The hope of the new nationalists is that by stiff-arming the libertarians, with their “market fundamentalism” and “libertinism,” conservative politicians can more than replace their numbers with populist voters by stressing immigration restriction, protectionism, and cultural conservatism. Perhaps, but I tend to doubt it. Donald Trump won the Electoral College not with a broader electoral coalition but with a differently distributed one that took a few swing states by small margins. The GOP has, on the whole, lost electoral ground since then. Basing a long-term political strategy on repeats of 2016 feels like drawing to an inside straight. Yes, there are voters with conservative views on abortion, homosexuality, immigration, and the culture who frequently vote Democratic. But they’ve been voting that way because they favor large-scale income redistribution, government monopolies in education and health insurance, and a generous welfare state — and they tend to prioritize those issues over cultural ones. If the GOP doesn’t deliver the economic policies they want, it won’t win their allegiance. And if it does deliver those policies, what’s the point of having a GOP?
I think that the Trump coalition is stronger electorally than the old fusionist coalition. Too many of us libertarian conservatives live in Democratic strongholds where our votes are meaningless. More of the populist conservatives live in swing states.
Apart from that quibble, I agree pretty much with Hood’s entire essay.
But I am not so concerned with getting libertarian conservatives back on the Republican Party bus. My biggest personal concern is with the demise of higher education, as ideological conformity has come to replace rigor as the overarching value.
Liberal Arts colleges used to teach you HOW to think. Now they teach you WHAT to think.
They never even understood how learning and thinking work in the first place. In the US, teaching is the one occupation that has achieved most nearly perfect uniform incompetence. https://www.joannejacobs.com/2019/09/what-teachers-know-that-isnt-so/
Stirner says “If one awakens in men the idea of freedom then the free men will incessantly go Tom to free themselves; if on the contrary, one only educates them, then they will at all times accommodate themselves to circumstance in the most highly educated and elegant manner and degenerate into subservient cringing souls.”
And the politicized education bureaucracy will wind up killing us:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/take-two-aspirin-and-call-me-by-my-pronouns-11568325291
“American-ness is creedal, it seems to me, or nothing much at all.”
Doesn’t it always come back to this. Whether America is “creedal” or not…Americans, real physical people, are still here. They still need to live their lives. My kids have to grow up in America whether or not its creedal. So the only question I ask is “will the creed you are peddling make that country they have to live in better or worse for them.” The impression I get is that it makes it worse. I’m not sure America ever behaved according to the “creed” your peddling, and in fact not behaving according to that creed is part of what made it great.
I take the Sailerite view that “to ourselves and our posterity” is the most important thing in the constitution. What is best for us? If the creed conflicts with that, it’s got to go.
That’s the big difference between Trump and NEVERTRUMP. Is America an actual people, and does their wellbeing matter, or is America and “creed”, which can be applied to any of an infinite set of fungible human being anywhere in the world, regardless of its effect. The NeverTrump set goes so far as to say that if the creed is bad for Americans, then screw Americans. I remember Bill Kristol’s line so well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=66&v=mWJSKhEwjy8
I don’t know if there is ANYTHING that can hold together all of the groups that he lists. Certainly, “the creed” can’t. No multi-racial, multi-religious, multi-cultural society has ever been held together well, and the few that have were always empires held together at the point of a gun by a dominant group. America was what it was because it was overwhelmingly white and those whites called all the shots. Period. The “creed” didn’t make America. Americans made America. All of the problems he cites are the result of changing the demographic basis of America, a change he advocated for.
The rest is a bit nonsensical. Apparently “small L” ordinary non-ideological people that hold lots of non-libertarian views like my father even if they like personal responsibility and are skeptical of government and welfare are “really” libertarians at heart. No, they aren’t.
“But they’ve been voting that way because they favor large-scale income redistribution, government monopolies in education and health insurance, and a generous welfare state”
My wife parents have voted Democrat all their lives and they don’t necessarily support any of those things. I asked one of them one time and he talked about Vietnam! Fifty years later he’s still voting against Nixon for drafting him.
My Dad has voted Republican most of his life, but he supports laws to help strengthen unions despite being extremely against the above points.
I don’t think he has a clue what will or won’t get people to vote a certain way.
This kinda reads like a libertarian version of the United 93 election in 2016. I still think beating Trump will be tough and I am increasingly concerned the moderate Ds have rallied to quickly behind Biden instead of Bullock or Klobachuer. Not that they are great campaigners, but frankly Biden lost his fastball and he is given too much support for standing around Obama for eight years.
At the heart of why libertarians don’t have political friends, is in the modern global competitive market with extreme specialization, I would say the images of the local capitalism of Adam Smith simply does not exist anymore. Libertarian is all dollars and sense which well in the corporate world and hiring but little in the political world. (And modern social conservatives always sound like we need promote religion in a way that completely agrees Marx point that “Religion is the opiod for the masses” I am thinking Lyman Stone or Pat Buchanan here.)
Second, we don’t know if the Trump coalition is long term stronger or weaker. On paper the Trump coalition led by a different candidate, but I am not sure who that candidate would be. Trump won the primary by campaigning on the center with Social Security and free trade while taunting specific Immigrants protected his less than conservative economic views. (Actually Trump is not new as Ross Perot did quite well in 1992 campaigning heavily against NAFTA.)
But I am not so concerned with getting libertarian conservatives back on the Republican Party bus. My biggest personal concern is with the demise of higher education, as ideological conformity has come to replace rigor as the overarching value.
An interesting comment. If academia is so hostile to libertarianism, why wouldn’t you want to make the GOP a more friendly home, to have an alternative?
That implies that you’d rather be accepted within the left-liberal academic community, than within the right-conservative political community. That’s actually the same strategy I favor at the moment – if only because having an alternative home for libertarians makes libertarianism more powerful. We can threaten to leave if the GOP coalition doesn’t support libertarian values. But conversely, if the GOP is too hostile to libertarianism, then we don’t have any influence over the left either. It’s better if we have alternatives.
But I think right now, I’d rather try to influence the left to become more friendly to free markets, and kick the various unsavory parts of the GOP to the curb. There’s too many parts of the GOP that are willing to abandon core free market principles in exchange for the votes of people who are basically racist/sexist/xenophobic jerks. I’d rather hang out with a bunch of SJWs than members of the alt-right.
I suspect Arnold says this rather because he thinks the culture of higher education is more important in the long run than current electoral politics? My suspicion is he finds people on the right, if not markedly more receptive, less hostile at least toward libertarianism than those on the left. That’s certainly my opinion, at least. I can’t say I’ve found progressives to be less racist or sexist than conservatives in my experience, or in judging their politicians.
The culture of higher education, like all people and cultures everywhere, is geared towards increasing its own power.
If you want to get academics to behave a certain way, you reward compliance and punish defection. Why are all academics progressive? It’s not because they believe in some rational argument, and thus can be argued out of their beliefs by some new rational argument. It’s because progressivism is a path to power. If you want them to adopt some other ideology, you have to convince them that not doing so will have bad consequences for them.
The difficulty with converting academics is the same as the broader society. The progressive strategy yields power. Demographic change and educational indoctrination only solidify this over time. Can you imagine “academics” going against the tide? Of course not. Ordinary people usually don’t have that much courage and I suspect academics have below average courage.
I’d rather hang out with a bunch of SJWs than members of the alt-right.
Dunno. If you hang with SJWs, you will go extinct. If you hang with the alt-right, you’ll still go extinct, but much slower.
Dunno. If you hang with SJWs, you will go extinct.
Somehow, I don’t think so.
Hanging out with racists, however, is about the fastest path to extinction possible.
“I agree that there is more likely to be rioting if Trump wins. The rioting will actually be fairly justified though. The millions of undocumented immigrants, and their families and friends, have every reason to perceive his election as a threat of physical violence against themselves. … If the Jews had rioted when Hitler was elected, maybe history would have been a little different.”
– Hazel Meade https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/11/will-violence-trump-loses.html#blog-comment-159537910
SJW who is onboard for race riots against the Trumpenreich redundantly confesses she’s more comfortable among SJWs than the alt-right.
Saying riots are “more likely” and possibly somewhat justified is not the same as being in favor of them.
If DACA had been canceled (as Trump wanted), we might well have seen violence employed to deport people who morally ought to be considered US citizens. That’s an evil at least on par with the internment of the Japanese in WWII.
Who are these “people who morally ought to be considered US citizens” but would also be subject to deportation?
Kids who were brought here illegally as children, and raised in the US.
So of the parents who came here illegally and the children they brought here illegally, the children are “people who morally ought to be considered US citizens” and whose deportation might justifiably trigger riots? And the parents are not?
There’s probably a bunch of other people in that category:
1. people who are married to US citizens and otherwise eligible for legal immigration but can’t because of various legal provisions forbidding illegal immigrants from applying even if they are now eligible.
2. People who have been here a very long time, like more than 20 years.
A lot of the parents of those kids who are now grown up would probably fall in one of those categories.
Generally if armed men with guns come to take away your parents, kids, friends and relatives, that is the sort of thing that tends ot make people upset.
I’m not sure optimizing for swing state representation is good long term planning though. In the course of the next few cycles, a few erstwhile swing states will likely become reliably red or blue, rendering all the other party’s investment in that state moot. I think the current Republican strategy (if it has enough intentionality behind it to be called a strategy) is risking a lot in the long run for short run electoral success.
The long run for the GOP has always been extinction. You can find GOP analysis reports indicating they know that pax 20XX it’s impossible for the GOP to win nationally. Demographics become overwhelming.
In the 1990s, the GOP had a choice. One win said “there are so many Hispanics, we have to get them to vote GOP.” The other said “these Hispanics are never going to vote GOP, we best keep as many of them out and send as many back as possible.” (Sidenote: the presence of Ross Perot made this all very complicated, and Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party of the time struck a very anti-immigrant stance. most famously when I was a kid, he ordered to have that SWAT team raid that house and drag away that little boy to deport him).
The former won out and this was tried really hard with Bush II, but he could never crack 50% of close. If you examine the fundamentals of their strategy it wasn’t very long run built either (running up the score with Florida Cubans and Hispanics that were attending evangelical megachurches). This strategy died when Romney got like 2x% of the Hispanic vote. It died an EMPIRICAL death. If they had succeeded in converting Hispanics we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
The latter went into the wilderness for twenty years and came back with Trump, who is peddling what Pat Buchanan, mid-90s Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot were selling.
The problem is that if you had gone hard on immigration in the 1990s you could have made the math work, but in 2019 it’s too late. At least too late unless you have mass deportations.
So the GOP strategy is to whole up in those parts of the country that aren’t too brown and carve out whatever they can. They can filibuster. They can use the courts to some degree. They have governorships. That should hold the tide for about as long a timeline as any politician has.
As for whites that have to live as a minority, better to live proud than grovel. When I was in college we had lots of people from Malaysia. The Chinese Malaysians are a minority and had to take a lot of crap from the Malays and live in a very unfair system with a hostile government. But at least they KNEW they didn’t deserve it. They didn’t turn on each other or have struggle sessions over their Chinese privilege. They endured in as dignified a manner as they could, and fought for whatever they could get. That is one thing neither the Democratic Party of the cuck wing of the GOP can provide.
Today we are going to get family photos at a place where all of the wealthy white Howard County progressives will be protesting the latest school redistricting scheme to send poor black kids to their schools. I’ve seen all the articles, and I can already imagine how it will play out. The leftists will call them racists and the parents will desperately try to prove they aren’t racist. And their kids will just take the message that their parents are evil racists. And the Asian parents who are getting their particular high school messed with will just openly state they want what they want and don’t give a damn, because they still have balls. And their kids won’t blame them for fighting for them.
Again, how do know all this about winning Hispanic-Americans and GOP did a lot create friction with Hispanic-Americans with Pete Wilson Prop 187 which won in 1994. (TBH long run I believe it impacted Asian-American voters than Hispanic-American voter.)
And W did get 40% of the Hi-Am so there was evidence. But then the Great Recession and Obama happened turning GOP hard against illegal immigration in 2012. (McCain got 35% in 2008 So break was 2012.)
1) The worst reality of the press is it is bot Hispanic or Asian but Indian, Mexican, Cuban, Korean, etc. So Republicans still vet a heavier Cuban or Cambodian vote.
2) in terms of 1960s Immigrants, we focus way too much on Hispanic and not Asian who were a big influence aa well.
3) The final reality is Hi-Am is still birth rate the last two generations but this has dropped big the last 10 years.
4) I am with Sean Trende the Parties move faster today than ever so I dont think one Party dominates the national scene.
This is a widely used talking point. I’ve read more convincing rebuttals of this argument.
Most voters don’t remember Prop 187. Many hispanic American voters don’t consider immigration their top voting concern, many even support immigration restrictions, as they do in Hispanic American countries.
That isn’t Smith advocating retaliatory tariffs. Quite the opposite, he spends the paragraphs prior saying how tariffs hurt the country imposing them and they are a terrible idea. That is why he states “there MAY be policy in retaliations of this kind…” (emphasis mine). He notes that it is possible, but only in that narrow case, and even then it might not work. He also limits it not to the legislator, but to “that insidious and crafty animal, vulgarly called a statesman or politician.” I include the paragraph including these quotes below.
There may be good policy in retaliations of this kind, when there is a probability that they will procure the repeal of the high duties or prohibitions complained of. The recovery of a great foreign market will generally more than compensate the transitory inconveniency of paying dearer during a short time for some sorts of goods. To judge whether such retaliations are likely to produce such an effect, does not, perhaps, belong so much to the science of a legislator, whose deliberations ought to be governed by general principles which are always the same, as to the skill of that insidious and crafty animal, vulgarly called a statesman or politician, whose councils are directed by the momentary fluctuations of affairs. When there is no probability that any such repeal can be procured, it seems a bad method of compensating the injury done to certain classes of our people, to do another injury ourselves, not only to those classes, but to almost all the other classes of them.