual. The media attacks Trump constantly, ferociously and very often inaccurately as Mollie Hemingway and Glenn Greenwald document from different political perspectives. Trump fighting back is not asserting government control. It is just challenging media assumptions and narratives in a way no president ever has. Reporters don’t like it, so they call it oppression. They are crybabies.
Finally, the accusation that Trump wants to enforce the border under current U.S. laws, as well as better vet immigration from a handful of failed states in the Middle East with significant militant activity hardly makes him a tyrant. Voters elected Trump to step up border enforcement. Scrutinizing immigrants from a handful of countries with known terrorist networks is not a “Muslim ban.” The idea insults the intelligence since there are about 65 majority Muslim countries the order does not touch.
Trump is not Hitler. Critics’ attacks are policy disputes, not examples of authoritarianism. The debate is driven by sore losers who are willing to erode norms that have preserved the republic for 240 years.
Amen.
For a complete change of pace I turn to a post by Bill Vallicella about consciousness:
This is an addendum to Thomas Nagel on the Mind-Body Problem. In that entry I set forth a problem in the philosophy of mind, pouring it into the mold of an aporetic triad:
1) Conscious experience is not an illusion.
2) Conscious experience has an essentially subjective character that purely physical processes do not share.
3) The only acceptable explanation of conscious experience is in terms of physical properties alone.
Note first that the three propositions are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true. Any two limbs entail the negation of the remaining one. Note second that each limb exerts a strong pull on our acceptance. But we cannot accept them all because they are logically incompatible.
This is one hard nut to crack. So hard that many, following David Chalmers, call it, or something very much like it, the Hard Problem in the philosophy of mind. It is so hard that it drives some into the loony bin. I am thinking of Daniel Dennett and those who have the chutzpah to deny (1)….
Sophistry aside, we either reject (2) or we reject (3). Nagel and I accept (1) and (2) and reject (3). Those of a scientistic stripe accept (1) and (3) and reject (2)….
I conclude that if our aporetic triad has a solution, the solution is by rejecting (3).
Vallicella reaches his conclusion by subtle argumentation, which I will not attempt to parse in this space.
My view is that (2) is false because the subjective character of conscious experience is an illusion that arises from the physical properties of the central nervous system. Consciousness itself is not an illusion. I accept (1) and (3). For more, see this and this.
Andrew Scull addresses empathy:
The basic sense in which most of us use “empathy” is analogous to what Adam Smith called “sympathy”: the capacity we possess (or can develop) to see the world through the eyes of another, to “place ourselves in his situation . . . and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence from some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them”….
In making moral choices, many would claim that empathy in this sense makes us more likely to care about others and to consider their interests when choosing our own course of action….
Conversely, understanding others’ feelings doesn’t necessarily lead one to treating them better. On the contrary: the best torturers are those who can anticipate and intuit what their victims most fear, and tailor their actions accordingly. Here, Bloom effectively invokes the case of Winston Smith’s torturer O’Brien in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, who is able to divine the former’s greatest dread, his fear of rats, and then use it to destroy him.
Guest blogger L.P. addressed empathy in several posts: here, here, here, here, here, and here. This is from the fourth of those posts:
Pro-empathy people think less empathetic people are “monsters.” However, as discussed in part 2 of this series, Baron-Cohen, Kevin Dutton in The Wisdom of Psychopaths, and other researchers establish that empathetic people, particularly psychopaths who have both affective and cognitive empathy, can be “monsters” too.
In fact, Kevin Dutton’s point about psychopaths generally being able to blend in and take on the appearance of the average person makes it obvious that they must have substantial emotional intelligence (linked to cognitive empathy) and experience of others’ feelings in order to mirror others so well….
Another point to consider however, as mentioned in part 1, is that those who try to empathize with others by imagining how they would experience another’s situation aren’t truly empathetic. They’re just projecting their own feelings onto others. This brings to mind Jonathan Haidt’s study on morality and political orientation. On the “Identification with All of Humanity Scale,” liberals most strongly endorsed the dimension regarding identification with “everyone around the world.” (See page 25 of “Understanding Libertarian Morality: The psychological roots of an individualist ideology.”) How can anyone empathize with billions of persons about whom one knows nothing, and a great number of whom are anything but liberal?
Haidt’s finding is a terrific example of problems with self-evaluation and self-reported data – liberals overestimating themselves in this case. I’m not judgmental about not understanding everyone in the world. There are plenty of people I don’t understand either. However, I don’t think people who overestimate their ability to understand people should be in a position that allows them to tamper with, or try to “improve,” the lives of people they don’t understand….
I conclude by quoting C. Daniel Batson who acknowledges the prevailing bias when it comes to evaluating altruism as a virtue. This is from his paper, “Empathy-Induced Altruistic Motivation,” written for the Inaugural Herzliya Symposium on Prosocial Motives, Emotions, and Behavior:
[W]hereas there are clear social sanctions against unbridled self-interest, there are not clear sanctions against altruism. As a result, altruism can at times pose a greater threat to the common good than does egoism.
I have addressed Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s “libertarian” paternalism and “nudging in many posts. (See this post, the list at the bottom of it, and this post.) Nothing that I have written — clever and incisive as it may be — rivals Deirdre McCloskey’s take on Thaler’s non-Nobel prize, “The Applied Theory of Bossing“:
Thaler is distinguished but not brilliant, which is par for the course. He works on “behavioral finance,” the study of mistakes people make when they talk to their stock broker. He can be counted as the second winner for “behavioral economics,” after the psychologist Daniel Kahneman. His prize was for the study of mistakes people make when they buy milk….
Once Thaler has established that you are in myriad ways irrational it’s much easier to argue, as he has, vigorously—in his academic research, in popular books, and now in a column for The New York Times—that you are too stupid to be treated as a free adult. You need, in the coinage of Thaler’s book, co-authored with the law professor and Obama adviser Cass Sunstein, to be “nudged.” Thaler and Sunstein call it “libertarian paternalism.”*…
Wikipedia lists fully 257 cognitive biases. In the category of decision-making biases alone there are anchoring, the availability heuristic, the bandwagon effect, the baseline fallacy, choice-supportive bias, confirmation bias, belief-revision conservatism, courtesy bias, and on and on. According to the psychologists, it’s a miracle you can get across the street.
For Thaler, every one of the biases is a reason not to trust people to make their own choices about money. It’s an old routine in economics. Since 1848, one expert after another has set up shop finding “imperfections” in the market economy that Smith and Mill and Bastiat had come to understand as a pretty good system for supporting human flourishing….
How to convince people to stand still for being bossed around like children? Answer: Persuade them that they are idiots compared with the great and good in charge. That was the conservative yet socialist program of Kahneman, who won the 2002 Nobel as part of a duo that included an actual economist named Vernon Smith…. It is Thaler’s program, too.
Like with the psychologist’s list of biases, though, nowhere has anyone shown that the imperfections in the market amount to much in damaging the economy overall. People do get across the street. Income per head since 1848 has increased by a factor of 20 or 30….
The amiable Joe Stiglitz says that whenever there is a “spillover” — my ugly dress offending your delicate eyes, say — the government should step in. A Federal Bureau of Dresses, rather like the one Saudi Arabia has. In common with Thaler and Krugman and most other economists since 1848, Stiglitz does not know how much his imagined spillovers reduce national income overall, or whether the government is good at preventing the spill. I reckon it’s about as good as the Army Corps of Engineers was in Katrina.
Thaler, in short, melds the list of psychological biases with the list of economic imperfections. It is his worthy scientific accomplishment. His conclusion, unsupported by evidence?
It’s bad for us to be free.
CORRECTION: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this article referred to Thaler’s philosophy as “paternalistic libertarianism.” The correct term is “libertarian paternalism.”
No, the correct term is paternalism.
I will end on that note.
Drawing on the database maintained by Robert Shiller, author of Irrational Exuberance, I estimated the constant-dollar value of the S&P Composite Index (S&P) with dividends reinvested. The validity of my estimate is confirmed by comparing it with the Wilshire 5000 Total Return Index (WLX), which is based on the reinvestment of dividends in the underlying stocks:
FIGURE 1
“Real” means that the underlying values are inflation-adjusted. The indices are equated to 1 in December 1970 because that is the first month of the WLX.
Shiller uses a cyclically adjusted price-earnings ratio (CAPE) based on the inflation-adjusted value of S&P and earnings on the constituent stocks. Specifically, he uses the current inflation-adjusted price divided by the average of inflation-adjusted earnings for the preceding 10 years. Accordingly, he calls it CAPE-10:
FIGURE 2
What is the relationship between the value of CAPE-10 for a particular month and the total return on the S&P over an extended period? Shiller’s database (which is reconstructed, of course) goes back to January 1871. January 1881 is therefore the date of his earliest CAPE-10 value. This graph shows the relationship between CAPE-10 and total returns for all 15-year periods beginning January 1881 and ending June 2018:
FIGURE 3
There’s an inverse relationship, as you would expect. But it’s a loose one because of marked shifts in the value of CAPE-10.
There’s a much tighter relationship for the “modern” financial era. I trace the beginning of this era to about 1982, when the stock market bottomed (see Figures 1 and 2) while inflation was receding from its post-World War II peak in 1980:
FIGURE 4
Here’s the relationship between CAPE-10 and real, annualized 15-year returns on the S&P since 1982:
FIGURE 5
The current value of CAPE-10 is about 32. If the relationship in Figure 5 holds true for the next 15 years, investors can expect real, annualized returns (with dividends reinvested) of 2 percent to 4 percent on broadly diversified mutual funds and stock portfolios.
Not great, you say? Well, the current real return on Baa-rated corporate bonds is about 1.5 percent. It’s less than that for Aaa-rated bonds, Treasury issues, most CDs, money-market funds, and deposit accounts. So if you’re into buy-and-hold, the stock market isn’t a bad bet. Alternatively, you can try to pick the next “big thing” — Tesla, for example.
“MAD, Again“draws on my correspondence with a colleague of yore who had asked me to review a couple of papers he has written about U.S. naval strategy. My reviews were hard-nosed but kind. I did not tell him that he is one of the
analysts of the hand-wringing kind who believed that Reagan’s defense buildup would bring on World War III. What it did, of course, was bring about the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.
That’s from “Mad, Again”, and it describes my colleague to a T. “MAD, Again” addresses his fear that the mere peacetime expression of a threat to Russia’s ballistic-missile submarines (SSBNs) would prove destabilizing. I say, for example, that
it would be taken as given by Russian leaders that the U.S. could wage an anti-SSBN campaign, even if the U.S. didn’t advertise its ability or intention to do so. If the possibility of an anti-SSBN campaign somehow threatened MAD, it would be logical for the U.S. to deprive itself of the ability to conduct it. But the continued ownership by the U.S. of a fleet of SSNs doesn’t seem to have sparked strategic instability.
By the same token, it would be logical to reduce NATO’s war-fighting capability so that a European war would end in a draw, with no need for Russia to escalate to tactical-nuclear or strategic-nuclear warfare to prevent defeat in a conventional war.
But MAD negates the kind of logic adduced above. MAD renders it most unlikely that the U.S. would undertake an anti-SSBN campaign unless the nuclear-warfare genie had already slipped out of the bottle through some horrendous mistake or work of sabotage.
Similarly, it is most unlikely that Russia would go nuclear in the event of an impending defeat in Europe – as long as the Russian homeland weren’t threatened – given the suicidal consequences of doing so….
U.S. discussions and demonstrations of an anti-SSBN capability amount to nothing more than saber-rattling, which is a useful reminder (if any were needed) of the power and reach of U.S. forces.
His response to my argument was to defend his hand-wringing with some beside the point hand-waving:
[Y]our assessment of the likely (small, “saber-rattling”) weight of strategic ASW seems persuasive – except from a Soviet point of view. Their SSBN strategic reserve was of the utmost importance in their plans for World War III. Being able to threaten it was thus potentially a genuine source of strategic leverage for the US.
In any event, and despite my rash characterization of U.S. saber-rattling as possibly counter-productive because it uses resources that might be put to better military use, I am whole-heartedly in favor of aggressive displays of U.S. military prowess to remind the world that America is no longer the patsy that it was under Obama. Daniel Greenfield puts it this way:
On October 1962, destroyers from the Second Fleet streamed out to intercept Russian vessels suspected of delivering missiles to Cuba. Under the shadow of DEFCON 2, Vice Admiral Alfred Ward, commander of the Second Fleet, watched over a blockade of Cuba. The Navy men putting Russian ships under their guns knew that they were the tip of the spear in what might at any moment become the next world war.
The Russians had ordered their ships to keep going. It was up to the Second Fleet to hold the line….
On September 2011, under the leftist politico whose admirers tried to sell him as another JFK, the flag of the Second Fleet was taken down. The fleet that had taken point against the Russians was no more….
These days, Obama’s party is mired in a haze of Russian paranoia. But it was their leader who dismantled our first lines of defense and Trump who is restoring our military deterrence.
Seven years after Obama shuttered the Second Fleet, its flag is flying again…. And it will watch over the East Coast and the Atlantic to checkmate Russian subs.
The shutdown of the Second Fleet was part of Obama’s failed pivot to Asia which ended with a humiliating apology to China for flying a plane too close to one of the Communist dictatorship’s fake South China Sea islands. (Trump has since dispatched B-52s, outraging China, with no apology.)
That was December 2015.
On January 2016, the complete collapse of naval credibility led Iran to seize two United States Navy boats, steal classified information, hold their crews hostage and humiliate them on television.
Obama had forced the Navy to grovel to China. Why not Iran?
Instead of taking decisive action against this second Iran hostage crisis, the appeasement administration instead used it to spin the success of the Iran Deal. The humiliation of the Navy was complete.
But the humiliation of the United States Navy and the United States of America ended on Jan 20, 2017.
The restoration of the Second Fleet is an important step in the revival of America’s Navy. But the full scope of the harm Obama inflicted on our readiness will take generations of hard work to repair….
The great dismantling of our military fueled Chinese, Russian and Islamic aggressive expansionism. But now the Second Fleet will be headquartered in Norfolk along with NATO’s Joint Force Command for the Atlantic. While media pundits wailed about Trump’s commitment to NATO, Norfolk sends a clear and direct message to the Russians and to NATO about American capabilities and determination.
Under Obama, Russian attack subs and spy ships showed up on our coastlines, approaching naval bases, coming close to our waters, occasionally passing undetected, testing our capabilities and our nerve. While Obama did nothing about the threat to our naval forces, Trump shut down the Russian consulate in Seattle to stop its spying on Naval Base Kitsap, one of the homes of our underwater nuclear arsenal.
Our capabilities have room to regrow, but no matter how much the media lies, our nerve is not lacking….
“American ships will sail the seas, American planes will soar the skies, American workers will build our fleets,” President Trump had declared at the dedication of the USS Gerald R. Ford.
Ford brings the Navy up to 11 carriers. Obama took the Navy below its mandated minimum strength. Now for the first time since those terrible years of appeasement, American naval power is recovering.
By the time Trump is ready to leave office, the Navy should be back up to twelve carriers again. A few years later, the People’s Republic of China expects to have four carriers. Its advanced new vessels will likely rely on stolen technology ripped off by Chinese hackers in the weak and feckless Obama years.
These include the Littoral Combat Ship and Aegis system designs.
The Democrats and the media howling about the national security threat from Russian hackers remain uninterested in the Chinese hacks that stole some of our most vital and advanced national security secrets. They expect us to believe that hacking John Podesta and Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s emails, and posting spam on Facebook, was a bigger threat than China making off with the F-35 plans.
China’s ambitious new supercarrier designs take advantage of our failures during the Obama era. These carriers show that the People’s Republic is thinking of projecting force beyond its territories and islands.
And China has worked closely together with Russia. Its first carrier is an unfinished Russian model. Russian and Chinese vessels are also participating in joint naval maneuvers because they know that seapower hasn’t, despite Obama’s assertions, gone the way of the era of horses and bayonets.
Not a day goes by without Democrat politicians and media ranting that President Trump is failing to protect us from Russian attacks. The return of the Second Fleet is an example of how Trump is doing just that. It doesn’t take the military to protect Democrat email accounts from hackers….
While Obama cut the US Navy, the Russians added warships with cruise missiles. They’re adding an amphibious assault ship capable of carrying 13 tanks. Their missile patrol boats are being hailed for their innovative designs. Putin has announced 26 new ships will be added to the Russian Navy this year.
Where are all the Democrats who shout about how we need to challenge Russia? Nowhere.
In 2016, a Russian warship made it to within 300 yards of the USS Gravely. The Gravely was protecting the USS Harry S. Truman. The warship pointed at the Truman. As usual, Obama did nothing.
These days, the Harry S. Truman Carrier Group is already sending a message to Russian subs in the Atlantic. If the Democrats want to see Trump standing up to Russia, they can look to the waves. [“Trump Confronts Russia with the Fleet Obama Sank“, Frontpage Mag, August 2, 2018]
Related posts:
Defense as the Ultimate Social Service
How to View Defense Spending
Liberalism and Sovereignty
The Decision to Drop the Bomb
A Grand Strategy for the United States
Transnationalism and National Defense
Defense as an Investment in Liberty and Prosperity
Defense Spending: One More Time
Presidential Treason
“A Date Which Will Live in Infamy”
Today’s Lesson in Economics: How to Think about War
It’s a MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD World
MAD, Again
Incorporated in this post.
UPDATED 09/02/20
I downloaded Word Spark to my Fire tablet on March 19, 2018. (It was then also available for iOS and Android devices.) There are 600 puzzles in all, grouped in 30 packs of 20 puzzles each. Working at the rate of about 4 puzzles a day, I completed the 600th puzzle on August 2, 2018.* That puts me among the 0.02 percent of Word Spark users who have completed the entire set.
This is a game for you if you have a good vocabulary (though arcane words are avoided), are good at pattern recognition, and are tenacious. That last condition is the crucial one. It separates the doers (conservatives) from the theoreticians (leftists).
The puzzles consist of letters arranged in squares, beginning with 4 x 4 squares and going up to 7 x 7 squares. Here’s 6 x 6 puzzle:
Here’s how to play the game:
1. Trace contiguous letters to form words. There are many possible words, but only a specific set of correct ones for each puzzle. Almost all of the words are singular common nouns and adjectives. There are many words that can also be used as verbs (e.g., park, scratch, walk). Rarely is there a word that is used only as a verb; proper nouns are equally rare; and adverbs, conjunctions, and prepositions aren’t used at all (as far as I can recall). You will save a lot of time by confining yourself to singular common nouns and adjectives. Don’t bother with plurals, they aren’t used.
2. When a correct word is traced, the letters of the word move to the corresponding group of spaces below the array. (There are five correct words and corresponding groups of spaces in the image above.)
3. If a correct word includes letters that are below the top of the array, the letters above drop to fill the gaps left when the letters of the correct word drop to the answer spaces. This is important because…
4. To complete a puzzle it is necessary not only to find the correct words but also to trace them in the correct order. Finding a later word before an earlier one may make it impossible to find the earlier one because of the rearrangement of letters, as described above. You may be alerted of this by the counter-clockwise movement of the reload button, but you may not be alerted — the game seems to be quirky about these alerts. If you are stuck, make an ordered list of the words you’ve found (noting any gaps between them), and hit the reload button. Sometimes it’s necessary to do this several times during the course of a puzzle, especially at the end. Forming a correct word with the “wrong” letter(s) will throw everything off. (A “wrong” letter is a letter that belongs in the word but is chosen from the wrong cell in the array of letters. There’s often more than one way of tracing out a correct word, and it’s easy to chose the wrong way.)
5. If you are really stuck, use a hint. (A hint gives you the first letter of a word; you’re on your own after that.) You start out with 50 of them and gain 3 for every 20-pack that you complete. You can also gain a hint a day (until you reach the last 2 puzzles) by playing a 4 x 4 daily-exercise puzzle. (I didn’t discover this feature until I was in the next-to-last 20-pack of puzzles.) You can also buy hints, though I didn’t have to do that. You should have plenty of hints to work with if you start doing the daily-exercise puzzle when you start playing Word Spark. Beware: Using hints too frequently may cause you to lose your edge, with the result that you have to use more hints. I found that I resorted to hints more often when I started earning an extra hint a day.
__________
* Proof:
The solution to the 600th puzzle is:
ENVELOPE
LOSS
COCONUT
SHOCK
SPIDER
ORANGE
SCREEN
HARVEST
This isn’t a spoiler. If you’re sharp enough and tenacious enough to reach the 600th puzzle, you will be able to figure this out on your own.
UPDATE 09/02/20:
I just completed the game again, at about the same rate and with the same result. It wasn’t like cheating; after a lapse of two years I didn’t remember any of the puzzles. It was like playing the game for the first time. But twice is enough … there won’t be a third time.
Politics and Prosperity 