My latest essay.

It strikes me that successful politicians, at least nowadays, are very high in “dark triad” traits. It seems obviously true of Clinton (both of them), Obama, Trump, and Biden (does Biden feel an ounce of remorse over Hunter Biden’s graft, the misguided drone strike in Afghanistan, or anything else?).

This is in reaction to an interview on Quillette with evolutionary psychologist David Buss. The essay also highlights recent output from various FITs stars, including Robert Wright, Glenn Loury, Heather Heying, Bret Weinstein, and Wesley Yang.

In a roundtable organized for Tablet by David Samuels, Angelo Codevilla said,

The current American elites hold every lever of power. But their power is brittle. They no longer try to persuade. They command and find ways of hurting and mocking the reticent. No organization that lives by pulling rank can be considered strong.

I think of this in terms of the distinction between a prestige hierarchy and a dominance hierarchy. When the elite uses dominance moves, that shows that it has lost prestige.

You probably want to read the whole discussion. It concludes with Codevilla saying “If we end up looking like Brazil, we should count ourselves lucky.”

In other words, have a nice day.

Jason D. Hill argues that blacks should lose their blackness.

This will not mean that they will cease referring to themselves as black. The world at large, as I have said, has picked out morphological markers and racialized them. In a very real way, people of color are stuck with those designators. But they can cease identifying psychologically and morally with the burdensome evil of racial ascription and all the ways in which it circumscribes life. Black Americans may learn the process of decoupling their robust or even surface self-images and depth-identities from racial-inflicted, denigrating identities designed for them for myriad reasons.

His piece goes 180 degrees against current trends. It aligns with my thinking.

Zaid Jilani writes,

Because we’re taking pleasure in the pain of complete strangers—all we know is that they belong to the opposite faction, so they must be awful people—it’s much harder for us to slam the brakes and recognize that we’re starting to bask in sadism.

. . .There is a reason our greatest traditions, both religious and secular, tell us to love our enemies. That imperative is particularly important in the face of rising social and political polarization. The people opposite us in our big debates are our fellow citizens, and they deserve respect. Only by affirming that truth can we successfully tackle something as daunting as a global pandemic and build the social and civic bonds we need to maintain our grand experiment in pluralistic democracy.

You are unlikely to be a moral exemplar when you define yourself by the groups you hate.

Joshua Mitchell writes,

when Christianity reigned, transgression and innocence could not be decoupled from repentance, atonement, and forgiveness. Without these, life withers. For the moment—perhaps forever?—the reign of Christianity is behind us. What walks about is a ghoulish and deadly creature that lives by killing the living creatures that remain. It does this by scapegoating them, by attributing to them transgressions that must be purged—and giving them no means to repent, atone, or be forgiven. Identity politics is the macabre confirmation of the permanence of the Christian language of transgression and innocence; and it is the chilling confirmation that the age of Christianity has passed.

In a much longer piece, Anne Applebaum writes,

In the 19th century, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel argued for the replacement of exactly that kind of rigidity with a worldview that valued ambiguity, nuance, tolerance of difference—the liberal worldview—and that would forgive Hester Prynne for her mistakes. The liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill, writing at about the same time as Hawthorne, made a similar argument. Much of his most famous book, On Liberty, is dedicated not to governmental restraints on human liberty but to the threat posed by social conformism, by “the demand that all other people shall resemble ourselves.” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about this problem, too. It was a serious challenge in 19th-century America, and is again in the 21st century.

Helen Dale writes,

It is from [Wilfred] Reilly we learn two-parent black families are substantially less likely to be poor than single-parent white families, and that between 1900 and 1960 African Americans had low crime rates relative to their numbers in the US population. This despite the well-documented presence of genuinely racist cops and judges throughout the period. We discover, too, that between 1900 and 1955, 85 percent of black families had both parents in the home raising their children and black unemployment rates were low. Between 1920 and 1940, American blacks actually had the highest marriage rates of any ethnic group in the US.

My hypothesis is that black culture broke up under the pressures of urbanization, as children of the great Northern Migration rejected the ways of their rural parents.

Daniel Klein writes,

GMU’s leadership in classical liberal, conservative, and libertarian perspectives draws many to the university. It is a reason that students from all over the country and the world come to GMU. I should think that the university would wish to build on that leadership and proven excellence.

Perhaps the policies you are planning are not intended to reduce dissent from leftism. But policies are being created, with an apparatus dedicated to enforcing them—an apparatus over which no single person has control. One can imagine how, either out of zealousness or from just wanting to feel relevant, dissent would be greeted. Dissident teaching, course material, and speakers might be encroached upon; policies or technicalities might be used to reduce effectiveness of dissident scholars and teachers; dissidents might be pressed into early retirement; dissident units might be unable to hire and promote as they think best.

Read the whole essay in order to get the background. My sense is that George Mason’s libertarians have already felt the chill in the air under the new university leadership.

Emily Oster on vaccine effectiveness, Glenn Loury on the black family, and more.