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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   33114 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025

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Matthew Yglesias befriends Richard Hanania, leans against Joseph Overton, symptoms worsen from a case of the noticing, and everyone gets mad.

Matty is full steam ahead with Democratic Party's Abundance rebrand. Build stuff, hope, and change. Yglesias has infrequently expressed a practical or tactical acceptance of noble lies. Depending who you ask, Matt has the freedom to tell it like it is, is an amoral deviant, or he is a sophisticated engagement maximizer.

This week Yglesias published an essay titled "The troubling rise of Hitler revisionism" on substack. The title points towards a surge of interest in revisionists like Darryl Cooper who have been (post delete guy strikes again!) discussed a few times. Matt's article isn't fully a refutation of revisionism or a celebration of Agatha Christie-- who revised her own anti-semitic (I didn't notice) caricatures later in life. He makes a couple points there. This is an acknowledgment as a set-up for broader cultural trends. I will format slightly.

I completely understand what people mean when they say Donald Trump is racist, and I understand why they say it. It’s also true that he’s had Black cabinet secretaries in both of his administrations, which was a bridge too far for JFK. FDR wouldn’t endorse an anti-lynching bill, and Woodrow Wilson worked to increase the level of segregation in the federal civil service... And I think the desire to promulgate revisionist accounts of World War II is intimately tied to a niche (but growing) audience on the right that may not want to bring back segregation but does want to undo the shift that made Christie rethink her anti-semitism.

And the force of this is that while nearly everyone agrees that left-wing racial justice politics went too far 5-10 years ago, there’s big debate on the right about the implications of that.

Ibram Kendi said it wasn’t good enough to not be racist, you had to be anti-racist in a very specific way. And there’s a counter-view, perhaps most forcefully articulated by Nathan Cofnas, that it’s not good enough to reject Kendi’s brand of anti-racism, you need to work to rehabilitate racism so that people can hold their heads high and believe in a hierarchy of races. On this view, you (allegedly) don’t need to be hateful — you can acknowledge that Lazarus is one of the decent Jews, even while maintaining that most Jews are not decent — but it is necessary to destigmatize racism. Cofnas has a literalist’s way of going about this, doing blog posts urging conservatives to stop citing Thomas Sowell on race. But I think coming in through the side door, trying to problematize Winston Churchill and normalize Hitler while destabilizing the pop culture consensus that Nazis are really bad, is probably a more potent way of achieving the same result.

Under the set-up is The Controversy. Yglesias has written against things like disparate impact before, though not in these terms. "Taboos can be good":

I have noticed that Black people are significantly overrepresented in the top ranks of professional basketball, and my guess is that you have noticed this as well. You need to be more of an NBA fan, though, to have noticed that residents of the former Yugoslavia are also overrepresented. I’m not sure why people from the Balkans outperform other people experiencing a lack of melanin. I am also not sure why Black Americans outperform white ones. You could imagine these dual outperformances having similar underlying causes or very different ones. I have not looked into it, and frankly I don’t intend to, because I am happy living in a society where it is considered unseemly and inappropriate to preoccupy oneself with such questions.

In my opinion, it is completely correct to observe that dogmatic accounts of disparate impact à la Kendi are dangerous and bad.

But I also think it’s perfectly reasonable for people to worry that stereotyping will lead to discrimination. And parsing the difference between “taste-based” and “statistical” discrimination doesn’t really change the fact that people are individuals, and they reasonably do not want to be discriminated against. Conversely, I think there is a broadly accurate stereotype that people who roam around the world articulating unflattering statistical observations about ethnic groups they don’t belong to mostly are, in fact, bigots with bad intentions.

Years ago, there was a take that what some disparage as “political correctness” is really nothing more than the basic habit of being polite. I don’t think that holds up to much scrutiny. What is true, though, is that politeness is a virtue, and that the habit of bending over backwards to try to be polite to people who are disadvantaged or groups that have historically been discriminated against makes sense.

And while not everything that right-wingers attack as “woke” or “PC” is just politeness, much of it is, and the impulse in some quarters of the right to say that we need to become a ruder, crueler society that no longer observes politeness norms is bad. The mistake of anti-racist excess was in going beyond trying to downplay ethnic differences to insist on measures that in fact reify them and increase their salience. But going in the other direction, and doing it in a mean-spirited way, isn’t going to solve anything and poses massive downside risks.

Norms that lead kids to spout the latest /pol/ memes to their classmates sound unpleasant. I, too, enjoy polite norms. Matt describes "bending over backwards" not as extra virtuous but as making sense. Asking people to bend over backwards doesn't make sense to me. Norms that involve individuals bending over backwards require coercion to enforce or an understanding of reward.

The comments to the substack article include two I wanted to comment on:

A: "For whatever excesses the Great Awokening may have had, once it ended there was always a risk of overcorrection in the other direction." It's extremely disturbing to me that anybody would need that risk pointed out to them.

B: I think it's because people don't really understand how big that risk is. They think it's just a small possibility. Unfortunately I think the opposite is true. The more off-course and disruptive a political movement becomes, it will almost by necessity give rise to a counter-movement that is equally if not more disruptive in opposition. The question people should always ask themselves is, "what kind of opposition do I want to create?"

I think this is true, but it's really not the people that must consider this a risk. It's elites and power that embrace a movement, eschew old taboos, and adopt new ones that take this risk. They mainly consider falling out of favor, but they also (should) consider how it demands resistance from competing elites and power. In our world the power pretty thoroughly embraced a movement with certain taboos which were themselves taboo a few years earlier.

Rather than coerce people into adopting a version of extra virtue, my proposed path forward includes seeking answers to questions like "why black basketball players outperform white ones?" Matt doesn't fully explain his position, but "intelligence research isn't worth the social costs" is not an uncommon one. Rather than fighting the power, as one might surmise from reactions to his post, I think Matt doesn't know he is asking for more of the same. Calling social coercion politeness sounds a lot nicer than what it is. If there's truth in uncomfortable answers, then it has to be buried. Instead, I think it is up to the Yglesi-i of the world to synthesize those answers into something that can become polite, then help normalize that.

That is a big project and I don't expect to see it happen in my lifetime. My small hope is we land on a stable normie consensus that better balances politeness with the incorporation of reality, science, and hard truths. Intuitively, pivoting the culture from identity groups towards individualism seems like step one, but that might just be my preference speaking. In sum, a not insignificant amount of moderate Democrats -- arguably a wing of the moderate Dems -- read and respect Yglesias and he has stepped into a soft HBD position.

"intelligence research isn't worth the social costs"

I think that this was basically the consensus for a long time. Have color-blind admission policies and don't care about the outcomes, and there is really no good reason for any decent person to wonder why there are more Ashkenazi than Black faculty members. Clever people like Scott Alexander might notice the trend, but they will also notice that the Gaussians overlap and not make undue updates towards intelligence estimates based on skin color, a nuance which would be lost on the wider population.

But then the wokes decided that a system which produces disparate outcomes must be unfair.

If you have to argue against claims that the NBA is favoring certain minorities, you will have a hard time if you also have to argue that every ethnic is equally good at basketball.

Have color-blind admission policies and don't care about the outcomes, and there is really no good reason for any decent person to wonder why there are more Ashkenazi than Black faculty members.

I don't know how anyone could believe this about our world. Maybe a different one with a different history, but there's just no way people here don't notice.

But then the wokes decided that a system which produces disparate outcomes must be unfair.

They decided on it because they noticed color-blind meritocracy wasn't getting the job done.

What "job" would that be?

Equalizing outcomes enough that we stop noticing.

The point is it doesn't matter what people notice and believe if they are doing it privately. In attempting to forcibly reshape reality based on the premise that these things that people noticed and believe are actually wrong, progressives force them to either have to say them publicly, which sucks, or to swallow injustice as a quasi-religious sacrificial rite.

There is no evidence that the groups that are noticing now would ever keep their noticing private. Especially on a Yglesian model where no one questioned their underlying assumptions. What reason would they have to stop something they've always done?

They decided on it because they noticed color-blind meritocracy wasn't getting the job done.

What job? To ensure that there are no racial or gender imbalances in the outcome?

This seems a silly ask.

Imbalances in outcomes can have two reasons:

(1) Cultural: this includes upbringing, parents financial situation, straightforward discrimination and so on. I think that I speak for the overwhelming majority (but feel free to correct me) when I say that these are bad, and that we should get rid of these barriers.

To a large extend, these barriers are bad because they lead to worse societal outcomes: if cultural factors such as plain old racism prevent Blacks from becoming doctors, then we end up with fewer or worse doctors than if it was otherwise.

(2) Inherent average ability (or -- in the case of genders -- interest): These differences exist, most obviously in gender and physical capability. They are the reason why most sport competitions are gender segregated. There are also physical capability differences between ethnicities, a few African peoples dominate long distance running, for example. The genetics of intelligence are complicated, and we get large variances, but there is a genetic component to intelligence. Should we just assume that while average height, skin color, long distance running aptitude, et cetera are all unevenly distributed over different ethnicities, intelligence is perfectly evenly distributed?

One has to be very careful attributing imbalances to (2), and has to notice the skulls of the people who came before. When the French Academy of Science did not admit women, they were certainly pleading something like (2), that women are intrinsically not suited to be scientists, not something like (1), that they were sexist pricks, while in retrospect it is clear that the latter was the case.

I am an utilitarian. In my utility function, women and men, Blacks and Caucasians, Danes and Madagascans all count the same. Being a doctor is good for the individual in question (student debts and insane work hours aside): it is a high status job which is paid fairly well. It is also good to society in proportion of how qualified the doctor is. The best solution overall is therefore for the people who will be the best doctors to become doctors. Predicting how good someone will be as a doctor is non-trivial, but certainly being good in science classes helps. Thus, I want the most qualified people to become doctors, regardless of any gender or ethnic balances.

(I would all have been for lightly putting our hands on the scales to make sure that we are not perpetuating effects caused by cultural effects, and thus permanently staying below the optimum. However, given how affirmative action is looking these days, I would argue that we are at the point where we are jumping on the scale as hard as we can, meritocracy be damned.)

If the meritocratic solution is that some ethnicities are mostly working low-paying jobs and some are well over-represented in high-paying jobs, then my utility sum tells me that I should not care (beyond making reasonably sure that (1) is not the cause). If you want to argue that the gap between low-paying jobs and high paying jobs is too high, because poor people could get out a lot more utility out of the marginal dollar than rich ones, then I am very sympathetic to that argument and open to ideas of how we can improve their lot without drawing the wrath of the Elder God called economy.

If the last part is not clear, imagine a feudal kingdom made out of nobles and serfs. Calculate its utility sum. Now imagine one of two scenarios: in the first, every noble magically takes on the physical appearance of an elf, pointy ears and all. In the other, the same total number of elves are created, but evenly distributed over both classes. How does the utility sum in either case change? Secondary considerations (perhaps elf ears are really bad at holding crowns, or perhaps most people have an elf kink and get a lot of utility from their partners being turned into elves) aside, it does not. It can not, because the utility sum does not weight your utility by the shape of your ears. (There is an argument to be made that the former scenario will lead to less meritocracy, because it limits the upwards mobility of the serfs, but I think "random people are in charge" is a closer model than "the best and brightest are in charge" for feudalism, i.e. that there is not much meritocracy going on in the first place.)

A cynic might even suspect that both the woke left and dissident right do this on purpose.

Similarly, as concerns Yglesias's concerns over Nazi-normalization, I have suspected that the radical left has inadvertently helped the radical right crack open that side door in their own quest for oxygen and sunlight.

Yay, Christian Conservatism With Liberal Characteristics has been defeated. Oh noes all the people who used to believe in Christian Conservatism With Liberal Characteristics are suddenly voting for Trump and refusing to defend liberalism from the leopards that are currently eating its face. Who could have seen that coming?

I wouldn't say this is a problem with liberalism eating its own, if that's what you're saying. I'd say it's more that the pro-Palestine memeplex has metastasized in the liberal body politic.

Maybe, but my point is more that the the kind of guy who listens to Rogan and might have voted voted for Bernie in 2016 is likely to have a strong negative reaction to the rape of young women and strangulation of toddlers even if said women and toddlers are jews.

The Democrats went out of thier way to alienate as many people as they could, and are now struggling to understand why they are unpopular.

Yglesias has infrequently expressed a practical or tactical acceptance of noble lies. Depending who you ask, Matt has the freedom to tell it like it is, is an amoral deviant, or he is a sophisticated engagement maximizer.

Anyone know the most recent comment he's made to this effect? He recently posted an essay advocating against such tactics: https://www.slowboring.com/p/misinformation-mostly-confuses-your

Even if he were to publicly disavow such tactics now, what reason would anyone have believe him?

What if disavowing the nobel lie is itself a nobel lie craven attempt to get people who stopped listening to come back.

That he gave a practical, rather than moral, argument for why noble lies are bad is a start.

I actually had the complete opposite intuition. All he's done is reinforce the perception that this is a tactical choice rather than a principled one.

I see your point, but it seems trying to redeem yourself from this would have an impossible bar to clear, if being judged by a cynic. I'd update towards - but not completely - truthfulness.

There is always the option to fall on your sword.

Part of the problem is confusing politeness and etiquette. Politeness is about showing genuine respect to, and consideration of, others. Etiquette is about the approved norms within a particular society / situation that guide interpersonal behavior. One can be polite without following--or knowing--the proper etiquette for conveying that politeness. One can follow all the norms of etiquette without any actual politeness being involved. In particular, etiquette can--and frequently is--exclusionary: having elaborate or ever-changing norms of etiquette is how a selective society can tell a wanna-be from the real deal.

So take something like announcing your third-person pronouns when introducing yourself in a new class. That's a norm of etiquette that the social justice trans rights supporters have been pressing for. It has a fig-leaf of politeness: you do it because there may be someone in that class whose self-perceived gender doesn't match how that person appears to others, and this person may want to communicate that to the rest of the class, and you saying your pronouns helps normalize how to do that efficiently. That's quite a stretch, though. What it does instead is establish the etiquette that disconnects perceived gender from a person's chosen gender, and states up front that the chosen gender is the way to go. The issue of politeness to everyone who then needs to carry a massive cognitive load of remembering everyone's chosen pronouns and pause to pick one's words to make sure no "misgendering" occurs--that never enters into the equation.

Politeness is nice. However, people sometimes make life-and-death decisions based on their political beliefs. If you deliberately teach people to ignore reality for the sake of politeness, some of them will literally die as a result. Having beliefs such as, "that run-down neighborhood which seems to be full of surly loiterers is actually made up of misunderstood people who have hearts of gold", or "the police are extremely dangerous, so it is safer to take your chances with street criminals", or "society would actually be safer if we drastically reduced the size of the police force", or "when this violent paramilitary group says that they are fighting for the benefit of humanity, they are being honest - so I should go join them" is not just an abstract thing. These are all examples where holding inaccurate views of reality can literally cause you or others to die. Teaching someone polite but inaccurate political and social views can be like teaching someone inaccurate things about chainsaw or firearm safety.

A: "For whatever excesses the Great Awokening may have had, once it ended there was always a risk of overcorrection in the other direction." It's extremely disturbing to me that anybody would need that risk pointed out to them.

B: I think it's because people don't really understand how big that risk is. They think it's just a small possibility. Unfortunately I think the opposite is true. The more off-course and disruptive a political movement becomes, it will almost by necessity give rise to a counter-movement that is equally if not more disruptive in opposition. The question people should always ask themselves is, "what kind of opposition do I want to create?"

Reading this reminded me of the whole "woke right" thing, which I don't know who coined, but which I've seen pushed heavily by James Lindsay (of Sokal^2 fame) to denigrate the identarian right as an attempt to prevent the right wing from falling into the sort of insane and extremely harmful identity/resentment-based politics as the left has been for the past couple decades. I don't know how successful it has been or will be, but I'll admit that despite seeing it mostly as crying wolf at first, I see signs that this is a legit potential problem worth preventing.

But what worries me about this is, what happens if we apply this sort of thinking to the sort of liberal enlightenment-style thinking that people like Lindsay and myself espouse? If we push things like free speech, free inquiry, freedom of/from religion, the scientific method, critical thinking, democracy, and such too much, are we destined to have a pendulum swing in the other direction, such that we'll get extreme forms of authoritarian or irrational societies in the future? Have we been living in that future the last couple decades with the rise of identity politics that crushed the liberalism of the 90s?

I guess the whole thing about "history repeats" and "if there's anything we can learn from history, it's that people don't learn from history" is probably true and also pretty depressing.

But what worries me about this is, what happens if we apply this sort of thinking to the sort of liberal enlightenment-style thinking that people like Lindsay and myself espouse? If we push things like free speech, free inquiry, freedom of/from religion, the scientific method, critical thinking, democracy, and such too much, are we destined to have a pendulum swing in the other direction, such that we'll get extreme forms of authoritarian or irrational societies in the future? Have we been living in that future the last couple decades with the rise of identity politics that crushed the liberalism of the 90s?

We are destined to push, pull, and change, but not always or usually on an pendulating axis. A forking, mutating spiral is cooler to think about anyway. If you can shove a helical shape in there then, baby, you got a stew goin'. A monarchy can lead to dysfunctional, parasitic decadence that allows its dismantling. A more liberal system that replaces it keeps some things, discards others, then passes on the scientific method through the next 300 years of political evolution.

My favorite modern opposites attract phenomena is the Antifa/Proud Boys duking it out in Portland or wherever some years ago. It seemed a perfect example of conflict attraction. Is the scientific method at risk? Humans consistently commit themselves to science-y endeavors. Perhaps it is safe until we survive the human battery farms as luddites.

Your concern is a good reason to maintain a broad, coherent consensus. I admit it is tough in a society that leverages polarization to stumble around. Even if principled, the no, stop, don't politicize X warnings are a conservation. No, stop, we need shared national identity and mythos. A counter-example might be that science didn't prune the consensus tree to accommodate evangelicals on evolution. That seems to have been mostly okay and now we don't argue about evolution much. Consensus maintained. Or we got bored and less religious.

Now that I think about it, it sounds like I'm instead answering "is conflict theory total?" with a desire to say, "No. Also, here's a bunch of reasons to be conservative and keep stuff the way I like." Heh.

Have we been living in that future the last couple decades with the rise of identity politics that crushed the liberalism of the 90s?

Maybe. Postliberal will come, or has come, but we do have a hand in defining it such that it might not be Patrick Deneen's vision or any other particular one.

Humanity repeats common mistakes in different contexts and time. Which is banal, but the point is it doesn't make critical thinking a guaranteed battle ground. Degrees of authoritarianism might swing back and forth for reasons. That does usually hit certain individual freedoms. Focus should be or should have been on keeping the important bits regardless of the change that comes. Which is always coming, common mistakes along with it.

As I have pointed out many times, Yglesias’s colorblindness politeness norms for white liberals will inevitably come crashing against the rocks, as they always do, the second that BIPOCs refuse to get with the program. All of this handwringing about how to execute a delicate social dance to obfuscate universally-understood truths, and it’s all taking place without the input, and without the buy-in, of the core group being spoken about.

“Alright, Nikole Hannah-Jones. I and the other white liberals have had a long conversation, and we’ve decided that talking about race is no longer acceptable.”

“Fuck you, honky.”

These social taboos have only ever gone in one direction. They’re a unilateral surrender by non-blacks. What mechanism does Matt Yglesias have with which to enforce his preferred taboos on black people? Black people, writ large, are not going to stop seeing themselves as a distinct group with an inherently fraught cultural relationship with White America! They’re not going to stop noticing disparities, nor are they going to stop thinking about the reasons for these disparities! And no white liberal, least of all Matt Yglesias, has ever demonstrated that they have any clout within the black community to even begin to promulgate any “colorblind” norms among them.

It’s not as if white liberals don’t know how black people think about them. White liberals obsessed about the film Get Out, which is a raw expression of the psychodrama blacks experience around white liberals and their labyrinth of strained politeness norms around race, which blacks see as hostile and profoundly dishonest.

Yet Matt believes that by writing Substack posts, he’ll not only be able to get white people to recommit to not thinking too hard about race, but that he’ll get black people to make that same commitment? It’s delusional.

All of this handwringing about how to execute a delicate social dance to obfuscate universally-understood truths, and it’s all taking place without the input, and without the buy-in, of the core group being spoken about... Black people, writ large, are not going to stop seeing themselves as a distinct group with an inherently fraught cultural relationship with White America!

Hmm ouch. Yeah, I agree that the ethnic identity and in-group loyalty is the largest hurdle to moving towards an alternative and Matt can't create any orders that to dismantle that. He isn't going to change anything by telling NHJ to stfu. But, NHJ is probably more famous among white liberals than black people anyway. So, step one: don't manufacture more NHJ's. It's okay to not indulge in NHJ's and Kendi's. They're wrong, unserious, and worsen race relations. White liberals can accept it in that order. Changing this perception is something even if it isn't an overhaul.

The disparities aren't going away and because of this we can't achieve a colorblind wonderland. We can work towards something closer to it though. Instead of manufacturing a Kendi as the prototypical black intellectual they could elevate some sort new form. A Glenn Loury/Coleman Hughes/Pastor hybrid rather than indulging in the Uncle Tom othering. They don't need to be conservative, in fact they can't be seen as conservative for awhile, but there are potentially new types of black identity that could be constructed as the Black Thinker. The next Rev. Al Sharpton can resonate, but not incite because we see where that's gotten us. Turn the knob a few notches a decade at a time.

If Matt can provide white liberals a different program that is not inconsequential. Even if white liberals are hopelessly disconnected from actual, real black people and only expose themselves to the black professorate. If the program helps fade disparity of outcomes equity stuff, nudging it a little further back, then that could be a substantial improvement for degrees of colorblindness given what I've lived through. There have been taboos regarding black people that haven't always advantaged them, but I know what you're saying.

I am also not sure why Black Americans outperform white ones. You could imagine these dual outperformances having similar underlying causes or very different ones. I have not looked into it, and frankly I don’t intend to, because I am happy living in a society where it is considered unseemly and inappropriate to preoccupy oneself with such questions.

It has been for decades now entirely seemly and appropriate to preocuppy oneself with the question of why the white animal is unsuited to positions of leadership and possessed of unique, vicious defects of character and moral turpitude.

Asking people to bend over backwards doesn't make sense to me.

The problem here is that this only goes one way. Respect’s a two way street, and if the response of, say, feminists once they’re on the high side of separate but equal start reinforcing that and solidifying that into privilege, the correct response is the iron fist present in that velvet glove, not further prostration.

Ibram Kendi said it wasn’t good enough to not be racist, you had to be anti-racist in a very specific way. And there’s a counter-view, perhaps most forcefully articulated by Nathan Cofnas, that it’s not good enough to reject Kendi’s brand of anti-racism, you need to work to rehabilitate racism so that people can hold their heads high and believe in a hierarchy of races.

Man, it's remarkable when people launder such a straw man into a piece. Because people on the right, and I'd wager a majority of moderates and even liberals, would probably believe Kendi's views that he's branded "anti-racism" are just regular old racism. Kendi's screeds didn't "create" a backlash which normalized racism, they were the racism that got normalized! So yeah, a lot of people are looking around going "Wait, is it ok to be racist again?" A lot of people are now living in the country of their birth, replaced down to a local minority, and are being openly discriminated against. Now I don't know if you can racism your way out of that looming pogrom. But forming an ingroup bias, identity and maybe a few institutions might not hurt.

But of course, it takes someone deep down the rabbit hole of intellectualizing how it's different when they do it to completely miss this point.

But of course, it takes someone deep down the rabbit hole of intellectualizing how it's different when they do it to completely miss this point.

Perhaps I'm just being arrogant, but there's a real sense of "too clever by a half" in this sort of intellectualizing. Because if you intellectualize it enough, you recognize that all the past racism/sexism/etc. that past societies bought into as the obviously Correct and Morally Right ways to run society were also justified on the basis of intellectualizing, often to the effect that "it's different when we do it." So someone intellectualizing this should recognize that their own intellectualization of the blatant racism/sexism/etc. that they themselves support is them falling right into the exact same pattern as before, rather than escaping from it.

This criticism only works if you assume that the target of it believes that “racism” is a priori a bad thing. What do you say to someone who doesn’t believe that this is the case, or who at least has a substantially different understand about what “racism” is or what specifically about it is bad?

Racism is effectively the rejection of individual variance/merit in favor of group variance/merit.

To the degree that we still live in a Christian-influenced Western Enlightenment Culture, racism is a priori bad, because the emphasis we place on individual merit is a key trait of Western Civilization.

What did you think the parable of the Good Samaritan was about?

Racism is effectively the rejection of individual variance/merit in favor of group variance/merit.

"Racism" has changed so much over the past fifty years that the "Racist" and "Anti-racist" positions have swapped. It used to be that teachers were racist and didn't let the Black children into the Advanced Placement classes because "Blacks are stupid". Back then the anti-racist position emphasized individual variance/merit. The clever children go in the top stream and the stupid children go in the bottom stream. Ideally the stupid children benefit from being kept out of the top stream; it is miserable and harmful to be in a class for which you are unprepared and which leaves you behind.

But one notices that the top streams are White or East Asian or Brahmin. That drives a re-alignment. Accepting individual variance/merit is the new racist position. Modern anti-racism looks to the statistics for groups, and expects all groups to be represented according to head count, regardless of individual merit. (and there is the extra, weird twist where Black under-representation is the fault of Whites, because Whites are bad (and, if they object to this condemnation, fragile (which oddly enough, earns them mockery not gentle handling)))

Racism hasn't changed at all, its just been reboxed and rebranded.

However if you prefer, let us taboo the term "racism" and instead discuss "racial identitarianism". Racial identitarianism is a priori immoral and anti-western as it encourages the devaluation of individual merit.

However if you prefer, let us taboo the term "racism" and instead discuss "racial identitarianism".

The same should also be done for "sexism" -> "sex/gender identitarianism", which not only covers feminism/gynosupremacy, but LGBT/homosupremacy too.

That's not racism. Racism is much a simpler Us and Them.

Are you trying to claim that all deliniations between ingroup and outgroup are "racism"? or are you arguing against any form of delineation that isn’t based on race?

No, the inverse. All racism is ingroup-outgroup.

Squares are rectangles, not the other way around.

the emphasis we place on individual merit is a key trait of Western Civilization.

“The West” had racial chattel slavery for centuries, which coexisted quite comfortably with a robust (far more pervasive and sincere than nowadays) Christianity. (The same “Western Civilization” very comfortably celebrated hereditary monarchy and nobility, again a slap in the face to “individual merit”.) The “West” you’re grasping at is a phantom. That it existed in the heads of so many does not make it real or coherent.

Racism is effectively the rejection of individual variance/merit in favor of group variance/merit.

“Racism”, in the sense that Yglesias is using it in the OP’s linked essay, is simply the recognition that although there is a substantial variation among individuals, it is still not only possible to draw reliable probabilistic conclusions about a given individual’s likely traits based on observable characteristics (many of them immutable), but also that in the absence of detailed information about that individual, it’s often necessary (or at least valuable) to make those probabilistic assumptions. Once more fine-grained detail about the individual is available, then it becomes possible to adjust one’s assumptions. This is entirely consistent with a belief in broadly-predictable population-level averages.

Chattle Slavery (as distinct from other flavors of compelled servitude) was something of an aberration in the West. To the extent that it coexisted, that coexistence was never "comfortable". The tension between Christian doctrine/ideals and the political and economic expediancies of colonizing the New World was arguably a major driver of intra-Western conflict from the 17th through 19th centuries. As @The_Nybbler quipped a couple weeks ago, if Thomas Jefferson had survived to see the ACW he probably would have said "I told you so", as this conflict, along with the recognition that it must eventually come to blows, was widely acknowledged at the time.

“Racism”, in the sense that both Yglesias and yourself describe is about devaluing individual merit in favor of an emphasis on group differences/membership. That is why it is "a priori bad".

“Racism”, in the sense that both Yglesias and yourself describe is about devaluing individual merit by in favor of an emphasis on group differences/membership.

How? How does it “devalue individual merit”? I genuinely have to wonder whether you don’t understand what I’m actually talking about, or are just unable to accurately model the mind of someone who believes as I do.

There are many observable qualities about an individual which can allow someone to make probabilistic assumptions about that person! If you see a man with a long black beard, olive-colored skin, and wearing a keffiyeh, you can pretty safely assume that the man is from the Middle East. Given that assumption, you can assume that he is most likely Arab, although there is a smaller possibility that he’s Kurdish or even Yazidi. If he is Arab, there’s a high likelihood that he’s Muslim; depending on which country or region he’s from, one can assess the probability that he’s Sunni or that he’s Shia. If he is Muslim, you can assume that he probably drinks alcohol either rarely or not at all; that he eschews pork; that he prays daily, etc.

Any of these assumptions could be wrong! He could be born and raised in the U.K., or America, or Canada, and not be from the Middle East, though he’s dressed in a manner more common in that part of the world than it is in Anglo countries. He could be a Greek or a Persian, and not one of the ethnicities I previously named. He could be irreligious, even though most Arab men are not. He could even be a Christian, or a Druze, or, as mentioned, a Yazidi. If he is Muslim, he could be Sufi, or from some other fairly small sect. He could be a non-observant Muslim who professes Islam but still drinks alcohol and doesn’t pray. He could even be a white guy in a costume, wearing a fake beard and some bronzer!

Still, though, I think you would agree that my initial assumptions about what’s most likely to be true about him are broadly accurate and representative of reality. In order to discover what’s actually true about him, I would need to personally get to know him, or somehow otherwise obtain accurate information. Without being able to do so, I may need to rely on probabilistic assumptions.

The same types of assumptions can be made about a woman (likely to be able to become pregnant, to be sexually attracted to men, to have interests more common among women than they are among men, etc.) even with the full knowledge that some not-insignificant portion of women have some other combinations of traits. You can do it with people from different parts of the world, people who dress a certain way, etc. If someone has MS13 tattoos, I would have some major concerns about hiring him to babysit my kids, unless he has a very convincing story about why he came about those tattoos by totally innocent means.

Literally all I’m saying is that race carries useful, if not perfectly dispositive, information that can be used to make similar probabilistic assumptions. The question of “individual merit” doesn’t even enter the occasion, because the entire point here is that we usually do not have very much information about the “merit” of strangers. We have to use other methods to predict their behavior. Most of the time this process is pretty low-stakes, and we can assign both low confidence and low salience to our assumptions while we wait for more fine-grained info to become available. If I have to make an important snap judgment, though, stereotypes are far more useful than simply pretending as though I have no information to go on.

Again, I think you would trivially recognize this as true when it comes to all sorts of categories of people! Old people are likely to be weaker and less energetic than young people, even though there are wacky outliers who run marathons at age 90. Fat people probably have less self-discipline than skinny people, and are probably going to be worse at basketball, if you’re picking people to be on your team. Most of these assumptions are totally non-controversial outside of the contrarian upside-down world of academia. Why, then, is race the one category from which we must totally taboo gleaning any useful information?

It devalues individual merit by arguing that you should focus on group differences instead of individual merit.

6 paragraphs of why that's actually a good thing doesn't change the underlying argument.

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