Following up on this post.
1. Various academics are rushing to judge PL harshly because they “get ____ wrong,” where ____ is some set of philosophers. Yet I would say that as a model to explain and predict the rhetoric and behavior of the social justice movement, PL works well. Consider these out-of-sample events:
–the attacks on statues. PL had written,
The drives to decolonize everything from hair to English literature curricula, to tear down paintings and smash statues. . .
–the Smithsonian whiteness chart.
–the new book In Defense of Looting.
How do we reconcile the explanatory power of the model with the view that they get ____ wrong?
a) Perhaps PL did not get ____ so wrong after all.
b) Perhaps although PL get ____ wrong, subsequent academic developments in what PL call “applied post-Modernism” and “reified post-Modernism” followed that same path.
c) Perhaps PL also get the subsequent academic history wrong, but the ideas that filtered down to college administrators, public school curriculum writers, and others in high-leverage positions (including the people responsible for the three events noted above) followed the path that PL describe.
2. Another line of criticism is to suggest other factors that might account for the rise of Social Justice ideology among these bureaucrats. There is Jonathan Haidt’s psychoanalysis. Haidt’s view of social media’s psychological effects might suggest that the bureaucrats are responding to what young constituents want. The role of the demand side is also stressed by commenter John Alcorn. But I don’t think that the explanation for the appearance of Social Justice curricula in public schools is that the children and parents are clamoring for it. And I suspect that even at colleges there is much more energy on the supply side than on the demand side.
I am also receptive to the view that the Social Justice movement helps satisfy a human need for religious belonging.
But attempts at psychoanalysis do not provide us with cognitive empathy. That is, we need to take people’s ideas as ideas, and to try to explore how those ideas might make sense to the people who hold them.
I think that PL succeed in offering a perspective on Social Justice that helps us achieve cognitive empathy. If PL’s critics can come up with a perspective that provides even better cognitive empathy, more power to them.
3. I am talking about cognitive empathy with the movers and shakers in the movement, not with the most esteemed academics. I think that any time you want to connect a popular movement to a philosophical idea, you have to deal with the fact that hardly anyone reads philosophers. How many of Washington’s soldiers at Valley Forge had read John Locke? How many of Lenin’s Bolsheviks had read Karl Marx? In a sense, the ideas that matter are the ones in the heads of ordinary people that never get written down.
In the case of Social Justice, the ideas in the heads of college administrators, public school curriculum writers, corporate HR departments and so on probably do get expressed in written form. Perhaps sometimes they cite academic works. It might be fruitful to collect some of this material and analyze it. Not having done so, my guess is that such material would tend to conform to PL’s characterization (or caricature) of post-Modernism as it has evolved.
I doubt that the Social Justice adherents in influential positions could describe the twists and turns in post-Modernism of the last several decades. They themselves could not tell you the links, if any, between the policies that they promulgate and the philosophy of Derrida or Foucault. But that does not negate the PL project.
You might say that the Social Justice adherents are to academic philosophy what Milton Friedman’s billiard player is to physics. They are acting “as if” they had followed the intellectual path described by PL, and that is why the model in their book is so useful.
The primary reason that PL get ___ wrong is because it is literally impossible to get ___ right, unless you’re one of the preordained high priests that gets to officially interpret the incoherent rhetoric.
How do I know? I was forced to take religion courses as part of my college education. In hindsight, I’m glad that I was exposed to this.
“I am also receptive to the view that the Social Justice movement helps satisfy a human need for religious belonging.”
It would be interesting if you revisited Joesph Bottum’s An Anxious Age
>—-“Yet I would say that as a model to explain and predict….”
I don’t think “predict” means what you think it means here. How many falsifiable predictions that you wouldn’t have made without this theory does it now reveal to you?
I would recommend a more Hayekian skepticism about the ability to identify cause and effect and make real predictions in complex systems.
Actually it’s fairly straightforward to predict what comes next, precisely by following and extending the logical implications of a few basic principles. Consider when President Trump asked a reporter three years ago whether George Washington and Thomas Jefferson should be the next statues to be taken down because they were major slave owners.
The answer is obviously yes, for them and for everyone similar, like Grant or Columbus, and just like the confederates themselves, whose statues and battle flag and honorifically-named public properties were always hated and doomed inevitably to cancelation, but which nevertheless stood for a long time, it’s just a matter of time until the actual implementation becomes politically expedient.
That and all the rest are easy to predict, were in fact predicted, and indeed have quickly come to pass, and the only difficulty is forecasting the precise timing, which is when leftists perceive the cancelation flips from just below to just above the level of social acceptability to occur without so much backlash reaction that it causes too much loss of power. The role of more mature and adult professional leftists like Shor is to remind people who are getting carried away in their brainless passions that they are misperceiving that reaction and are getting ahead of the curve.
It is was likewise predictable that Shor would himself be cancelled for pointing this out, precisely because he was on the wrong side of the principle justifying mass violence, and only calling for unprincipled restraint out of mere strategic expediency.
Consider that when Trump asked the question why not these guys next, either the left can’t come up with a good reason, or the attempts at answers were so lame and unconvincing. The only reason they don’t just bite the bullet and admit “yeah, of course they’re next! Duh!” is because they know that this admission would be embarrassing and politically costly in the short term.
This is why Dreher’s Law Of Merited Impossibly is true. Every claim that the logical extension of leftist principles is impossible and sheer paranoia is a lie that will only continue to be lied about as long as it takes to make it true, at which point it will be perfectly safe to admit it was correct all along.
All that being said, PL is wrong about the direction of the arrow of causation, because there is an upstream phenomenon of social psychology at the true root of the leftist political formula, and the reason of the academics is merely a slave to these passions like Hume said, and exist in their form merely to retroactively justify and rationalize what is necessary to buy off of leftist clients: just secondary nonsensical mumbo-jumbo apologetics for the logically prior acts of doing what they always wanted to do.
A metaphor could be to certain kinds of Hollywood entertainment, especially mild sci-fi like dramas about disease outbreaks or zombies.
In these dramas, the plot arc and soap operas come first as the fundamental theme or formula, because that is the pattern of story that human psychology is hard-wired to want. All the rest of the detail is merely decoration and depends on certain suspension of disbelief and lowering of standards of rigorous scrutiny in order to just enjoy the plot moving along. It doesn’t have to make sense and it doesn’t have to be realistic, few care. In fact, the kind of person who can’t “get into it” and complains about the technical incorrectness, plot inconsistencies, and unrealistic nature of the story is considered a spoil sport who in a correct way can be accused of “not getting it”. No one else cares, and you are missing the point if you care too much about these things.
That’s contemporary academic leftist studies, just like some of the weakest Christian apologetics before it for things like witchcraft and spectral evidence. The point is just to put together the right kind of word salad so that people can pretend there are serious arguments that allow the plot to move along in the way consistent with their desires, that validates and excuses their otherwise unjustifiable bad emotions and motives.
Of all the many insipid trend in America political culture, surely the dumbest is when both extremes scour social media and mass protests for the dumbest and most extreme ideas on the other side and then portray them as representative of the mainstream of their political opposition. That is what you have done here, Handle.
Do you really think anything remotely like the majority of those you consider leftists are advocating tearing down statues of Washington and Jefferson? How many prominent Democratic politicians can you cite who advocate this? None so far it appears. But that’s no obstacle to making the claim that this is a prediction that has already come true. All under the banner of “taking the most charitable view of those who disagree” of course.
So far you have offered us no real falsifiable predictions despite all the claims about how “That and all the rest are easy to predict.”
“Do you really think anything remotely like the majority of those you consider leftists are advocating tearing down statues of Washington and Jefferson? How many prominent Democratic politicians can you cite who advocate this?”
But, do note their silent (and often vocal) support of the violence and mayhem. It was only after the poll numbers took a precipitous drop that we started hearing anything different.
Bob,
>—–“But, do note their silent (and often vocal) support of the violence and mayhem.”
It’s impressive how quickly you embraced the “silence is violence” concept. And I was led to believe that was a pernicious leftist trope. I rarely have to look beyond these comments for my daily dose of irony.
Who exactly are the prominent Democratic politicians that are “vocal” in favor of “violence and mayhem” and what exactly did they say to convince you of that?
The fact is this violence and mayhem are politically good for Trump and everybody knows it. The rioters tend to have nothing but contempt for conventional Democrats like Biden. Peaceful protests are good for the Democrats but riots are bad for them. Republicans are working hard to conflate the two. Trump is running as the the only person who can restore order to what it was in some unspecified time of greatness that is somehow well before he took office.
“Who exactly are the prominent Democratic politicians that are “vocal” in favor of “violence and mayhem” and what exactly did they say to convince you of that?”
Here is one example from NPR…In Defense of Looting.
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178/one-authors-argument-in-defense-of-looting
Also, google Kamala Harris and listen to some of her recent interviews on the topic.
Have a wonderful day!
Bob,
Ok then, so Natalie Escobar is the most prominent and only prominent leftist you have found supporting looters. Did you even know who she was without Googling? I didn’t.
I did Google: Kamala Harris support for looters. All I got was videos of her denouncing looting.
Kamala Harris on Colbert.
https://youtu.be/NTg1ynIPGls
Bob,
Are you sure you posted the link you intended to?There is not a single word of support for looting or violence in that Colbert video.
If you do the search I did: – Kamala Harris support for looters – you will just find page after page of links to her denouncing looting and violence and praising peaceful protest. Some of the most radical protesters consider her unacceptably tainted because she was a prosecutor.
Greg,
On the off chance you are actually unaware, https://www.dailywire.com/news/report-kamala-harris-backed-minneapolis-freedom-fund-bailed-out-dangerous-criminals-along-with-protesters
Greg,
When Baltimore had its riots in 2015, our Mayor got on TV and said that “if people want room to destroy, we should let them.”
Something similar has played out in every blue city. There is a mixture of passive and active pullback of law enforcement to allow the looting.
I suppose if you directly asked the Mayor if she wanted the CVS burned down, she would say no. But she did essentially tell people to do what they want and told law enforcement to let them. This is a distinction without a difference.
Here is more Kamala Harris:
https://twitter.com/kamalaharris/status/1267555018128965643?s=21
asdf,
The purpose of the pullback was not “to allow the looting,” it was to avoid an escalation that might result in even more rioting and violence. Policing decisions in such situations are very difficult since some rioters are deliberately trying to provoke the kind of over reaction and resulting videos that would actually cause the disorder to grow.
There are difficult trade offs involved in these policing decisions and results are hard to predict. No doubt there are some places where far too much leeway has been given those committing violent acts.
The Waco debacle resulted in norms about this changing sharply in favor of de-escalation and allowing more time for things to settle without trying to immediately impose order and government authority.
Good point about de-escalation. But Waco involved a self-contained entity way out in the sticks. Only the Branch Davidians lived there. Anything they did just involved themselves. “[A]llowing more time for things to settle without trying to immediately impose order and government authority” just meant leaving them alone.
The present situations all involve places where ordinary people live and work and do business. “Allowing more time” has meant fire and destruction and even loss of life. For whatever reason, the authorities seem to have guessed wrong about what to do.
Waco is a really poor analogy. As far as I can remember, they weren’t engaging in any kind of violence or destruction.
Roger,
Quite right that urban situations come with much more of a duty to protect nearby third parties. It’s still not always obvious whether or not more escalation would be safer and for those third parties.
In Waco law enforcement was fired on while serving a legal arrest and search warrant by people clearly prepared for a firefight with them. Law enforcement usually has little patience with that. The Branch Davidians didn’t just have a knife in the car.
For better or worse norms about deescalation in policing throughout the country were much affected by the mess in Waco.
“We also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well,” seems pretty clear to me.
What exactly does escalating mean to you? If they arrested, tried, and harshly punished all looters, there would be no more looters. If they shot anyone resisting arrest, there would be no more resisting arrest. How are these people going to escalate against an entity that supposedly has a monopoly on force? The whole concept of a monopoly on force is that you will inevitably win every single escalation, because you can escalate further to the point of complete control over the use of deadly force.
“some rioters are deliberately trying to provoke the kind of over reaction and resulting videos that would actually cause the disorder to grow.”
Overreaction? If someone is acting in such a manner, they should be killed. If this started happening, the riots would end immediately. People riot because they aren’t afraid, because they know the authorities will let them get away with it. Rioting is a response to weakness, not strength. People simply don’t behave this way in places that have the will to keep order.
asdf,
>—“If they shot anyone resisting arrest, there would be no more resisting arrest…People simply don’t behave this way in places that have the will to keep order.”
Keeping “order” is not the only important value. It is true that totalitarian governments that respond to any resistance with the kind of killing and torture you support do have more of what you consider to be good “order.”
For God’s sake man, you are on a libertarian blog and you somehow manage to seem surprised every time people don’t favor totalitarian government responses in support of the policy choices you favor. Did you ever consider the possibility that if such government responses become acceptable it might not be that long before they are used in opposition to you and the policy choices you favor.
One of the most basic principles of human rights is that government responses to crime need to be proportional to the offense.
I don’t think Handle has ever said he was “taking the most charitable view of those who disagree”. That’s our host, Arnold Kling. There is more than one commenter of whom that cannot be said.
>—“I don’t think Handle has ever said he was “taking the most charitable view of those who disagree”. ”
Quite right Roger. That’s why I referred to it as being “under the banner” at the top of the blog.
I was also referring to the fact that his failing to practice, or maybe even aspire to this, has not prevented him from apparently being the most revered commenter on the blog.
Actually I’m in favor of charity, but not to the point of naivete. In politics, people lie all the time, to assume they don’t is unrealistic.
Consider the case of Obama and gay marriage. Axelrod wrote what anybody with any sense already knew, that Obama was bullshitting about his opposition for the purpose of winning the election and letting the Supreme Court have some more political capital and perceived institutional legitimacy when they eventually forced it upon the whole country.
It would have been foolish to take him at his word, and only fools did, but there are plenty of fools out there. “Charity without foolishness” is probably a more sustainable norm.
@Greg G, you said,
“Do you really think anything remotely like the majority of those you consider leftists are advocating tearing down statues of Washington and Jefferson? How many prominent Democratic politicians can you cite who advocate this? None so far it appears. But that’s no obstacle to making the claim that this is a prediction that has already come true. All under the banner of “taking the most charitable view of those who disagree” of course.”
In the context, I took that to mean you were saying Handle was under the metaphorical banner of “taking the most charitable view of those who disagree”, that he was claiming to do so. (And, of course, there is no literal banner at the top of the page, no banner that we are all under.)
I’ll bet that within 10 years the majority of self-identified liberals will support taking down statues of Washington, Jefferson et al. What you wrote could’ve been written about gay marriage little over a decade ago when nearly everyone under 40 supported it. Politicians are lagging – not leading – indicators. I don’t know how many people in their 20s in 30s you hang around with, but I think ultra-wokeness is where gay marriage was 15 years ago. Most young people today would, I think, at least tacitly assent to the taking down of statues of slave owning founders. Of course the statues are the least of our worries.
I think there’s more than one generational disconnect pervading topics like this. I think lots of people who think of this as a fringe fad that’ll peter out soon tend to be older and socialize mainly with older people. I’m surrounded by young urbanites, and among them it doesn’t seen remotely fringe. Maybe they’ll all lurch rightward in a few years, but that seems unlikely to me.
This matches polling on the issue. Taking down the status polls very badly overall, but polls well enough with the under 40 crowd and very well in the under 40 and leftist crowd.
Iconoclasm continues apace:
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/missouri/articles/2020-08-27/washburn-university-removed-jefferson-franklin-statues
Do we have much data on iconoclasm–is a it leading indicator of civil war? a sort of “early warning signal” or “warning light on the dashboard.
regarding iconoclasm…
1. Niall Ferguson kind of implies it in his youtube video saying that our current moment is rather like the period after the printing press and the Protestant Reformation beginning. I’ve provided a link to the short video clip before.
at YouTube:
“Niall Ferguson on the roots of today’s political polarization.”
2. Israeli military historian Martin Van Creveld kind of implies the same thing.
“Bad as pulling down old monuments is, it is not as bad as the killing that will invariably follow.”
Martin van Crevdeld is a bit relaxed now–writing casually at his blog, though methinks he still writes more serious and weighty things as well.
https://www.martin-van-creveld.com/credo/
If you had chosen to listen, the most commonly cited delineation was to ask whether the core reasons for why they were celebrated were honorable and could reasonably stand separately from damage they might have caused. Of course, not everyone calling for removal of statues respected that distinction, but most did.
To use your examples, Washington, Jefferson and Grant accomplished important things that should be celebrated. With Columbus, separating the good from the bad is somewhat more difficult.
Ok, but all had monuments destroyed.
Separating Columbus’ statues from their pedestals was apparently much less difficult.
Whatever the case may be, it is certainly true that the mobs who destroy statutes are uninterested in working through the legal methods of disposing of public property.
In a sense, the ideas that matter are the ones in the heads of ordinary people that never get written down.
Having just finished War and Peace, that sentence struck me as very Tolstoyan.
Nice.
I am also reminded of the great Chicago economist Harry G. Johnson who sometimes used the term “vulgar Keynesianism.” I’m only familiar with some of Johnson’s essays, and I’m not sure where the term came from, but certainly at this point we do have a form of “vulgar Keynesianism.”
Off the top of my head, I would describe vulgar Keynesianism as the notion that the economy always could use a little more aggregate demand, therefore deficit spending can always be justified, especially if it involves giving a little more money to people who could probably use it.
At the limit, the vulgar form of Cynical Theory or The New Religion (the religion that persecutes heretics” might be ..oh…I don’t know. How about this: “Nobody legitimately has secure and legitimate claim to any property or position or achievement, since privilege was involved, or might have been.”
Yeah, my favorite example of “vulgar Keynesianism” was Dick Cheney’s famous line: “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.”
+1.
This looks like a rollicking read, for what it’s worth. “How Keynes took over the world” by Murray Rothbard. It mentions Harry G. Johnson. To repeat, the author is Murray Rothbard, who is nothing if not entertaining.
I’ll note that it’s biased, but eliminating bias is just about impossible.
No need to bore you with the citation, but Walter Laqueur once quoted a historian on how for several decades the best people to read to understand the Soviet Union tended to be heretics and apostates from the regime, rather than neutral observers from respectable universities.
https://mises.org/library/how-keynes-took-over-world
It may be kind of hard to get oriented in this my charming little digression here about Keynes. I’m pushing it just because it’s a good example of a fashionable theory that doesn’t quite fit reality, but that “takes over” a discipline, possibly to the detriment of progress.
The mechanism seems to be in part “contagion” through social dynamics, status seeking, and careerism.
That is my point, to the extent I have one.
Re: Locke and the troops
If Washington’s troops at Valley Forge had read any of Locke, who died in 1704, it may likely have been his Grand Model for the Province of Carolina. These were the implementing instructions for the Carolina colonists designed to ensure that settlement and development was consistent with his Fundamental Constitutions which “were ‘reactionary’ and ‘experimented with a non-common law system designed to encourage a feudal social structure,’ including through the use of non-unanimous jury decisions for criminal convictions.”
George Washington was, however, among, the many colonial readers of Thomas Paine’s writings. Before the crossing of the Delaware on the way to victory at Trenton in late 1776, General Washington ordered officers to read Paine’s The American Crisis to the troops of the Continental Army.
The revolutionaries, now as then, are not ignorant. Today’s revolutionary has been nursed at the teat of Howard Zinn, rather than something like the ennobling Paine, since learning to read and every text book they encounter has been marketed with the intent of maintaining a bubble perception in which the white bourgeoisie is nothing but an evil oppressor to be ashamed of and people of color ore the noble oppressed.
Another way to understand what PL are engaged with is extortion. In something of an Occam’s razor approach JoNova this morning comes right out and describes the campus ideologies as shakedowns: http://joannenova.com.au/2020/08/reagan-on-rioters-whats-to-negotiate/
This perspective is fairly predictive but needs better data. In general, most regulatory initiatives can best be understood as rent seeking by the legal guild. To get a better understanding of how much the legal guild siphons out of the productive economy some legislation requiring the reporting of the compensation received in each legal case along with statutory, regulatory, or common law basis of the action would be illuminating and explanatory as well as perhaps offering guidance on ways to improve public policy.
One wonders if there could be more transparent reporting of tax-deductible donations to tax exempt organizations as well. It seems as if the higher education industry has been highly successful at concealing its CCP funding.
OK, so I finished the book. Actually made me more sympathetic to the academics. Nevertheless, though the ending with the statements of principled opposition was a nice approach. Would like to see more of that in current topical polemics.
Did not find their argument that defunding public subsidies for Theory departments is innately illiberal. The public purse is not unlimited and lower priority departments that contribute little, nothing, or negatively to human flourishing should be defunded. If the woke take control and defund hard sciences, no problem. The market will find ways to meet the demand for that type of learning.
Overall I would not recommend this book because I was not really sure whether or not it was charitably interpreting its subject matter. It did reaffirm my impression that this debate is a tempest in a excessively-well publicly funded teapot that produces nothing pragmatically useful. Unprofitable Education edited by Zywicki and McCluskey still seems to point to the right direction out of this mess.
About religion. There are intellectuals who debate the fine points of theology and think that is what religion is about. By contrast, anthropologists look at the “lived experience” of people’s lives, and in this context, religion in a society is about how ordinary people practice religion, how ordinary people think and feel, what they do and say and how they act. Wordy clerics and academic theologians matter little.
Same with politics. Political theory is about how people think, feel, and act in a political sphere. I agree with your view of PL.
I dislike the term “neo-Marxism.” I prefer “cultural Marxism.”
Marx did a lot of writing about society, culture, politics, and history before he wrote Capital. He borrowed from German philosophers and French socialists. He had a Theory.
He felt it necessary to develop a full theory of “capitalism,” a term he invented, and he worked out a version of Ricardian economics to prove, he thought, that workers are exploited by businesses.
No one cares about the labor theory of value. None of the woke understand, much less believe in, the transformation problem of values into prices or fixed coefficients of production. But the woke still follow Marx’s social theories, which created the ideology of Critical Race Theory and all that followed. The Frankfurt School played a major role in developing cultural Marxism, with elements of existentialism and Freudianism added in.
The core of cultural Marxism is that Group “A” exploits Group “B”, and does so with structural oppression and false consciousness. The mechanism no longer needs to be ownership of the means of production. If “blacks” or “queers” owned businesses or have mutual funds stuffed with equities, nothing would change.
For Marx, everything was about power and status and hierarchy and dominance, and that is what cultural Marxism is about. Only nerdy economists think of Marx as doing price and growth theory. No Critical Race Theorist gives a damn about the labor theory of value.
I would add that you see the poison of cultural Marxism in entertainment. If your only source of information about crime was prime-time TV shows, you would think that the typical murderer was a middle-aged white male businessman. Not really! Or consider the villains in action movies. Often powerful white male plutocrats or right-wing terrorists. For example the James Bond novels often had the Communists as the enemy, in cohoots with the USSR. In the movies, the villain was turned into gangster outfits, whose sole goal was profit, and whose identity was white male.
Mark,
>—“What you wrote could’ve been written about gay marriage little over a decade ago…”
And right there is one of the most common misconceptions about predictions. A “prediction” that, with the benefit of hindsight, “could” have been made but wasn’t…..isn’t a prediction at all. The reality is that almost everyone was surprised by how quickly opposition to gay marriage crumbled.
Perhaps what you should learn from that is not to be surprised this time.
Greg, that is a bogus hedge so you can try to have it both ways. If most prominent leftists are maintaining message discipline and bullshitting like Obama, then right before something actually happens, you will say, “Ah, there is no support, they explicitly deny it, so it is paranoid to say it will happen.” When someone points out to you an instance in which it actually happened, thus illustrating the truth of the point that levels of publicly avowed support from prominent leftists are not a valid basis for determining true levels of support or making predictions, you will just always be able to say that ever possible exception was a ‘surprise’ and thus doesn’t count.
As I pointed out below, the only surprise in all these instances is the precise timing. Well, what counts as a non-surprise to you? What kind of example do you want to change your mind? Not holding my breath.
In truth there would be no such thing as a preference cascade, or a Bradley effect, or Dreher’s Law, or the sudden, ‘surprising’ collapse of certain regimes, were it not for the common problem of the chilling effect of it being dangerous or politically or socially undesirable to express one’s honest sentiments on certain subjects, and so people – especially savvy politicians and those aligned with the cause – lie about it up to the minute when it suddenly feels safe not to lie about it anymore.
As it happens, plenty of people predicted that the courts would impose gay marriage long before it actually happened, which is why you had all those efforts to pass state level constitutional amendments to stop it, which won the day even in California of all places, though supporting it cost Brendan Eich his job. Scalia and many conservative judges and commentators said that the Lawrence decision – overturning purportedly holy precedent from just 17 years prior, would mean gay marriage nationwide in due time, and they were of course right. They also said it would open the door to polygamy which has little publicly admitted support, and yet here we are with the Utah state senate decriminalizing it in response to a court order, and then the transgender bathroom stuff, also just ordered by a court of appeals after Justice Windsock opened that door.
For Pete’s sake, they got Bill Clinton to sign the Defense of Marriage Act way back in 1996 when Bork wrote Slouching Toward Gomorrah because the gay marriage issue being in ascendancy was obvious to the scholars and lawyers who swim in these seas to have been obvious and otherwise inevitable in the late 80s. That’s what he meant by ‘slouching’ : the slow and gradual process of moving toward the logical implications of an ideology’s principles. This is also why work on a Federal Marriage Amendment began immediately afterwards and George W Bush ran (obviously cynically, just like Obama) on the issue in 2004.
This is decades of people correctly seeing it coming, saying so explicitly every step of the way, and passing major laws and amendments trying to stop it in its tracks, being told all the way they were being completely paranoid because “no one is saying” they support that happening. Well duh, of course they weren’t saying it in public, they had to bullshit like Obama about it until it was safe to light up the White House in rainbow lights with “Love Wins!” (Unlike today with the RNC, it was ok to politicize the image of the White House back then.)
In other words, gay marriage was o surprise to all those people making huge efforts trying to stop it, and was exactly the kind of case to prove the worthlessness of the “argument from assuming the public statements of politicians are not a bunch of expedient lies covering up their real loyalties and agenda.”
Handle,
I expected gay marriage to find acceptance maybe 10 years after it did. I don’t consider that to be a successful prediction about the matter on my part. A prediction without time constraints is no prediction at all, just the broken clock being right occasionally.
When Obama did lie about his feelings on gay marriage he was actually telling the truth about the part of the issue people really cared about. They wanted to know whether or not he was willing to make it a priority and expend meaningful political capital on the issue. He wasn’t and he communicated that part accurately. It matters a lot more what Presidents will do about an issue than how they feel about it.
>—-“As I pointed out below, the only surprise in all these instances is the precise timing. Well, what counts as a non-surprise to you? What kind of example do you want to change your mind? Not holding my breath.”
If someone had predicted that Trump’s comments expressing hostility to racial minorities would soon result in an increase in bias attacks against those minorities…and then, in the first year after that, crime statistics showed that increase, then I would count that as a “non-surprise” to the person making the prediction. There is an example for you. I didn’t make that prediction because I have little confidence in my ability to predict the future. But it wouldn’t surprise me if someone did. In any event, it will serve as an example of a falsifiable prediction.
According to the FBI, from 2016 to 2017, though there was an increase in total number of hate crimes from 7,600 to 8,800, there was a % decline for black people and Muslims, and the % stayed the same for hispanics (it also declined for white people). It increased for Jews. In 2018, it increased for hispanics, but declined again for black people and Muslims (it increased for white people by about the same amount as for hispanics, bringing the white % back to 2016 levels). It increased for Jews again. I can’t say I see this obvious causal pattern you’re referring to. Are you referring to the jump for hispanics in 2017-2018?
Source: https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2016/topic-pages/victims. Just change the year in the URL to look at different years.
Mark,
I wasn’t claiming an obvious causal pattern or claiming any skill in prediction. I thought I made that clear. I was giving a hypothetical of what a time constrained prediction would look like.
I was thinking of a news report I had seen of an increase in bias attacks against Asian Americans soon after Trump said China would have to pay for loosing the China virus on us and explaining what that would have looked like if it had actually been a real prediction rather than hindsight bias.
>—- “(Unlike today with the RNC, it was ok to politicize the image of the White House back then.)”
So you are saying that lighting up the White House with rainbow lights is a comparable politicization to holding the climax of a political party nominating convention there?
This must be some kind of new Olympic record for false equivalence.
Um, I made a specific (time constrained) prediction about how attitudes would change over a specified period of time. There are plenty I’m willing to make. The statue of Columbus in Columbus Circle will be down (with Columbus Circle probably being renamed) by 2030. I think most public universities (and prestigious private ones) will have followed the U of California system and added ideological litmust tests in the form “commitment to diversity statements” for faculty applicants (making public opposition to affirmative action grounds for refusal to hire), something I care about since I may be working in academia. Most major journals – as well as most major newspapers – will require authors to capitalize ‘Black’ and not capitalize ‘white.’ I expect three of the nine states that outlaw race-based discrimination will have have legalized it and put it to use aggressively in school admissions and public employee hiring (one probably will this November). There are plenty of specific consequences of this ascendant ideology that I’m willing (can’t say happy) to predict will be realized by 2030.
Fair enough Mark, those are all real time constrained predictions that will actually be confirmed or falsified by 2030.
I was specifically challenging only the formulation that you made about something you claim you “could’ve” predicted but didn’t. Hindsight bias is a very real thing.
Arnold,
Since you are reading up on these issues, I would like to recommend this book: “Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left” by the late Roger Scruton. Scruton was a professional philosopher and was willing to engage the cultural Marxists in strictly philosophical terms, and not just at a “folk” level.
He is a very clear writer.
Scruton works on the civilization-barbarism axis, while the cultural Marxists work on the oppressed-oppressor axis.
Re: “we need to take people’s ideas as ideas, and to try to explore how those ideas might make sense to the people who hold them.”
Let’s look again at the demand side.
It’s no surprise that many people seek or embrace ideas that are at once irrefutable, high-minded, and roughly compatible with self-interest. Such ideas may be strengthened by passions (anger, righteous indignation, envy, guilt, or fear). When such an idea gains currency, then conformity amplifies it.
Examples of irrefutability: Religious dogmas and prophesies (inscrutable beliefs); folk Freudianism (incredulity = avoision of repressed mental states); totalitarianism (dissent = evidence of insanity); and “Theory” (“Check your privilege”).
Compare “Trust, but verify.” Verification is work. Self-confirming beliefs are easy.
Irrefutable beliefs are compatible with material self-interest if the people who hold them can free-ride on science and engineering. For example, I earnestly can type “Science is bunk” on my computer (produced by science, engineering, etc.).
Lip service to a high-minded, irrefutable belief may be in one’s interest if espousing the idea keeps the peace (protects one from termination, cancellation, etc.). It’s hard to know how many people are true believers, and how many go along to get along.
Perhaps the real psychological puzzle is the resilience of tolerance, openness, empiricism. But Bryan Caplan insists that “western civilization is a hardy weed.”
Arnold, the writing is on the wall:
“On the Rotunda of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington is inscribed these words: “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” This statement by Thomas Jefferson is the heart of the democracy in whose founding he played so central a role. It is why the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights is the First Amendment and not the Second, or Fourth, or Fifth.
Today our nation is facing the most serious threat to establish such a tyranny in our entire history. This threat comes from the political left, which deceptively calls its reactionary creed “progressive.” Its tyranny is advanced under the Orwellian names, “political correctness,” “cancel culture,” “wokeness” and “anti-racism,” which is a recently minted doctrine that condemns every deviation from the leftwing party line as “racist” and therefore worthy of suppression.”
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/alarming-progress-hate-america-left-david-horowitz/
Read the whole thing.
Yes, democrats understand that they will be able to grab and keep power ONLY by resorting to violence, so they have colluded with the radical left and its criminal gangs (indeed, an idiotic idea because if they grabbed power, they would never control the crazy revolutionaries and their hired guns).