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While this quote gets repeated, I don't think it's quite true. Instead I think at the level of running a society there is no difference between stupid and evil and the right doesn't quite get why the left doesn't get that.
Granted that Mao was not a good person, he didn't set out to kill 100 million people. He made some bad decisions that inexorably led to a famine which killed 100 million people. But that wasn't his goal, his goal was to do what Deng would wind up doing. He simply happened to be incompetent at it. And from a right wing perspective, the results speak for themselves- Mao's incompetence killed more people in a war against sparrows than Hitler did in a war against a continent spanning superpower. The lesson if you're a right winger is pretty obvious- pick the cold and competent guy even if he's a little bit evil. That's probably why the right bet so big on capitalism in the later 20th century- capitalism is not very nice, but it works better than anything else anyone has ever tried and there's no getting around that.
The left, on the other hand, doesn't seem to grasp that right wingers see no practical difference between stupidity and evil in running a society. The trying to help people is what's important, that's why the political left doesn't like arguments about tradeoffs and side effects and whether or not their climate change and gun policies work. It's easy to write this off as a bit, or virtue signaling, or whatever, but I think a lot of them really do inhabit a world where as long as the people in power are willing to commit strongly enough to solving whatever problem it will inevitably be solved through the power of positive thinking. Maybe that's uncharitable, but my experience has not been that, say, gun control activists consider "whether assault weapons bans actually prevent mass shootings" to be a particularly relevant factor in whether there should be assault weapons bans to prevent mass shootings, more like it's a distraction from the broader issue of whether mass shootings are a tragedy.
This has bad implications when it comes to HBD. It's one thing to say that your worth as a person isn't the same as your IQ, but that falls apart really quickly when you also say there's no difference between stupid and evil.
I know you have your caveat, "at the level of running a society," but that doesn't give me much hope considering universal suffrage. When the people are stupid, how can democracy work?
Which is an argument against universal suffrage. And indeed, most people are against universal suffrage (10 year olds often don’t get to vote).
Of course there are no perfect solutions.
I unironically think land-owning was actually a pretty good Schelling Point, at least for state-level elections. The people who own land in a state have skin in the game and have demonstrated at least some level of competence and future orientation.
I’d be open to a return to that as well. Landowning with kids might be my ideal
What should be the cutoff point? One acre? One square foot?
Dunno — presumably a lot large enough for a small house.
Under the International Zoning Code, that would be 6,000 square feet (0.14 acre, 560 square meters; a 78-foot (24-meter) square).
LOL, given the number of houses sitting on 50x100 and even 25x100 lots, the International Zoning Code is a bit aspirational.
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