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PaperclipPerfector  16d ago (text post)   32200 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.

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?

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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