2023-09-15 Fr: NOT YET FINISHED: Ethno-Domination Conservatism vs. Cosmo-Plutocratic Conservatism

Matt Yglesias was going to write about “[the] arguments on the left between supply-side liberalism and its critics… [and how] you can’t resolve anything at this level of abstraction”.

Thank God he didn’t.

Circular firing squads not good. Plus critics of supply-side liberalism and of “Bidenomics” these days—from the left, claiming that it is really a giveaway to BIG CORPORATIONS, and from the right, claiming that it is Woke theft from the job creators—are almost exclusively bad-faith power grabs and grifts, either direct grifts for money, or indirect grifts for future influence and paying customers.

I think the best way to deal with them is to refute false factual claims and otherwise give them no oxygen.

Thus MattY’s “let’s steelman—summarize not the argument they make, but rather the argument they would have made had then kept their moral vision of the universe but actually learned something about the world and been able to think issues through—the person I’m going to wind up coming down against” is, I think, profoundly unhelpful in this case. (And I might go further, and argue that it generally is unhelpful outside the seminar room. Inside the seminar room it is a very good habit, because the works read have been pre-selected to benefit from steelmannning. Outside it turns into a DDOS attack against constructive thought. John Holbo keeps convincing and reconvincing me of this—see: Vavilovian Philosophical Mimicry & The Steelwool Scrub—A Fallacy.)

So it would nice to see Matt turning his steelmanning expertise imbued in him during his time before the mast in Harvard’s Philosophy Department to some other issue. In this case, it is an issue where I am proud to quote Abe Lincoln: “Go to it, husband!—Go to it, bear!”: what I am told is the current intellectual fight within American conservatism.

To clear the ground: What calls itself “National Conservatism” has nothing of the American nation that I recognize in it. In accordance with Master Kung’s precept that you should call things what they are rather than what they are not, I propose: Ethno-Dominationist Conservatism. And by the same principle “Freedom Conservatism” offers freedom only to those who have enough money and do not run into the buzzsaws of conservative bigotry. So I propose: Cosmo-Plutocratic Conservatism.

And so I read Matt. And, afterwards, I find myself depressed.

Matt, talented as he is, is unable to do any steelmanning. He concludes that the whole argument is pointless due to the lack of technocratic institutional capacity on the right:

Matthew Yglesias: Big ideas aren't enough: ‘I’ve been following recent debates between proponents of national conservatism and freedom conservatism…. Debates at this level… [never] resolve anything…. [For] how do you actually do that?…

[While policy analysis capacity on the left has withered somewhat… it’s borderline non-existent on the right…. The uselessness… [of] Bush-era programs in terms of actually helping poor women…. Lecturing people about marriage fail[ed] to achieve anything… [ focused attention away from] unreliable bus service that made it hard to stay employed…. Reliable bus service is not as useful as… a reliable life partner. But “spend money to run the bus more frequently” is… tractable…. John DiIulio… [claiming] the whole thing was being ruined by “Mayberry Machiavellis,” political opportunists who didn’t care about substance or policy detail….

The National Conservative manifesto, “Rebuilding American Capitalism: A Handbook for Conservative Policymakers,”… ideas seem awfully half-baked…. Oren Cass… I mostly admire what he’s trying to do… highlighting… important issues… [but] thanks to education polarization, there are not currently that many people on the right who are qualified to work through these ideas… [which] are only as good as their implementation….

“Democrats are too soft on crime, too lenient about violations of immigration rules, ask too many sacrifices in the name of preventing climate change, tax too much, spend too much, and are generally too indulgent of weirdos”… wins elections in all kinds of places…. If you decide it’s actually not important to reverse… trends… a winning formula… [is to take] the most dysfunctional or outlandish thing [anyone on] the left is doing on any given day and hammer them….

I’m not sure any iteration of the current right is up [to do anything else…

I note, first of all, that often—maybe 80% of the time something comes across my radar—it is not “the most dysfunctional or outlandish thing [anyone on] the left is doing on any given day”. It is, rather, some group with little social power that can be made the object of a two-minute hate—and they aren’t too careful about that “little social power” part. I never thought that I would feel that I would have to write to urge people to “Ride or Die for Larry Fink”, but I do.