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Notes -
I have a new post up on my Substack today, which is expanded from a comment I wrote replying to @FarNearEverywhere's comment (for which they won one of their whopping five AAQCs for December - congrats!).
"Leftists are the real authoritarians" plays about as well as "Democrats are the real racists". It is axiomatic that the right is authoritarian and the left is fighting against that.
That doesn't make either claim less true though.
Sooner or later you have to choose which you value more, maintaining your existing position in your largely progressive work/social life, or acknowledging the truth.
The claims are true but they are useless politically. I can acknowledge the truth all I want, it doesn't reduce the power the leftists have.
Bullshit.
If you didn't want to be ruled by these people you wouldn't be. You'd move to a different state, you'd join a crime syndicate, or maybe even start your own. "Kolmogorov Complicity" is just "Complicity" wrapped in "Copium". No one has any more power over you than what you give them.
LOL, if I had the wherewithal to start a crime syndicate I'd be much better off (though I probably would do something else with that ability) but I don't. I agree with you about "Kolmogorov Complicity", I've said myself that "Kolmogorov Complicity" is just complicity. And I've refused to be complicit and suffered consequences as a result. That doesn't make their power any less real; the idea that it is not is a form of solipsism.
Serious question, if that's the case why don't you?
I lack the organizational and social skills.
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To whom?
Maybe my brain is just melted by exposure to political compass memes, but I don’t see people contesting the existence of an authleft.
I suspect the main point of divergence is who you think the authleft is and how influential they are. Do you the representative authoritarian leftist is some tankie academic or Joe Biden and the Regime? (And, just as relevantly, what priority to do you assign to them?)
The big issues that I’d frame as authright-vs-libleft are
But there are some other really salient ones that don’t fit the mold:
To me, this suggests two parties with comparable support for authoritarianism. Neocons and neoliberals represent the equilibrium level. Because “Policy Debates Shouldn’t Be One Sided,” they’ve split on cultural issues instead.
So I guess I’d say most everyone in national politics is, like, between 60 and 80 percent on the authoritarian axis. Even the open socialists or populists. To get on the national stage, you just have to bite the bullet and accept the concept of driver’s licenses.
I think it's important to draw the distinction between paternalism (by which I primarily mean laws that curtail individual autonomy for the subject's own good and/or pro-social causes) and authoritarianism. While one shades into the other in places and there tends to be strong correlation (authoritarian governments are not known for their laissez faire attitudes except when it comes to accountability), you can, e.g. have a politically free country that bans drugs or gun or sodomy. Likewise, you could have a politically unfree country that permits all of the above.
Political radicals are the most prone to authoritarianism because they tend to assume ordinary politically processes are hopelessly corrupted/subverted and thus extreme measures are justified.
Is that paternalism not already captured in the compass? Economic/structural paternalism is pretty much the normal statist-vs.-laissez-faire axis. The other ought to cover moral paternalism.
Yes, and I think in American politics, they’re still only partway up that axis. Or Axis, as it were.
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Also homeschooling, religious exemptions, and the environment.
Good examples, especially since they avoid the libertarian valence of most of my list.
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It's been official doctrine in the social sciences that authoritarianism is exclusively a right wing phenomenon for decades:
The Experts Somehow Overlooked Authoritarians on the Left - The Atlantic
Depends what you mean by social sciences. In the fields of economics, political science, and history, at least, there is no mainstream consensus about the non-existence of authoritarianism outside of the right wing.
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In the last decade or so, this seems largely true, although the last few months have shown some serious fractures in the left-leaning coalition that is in power in most of the West. Specifically there have been some rhetorically effective memes -- university presidents testifying to Congress, genocide-adjacent slogans at left-led protests -- that, at least to me, feel like they've moved the needle on what has previously been sold to the median voter as "just being nice". But it could get swept under the rug like the Canadian Truckers (nor am I particularly invested in partisan outcomes, personally).
They'll probably have to sideline the Hamas-supporters and other obvious anti-Semites for a while. But it's not a serious fracture.
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It’s so axiomatic that the measure being used is literally called right-wing authoritarianism and only measures authoritarianism in certain directions.
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You don't need the "real" there - it's all auth-on-auth warfare. Any form of actual liberalism can only flourish briefly as the authoritarian supermajority considers it the lesser evil as opposed to having to fight against other types of authoritarians.
I think this sums it up nicely. Liberty only exists when there is a relative balance between two opposing forces.
It's why I'm terrified of the left right now. When one party is so strong they think they can throw the leader of the opposing party in jail and get away with it, that's a bad sign. During the Bush years, I was pretty anti-Republican because it felt like they were winning (although nothing like today).
An ideal situation is a stable equilibrium.
Worse is swinging between two extremes like in Latin America.
Worst is when one party gets permanent victory like Nazi Germany or the USSR and banishes the competition.
This seems like setting up a standard liberalism can't possibly meet?
Well yes, absolute liberalism, like absolute freedom, probably can't exist. We can only hope to have some more of it than we currently do (and it seems that in the past, in certain domains, we did), as the sovereign tyrant is forced to compromise.
Much of the current culture war landscape appears to be a consequence of the progressive meme (known at the local scale as "cry-bullying") where they are in power while denying being in power. The rough shape of the game is that the winner takes all, but the earnings are reduced by whatever it takes to keep contenders down. In that game, the second runner is always incenticised to fight more, but it might actually be optimal for the winner to compromise (yield some payoff to the contenders to buy them out of fighting).
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And I think it’s worth noting that the progressive establishment is terrified that the mainstream red tribe will have the kind of engrained distrust of institutions that’s common in the Arab world, or exists between the inner city ghetto dwellers and the police, or etc etc. I think that’s what’s really behind the trump arrests and social media censorship and all that. There’s this idea that the flyover will simply stop obeying the institutions because it’ll be led into conspiracy theories by the president, bolstered by social media.
Obviously the progressive establishment would need to have a pretty bad theory of mind of Republican normies to think that trying to jail trump or exclude him from the ballot on dubious grounds will make them less likely to listen to them, or that censorship makes their authorities seem more authoritative. But, uh, we already knew that. And progressive moderate establishment mouthpieces like The Atlantic keep telling us that that’s what their goal is. It’s not some conspiracy to create a one party state, they want a moderate Republican Party that compromises with democrats in exchange for the odd tax cut. Nor are they that interested in oppressing the red tribe; oppressing people is a lot of work and these people know it, and they also know they have a strictly limited number of people who will go kick in doors(almost anyone willing to do that is either a Republican or a minority, and the terms of minority communities’ deals with the DNC do not include that). We already knew these people are extremely neurotic and frequently do counterproductive things because of their unwillingness to question methodology and narrative; it’s worth considering that the stated goals for the censorship and arrests of opponents are more in keeping with the flaws we know they have than the flaws their enemies claim about them.
I’m having trouble buying that they’re terrified of the Red Tribe losing trust in institutions simply because they’ve been doing everything that one would do to create the outcomes that they’re claiming they want.
Taking the moderate Republicans who compromise thing. If that’s what you want, then calling people fascists and liars is going to go the opposite direction. As are executive orders that undo the previous administration’s actions on day one is a terrible way to do it. Executive orders that end run around the Red Tribe is a terrible way to do it for much the same reason. You would have to be absolutely stupid to compromise when anything you actually get is going to be taken away at the nearest opportunity. You would likewise be stupid to try to reason with someone who thinks you have nothing legitimate to say.
A lot of these people are simply in denial about how Obama treated republicans and/or are stuck in a cycle of 'turnabout is fair play', but more to my main point- we already know that even fairly moderate and establishment-y progressive types have a very bad theory of mind of their opponents. Using ineffective and counterproductive tactics is what we would expect them to do in, well, anything addressed to cultural conservatives/red tribers/republicans(they're technically three separate things). As far as I can tell they really do think they're warning Trump supporters about where they're heading, and don't understand why they're not being listened to.
I'm honestly not even sure what you're talking about. The story on /r/politics is that Obama's primary failure was working with Republicans too much.
That would be being in denial, yes.
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I might be missing something, but isn't that his point?
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The thing about that novel is, that the recent expansion of police powers and giving them extra equipment, plus the public sentiment starting to crystallise around cracking down on 'hate speech' and thus giving the government more remit for censorship (even if it's not phrased that way) is happening under a slightly right-of-centre economically but liberal and very social progressive otherwise government, not the stereotypical GOP administration as would be the case for such a novel in the USA.
Leftists can be authoritarian too, see Cuba for instance (if the examples of the Soviet Union and China are going to be No True Scotsmanned as not really being left, or not really being authoritarian) or indeed the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and The Shining Path in Peru.
As far as the extra police equipment goes I think the general street crime problem in Dublin deserves a mention. Yes the rioters are “far-right” according to the government and they’re seizing the opportunity to push hate speech legislation, but they’re also the Dublin scumbags that have been embarrassing the government in the past year by, for example, earning Ireland an American embassy travel warning.
By all accounts Dublin should be more seriously policed and the type of authoritarianism that would remove ‘junkie’ as the first thought that enters non-Dubliner’s minds when visiting (I mean Irish people here, foreigners I’ve talked to seem to be used to this type of thing in their own cities) would ordinarily be welcomed by all sides of the political spectrum.
It’s just a shame that something is only done when the disorder takes on a political dimension, it makes me think that street crime isn’t the main thing they’re trying to tackle.
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The mainstream left is generally sympathetic to Cuba ("Look how great their health care is, shame on the US for not having single payer") and was sympathetic to the Sandinistas (if only because Reagan opposed them).
I’ve always been blown away by the obsession with health care. Does the average person spend more than a few days interacting with health care pa?
In addition to the comments below, it's also worth noting that there is a massive disparity in how much people interact with medical institutions. Some people do have the misfortune of either personally having been struck by chronic conditions or having a close family member that has, but the more common situations are people that just eat themselves into it or medical their neuroses. About 15% of adults have diabetes, about 6% have sleep apnea, about 20% take some sort of psych meds, and so on. Sure, many of these things could be cured with diet and fitness changes, but for many people there is a culture of medicalization and it seems entirely normal to them that they are permanently dependent on medical institutions to remain alive and physiologically regulated. They can't control blood sugar, they can't sleep, they can't even focus on basic tasks without repeated visits to medical professionals and prescriptions for daily drugs.
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If one’s a parent of small children or very aged, certainly.
I’m a parent of small kids. So we go to the pediatrician and it is very easy. No fuss. Don’t know why anyone would complain about that.
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The people I know who are the loudest about health care all have Type 1 diabetes. That Wikipedia article says
so around 0.3-1% of the population. One I know says they very intentionally went the route of working for a big company to have a stable corporate job with health care because they've known since childhood that their choices were stable employment or death. The ones I know who didn't luck into such a stable career are pretty angry about it.
Women with significant period symptoms (which are fairly common, albeit not universal) also tend to care about health care to get access to the medication to manage their periods (aka birth control).
But also, catastrophic events resulting in high medical bills don't have to be all that common before a lot of people have a friend or acquaintance who had trouble with such a situation.
I know no one in the final category. My recollection from the literature is that bankruptcy due primarily to healthcare is very small (as opposed to bankruptcy that includes health care but where health care is not the primary factor).
With respect to the second category, I guess (maybe?). That’s putting aside that birth control per se is pretty shitty for women but also relatively cheap and affordable. I wouldn’t think again that birth control is a primary factor but who knows.
First one, yeah that seems legit (insulin is expensive).
You're probably thinking of birth control pills. Long-lasting birth control is both more effective and less shitty. And possibly actually cheaper, but the cost has to be paid up-front. An IUD is about $1000+ (but can last 7+ years), which isn't huge but can be a large expense for a young woman.
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Per annum? Yes.
Schedule an appointment. Attend it only to get a referral for the thing you already knew you needed. Get a test ordered which has to be done across the county because reasons. Pay for all of these when you receive a bill months later, because the whole time, the provider and insurance are volleying back and forth on what will be covered and in what amount. If, during any step, you run into a bureaucratic hurdle, expect to spend an hour or two on the phone, because for some reason these companies all use voice-activated robot dialogue instead of a keypad or, God forbid, a website.
You can avoid most of this stuff if you’re young and healthy. America is not really either of those things, on average. Even the simplest brush with this system turns into a bureaucratic hassle. I understand the processes which led to this perverse setup. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could design it better?
Per annum. I get that it can sometimes be a hassle but that seems weird for relatively young people to base their seeming life or identity around, no?
How do you mean?
I think the normal level of engagement with the issue is something like “that guy says American healthcare sucks; my one experience with a chest x-ray concurs, so I guess I’ll vote for him.” If you want to get really spicy, share a meme or two about it on Twitter.
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It's about a fifth of the US economy, if you're insured it involves monthly payments that will make up a significant portion of your paycheck or be significant deductions from it, if you're uninsured and poor you get regular paperwork from Medicaid that you have to fill or correctly or can end up in deep shit, and the reimbursement and deduction system drives a lot of other (often dumber) behaviors.
And if you have a pregnancy, or a serious illness, or a chronic illness, it gets a lot more in-your-face.
Yeah I guess the monthly payments are a pain in the ass. But so is FICA or Fed Income Tax, etc.
My wife and I have kids. Her heath care during pregnancy was fine. Wasn’t enough to orient our life around health care as a topic.
But assuming you fit the demographics of the average Motte reader, you likely have good to very good insurance no? That puts you in the upper bracket. How much did you end up paying for your wife's pregnancy care? How long did it take you to pay that off? Had she had to have been rushed to an out of network hospital, how would that have impacted your finances? What if her doctor was in network but the lab her doctor used was not?
I moved from the UK to the US so I have experienced both healthcare systems as an adult, and they both have their advantages and disadvantages, but the US one definitely requires more engagement, which isn't necessarily bad, but the more issues you have with executive function and planning the worse it gets. I can get a good chunk off my premiums by getting a yearly physical and then a yearly biometrics test, and by getting a prostate exam and by getting a dental exam and so on and so forth. For a planner like me with experience working through bureaucracies that works pretty well (though even for me the inability to know if a recent colonoscopy was going to be coded as routine or diagnostic in advance and therefore not knowing if was going to be out of pocket for around 600 dollars or 6,000 was literally a pain in the ass).
Treatment in the US is usually good and quicker than the NHS (though in rural or urban areas it can be comparable, it took me 6 months to get in with my PCP when I moved to a small town in the US, and it looks close to that now I have moved back to the city), but it does require much more engagement and does give you much more uncertainty about what is exactly going to be paid for or not. On balance I would say it is probably better, but it is also more stressful. It took 3 months before I knew for sure my bill was going to be 700 bucks, not 6,000.
We have an HSA. Just set up payment plan and used that. It didn’t impact our finances in any noticeable way.
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I think it's mostly a way to score points against the US and praise the European social democracies (+Canada) that leftists in the US tend to idealize.
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Hypochondria was already widespread in progressive circles in 2019, but Covid practically made it into a heavenly virtue, to the point that many of the people reporting "long Covid" symptoms never actually contracted Covid in the first place. Progressives are also the faction most likely to endorse the idea that literally everyone in the world should be in therapy, which implies that anyone who isn't currently in therapy should interact with a healthcare professional anywhere from 12-52 days of the year more than they do at present.
That’s fair. I wasn’t thinking of therapy. I am literally anti therapy (generally think it does more harm than good).
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A recent study demonstrated that getting vaccine boosters is correlated with Long Covid.I was not surprised at all. In fact, this result is obvious once you have an accurate model of Long Covid. Boosters don't make it more likely for Covid to occur. However, people whose anxiety disorder masquerades as "Long Covid" are also more like to seek boosters.Can you cite the study you're referencing?
I won't pretend to be anywhere close to up-to-date on COVID literature, but the top pubmed result was this review:
Here you go: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36538532/
My original synopsis was wrong. It was having 2 doses at all which was associated with Long Covid, although the much bigger risk was obviously having a severe case of the disease.
Note that this was only among people who tested positive for Covid and presumably sought medical treatment so it wouldn't capture the anxiety cases who may have never even contracted the illness.
I'll retract my original statement.
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Not sure, but access to reasonable healthcare without bankruptcy or other life-destroying stuff is nice. In this case importance is not well measured by how much time is spend on interaction with them.
It is kind like I spend about 5h in total in my life interacting with military and consider armed forces to be quite important for my country to have (and large part is that I prefer to avoid interacting with military too much, especially Russian one).
Yes black swan events etc. But most people don’t orient their life around that (and for most people catastrophic coverage is feasible).
I guess I just don’t understand the extreme fixation on health care for people who frankly don’t use a lot of it.
"what happens if I break leg / get run over by bus / get cancer" is not some very unlikely black swan but something that happens to basically anyone.
You think a lot of people get run over by buses? Or for that matter you think a lot of healthy young people get cancer or even break a leg?
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So is "what if I get struck by lightning".
Now obviously it's more reasonable to worry about getting injured in the workplace/a bad car crash/whatever than by a lightning strike, but a lot of this runs afoul of "a huge increase over a trivial base...." and anyways most people don't know that the sticker price on the bill you get for medical treatment is not the final price.
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I wouldn't even necessarily classify Leo Varadkar or Justin Trudeau as "leftists". I think both men would classify themselves as centre-left neoliberals.
Here's how Varadkar himself classifies his party:
Definitely has moved towards social liberalism, I wouldn't say so much on economic liberalism as traditionally they have been slightly more to the right (the party of the big farmers, etc.) than our other centrist-right party. But all the major parties, including Labour, have been rebranding themselves as business-friendly, pro-'light touch' regulation and so on. I do think Fine Gael went for Thatcherism-Lite there for a while, however Leo might describe them now.
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What a confused statement. "We're not conservative, we're centre-right, but we're also economically and socially liberal." I've heard of politicians trying to be all things to all people, but usually not in the same paragraph.
Whatever the confusion, Varadkar certainly wouldn't be describe himself/his party as centre-left, and most observers would likewise not describe him as one. Within the political sphere of Ireland, the only way to describe him as one would be taking the point of reference that the only ones on the "right" are parties and movements that are so marginal that they aren't even represented in the Dáil.
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Fine Gael were perceived as very socially conservative there for a long while (think Oliver J. Flanagan, for instance) and certainly under John Bruton as being pro-Unionist/West Brit tendency, and it really is only recently, as these things go, that they rowed in on contraception/divorce/gay marriage/abortion and all the other social liberal ideologies.
So keeping tight hold of the purse strings and being pro-capitalism as an economically conservative party, while flying the rainbow and other flags and having our First Gay Taoiseach as the socially liberal party, does put them right of centre on a scale. I definitely wouldn't describe them as economically liberal, but I imagine Leo is trying to claim credit, on that, as 'we reduced taxes, we increased payments' and so on (oh yeah? and what about the USC, huh, Leo?)
Remember, they're tussling with Sinn Féin and the other splinter parties like People Before Profit to claim to both represent the working class and the squeezed middle class, so "we don't tax you as hard as we might" is their idea of being 'economically liberal'.
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Economic liberalism is associated with the center-right in European politics. It’s contrasted not with ‘economic conservatism’, which is ill-defined, but with economic leftism, which is clearer (more state control of the economy, more redistribution, higher taxes).
So sure, there are many countries in which the ‘center right’ is economically and socially liberal, while the ‘center left’ is economically (more) leftist and socially liberal. This is because social liberalism dominates elite opinion.
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Five nominations, Santa must have thought I was a good girl last year! 🤣 Thank you to everyone, and thank you for engaging with me complaining about a literary fiction novel I have no intention of reading. It annoyed me by the reviews because (1) it was plainly the same old Usual Irish Novel, just dressed up in today's trendy clothing and (2) the guy was giving interviews about how brave he was, writing this, when the actuality was that it was precisely the kind of prize bait that, well, won him the Booker.
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