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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   28821 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024

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To set the stage: apparently David French is a progressive liberal, now? I had heard he endorsed Kamala Harris based on his own personal cafeteria Christianity. But on Thursday he also wrote a flagrantly false-consensus-building article for the New York Times, arguing that the Supreme Court needs "reform" in the form of term limits--and furthermore, that this could even be done through legislation without being blatantly unconstitutional.

Dan McLaughlin then took him to task over at National Review, in one of the better discussions I've seen on this issue.

First, to call the Democrats’ proposals “reform” is to take partisan sides by parroting one side’s loaded talking points. . . . Second, these proposals are not “in the air.” They are not emanating from multiple sources in different places on the partisan and ideological spectrum. They are not generated by an impersonal History, before which we must simply stand aside. We would not say that building a wall across the Mexican border is “in the air.” These are the specific ideological demands of one political party. They have been pushed by a particular coterie of activists, all of whom have essentially the same desired policy ends in mind. They arose out of one party’s presidential primaries and its Senate Judiciary Committee members. They were on nobody’s agenda until after Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh were appointed to the Supreme Court. We heard a quite different tune in 2016 when Mark Tushnet was arguing for a triumphal march of liberal and progressive ideology through the courts on the premise that “right now more than half of the judges sitting on the courts of appeals were appointed by Democratic presidents. . . . Those judges no longer have to be worried about reversal by the Supreme Court if they take aggressively liberal positions.”

An honest accounting would be frank about the fact that these proposals came about for only one reason: There’s a conservative majority on the Court for the first time since 1930, and liberals and progressives don’t think it’s legitimate for our side to ever get what their side has enjoyed in the past.

The sole reason we are talking about restructuring the Supreme Court is that liberals and progressives are unhappy with the outcomes of its decisions. That’s the thing. It’s the whole thing. It’s the only thing. It’s the entirety of the thing. It’s 100 percent of the thing. There’s no other thing. And if you are endeavoring now to make a purportedly conservative (or at least non-ideological) case for restructuring, you need to first explain why it is that liberals and progressives being unhappy with outcomes is, in and of itself, a crisis. Why is it not a permissible result of a political process that liberals and progressives get something they dislike? Why is that not legitimate? Why, specifically, does it change the legitimacy of a system that was acceptable when it delivered outcomes that liberals and progressives liked?

French speaks of “instability and anger that harm the court and threaten the rule of law.” Whose anger? Why is the anger of progressives an infallible sign that something must be given to them to assuage it? Do we treat conservatives, let alone MAGA Republicans, as if the mere fact of their anger requires a restructuring of the existing rules to let them win? French typically treats the anger of Donald Trump’s devotees as a problem for the system to resist, not a cause for it to give them more of what they want.

Sorry for the length of that quote, by the way, I'm trying to not just cut-and-past the whole article, but it's really, really great. In particular, something he doesn't say outright but which I noted recently is that Democrats are "doing everything they can to disassemble any part of the system that doesn't guarantee their victory and continued ideological dominance."

Are Republicans doing the same, in reverse? I think I see as much at the state level; state legislatures, (R) and (D), seem to do their damnedest to gerrymander permanent majorities while flying just beneath the radar of watchdog authorities. But something that does not get discussed often enough, concerning the Supreme Court, is that while the Supreme Court has been dominated by progressive justices for almost a hundred years, it has also been overwhelmingly controlled by Republican-appointed justices since Nixon was in office. But for some reason, moving to Washington D.C. and taking a lifetime sinecure tends to shift people's politics leftward. Or, stated a little differently--these people are highly prone to losing what Rudyard Kipling once called "the common touch."

So here's my wonkish take for the morning: The United States of America is drowning in historically unprecedented wealth. This makes governance too easy. Keeping people happy enough to not revolt ("bread and circuses") is trivially achievable. Somehow, you can mismanage cities to the point of transforming San Francisco into an open-air sewer and still maintain total ideological dominance over the voting population. This sort of thing suggests to me that political competition just isn't happening at the object level. Party politics is approaching 100% meta--which could help to explain how a turn-of-the-century Democrat became the darling of Republican populism circa 2024. Politicians no longer offer competing visions from which voters can select--indeed, too clear a vision can be a liability to "big tent" rhetoric! The goal is not to demonstrate one's merits as a leader, a visionary, or an intellect; it is all pure meta.

Here's where someone slaps me with an "Always has been" .jpg, right? But I think that's not quite right, though I'm not sure I have anything original to say about it. I think that, throughout American history, we have had a fair number of politicians of vision and intellect, who established their merit and provided real leadership. Televised debates were probably the beginning of the end of that, but maybe just "mass media generally." We have become a nation in which politics has become the practice of demanding consensus on issues of real disagreement, even when that consensus is flatly contradictory with some other portion of the consensus.

Fake "term limits" where a lifetime appointment becomes "de jure" but not "de facto" justices is not a legitimate Constitutional approach; I suspect it is only being floated because the Constitutional approaches are politically unpopular. While Court packing (or, even more aggressively, Court impeachments) is a legitimate Constitutional approach to reforming the Supreme Court, doing do for nakedly political reasons is politically risky. People may in general be okay with politics at the meta, but if you make it too obvious, people demanding object-level politics start to look less crazy, which threatens to upend the apple cart.

So in an attempt to be the change I wish to see in the world here's an object-level take: I feel bad for David French. I would say he has lost the common touch. I definitely don't go out of my way to read his essays the way I have sometimes done in the past. I think circa 2015 I enjoyed most of what he had to say. His criticism of Trump in 2016 was not unwarranted. But the right-wing meta reacted very strongly against him, and he also gained some wealth and notoriety; he has been on a steady leftward trajectory ever since (not unlike the trajectory of some Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices)--though he maintains that it is others who have changed, not him.

Well, it's possible for two things to be true at the same time.

So here's where someone slaps me with an "Always has been" .jpg, right? But I think that's not quite right, though I'm not sure I have anything original to say about it.

I don't think it has "always been" like this.

I am usually the one who contradicts the catastrophizers, the doomers, and accelerationists by bringing up whatever American history book I have most recently read to point out that we had extremely hot culture wars in the past, with politicians literally assaulting each other on the floor of Congress, with ideological camps deriding each others' partisan cures for epidemics, with very real, widespread and sometimes laughably blatant voter fraud, etc.

But at least in my lifetime, we mostly grew up with the idea that we might live in a two-party system with drastically opposing ideas, but nobody actually wanted to delegitimize and disenfranchise the other side. If you lost an election, that sucked and you could be unhappy about it, but you set about trying to win the next one.

The Motte being the place it is, most people perceive the Democrats to be the villains here, and right now, they are, because they are in power and because the left has the upper hand in the culture wars. But it was during the Clinton years when I first noticed a radical shift amongst right wingers; Clinton was not just a bad president, he was illegitimate. He was a monstrous, degenerate, nation-ending catastrophe. Liberals were traitors. Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter rose to prominence on the strength of their invective.

This wasn't a particularly unique period in American history and I am not (quite) saying "Republicans started it," but I am saying that was about the time when I noticed, in the modern era, an end to our civic-minded Schoolhouse Rock version of American politics where Republicans and Democrats could still grill together. I know for certain that Congress was a more congenial and bipartisan body (and a lot of people criticized it for that, arguing that bipartisanship was bad because it meant making compromises and concessions with the enemy - well, those critics got what they wanted).

So I feel what you are saying, and what your National Review article is saying. I feel it every time I talk to my liberal friends. I feel it when I visit my hobby boards which have become essentially a chorus of daily agreement about leftist talking points. That someone could be a good person and still vote Republican is basically unthinkable. That you could be a liberal and remain friends with a Trump supporter is considered a logical contradiction, like saying you're a Jew who's friends with a Nazi.

I have seen liberals arguing that packing the court is a perfectly legitimate measure, that controlling free speech on the Internet is essential to combat disinformation, that the Constitution is fake and gay, and it's very clear that:

liberals and progressives are unhappy with the outcomes of its decisions. That’s the thing. It’s the whole thing. It’s the only thing. It’s the entirety of the thing. It’s 100 percent of the thing. There’s no other thing.

This makes me sad and frustrated and gloomy, but while I am not going to say Republicans started it, I'm not not saying that either.

No, seriously, you can probably pick whatever ideologically-motivated starting point fits your narrative, but it didn't used to be like this.

I like to think of it in terms of a multi-generational cultural-economic debt model:

  1. Greatest Generation: Inherits the economic memory of the depression and prosecutes WW2. Their just reward is the American economy 1958-1968. 20 years of "it's raining money". They also inherit the traditional culture of their parents - WW1 veterans and earlier - who grew up in a highly localized and federated political system mostly because technology and communication meant that Washington D.C. injecting itself into the daily concerns of say, Tulsa, Oklahoma, was impossible.

  2. Baby Boomers - Inherits amazing economy, prosecutes Vietnam - but this is the start of "War is for the poors" and objecting to military service (unthinkable in all previous generations) is hailed. They inherit just enough of their parent's traditional cultural norms that monogamy and family-as-center-of-political life maintains, but, combined with the sexual revolution and the pill, that starts to fade in strength considerably. The top 20% of them end up getting a bonus 30 years of economic prosperity (being a white collar worker 1968-1998 was like 30 years of being a FAANG engineer).

  3. Gen X / Elder millenials - Problems start. They don't inherit much of the economy prosperity of their parents because the 1970s inflation makes it difficult and the aforementioned top 20% of baby boomers capture a lot of the wealth generation as Gen X / Elder-M begin their careers. Culturally, there is no Big War - Gulf War 1? That was like, one summer, right? The last frayed stands of traditional family are exploded by 1970s welfare programs etc. Feminization of the culture is in full swing.

  4. Mainline Millenials - They come into their teens / early adulthood with 2008. 8 Years later, half of them sincerely believe Trump is Hitler. Economically, it's not just that the top 20% capture some of the wealth being generated, it's that they're capturing all of it. There are no more families, there's a decent change you grew up in a divorced household. Religious and community based institutions are non-existent. The babyboomers are now retiring and their built up national debt is now your concern.

So, no, there isn't a single "starting point" but you can see the accumulation of degeneration economically and culturally. Do I blame this on the baby boomers? You bet your ass. Winning World War 2 created such an advantageous structural position for the US on a planetary scale that not engaging in decadent behavior was close to impossible. It wasn't winning the lottery - It was the Super Bowl champion quarterback being made president of the world's biggest company with an unlimited credit line from the rest of the human species.

The failure mode began in the 1960s but really compounded in the 1970s. I don't know what was in the water, but there seems to have been so many concurrent social, political, and economic moments of "what the actual fuck?" in those 10 years. 1990s Republicans (Newt, in particular) based a lot of their macro-strategy on trying to roll back 1968-1978.

This is ridiculous. Being a white collar worker from 1968 to 1998 was nothing like 30 years of being a FAANG engineer, and I speak as someone who was in both positions (though not for 30 years). And the boomers only "prosecute[d]" Vietnam in the sense that they got sent there to kill and to die; they weren't running the country at the time. The 1970s inflation hit the boomers more than the Xers, who were children at the time. The earliest Gen Xers in fact graduated into the start of the Reagan Boom; later Xers weren't so lucky.

Being a white collar worker from 1968 to 1998 was nothing like 30 years of being a FAANG engineer.

You're right - it was probably better. You still had company provided pensions for tenure of service. Company cars, relocation assistance, mortgage assistance was somewhat common.

And the boomers only "prosecute[d]" Vietnam in the sense that they got sent there to kill and to die;

This is correct. But @jeroboam and @hydroacetylene did a much better job of highlighting my shortcomings to this point.

The 1970s inflation hit the boomers more than the Xers, who were children at the time.

Children don't experience inflation?

The earliest Gen Xers in fact graduated into the start of the Reagan Boom; later Xers weren't so lucky.

Much like their millennial counterparts 20 years later, Gen Xers walking into the workforce in the Reagan years found obstinate Boomers hogging all of the upward mobility. Again, the economic miracle of the 1980s and 1990s went disproportionately into the pockets and accounts of boomers, often in indirect ways; real estate prices going up for ever, the wealth transfer scheme of subsidized college loans.

This is ridiculous.

This makes me feel bad. And I feel like it's on purpose. You and I don't get a long much. Sometimes you are right. Sometimes I am right. Please be cordial.

You're right - it was probably better. You still had company provided pensions for tenure of service. Company cars, relocation assistance, mortgage assistance was somewhat common.

Did you miss the part where I did both? It wasn't. Company-provided defined benefit plans were on their way out already, and 401ks from FAANG are superior. Company cars were a workaround for super-high taxes and the concomittant low salary. Relocation assistance exists in FAANG companies if you move for them. Mortgage assistance was another workaround for super-high taxes.

The 1970s inflation hit the boomers more than the Xers, who were children at the time.

Children don't experience inflation?

It generally does not affect their career progression.

Much like their millennial counterparts 20 years later, Gen Xers walking into the workforce in the Reagan years found obstinate Boomers hogging all of the upward mobility.

The oldest Boomer was 42 at the end of the Reagan presidency and 44 when the 1990 recession hit. It's "obstinate" for people of that age to stay in the workforce? All those Boomers moving up were replaced by younger people. It's true that the Boomers got more benefit in dollars from the Reagan expansion, since they were in later, more lucrative parts of their careers, but it was still pretty good for the younger Xers. Real estate values did not go up forever in this time; there was a slight drop, then a boom, followed by a bust.

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