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Market capitalism leads inexorably to ever more socially (although not necessarily economically) progressive politics in Anglo countries because it successfully filters ambitious, right-wing young men, largely by their own choice, into professions where they make money but are not involved in the running of core political, cultural and educational systems, because careers in them almost all pay much less than comparable careers available to men of the same social class and intelligence in other sectors (eg. whether you’re a Yale grad or a community college grad, a job in ‘media’ or ‘education’ is still going to pay less than a career in much of the private sector).
The only time ‘business conservatives’ in an Anglo capitalist society have cared about politics in the last 150 years enough to make a difference is when they perceived there to be imminent threat of ‘actual socialism’ involving, to a greater or lesser extent, some kind of revolution that would actually expropriate them and make their lives, and those of their families, much worse. Not the distant threat that America or England becomes Brazil in 100 years, or that tax rates may rise a little, but the threat that it becomes Lenin’s Russia or the Paris Commune in 5 years.
If you think about it, it really is the perfect scheme. It’s like running Vogue and wanting to ensure your magazine is staffed only with wealthy young women of the right social background, so you decide to preference degrees in History of Art and require a 2 year unpaid internship before any job offer. You will get what you ask for.
If all the smartest young people in a society become quants at Jane Street UNLESS they care a huge deal about leftist politics and have a strong dislike for Wall Street…you get a society that looks a lot like this one. The human capital in conservative politics is dogshit because unless you either host a prime time Fox News show or are senior enough in the congressional GOP to get good kickbacks after you leave office on the corporate circuit, why bother? The remote chance you might possibly maybe have some influence on power some day, if you’re lucky (but will probably just be poor)?
We can look at this very sub, full of very intelligent conservatives. Almost to the man or woman every single one (including, if you’ll stoop to somewhat less intelligent ones, myself) works in tech, in finance, in the corporate world or in the private sector in general to some extent. And high school teachers making $50k a year have a much bigger effect on the politics of the next generation than an investment banking MD making $1m a year, or than almost any FAANG engineer.
But would you rather be the teacher?
This has a lot in it. As someone in (higher) education, my way to make the profession more conservative would be (a) more job security at the earlier stages, (b) more competition/rules based criteria for hiring, and (c) higher salaries that are more linked to performance.
(That I've done extremely well on quantitative criteria like students' ratings of my teaching and my number of publications, but suffered from not being part of certain cliques, is obviously incidental to my opinions...)
Right now, academia is a matter of being an itinerant global citizen (so less disincentive for people with more openness to experience and lower orderliness) with the ultimate goal of a secure job where the key skill is people liking you (so motivates people with higher agreeableness and neuroticism). Why would anyone who knows about political psychology be surprised that this tends to select for liberals over conservatives?
You could try "defund academia," but this isn't going to result in more conservative academics, just fewer academics. You could try "defund the humanities," but the sciences also have plenty of liberals and potential liberals, and they'll feel threatened by conservatives, to the point of turning potential conservative scientists into liberals.
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absolute banger. struck a real chord with the anxiety I feel about staying in the private sector and trying to start a family and my bafflement that anyone has time to run for politics. It seems important to me that from my middle class upbringing I don't know anyone who actually has a politically oriented life path and if you tasked me with becoming to the mayor of my city I'd have to google what that process could even look like.
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I think it depends. Social conservatives are much more likely to get involved in politics simply because they care more that their government supports their socially conservative views than they do about getting rich. This is one reason I’m a bit more optimistic about the chances of social conservatives becoming much more of a political force in the next generation of politicians. The reason is much like what you’ve said. The landscape is shifting precisely because the left has been so forceful in pushing its views and ideas through institutions and forcing them into businesses that there’s no longer the option of not being involved unless you’re okay with those ideas. Politics is coming for them in a way that’s kinda unprecedented. When you have to vet every piece of entertainment, your kids school, toys, stores, food and drinks, churches, clubs and organizations to make sure they’re not promoting things that you consider vile, being apathetic isn’t much of an option anymore. There’s no such thing as being left alone, no neutral territory. And because of that it’s going to come down to one of two options— opt out of society completely and live more or less like the Amish or Hasidic Jews, or fight for the right to not have that stuff shoved down your throat all the time.
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Yes. What's more, I suspect that most of the ambitious right-wing young men who go into business are mainly right-wing in the sense that they support a market economy, they do not hate rich people and businesses, they have relatively favorable views of law enforcement, and they do not blame white men for all the world's problems. They are not social conservatives. They probably enjoy a line of the good ol' blow every once in a while, they don't believe in god, they would be happy if a random hookup got an abortion rather than having the baby, and they have no desire to leave the big city and live in a small community.
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Very well put, and neatly in line (down to mentioning Jane Street) with a recent thought of mine:
If you want smart rational capable people to do a job building the culture then you should increase their compensation. Pay me $1 million a year guaranteed for the next 30 years (inflation adjusted) and I will gladly leave my quant job and focus on shaping societal culture into my preferred image, it certainly beats predicting fair values of AAPL 30 minutes in the future better than the competion. Problem is that the "conservative right" refuses to pay the opportunity cost going rate for the kinds of people it says it wants. I'm sure that rich like minded billionaires like Thiel could band together and fund such an organisation of 250 such people without too much cost to themselves; it would cost a fraction of what Musk on his own paid for Twitter over the whole 30 years.
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Right, the only thing that could stop this is if young conservatives prioritized political victory over making money. It is possible to imagine a world - perhaps one in which making money is a little ‘grubby’ or ‘middle class’ while ‘gentlemen’ play politics, as it was with the aristocracy in pre-corn-laws Britain - where this might be the case. But it’s very far from this one. And the hereditarily rich, whether they’re Musk’s kids or Tucker’s, are almost all still taught by the same progressive teachers and academics, so their politics mostly fall in line too.
Consider that Musk might indeed change politics somewhat with his purchase of Twitter. But this is the richest man, by far, in the United States! To have a chance of shifting the window even a little requires a not insignificant portion of the wealth of the richest person in all the land. Meanwhile, a few dozen progressive apparatchiks in DC who nobody has ever heard of likely have more power between them.
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