"Interestingly, the right didn’t take the leftist ideas that were intended to build something; they took just the ideas intended to destroy."

"As so many have noted, MAGA is identity politics for white people. It turns out that identity politics is more effective when your group is in the majority.

"… Last year, a writer named James Lindsay cribbed language from “The Communist Manifesto,” changed its valences so that they were right wing and submitted it to a conservative publication called The American Reformer. The editors, unaware of the provenance, were happy to print it. When the hoax was revealed, they were still happy! The right is now eager to embrace the ideas that led to tyranny, the gulag and Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Interestingly, the right didn’t take the leftist ideas that were intended to build something; they took just the ideas intended to destroy."

~ David Brooks from his column 'Hey, Lefties! Trump Has Stolen Your Game' [hat tip Alex Tabarrok ] 

Seymour's Bill is frightening the luvvies so much they can't read

DAVID SEYMOUR'S REMARKABLY TEPID Regulatory Standards Bill is getting frightened and bewildered luvvies to put down their lattes and type indignant emails to their MPs.

Fuel for many of this outraged commentariat (Anne Salmond was the first; Brian Easton is the latest) is provided by a book-length screed by one Quinn Slobodian called Hayek's Bastards, "The premise of Quinn Slobodian’s new book," says the bookplate, "is that authoritarian right-wing populism is a mutated version of classical liberal economics." A version labelled "neoliberalism" by its opponents.

A counter-intuitive thesis to be sure, So I checked on some actual classical liberals to see what they thought of the book. (Pointless asking Trump followers, since we know none of them can read. Or "neoliberals," none of whom actually exist.)

Phil Magness, an economic historian  who most recently convinced over 150 economists and scholars to sign a declaration opposing Trump's economically harmful, constitutionally dubious tariff policies, wonders aloud at the absurdity of the book's central thesis. Which is Slobodian's apparent conviction "that Trumpism traces its intellectual origins to the Austrian economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises." This would undoubtedly astonish all three. 

Slobodian's attempts to link the three suffers, Magness says wryly, "from a lack of clear evidence for the parentage. Undeterred, Slobodian supplies the links by making them up."

As they say, if you have to lie to make up your criticisms, it suggests you probably don't have any.

Slobodian of course relies on the fact that few if any of his credulous readers will bother to actually read Hayek or Mises. (Easton for one would benefit hugely from the experience.) But if you want a candid study of how to quote somebody to say the precise opposite of what they say — in this case Mises quoting others to denounce their racial prejudice is used to suggest their vile views are his own — then Magness's review is a good place to start. 

This is not even sleight of hand. It's a conjurer simply assuming his audience are too dumb to notice. "Deliberate deception" is how another commentator describes it. It's a consistent pattern. Here's Slobodian in 2015, for example, showing how to get Mises to support something he was writing to oppose:

Slobodian demonstrates his pattern of ripping quotes from their
context to give the opposite impression of an author's intention.

It's complete dishonesty: a "scurrilous  ... slipshod attempt to taint and tarnish the reputation of one of the leading economists of the 20th century, and one of the most consistent and outspoken defenders of the classical liberal ideal of political, social and economic liberty and the free society," says Misesian Richard Ebeling in his response to the deception.

We live at a time when one of the worst accusations that can be thrown at someone is the charge of “racist.” Have that word tied to your name and it not only results in moral condemnation, it potentially throws into discredit almost anything and everything that person has said or done. That makes it a serious matter when an individual never identified with such racist views or values has that accusation attached to them. ... The actual facts show this is a fundamentally baseless accusation that attempts to taint and tarnish the reputation of one of the leading economists of the 20th century ...

[O]ne of the most embarrassing observations that can made about an author’s work [is] being slipshod scholarship. Professor Slobodian has 93 footnotes in his article. Over 50 of them reference Mises’s writings or correspondence. Looking them up, I found many instances in which the page reference to a paraphrase of a passage or a quote in one of Mises’s works was not to be found where Professor Slobodian indicated it to be.

In some instances, this was not simply being off a page or two; the page referenced turned out to be in a portion of one of Mises’s works that had nothing to do with the theme or idea that Professor Slobodian was referring to....

In addition, there are instances in which Professor Slobodian asserts or implies views or states of mind held by Mises at some point in time. But the footnoted reference sometimes refers to some other scholar’s work that when looked up did not refer to or imply anything about Ludwig von Mises. For example, at one point (p. 4), Professor Slobodian says, “But for Mises, a war had shaken him the most. Japan’s defeat of Russia in 1905 brought about a non-white power into the elite white club of empires. The event resonated with the rhetoric of the ‘yellow peril’ widespread at the turn of the century, understood as both a racial demographic and commercial threat.” And he footnotes a[nother author's] work about Asian intellectuals in the period before the First World War.

Professor Slobodian then says, “Mises’s response was different but no less radical,” and then references how Mises [allegedly] saw the economic significance of increased global competition from Asia ... The juxtapositioning of these two ideas, one following the other, easily creates the impression that Mises, while having a “different” response, was part of the group worried about a “yellow peril.

There is nothing to suggest in Mises’s writings actually referenced that he held or expressed any such race-based fear in the wake of the Japanese victory over Russia. But the implication is easily left in the reader’s mind.

Slobodian is fundamentally dishonest.

Christopher Snowdon has more:

The first two chapters find Slobodian searching for hints of racial prejudice in the work of Hayek and Mises. For the former, the best he can manage is a reference to ‘the Christian West’ in a 1984 speech. For the latter, who may well have been Austria’s least racist man in the 1930s, it is an even greater challenge. 

Slobodian revives two articles he wrote about the lifelong supporter of open borders in 2019 that have been heavily criticised by Phillip W. Magness and Amelia Janaskie for ‘inverting Mises’s meaning in a light that erroneously casts him as sympathetic to racism or colonialism.’ 

One does not need to be an expert on Mises to see that Slobodian is guilty of selective quotation. One only needs to read the whole paragraph from which the quote is taken. For example, Mises is quoted as writing in 1944: ‘There are few white men who would not shudder at the picture of many millions of black or yellow people living in their own countries.’ Slobodian puts this in a context that implies that Mises shared this revulsion and cites it as evidence that Mises had ‘partially legitimised closed borders for nonwhite migrants as a near-permanent feature of the world order.’ But the very next sentence of Mises’ text reads: ‘The elaboration of a system making for harmonious coexistence and peaceful economic and political cooperation among the various races is a task to be accomplished by coming generations.’ It should be obvious that Mises was not endorsing the prejudices of the majority, but merely acknowledging the existence of such prejudices and hoping that they could be overcome.

And here's Slobodian's problem, and the reason he must so transparently mis-quote: "There is simply no through-line from Mises or Hayek to the alt-right." 

By referring to right-wing populists of the present day as Hayek’s illegitimate offspring (‘bastards’) Slobodian allows himself a certain amount of wriggle room, but if a student believes the exact opposite of the teacher, can he really be portrayed as a follower?

The fatal flaw in this book is that Slobodian has clearly started with his conclusion and worked backwards. An author who was interested in writing about the roots of the current wave of right-wing populism would start with the right-wing populists and study their words and deeds.

Which is what Misesian Jeffrey Tucker did many moons before Slobodian even thought about slithering into print — "the most important political book in recent memory" is what my own reviewer called it.

BUT THIS BRIEF GLIMPSE  into a fetid authorial swamp was not just to alert you to a shitty book from an author too incompetent to even formulate real arguments. It's to show you how bereft of clothing are the nakedly insubstantial objections to Seymour's bill, that so many rest their objections on a ad-hominem without even a home. As Richard Ebeling says so tellingly in a recent article, "“Progressives” Blame F. A. Hayek for Everything They Dislike."

That so many of these "progressive" objections to a fairly unobjectionable Bill rest unthinkingly on Slobodian's animus and deception — for a historian used to checking sources, Anne Salmond's was an example of one of the most dishhonest — suggests the same thing said of Slobodian's book could be said about the objections to the Bill: if you have to lie to make your arguments, then perhaps you don't really have any.

I only wish they were right that it is something they need to be scared about.

"Nationalism is not patriotism!"

"Alchemy is not chemistry.

"Altruism is not caring.
"Socialism is not sharing.
"Astrology is not astronomy.
"H2SO4 is not water.
"Nationalism is not patriotism."

~ Keith Weiner

"Nationalism is not patriotism! A French patriot roots for their Olympic basketball team; a French nationalist grumbles that almost all the players are black....
    "Note that 'identity politics' is not an inherently left or right wing idea. Where it favours minority groups, it is typically framed as left wing. When it favours the majority ethnic group (or more precisely the group in power – recall South Africa before 1994), it’s typically viewed as right wing. Thus [both varieties of] nationalists tend to oppose immigration, which threatens to dilute the [favoured] ethnic group."

~ Scott Sumner, from his post on 'The authoritarian nationalist playbook'

"The Woke Right ... " [updated]

"The Woke Right is that part of the Right that has decided everything the Left has been saying is bad must actually be good.

"The Left said racism is bad, so racism must be good. 

"The Left said patriarchy is bad, so patriarchy must be good.
"The Left said Fascism is bad, so...

"Because the Woke (or Dissident, or New, or 'New Christian') Right defines itself by glorifying everything the Left said was bad, it becomes an extension of the Left's tortured and destructive caricature of society. They become an extension of the Left and take up its methods.

"The Left wasn't wrong that racism is bad. The Left was wrong about what racism is. The thing the Left referred to as 'racism' isn't racism. Most of it isn't even real. The purpose of most of those claims was to extract power, and it worked because racism is actually bad.

"The Woke or New or Dissident Right ... has adopted a basic reactionary reversal of the Left's pronouncements while accepting the Left's characterisations, framing, and belief in power dynamics."

~ James Lindsay on 'The Woke Right'

UPDATE:

Young men are resenting being resented

 

"Young men seem to be motivated, not so much by a specific issue, but by their resentment of the current culture. If true, the upcoming elections will express the 'Breitbart Doctrine,' named after the late conservative journalist Andrew Breitbart. This doctrine states 'politics is downstream from culture.' To change the politics of a society, you must change its culture because politics originates from culture which, in turn, originates from the values of individuals who constitute society. Simply stated, if a person’s values and culture are transformed, his politics transforms accordingly.
    "The culture surrounding young men is dramatically different from that of their fathers, and the change has not been kind. The Brookings Institute notes, 'Young men increasingly feel as though they have been experiencing discrimination.' For decades now, prominent voices of political correctness, which is now called social justice, have blamed men as a gender class for a long slate of social wrongs. And, for young men, the past few decades constitute all of their lives. This means they have heard about their collective guilt since birth, and it would be natural for them to feel resentful for being castigated as a class for social wrongs. Such young men are reportedly turning to Donald Trump as a symbol of more traditional and proud manhood. ... [!]"

   "Women need healthy and well-adjusted men to be life partners, loving family members, friends, good neighbours, co-workers, and the peaceful strangers you pass on the street. The last thing women need is to live beside a generation of resentful men who act on their resentment, especially if the feeling is justified."

~ Wendy McElroy from her post 'Ignore The New Power Demographic at Your Own Risk: Young Male Voters'

The tribalism of the new Right contrarians

"The new Right’s absurd positions [on Ukraine, on Putin, on Milei, on vaccines, on immigration, you name it] cannot be explained by their adherence to any coherent ideology, but only by their tribal view of the world.
    "To get a better grip on how these people think, we need to understand what the new Right is. By 'the new Right' I mean a loose network that emerged in the last decade and is active in the culture wars. It includes social and alternative media influencers (like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Jack Posobiec) and politicians (like Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy). And it includes their numerous followers and the segment of Donald Trump supporters who are fanatical. Uniting this loose network is their opposition to both the liberal-leftist ideology and what they see as establishment conservatism. The new Right should not be understood as a coherent political ideology, but as a political tribe.
    "There are two ways a tribalist makes up his mind on an issue. The first is by following the line of his group. This is, after all, the essence of tribalism: making sense of one’s self, of others, and of the world through the prism of the group. These days though, we can see another kind of tribalist who follows another guide: first he observes what the other group, the enemy tribe, stands for, and then he supports the opposite position. Whatever the enemy believes and supports, this is the bad; whatever they oppose, the good. Thus, the enemy, the other, becomes the standard of true and false, the yardstick of right and wrong. This mode of thinking is still tribalism: the standard of truth is still other people and opposition to what they believe. ...
    "[Why do m]any who think that the election of 2020 was rigged also tend to believe that the vaccines made young people 'drop like flies'? ... because they formed their views on those topics [by opposing the consensus of the liberals/progressives/globalists,” i.e. the 'current thing.' .... Why do new Right culture warriors oppose the struggle of a nation to maintain its freedom against an aggressor? Because Ukraine and Zelensky also became 'the current thing.' ...

I will call this subcategory of tribalism contrarianism. Interestingly, the contrarian thinks he is the opposite of a tribalist. He makes fun of the masses, calling them victims of groupthink or 'NPCs' (the Non-Player Characters of video games who lack agency). In the contrarian’s mind, he is above any such brainwashing and claims to do 'his own research.' Yet if he simply adjusts his thinking about all major topics by picking whatever is the opposite of the dominant opinion, he’s not really thinking. ...
    "Understanding the character of the new Right contrarians should give us insight into how to oppose their tribalism and nihilism. They are collectivists, in thought and in action. Their existential compass is the group. The opposite of collectivism is individualism, and the opposite of tribalism is independent thinking — taking the responsibility to make sense of the world on one’s own. Independent thinking is difficult, and in no way infallible. Yet, it is our only navigating instrument towards the truth. There is no substitute for the responsibility to think. ...

"That the tribalists of the new Right promise to make America great again is an outrageous farce. The people who made America great were the opposite of tribalists. They had the self-esteem to see the world through their own judgment and to put no tribal allegiance or dogma above it. It can only be independent thinkers that can appreciate and pursue the positive values that have made America a country worth loving and fighting for: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
    "To be an American patriot, one must first reject tribalism."

~ Nikos Sotirakopoulos, from his post 'Contrarians of the New Right'

'The betrayal of Southport'

"Southport was rocked by two tragedies last week. First was the senseless stabbing spree that claimed the lives of six-year-old Bebe King, seven-year-old Elsie Dot Stancombe and nine-year-old Alice Dasilva Aguiar. Second was the racist rioting the following evening, when thugs hurled bricks and bottles at the local mosque. While the depraved killings of those three young girls remain front-and-centre in the minds of the people of Southport, tragically, it is those deplorable, ugly scenes on Tuesday night that have had greatest impact nationally, as rioting has since spread relentlessly across much of the rest of England....
    "It’s a journalistic cliché to describe a whole town or entire community as being in mourning. ... [But a]n ongoing sense of unease has kept a lot of [local] people indoors. ...
    "The evening after the murders, the quiet dignity of the people of Southport was utterly betrayed. The riots began just as a vigil for the three girls ...was drawing to a close. ... Cars started appearing ... until they were ‘bumper to bumper’ ... ‘Then, suddenly, people started appearing, mostly young men, in groups, walking towards the mosque… Then another group, and another group, and another group.’ ... these were people ‘who came from outside, looking for trouble’. Initial police reports corroborate this. Of the hundreds of people causing carnage that night, 13 have been arrested and one charged. Three were local to Southport, but many others have been identified as coming from out of town, including from Formby, St Helens and Newton-le-Willows. The latter two are at least a 40-minute drive away....
    "You will struggle to find any support or sympathy for the rioters here in Southport. ... ‘Three little girls have lost their lives in tragic circumstances. There’s a feeling that people are utilising that for their own agendas'."

~ Fraser Myers from his report 'The betrayal of Southport'

It's the age of the Neotoddler protestor

Young men riot in Sunderland (Drik/Getty Images)

"Across the West, protests are getting larger, more frequent and more disruptive. Over the weekend, the UK saw nationwide anti-immigration riots in which mosques and other buildings were set aflame. A few days before that, Just Stop Oil activists sprayed orange paint in the world’s second-busiest airport, Heathrow. The week before, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the US Congress, pro-Palestine activists rioted in Columbus Square, vandalising memorials and releasing a swarm of maggots and worms in his Washington hotel.
    "These are just the latest examples of a growing trend of shock-activism that combines political protest and public nuisance. Ostensibly, they are carried out by distinct groups motivated by a particular cause, such as immigration, the environment, or Palestine. In reality, however, all are animated by the same, self-destructive ideology: neotoddlerism....
    
"[T]he ease with which theatrical behaviour goes viral online has convinced many that a better world doesn’t require years of patient work, only a sufficient quantity of theatrics. Many activists — on both the Left and Right — now hope to bring about their ideal world in the same way a spoiled brat acquires a toy they’ve been denied: by being as loud and hysterical as possible. This is neotoddlerism: the view that utopia can be achieved by acting like a three-year-old....

"Instead of trying to produce the best arguments, neotoddlers try to produce the most shocking video clips, which typically involve vandalism, desecration, or some other kind of public meltdown. Thus, they outrage others by embracing their own outrage and lashing out at the world. ...

"Not only do neotoddlers lack impulse-control, they also mistake their lack of impulse-control for morality, and mistake the impulse-control of others for callousness. 'Where is the outrage?' they commonly yell, demanding everyone be as irrational as them. For the neotoddler, impatience is a virtue. ...

"They therefore don’t have the means to create, only to disrupt.
    "And so they disrupt, with the goal of spreading awareness. Yet ... for all the issues they protest about — from immigration to climate change — the problem is not a lack of awareness; it’s a lack of solutions. We don’t need to be told that war, injustice, and pollution are bad, because we learned these lessons in primary school. What we need are realistic plans of action — but the neotoddlers have none. A 'ceasefire now!' would quickly be broken by Hamas. To 'just stop oil!' would be to cause Western civilisation to regress technologically into an age of famine, war and superstition. On immigration, the Government can’t just 'get them out'. ...

"But if nuisance-protests are counterproductive, why are they spreading? Because protests are usually motivated more by emotion than reason. Take the recent Southport riots. These have been driven not by any rational plan but by the frustrations of Right-wingers and ordinary working-class people about their concerns over immigration not being taken seriously by politicians. These frustrations, stoked by fake news, have led them to engage in infantile — and dangerous — actions like vandalising mosques and setting fire to police cars, which will hurt their cause more than help it. But it does make them feel good for the moment, and they live mostly for the moment.
    "As for Left-wing neotoddlers, their motivations tend to be more complex (but no less childish) than those of their Right-wing counterparts, because, instead of being impoverished and alienated, they tend to be privileged and popular. For instance ... Gaza campus protests were largely confined to the most expensive and elite colleges. And Just Stop Oil members are themselves quick to admit that their movement is 'privileged' and living in a white middle-class 'student bubble.' ...

"Unsurprisingly, the harm neotoddlers cause to liberal democracies has endeared them to foreign dictators. The Ayatollah developed a soft spot for the Ivy League campus protesters, cheerleading them on X, and even writing them a letter of support. It also recently transpired that Iran has been funding and directing activists across the US, and that they even masterminded an anti-Israel protest at McGill University in Canada. Closer to home [in the UK], the misinformation that caused the Southport riots was amplified by a fake news website linked to the Russian government. ...

"There is a way out. The solution to neotoddlers is the same as the one to regular spoiled brats: to ignore their outbursts and deny them attention. If someone sets fire to a car or makes a mess with orange paint, it shouldn’t make global or even national news. The media will stop reporting on these stories when we stop engaging with them. ... So we should learn to react more slowly to news, to pay attention to what we pay attention to, and to give more of our attention to behaviours we wish to encourage rather than those we disapprove of. It’s not just the neotoddlers who need to be less impulsive, we do too. ...

"Every child begins life throwing tantrums. And every good parent learns to ignore them, because they know that acknowledging attention-seeking behaviours validates them, and prevents their kids from outgrowing them. If we wish to stop seeing good causes ruined by bad actors, we must stop rewarding immaturity. If we wish to usher in an age of post-toddlerism, we must stop making neotoddlers famous."

~ Gurwinder Bhogal from his article 'The scourge of Neotoddler protestors: The Left and Right now rely on shock activism'

UK immigration misinformation

On this subject more than maybe any other, misinformation rules. 

News reports say that Britons are rioting in the street over a knife attack by a Muslim immigrant a locally-born Christian. 

The misinformation is almost symbolic.

Rioters (committing these violent crimes) are alleging that violent crime has risen with immigration. Yet ...

They've alleged that "grooming gangs" are everywhere in immigrant communities. Yet ...

...

It's been claimed that migrants — especially illegal migrants — overwhelmingly take benefits. Yet ...

• the vast majority of new legal migrants are unable to access benefits due to a policy called "no recourse to public funds"
• new migrants pay something called the Immigration Health Surcharge (on top of other taxes) at rates greater than some private health insurance
• illegal immigrants aren't entitled to any benefits at all
• far from being "a burden on public services" it is overwhelmingly migrants who work in public services (health, education etc.) without which these government systems would have collapsed long ago

It's claimed nonetheless that illegal immigrants "abuse the asylum system." Yet ... you cannot be both "illegal" and "abuse the asylum system" because, by law, someone seeking asylum is allowed to use irregular means of entry to do so without penalisation.

It's said that new legal migrants have created Britain's housing crisis ... not the planners, politicians and NIMBYs who for decades have stopped Britons building.

It's argued that "migrants don't integrate." Yet ... despite many hurdles, research suggests that on five measures assessed (structural social, cultural, civic and political) there is no lack of integration, or any lack of motivation to integrate.

Protesters suggest that all Britons are with them. And yet ...

• out of 17 countries surveyed, the UK public were least likely to push for strict limits on foreigners or prohibitions on immigration
• ... were least likely to believe immigration increases the crime rate
• ... were least likely to say that immigration causes unemployment
• ... among the least likely to say that immigration increases the risk of terrorism; and
• has one of the most favourable views of the impacts of immigration

So why, you may wonder, are some Britons rioting in the street about immigration over a crime by a locally-born man.

Dunno.

It's almost like they've been played.

[Hat tip Dan Sohege, from whom most of these links, graphs, news and answers are sourced.]

Labelling everything "far-right" normalises the real far-right

"Progressive devotees have expanded the scope of who and what is 'far-right' ... [But] if milquetoast conservatives get into government as ‘far-right’ and govern in a way with no perceptible difference to the liberal consensus ... then it normalises the idea of far-right government. ...
    "If mothers growing their own food are far-right, the pro-life church lady is far-right, the radical feminist who isn’t keen on transvestites is far-right, the liberal who gets fired for not using progressive speech codes at his corporate job is far-right, then no one is going to bat an eye at the real far-right – whoever they may be and wherever they may lurk. When the progressive says, ‘But he’s far-right!’ about someone with genuinely reactionary political aims and the means to achieve them, no one will recoil in horror.
    "Instead they will think, ‘Ah, so he is just like me.'
    "The funeral pyre of progress has been constructed by the hands of its faithful devotees and awaits only the match that will set it ablaze."

~ Dieuwe de Boer from, his post 'The Funeral Pyre of Progress'

 

"...they lost the debate on economic issues within the economics profession. So they moved over into the English department and other humanities..."

"One of the great untold stories of the 20th century political left is how they lost the debate on economic issues within the economics profession. So they moved over into the English department (and other humanities) instead, and resumed teaching discredited economics there.
    "Note that this also explains why many of the humanities adopt an explicitly conspiracist epistemology when they talk about economics as a discipline. See also the neoliberalism studies' literature ... and similar.
    "Corollary: this also applies to the protectionists of the NatCon right ... They lost the economic debate on trade over a century ago ... "

~ Phil Magness

BOOK REVIEW: 'The Capitalist Manifesto: Why the Global Free Market Will Save the World,' by Johan Norberg

The IEA's Kristian Niemitz reviews Johan Norberg's important new book.

I first came across Johan Norberg almost exactly 20 years ago, when the German translation of his book In Defence of Global Capitalism came out. The book argued that globalisation was a success story. In large parts of the developing world, poverty, infant mortality and illiteracy were falling, life expectancy was rising, nutrition was improving, and democracy was spreading. These positive trends were, according to the younger Norberg, likely to continue, and they were not a product of chance. They were a result of the spread of capitalism.

At the time, this was considered an outrageous thing to say.... The almost universally accepted conventional wisdom of the day was that “globalisation” meant the exploitation of poor countries by multinational corporations, and that the world was going from bad to worse. ...

With his most recent book The Capitalist Manifesto: Why the Global Free Market Will Save the World, Norberg goes back to the beginning.... The era of “globalisation” is generally said to have started around 1990, so when In Defence of Global Capitalism came out, it was still in its relatively early stages. We now have three decades to go by. What happened in those three decades?

Quite a lot. 

• Extreme poverty fell from 38% of the world’s population to less than 10%, 
• child and infant mortality fell from 9.3% to 3.7%, 
• global life expectancy increased from 64 years to over 70 years, 
• illiteracy dropped from 25.7% to 13.5%, 
• child labour decreased from 16% to 10%, and so on, and so forth. 

The countries and regions which performed best are the ones which did precisely the opposite of what the anti-globalisation movement wanted them to do, while the most spectacular counterexample is the movement’s erstwhile poster child of Venezuela. ...

There are genuine problems, though. In some Western countries, NIMBYism is driving up the cost of housing. This makes it harder for people to move to where the best job opportunities are, and it gives younger generations a worse deal. In addition, the extension of occupational licensing is erecting market entry barriers. None of this has anything to do with “neoliberalism” or “hyperglobalisation”, though – quite the opposite....

But have classical liberals benefited from this, in any way? Has being right made us more successful in winning over hearts and minds? Are there more people now who embrace free-market capitalism, or who at least accept that, even if they don’t like it, it is the most powerful motor of economic and social progress known to man?

Very far from it ... in addition to the anti-capitalist Left, we have also seen the rise of an anti-liberal Right. ... Where In Defence of Global Capitalism was able to concentrate on one enemy, The Capitalist Manifesto has to fight a two-front war. Some chapters are primarily aimed at the anti-capitalist Left, others are primarily aimed at the anti-liberal Right, and some could apply to both in roughly equal measure. ...

• Chapter 3 concentrates on the ... misplaced nostalgia for the economic structure of the postwar decades ... Norberg shows that automation and productivity improvements have contributed far more to job losses in the manufacturing industries than free trade, and that ... the same processes that make some jobs redundant also lower consumer prices and thereby make us richer, [creating] demand for new jobs in other sectors ...
• Chapter 4 addresses the old Marxist idea that wealth must be built on exploitation, but also some of the more recent literature on inequality, such as Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century and The Spirit Level by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson. In market economies, people do not get rich by exploiting others. They get rich because they offer something that lots of people are prepared to pay for. Left-wing celebrity authors like Michael Moore and Bernie Sanders understand that perfectly well when it comes to their own book sales, but they are not capable of extending that logic to entrepreneurial activities. ...
• Chapter 5 picks up another perennial Marxist theme: the idea that capitalism supposedly leads to greater and greater industry concentration over time. ... The best antidote to worrying too much about market concentration, though, is to read an article from 20 or 30 years ago that was worrying about the same thing. This is because a lot of the behemoths of yesteryear have since faded into obscurity. ...
• If there is one thing those of us on the pro-globalisation side were wrong about 20 years ago (and in Chapter 7, Norberg is very open about that), it was our belief that freer trade and freer markets would lead to the spread of Western liberal values, and Western-style liberal democracies. In China, this has clearly not happened. Under Xi Jinping, China has gone into reverse, both in terms of economic and political liberty. However, none of this means that economic nationalists, who seek to decouple Western economies from China, are right.... 
• One of the weirder phenomena of the past five years or so was the rise of a new wave of militant, anti-capitalist eco-movements: the Greta Thunberg movement, Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, and their various offshoots and counterparts in other countries. It is weird because it happened after the environmentalist side had already won the debate on climate change. ... On green issues, anti-capitalists are as wrong as they are about everything else. As Norberg shows in Chapter 8, market economies can and do address environmental problems very effectively.

All in all, the slightly older Norberg skewers the bad of ideas of the 2020s as effectively as the young Norberg skewered the bad idea of the early 2000s.

>> FULL REVIEW HERE: PART ONE  AND PART TWO.

IDENTITY POLITICS, Conclusion: It's Not a Right/Left Issue

 

Remember when you just took people as you found them? You didn't need to first check their tribe, their pronouns, their penis, or their "privilege." Alright, true, that wasn't all entirely universal -- but for a time there, it was at least the aim, wasn't it? 

That was, until today's identity politics took over.  Watching the increasing re-tribalisation of political life, it was hard to miss its arrival; any folk who did could hardly have missed its explosion in the latest TERF v Trans wars. It's real, and it's odious, and it's here. And it will only go away if you understand it, and fight back.

In today's conclusion of this brief series on the what and why and where and how of the identity politics movement and its origins and spread (first published back in 2019, remember), I remind you that the focus of the attack was (and still is) on our right to speak freely ... and it comes from both sides of the alleged political spectrum...

CONCLUSION: It's Not a Right/Left Issue

"Speaking is not only essential to the transmission of ideas; it is also essential

to the formation and validation of ideas. Speaking is essential to thinking."

~ Craig Biddle

As we’ve seen, this is not a right/left issue – it's bigger than that. Both “sides” of that notional spectrum collectivise people this way. And both sides should be damned for it. 

The right for example argue that race determines IQ and earning power; the left that class and gender determine one’s “privilege.” The right use this issue to oppose immigration because “white culture” is allegedly under threat; the left, to oppose “white privilege” in order to protect privilege’s alleged victims.

They disagree about what your particular collective might be, and what precisely this determines about your group, but they join hands in this deterministic embrace of collectivism. That your race determines your culture.

And both sides of the alleged political spectrum are united in opposing free speech: The left publicly celebrates “diversity,” except for diversity of opinion; while the right just as ostentatiously celebrates “western civilisation” by upholding values that civilisation has rightly damned. 

And the left trumpets “tolerance,” all the while being intolerant of those against tolerance; and at the same time the right celebrates their own intolerance, while seeking to ban those who are intolerant of them. 

And while the left wants to shut down and deplatform speakers on public streets and in public universities [and, most recently, in Albert Park], the right wants to regulate and control speech on Facebook, Twitter and on other private social media.[ii] 

The allegedly opposed political tribes are neither opposed nor rational, but on this point they agree fundamentally: the group above all. All they're really arguing about is: "Which group?"

Let me remind you of the three things missing here in all this: your own choices, your own values, your individuality, and your free speech. The values, in short that did build this civilisation, the values these barbarians have dropped. Defending civilisation should begin with embracing those values, and rejecting their tribalism. Because, remember this: "if the west resorts to tribalism to defend civilisation, then civilisation is already irredeemably lost."[iii]

If there is a "side," then it's this one: those on the side of reason, individualism and civilisation, and those against.

Because it's not about left versus right. Or our gang against your gang. That's a pathetic phone war. It's about individualism against collectivism -- especially, in these times, about individualism against this barnyard form of collectivism that has been building and incubating  on either side of the political spectrum, and is now very dangerously busting out again -- and in our own backyard.

The threat to civilisation is not "invaders" from elsewhere. It's our own awful ideas.

Arguing that race trumps reason -- that's wrong. And it leads to much worse.

Identifying collectives by means of race -- seeing conflict as inevitable and racially driven -- identifying ourselves or others by collectives, especially racial or religious or gender-based collectives -- is as deluded as it is deadly.

And it's dangerous whichever side of the alleged political spectrum from which it emerges.

The right's adoption of "identitarian" race-based politics in answer to the left's introduction of identity politics is wrong. Dangerously wrong. Irredeemably wrong. "Crushing the left" by adopting their tactics, strategies, and identity politics is not any kind of "winning" -- it's being captured whole. Killing people in the name of your racial identity is a throwback to a kind of barbarism that should have been, but still hasn't, been buried.

The politics of race is as vile when imposed by the left as it when spat out by the right; it has no place in civilisation.

Bad ideas can only be fought by better ideas. And that, right there, is the value to every one of us of free speech: in an environment of free and open exchange of ideas, we get to hear and think about this free exchange of ideas for ourselves; and the freer the contest, the more likely it is the better ideas that generally win. And then we all do.

It really needn't be a zero-sum conflict.

ENDS 

THIS IS THE FINAL PART of what has become a 7-part series explaining "identity politics," excerpted from one of my chapters in the 2019 book Free Speech Under Attack.

• Part 1: 'What is Identity Politics?'
• Part 2: 'Determinism isn't dead, it just smells that way'
• Part 3: 'Tribal Politics Means Zero-Sum Conflict'
• Part 4: 'Politics + Poly-logic: Marx + Marcuse'
• Part 5: Intersectionality, or: 'How some tribes are made more equal than others'
• Part 6: The right adopts the left’s love child 

 

NOTES 

[ii] See for instance Elizabeth Nolan Brown’s ‘[Trump] White House Seeks Social Media Sob Stories From Conservative Snowflakes,’ Reason, 16 May, 2019.

[iii] Yaron Brook Show podcast, 'NZ Massacre & "White Genocide",' March 19 2019

 

IDENTITY POLITICS, Part 6: The right adopts the left’s love child

 

As we've learned in earlier posts in this series, the left began and embraced the anti-reason collectivism of identity politics, using it as a lever by which to grasp power.  But as this post points out, the grotesqueries of tribalism work both ways.

Written soon after the Christchurch mosque murders, the post argues that the tribalism of identity politics has been picked up by what passes for the right of the political spectrum -- picked up, and turned into something savage and wholly odious ...

The right adopts the left’s love child

"The [Christchurch murderer] is ideologically on the same side as the 

Jihadists: he's moved by the idea that people are essentially parts of 

tribes, defined by ancestry & tradition, that are vying to 'replace' or 

repress one another. This idea must be opposed in all its forms." 

~ Greg Salmieri

IDENTITY POLITICS IS TRIBAL.  We are tribalised by others by gender, by race, by sexuality, or by “privilege.” (Or by all of the above!) Our “tribe” is how the progressive left now defines each of us and, if necessary silences us as well.

While this modern tribalism emerged on the left, it has now been fully embraced by the right – in another, but equally destructive form.

The left’s impugning of the white, the middle-class, the so-called privileged was bound to lead to a reaction from those being so labelled. But rather than argue against this flagrantly irrational collectivism on the basis of reason and of rational ethical standards, the reaction of some on the right has instead been to embrace it -- to embrace it on behalf of “whiteness” and “privilege.”

"Proud to be white!" say their T-shirts and bumper-stickers, unaware they're allowing their alleged adversaries to define them.

If the left, as a policy, had adopted so called “reverse racism,” then this new movement, calling themselves the Alt-Right, was willing to openly adopt its adverse: real and original racism. "If they're going to call us 'racists'," goes the (non) thinking, "then let's go balls deep."

That in a nutshell is what the Alt-Right represents: the politics of race, reversed. And with it we’re back to the very racism that the right originally opposed. Because the Republican Party, as representative of the Old Right, was formed before the US Civil War to explicitly oppose black slavery.  

“There can be no denial of rights on account of colour” declared Radical Republican leader Charles Sumner when eulogising Lincoln at his burial. This is how the "right" spoke then. Not now. Not any more. In recent times they've been slamming immigrants, spewing anti-semitism, talking about so-called "race realism," and scaremongering about so-called "white genocide." 

With this discussion of the Alt-Right, you might notice that we’re also right back to the gunman with whom we began this seven-part series. The “race realism” his tract upholds is a demand that the only realistic racial policy that governments should enforce is separatism. This is the so-called “replacement theory” for which he killed 51 people, the misbegotten notion that white people are being "replaced" by an “invasion” of more fertile coloured immigrants. After this and similarly-motivated massacres in El Paso and in Pittsburgh, Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill described these animals as “the armed wing of identity politics.”

They are armed. And they are barbarians. But this is identity politics taken to its logical conclusion.

And this -- all of this -- is very far from the reason, individualism and individual rights on which western civilisation was born and grew up (values which the right were once said to embrace). It is simply the violent flip side of the left’s own version of tribalism – a flipping of the intersectionalist’s diagram with the “strong” tribe on top, and very well armed.

If you can smell Nietzsche hovering around at this point, you would not be mistaken.

THE WORLD WOKE UP to this odious movement after an explicitly Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia, just five years back. But it had been incubating for some time, and was emboldened by the populist revolt of Donald Trump’s election, and his pandering to the movement that had helped put him there. ("Very fine people on both sides," he famously said when asked.) 

But they had been around much, much longer than that. 

The two “sides” exposed themselves four or five years ago in an online “call to arms” over four women of colour in the US House of Representatives, including Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which was known as “The Squad.” Trump set off another small eruption heard around the world by tweeting that these women should “go home.” His supporters then began unthinkingly chanting “Send them home!” (oblivious to the fact that three of the four women were born in America). In response to this, many supporters of The Squad began reflexively chanting “Racist,” “Racist,” “Racist.” And on Twitter, almost immediately, two hashtags began trending: #IStandWithIlhan and #IStandWithPresTrump – the call going out for both sides to “pick a team.”

Such is the level to which public debate has descended in the United States of America.

OF COURSE, AS SOMEONE who thinks for themselves, one should choose neither “side.” As an independent thinker, one would recognise the implicit tribalism for what it is. As an individualist, you would reject the implicit demand from the drones that you pick a tribe and stick with it, no matter what.

The right's adoption of this tribalist "identitarian" race-based politics however, in answer to the left's introduction of identity politics is wrong. Dangerously wrong. Irredeemably wrong. "Crushing the left" by adopting their tactics, strategies, and identity politics is not any kind of "winning" -- it's being captured whole. Most particularly, killing people in the name of your racial identity is a throwback to a kind of barbarism that should have been, but still hasn't, been buried.

The politics of race is as vile when imposed by the left as it when spat out by the right; it has no place in civilisation.

For folk sympathetic to the Alt-Right, the Christchurch mosque murders should have been a wake-up call. For many of them, subscribing to Alt-Right identity politics however is simply their way of "owning the Libtards." Trolling them. They apparently don't realise that it's them being "owned" by the very irrational collectivism they (sometimes) claim to oppose, while releasing this barbarism from the crypt where it was deservedly buried.

They apparently don't realise that the opposite of Leftist identity politics is not the Alt-Right and its own politics of white supremacy. That these are both forms of the same thing: both forms of collectivism, both of which must be shunned. That the opposite of identity politics is not the creation of an identity politics of your own: the opposite of identity politics is individualism.

In the slogan of Quilliam's Maajid Nawaz (fig. 5, above), the controlling left and the Alt-Right must both be damned to hell[3] -- their shared identity politics condemned altogether as being the politics of the group, of the tribe, of the race. Racism, as Ayn Rand identified, being "the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism," a "barnyard" form of collectivism appropriate only to a mentality "that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men."[4]

Because, like every form of determinism, it removes the thing that makes us truly human: our ability to think and to choose.

AND POST-CHRISTCHURCH? The political reaction worldwide to the Christchurch shooting was as swift as it was self-destructive, ramping up threats to free speech with an across-the-board call for massive online censorship—social media platforms and governments "voluntarily" teaming up to ban "violent extremist content." As Reason’s Nick Gillespie wondered out loud: “What could possibly go wrong?”

What the New Zealand government did in the wake of the Christchurch, New Zealand, mass shooting, should disturb anyone who believes in free speech. The government went so far as to ban the manifesto of the shooter and video of the shooting… “possession of either the video or the manifesto by unauthorised individuals is punishable by up to 10 years in prison and NZ$50,000, while distribution can get you 14 years behind bars.” 

That's simply terrifying and positively dystopian. Do people really think that possessing a book or a text or a video means the owner is enslaved by it or even agrees with its messages? …

This sort of response makes me think of Stetson Kennedy, who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s and revealed just how banal and childish many of their rituals, titles, and activities were in his 1954 blockbuster ‘I Rode with the Ku Klux Klan.’ The level of ridicule he brought to bear on the Klan helped destroy its credibility and power. Something similar happened to Scientology when its secret documents were made public via the internet in the early 1990s ... On a pragmatic level, the idea that hiding details and suppressing information about extremists will reduce their power seems wrong.

More fundamentally, though, it should be deeply worrying to anyone who believes in free expression that governments and corporations are openly working together to decide what is and is not acceptable speech…

Between threatened crackdowns by Republicans and Democrats and European Union bureaucrats and cave-ins by tech giants trying to preserve market positions, it's right to fear that the era of the open internet is almost certainly over.

Practitioners of politics exploit every opportunity, however grotesque. Post-Christchurch, their motive wasn't primarily empathy, it was "never let a good crisis go to waste." And the focus of their attack was (and still is) on our right to speak freely ... 

CONCLUDED IN PART 7: 'It's Not a Right/Left Issue'

PART 6 in a series explaining "identity politics," excerpted from one of my chapters in the 2019 book Free Speech Under Attack.

• Part 1: 'What is Identity Politics?'
• Part 2: 'Determinism isn't dead, it just smells that way'
• Part 3: 'Tribal Politics Means Zero-Sum Conflict'
• Part 4: 'Politics + Poly-logic: Marx + Marcuse'
• Part 5: Intersectionality, or: 'How some tribes are made more equal than others'

"Many young people had suddenly—around 2013—embraced three great untruths"

"There are at least two ways to explain why liberal girls became depressed faster than other groups at the exact time (around 2012) when teens traded in their flip phones for smartphones and the girls joined Instagram en masse. The first and simplest explanation is that liberal girls simply used social media more than any other group.... But I think there’s more going on here ... there’s something about the messages liberal girls consume that is more damaging to mental health than those consumed by other groups.
 

   ""[T]een mental health is not and must not become a partisan issue... [but we can't ignore that] 'progressive institutional leaders have specifically taught young progressives that catastrophising is a good way to get what they want'.... on the other side of the political spectrum, there was 'the most insensitive culture imaginable, which was the culture of 4chan.' The communities involved in gender activism on Tumblr were mostly young progressive women while 4Chan was mostly used by right-leaning young men ... The two communities supercharged each other with their mutual hatred ...
    "The young identity activists on Tumblr embraced their new notions of identity, fragility, and trauma all the more tightly, increasingly saying that words are a form of violence, while the young men on 4chan moved in the opposite direction: they brandished a rough and rude masculinity in which status was gained by using words more insensitively than the next guy..

 

   "... I think the messages young, liberal women are hearing (every day, around the clock) are doing them no good.
    "Seemingly learning to view every single interaction through an intersectionalist lens, while searching for the ways in which you're being victimised by everyone on the planet who disagrees with you, makes you depressed. Crazy.
    "The 4Chan backlash was always inevitable (and is equally self-pitying and responsibility-denying).
I really feel for kids today. Instinctively I know the answer is to retreat from it all and engage with the world in a more physical, productive way, but opportunities to do that are dwindling'....

    "Thinking of ourselves as oppressed or infirm may inadvertently cultivate what psychologists call an external locus of control. Locus of control is a psychological concept articulated in the 1950s by Julian Rotter. Those with an internal locus of control experience themselves as able to influence outcomes that affect them. Those with an external locus of control feel that most of what happens to them is beyond their ability to affect.

    "Though both external and internal loci of control confer advantages and disadvantages, research has shown that having an internal locus of control is associated with less stress and better health, whereas having an external locus of control is correlated with anxiety disorders. Importantly, an internal locus of control appears to be a decisive factor in determining whether one will be psychologically resilient. As a society, therefore, it is in our interest to cultivate an internal locus of control, and indeed, the popular notions of grit and mindset are undergirded by locus of control theory. However, some [online and educational] environments [have been] fostering its opposite.....

    "In conclusion, I believe that Greg Lukianoff was exactly right in the diagnosis he shared with me in 2014. Many young people had suddenly—around 2013—embraced three great untruths:
    "They came to believe that they were fragile and would be harmed by books, speakers, and words, which they learned were forms of violence (Great Untruth #1).
    "They came to believe that their emotions—especially their anxieties—were reliable guides to reality (Great Untruth #2).
    "They came to see society as comprised of victims and oppressors—good people and bad people (Great Untruth #3)....

     "[And yet c]reating a society in which we are encouraged to confront anxiety and face difficult realities matters not just for the mental health of individuals, but also for our collective well-being. In the world that soon awaits us, humankind will desperately need those individuals willing to rise from their beds. The challenges that loom ahead will require us to set aside timidity, weakness, and victimhood and claim instead agency and boldness, no matter how grim the odds."

~ composite quote from Lisa Marchiano and her article 'Collision with Reality: What Depth Psychology Can Tell us About Victimhood Culture,' Jonathan Haidt, from his article 'Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest,' and comment by Ria Parkinson [hat tip Paul Litterick and Ria Parkinson]