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Notes -
TL;DR: see the bullet points at the end
Today, let's talk an old article and see if it still has relevance. Way downthread when talking about language, I was reminded of one of the language influencers of the left, George Lakoff. A linguistics professor by trade, he wrote a number of books, two which I'll mention briefly: "Moral Politics" in 1996, where he argued conservatives and liberals differed in their emotional and subconscious attitude towards government, and "Don't Think of an Elephant!" in 2004 as a rough guidebook accompanying his progressive think-tank, where he argued that the linguistic framing of the debate often would often determine who would win. Conservatives think of government like a strong and strict parent who needs to strictly raise their citizen-kids into more-responsible adults, then be hands-off from there, he argued. Liberals, however, think the government is and should be a nurturing parent, promoting good virtues and protecting against corruption and badness that encompass various common ills of society. Lakoff thought that liberals were often losing because they were using conservative linguistic frameworks. He was especially active in trying to push a certain brand of linguistics during the Bush years, but upon the 2008 crash his think tank collapsed and he more or less retired at 67.
However, for today, the year is 2011 and he comes out to pen one more article with some advice. Enter The “New Centrism” and Its Discontents. The event he's worked up about? Obama's 2011 State of the Union, with whom he disagrees about political tactics. Please note that any emphasis is purely my own.
He goes on to argue that while many Obama-style Democrats were using the playbook of using friendly-sounding packaging to sell good liberal policies, that this was bound to backfire dramatically as the packaging would become the product - or perhaps more accurately, the framing determined the (often hostile) battlefield. Well, wait, actually it's worse - he thinks that to some extent, fighting wars of words on hostile territory actually pushes moderate voters to the right in a sort of self-reinforcing cycle! He thinks not just that politics is a value conflict, but that the fight itself shifts the power of the players. This was a little bit new to me.
I found this especially interesting. He thinks that conservatives are really good at using the right language, partly through what elsewhere in the article he describes as a far better and more organized (or at least, disciplined) media ecosystem. Is he right? Do liberals regularly lose the language framing wars among moderates and swing voters, and thus the battle, even before they begin?
Whoa. Brain-changing language is quite a claim. This caught my eye a little bit because of how it makes at least a theoretically-grounded factual case for language as a thing that influences people on a physical level. Is he to be believed? I have my doubts about the scientific application, but it was interesting to see this discussion happen in 2011. However, that's not an accident! Obama was, in the referenced Tuscon speech, speaking soon after the Gabrielle Giffords shooting that is now seen as one of the earliest examples of political assassinations now frequently discussed. If language usage choices rewire the brain, are we actually to blame, at least in part, for these kinds of shootings? (I hope I'm not misrepresenting his point here)
In a way, this seems pretty prescient. According to progressives, at least (and certainly others) radical conservatives did take over the Republican party, and they did espouse authority and overwhelming force to punish the unworthy and the enemies, and they did use the deficit as a ruse, and they did have a uniquely selective approach to which science to believe. It's all over the news these last few months. As a pretty classic centrist myself, that feels like a pretty damning indictment, if true. Is it true? And even if he's wrong, does he have some useful advice?
The "progressive" solution
He ends by giving essentially a nice bullet-point list of things that progressives need to do. (I should note that there is some question as to whether 2011-era progressives are the same group as 2025 ones, so maybe it's best to consider it more broadly). If you read nothing else, this is his thesis, distilled.
Again, strong language. Conservatism drives empathy from the world? Uncharitable, but I can kind of see it. My parents originally flipped from Republican to Democrat, even as religious social conservatives, because in the words of my dad, "they at least pretend to care about poor people, but the Republicans don't even try". There's some pragmatism here, even among the moralization, for finding good allies. His vision of morality as the wellspring of progressive vision is an interesting one that I think partially got lost in the political noise, though I'm unsure how well it would work in practice. Most of all, though, the sixth bullet point has almost objectively been flagrantly violated in the last decade. Support Trump? You must be stupid, or mean, or shortsighted. Different values? No, clearly you just didn't see all the facts. If nothing else, I think for Democrats to get their mojo back, that probably has to change. You can't persuade someone you don't even understand.
What do you think? Is he right about language choices molding the political conversation and even changing values themselves via mere reinforcement? Should Democrats focus on long-term value-change strategies? Even if he's wrong, would you appreciate a Democratic party following his six proposals? Are "progressives" still losing the language battle? Food for thought.
To me, the most interesting point is how Lakoff's programme interacted the change in what the left-wing project was about between then and now.
In 2011, centre-left politicians thought they were in politics to deliver rising material standards of living for the bottom 99%. The activist base had started to shift to social issues (the tipping point was the failure of Occupy in late 2011) but the establishment wouldn't for a few more years. The frame that Lakoff was telling the Democrats to adopt was to fully lean into their role as the Mummy Party. (It isn't in the excerpt above, but Lakoff explicitly said was that the correct frame was that the nation was a family and the State was a "nurturant parent"). Of the six points, 2 is "accept support from successful businessmen who offer it", 4, and 5 are "git gud" and 1, 3, and 6 are "always talk like Mummy, talking like Daddy only benefits the Daddy party".
What actually happened is that the broader left-wing ecosystem of which the Democratic Party is part did embrace the spirit of points 1 and 3. They did organise around a single morality, optimise their communication to reinforce the frame of that morality, try to change the world through brain-changing morality etc. But the morality they adopted wasn't egalitarian therapy culture with the State as mother, it was woke culture with the State as HR lady. By 2020, centre-left politicians thought they were in politics to raise the relative social status of historically oppressed groups at the expense of white males.
"But the morality they adopted wasn't egalitarian therapy culture with the State as mother, it was woke culture with the State as HR lady."
Good point. You may remember the age of "everyone gets a gold star" or "a trophy just for playing." The turn of the last ten years by progs has been far more discerning about whose esteem should get boosted.
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If its occasional, yes. But making a kid his brother's keeper, and particularly making big brother responsible for little brother's fuckups, is considered abusive parenting ("parentification" is the technical term), not nurturing parenting. The ideal Mummy State makes the badly-behaved retarded kid its problem, not the healthy siblings' problem.
But that's the rub and where the analogy falls short.
The State's problem IS my problem because of how taxes work. In the mommy/sibling/bad sibling framing, the mommy who takes on the burden of the bad kid is paying out of her own pocket. She isn't demanding the good kid get a job and then bring home 25% of his or her wages to immediately be wasted on indulging the bad kid's emotional needs.
People who decry the Nanny State concept, in my mind, aren't going far enough. There is no such thing as a Nanny State. There is only confiscation of the abundance that the responsible and capable have produce on their own to be redistributed for .... reasons?
Direct, socially network charity is what I want. If I see that there's a guy in my town struggling because of some legitimate bad luck, I'd want some sort of mechanism to directly help him out over and above just me giving him cash. Local level, socially networked welfare.
Some of the counterarguments I see are:
Some communities, as a whole, don't have the resources to do this. Response: Then that's a broken community. They should all move. Yes, I am serious.
Smaller communities don't have the "resources" to "administer" such benefits. Response: This is just a thinly veiled argument for bureaucracy and PMC jobs. GoFundMes can be setup in a matter of minutes with all the necessary reporting and compliance. There's no reason Anytown, USA couldn't have their municipal government set these up - and then instantly fund them - just as easily. The not-conspiracy conspiracy is that government technology implementation is so awful party because of naked job preservation instincts by bureaucrats.
"What, so you want people to BEG their neighbors for money!? How despicable!" Response: "Beg" is hyperbole. Asking for an receiving charity is a pro-social act (Christians even call it Saintly). I'd rather have this be open and explicit than what we have now - covert signaling, counter-signaling, and assumptions of who is on what kind of government assistance. Furthermore, because government assistance is secured through faceless paperwork, people do not feel the same sense of humility and become, eventually, entitled.
Again, a Nanny State doesn't exist. The reality is far worse. We could solve these problems by admitting that PMC'ism is rampant and that individual emotional self-preservation, currently, outweighs pro-social society wide benefit. That's liberal, "humanist" individualism for you.
What if giving him cash is just mathematically the most effective option? I occasionally donate to GiveDirectly because I believe in their premise: that the administrative efficiency of just distributing cash directly is so high that enabling the occasional bad behavior is outweighed by all the good behavior it promotes and bureaucratic behavior it avoids. I'd concede that not every individual would benefit from the cash-- I don't give money to homeless people directly because I reasonably suspect they would misuse it-- but that's a rule-proving exception. Deciding which particular individual you want to give cash to re-introduces the hated administrative burden; better to do something like a UBI or the libertarian negative tax rate.
I think I agree, morally, that no amount of government spending can ever replace charity... but some amount of government spending is just sensible economics.
I'm not sure that it is.
I think the left-wing position needs to reckon with the fact that some percentage of people have problems that can't easily be solved and, even worse, risk becoming disproportionate consumers (of welfare or police resources or park space, etc. ) whenever you liberalize controls on them or make systems more generous and less skeptical.
And perhaps worse than that, that you can move people on the bubble into that category.
Funny, I just saw a new left-wing outlet wrestling with research that hinted at weak results when people are given money.
Yes, there are some people who are bad targets for the policy. That's the exact argument for making these programs less conditional-- ideally, not conditional whatsoever. ubi pilots consistently show improvements in welfare, and while GiveDirectly wastes effort trying to pick specifically extra-disadvantaged villages, it redeems itself by distributing payments to everyone within those villages.
Consider this simplified model of the economy:
After a decade, semi-random economic events will have sorted people into "poor" and "rich". The "rich" group is mostly composed of people form Group A, and the "poor" group is mostly composed of people from Group B. But you know in principle that there are still poor people who might improve their lives with more money, and that, meanwhile, the rich people have mostly hit diminishing utilitarian returns for improvement-by-money. Your first instinct-- well, not your first instinct, because you're a conservative, but the first instinct of someone further left than you-- will be to take money from the rich people and give it to the poor people. At first, you see the lives of people of the poor people rapidly improve-- because they're improvers, and using that money to take all the low-hanging-fruit they were previously unable to. But soon, most of the improvers move into the rich group, and now you're just giving money that the improvers could be using to improve things to wasters instead, and the program fails. The better option would have been to take more money from the rich, but pay it to everyone. The richest of the rich would suffer a little as they're paying disproportionately more, but they're far at the reducing-rate-of-utilitarian-returns section of the scale. So given that they're also recieving the UBI, the only way they move from rich to poor is if they're wasters... and if they are, then society should want them to be poor, to discourage waster behavior. Meanwhile, the improver poor become improver rich, and the improver rich maintain their position, while the waster poor get to control a proportionately smaller share of the economy than they would if they were receiving direct welfare and also aren't facing any incentive to remain poor.
The funny thing is, I've also seen that same article, and I consider it direct proof of my point-- even though the leftist writing it doesn't seem to understand that. For example, they say,
but then turn around and say,
completely ignoring the obvious conclusion that if all these targeted giving schemes are failing, they should stop advocating for targeted giving schemes. Just give the money to everyone. The pregnant women/domestic violence victims that will use the money productively will still get it-- and so will everyone else that actually needs the money, and would use it to improve their lives. Sure, plenty of people who won't use the money to improve their lives will also get it-- but at least they're not directly incentivized to not improve their lives, and also they're probably going to be paying their money to people who can make better use of it.
Using the meme definition of insanity, this "transfer money to particular poor households" scheme is definitely it. Wealth-transfer research has promising results. Wealth-transfer-to-poor-people research has less promising results. Why do these leftists keep insisting that we trying to find even worse-off people to give the money too? That's just going to result in even worse results. Just give the money to everyone! The trump stimmy checks were the right idea, only held back by the fact that they were unfunded and increased the deficit (because deficit-mediated inflation is effectively a regressive tax on poorer people, who hold more cash wealth and suffer more from sticky salaries.)
To sketch out an ideal tax + welfare system...
Revenue:
LVT used almost exclusively as a revenue-generating tax
Pigouvian taxes applied in conditions of high economic certainty
Service charges for excludable use of sensibly government-provided services (e.g., getting your passport renewed, driving on a toll road)
Spending
Pigouvian subsidies applied in conditions of high economic certainty
security (including military)
contract enforcement (the courts, plus the parts of the regulatory state that do stuff like fine people for lying about the efficacy of medical treatments)
the strictly necessary parts of the administrative state (e.g., salaries for judges, lawmakers)
the parts of the regulatory state that exist to solve multipolar traps/tragedies of the commons/failure states of capitalism/etc. (e.g., climate change, national parks, trustbusting)
the parts of the regulatory state necessary for auditing the other parts
A UBI calculated to be the higher of {[enough so that almost* no one starves, dies of exposure, dies of easily treatable disease*, or otherwise lives considered strictly unacceptable for a citizen*], [Whatever figure maximizes the equation: RISE IN(MINIMUM OF(aggregate GDP, aggregate population utility*)) DUE TO PAYMENTS - FALL IN (MINIMUM OF(aggregate GDP, aggregate population utility*)) due to taxes]}
A service designed to care for people who are strictly unable to make economic choices (the mentally challenged, the insane, and the senile)
* I'm using fuzzy language in a few cases because some of these concepts/thresholds are strictly subjective... I concede that even in my "ideal" economic system there would be plenty for people to fight over and disagree about
Part of the reason progressives don't seem to win with this argument in practice is that it depends on assumptions that prove dubious in practice: that only the richest of the rich will suffer (when social democracies as we know them today tax more across the board) or that taxing to create such broad benefits is costless.
Yes, UBI avoids the problem of means-tested systems that still end up giving disproportionate money to dubious cases. But it does so by simply ducking the problem of the bill that makes them want to discriminate in the first place.
Maybe because leftists share the impulse that you categorized as conservative? That if the government is going to take a lot of your money out of your hands it should be some sort of emergency or going to a case so self-evidently worse off that it justifies the effort and isn't either a gain at the margins or an active loss to people seemingly incapable of making good use of it.
That isn't it solely - some seem deeply skeptical of UBI as a suggested welfare replacement, presumably because they're skeptical that you'll get a high enough UBI for unfortunates - but worth considering.
I actually think it's better without the concession to fuzziness. After all, what your UBI proposal has going for it here is that we theoretically know what everyone is going to get and so the spending is predictable. If we start adding new expectations you risk ending up with the very problem of throwing good money after bad to raise some people to a standard they seem incapable of in addition to the big bill.
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The Trump Stimmy checks were in fact not universal.
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The left's answer is to keep taking from those better off and giving to those worse off without even trying to grapple with that. And the right's answer is to institute an authoritarian system which governs everyone as if they are those people. A better answer -- discrimination -- is anathema to both.
Huh, seems like the traditional failure mode the right wing is accused of facing is the opposite. Just throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Fewer/no services, let people (even those who might prudently use any additional help) fend for themselves.
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I mean, it is theoretically possible if you have the rare case of a guy who was fired from his job for no fault of his own and needs some money for food and shelter until he gets another job. In that hypothetical you are preserving the theoretical productivity of a person just long enough until they return to productivity.
In practice even unemployment insurance as implemented is not even this. Last I checked, most users of UI are repeat users. The rest of the redistribution programs fail even harder. The problem with giving money to people to keep them alive is it doesn't wean them off. Its just a self licking ice cream cone in social program form. That is, unfortunately, the Achilles heel of EA as currently styled as well. You have to account for future expenses as well.
You're considering redistributive programs in a vacuum, but I contend that that's not the best way to understand my proposal. My position is that the best way to perform welfare is unconditional wealth transfers, and to various degrees UI, SS, and even GiveDirectly are all conditional. That naturally leads to problems, like your mention of the "repeat users" thing, but that's proof of the conditionality being the problem, not the nature of transferring cash. Consider if, alternatively, these programs were administered as deliveries of particular baskets of goods. Think of how much more room there would be for corruption and inefficiency. Cash is better than food stamps is better than a council of politicians getting bribed by ag lobbyists to buy specifically high fructose corn syrup and distribute it. Anti-welfare people look at poor people choosing to buy inefficient luxuries and claim that that's proof that programs should be reformed to give politicians more control over program administration... but the alternative isn't poor people getting a healthier diet, the alternative is financially motivated politicians forcing poor people to buy even more inefficient luxuries.
And yes, "giving people money to stay alive" does result in dependency, for the uncontreversial reason that if you pay someone to do something, they will keep doing it. If you only provide wealth transfers to poor people, they will remain poor. But if you pay people independent of their actions, their incentive is to put the money to the most personally productive use possible. And given that capitalism provides a network of incentives to align personal greed to societal benefit, that in turn funnels money toward what's better for society.
But to give everyone money you either have to tax at such exorbitant rates that you are going to cripple the economy, or you are going to be giving out so little that it doesn't help anyone but the very poor anyways.
So unless you are the first politician in centuries to figure out a way to tax the underclass to give some extra money to private sector upper middle class families, your redistribution program is going to be bad for society.
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Widely distributing cash changes the incentives. Cash works precisely because giving it out is rare and thus people are not incentivized to behave badly in a way enabled by it.
Cash works because... everything is fungible to cash, but literal cash has higher liquidity and therefore fewer transaction costs than any other form of welfare. In any economy that is not a perfectly optimized free market, there will be some role for enforced wealth transfers. Unconditional cash payments are just the second-best way to do payments, after pigouvian subsidies.
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This analogy begins with questionable premises, but if we decide to go with it, one super-common issue it raises is how often do abusive parents believe they're not being abusive but are rather being nurturing? IME, almost no one likes to believe themselves as being abusive towards others, and this is no different among people who are, factually, abusive abusers. As such, the modal abusive parent (or husband or wife or whatever) genuinely believes that they're not being abusive, but are rather being nurturing. As such, any parent who is motivated to nurture a child must demonstrate openness to being convinced that what they see as nurturing is actually abusive, especially when they're sure that they're actually being nurturing.
By this analogy, it's pretty clear that these center-left politicians in question were mothers who were being told both by their older child and by tons of independent observers that she was being abusive and refused to entertain the possibility, because by their model of parenting, what appeared to the child and to independent observers as "abusive" was actually "nurture." Perhaps they're correct that it is actually "nurture;" however, the lack of concern for the possibility that it might not be is a reflection of an utter lack of motivation to actually nurture that older child.
This is complicated by the fact that the younger child is also dead certain that they need this sort of nurturing and said child is sometimes clearly worse off . One might even grant that you're making the better off child slightly worse off and still believe the trade off is not only worth it but fair.
And there are, of course, observers and experts on both sides. There are plenty of others who will insist that the problem is that they haven't directed enough attention and effort to an underperforming child.
Imagine a mother steeped in a certain ideology, she reads only so many books a year but the ones on parenting involve figures with impressive degrees egging her on. She has some reason to continue.
I don't think this complicates things at all, actually. One can listen to the younger child being dead certain* in this while also spending exactly as much time and effort as required to seriously consider the older child's complaint that she's being abused (with exactly as verifiable and commonly-found examples of the older child being clearly worse off, of course). One can consider either argument and still reject them; it's very possible that it is actually true that the older child being abused by her own perception is what's required for justice to be done and for the younger child not to be abused. But it's incumbent on the parent to credibly come to this conclusion by demonstrating a willingness to seriously consider the possibility that the older child has a point. Which is where, in this analogy, this didn't happen.
* The analogy breaks down even more here due to comparing populations with individuals - whatever population analogue of the younger child is, they certainly weren't "dead certain" that the type of zero-sum-style oppression-Olympics "progressive" politics pushed by center-left politicians were actually preferable the alternative of an egalitarian politics based around equal rights and free speech. At most, a small majority of some subgroups were "dead certain" of this sort of thinking, but also there has always been a sizable portion - often a majority, depending on the subgroup - who were "dead certain" of the opposite. Making this analogy work would be tough, but it might be like if the child, like many children, goes to different moods and beliefs, and half the time he's dead certain that abusing his older sister is the only way he can feel like justice has been served and another half the time he's apologizing for getting into that mood.
Of course, we should also apply this to the older sibling; sometimes, she's insisting that the abuse she claims other times is actually not abuse, but justice that she deserves, to make the family better, to make her better, and to make her little brother better off. Other times; she's insisting that that's actually abuse. If we continue this analogy like the above, I'd wager the ratio of times of those would be quite skewed in favor of the latter, relative to ratios of what the younger child is saying.
But the analogy is probably stretched beyond use at this point, and it's moot anyway; even presuming that the younger child was "dead certain," this doesn't really add complication.
Absolutely. Not only fair, but morally obligated. It's very possible that this is the case. It's also very possible that this isn't the case. The only person worth trusting with the power to make such a judgment call is someone who has demonstrated a willingness to, in good faith, listen to arguments in favor of both. And, I'd add, a willingness to listen more to people who disagree with oneself; e.g. if the parent has been told by others that he's playing favorites by favoring child A over child B, he should be extra receptive and welcoming of criticisms from child B (or on behalf of child B, though that has many more points of possible failure) relative to criticisms from child A. That doesn't mean being convinced by the former over the latter; it means prioritizing the truth over one's own biases.
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Do you think that a mommy-mentality or "egalitarian therapy culture" would have been more effective in terms of pure politics?
It might be a question of methods. I think to most Democrats being a good person for selfless and societal reasons was part of the messaging, but were they "gentle and firm"? Seems to me that the mainstream left decided that shame and blame was more effective. They were, of course, almost completely wrong on medium- and long-term time horizons, though not the short-term one.
However, it's undeniable that some parts of his plan did get implemented. When he says "government is about 'necessities' – health, education, housing, protection, jobs with living wages, and so on – not about “programs.” Economic success lies in human well-being, not in stock prices, or corporate and bank profits" that does sound pretty familiar to me! Another weak point: he theorizes that it's impossible to be all talk but no action. He says "language use, over and over, affects how citizens understand policy choices, which puts pressure on legislators, and ultimately affects what policies are chosen," but is that really true? Did a shifted linguistic landscape around housing, education, health, jobs, etc. lead to matching policies? Biden Democrats would say yes, but that they simply were too modest to take credit (or that people were too dumb to give them that credit). I kind of think no, and that's where maybe it all falls apart for me - I don't think I'm really a Lakoff acolyte. Messaging does frame the issue, but I don't think I buy the value-shift theory. Or to be more precise, backlash from a mismatch between values and action (even if perceived and not truly real) overwhelms any incremental gains provided by the linguistic landscape of the fight. As I like to say, betrayal is actually one of the most powerful emotions (and voters are really fairly good at sniffing out bullshit).
Yet I wonder. DO we in fact have a shifted attitude toward some of these issues? Health care yes! Conservatives were very resistant to "health care is a human right" but I think that attitude is everywhere now. People are less sympathetic to corporations, even if deregulation still has lots of appeal. Social spending they maybe even went backwards; he says "Social Security and Medicare are earned" but today that reads like a GOP talking point. I assume he's pretty unhappy with the current landscape, although I don't really know - but if so, who does he blame? Centrists, or progressives?
The big one, as I see it, is the migration of the abortion debate from "pro-choice / pro-life" to various terms like "reproductive rights", "reproductive freedom", "family planning", and, most eye-rolling of all, "right to choose."
It's a sleight of linguist hand that moves the subject of debate from the issue of terminating a pregnancy to the much more broad concept of individual liberties and choice. This is effective because, in the most whishy-washy general sense, very few people in America vote for less "choice" and / or less "freedom."
The apoplectic left doesn't actually have a very specific reason why they hate Trump. Ask them. In real life. Most will, first, engage that classic cosmopolitan liberal snide sense of humor and begin with something like "I mean, where do I even start? lolol!" Keep pushing. Get past the "literally Hitler's" and eventually you'll probably get to some version of "He's trying to take away our rights?" Which ones? Specifically And then you'll get to some real meat - maybe. The Dobbs decision will probably make an appearance. This is when you can calmly inform your counterparty that Dobbs didn't "make abortion illegal" or anything close to it.
But the vibes will remain. "He's made the country feel so much worse!" Has he? Or does this linguistic shift mean that anything short of ear-splitting affirmation of everyone's "lived truth" default to Nazi level oppression?
Average lefty here, happy to respond with specifics?
I just sort of mourn the old United States where acting with blatant corruption was out of the pale.
Also as someone in science I mourn the days when the nation took pride in being a powerhouse in things like scientific research, and in being a place where people all over the world wanted to come and get educated here.
We had this really great thing going being not just the most economically powerful but also the most intellectually productive country in the world, and we acted as a vacuum sucking up all the intelligent and ambitious people from around the world and having them come here to build things with us.
Now we started with this mean style of politics which makes those same people not want to come here anymore. Some might still do it based on a risk-reward calculation, but even then, we’ve destroyed science funding in the country and so even the reward side of the equation also got hit.
Meanwhile, we’re destroying the open market of energy that we used to have and actively persecuting renewable energy technologies. Places like Texas were world leaders in renewables because the tech is just simply good and competitive. No more. Batteries and renewable energies are the technologies of the future of the rest of the world and we’re letting China and the rest of the world just absolutely eat our lunch there. While the world undergoes this technological revolution we just chose to sit it out.
So overall, largely because of Trump and his politics, we’ve become this angry inward focused power that is giving up the very sources of dynamism that make us powerful.
I guess the one thing we have is AI and it’s just about the only area where the United States has an advantage that the Trump administration isn’t trying to destroy while pursuing some misguided ideological end.
By that you mean "moral" corruption, and that appears to be the root of the disagreement. Conservatives (and the average leftist is motivated by the same things per Haidt- after all, they [perceive themselves to have at least perpetuated if not] built the system, they are interested in that work meaning something) correctly observe that people who are unwilling to respect their prerogatives of decorum are probably unwilling to respect conservative framings entirely.
For instance, if a conservative redefines X to mean Y "because it's what decent people do" (read: because I make money hand-over-fist; business always marches alongside honor), a reformer might then redefine word X as Z and reject definition Y with prejudice, which will disadvantage and destabilize conservatives that built their fortunes around definition Y.
"Where my country gone?" is a conservative statement, it's just coming from the left now.
Well, as long as they were the correct color. They had quotas for that, just like they did in the '50s, for the same reasons they had them in the '50s.
Science that doesn't replicate isn't science, and the initiatives to do R&D were also suffering from the "so long as they're the right color" problem. I guess it's the age-old dilemma where you can either do science or you can sacrifice it to be anti-racist, just from the right's definition of anti-racism instead of the left's. Naturally, this is moral corruption to the left, just like ending racism the first time was to the right.
No, only China. Nobody else invested into the tooling to manufacture the panels for the same reason the US couldn't- too expensive. The West has already lost the battle for renewable energy sovereignty (and already won the battle for forcing Europe into a dependence on American natural gas by successfully provoking a war in Ukraine); the only question is whether we want to pay now to redevelop indigenous green energy generation capacity, or pay later by having to do that anyway when China starts making diplomatic demands in exchange.
Now, are tariffs the right way to do that given how long it takes to spin up manufacturing in a country that has largely forgotten how to do it? Well, maybe not (annexing the country with a good chunk of high-tech manufacturing immediately to the north is likely to be the better long-term plan here). But it does strike me as interesting that the Rs have pivoted into being the party of bad ideas and the Ds into the party of no ideas.
Maybe that is the deeper issue but I had more in mind things like: the president and his associates running cryptocurrency scams on their supporters
That sort of thing didn’t used to happen in the US or even the developed world from what I know.
The moral corruption I perceive is that suddenly the US started acting in ways that I associate with third world governments, and there was only tepid criticism.
Affirmative action type stuff to me is a side note to what I’m describing.
I agree with conservatives about basing acceptance for jobs and studies on merit instead of skin color.
That doesn’t change the fact that we’ve essentially renounced the role as the country that hoovers up all the intellectual talent and high agency individuals from the world and puts them to work building things here on our soil.
Look, science has flaws, but it works, damn it!
The survivability of cancer has increased dramatically over the past decades. That’s just one (set of) disease(s). Dementia, Parkinson’s, AIDS, diabetes, MS, arthritis, many of these conditions have seen outcomes quietly yet drastically improve over these past decades. Science is working and still acts as a fundamental engine advancing human wellbeing.
Materials science, computational techniques, and even odd niche branches of science such as looking at what chemicals are in the saliva of lizards, have delivered huge advances in recent decades. And surprisingly, most of this has happened in the US!!
You might be destined to get Alzheimer’s in the future and science poses the ability to save your very brain and being from a terrible fate. Or maybe you will experience a horrific accident and regenerative medicine techniques might save your life from becoming a living hell.
Scientific advancement is occurring, and is good for all of us, and despite our comfort and confidence in continuous advancement, it’s not guaranteed.
The current administration has been a storm that passed though science funding at every level, ripping up grants, discouraging a generation of youth from getting into the discipline, and discouraging people who typically would have come here to work in our labs to stay away and go elsewhere.
The sheer strength of our position as the center of the scientific world might allow it to hunker down and withstand all of this, but that’s not at all the outcome you would hope for.
I agree and this one is complicated, but we had a role to play in a technological revolution that the entire world is going through and we decided it’s better to sit back and actually attack it rather than get in and help shape it.
It’s like if in the past upon seeing that the English were advancing with this new concept of coal fired trains and industry, we had decided to actively combat its establishment here to preserve the timber industry.
China has the lead but we could have played a role with innovating in this domain and then at least competing to help lead the global buildout that is (genuinely) occurring. Instead, China is the one and only benefactor, and for this is leaps and bounds ahead with the know how to produce and install this stuff and is doing so in every country across the planet. Not to mention that in any conflict has a decent shot at kicking our ass with massive swarms of cheaply made drones and batteries.
Were obviously just missing out on the next supercycle of technological development on the planet when we could have at least tried to be in the game.
Like I say we did stay in the game on AI, since it was genuinely our innovation which came from the US academia and tech industry. Currently it’s the only thing keeping the American economy afloat (although probably also is in big bubble territory).
But instead of navigating this time of challenges skillfully, focusing on our fortifying our competitive strengths, we just adopted the posture of an angry inwardly-turned nation that started attacking its own foundations of power and influence based on passing culture war freak out stuff.
In other words, stuff like affirmative action and all that is just some silly ornamentation we put on top of the most successful engine of power and influence of the modern world. We could have taken away the mild productivity-decreasing AA stuff and kept the foundation intact! Instead, we started chopping the entire thing down.
The baby can only be thrown out with its bathwater for so long. The lightening might be very hard to get back into the bottle, as each former center of world power and influence can attest.
As another scientist, the problem is that it has been working less and less well, with ballooning costs to boot (especially including the entirety of university funding).
On the teaching side, I've been now long enough part of academia, and have seen it from both the student and the teaching side, over more than a decade now, and it's obvious that the standards just keep going down and down. Professors openly admitting that they let everyone pass in the oral exam anyway, so why even bother making the written exam hard? Students just whining until they get their way, and the administration takes their side. Entire new courses with even lower standards are created, lest the "Nursing Sciences" may feel disadvantaged by the mean old boys club of math and statistics.
On the research side, it becomes harder and harder to even try to conduct neutral investigations. Everything that can possibly be judged politically has to either directly include assurances that you're a good person with good politics, or you have to live in fear that activist-scholars will go after you. Jesse Singal has examples that are close to the platonic ideal of course, but you're extremely mistaken if you think this just limited to specific topics.
I'm working in genetics, and it often feels like almost everything about it is politisized. IVF and embryo selection have always been opposed by the conservatives of course, but nowadays the left will be much more dangerous to your work. A colleague of mine works on a certain kind of serious, inheritable and debilitating diseases. She is being pressured by left-wing activist-scholars from the humanities to drop the topic since exploring the genetic background assumes these diseases are bad - which is ablism - , the money ought to instead go straight to left-wing support structures. Nevermind that most of the patients themselves hate the disease and are thankful for any attempt of fixing, even if only available for their kids. Do you think they get in trouble for this egregious breach of scientific conduct? Of course not, they get support from the administrative and cheers from the media. One of my PhD students is an Egyptian curious about his heritage, and we are investigating what the genetic differences we found functionally do. But even here we have to walk on eggshells since implying that different groups from different places with different conditions might be genetically different in meaningful, functional ways is a big no-no. Well, only for humans, for any other animal it's perfectly obvious and only a creationist would disagree.
And apart from the science itself, the AA hiring is also madness. I personally know not just one, but two cases of a female professor getting their position with just a single publication. I haven't had to work with them myself, but everyone who did has told me that they have been wildly out of their depth and very difficult to work with. Committees that make lists by publications and other measures of competence, and end up taking number ... eight because that's the first one that fulfils whatever quota currently in need of filling.
This is not mild productivity decreasing, these are the big dangers that have been bogging down science for decades. For a different field, just look at the nuclear renaissance going on in certain countries right now; we could have had that in the 90s for the entire world, but fearmongering and green extremism has thrown us back so, so far. Instead, we ideologically wasted so much on trying to turn solar and wind into essential generators through complicated battery schemes, while they are much better suited to simply being supporting energy generators for specific times & places. Michael Magoon has a whole slew of good articles for lay audiences on the topic, but the basic economic case is currently being proven by demonstration in my own home country, germany, which has managed to utterly ruin its own energy production through ideological mismanagement. Even just keeping the old nuclear reactors would have been better than the insanity we've went through. We didn't just move more slowly; We actively moved backwards, and are now depended on the countries around us who invested correctly.
The only part I agree on is that I do not like Trump and don't think he is likely to really fix things. But I also do not trust academia to fix itself. If anything, I expect it to get worse.
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I get the feeling that maybe you haven't spoken with many Trump-hating leftists recently? I do on a pretty regular basis, and put simply, most of the complaints boil down to one of the following: "he's stupid and I want a smarter president", "I dislike his thin skin and meanness", "his policies often make no sense", "I still haven't forgiven him for J6/the 2020 election lie", "he's been tanking the economy even more", and yes, "he's trying to take away important rights" does make an appearance. There's some resentment of perceived anti-LGB, anti-T, and anti-immigrant background too. But framing the first 5 reasons as not very specific I don't think is very fair.
Charitably, I guess I'll say that instead of "specific" substitute in "low content" then?
"He's stupid and I want a smarter president" - This is subjective to the person you're talking to. And, again, being specific would be to cite what decisions he's made that a person finds "stupid" -- a lot of lefties really can't do that.
"I dislike thin skin and meanness" -- See above?
"His policies often make no sense." -- Again, this is a perfectly valid critique if the person goes to the next level and highlights just one given policy and how it "makes no sense."
"I still haven't forgiven him for J6 / the 2020 election lie" -- Lol, ok.
"He's been tanking the economy even more" -- The president does not control the economy. This is just a slightly mid-witted vibes based reasoning.
"He's trying to take away important rights" -- Cool! which. ones?
I don't think you made the point you wanted to make, so I'm trying to be charitable here in the spirit of productive argument. All of the above examples are exactly what I mean when I say not specific. They're straight vibes at best and vibes masquerading as thoughtful analysis at worst.
I'll give you some specifics about why I disliked the Obama admin: I think he routinely tried to circumvent the constitution in blatant ways. And here is a specific article about the Obama admin losing a SCOTUS case 9-0 (!) to provide such an example
I was grouping/aggregating general left-leaning sentiment into a few distinct buckets. Obviously each point would have details. My dad, for example, can almost certainly instantly name 4-5 examples of each the first 3 points. Sorry if I misinterpreted what you were saying there, I guess you were looking for examples. I thought you were saying that everything boils down to pure vibes. I think each of those buckets I brought up has factual basis, they are not really invented and are not linguistic sleight of hand. Now you and others might weight certain facts differently, or make different assumptions of intent of various politicians, but believing that doesn't make those factual points disappear.
For example, the first point about stupidity: it's pretty clear in interviews and from sources near him that Trump basically doesn't read books, like at all. For meanness you can just look at Trump's recent remarks at Kirk's funeral where he outright says that he hates his enemies with a passion, and of course he regularly makes fun of people. Although the president doesn't control stuff like gas prices, and only kinda immigration, there's a cogent case to be made that tariff uncertainty has gummed up the free trade works and made things more expensive, that's more than vibes. So too is the financial market unrest about presidential undue influence of the Fed, which bears very, very directly on global financial health. Some people consider vote by mail a right, free speech is a right that is arguably threatened, the free press is a right which Trump has arguably suppressed, the right to protest is a right that Trump has discouraged (I think that one's pretty tenuous though personally), equal protection and due process are rights that he has threatened (e.g. for immigrants - yes, certain constitutional protections DO apply to them, even if not all of them), weakened environmental protections can threaten to violate rights to safety, among those who consider healthcare a fundamental right major Medicare/Medicaid cuts above a certain threshold could violate that right, the list goes on.
You can disagree with all of these! That's fine. But you can't just say these arguments don't even exist. That seems a step to far for me. And yes, I think that at least half of Democratic voters would be able to name at least 2-3 specific examples of their chosen pet-issue bucket. In that sense, Trump Derangement Syndrome is a media phenomenon, insofar as it exists, not an individualized one, at least not broadly speaking. I'm sure some smaller segments are in "irrational hatred" territory, but that's nothing new, is it? I'm old enough to remember people thinking Obama was the literal anti-Christ, and few of them were able to articulate specific reasons why this was the case. Yet we wouldn't claim on that basis that virtually all Republicans hated Obama on "vibes at best", that's absurd.
Excellent paragraph. Full of substantive arguments. Perhaps I may disagree with some of them, but that's beside the point.
At least 50%? No chance in hell. No chance. And I don't think it's because they literally do not know or are unaware of the many excellent examples your provided, it's that they cannot articulate them well. Instead of "the lack of due process for immigrant deportations" you will hear "He's sending people to concentration camps! Kids in cages!" If you politely push back and say, no, that isn't quite the case, and even go further and try to lead them down the steelman path of "but there are concerns about due process," you'll be met with even more vitriolic statements.
For most blue tribers, highly emotive reflexive "resistance" to Trump is a level one in-group signaling mechanism. It is not about even basic disagreements on policy or the outcomes thereof. It is about basic in group signaling at the loudest possible emotive volume.
As I said before, "The apoplectic left doesn't actually have a very specific reason why they hate Trump." Instead, they have the received opinion from PMC / Media / Acdemia paired with the living hell gravity well of bi-coastal social pressure to "just hate Trump harder!"
Edit/Update:
Because examples are fun, I recently saw a woman of about 40 - with purple dyed hair - at a brewery tap room handing out car bumper stickers that read "my cat hates fascists." As the kids say, what even is that? First, we have a reference to Trump being a fascist. The polisci major in me cringes. Second, why is a non human agent involved? Third, what is the message you're trying to get across. This third point, I can answer - there is no message. This is a vibes based public display of emotion wrapped up in weird internet reverence for irony and cats. This is a signal, nothing more. There is no substance. It's actually close to nihilistic because the woman didn't even put herself in the meme as the primary actor. Instead, she deflected all responsibility to her .... "fur baby."
That feels like someone riffing off of the "This machine kills fascists" sticker that was somewhat en vogue in the 2010s that people would stick on their laptops. Not that common, but common enough to form a stereotype within my blue tribe enclave of a keyboard warrior who genuinely believed that his activity on the internet via his laptop would play out eventually in killing fascists (or just preventing them from existing, I suppose). As you say, it's pure applause light.
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I think that anything, including shutting up, would have been more effective in terms of pure politics than the woke turn - which didn't even help shore up minority support for the Democrats. My go-to joke on this point is that the Trump was such a weak candidate that the Democrats could have beaten him with an empty suit in 2016 or 2024, and did beat him with an empty suit in 2020. Why did a woman with access to Bill Clinton's political sense, machine, and advisors (and essentially unlimited cash) run a campaign which underperformed an empty suit? I think the main problem is the incredible unpopularity of the woke frame.
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Shame and blame are unavoidable because progressives, like all of us, always have to reckon with the fact that some people just point blank don't agree with them sometimes. Progressives did create a powerful media machine. Maybe not the sort of grassroots one here but there was control of a significant amount of the media space directly. They did basically try to spend the credibility of all sorts of industries and institutions to push their messages.
What happens when that doesn't seem to convince conservatives? Well, once you have a media machine the temptation to shame and censor is nearly irresistible, because of the very mindset in this post: problems are a result of conservatives imposing the wrong linguistic frame so why not just...stop them imposing any frame whatsoever?
Lakoff seems to avoid the manichean view of modern progressives but he shares the same impulses: political differences are based on messaging or the wrong sort of education as opposed to deep disagreement on values or even a pragmatic judgment that progressive policies are not in one's interests.
Another theory is that conservatives have given up on fighting healthcare for the same reason that fiscal conservatives across the West are unable to cut the budget or stop many deeply unwise policies (e.g. the triple lock in the UK): once the government starts giving people things it's very, very hard to stop it.
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