Our culture war in historical perspective

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Michael Lind writes,

In addition to the “Deep State,” other national institutions that the neo-Jacksonians of the New Deal coalition never conquered in their revolution against Yankeedom include the major nonprofit foundations like Ford and Rockefeller and the Ivy League universities. The culture of what might be called the NGO-academic-spook complex remained deeply rooted in the Social Gospel wing of Northern mainline Protestantism of the early 1900s.

The Social Gospel progressivism these institutions have long embraced is a Janus-faced tradition. One face is technocratic, holding that social and global conflicts, rather than reflecting the tragic nature of human existence, are “problems” which can be “solved” by nonpartisan experts guided by something called “social science.” The other face of Social Gospelism is irrational, and rooted in post-millennial Protestant theology convinced that we are on the verge of a world of peace and prosperity, if only wicked people at home and wicked regimes abroad can be crushed once and for all.

People in this tradition will tell you that the virus would go away if the wicked would only “listen to the scientists.”

Pointer from a commenter. I recommend the entire essay. In fact, I recommend Tablet in general. I have signed up for their newsletter.

23 thoughts on “Our culture war in historical perspective”

    • If I understand the argument right, it’s that covid-19 is obviously a lot more deadly than the typical flu, but the typical death rate is still remarkably seasonal (see the video at 22 minutes) because of normal influenza and pneumonia deaths for old people.

      And overall *those* deaths are down a lot more than usual because of the lockdown measures, which just about statistically compensate for the extra covid-19 deaths (up to the point of the study anyway).

      There is also some large percentage drop in deaths of young people from not being able to do reckless, dangerous things, but compared to old people deaths, those aren’t very many.

      Let’s say all that’s true. Then with the lockdowns we bought something like a quarter million elderly people an extra life year, but who would have certainly died from this year’s ordinary flu. That means there’s a backlog.

      Let’s assume that people who “would have died” from ordinary flu this year, but for lockdown measures, will almost certainly die from ordinary flu next year, because they are facing a flu a year older.

      So vaccinating them against covid won’t help them if the lockdown ends. Once we vaccinate everyone and end the lockdown, next year’s ordinary flu is going to *look like* another quasi-pandemic bug, because it will be killing the usual seasonal population, and working off the substantial backlog too.

      Oh no. If next year’s flu looks like a super-flu because of this mis-interpretation, the politicians will get spooked and we’ll all go right back into lockdowns over a new virus, which in truth was just an ordinarily deadly flu virus.

      It could be even worse, a kind of “phugoid oscillation” effect. You lock-down, relax a little, the ordinary annual flu starts working off the backlog, looks like a super-flu, you lock-down again, add some more old people to the backlog, and it takes many cycles for the pendulum to stop swinging.

      • If they can do all this over something that at the end of the day just isn’t a big deal, they can do it every few years or so when another bad virus comes out.

    • Since there were 300K more deaths than last year at this point and there are about 220K deaths attributed to COVID. It seems straight forward that there are excess deaths due to COVID. What is missing?

      • Interestingly, the author of the study compares 2018 to 2020, and finds little difference between all cause mortality in 2018 and 2019. I really would prefer to see a five year average for all cause mortality, updated and adjusted for the population and population structure of 2020, and then compares to actual all cause mortality in 2020. It strikes me as totally plausible that excess mortality in 2020 isn’t actually all that much higher than what you would expect from a year with a pandemic of a novel coronavirus.

        But of course that mortality in 2020 has occurred with people substantially changing their behavior, so that fact alone wouldn’t prove that there is nothing unusual about the coronavirus.

  3. Maybe it’s time to introduce the 4th language of politics into the mix? The geriatric axis – no one is able to move forward with his/her life until this crowd is absolutely convinced that the vaccine is proven 100% effective. That’s obviously what science dictates.

    Fwiw – the geriatric crowd had no issues whatsoever in lecturing us about the Goolsbee findings over the last few months, even if those results were substantially less valid from a scientific perspective.

  4. There are too many “cultural Southerners” and “Northern transplants” in the first part of Lind’s essay (WASPs being thrown out of government by FDR) to take it without a big grain of salt. There were more than enough super-progressive WASPs supporting FDR’s New Deal and even CPUSA to keep the ball rolling. I am reminded of Elizabeth Bentley, herself a WASP, writing in “Out of Bondage” :

    There was the meeting that I had with an advanced student — whom I shall call Edwin — at Union Theological Seminary back in the spring of 1935. Harold Patch had introduced me to him because he wanted me to co-sign Edwin’s application for membership in the Party. I asked him why he wanted to join, and with eyes aglow he tried to explain his beliefs.
    “The old Christianity is dead, Elizabeth,” he said thoughtfully. “Christ came to this earth to preach the brotherhood of man, but most people seem to have forgotten. They are too immersed in making money and getting ahead in the world. I’ve always wanted to be a minister of Christ, but somehow, until I discovered the doctrine of Communism, I was nauseated with the rotten hypocrisy of the average churchgoer, not to mention the attitude of the clergy.” Then he smiled, and I felt that at long last he had found what he was looking for. “I’m convinced that Communism is the Christianity of the future, that I, as a potential Christian minister, must per se be a Communist, even though it will be a very hard life. Does that startle you?”
    No, it didn’t. In fact, it only confirmed what I had been thinking for several months. Yet I was worried about his future. Would this new-found allegiance of his stand in the way of his being ordained the following year? I asked him whether or not he had broached his ideas to anyone at Union Theological Seminary and, if so, what they thought.
    “Yes,” Edwin said cheerfully. “I’ve talked to Dr. Harry Ward about the question of my joining the Communist Party. He’s not a member, as you know, but he told me that I should follow the dictates of my own conscience. In fact, he indicated that my membership would make absolutely no difference in my being ordained.” He paused for a moment and looked at me. “You know, it’s funny, but I would swear he approved the step I am taking.”
    …
    Edwin joined the Party, and very soon thereafter two other students at Union Theological Seminary applied for membership.

    Harry Ward was English. Union Theological Seminary was founded by Presbyterians, and members whom Presbyterians considered heretics for being too progressive switched over to Episcopalians, another core WASP denomination.

    As for the part about progressivism being secularized mainline Protestantism, Moldbug wrote many voluminous posts about it 13 years ago, with extensive references. Nobody cares, except a few internet weirdos such as yours truly.

    • It’s also worth noting that southern Democrats were among the biggest skeptics of the New Deal. In fact southern apprehension over perceived federal overreach by the New Deal was one of the early factors that helped push the south Republican. Lind’s portrayal in some ways seems backwards.

  5. I thought this was an interesting, counter-intuitive essay, but the biggest hole in it seems to be that he speaks of the New Deal coalition as being Southerners and Northern ethnics, but Franklin Roosevelt himself was an upper-class New Yorker.

    • Yeah, Lind said nothing in that essay that was both correct and that Moldbug hadn’t said better (and longer) in the late ’00s.

  6. It’s comforting to know that the takes are just as paranoid when the discussion is white guy identity politics.

    • I take it that your Black Friday didn’t go so well? Sorry!

      Mixed results over here. 9mm and 223 still way overpriced and in short supply, but I think I’m starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel (finally). Inventory starting to trend upwards. However, scored a sweet deal on an upgraded trigger for the wife’s Sig P320.

  7. I think that deregulation could make a positive difference, although the difference might be small. That is an area where there is some alignment between President Trump’s agenda and the needs of working-class Americans.

    However, if it were up to me, I would focus on reducing the implicit taxes on labor demand and labor supply.

    a. Get rid of “employer-provided” health insurance, which is an employment tax on healthy workers to pay for health care costs of workers with chronic illnesses, and instead provide support for the chronically ill with government funds. On health care policy in general, I continue to prefer the approaches that I suggested a decade ago in Crisis of Abundance to the Obamacare and ObamacareLite choices currently in play.

    b. Reduce or eliminate the payroll tax.

    c. Substitute a basic income grant for means-tested programs, including food stamps and Medicaid. However, reduce overall spending on poverty programs. That probably means setting the BIG below the level required to sustain a household. Leave it to charities and local governments to find the households that need and deserve more assistance than a low BIG can provide.

    d. Fund (a) and (b) with a tax on consumer spending.

    5. On foreign policy, if Trumpism means nothing more and nothing less than treating governments that work with us better than governments that work against us, then I am on board.

    • That was Arnold King 2017. A good policy start for winning the culture wars. Working class stability, security and prosperity will render culture war ideologies irrelevant.

      • I don’t believe culture war will ever be irrelevant, much as I wish it would be.
        The elite snobs will always want some way to show moral and/or intellectual superiority, to go along with their greater wealth.

        It’s the zero-sum status competition – one can only rise on top of others who fall.

        • Maybe. One thing follows another. In the USA in particular where my Scandinavian sensibilities sometimes blind me to the working of USA culture. There is still something of a Law of Jante in the rural Midwest that the woke religion imposes upon working class whites. The ten rules of Jante state:
          1. You’re not to think you are anything special.
          2. You’re not to think you are as good as we are.
          3. You’re not to think you are smarter than we are.
          4. You’re not to convince yourself that you are better than we are.
          5. You’re not to think you know more than we do.
          6. You’re not to think you are more important than we are.
          7. You’re not to think you are good at anything.
          8. You’re not to laugh at us.
          9. You’re not to think anyone cares about you.
          10. You’re not to think you can teach us anything.
          11. * There is an eleventh warning, or punishing, law included in the book also: Perhaps you don’t think we know a few things about you?
          (https://www.workhuman.com/resources/globoforce-blog/recognizing-across-cultures-scandinavia )
          This works in a consensus democracy when it is applied across the board. But not so well when it is a “Law of Jante for thee, status for me” game like in the USA.

          When enough of a population have economic security, stability, prosperity, the power of status like that endowed by the woke religion, I tend to believe, winds up being subverted by the masses who get bored by it and ignore the practitioners.

          • Rather than getting bored with it – they will constantly change the goal posts.

            Remember gay marriage “for equality”? Finding and using “hate speech” against those who disagree is a never ending sport, the believers & players never tire of it, never get bored, never get satisfied. OK, it ends when they STOP being such, or when they “win” and there is no longer any Free Speech (= hate speech).

            Like you mention, the USA “self-promotion” culture, with Trump as an extreme in both success and promotion, is far away from Jante. [Thanks for link!]

      • Individualism and meritocracy will never win the culture war – but might achieve a trench warfare stalemate of very slow moving lines – sort of like on abortion.

        Many Libbers and Cons who are tired of fighting in the wonk committees, seem willing to accept UBI – Universal Basic Income. In principle. But it will never work in a stable way – because a huge need of most people is self-respect.

        And while getting paid to play video games all day, every day, might be fun. Might be so fun and so easy that boys grow into men doing nothing else to make money / create wealth – but they won’t be happy, nor satisfied with their lives.

        No gov’t nor charity program can give them self-respect. The closest that has been successful for low-to-avg IQ people, especially with poor examples as parents – the best Gov’t program has been the military. More messed up young men go thru some military service and come out as self-respecting adults than any other program.*

        So I support a voluntary National Service, paying 80% of military service basic enlistment (~$1,733/month 2020), to anybody and everybody willing to work 8 hrs/day. Tho that might be less than a state’s minimum wage ($10/hr = 400/wk, 13 weeks each 3 month $5,200 /qtr; = $1,733 why am I surprised?)

        I’d rather the gov’t find lazy/ stupid/ unlucky workers a job and give them orders on what to do, over just giving them money. With orders to do work, they might learn self-respect, and take a step on the ladder leading up out of poverty.

  8. The increasingly powerful and intolerant woke national overclass justifies its cultural iconoclasm in the name of oppressed minorities. But this is just an excuse for a top-down program of cultural imperialism by mostly white, affluent, college-educated managers and professionals and rentiers. Woke attitudes are much less common among Black Americans and Hispanic Americans than among the white college-educated elite.

    “Helping the poor” has long been just an excuse for mostly more pork.

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