The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. -- G.K. Chesterton
Largely the case. There is a left, which is not merely collectivist but anti-market and often Marxist. And currently the left is eager to condemn, and often to wreck the lives of, anyone who disagrees with them. But that includes many disparate groups: anarchocapitalists, constitutionalist libertarians, classical liberals, American constitutional conservatives, European king/church/army/land conservatives, nationalists, racists, and fascists are all hated by the left, and all labeled "right wing" or even "extreme right wing." And to add confusion, they are seen as all agreeing with each other and supporting each other!
It's all rather like the time, back in 2008, when I disagreed with a friend who was arguing that the United States was founded on Christianity and ought to hold Christian values officially, and he got angry and told me that if I wasn't pro-Christian than I was supporting Islam. It didn't seem to occur to him that someone who rejected Christian theism and Christian sacrificial ethics would also reject Muslim theism and Muslim sacrificial ethics. There's an unfortunate tendency for people to think that there is their own clade, and there is a single other clade that includes everyone who disagrees with them.
As I understand it, Christianity and Islam are basically two branches of the same religion. Myself, I come from a non-religious family and have never felt tempted by any religion; I get along perfectly well without it.
I came from a socialist atheist family, which raised two born-agains, one atheist, and me, the areligious one. I sometimes tell the pushy kind that I'm a don't-give-a-shitist, which usually shuts them up.
Agnostic: actively worries whether there are any gods.
I am areligious: It's not than I don't care, it's that I don't even think about it. There may be gods, and green triangles may hold more giraffes than yellow cubes. The only time I think about it is when some nosy Parker wants my opinion, and my answer is more likely meant to annoy them than have any bearing on their question.
Yes. I have tried to explain my position as "not any organized religion" but not atheist (which implies I'm against something -- God or gods or religions or whatever). Rather I suppose I'm some sort of seeker of answers wherever I can find them. Most Americans don't seem to like that answer.
I tend to have a healthy respect for any believers who use their religious beliefs to become better human beings.
I also tend to severley dislike top-down forcing of any belief or behavior, so there's that.
"Atheist" doesn't imply you are against something. It implies that you don't believe there is a God. You can still believe that some or all religions are on the whole good things and think well of some religious people. I'm an atheist, and also an admirer of Tolkien, GKC, and C.S. Lewis. Also Maimonides, Umar ibn Khattab, and al Ma'mun.
Permit me to add, also as an atheist: I have nothing, nothing, against religious people. The great religions are like containers, each filled with many, many little boxes. Some of those boxes are empty. Some are filled with garbage. And some are filled with diamonds!
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you is an example of a diamond. Don't cheat on your wife is another.
I probably phrased that badly. But I've known a lot of people who claim to be atheists, and 1) they all come from Christian or Jewish backgrounds/cultures/families, and 2) most of them(not all,of course) seem to spend a lot time railing against Believers in God, especially Christian and Jewish believers. They may be out there, but I've not met and atheists who were 'raised' as Muslim, or Hindu, or anything else. I have met a few Muslims and Hindus who seem to not practice their faith, but no one who left the faith and claim to be atheist.
I don't believe I've ever heard any of the atheists I've known personally to go after pan-theists, or Muslims, or Hindus, or Buddhists (to the extent that Buddhism is a religion), or any non-Christian, non-Jewish believer.
I know a few atheists who leave Believers alone, but they are far outnumbered by the "God botherer" botherers. LOL
But this is all anecdotal. I have had friends and acquaintances and family pretty much all across the religious spectrum.
I find it curious that people treat atheism as a moral stance, or even an emotional one. In general, physicists don't believe in magnetic monopoles, or tachyons. But we don't describe such physicists as "against" particular subatomic particles. There is arguably a moral stance in science, one of commitment to truth and to the testing of theories against empirical evidence as a way of getting to truth, but there are no moral stances of believing or disbelieving certain hypotheses. So why should belief or disbelief in the God hypothesis be treated as a moral stance, or as a position of being "against" something?
In practice I think David Foster Wallace was correct about most human beings when he said “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”
Old school atheist liberals disproportionately worship at the altar of Mother Nature and “climate change” catastrophism.
Today’s irreligious young people, egged on by academia, worship oppressor-oppressed woke / SJWism.
I will concede that libertarians - who “worship” freedom and lack of coercion - don’t fit this model nearly as well as most leftists do. But even if such folks are indeed an exception, that doesn’t disprove Wallace’s “rule”.
I especially dislike the term "new right." There have been so many new rights that it doesn't mean anything. In England in the early 1980s, libertarians were considered part of the new right.
"Far right" is also practically meaningless. It seems to me "right wing people who I especially dislike."
Given that at least in the U.S. MSM “right wing” means “anyone to the right of Susan Collins, and absolutely everyone to the right of Mitt Romney”, your description of how “far right” is used seems appropriate.
Being a European myself, I must say that I think your analysis is pretty accurate. The challenge in Europe is to convince voters that the welfare state is not a good thing, and that it can actually be reformed and even scaled back. This should reduce the immigration of people simply moving to Europe to take advantage of it. But arguing against immigration due to the presence of spendthrift welfare states really is justifying one wrong with another. Because the grossly unfair, redistributive welfare states exist, we have to be grossly unfair to people who simply want to seek a better life in Europe. The vast majority of these people have never committed a crime in their life and bear no responsibility whatsoever for the creation of the European welfare states. That does not sit right with me.
Incidentally, all it takes for a political party to be labelled ‘far right’ in Europe is to be against immigration. In that regard, the economic policies of the party in question matter little. There are a few anti-immigration parties who favour more capitalism and free markets, but most of them support traditional social democratic policies such as higher state pensions and more funding for public hospitals. Even so, all of them are labelled ‘far right’ by the mainstream media. The one exception is the new German party BSW, which combines the worst of both worlds, namely anti-immigrant nationalism and left-wing populism. The charismatic leader of the BSW, Ms Wagenknecht, has, perhaps, realised that in order to preserve the bloated, socialist welfare state, large-scale immigration must be stopped.
Regarding immigration, what if the rest of the world is much less libertarian than current residents and thus immigrants will on average vote to move the US in a less libertarian direction? I think this is true, but treat it as a hypothetical. Would that influence your open border position?
Also, is your position really Kamala's (presumed), which is not that we should have "lots" of legal immigration, but rather that we should kind of turn a blind eye to porous borders and have millions of unvetted people living and working here under the table and not constrained by labor laws that apply to Americans?
Not constrained by labor laws certainly — better to be employed at five dollars an hour than unemployed at ten. I want enough restrictions on collecting welfare so that immigrants won't come for that, will come to work. And enough of a delay in citizenship so that by the time the immigrants can vote their interests will be similar to those of other Americans.
I don't think you can predict how immigrants will vote, both because they are a non-random selection from their population and because living in America will affect them. Do you think first and second generation Hispanics are more woke than other Americans?
First, we ran this experiment with Prop 187 in CA and it failed. It is not possible to keep immigrants from attaching themselves to the welfare state. If they are here, they are going to get welfare.
What matters is that first, second, third generation etc Hispanics vote democrat. Based on polling of issues they do this largely because the democrats support a larger welfare state, which they are disproportionate recipients of on a per capita basis.
They may theoretically say oppose transgender issues or whatever, but if they like ACA subsidies more then they care about trans they will vote dem. I think musk summarized this quite well in his interview with Tucker, welfare is just more important then culture wars and the dems can always bid higher then the gop.
On race related wokeness they are in favor of racial set asides for themselves but not others. On net that makes them relatively pro dem.
Since they are lower iq and iq predicts earnings, they are likely to be net welfare recipients as a group indefinitely. That’s what we see in the intergenerational data but the theory behind why is genetic and unchangeable in origin. Charles Murray, whose written the most on the libertarian response to this fact, outlined both in The Bell Curve and much of his work since 2016 that this implied that americas immigration policy would need to take account of the IQ of potential immigrants and move away from things like family reunification and “asylum”.
Part of why America seems better at integration is that Hispanics aren’t that bad pound for pound. Let’s say their IQ is in the low 90s and they are partially white and Christian. That’s a lot easier to integrate than some Muslim in the 80s iq level with no white admixture. Muslims in particular have a long history of cousin marriage that makes them very clannish, it’s why Europe is rejecting them even at much lower % of the population.
The reason it’s gotten out of control in America is that quantity has a quality all its own, and there are just so many Hispanics that the numbers have caused whole states (like ny/ca) to fall to permanent leftism even though they aren’t as bad.
I think you exaggerate your IQ figures significantly. Also, Trump seems to be getting substantially more Hispanic support than previous Republican candidates — who, with the notable exception of the second Bush, didn't make much attempt to get it.
Hispanics are descended from Europeans, Amerinds, and Sub-Saharan Africans, the last probably the smallest contribution, so even if you accept the standard claims about racial IQ you wouldn't expect theirs to be much, if any, lower than the US average.
"I think you exaggerate your IQ figures significantly."
If you can provide a source on why you think my IQ figures are wrong, I will examine it.
However, I have researched this area pretty extensively, and I think it's on the whole correct. I may even have been slightly generous in my statements.
"Also, Trump seems to be getting substantially more Hispanic support than previous Republican candidates"
Yes, this was predicted by Charles Murray in The Bell Curve.
Trump did two things to win over Hispanics:
1) He move left on economic policy. He's not talking about cutting entitlements and he hardly cares about balanced budgets (amazingly, the democrats are worse on that number).
2) He communicates in a manner far more attuned to an electorate with a lower median IQ. Quite frankly, he is very much borrowing from South American right wing politicians.
Murray said there were two ways that immigration could move the electorate leftwards. They could give leftists the votes to get elected, they could cause the right wing party to move to the left to remain competitive, or both.
Finally, we've learned pretty clearly that current immigrants don't have a lot of solidarity with new immigrants. It turns out Hispanics don't want new Hispanic immigrants flooding their neighborhoods, especially if they are poor or involved with gangs or what not.
This goes double when we realize that "Hispanic" isn't a meaningful category. Why would a Puerto Rican have solidarity with a Guatemalan, etc.
It turns out that being anti immigration is neutral to good for the GOP with Hispanics.
"who, with the notable exception of the second Bush, didn't make much attempt to get it."
I think we can all agree that woke super nice racially sensitive pro amnesty Mitt Romney made an effort. But he couldn't compete with Obama offering free healthcare.
Bush tried to bring Hispanics into the coalition by giving them subprime loans, it was a disaster. His machine was also pretty good at getting Hispanics to join evangelical megachurches in the exurbs and turning them out to vote, but that's a spent force and it never got to 50%.
"Hispanics are descended from Europeans, Amerinds, and Sub-Saharan Africans, the last probably the smallest contribution"
If one wanted to evade the crux of the matter, they could point out that "Hispanic" has a very wide distribution. From the light skinned Cubans that fled the revolution to current dark skinned asylum seekers. It's a wide basket from the generally OK to the very bad. The bottom line is that when you do a weighted average it aint a pretty picture.
You're the one making the extraordinary claim that one ill-defined subset of humanity has a collective IQ lower enough than the rest to be measurable. You're the one needing to provide the extraordinary proof.
I think they are probably less woke, but free handouts trump culture war stuff every time.
It appears that the left may be in the process of shooting themselves in the foot here though, with the dems becoming the party of entrenched establishment and wealthy elites fixated on climate, abortion and gender stuff. Of course this may come at the expense of the republicans being less libertarian as they draw these voters in.
Merely delaying the time until immigrants can vote or receive welfare is still a short-term strategy. Most immigration that European countries receive is net negative at all times, and for any number of generations down the line. There is no way this is economically beneficial given the welfare state. Voters love welfare states, so you can't get rid of them democratically. Thus for any sensible economic realistic policy, anti low-skill immigration must be a strong factor. You can look up recent calculations, say, from Denmark or Netherlands. Your father, Milton Friedman:
“It is one thing to have free immigration into the labour market. It’s another thing to have free immigration to the welfare state. And you can’t have both. If you have a welfare state, if you have a state where every resident is promised a certain minimum income or subsistence level, whether they work or not, whether they produce anything or not. Then it really is an impossibility.”
A prime characteristic of the Right for me is wanting less government, less regulation. I'm surprised that's not an item in the table. I think it’s difficult to capture the Abortion question with a yes/no without some reference a particular stage of fetal development.
In the US, one side wants no abortion, the other side includes people who want no restriction on abortion, although there are a fair number of people in between.
I don't think either Vance or the European right wing parties are consistently for less government. I did look at whether parties identified as Liberal (European sense — moderate libertarian/classical liberal). Some did, some had but were moving away from that to identifying as National Conservatives, some pretty clearly were not.
Vance: let’s subtract 8 laws/regulations but add 2 different (major) laws back in.
Traditional GOP: let’s get rid of a couple regulations and water down a few more.
Trump 2016-2019: ACTUALLY got rid of a bunch of regulations. Renegotiated NAFTA to get us a slightly better deal. Added some tactical tariffs on China to try to get us a “better deal” (that China waited out rather than negotiate with him).
Tea Party: let’s get rid of a bunch of regulations.
The Tea Party (not an actual political party, of course, but a faction within the GOP exactly as “Vance” is in DF parlance), was the closest thing in modern times to what classical liberals want (I have no interest in including the impotent capital “L” Libertarian Party in this discussion).
Vance ain’t the Tea Party, to be sure. But it’s unfair to say that Vance isn’t for less government. Especially compared to the current alternative.
Please don't pretend that Trump renegotiated NAFTA to get "us" a slightly better deal. A better deal would have been to leave "us" alone. He renegotiated to make himself look like a great negotiator, the master of the deal. He made his base happier even though most people on all sides of that deal had, and still have, no realistic opinions of either deal.
I said his deal was not for "us". I did not say it was a worse deal for him or for you. I said stop pretending Trump or any politician negotiates on behalf of "us".
One thing with the less government bit: The people matter, a lot. You can give my old school teachers a lot of leeway (If you can forgive them turning me briefly Rawlsian) since they were fundamentally sane and interested in teaching the subject, and most of the weirdness was along the lines of a math teacher being a bit too enchanted by "the language of mathematics" (she was good at teaching math).
But if you take your slate of teachers from a Libs of TikTok highlight reel of ideological obsessives more interested in 'hatching eggs' and talking to little kids about sexual identity than making them able to read, write and do math, you're going to have to impose very draconian rules on teachers since they want to do anything but their real professional responsibility - they are priests before educators.
In this sense, immigration control can let you keep a more homogenous society, and that more homogenous society will then sometimes allow more social trust and more freedom. See for example small stalls selling things on an honour system. There's no end of videos of culturally foreign immigrants looting the things, which is a net loss compared to very low effort way of delivering value to the community.
Do you think social trust declined as a result of the mass immigration of the early 20th century? My impression is that the first generation tended to live in enclaves of their ethnicity, and within those had both homogeneity and social trust. Their descendants — my grandparents were all immigrants, and my maternal grandfather never learned English — mostly merged into the general society.
In the case of what taxpayer funded public schools teach, that’s not regulation in the traditional sense. That is simply elected government officials *completely appropriately* exercising their power over curricula rather than unelected administrators and teachers being able to do so.
(There is a local - e.g. school board - vs. state control issue here, I suppose, but if state taxpayers are funding a substantial portion of the bill and the local schools accept the state money, then it’s again not at all unreasonable that elected officials attach strings to said money. And to the extent that school boards are especially frequently bought and paid for by public teachers unions, I consider that more corrupt than anything else in this context.)
Perhaps we are completely agreeing in practice. My point is that I wouldn’t consider what DeSantis and the FL legislature did on school curricula to be “regulation” in the common parlance of that term in the discussion above.
Separately, I didn’t really follow your last paragraph re: immigration at all.
Interesting. Regarding the difficultly of pinning down "right wing", Matt Yglesias proposed what I think is a pretty robust concept of how "right" and "left" are used (that it covers an axis going from hierarchal to egalitarian.) In this post, I argue that libertarians are unusual in that they just don't really care about that axis, and that indifference is why they find themselves allied with the left or right, depending on circumstance: https://www.maximumtruth.org/p/left-and-right-are-valid-concepts
As an Italian I would say that our right-wing parties, which fall outside the scope of your analysis, tend to have more conservative positions on social issues than other conservative parties across Europe, mostly due to the residual power and influence of the Catholic Church in Italy. Even our liberal parties, by comparison, are more conservative on social issues than other liberal parties in Europe. For instance, many members of our Democratic Party (Partito Democratico) do not wish to legalise marijuana or surrogacy because they come from a Christian Democrat rather than left-wing tradition.
A point made many times, but which bears repeating: left or right have little to do with policy and, as per Jouvenel, everything to do with coalitions: the Left is the Elite plus the Masses and the Right is the Middle. From here much, if not all, derives.
The core of the “right” is basically white middle class families. Especially if their work/income is less government dependent.
The core of “the left” is a broad coalition of people that want to bite off a chunk from that group. The best lodestar for the left is single women, who consistently vote 68/32 dem. They are the largest beneficiaries of government largess (both welfare and professional). Every dem campaign in my adult lifetime has featured a “life of Julia” type appeal.
In order to get to 51% you get a lot of strange bedfellows in coalitions, and each party often buys votes. Sometimes coalitions shift.
And what people perceive as being in their interest can change. And they can be wrong about what is in their interest.
Asking “what do the constituent groups think is in their interest” is more likely to yield an answer than trying to build a consistent ideology over long periods of time.
So what matters to me is to look at the patterns that hold up election after election.
In general, would we say that TX/FL is “more free” than CA/NY? If you were a young person just about to start a family and you had the same job offer in either and could choose where to settle down, which would you choose?
The answer to that basically tells you what you need to know about right/left.
Read “The Myth of Left and Right” by the Lewis brothers, Hyrum, a historian, and Verlan, a political scientist, or watch one of their YouTube videos. The myth is the false belief that the common unidimensional political spectrum separates left from right due to their conflicting fundamental philosophical principles. However, those two ideologies are inconsistent and differ with time and place. In reality, left and right are mere tribes. Unlike today's American “liberalism” and conservativism, libertarianism and individualism—distinguished from authoritarianism and collectivism—are based on timeless principles.
The Hayekian triangle, which Nate Silver recently resurrected but mangled slightly, is surely the more appropriate description here.
The original: top-left corner is Socialism, top-right corner is (European-style) [social] Conservatism, bottom middle corner is classical liberalism.
The updated Nate Silver one: top left corner is Social Justice Leftism (a.k.a wokeism), top right corner is MAGA (populist) Conservatism, bottom middle corner is classical liberalism.
Oh, for the good old days of even 30 years ago, where neither the Dems nor the GOP were “good enough” for we classical liberals/libertarians, but at least the debates were largely nearer to the bottom sides of the triangle than to the top…
Also check out Arnold Kling’s “The Three Languages of Politics”
His three terms that describe problems - oppression; barbarism; and coercion - map perfectly to the concerns, respectively, of the Silver definition of SJW Leftism, the Hayek/Buckley definition of Conservatism, and everyone’s definition of classical liberalism.
Kling:
“Oppression is when one group exploits and discriminates against another. Barbarism is when civilization breaks down and people engage in violence and disorder. Coercion is when people are forced to do things against their will, especially by the government.”
I've read "The Three Languages of Politics." I hope someone will read "The Myth of Left and Right" by Hyrum and Verlan Lewis or at least watch one of their YouTube Videos.
It seems to me that the most nearly accurate political typology chart I've seen is a square with an x-axis running through the center from top to bottom and a y-axis running through the center across the middle. In the center of the square is a circle. The top half of the chart is labeled "authoritarianism," the bottom half "libertarianism," the left half "collectivism," the right half "individualism," and the circle "centrism." There are five equal-sized sections: authoritarian collectivism, authoritarian individualism (a nearly null section?), libertarian collectivism (e.g., anarcho-collectivism), libertarian individualism, and centrism.
I think Richard Hanania's relatively recent post was about this? "Right wing" is all over the place regarding economic conservatism but more united by _social_ conservatism, hostility to foreigners and to new ways of life (same-sex marriages did some magic where they no longer count as "new" for most of Europe).
The difference between US and EU is that in Europe we tend to have proportional voting and thus multi-party systems, as opposed to the American two-party system. Therefore, you often see a small pro-business party that sucks libertarian votes and big parties both on left and right are all pro-distribution. In the US, on the other hand, libertarians have to choose to vote for one of the big parties and the chosen one happens to be (by historical accident?) the Republican party.
What we call parties in the USA are long term coalitions of factions which would be separate parties in a parliamentary system. In a parliamentary system you don’t know who will govern until the parties elected form a government. I the USA the parties have their power sharing fights in the primaries, and we vote on the result in the general election.
“…libertarians have to choose to vote for one of the big parties and the chosen one happens to be (by historical accident?) the Republican party.”
Well, putting assigned the principled-but-unpragmatic folks who choose to vote for neither party and vote Libertarian Party or something else, it is not correct to say that is is a historical accident that pragmatic libertarians / classical liberals vote for Republicans and not Democrats today.
Namely, with the possible and noteworthy exception of immigration - where for reasons that have nothing to do with libertarians the parties have largely switched position over the last 35 years (Bill Clinton was for very strong border enforcement) - the Republicans, while highly imperfect, are much closer to being for freedom and smaller government than are Democrats.
That is no historical accident, as the Democrats have since even before FDR been the party of big government and interventionism.
Since those two things are antithetical to libertarians and classical liberals, those of us wanting to be part of the two party system and influence who actually attains power have no other pragmatic choice than the Republican Party.
And this is even more true given how far to the left the Dems have shifted in the last 20 years. One could make the credible case that the Dem party of Bill Clinton in the 1990s wasn’t all that different from the GOP party of H.W. Bush and Bob Dole. But no serious person can make that same case today.
I like Caplan's theory of left and right: the left is anti-market. The right is anti-left.
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. -- G.K. Chesterton
Largely the case. There is a left, which is not merely collectivist but anti-market and often Marxist. And currently the left is eager to condemn, and often to wreck the lives of, anyone who disagrees with them. But that includes many disparate groups: anarchocapitalists, constitutionalist libertarians, classical liberals, American constitutional conservatives, European king/church/army/land conservatives, nationalists, racists, and fascists are all hated by the left, and all labeled "right wing" or even "extreme right wing." And to add confusion, they are seen as all agreeing with each other and supporting each other!
It's all rather like the time, back in 2008, when I disagreed with a friend who was arguing that the United States was founded on Christianity and ought to hold Christian values officially, and he got angry and told me that if I wasn't pro-Christian than I was supporting Islam. It didn't seem to occur to him that someone who rejected Christian theism and Christian sacrificial ethics would also reject Muslim theism and Muslim sacrificial ethics. There's an unfortunate tendency for people to think that there is their own clade, and there is a single other clade that includes everyone who disagrees with them.
As I understand it, Christianity and Islam are basically two branches of the same religion. Myself, I come from a non-religious family and have never felt tempted by any religion; I get along perfectly well without it.
Christianity, Islam and Judaism.
I came from a socialist atheist family, which raised two born-agains, one atheist, and me, the areligious one. I sometimes tell the pushy kind that I'm a don't-give-a-shitist, which usually shuts them up.
I see I should explain my definitions.
Atheist: actively denies there are any gods.
Agnostic: actively worries whether there are any gods.
I am areligious: It's not than I don't care, it's that I don't even think about it. There may be gods, and green triangles may hold more giraffes than yellow cubes. The only time I think about it is when some nosy Parker wants my opinion, and my answer is more likely meant to annoy them than have any bearing on their question.
Yes. I have tried to explain my position as "not any organized religion" but not atheist (which implies I'm against something -- God or gods or religions or whatever). Rather I suppose I'm some sort of seeker of answers wherever I can find them. Most Americans don't seem to like that answer.
I tend to have a healthy respect for any believers who use their religious beliefs to become better human beings.
I also tend to severley dislike top-down forcing of any belief or behavior, so there's that.
"Atheist" doesn't imply you are against something. It implies that you don't believe there is a God. You can still believe that some or all religions are on the whole good things and think well of some religious people. I'm an atheist, and also an admirer of Tolkien, GKC, and C.S. Lewis. Also Maimonides, Umar ibn Khattab, and al Ma'mun.
Permit me to add, also as an atheist: I have nothing, nothing, against religious people. The great religions are like containers, each filled with many, many little boxes. Some of those boxes are empty. Some are filled with garbage. And some are filled with diamonds!
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you is an example of a diamond. Don't cheat on your wife is another.
I probably phrased that badly. But I've known a lot of people who claim to be atheists, and 1) they all come from Christian or Jewish backgrounds/cultures/families, and 2) most of them(not all,of course) seem to spend a lot time railing against Believers in God, especially Christian and Jewish believers. They may be out there, but I've not met and atheists who were 'raised' as Muslim, or Hindu, or anything else. I have met a few Muslims and Hindus who seem to not practice their faith, but no one who left the faith and claim to be atheist.
I don't believe I've ever heard any of the atheists I've known personally to go after pan-theists, or Muslims, or Hindus, or Buddhists (to the extent that Buddhism is a religion), or any non-Christian, non-Jewish believer.
I know a few atheists who leave Believers alone, but they are far outnumbered by the "God botherer" botherers. LOL
But this is all anecdotal. I have had friends and acquaintances and family pretty much all across the religious spectrum.
I find it curious that people treat atheism as a moral stance, or even an emotional one. In general, physicists don't believe in magnetic monopoles, or tachyons. But we don't describe such physicists as "against" particular subatomic particles. There is arguably a moral stance in science, one of commitment to truth and to the testing of theories against empirical evidence as a way of getting to truth, but there are no moral stances of believing or disbelieving certain hypotheses. So why should belief or disbelief in the God hypothesis be treated as a moral stance, or as a position of being "against" something?
In theory you are correct.
In practice I think David Foster Wallace was correct about most human beings when he said “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”
Old school atheist liberals disproportionately worship at the altar of Mother Nature and “climate change” catastrophism.
Today’s irreligious young people, egged on by academia, worship oppressor-oppressed woke / SJWism.
I will concede that libertarians - who “worship” freedom and lack of coercion - don’t fit this model nearly as well as most leftists do. But even if such folks are indeed an exception, that doesn’t disprove Wallace’s “rule”.
I especially dislike the term "new right." There have been so many new rights that it doesn't mean anything. In England in the early 1980s, libertarians were considered part of the new right.
"Far right" is also practically meaningless. It seems to me "right wing people who I especially dislike."
Those "far right" and "extreme right" labels have been abused so much that any article or quote with them immediately allies me against the author.
Given that at least in the U.S. MSM “right wing” means “anyone to the right of Susan Collins, and absolutely everyone to the right of Mitt Romney”, your description of how “far right” is used seems appropriate.
Being a European myself, I must say that I think your analysis is pretty accurate. The challenge in Europe is to convince voters that the welfare state is not a good thing, and that it can actually be reformed and even scaled back. This should reduce the immigration of people simply moving to Europe to take advantage of it. But arguing against immigration due to the presence of spendthrift welfare states really is justifying one wrong with another. Because the grossly unfair, redistributive welfare states exist, we have to be grossly unfair to people who simply want to seek a better life in Europe. The vast majority of these people have never committed a crime in their life and bear no responsibility whatsoever for the creation of the European welfare states. That does not sit right with me.
Incidentally, all it takes for a political party to be labelled ‘far right’ in Europe is to be against immigration. In that regard, the economic policies of the party in question matter little. There are a few anti-immigration parties who favour more capitalism and free markets, but most of them support traditional social democratic policies such as higher state pensions and more funding for public hospitals. Even so, all of them are labelled ‘far right’ by the mainstream media. The one exception is the new German party BSW, which combines the worst of both worlds, namely anti-immigrant nationalism and left-wing populism. The charismatic leader of the BSW, Ms Wagenknecht, has, perhaps, realised that in order to preserve the bloated, socialist welfare state, large-scale immigration must be stopped.
Regarding immigration, what if the rest of the world is much less libertarian than current residents and thus immigrants will on average vote to move the US in a less libertarian direction? I think this is true, but treat it as a hypothetical. Would that influence your open border position?
Also, is your position really Kamala's (presumed), which is not that we should have "lots" of legal immigration, but rather that we should kind of turn a blind eye to porous borders and have millions of unvetted people living and working here under the table and not constrained by labor laws that apply to Americans?
Not constrained by labor laws certainly — better to be employed at five dollars an hour than unemployed at ten. I want enough restrictions on collecting welfare so that immigrants won't come for that, will come to work. And enough of a delay in citizenship so that by the time the immigrants can vote their interests will be similar to those of other Americans.
I don't think you can predict how immigrants will vote, both because they are a non-random selection from their population and because living in America will affect them. Do you think first and second generation Hispanics are more woke than other Americans?
First, we ran this experiment with Prop 187 in CA and it failed. It is not possible to keep immigrants from attaching themselves to the welfare state. If they are here, they are going to get welfare.
What matters is that first, second, third generation etc Hispanics vote democrat. Based on polling of issues they do this largely because the democrats support a larger welfare state, which they are disproportionate recipients of on a per capita basis.
They may theoretically say oppose transgender issues or whatever, but if they like ACA subsidies more then they care about trans they will vote dem. I think musk summarized this quite well in his interview with Tucker, welfare is just more important then culture wars and the dems can always bid higher then the gop.
On race related wokeness they are in favor of racial set asides for themselves but not others. On net that makes them relatively pro dem.
Since they are lower iq and iq predicts earnings, they are likely to be net welfare recipients as a group indefinitely. That’s what we see in the intergenerational data but the theory behind why is genetic and unchangeable in origin. Charles Murray, whose written the most on the libertarian response to this fact, outlined both in The Bell Curve and much of his work since 2016 that this implied that americas immigration policy would need to take account of the IQ of potential immigrants and move away from things like family reunification and “asylum”.
Part of why America seems better at integration is that Hispanics aren’t that bad pound for pound. Let’s say their IQ is in the low 90s and they are partially white and Christian. That’s a lot easier to integrate than some Muslim in the 80s iq level with no white admixture. Muslims in particular have a long history of cousin marriage that makes them very clannish, it’s why Europe is rejecting them even at much lower % of the population.
The reason it’s gotten out of control in America is that quantity has a quality all its own, and there are just so many Hispanics that the numbers have caused whole states (like ny/ca) to fall to permanent leftism even though they aren’t as bad.
I think you exaggerate your IQ figures significantly. Also, Trump seems to be getting substantially more Hispanic support than previous Republican candidates — who, with the notable exception of the second Bush, didn't make much attempt to get it.
Hispanics are descended from Europeans, Amerinds, and Sub-Saharan Africans, the last probably the smallest contribution, so even if you accept the standard claims about racial IQ you wouldn't expect theirs to be much, if any, lower than the US average.
"I think you exaggerate your IQ figures significantly."
If you can provide a source on why you think my IQ figures are wrong, I will examine it.
However, I have researched this area pretty extensively, and I think it's on the whole correct. I may even have been slightly generous in my statements.
"Also, Trump seems to be getting substantially more Hispanic support than previous Republican candidates"
Yes, this was predicted by Charles Murray in The Bell Curve.
Trump did two things to win over Hispanics:
1) He move left on economic policy. He's not talking about cutting entitlements and he hardly cares about balanced budgets (amazingly, the democrats are worse on that number).
2) He communicates in a manner far more attuned to an electorate with a lower median IQ. Quite frankly, he is very much borrowing from South American right wing politicians.
Murray said there were two ways that immigration could move the electorate leftwards. They could give leftists the votes to get elected, they could cause the right wing party to move to the left to remain competitive, or both.
Finally, we've learned pretty clearly that current immigrants don't have a lot of solidarity with new immigrants. It turns out Hispanics don't want new Hispanic immigrants flooding their neighborhoods, especially if they are poor or involved with gangs or what not.
This goes double when we realize that "Hispanic" isn't a meaningful category. Why would a Puerto Rican have solidarity with a Guatemalan, etc.
It turns out that being anti immigration is neutral to good for the GOP with Hispanics.
"who, with the notable exception of the second Bush, didn't make much attempt to get it."
I think we can all agree that woke super nice racially sensitive pro amnesty Mitt Romney made an effort. But he couldn't compete with Obama offering free healthcare.
Bush tried to bring Hispanics into the coalition by giving them subprime loans, it was a disaster. His machine was also pretty good at getting Hispanics to join evangelical megachurches in the exurbs and turning them out to vote, but that's a spent force and it never got to 50%.
"Hispanics are descended from Europeans, Amerinds, and Sub-Saharan Africans, the last probably the smallest contribution"
If one wanted to evade the crux of the matter, they could point out that "Hispanic" has a very wide distribution. From the light skinned Cubans that fled the revolution to current dark skinned asylum seekers. It's a wide basket from the generally OK to the very bad. The bottom line is that when you do a weighted average it aint a pretty picture.
You're the one making the extraordinary claim that one ill-defined subset of humanity has a collective IQ lower enough than the rest to be measurable. You're the one needing to provide the extraordinary proof.
I think they are probably less woke, but free handouts trump culture war stuff every time.
It appears that the left may be in the process of shooting themselves in the foot here though, with the dems becoming the party of entrenched establishment and wealthy elites fixated on climate, abortion and gender stuff. Of course this may come at the expense of the republicans being less libertarian as they draw these voters in.
Merely delaying the time until immigrants can vote or receive welfare is still a short-term strategy. Most immigration that European countries receive is net negative at all times, and for any number of generations down the line. There is no way this is economically beneficial given the welfare state. Voters love welfare states, so you can't get rid of them democratically. Thus for any sensible economic realistic policy, anti low-skill immigration must be a strong factor. You can look up recent calculations, say, from Denmark or Netherlands. Your father, Milton Friedman:
“It is one thing to have free immigration into the labour market. It’s another thing to have free immigration to the welfare state. And you can’t have both. If you have a welfare state, if you have a state where every resident is promised a certain minimum income or subsistence level, whether they work or not, whether they produce anything or not. Then it really is an impossibility.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C52TlPCVDio
Even without immigration, welfare states will eventually collapse under the weight of their own bad incentives.
As will all governments.
A prime characteristic of the Right for me is wanting less government, less regulation. I'm surprised that's not an item in the table. I think it’s difficult to capture the Abortion question with a yes/no without some reference a particular stage of fetal development.
In the US, one side wants no abortion, the other side includes people who want no restriction on abortion, although there are a fair number of people in between.
I don't think either Vance or the European right wing parties are consistently for less government. I did look at whether parties identified as Liberal (European sense — moderate libertarian/classical liberal). Some did, some had but were moving away from that to identifying as National Conservatives, some pretty clearly were not.
Due respect, the “Vance” “right wing” party does indeed want less government than the Democrat Party, and Vance makes that clear.
Which is different from wants *only* less government, to be sure. To simplify, let’s use pretend math:
Democrats: let’s keep adding laws/regulations, eliminating none.
Vance: let’s subtract 8 laws/regulations but add 2 different (major) laws back in.
Traditional GOP: let’s get rid of a couple regulations and water down a few more.
Trump 2016-2019: ACTUALLY got rid of a bunch of regulations. Renegotiated NAFTA to get us a slightly better deal. Added some tactical tariffs on China to try to get us a “better deal” (that China waited out rather than negotiate with him).
Tea Party: let’s get rid of a bunch of regulations.
The Tea Party (not an actual political party, of course, but a faction within the GOP exactly as “Vance” is in DF parlance), was the closest thing in modern times to what classical liberals want (I have no interest in including the impotent capital “L” Libertarian Party in this discussion).
Vance ain’t the Tea Party, to be sure. But it’s unfair to say that Vance isn’t for less government. Especially compared to the current alternative.
Please don't pretend that Trump renegotiated NAFTA to get "us" a slightly better deal. A better deal would have been to leave "us" alone. He renegotiated to make himself look like a great negotiator, the master of the deal. He made his base happier even though most people on all sides of that deal had, and still have, no realistic opinions of either deal.
You are entitled to your opinion, but I am confident that I am objectively right on the facts.
I never claimed it was a massively better deal. Merely that it was a better deal.
Unlike your “most people”, I have actually read a decent bit about it.
But I’m glad that you can be so sure that you know his sole objective for doing it.
What evidence do you have that not renegotiating would have made “us” better off?
I said his deal was not for "us". I did not say it was a worse deal for him or for you. I said stop pretending Trump or any politician negotiates on behalf of "us".
🙄
You can claim to know his motives. That’s nice for you.
The resulting laws and treaties in fact do apply to all of us citizens of and residents of the U.S.
If you don’t think the result in this case was better for you personally, you are welcome to that opinion as well.
But yes, purely factually in our republic, our democratically elected representatives do indeed negotiate on *behalf* of “us”.
Whatever their motivations are.
One thing with the less government bit: The people matter, a lot. You can give my old school teachers a lot of leeway (If you can forgive them turning me briefly Rawlsian) since they were fundamentally sane and interested in teaching the subject, and most of the weirdness was along the lines of a math teacher being a bit too enchanted by "the language of mathematics" (she was good at teaching math).
But if you take your slate of teachers from a Libs of TikTok highlight reel of ideological obsessives more interested in 'hatching eggs' and talking to little kids about sexual identity than making them able to read, write and do math, you're going to have to impose very draconian rules on teachers since they want to do anything but their real professional responsibility - they are priests before educators.
In this sense, immigration control can let you keep a more homogenous society, and that more homogenous society will then sometimes allow more social trust and more freedom. See for example small stalls selling things on an honour system. There's no end of videos of culturally foreign immigrants looting the things, which is a net loss compared to very low effort way of delivering value to the community.
Do you think social trust declined as a result of the mass immigration of the early 20th century? My impression is that the first generation tended to live in enclaves of their ethnicity, and within those had both homogeneity and social trust. Their descendants — my grandparents were all immigrants, and my maternal grandfather never learned English — mostly merged into the general society.
> Do you think social trust declined as a result of the mass immigration of the early 20th century?
There was this thing called the mafia, you may have heard of it.
And its functioning depended on social trust among the members.
I don’t understand your point.
In the case of what taxpayer funded public schools teach, that’s not regulation in the traditional sense. That is simply elected government officials *completely appropriately* exercising their power over curricula rather than unelected administrators and teachers being able to do so.
(There is a local - e.g. school board - vs. state control issue here, I suppose, but if state taxpayers are funding a substantial portion of the bill and the local schools accept the state money, then it’s again not at all unreasonable that elected officials attach strings to said money. And to the extent that school boards are especially frequently bought and paid for by public teachers unions, I consider that more corrupt than anything else in this context.)
Perhaps we are completely agreeing in practice. My point is that I wouldn’t consider what DeSantis and the FL legislature did on school curricula to be “regulation” in the common parlance of that term in the discussion above.
Separately, I didn’t really follow your last paragraph re: immigration at all.
Interesting. Regarding the difficultly of pinning down "right wing", Matt Yglesias proposed what I think is a pretty robust concept of how "right" and "left" are used (that it covers an axis going from hierarchal to egalitarian.) In this post, I argue that libertarians are unusual in that they just don't really care about that axis, and that indifference is why they find themselves allied with the left or right, depending on circumstance: https://www.maximumtruth.org/p/left-and-right-are-valid-concepts
https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-liberalism-and-leftism-are-increasingly
…and see my comment to John Ketchum elsewhere.
I think Hayek got this correct first.
As an Italian I would say that our right-wing parties, which fall outside the scope of your analysis, tend to have more conservative positions on social issues than other conservative parties across Europe, mostly due to the residual power and influence of the Catholic Church in Italy. Even our liberal parties, by comparison, are more conservative on social issues than other liberal parties in Europe. For instance, many members of our Democratic Party (Partito Democratico) do not wish to legalise marijuana or surrogacy because they come from a Christian Democrat rather than left-wing tradition.
A point made many times, but which bears repeating: left or right have little to do with policy and, as per Jouvenel, everything to do with coalitions: the Left is the Elite plus the Masses and the Right is the Middle. From here much, if not all, derives.
https://mendimeterastit.blogspot.com/2022/01/on-milking-hlvm-model.html
There are two types of people in the world: those who divide people into two types, and those who don’t.
But when it comes to political ideologies, I prefer four types:
https://jclester.substack.com/p/the-political-compass-and-why-libertarianism
This makes Wokeism extreme authoritarianism, rather than on the left:
https://jclester.substack.com/p/woke-a-libertarian-viewpoint
And Open Borders without prior privatisation cannot be libertarian:
https://jclester.substack.com/p/open-borders-today-stupid-or-sinister
No, there are 3 types of people in the world: those who can count, and those who can’t… 😏
The core of the “right” is basically white middle class families. Especially if their work/income is less government dependent.
The core of “the left” is a broad coalition of people that want to bite off a chunk from that group. The best lodestar for the left is single women, who consistently vote 68/32 dem. They are the largest beneficiaries of government largess (both welfare and professional). Every dem campaign in my adult lifetime has featured a “life of Julia” type appeal.
In order to get to 51% you get a lot of strange bedfellows in coalitions, and each party often buys votes. Sometimes coalitions shift.
And what people perceive as being in their interest can change. And they can be wrong about what is in their interest.
Asking “what do the constituent groups think is in their interest” is more likely to yield an answer than trying to build a consistent ideology over long periods of time.
So what matters to me is to look at the patterns that hold up election after election.
In general, would we say that TX/FL is “more free” than CA/NY? If you were a young person just about to start a family and you had the same job offer in either and could choose where to settle down, which would you choose?
The answer to that basically tells you what you need to know about right/left.
Read “The Myth of Left and Right” by the Lewis brothers, Hyrum, a historian, and Verlan, a political scientist, or watch one of their YouTube videos. The myth is the false belief that the common unidimensional political spectrum separates left from right due to their conflicting fundamental philosophical principles. However, those two ideologies are inconsistent and differ with time and place. In reality, left and right are mere tribes. Unlike today's American “liberalism” and conservativism, libertarianism and individualism—distinguished from authoritarianism and collectivism—are based on timeless principles.
The Hayekian triangle, which Nate Silver recently resurrected but mangled slightly, is surely the more appropriate description here.
The original: top-left corner is Socialism, top-right corner is (European-style) [social] Conservatism, bottom middle corner is classical liberalism.
The updated Nate Silver one: top left corner is Social Justice Leftism (a.k.a wokeism), top right corner is MAGA (populist) Conservatism, bottom middle corner is classical liberalism.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-liberalism-and-leftism-are-increasingly
Highly recommended reading.
Oh, for the good old days of even 30 years ago, where neither the Dems nor the GOP were “good enough” for we classical liberals/libertarians, but at least the debates were largely nearer to the bottom sides of the triangle than to the top…
I'll check it out.
Also check out Arnold Kling’s “The Three Languages of Politics”
His three terms that describe problems - oppression; barbarism; and coercion - map perfectly to the concerns, respectively, of the Silver definition of SJW Leftism, the Hayek/Buckley definition of Conservatism, and everyone’s definition of classical liberalism.
Kling:
“Oppression is when one group exploits and discriminates against another. Barbarism is when civilization breaks down and people engage in violence and disorder. Coercion is when people are forced to do things against their will, especially by the government.”
https://www.econtalk.org/misinformation-and-the-three-languages-of-politics-with-arnold-kling/
https://www.libertarianism.org/books/three-languages-politics
I've read "The Three Languages of Politics." I hope someone will read "The Myth of Left and Right" by Hyrum and Verlan Lewis or at least watch one of their YouTube Videos.
It seems to me that the most nearly accurate political typology chart I've seen is a square with an x-axis running through the center from top to bottom and a y-axis running through the center across the middle. In the center of the square is a circle. The top half of the chart is labeled "authoritarianism," the bottom half "libertarianism," the left half "collectivism," the right half "individualism," and the circle "centrism." There are five equal-sized sections: authoritarian collectivism, authoritarian individualism (a nearly null section?), libertarian collectivism (e.g., anarcho-collectivism), libertarian individualism, and centrism.
I think Richard Hanania's relatively recent post was about this? "Right wing" is all over the place regarding economic conservatism but more united by _social_ conservatism, hostility to foreigners and to new ways of life (same-sex marriages did some magic where they no longer count as "new" for most of Europe).
The difference between US and EU is that in Europe we tend to have proportional voting and thus multi-party systems, as opposed to the American two-party system. Therefore, you often see a small pro-business party that sucks libertarian votes and big parties both on left and right are all pro-distribution. In the US, on the other hand, libertarians have to choose to vote for one of the big parties and the chosen one happens to be (by historical accident?) the Republican party.
What we call parties in the USA are long term coalitions of factions which would be separate parties in a parliamentary system. In a parliamentary system you don’t know who will govern until the parties elected form a government. I the USA the parties have their power sharing fights in the primaries, and we vote on the result in the general election.
“…libertarians have to choose to vote for one of the big parties and the chosen one happens to be (by historical accident?) the Republican party.”
Well, putting assigned the principled-but-unpragmatic folks who choose to vote for neither party and vote Libertarian Party or something else, it is not correct to say that is is a historical accident that pragmatic libertarians / classical liberals vote for Republicans and not Democrats today.
Namely, with the possible and noteworthy exception of immigration - where for reasons that have nothing to do with libertarians the parties have largely switched position over the last 35 years (Bill Clinton was for very strong border enforcement) - the Republicans, while highly imperfect, are much closer to being for freedom and smaller government than are Democrats.
That is no historical accident, as the Democrats have since even before FDR been the party of big government and interventionism.
Since those two things are antithetical to libertarians and classical liberals, those of us wanting to be part of the two party system and influence who actually attains power have no other pragmatic choice than the Republican Party.
And this is even more true given how far to the left the Dems have shifted in the last 20 years. One could make the credible case that the Dem party of Bill Clinton in the 1990s wasn’t all that different from the GOP party of H.W. Bush and Bob Dole. But no serious person can make that same case today.
That’s why I despise political labels.