Martin Gurri and Yuval Levin face off. Getting the last word, Levin writes,
And as Martin has shown better than anyone, social media and related technologies have powerfully undermined our capacity for self-restraint too. They encourage fast, short, unconsidered reactions and counter-reactions, and the pleasure we derive from these sours us on the habits of discipline.
In order to become “elites who can stand straight in the digital storm,” as Martin beautifully puts it, our leaders would need to hone the capacity for restraint despite all of these pressures. And the rest of our society would too. In the hands of restrained users, the benefits of social media would surely outweigh the costs. In the hands of restrained citizens, the tools of radical transparency could serve democracy rather than scorch it. In the hands of restrained elites, our institutions would be much easier to trust.
Both Gurri and Levin stress the need for better behavior on part of would-be elites and ordinary citizens. And both realize that this is easier said than done. Both would make my list of FITs, so the fact that this about the best they can come up with shows that the problem of restoring trust and authority is quite a challenge.
Martin Gurri and Yuval Levin eloquently remind us that individual responsibility matters at myriad margins in culture. Exhortation and bootstrapping can’t harm and might help.
However, I think that Gurri and Levin mischaracterize the elites. Bryan Caplan makes a strong case that a principal function of higher education is to certify that persons who want to enter elite career tracks have not only smarts, but also character traits of self-restraint (diligence and conformity). Indeed, as far as I can tell, elites — especially in politics, mainstream media, and education — are entirely calculating in polarization. Although social media discourse often is “fast, short, unconsidered,” elite decision-making and behaviors are not.
IMO, the key is to harness new technologies to update institutions to improve voice and exit, the forum and market. A start would be a set of rigorous experiments in new institutions that have a foundation in American traditions. Here (below) are a few examples. AskBlog readers might offer better examples.
– Experiments in grass-roots deliberative democracy by small groups: sortition (random sampling, diversity) + exposure to experts (education) + deliberation + voting. Well-designed agendas would present citizens with explicit trade-offs among policies. BTW, Thomas Jefferson proposed an experiment like this more than 200 years ago.
– Experiments in quadratic voting in specific settings. Although quadratic voting doesn’t solve the problem of rational voter ignorance (or voter bias), it does enable citizens to register intensity of preference, and does present individual citizens with real trade-offs between having opinions about everything and caring deeply about a specific issue.
– Experiments in radical school choice: vouchers in human-capital formation, redeemable for tutors, apprenticeships, internships, training programs, as well as alternative schools. This would be an experiment in new exit options within the education system.
If wealthy foundations or philanthropies would like to improve public discourse and social mobility, they should consider funding rigorous experiments to update institutions.
AskBlog readers: Any ideas for reasonable experiments to try and update institutions and improve voice or exit options?
Agreed, and I came here to mention that Levin dismissed and then vered away from Gurri’s structural proposal:
It might be that this will work through the mechanism of improving individual character, because our characters are formed and controlled by small social circles. But polities that are small enough to make exit a reasonable choice will also (I hope) make voice less performative and more restrained.
I’ll ponder the ask for experiment ideas . I know of a number of rough tools for “deliberative democracy” (decidim, deliberatorium, kialo) but none have the kind of uptake that implies real product-market fit.
Drea, I agree with your point that exit and voice are complements in healthy polities. I look forward to any pointers you might have about experiment ideas or tools for deliberative democracy.
In looking over my list of tools, the three I came up with off the top of my head are probably the best. The topic breaks down into improving argumentation and collecting preferences.
Decidim is a tool for large group proposals, discussion, and voting/rating. In Helsinki, they use it for an annual budget discussion with a round for proposals, a round for “co-creation” (e.g. discussion) and a round for voting. There’s about 187 proposals in now for this year, but I don’t know if that’s a lot or whether this feels like meaningful deliberative democracy.
You could include general civic polling and govtech like Polco in the mix. I’m currently on a frustrating hunt for HOA management software that has good discussion, polling, and voting tools.
Mark Klein at MIT tackles this from a more academic side. The closest to a tool is the Deliberatorium for crowdsourced problem solving.
Kialo is theoretically for structured argumentation, but I don’t see their debates being clearer or easier to follow than anything else. They seem to be focusing more on it as an educational tool (www.kialo.edu).
For improving exit, I’ve mentioned Prospera before, as an active attempt to build a charter city in a country that needs more competitive governance. I’m a fan and an investor, though it’s a long game.
Meh. The rise of rentier capitalism, as David McWilliams points out, is what is stressing the yeomanry and producing low levels of trust in (many) institutions:
“In short order, the economy becomes an extractive business. Rentier companies, with State-sanctioned monopolies or State-written legislation limiting supply and competition, charge the average worker. These charges come in the form of higher taxes (to pay the battalions of consultants), in insurance premiums or in real estate.
Internationally, these sectors are known as the “Fire” economy (standing for finance, insurance and real estate). They extract rents, but ultimately generate no innovation. Equally, these rentiers are in sectors which are usually not traded internationally and therefore are exempt from the forces of international competition.”
http://www.davidmcwilliams.ie/why-the-young-are-priced-out-of-the-irish-economy/
Not surprisingly, trust is low among the yeomanry:
“The majority of Irish people distrust government, Non-Governmental Organisations, the media and business, the latest Edelman Trust Barometer shows.
They also do not see their economic prospects improving over the coming years and believe that in its current form, capitalism does more harm than good.”
https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2020/0217/1115778-edelman-trust-barometer/
This is a mirror of the USA. Except add disproportionate shares of tax revenues and tax expenditures distorting the education and tax-exempts into vast blimps of ZMP employment.
You know who has high trust in government? China. See the 2021 Edelman trust report. https://www.edelman.com/trust/2021-trust-barometer
Perhaps if every attempt to make the USA a less hostile environment for domestic production of goods was not met with a chorus of “autarky” accusations, people might see a future for the USA.
+1, especially on the McWilliams excerpt
“the problem of restoring trust and authority is quite a challenge”
FWIW, Daron Acemoglu concurs:
“U.S. institutions are really coming apart at the seams. And we have an amazingly difficult task of rebuilding them ahead of us.”
https://www.wxxinews.org/post/why-nations-fail-authors-what-capitol-riot-means-future-us
Acemoglu and Robinson would be good FIT candidates. Could such notable intellectual partnerships be selected as a single pick? Other interesting partnerships: Duflo & Bannerjee, Page & Bring, others?
No institution will earn trust when they support untruths.
Gurri: When candidates for office can say “I’m not sure” or “I was wrong,” the reconquest of trust will have begun.
But voters demand certainty.
And too many, probably most, prefer untrue certainty over honest uncertainty.
Levin: Holding people to a standard means constraining them. This is how institutions build trust.
But who has been holding colleges to a standard of hiring fairly – especially more Republicans? Or supporting Free Speech.
Most Trump-supporters have a long list of standards that have NOT constrained Dems, HR Clinton allowed to have illegal server, IRS illegal treatment of Tea Party groups, FBI illegally spying on Trump, illegal unmasking – all without trials or real punishment even after illegal behavior is found. Trump-haters also think his tweets violate standards.
Breaking standards predates Trump’s 2015 candidacy by decades.
Gurri: the quality of our elites has declined appallingly … our elites became performative and now value applause over achievement.
All too true about so many intellectuals – as well as Trump. And Trump critics, who refuse to look much at his accomplishments, blinded by a vulgar style that turns off so many elite.
But here Gurri is a bit wrong – what we need are elites who want to get applause, and do get applause because of achievement.
Real accomplishments more than rhetorical promises. Plus fame as part of achievement.
But his words are almost hopeless:
We’ll never get an elite class driven to service and achievement from a self-indulgent public.
It looks like a majority, or even a large majority of the public WANT to be self-indulgent, and will VOTE for the candidate who promises most indulgence, and are looking for intellectuals or pseudo-intellectuals, or news anchors, or late night comedians, to tell them rationalizations so that their own self-indulgence can be justified as “good”.
Levin: A free society’s institutions should instill and reward self-restraint—in powerful people but also in the larger public. And a crucial factor in our society’s loss of confidence in its institutions is a loss of the sense that they now do this effectively.
Most folk who are looking would say the current institutions of college, media, both political parties, often church, and always to some extent but now excessively business – these elites are replacing general self-restraint with Woke super-restraint and moral libertinism.
There’s always a trade-off between Freedom and Security, and it seems so many want their own freedom w/o self-restraint while also wanting more security – and are willing to take away other people’s freedom so as to feel more secure themselves.
Without being bothered by inconsistency.
Freedom for me, self-restraint for thee, or the police.
“It looks like a majority, or even a large majority of the public WANT to be self-indulgent, and will VOTE for the candidate who promises most indulgence”
That seems true at a gut level, but is there empirical support? For decades after Thatcher we have been listening to a symphony of laments about the horrors of the “age of austerity. “. Could that austerity have happened without significant public support? Such popular support for austerity is frequently derided as populism or fascism. Remember Pork Busters?
Examples of popular support for austerity include Macron getting elected on an austerity platform, the Dutch being derided as “apostles of austerity,” Tony Abbott’s Liberal government, and Bolsonaro getting pension reform enacted. Democracies like Botswana, Germany, and Estonia are famously low on debt. Moreover the 20 democracies with a more competitive tax rating from the Tax Foundation than the USA with its $69,162.19 in debt per capita are all better off in terms of debt per capita . https://taxfoundation.org/publications/international-tax-competitiveness-index/
And
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/10/this-is-how-much-debt-your-country-has-per-person/
Let’s be careful about how much blame we dish out onto the little people.
I really wouldn’t call it a “face off” – which would have been better. Instead, they seem to be on the same page, monolithic, not dialectic. After all, Gurri even says:
Well, you’re not going to get “iron sharpens iron” that way.
Ironically, I think one of the answers to the problem they are exploring is precisely what they have been lacking in their publicizing of their themes, which is “civil adversarial accountability.”
That is, if you are making a case, then like a litigator, your arguments will benefit from knowing in advance that you will face an incentivized but friendly opponent, operating under court rules that are analogous to “enforced good sportsmanship”, and who will question, contest, and make the strongest reasonable objections to every element of your case. So you had better have your ducks in a row ahead of time.
Such adversarial trials are what tends to keep counsel as ‘honest’ as it is possible for humans to be in, and what generates ‘trust’ if the sense that both sides had competent representation and a fair shot to present their side of the story, and every reason and opportunity to independently investigate and poke holes in the other side’s arguments. What generates distrust is insulation from criticism and the perception of improper favoritism, censoring or deplatforming opponents and their rival viewpoints.
When works get nothing but mild applause they are either works or genius or perhaps have not been made to go through a hot enough crucible. I mean, really, who is going to argue against vague calls to moral regeneration and good behaviors among elites and role models?
Gurri says the public is just ‘against’ and nihilistic, but seems unjustifiably dismissive of live controversies and furthermore is not compatible with what we observe, which is that there are two publics, split into warring camps which are very enthusiastic about their leaders (like Trump) and/or values (like Social Justice Wokeness). Does ‘nihilism’ describe the strong attitudes about border walls or abortion? Nope.
Gurri’s thesis seems to indicate that government is more or less the same mess it ever was, but that in the pre-internet era, scandals could get covered up easier and didn’t drive the news so much. But, if you look at pre-internet news, there was constant coverage of political leader scandals. Also, anytime anyone tries to measure it quantitatively, we see not just some *perception* of our government getting worse at things, but it *actually* getting a lot worse at doing things. Consider the recent comparison of post-war vaccination of all NYC against Smallpox in weeks in a much poorer country with fewer technological augmentations, vs today’s effort, in which we’ll be lucky if NYC is done before 2022. Is that because La Guardia didn’t have to worry about scandal reporting in the local press? Uh, no.
He says we have to reform and ‘flatten’ the government, but Israel’s government looks more or less like ours, but, when it comes to vaccinating people, works an order of magnitude better per capita. Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea are Northeast Asian-variant Westernized pyramidal bureaucracies, and also work, even in the era of the internet, and, certainly in Israel’s and South Korea’s case, plenty of focus on political leader scandals. So … scandal coverage and the networked public aren’t it.
Speaking of scandals, does everybody really have to worry about it? There was the whole Hunter Biden thing recently, well, the media certainly seemed to exercise a lot of discipline in not covering that scandal and silencing those who tried. No one thinks the return of message control also signals the return of trust.
Instead, like they both said, we lose faith in institutions because they lie a lot and have bad performance. I don’t like it when other people “argue from personal anecdotal observation and experience”, because it’s hard to know whether they are blowing smoke, so in the spirit of fairness it is perfectly reasonable for you to be likewise skeptical of my claims.
That being said, I have worked in USG a long time, and the rapid, general, and widespread decline in honesty and competence is real and alarming, something that is getting bad enough, fast enough, that it is above the “frog boiling” threshold, and people can notice it as a terrifyingly salient and palpable phenomenon within the course of a single career.
Before anyone jumps on it, let me assure you, this is *not* a Trump thing, and affects administrations of all parties, including this new one from what I can see so far. But in general I am living inside the nightmare the symptoms of which Gurri and Levin seem to be observing from afar with diagnoses that don’t resemble my reality at all. Perhaps the true explanation is simply too gloomy and obvious to lend itself to an exploration which satisfies the market for hopeful sophistication.
Now, it’s true that there is a way in which all this is related to changes in information technology which have contributed somewhat to the actual root problems, but neither Gurri nor Levin seem to have any awareness of the true mechanisms by which the new IT environment generates negative organizational capital and dysfunctional pathologies in coordination, and thus they have picked issues that are simply not relevant to many of the government failures we complain about.
The FDA and CDC have come in for a lot of perfectly well-deserved grief lately, and it’s not because of personal brand building (all these people are faceless and anonymous functionaries) and social media scandal mongering.
You can look back at all kind of failing foreign bureaucracies in history and you’ll notice that they failed similar to the way we are failing, but again, no internet to blame for it, and, to put it euphemistically, some were not particularly sensitive to general public perceptions, of trustworthiness or otherwise.
Levin uses two meaning of ‘trust’, one of which is, “I have confidence that this organization is ready, willing, and able to accomplish its stated objectives well and to deliver on its promises.” The other is “I believe claims made by the leaders and members of this organization, because I believe those people are motivated by a combinations of practical incentivizes to tell the truth and also driven by an internal commitment to integrity even at personal cost.”
Well, both kinds of trust have fallen, and it’s an interesting question as to which would you try to repair if you had to pick just one. Maybe your politicians lie all the time about everything, but when it comes time to get the whole country vaccinated, they are super competent at getting it done fast.
I remember early on in the pandemic, a lot of people I knew were saying things to the effect of, “Oh, WHO, CDC, FDA, a bunch of competent, apolitical, expert, scientific professionals. They *got* this.” Even *I* – and I am probably at least +4SD on the cynically pessimistic scale when it comes to USG’s capabilities – trusted too much in those institutions, and those priors got updated very quickly, “Oh. Oh no! They *don’t* got this!”
So, in that case, we had lots of trust in institutions which in reality had (and still seem to have) no ability to get the job done well. Trust wasn’t the problem, except for there being too much of it. I’d much rather have had the situation reversed, with no one trusting the CDC, but to all of our happy surprises, it really blowing us away with a solid performance.
Levin talks about institutions forming people to be trustworthy by means of incentive and constraint, but that’s just another way of saying “monitoring and accountability.” We have a whole literature of ‘public choice’ that tells us that if you don’t align employee interests, monitor people and hold them accountable for good performance and customer service, then eventually you just won’t get good performance or good customer service. Like everybody else, those employees know what they won’t get in trouble for, and they will try to get maximum benefit for minimum effort, but without accountability, that won’t translate into good results for the organization, or those who depend on that organization’s performance.
Levin notes that people trust the military, but, well, again, it’s kind of obvious that the military has a unique set of legal authorities that are the tools it uses to really scare people and hold them accountable. So the equally obvious answer would be to give those same tools to other institutions, and what’s not obvious is why Levin wouldn’t just come out and say, “Either you concede that it just has to become really quick and easy and low risk to punish and fire civil servants, or you’re not serious about this, so forget about it.” Not a good way to make friends in this town!
This line by Gurri seems to me to be a total non-sequitur: “It’s also true that the quality of our elites has declined appallingly. In part, this is because they keep dreaming of a return to the last century, when the insides were still inside.”
By what line of causation can we connect elites dreaming impossible dreams of being insidery insiders to a appalling decline in their quality? By the way, it’s not an impossible dream, there are still real insiders who keep their inner circle business very much inside the circle, which is another mismatch of Gurri’s story with reality.
This is easy to test. Get anybody with any actual insider knowledge. Then they can ask a question, “Ok Gurri, what *really* happened with the so-and-so decision?” As a former professional analyst, if this was all exposed to the outside, Gurri should be able to put together the accurate, and complete story with no deviations from the true course of events. What I will tell you is that in the government today, and from what I hear in most private organizations too, even people extremely close to the inner circle, who are just outside it, with their almost-insider level knowledge, supplemented by all the conventional media and social media accounts, *still* can’t quite piece together these details, which is of course by design and as intended. The dream lives!
Levin talks about self-discipline and restraint, as if current elites can’t and don’t exercise it. I think he gets this – and exaggerates it – from watching the way people – especially the very-online commentator chattering class – interacts and postures on Twitter. The answer to that is probably the same as with any tempting vices or toxic drugs – continence, abstinence, and temperance – and for everyone to just get off Twitter. But the personal and professional costs are quite high for writers so … @Yuval_Levin and @mgurri.
But here’s the thing. I’ve had the opportunity to watch some genuine elites up close, and they are *extremely disciplined* and have *rock-solid self-control*. There are a few of them who have a bad temper and maybe fly off the handle on Twitter at each other, but my impression is that for many of them, even when you see that, it is mostly scripted and choreographed, which, again, is the application of self-mastery, not a sign of its absence. My experience is that – with the exception of elected politicians who tend to be pretty slimy in any time or place – these elite and successful people are also, ok, not saints, but I think certainly above average in being nice, ethical, trustworthy, hard-working people, many of whom are strongly moralistic and have deeply-held moral sentiments. It is hard to be a real dirt bag and not mess up somewhere along the way in a manner that tends to stain one’s permanent record and make one ineligible for many of the top spots.
Just saying there is a new, special, pervasive moral crisis going on among elites just seems like a kind of casual class slander not backed up by any real evidence. If you want to get into the *content* of those morals, and how *that* has gone off the deep end, then that is a very different question, and one that Gurri and Levin seem quite reluctant to address.
My point is, it is simply incorrect to blame a lack of self-command as if it has become a pervasive character fault. There is plenty of self-command, it is just being harnessed and directed in ways that are not compatible with the stated ends and purposes of our institutions, especially public ones. The problem is incentives, not ideals. Motives, not morals. Costs, not character.
Handle,
Thanks for taking time and care to write your comment, really an essay full of insights and wisdom.
Thanks John. I’ve watched a *lot* of institutional dysfunction up close in the past year (or three), which unfortunately includes the last two weeks too. It has provoked a lot of deep reflection on the nature of these poor results and the common root causes at the heart of the matter.
One thing I have had to do is admit to myself I was wrong and naive about these matters being idiosyncratically related to Trump and the general chaos characterizing his administration. When the transition happened and many of the human factors related to the problems didn’t change at all even when the humans did, I had to rapidly update my priors and go searching for alternative explanations. For example, while I certainly agree with “personnel is policy”, I also thought that “personnel is performance”, but now I have had to seriously discount that second maxim.
After two weeks of reflection, I think I’ve gotten a lot closer to the heart of the matter, and maybe I’ll write about it in a comment (heh, or ten) here sometime when the opportunity arises and I have the time.
But two quick notes:
1. The real mechanisms and causes have very little to do with what Levin and Gurri are talking about, and I am more convinced than ever that both of them are very much barking up the wrong trees. These are not just small errors, but sometimes going after the very opposite of the ugly truth (e.g., In actual practice, things have become more ‘insidery’ than ever before: centralized and concentrated and run out of secretive inner circles.)
Now, I like and respect both of them a lot, and I’m not trying to trash them at all. I am kind of a fan and do not hesitate to recommend them to people. I’ve bought all their books, read them cover to cover, taken detailed notes, and read most everything they put out. However, these bloodhounds are just not sniffing out the proper culprits. And getting to the real answers behind things like, “Our Regulatory State Is Failing Us,” is, as we’ve all been sad to be reminded of, a matter of literally life-and-death importance.
Also, I have been quite disappointed that they either don’t seem to be facing much criticism, or maybe they’re just unaware of it, or ignoring it. When I read their latest, it just seems to be pounding the same drum and repeating the same one-liners over and over, not addressing what I regard as many obvious objections, such as I’ve discussed extensively in the comments here. Yes, I get that like being active on terrible-toxic-Twitter, that’s how things kind of have to be in ‘the biz’, but that’s just another nail in the coffin of our public intellectual discourse.
Kling mentioned Jim Manzi as a ‘sleeper’ for the FIT, and I certainly agree, but I don’t know what the jargon is for the opposite of ‘sleeper’ except for ‘overrated’, and while I absolutely agree that both of them certainly belong on the list, I admit that if they ended up on my roster I would quickly trade them if I didn’t have to optimize for Kling as scoring judge.
2. If you think about it, you’ll realize that the main reasons for the dysfunction being of a nature that transcends party and personality is *very bad news*, which should be quite alarming and depressing. It means you can’t fix things by just picking different people. If means there are no “tweaks” that are reforms that stand any chance of producing major improvement. It means that anything that stands any chance of disrupting this bad state of affairs is necessarily of a radical nature that will trigger an incredible and likely insurmountable amount of political resistance. Now, all that doesn’t mean that the Trump administration wasn’t particularly bad – it was – but it still means that one should downgrade the level of culpability and upgrade one’s view of the administration by giving them a more forgiving golf handicap for facing structural, systemic headwinds that *everyone* faces now.
Handle,
Re: Your point about increase in insidery. Yes, it’s unclear who really calls the shots in the executive branch now.
I’ll add just one more thing here, which is that while Gurri’s book can only really be read ‘straight’, Levin’s book lends itself to several possible subtle “Straussian” interpretations, some of which I think are better that the ‘straight’ read, i.e., it would be more charitable to assume that’s what he really meant, and to thus not worry too much about the lack of accuracy or consistency in the rest of “A Time To Build”. Others who pick up on the same Straussian message would think, “Oh, he just doesn’t really get it.” Well, here is the “consider the context, read between the lines” version.
Basically it’s about Trump. Not so much Trump the man in particular, but the vulnerability and existential threat to the American Conservatism Movement Establishment Respectable Intellectuals’ influence that Trump’s win revealed. I’m just going to call that ACME for short.
Remember how after it collapsed in late 2008, the motto at the Fed and Treasury was “No More Lehmans”? Well, for ACME, the motto is “No More Trumps”. As subtitle, “The Party Decides (e.g., on acceptable candidates), and ACME Intellectuals influence the donors and the politicians.”
That is, if your party purports to really believe in democracy and to run genuinely open primaries by simply counting heads, then they risk “A Face In The Crowd” scenarios, letting great celebrity demagogues rally the great unwashed, with the party leadership losing control of everything. Then the whole movement is going to go off the rails, become a laughingstock, crash and burn, and go down the tubes.
To avoid that, the GOP establishment and ACME would have to be determined and courageous and be willing to exercise their *institutional* powers to exclude unacceptable performers and demagogues and, well, let’s face it, exclude, cancel, and deplatform them. “No More Trumps. The Party Decides.” Maybe they could use that whole “super-delegates” tactic that worked for the Democrats against Bernie.
Well, ok, but the raw and open exercise of explicit suppression feels more like domination than prestige and thus generates bitterness, resentment, and resistance. Just ask anyone who’s been cancelled lately.
So, what one has to do is have the modern equivalent of a political ‘cleric’ *legitimize* the political authority’s right to exercise such power, to find that spoonful of rationalization sugar that helps the bitter medicine go down, and to spread lots of that sugar around all the elite players who are supposed to “get it”, and immediately grasp what you are trying to do and understand the instrumental utility and importance of that sugar, and thus start repeating the same memes over and over to each other and their public audiences, to make it seem like a consensus and a way to affiliate with the beliefs of high status elites.
So that, when it comes time to keep someone out of the party, or kick them out, party authorities can use language that people have already been taught to understand and to which they have become accustomed to hearing, “Well, the institution has to constrain these people to form them, for its own good and for their own good, and for the reputation of the institution, so that people can trust us. It is tough love: it feels a little rough and you wish you didn’t have to do it, but it’s for the best for everybody, spare the rod, spoil the child, and all that. And that means picking insiders who have been ‘formed’ by that constraining process (i.e., damn well doing what The Party and ACME tell them to do), and excluding outsiders who are not team players, not organizational men. And, let’s face it, who *should* be excluded, because they are just in it for themselves and their ‘personal brand’, for their own aggrandizement, fame, and wealth, not committed to any principles or platform policies, and thus likely to burn up social capital for their own benefit, and agitate unnecessary amounts of controversy and animosity, just for the clicks, which is just really bad for everybody.”
It is of course only coincidental that it would also be bad for those establishment figures personally, whether they are powerful and influential party leader courting donors, or respectable intellectual writers, or otherwise.
So, the Straussian read of Levin is simply that, the attempt to write the script for legitimization of “No More Trumps”, by creating the language patterns and a kind of “Talking Points Memos” collection of one-liners, then acting as a flag pole around which everyone can rally, coordinate, and synchronize. Then those lines that seem like inarguable calls to moral propriety and selfless service can be repeated by party elites, widely enough, and for long enough, to penetrate the audience thoroughly enough, that when it comes time to kick out a latter-day Trump, the target has already been softened, the way already paved, and the groundwork already layed.
Well, there is something to be said for that whole line of argument, and, in my opinion, it is a better argument than the more general, Straussian one Levin presents in his book and public writings and appearances.
However, there is one catch. It only works when the institution exercising the exclusion power is itself a worth institution, and has not been internally corrupted past the point of trustworthiness, such that one can’t trust its judgment or that it won’t abuse such discretion to merely keep the incumbents in power and further *their own* personal interests and agenda.
Are there such corrupted institutions? As the kids say these days, “many such cases.” There are some crazy people who might even argue that such a thing already happened to the GOPe and ACME before Trump even arrived on the scene, and so, even if they had their Levin-prescribed act together at the time to stop him, they still wouldn’t have deserved to have been able to.
Supposing this Straussian read is correct, pounding the same drum and repeating the same one-liners over and over is exactly what they should be doing. This would explain your observations of the quality of their recent work.
I think you got the nail on the head. I was baffled by how pathetic Levin’s argument was when he was on Econtalk. I remember thinking that some institutions needed to die out, yet here he was arguing as though institutions were properly immortal and individuals must be sacrificed to ensure that. No recognition that sometimes the organization just has to stop, be it a failed company or a corrupted social institution, or even a good institution that has served its purpose and now no longer has one.
The Handellian read makes much more sense, or at least makes me less uncomfortable than thinking this guy must be a bit of a twit. Replacing “institutions in general” with “this particular institution that collects and distributes goodies for us” makes his argument more intelligent. More mostly distasteful, but not the work of a very literate idiot.
So much pessimism; where will it end? That is, if our not-very-functional government is not going to get better, and may get worse, will people live with that? So far we are doing so–and, really, times are pretty good for most of us, compared with the past–but will governmental disfunction lead to a revolution? That would be scary; I hope, instead, we can muddle through, living with low-capacity-but-not-horrific government.
You say that “the problem of restoring trust and authority is quite a challenge.” But this is not a challenge *for me*: I am not at all trying to do it, seeing that I have negligible influence. I *hope* that over time our authorities will more and more deserve our trust, but do not see a trend in this direction.
Great comments above by Handle are why I’d have him, Handle, as a hugely underappreciated “intellectual”.
Really – I always read and usually, but not always, agree with his points AND think they are insightful plus seldom articulated by others.
But his blog is not as robust as his comments here – http://handleshaus.com/
(if you search for it, you might see an Estonia cryptocurrency consultantcy)
And I wouldn’t want him disqualified from being on a team when he’s a potential draft/ auction (auction better!) member.
What if David Henderson (possible) or Tyler Cowen (hmm?) wanted to play? Would they still be eligible to be picks? I’d say yes.
Actually, as a way to get my favorite Econ blogger more exposure – I’d suggest Arnold suggest to all those who are listed that they consider playing, too. Leading to issues of having one team, which you gain with exclusive picks, but also having a single All-Star set of picks which is not exclusive. And, in December 2021 or when the final score per team member is tallied, there would be a single Maximum Score of the “ideal All-Star team”.
Gamification of supporting intellectuals is a great idea. Like War Strategy.
Scoring criteria is a huge bear. Like War Logistics.
Thanks Tom, but I would like to auto-disqualify.
First, I accept the choices I’ve made in my life that keep me very busy and don’t give me nearly enough time to be “in the arena”, so to speak. The players are some combination of being far more productive than me, or having much more time.
Second, while I don’t really know, it may be that I have a bad reputation in some quarters. If so, especially given the hair-trigger thermonuclear social-punishment machine out there, I certainly don’t want any of that unjust guilt-by-association stink sticking to Kling. As an example of which I was recently reminded by an acquaintance: despite my efforts at being very civil and polite and reading his books more carefully than 99.99% of people out there, even Rod Dreher straight-up ghosted me. Which I thought was pretty rude, but to be fair, Dreher can’t afford any more stink stick either. C’est la guerre, mon ami.
Third, as for the blog, I’ve mostly abandoned it, save for reviewing Dreher’s books (but see above). When I want to discuss things with my friends, I’ve gone private. As for public, I’ve moved on to different projects, and I hope no one actually is ever able to make the connection.