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I'm a liberal who's been here for a while but doesn't post very frequently. I wanted to argue about the core disagreement I think I have with the prevailing political views and values on this forum. Specifically, whether this disagreement is real or just against a strawman, and if it is real, what are the best reasons why the disagreement is not serious enough to justify conclusions like "despite all their craziness, I would rather the woke have power than people with TheMotte-like views".
I think the prevailing views and values here are anti-individualistic and anti-meritocratic. To make more precise how I'm using these terms
Individualism means people should be judged based on their own personal qualities and actions instead of based on groups that people assign them membership to. Since the groups someone belongs to often give you information about their personal qualities, this needs to be made more precise as a conditional independence statement: conditional on someone's personal qualities and choices, judgements about them, their obligations, what they deserve, etc. should be independent of the groups they belong to.
Meritocracy means that positions of influence and power should be given to those best able to wield them in service of society's goals. While you can get into a lot of arguments about what society's goals should be in corner cases, for most practical decisions---who should become a doctor/lawyer, who should get research funding, who should run a company---this rounds off to two soft consideration: competence, that when someone wants to do something related to their position, they actually can, and personal virtue, that people don't use their position in ways that help themselves at the the expense of others.
The first point of argument is whether these definitions are reasonable and deserve the good connotations that "meritocracy" and "individualism" have. Therefore we should discuss what the point of these terms is and why they're considered good things:
Individualism is important for motivation---if people know that they're life outcomes are dependent only on them and their choices, then they have the strongest possible motivation for improving themselves as much as possible. Secondly, most people are happiest when they have a sense of agency and control over their lives. Individualism maximizes this control.
Meritocracy is important to make society as effective as possible in achieving its goals---this is the standard "if a surgeon is operating on you, you want to surgeon to be as competent as possible" argument.
Note that neither of these justifications are about "fairness" or anything like that (even though they line up with a many widely-held intuitions about fairness); they're both just very powerful instruments for achieving whatever terminal values society actually has at the bottom.
Now as for why I think this place does not follow these values, it might be most productive to focus on a very specific example instead of a billion arguments about racism, skilled immigration etc. A few weeks ago, J.D. Vance made a statement that citizenship in the US should be based on ancestry instead of individual choices and beliefs:
I am under the impression that most posters here who care about American politics would 99% endorse this statement, even though it's pretty strongly violating meritocracy and individualism---judging people based on what their ancestors were regardless of their own qualities and competencies. Now, in the quote the the alternative is judging based on if "you agree with progressive liberalism in 2025" for rhetorical punch, but the way it's framed, he likely would also be against the alternative of e.g, "whether you agree with 1995 tolerance and colorblindness"---otherwise the entire frame of the argument wouldn't be against deciding belonging based on personal choices.
So now the specific questions:
Does this place actually overwhelmingly support JD Vance's statement?
Is this statement actually anti-individualistic and anti-meritocratic as defined above?
Are the above interpretations of meritocracy and individualism reasonable and consistent with anti-individualism and anti-meritocracy being very bad things or are they just word games?
If you put any value at all into individualism and meritocracy, then there are very few groups you should rank as less deserving of power than "the woke." Even if you find The Motte undeserving, you're still betraying those values.
Strongly disagreed, they are almost entirely counter-efforts to what many people would consider "fairness" for the last 30-50 years.
It's disagreeing about what the creed of America is. The people who fought in the Revolution and the Civil War (charitably, one could think the North; being a Borderer, Vance undoubtedly had ancestors on both sides) stand for one set of creedal ideas of America.
Progressive liberalism, to the extent one can call it liberalism without choking on their words, rejects everything that came before and represents another- IMO murky, and to the extent defined at all completely unworkable for a multicultural society- set of creedal ideas.
5-10% anti-meritocratic at most. Liberalism isn't a suicide pact, don't have a mind so open your brain falls out, yada yada. Rephrased, "we want useful, competent people- so long as they don't hate Civilization."
Right, so the comparison to the woke needs more justification (I'm sorry for the repetitiveness I've made this point before to you in the past, but I think there's some new aspects).
Most people I talk to in person who would describe themselves as woke seem to actually agree with me on at least the thing I called "individualism". Their belief is rather that the world is so far from achieving this that we have to do extremely drastic things in response. When they make mistakes, their mistakes are factual---that their extreme remedy is going to make the situation better than the status quo. These mistakes are not that hard to correct---no getting rid of standardized tests won't help because every other measure is even more skewed towards the rich, etc. In everyday life, I've found it very easy to argue/convince very woke people on most concrete policy issues relating to "individualism".
"Meritocracy" is harder, seemingly because the very woke that I know don't see its need---we already have enough, why do we need growth, why does it matter that jobs are done well, etc. However, in cases like medicine where you can argue that we don't already have enough you can argue in the same way. The "we already have enough" is also not so hard to argue against by just having them look up global GDP/capita and speculate on what sort of lifestyle that allows in comparison to what they're used to.
Conversely, a hypothetical group that actually accepts the ancestry-is-paramount interpretation of JD Vance's statement just disagrees on these values completely. There's no resolution to be had here.
Anyways, this is all theory. Since January, we can see how the comparison worked out in practice. I think even the worst 2020 wokeness was better for getting skilled people into positions in the US than the attacks on skilled immigrants from the Trump administration---the stories like this that keep coming out every few weeks and the chilling effect they create.
Indeed, irreconcilable differences of opinion here. The FAA scandal, nominating a Supreme Court justice who can't even say what a woman is, choosing a VP on similar grounds who failed hard at everything she tried, and countless other attempts to put identity over skill or even mere humanity, like highly-credentialed psychotic freaks that suggested teachers deserved to die for "health equity"? Lipsitch and Schmidt should be scourged and sent to the salt mines.
The worst of 2020 wokeness was violent psychopathy and promotion of the unskilled, unwilling, and in some cases just plain evil. While I do not approve of much that Trump has done, he has not done and I predict will not do even 1/10 the damage.
Whatever you think got skilled people into useful positions, it was due to whatever liberal remnant that hadn't completely rotted its brain out with wokeness.
These individual cases are quite bad, though I suspect there's a major attention component to your noticing. I continue to think they are nothing in comparison to the vast racism propagated by wokeness against whites and Asians, and Jews on alternating weeks.
I'm sorry, do you have any real-world experience with the impacts of this administration's policies or are you just judging this based on what you hear from the internet. Because if you did have actual real-world contact, making a judgement that the damage is solely at the level of the FAA scandal and some awkward interviews and media quotes is completely absurd.
Do you have any idea how many grad students are deciding to only apply to postdocs outside of the US? How many people from outside who would've a year ago loved to come here deciding not to apply to any schools in the US? How many people are leaving research because of 60-70% funding cuts to hard sciences and the subsequent hiring freezes? The rumors in my field are that young people shouldn't even try applying to Canada because all the openings are going to be taken by senior researchers leaving the US. From anecdotes on the ground, literally hearing what people are saying at conferences, the destruction of the scientific research infrastructure in the US is unmatched by any event in a western country since Nazi Germany.
Yes, I don't give a damn about whatever stupid ultimately superficial nonsense you can pin on the woke if the other choice is this! Seriously, most of you're examples are quotes and words, it's obnoxious how much you're ignoring actual material impacts.
EDIT: and as you can see from the responses below, it seems that some prominent posters here seem to think that this is a good thing? Do you understand now why I would pick the woke?
Consider this a general reply to the quoted comment as well as to https://www.themotte.org/post/2277/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/352758?context=8#context .
Look, I'm not trying to convince you to not "pick the woke", or that I or anyone on my side as it were should "have power". I don't meant to tell you what to support or oppose. I'm not trying to convince you of anything, really. I don't think you made a mistake in your thinking, or that you should support a different side. I think you need to acknowledge that there's a good deal of conflict theory playing out. And I think arguing that the goings-on are good or bad in the framework of mistake theory misses the more tangible points of why and how this happened and why and how it will happen again.
Co-opting institutions in the name of ideology taints them.
If I turn the military into a bastion of reactionary thought, then I shouldn't be surprised that a century of leftist agitation works to erode the military even if that means that modern European nations have to piss their pants when Putin knocks over some border towns in Ukraine (though, granted, much of that panic be performative), or that we flail helplessly as pauper pirates in the Red Sea take our shipping hostage. We're materially worse off for it, and now untold billions of Euros will be wasted on incompetent rearmament programs to pretend to remedy the problem, but what good is any complaining? Socialists and communists and their green and woke successor ideologists have dismantled the military not because it wouldn't have been useful to them, but because the military was inseparably linked to reactionary ideologies.
The church - really any Christian church, all of them, doesn't matter which - has undergone the same process, though over a longer period of time. I'll skip the blow-by-blow, let's just say that in between the middle ages where the church wasn't just a major power-broker but also an absolutely essential insitution in almost matters social and cultural, at all levels of society, in all stages of life, it now mostly isn't. And it's left a giant God-and-Church-and-Community-shaped hole in western people's lives. Why did we do that to ourselves? Why didn't we take it slow and wait for a superior alternative to be developed? Why didn't we just root out the pedophiles and the nazi sympathizers and the intolerable profiteers like the prelate of Limburg and then go back to our congregations? Because again, it wasn't about troubleshooting or optimizing a socially useful institution, but about destroying an ideological enemy. Whether you were an enlightenment firebrand, a libertine who didn't want his hedonism criticized, a revolutionary who wanted to design his own institutions, a socialist who saw it as a tool of the burgeosie, or a late 20th century progressive who really needed to show off how much better he was than the primitives of yesteryear - they all had their various tactical reasons for destryoing the standing of religion in society, even without providing a better alternative. And they were right to, because the church wasn't just there to provide spiritual care and moral support, it absolutely was in their way and unwilling to give up what authority it had over peole's lives.
Or think about the immense economic damage caused by various green ideological warfare. For every sensible ban on a poisonous but replaceable substance, and for every much-appreciated restriction on the pollution of the commons, there's at least one other ideologically motivated but completely superfluous and highly harmful obstruction to economic activities. Pouring massive public funding into electric cars, for example. But it will save the climate, you might say. Then how about scrapping Germany's safe and productive nuclear power plants on what was little more than a whim?
And let's not even get started with "The Pandemic" or "The Refugees".
And by all means, maybe I'm just not aware of the full scope of the goings-on in America right now, but I doubt that what President Trump is doing to public university funding is anywhere near on that level.
In any event, my point is just this: I encourage you to consider these events in terms of conflict theory, because conflict is what is happening. Neither side is trying to do what's best for society; both are vying for influence, standing, authority and power, and whatever socially useful institution gets ground up on the way is just collateral damage. And neither side can, at present, afford to play nice. I leave it open to you whether you want to see the two sides as a left-vs-right, woke-vs-antiwoke or trump-vs-antitrump. But it's a conflict. In game-theory/prisoner-dilemma terms, both sides are in the business of defecting, and whichever side opts to cooperate instead loses. It would be terribly nice if both sides cooperated, but that's not what's happening, and asking only one side to cooperate while the other defects amounts to asking them to lose gracefully.
Destroying the commons for ideological gain is not new or unique to one side in the culture wars, and both will do it when it ends up being strategically feasible.
@FCfromSSC used to have a pithy phrase about this. Something about maximizing inconvenience for the outgroup?
Thanks!
Hm. It may not be as applicable to my topic as I thought. "Without getting in too much trouble" doesn't seem very accurate at the current stage.
Edit: No, I'm wrong. It remains accurate. It's not like POTUS Trump is getting into any trouble he wouldn't have been in anyways.
I'd say it's entirely applicable. "without getting in too much trouble" is one of the two main throttling mechanisms on the tribal hatred engine, and is tightly linked to the other one, the fact that the search is "distributed". The search being distributed reduces how much trouble individuals get in, and reduces the efficiency of the search because it's conducted in a less-conscious fashion. It's the part people miss when they niavely predict the outbreak of civil war over the atrocity du jour.
Here's a gradient:
"X are bad" > "X shouldn't be tolerated" > "It's pretty cool when an X gets set on fire" > "you should set an X on fire" > "I'm going to set an X on fire" > actually going out and setting an X on fire.
You can graph the gradient in terms of actual harm inflicted on the outgroup, by the danger of getting in trouble, or by the amount of trouble you'll get in. There's a sweet spot on the graph where you find the greatest harm inflicted for the least cost incurred. The Culture War consists of people, with various degrees of consciousness, searching both for that sweet spot and for changes to social conditions that make the sweet spot larger and sweeter. Increasing consciousness of the nature of the search increases search efficiency greatly. Being unaware of the mechanics of getting in trouble likewise increases the efficiency of the search, since even if you get in trouble, you still provide valuable data to the rest of the search nodes. Various coordinated actions, changes in social norms or in formal policies likewise increase the efficiency of the search by asymmetrically reducing the threat of trouble being gotten into. Affirmative consent policies, DOGE, "who will kill Elon" and "are those level-4 plates?" are all variations on a theme.
Blue hostility toward the Church and Red hostility toward Academia are the same thing: coordinated meanness against an enemy tribal stronghold, moderated by the need to not individually get in too much trouble. The tribes successfully purge each other from their institutions, and then are shocked when the other side no longer values the institutions they've been purged from and begins reducing them with metaphorical bombardment.
...And for those who've read this far, this is your reminder that this process is not your friend. Our capacity to maintain flowing electricity and running water rely on the sweet spot staying quite small and the search being quite limited and stable over time.
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