I answer questions about links between data science and intersectionality, why so many conservatives are drawn to Catholicism, and how to cut through the "bad faith and bullshit" in our politics
Linker, your realism is shining through all these responses, especially your trenchant rebuttal to Mr. Scialabba's left nostalgia (no, the right does not hold the exclusive franchise on dreams of restoring a hypothetical golden age; for liberals, that would be the period between roughly 1961 and 1967). He probably does not realize that although he abjures the system that enables the obscene concentration of economic power (I wanted to in days gone by), neither he nor you nor I would be able to endure for very long the absence of the material and social goods it brought in its wake. At least our stomachs would not. If one considers things with a measure of determinism rather than the consumerist lens that late-20th century prosperity conditioned most people to view almost all of life with, we come upon the insight that we cannot always choose certain aspects of an ideology to accept or reject like produce at a salad bar (remember that analogy?). We usually have to take them wholesale as a package (especially with the American electoral system, which is not going to change in profound ways anytime soon) and cannot always foresee the downsides--an insight conservatives used to understand but have jettisoned in favor of a raw, crass pursuit of extirpating its rivals, and thus imagining themselves masters of history, as generations of myriad totalitarian, closed worldviews have done.
Now, if my insight makes me sound like a libertarian, I would like to say in Scialabba's defense that, contra your seeming dismissal of the question, inequality does indeed create conditions of resentment and the decline of trust, things that plowed the ground for the recent rise of MAGAism and the post-liberal vogue on the right. That said, the left has increasingly no sense of history (at least an unflinchingly, rigorously disenchanted one). That is especially the case when its doctrinaires refuse to comprehend situations that do not conform to their ideological priors, like the Weimar period. For it was then that the onerous reparations handed down at Versailles undermined any attempt by German pols to build a lasting liberal-democratic edifice that could resist the lures, first, of the "revolutionary conservatives" (roughly the stage where the Republican Party and its cognates elsewhere in the West are now), and then the seduction of Hitler's appeal to the basest human instincts. Woodrow Wilson is the American most responsible for what transpired, from a realist standpoint.
Point being, we now know, or should, that leftist redistributionism is far from the only possible response to maladies like that described above. In cultures shaped by authoritarian expressions of Christianity (Protestant, Catholic, or Eastern Orthodox; they all ethically amount to the same here) combined, paradoxically enough, with the same materialist outlook on life that classic Marxism sees as the sine qua non of human civilizations of any kind (namely, that acquisition and consumption of material goods is more important than the inner human life), fascism, or its close cousins like Orbanism or the DeSantis experiment in Florida, is the likelier to appeal to a public reared on notions that certain ideas about life are sacrosanct and should not be subject to the academic-type "acids of modernity," as Walter Lippmann put it.
The resulting political impotence of class-conflict models in such a scenario poses painful questions for the left, to be sure, about whether or not alternatives to an identitarian mode are even possible anymore in liberal culture. That is what Scialabba and his dittoheads out there need to ponder instead of trotting out the tired, dated tub-thumping act that has gotten everyone to the left of, say, Joe Manchin, absolutely nowhere. If you do not believe me, then ask why Bernard Sanders has not achieved public office outside that bastion of squeaky-clean, hyper-liberal New England rectitude, Vermont.
We are, in all likelihood, never going to have Medicare for all or a Green New Deal, because the left has nowhere near the muscle it needs to get beyond its coterie to break through to "the system." The enduring appeal of Horatio Algerism in our supposedly more sophisticated, technocratic age (huh!) is the main reason, as Linker pointed out, and it has perhaps done more than anything to keep conservatism not only alive, but thriving in an age when we were supposed to have done away with clashes over the allocation of scarce resources, if one took the 1990s neoliberal utopians (a la Thomas Friedman et al.) seriously. But I do hope that the same holds true for basic human liberty at the Federal level for what has become the far left's mirror image, although I am not holding my breath any that the Congress or the Supreme Court will be willing or able to retard the steadily growing stranglehold of perpetual culture war on states dominated by non-metropolitan mores in the Midwest and South. Red America is not letting up in the wake of Trump, not a solitary inch. In other words, it "can happen here."
I think the answer to George Scialabba’s question focused almost solely on the role of inequality in creating political instability. Whereas the question seemed as concerned or more concerned with the socio-economic suffering it can cause to those left out (which of course adds to instability).
This "Ask Me Anything" resulted in a great potpourri of interesting discussions! As a Recovering Catholic, you really locked in for me how their ingrained sense of what is True, drives their omnipotent behavior that at its core is authoritarian.
I would like to make a comment in connection to George Scialabba's question and your (Damon's) response: Damon maintains that economic standing alone does not determingevoting choices. That is true--but that is not the only thing going on. Inequality affects numerous other factors in life, directly or indirectly--even if those at the bottom don't always vote their pocketbook (or think they don't). Back when French social economist Thomas Picketty's books were being translated into English, a number of us (social scientists) were talking about them (in particular the first book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century--English translation 2014) and asking ourselves if there was a "master problem" in the world today--and, for what it is worth, there was general agreement that the "master problem" was inequality. I am talking here not only about the US, but the entire world, which is now deeply interconnected.
Inequality has existed as long as there have been stratified state societies, but today, with the internet and digital communication, awareness of one's own situation vis-a-vis others is much greater than in the past, leading to many grievances--and, as we know, grievances and anger have grown--and a lot of that, while not necessarily directly based on economic differences, are indirectly based on those. And, at the same time, the super-wealthy have grown to obscene proportions, even though there are relatively few of them within the US or the world. They have outstandingly outsized international power that is unprecedented (we are on track to seeing the first individual trillionaire!!!) This is tremendously destabilizing to both US and world order (and, in fact, as the late political philosopher, Sheldon Wolin, has continuously written--we are not really a democracy anymore, but some sort of oligarchy). I do consider that to be part of the "master problem" of inequality, which effects so much else that may not immediately appear to be economic in nature. (My response here echoes what another poster on this site--Evets--has said).
While I shudder at the thought of armed conflict over this matter, I share a lot Scialabba's critique--and I think that our political energies should be directed towards lessening the now highly unequal circumstances before us. We can start in the US with all the interconnected problems people face in getting medical and dental care. Here is a relatively simple issue: why are eye and dental care always separated from the rest of medical care in insurance policies? (I just had to help an adult millennial daughter pay for her dental care because she is struggling to get adequate medical coverage in spite of the three jobs she holds down).
Just a brief comment on the ties to A Dugin. Benjamin Teitelbaum in his book A War For Eternity states Bannon broke from Dugin and Eastern Traditionalism in favor of Orban and his (Bannon’s) own version of a Western Traditionalism. I suppose the same is true for the Tuckerites et. al. It would make sense for several reasons.
David French wrote in the New York Times February 15 that the Jack Smith should make a prosecutorial decision based purely on the law and leave political considerations to the political branch. He argues such considerations should be left to the presidential pardon power. So in a way he agrees with you but kicks the decision about prosecuting Trump to the president and out of the DOJ. What are your thoughts?
You are most welcome.
Linker, your realism is shining through all these responses, especially your trenchant rebuttal to Mr. Scialabba's left nostalgia (no, the right does not hold the exclusive franchise on dreams of restoring a hypothetical golden age; for liberals, that would be the period between roughly 1961 and 1967). He probably does not realize that although he abjures the system that enables the obscene concentration of economic power (I wanted to in days gone by), neither he nor you nor I would be able to endure for very long the absence of the material and social goods it brought in its wake. At least our stomachs would not. If one considers things with a measure of determinism rather than the consumerist lens that late-20th century prosperity conditioned most people to view almost all of life with, we come upon the insight that we cannot always choose certain aspects of an ideology to accept or reject like produce at a salad bar (remember that analogy?). We usually have to take them wholesale as a package (especially with the American electoral system, which is not going to change in profound ways anytime soon) and cannot always foresee the downsides--an insight conservatives used to understand but have jettisoned in favor of a raw, crass pursuit of extirpating its rivals, and thus imagining themselves masters of history, as generations of myriad totalitarian, closed worldviews have done.
Now, if my insight makes me sound like a libertarian, I would like to say in Scialabba's defense that, contra your seeming dismissal of the question, inequality does indeed create conditions of resentment and the decline of trust, things that plowed the ground for the recent rise of MAGAism and the post-liberal vogue on the right. That said, the left has increasingly no sense of history (at least an unflinchingly, rigorously disenchanted one). That is especially the case when its doctrinaires refuse to comprehend situations that do not conform to their ideological priors, like the Weimar period. For it was then that the onerous reparations handed down at Versailles undermined any attempt by German pols to build a lasting liberal-democratic edifice that could resist the lures, first, of the "revolutionary conservatives" (roughly the stage where the Republican Party and its cognates elsewhere in the West are now), and then the seduction of Hitler's appeal to the basest human instincts. Woodrow Wilson is the American most responsible for what transpired, from a realist standpoint.
Point being, we now know, or should, that leftist redistributionism is far from the only possible response to maladies like that described above. In cultures shaped by authoritarian expressions of Christianity (Protestant, Catholic, or Eastern Orthodox; they all ethically amount to the same here) combined, paradoxically enough, with the same materialist outlook on life that classic Marxism sees as the sine qua non of human civilizations of any kind (namely, that acquisition and consumption of material goods is more important than the inner human life), fascism, or its close cousins like Orbanism or the DeSantis experiment in Florida, is the likelier to appeal to a public reared on notions that certain ideas about life are sacrosanct and should not be subject to the academic-type "acids of modernity," as Walter Lippmann put it.
The resulting political impotence of class-conflict models in such a scenario poses painful questions for the left, to be sure, about whether or not alternatives to an identitarian mode are even possible anymore in liberal culture. That is what Scialabba and his dittoheads out there need to ponder instead of trotting out the tired, dated tub-thumping act that has gotten everyone to the left of, say, Joe Manchin, absolutely nowhere. If you do not believe me, then ask why Bernard Sanders has not achieved public office outside that bastion of squeaky-clean, hyper-liberal New England rectitude, Vermont.
We are, in all likelihood, never going to have Medicare for all or a Green New Deal, because the left has nowhere near the muscle it needs to get beyond its coterie to break through to "the system." The enduring appeal of Horatio Algerism in our supposedly more sophisticated, technocratic age (huh!) is the main reason, as Linker pointed out, and it has perhaps done more than anything to keep conservatism not only alive, but thriving in an age when we were supposed to have done away with clashes over the allocation of scarce resources, if one took the 1990s neoliberal utopians (a la Thomas Friedman et al.) seriously. But I do hope that the same holds true for basic human liberty at the Federal level for what has become the far left's mirror image, although I am not holding my breath any that the Congress or the Supreme Court will be willing or able to retard the steadily growing stranglehold of perpetual culture war on states dominated by non-metropolitan mores in the Midwest and South. Red America is not letting up in the wake of Trump, not a solitary inch. In other words, it "can happen here."
You have nothing to lose but your chains, hell.
I think the answer to George Scialabba’s question focused almost solely on the role of inequality in creating political instability. Whereas the question seemed as concerned or more concerned with the socio-economic suffering it can cause to those left out (which of course adds to instability).
This "Ask Me Anything" resulted in a great potpourri of interesting discussions! As a Recovering Catholic, you really locked in for me how their ingrained sense of what is True, drives their omnipotent behavior that at its core is authoritarian.
I would like to make a comment in connection to George Scialabba's question and your (Damon's) response: Damon maintains that economic standing alone does not determingevoting choices. That is true--but that is not the only thing going on. Inequality affects numerous other factors in life, directly or indirectly--even if those at the bottom don't always vote their pocketbook (or think they don't). Back when French social economist Thomas Picketty's books were being translated into English, a number of us (social scientists) were talking about them (in particular the first book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century--English translation 2014) and asking ourselves if there was a "master problem" in the world today--and, for what it is worth, there was general agreement that the "master problem" was inequality. I am talking here not only about the US, but the entire world, which is now deeply interconnected.
Inequality has existed as long as there have been stratified state societies, but today, with the internet and digital communication, awareness of one's own situation vis-a-vis others is much greater than in the past, leading to many grievances--and, as we know, grievances and anger have grown--and a lot of that, while not necessarily directly based on economic differences, are indirectly based on those. And, at the same time, the super-wealthy have grown to obscene proportions, even though there are relatively few of them within the US or the world. They have outstandingly outsized international power that is unprecedented (we are on track to seeing the first individual trillionaire!!!) This is tremendously destabilizing to both US and world order (and, in fact, as the late political philosopher, Sheldon Wolin, has continuously written--we are not really a democracy anymore, but some sort of oligarchy). I do consider that to be part of the "master problem" of inequality, which effects so much else that may not immediately appear to be economic in nature. (My response here echoes what another poster on this site--Evets--has said).
While I shudder at the thought of armed conflict over this matter, I share a lot Scialabba's critique--and I think that our political energies should be directed towards lessening the now highly unequal circumstances before us. We can start in the US with all the interconnected problems people face in getting medical and dental care. Here is a relatively simple issue: why are eye and dental care always separated from the rest of medical care in insurance policies? (I just had to help an adult millennial daughter pay for her dental care because she is struggling to get adequate medical coverage in spite of the three jobs she holds down).
Just a brief comment on the ties to A Dugin. Benjamin Teitelbaum in his book A War For Eternity states Bannon broke from Dugin and Eastern Traditionalism in favor of Orban and his (Bannon’s) own version of a Western Traditionalism. I suppose the same is true for the Tuckerites et. al. It would make sense for several reasons.
This is one of my favorite things Damon does on his Substack, and cheers to my fellow readers who are clearly an intelligent bunch.
David French wrote in the New York Times February 15 that the Jack Smith should make a prosecutorial decision based purely on the law and leave political considerations to the political branch. He argues such considerations should be left to the presidential pardon power. So in a way he agrees with you but kicks the decision about prosecuting Trump to the president and out of the DOJ. What are your thoughts?