Both have recommendations for how politics should pivot after Trump. Scott Alexander writes,
He didn’t use the word “class”. But he captured the idea. He implicitly understood that there was some kind of difference between the average working-class voter and the sorts of people who set trends in the media, academia, government, et cetera. His message – which he never put into words, but which came across clearly anyway – was “you working-class people should hate and fear the upper class, and I’m on your side”.
Whenever an upper-class institution tried to make him admit that they were the experts and he should bow to them, he spat in their faces instead. This was terrible; he spat in the faces of epidemiologists trying to tell him about an epidemic! But it sent his message loud and clear – just as South African populist Thabo Mbeki denied HIV/AIDS partly as a way of spitting in the face of the rich white countries who wanted him not to.
Consciously embracing the project of fighting classism would let future Republican politicians replicate Trump’s appeal without having to stoop to his tactics.
professionals often define integrity in large measure by the conduct they disallow — in themselves and in others. A professional intelligence analyst does not spin his findings politically. A professional journalist does not invent sources. A professional scientist does not monkey with data. A professional accountant does not allow a CEO to cook the books. A professional police officer does not allow a partner to plant evidence. A professional lawyer does not permit a client to break the law.
…Professionals are thus the first, and often the only, line of defense against predatory elites who seek to abuse or circumvent institutional safeguards. That is why demagogic populism is, among other things, fundamentally a war on professionalism. It is why opportunists and rogue operators are so keen to push professionals aside. It is why devaluing and corrupting professionalism is a profound danger to a democracy.
I read Number One Pick as saying that the Republican Party should re-brand itself as the party of everyone who is not in the white-collar professional class. Meanwhile, Rauch is suggesting that we need to praise white-collar professionals, not bury them.
NOP and Rauch may not be as far apart as this makes them seem. They are both never-Trumpers. I imagine they both respect true expertise. I gather that both are wary of progressive ideological know-it-alls.
Rauch wants professional politicians and bureaucrats to earn enough respect so that amateurs defer to them. He treats both progressive ideologues and populist demagogues as meddling amateurs.
I think that NOP is posting too much. Maybe he thinks that the money he is getting from subscriptions means that he should work harder on his blog. I would rather he stick to posts where he is thinking in bets. The sociological analysis in this post is nothing you cannot find in Coming Apart or, for that matter, Bobos in Paradise.
Nonetheless, I am inclined to give the W to NOP. While NOP’s proposals for the Republicans are romantic and highly improbable, they are not beyond all realm of possibility. On the other hand, what Rauch’s proposals boil down to saying that if we can click our heels three times and repeat “There’s no place like home,” we can go back to 1985. He desperately needs to read Martin Gurri in order to understand 21st-century reality.
On the first author, I disagree that he’s posting too much. I can’t get enough of his posts. That being said, he’s mentioned that a lot his posts were written after he deleted his blog and before he moved to Substack. He’s said the posts will become less frequent once the backlog is exhausted.
Wonder why Arnold doesn’t engage with Curtis Yarvin’s material anymore. Arnold, years ago, turned me onto Yarvin by commenting on one of Moldbug’s posts. Yarvin’s output over the last year is extremely unique (I obv don’t agree with all of it but the guy is sharp). His critique of SA’s ideas for republicans is spot on.
Where is Yarvin posting these days?
https://graymirror.substack.com/
It would be good to have a second sheet of names with their blog or where they post (twitter, FB). Maybe sorted alphabetically.
Does Pope Francis even have a blog? Is he still your #1 pick? What you got?
Shhh! Here is a sleeper pick just in time for the draft. She is sure to score many many touchdowns and drive Arnold crazy at the same time since she might not completely qualify as a FIT.
https://www.dailywire.com/show/candace?utm_campaign=Candace&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter
So in the last several months here is what I observed the Republican Party do. And I’m not talking Trump, I’m talking Mitch.
1) Even though the stimulus checks were a TINY portion of the Covid bills and very popular, Mitch decided to be really opposed to them over the suggestions of Trump. Predictably, this cost him two senate seats in GA.
2) Armed with 50 senate seats, Democrats spent $1.9 trillion, dwarfing what Mitch “saved” on the last round of checks by over an order of magnitude. I think we all expect the Dems to continue to pass a lot of objectionable things by one vote in the Senate.
3) The “moderate republican” contribution to the bill was to save some chump change by making dual income professional couples ineligible for the stimulus payments. If the new Republic party is all about increasing the effective marginal tax rate on my family (either directly through taxes or indirectly though giving out free debt fueled money to everyone but us) its not very endearing. Lord knows they will probably try to argue us out of the child allowance too.
What exactly has the Republican Party done for me? Are they good at fighting Democrats? No. Do they make live easier for me and my family? No.
I actually can’t think of a positive contribution Mitch has made. At least with Trump my family got vaccines because of him, and although Biden killed it Trump passed some good regulatory changes in my industry.
Scott is right that the Republican Party should decide who its constituents are and represent them, but it doesn’t seem to know. It’s ham fisted attempts are populism are transparently terrible, and actually a downgrade from Trump.
The GOP establishment (to include its more respectable outlets of commentary) faces a similar ‘third-party payer’ problem as with the health sector. The people paying for it are not the ‘customers’ (voters), aren’t aligned with them politically, and have irreconcilably divergent interests. Until non-elitist funding gets figured out, there can be no non-elitist party, period.
Also – as something approaching a General Law of Politics – advice to Republicans from non-Republicans is universally abysmal.
I have a hard time believing that the GOP donor class really gave a shit about slightly handicapping the stimulus payments.
I can’t even really believe it was about sabotaging Trump after Nov 3rd and in the run up to an obviously important election.
I’m honestly just confused. Even “they did it for the donors” doesn’t make much sense here. It’s just moronic, period. You have to actively want to be that stupid.
Hint: Trump sabotaged himself and the movement time and time again. His Twitter ban has helped more than hurt.
Arnold likes to compare what happened to Trump to certain historical boxing matches. Nope – Trump took an AR-15 to the foot of himself and the movement time and time again.
Please stop blaming Mitch for the stupidness of Trump.
Correction: 12 gauge shotgun with 00 buck vs. AR-15. The former is far more devastating, at least at close range.
You’ve seen the butcher and his name is Trump.
https://youtu.be/woAcXSMyCEw
None of this is responsive to the questions being posed. It’s just needless fixation on Trump.
What is Mitch for? What are the big money elements of the GOP for? What is “the movement” for?
MikeDC,
Fair enough even though the original comment contrasts Mitch with Trump.
Have a look at the polling on the virus bill. That will provide pretty much all the the answers that you need to your questions. Mitch didn’t have any viable options nor did anyone else.
My question: is the movement is better off without Trump? I, unequivocally, answer yes. Dude basically phoned it in for his last two years with an endless repetition of his greatest hits album and zero substance. If I wanted that then I’m going with Neil Diamond and yet another live performance of “Sweet Caroline” for the umpteenth million time. That’s not gonna be a winning hand ever.
Explain to me what Mitch was trying to accomplish by sabotaging the GA senate races after Trump had already lost the election?
The correct response to Trump calling for $2,000 checks was “yes, defiantly”. Such a decision would have saved trillions and was very easy to predict.
My advice… if you think you’d be unequivocally be better off without Trump, stop complaining about him. Stop asking questions about him. Stop redirecting every question back to your opinion about him.
Polling has nothing to do with it. As the original comment noted, McConnell has gone out of their way to let popular things die and fought pretty hard for unpopular ones. Which gets to the still unanswered questions…
… what do these guys stand for, if anything?
“Mitch didn’t have any viable options nor did anyone else.”
What are you talking about?
The checks poll well, but the checks are the cheap part of the bill. And tiny changes in eligibility are cheap parts of a cheap part.
Even if he was doing it all for fiscal conservatives (and quite frankly in a scenario like this I think you learn to pick your fights better), its not as if these bills weren’t loaded to the brim with things far less popular then the stimulus checks and far more expensive.
Now, maybe you will say that some of his donors wanted that sweet sweet lucre, so Mitch wouldn’t touch it. If so, let’s dispense with this fiscal conservatism bullshit. We all know government henceforth is going to be “loot what you can for your side while you can.” The 51-50 votes should be kind of a giveaway that the other side sees it that way. The only message I got from Mitch is that he’ll bankrupt the republic to give his buddies bailouts but I can’t even get a mortgage payment out of the guy.
“… what do these guys stand for, if anything?”
You’ve got it 100% correct. We don’t disagree. As of now, they stand for nothing. And, they are still back pedaling from the riots. What great ideas you got on tap for us?
All of the interesting action is at the state level with the red governors.
Yeah, gonna ask it again…how does Trump help this one iota? Exactly!
asdf, I believe Mitch and most elected Reps and gov’t workers in the GOP are relieved that Trump is gone from office, and want him to be gone from the Rep Party.
BUT, they see he’s not gone, and in fact expects to fundamentally transform the Republicans into Trump supporting Republicans.
Because Trump has the voters, which really decide winners by their votes, but is only a very light constraint.
Mitch wants Trump support for votes, but wants to look like he’s fighting Dems rather than actually fighting on most fronts.
One huge good front was in getting Heritage conservative judges – tho many think he could have been better & faster with the non-SCOTUS pics.
Rauch slowly creeps his definition of professionals from self regulation to regulation of others. And all we need is to trust them as professionals, because of their incentive to be professional! Morals, innate altruism, money and status incentives need to be discussed to capture why professionals have been acting less and less professional, and why experts disagree so often and seem driven less by professionalism and more by political pressures.
I find Heumers description of why we should be skeptical of just trusting experts to be pretty applicable here: https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers/passivity.htm
Using “A Time to Build” is Handle-bait, but the bottom line is that the power that institutions have to form professionals can also be used to deform them, and indeed, the story of the naive and good-natured youth being gradually soured and made more cynical and jaded and sinister by long deforming exposure to corrupt institutions goes back at least as far as classical antiquity.
At “Ending The War” – Rauch is being somewhat post-modern in the “marketing over merits” sense of the nature of the discussion. Instead of professionals and institutions needing to reform and be better to earn lost trust, we should all participate in the influence campaign of convincing each other that giving them our trust is the right thing to do.
The great question implicit in both these articles is how to hold professionals to rigorous but achievable standards and to give them no more and no less respect than is their due. Gurri would no doubt say that what we cannot hope to recapture is the mystique of professionalism: technology and society have changed such that we now know how plainly human professionals are and how often they fall short of their aspirational standards. Rauch is making the case that we need them anyway: as you would say “Markets fail. Use markets” he would say “Professionals fail. Use professionals.”
What happens when neither markets nor professionals really exist?
Markets will emerge if the product can be supplied in light of a paying customer.
Professionals will emerge and… tell you how professional they are?
This is 2020 but 2016 was similar.
Exit polls of the 2020 Presidential Election in the United States on November 3, 2020, share of votes by income
Donald Trump Joseph R. Biden, Jr.
Under 50,000 U.S. dollars 42% 57%
50,000 U.S. dollars to 99,999 U.S. dollars 43% 56%
100,000 U.S. dollars or more 54% 43%
What is this working class populism ppl keep talking about?
Trump lost the popular vote by 7 million mostly lower income votes.
7 million!!
It’s worth comparing to 2012: https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/how-groups-voted-2012
The breakdown is virtually identical for >100k voters. Trump gained a few % in the <50k cohort and lost a lot (8-9%) in the 50-100k groups. The notion that Trump turned the GOP into a working class party (or made any significant movement in that direction) is mostly a myth. The class composition of the parties is remarkably stable, it's their self-images that have changed.
Neither won. Your scoring system does not account for the most common result. Neither of them illuminated the subject. There’s no intelligence or expertise demonstrated.
That’s a problem. The bar for intellectual and/or expert is set very, very low.
https://mobile.twitter.com/JHWeissmann/status/1368730870111211520?
Bailing out the pensions of millions of retired truckers, builders, retail workers, etc. Cost of 85 billion. These are working class people. What was the Republican plan to help them?
Hey yo – wassup my bovine friend? The unfunded liabilities for Medicare are like $40 trillion plus. Until someone comes up with a solution for that (no one has and no one will because the political consequences are completely unpalatable), no need to get your knickers in a knot over a $85 billion rounding error.
We are doomed! Have a moo day!
New name again, bruh??
Yeah Medicare is toast unless we reduce costs. What’s the Republican plan for that again? Vouchers? How does that poll with the working class? I can’t remember.
“Yeah Medicare is toast unless we reduce costs.”
Nope, you’re not quite getting it yet. We are toast, not Medicare.
Medicare is nothing more than an accounting entry on ledger paper and can continue into perpetuity provided that the accounting system can handle enough negative digits.
We collectively decided that seniors needed free healthcare, but no one was willing to raise the taxes needed to fund it. And, we also decided that seniors in the last years of their lives were worth saving at any cost.
The bipartisan consensus on this has been with us since at least the 1990s.
Lastly, I find it laughable when seniors collecting their social security and Medicare benefits rail against the stimulus checks sent to those displaced by the virus. I cannot think of anything more blatantly hypocritical than this.
We agree!
Mr. Moo – likewise, I agree with you. The Republican support to bailout the pension funds of working class folks is probably going to be extremely limited. We are nowhere close to reaching a new normal on the political alignment and you are very apt to point this out, so thanks.
Btw – RIP Hans Gruber. Best villain ever!
https://youtu.be/mklnXM3LIXo
The Power of Armies
-Wordsworth
The power of Armies is a visible thing,
Formal and circumscribed in time and space;
But who the limits of that power shall trace
Which a brave People into light can bring
Or hide, at will,—for freedom combating
By just revenge inflamed? No foot may chase,
No eye can follow, to a fatal place
That power, that spirit, whether on the wing
Like the strong wind, or sleeping like the wind
Within its awful caves.—From year to year
Springs this indigenous produce far and near;
No craft this subtle element can bind,
Rising like water from the soil, to find
In every nook a lip that it may cheer.
Rauch is factually wrong. Many of the corporate frauds in the US over the past 40 years have been audited by large accounting firms and to my recollection none were caught by the firms. Sometimes that is because the accountants are in on in (Madoff, but he had a small time accountant), but often you have short sellers/journalists discovering the frauds on less information than the accountants had, for less time.
Isn’t this like saying that because there have been terror attacks in the US, the US gov’t has never stopped any terror attacks?
Not it’s not, no more than what you’re saying is “even if we prevented a single corporate fraud, all the accounting will have been worth it.”
No, I’m not making an assessment as to the cost / benefit.
The point was that it’s wrong to infer that because we observe fraud, accounting firms don’t prevent fraud. Without identifying the amount of potential fraud that was prevented by accounting firms, you cannot say they don’t serve their intended function.
Rauch’s almost doesn’t have to disagree with Gurri.
What Rauch should realize is that it is the decay of the professional class–not the marginalization of the decayed professional class–that poses the “profound danger” to democracy. Gurri often said what he might wish for is a better bunch of elites, although he hardly sees that about to happen.
One thing to remember about Scott Alexander is that he is a member of one of the wokest professions living in the wokest city on Earth. His vision within that bubble is crystal-clear, but he sees dimly outside of it. His advice for Republicans basically boils down to “run against classism”. He doesn’t realize that this is essentially the same thing as running against elitism, which they’ve been doing (mostly successfully) since W.
Sure, Trump lost. He was a historically unpopular president, plus he’d fumbled the pandemic, plus the economy was the worst in 70 years. Pulling off a narrow win in those circumstances is nothing the Democrats should be too proud of.
I don’t view him as having given genuine ‘advice’.
The Straussian interpretation is that such unsolicited and free ‘advice’ from the inside of one group to an outsider group is a historically common device by which an insider can lob gentle or at least subtle criticisms of the excesses and hypocrisies of his own in-group, while seeming to harshly criticize the out-group.
Notice that all the ‘reforms’ and rhetorical suggestions for campaigning and platform organization and basically putting into the mouths of the ‘enemy’ the same criticisms the insider would like to be able to express, but without having his own loyalty questioned.
Another common technique is to say, “Hey comrades, we wouldn’t want the enemy to make [insert some particular argument] because that would be quite effective and devastating and we would have a very difficult time countering it.”
If someone is being serious about free advice, then consistent with the motivating spirit behind prediction markets, one could lay down a marker and either bet that if the Republicans did this, then they would win the next election, or else go further and promise to vote for and donate to Republicans so long as … Scott is not going to do either of those things.
Perhaps. But Scott posted his advice to Republicans the week after reviewing Paul Fussel’s Class, and he’s been living in a woke bubble for a long time. I suspect the book made him see things that he never noticed before, and that his new awareness of social class got him to the point where he can almost see what Republicans have been talking about for 20 years.
The distilled version of the Rauch essay is that Trump posed an existential threat to the politics of division upon which the Ruling Elite depends.
The politics of division prevents the divides the working class by race, and the white majority by government versus non-government employment and suburban versus rural.
Unlike the plunderers of the past, Trump actually improved economic conditions so that working class employment and income improved. This threatened the divisions by threatening to unify the working class around their common interests. Trump’s competence in this regard was deeply embarrassing following decades of their incompetence and threatening hence the ruling elites went crazy with unfounded conspiracy theories, Q-Anon-like theories of racism, eco-apocalypse doom mongering, and every unhinged slur they could think to throw in Trump’s direction.
Now they are worried that the dumpster fire that is the Biden Administration will threaten control of Congress. Hence HR 1 prohibiting election process reforms and banning transparent, orderly, and accountability voting processes. Welcome to North Korea, a democracy in name only.
Scott’s recommendations do seem better than Jonathan’s, using class rather than trying to give respect to “professionals”.
Jonathan totally failed to note how BAD the professional advice has been, for years & decades. So bad that Trump’s gut feelings are more often right, and thus more trusted by his voters, on issues such as:
illegal immigration; Mid East Peace; confrontation with China, including tariffs; rebuilding American manufacturing capability; increasing wages for working class.
Arguably even COVID, with Trump’s highly criticized Jan. ban on China travel likely saving tens or hundreds of thousands of US infections. The WHO and other professionals were against that ban, at the time.
Yet Scott also almost perfectly shows his projection and hypocrisy on Trump:
His message – which he never put into words, but which came across clearly anyway – was “you working-class people should hate and fear the upper class, and I’m on your side”.
Trump’s message WAS “I’m on your side”, and it WAS “the upper class doesn’t care about you, and you should fear their policy results.” But it was NEVER “hate”. Trump was insulting and laughing at the upper class, but not hating them.
Where did ALL the hate come from?
From the upper class elites, who hated Trump.
I started reading Trump’s tweets, but didn’t read all or even most of them – he was mostly “hooray for our side”, and “we’re winning and will win more”. When he was insulting, he was almost always counter-insulting somebody who had insulted or disagreed with him, but it wasn’t to hate the insulted; it was to laugh at them. Which THEY hated.
I think Scott wrote more words than Trump tweeted, but it was close. A lot more hate was written from Scott’s side.
And it seems sort of useless to push “anti-upper class” rather than “anti-elite”, which is a big part of the Republican worker voter current idea.
“Expert” is a relative measure – colloquially, a person who knows most of what is known about a domain. If not much is actually known about a domain, the value of “expert” is reduced.
Experts/professionals belong not only to their own guilds, but also to a meta-guild : that of all experts/professionals. The more experts in any domains profane themselves, the more experts in general are profaned and ignored. It is up to them to self-regulate and clean up their collective act. However, they seem more inclined to demand respect for each other.