Why in Order for Democracy to Prevail, We Must Prioritize the Self-interest of the Common Taxpayer, and Nobody Else
Why This Blog is for Suburban Jocks and Moms
“Anyway, all of this is to say that I’ve lost my patience for people with grandiose ideas for revolutionary this and radical that. We have two parties that have convinced themselves that the solution to all of our problems is eliminating the other party so they can rule—not govern—unobstructed. And any policy that seems like a concession to the other party’s arguments is a non-starter or a moral betrayal. Most Americans like immigrants, but they think they should come here according to the rules. Most Americans consider abortion on demand at any stage of pregnancy to be morally objectionable. But most Americans also think blanket abortion bans are too draconian. Most Americans have sympathy for the poor, but little sympathy for violent criminals, regardless of their motives or their net worth. Most Americans would like the government to do something about the problems in their lives that government is suited to do something about effectively. Normal people can debate what those problems and solutions might be. But our political system punishes normalcy as a kind of heresy.” Jonah Goldberg, “In Praise of Normalcy” ~ The Dispatch
“… Democracy needs moderates. Moderates are not only important for the role they play in deciding close elections, but because their positions are useful and virtuous. “Moderate” is not some constantly shifting position between two more extreme and authentic positions: Rather, it sees a distinction between politics as a religion—as a salvation—and politics as a way to accommodate a diversity of opinion that still recognizes the greater good of the community. At its heart, moderation is absolutely necessary for a republican democracy—and essential to maintaining a viable constitutional order in America.” — Joseph Romance, “Why America Needs Moderates” ~ Discourse
The other week I read a quite inspiring op-ed in National Review, “We Need a Revenge of the Jocks,” by Wilfred Reilly, who observes that one of the congressmen in Tennessee kicked off the legislature, only to be reinstated, for, as I wrote a short piece about, interrupting a legislative proceeding with a bullhorn protesting gun violence—was once a preppy kid who went to Boudoin; as Reilly describes from an old video posted on the internet, “a shaven-headed Pearson rocks a natty dove-gray suit with striped tie, talks in upper-middle-class General American, and speaks about “bringing together everyone from the College Democrats to the College Republicans.” Rather than the divisive firebrand attempting to reincarnate, but only caricaturing, Malcolm X that he has become today.”
Reilly notes how more and more people statistically are attempting to identify themselves as ethnic and also sexual minorities, just to fit in. Where it used to be that minorities sought acceptance from majorities, now majorities seek acceptance from minorities. He says,
“…oppression itself has a prestige or cachet that perversely confers ranking within society, in that all those who lack oppression credentials should “do the work” of submissively listening to those who do. A corollary idea is that large majorities should, in general, strive to accommodate small minorities rather than vice versa.”
He writes,
“The idea that one should “do the work,” listen primarily to “POC,” and so forth is the core thesis of quite mainstream trainings such as NPR’s “life kit,” “How To Survive In A Mostly White Workplace: Tips For Marginalized Employees.” The idea that a societal minority should be accommodated even when tiny also largely explains concessions made to the transgender movement, and is why, these days, the probably 99.5 percent majority of women who see themselves simply as women often find themselves referred to as “people with uteruses” or “people who menstruate/bleeders,” and see their anatomical features referred to as “front holes,” and so forth.
“This shift in social preferences — combined with the existence of hard advantages like affirmative action — has apparently had an unsurprising empirical effect on behavior. No less a leftist than Ibram “X.” Kendi recently shared data indicating that one-third of all white applicants to American colleges now describe themselves as something else in racial terms, such as Native American or Hispanic. At the same time, 20 percent of all young (ages 18–34) Americans now say that they are gay, or at least members of the increasingly broad and alphabetically lengthening LGBTQIA etc. community.
Amusingly and importantly, there is some question about what this latter figure actually implies. At least among women, 55 percent of young “bisexuals” — up from 13 percent just ten years ago — say they have had only heterosexual sex during the last five years; many have never had sex with a woman.”
Moreover it’s “unsurprising” to Reilly that affirmative action seems to have given people perverse incentives to fake their minority status to exploit its power as a credential. I appreciated his opinion, not only since I passionately agree we do need a “revenge of the jocks,” but because he shares my curiosity regarding the vicissitudes of social morality.
As Nietzsche would have also found, this belief that one’s particularist alleged victimhood confers universal superior status, such that people feel guilty just for not being victims—is an example of what we might call the bad conscience of entrenched, rote Christian social morals.
Indeed the self-induced guilt-ridden, guilt driven progressivism, motivating the compulsive desire to associate and identify oneself in every way with the idealized minority, is social democracy supercharged to a paradoxically undemocratic extreme. However, it is the Christian virtue component of traditional democratic values—hence the increasing blurring of the lines between “democracy” and progressive ideology in progressive-speak—corroding democratic norms…
Some people call it secular religion, antiracism, environmentalism, the neverending LGBT acronym. And I would argue it’s not just a left-wing thing. The MAGA movement, which is only progressivism in reverse, mirrors the obsession with the minority, as opposed to the majority. Where conservatives were never supposed to care very much about the working class, or class at all, now Desantis-Trump Republicans are all falling over themselves with saccharine, smarmy compassion for the proletariat, the “silent majority,” i. e. the forgotten, the abandoned, deindustrialized lost poor, pure soul—the nativist myth of the original and the true Americans.
MAGA is only social justice for old and/or uneducated white guys. And both left social justice wokeism and right social justice MAGAism, are forms of collectivism which borrow from democratic ideals and virtues—in the crudest way possible—using democratic language, ranging from diversity, equity, inclusion, sustainability, to freedom, to rights (“parental rights”); but they all, both factions, engage in this rhetorical mass manipulation, just to game the system for their tribe and usurp the norms, rules, and laws that make democracy possible. George Will in a fascinating WSJ interview said the weird about these times is how each tribe is seeking to shape your consciousness. Not persuade you with argument, like one was formerly supposed to in a pluralistic democracy, the left and the right are literally trying to brainwash or convert you to their cultish religion. Whether it’s “equity” or “net zero,” or “Trump won,” or “it’s a witch hunt,” factions want to control your thoughts.
Introduction— The Concerns of the Marginalized or Excluded are all Ridiculous and Incompatible with the Democratic Order
This was actually more or less the reason I started this newsletter. I observed that on the hard right as well as the hard left, their demands corresponded with and were giving rise to a kind of digital age moral revolution, which threatened to destabilize the international order abroad, as well as undermine the rule of law at home. This moral revolution—which I would regard as a kind of moral terrorism— which emphasizes pity for people who have been marginalized, or excluded and left behind: I noticed has even managed to dupe some of the elites to think more or less maybe the populists have a point. So that formerly market friendly center left people like Joe Biden have turned into progressive demagogues, and center right columnists like David Brooks or Ross Douthat have been duped, fearfully, into thinking the populists need to be accomodated somehow. Brooks who never would have said this way back, said recently on PBS News Hour, that the government must do something about the nation’s mental health crisis. Ross Douthat has argued that we need a “revival” of Christianity. And jus about everyone who formerly supported the Iraq war have turned against such “adventures” or “entanglements” hanging their heads in shame. Max Boot is a great example, perhaps the most vocal of the self-lacerating ex neocons.
It’s very disappointing and frightening to me that so many moderates and centrists seem to believe that populism should be appeased, and the minority of the population deserves a larger voice—populism right and left, whose absurd moral causes range from parents’ whims, or teens’ mental health, or fentanyl victims, masculinity in crisis, “big tech,” or gender transitioning that some progressives argue counts as healthcare, or the manufacturing whose wages are alleged to be stagnating (they’re not!!).
But that fewer and fewer people still care about liberal interventionism, individual liberty, and private sector solutions, not to mention free trade— people seem to hate globalization the most—is the real danger to democracy. And moderate elites who think populist concerns can be accommodated or appeased are wrong, and they’re making a grave error. Populism and democracy are an unstable contradiction which we can never harmonize, and that we cannot risk trying to make work. Populism by definition can never be satisfied. Democracy cannot accomodate populism without inevitably undermining the rule of law. Take FDR. Take Nixon— our two most illiberal presidencies. In the extreme, take Weimar Germany when Hitler slowly came into government. Partly because of the complacency of elites, he was allowed to steal absolute power through a small parliamentary maneuver. Populism and whiny factions and their marginal grievances, teens’ “mental health,” “parents’ rights,” or “border security,” cannot and must not be given any space in the system to fester.
Certainly, I should mention, a not insignificant number of moderates haven’t suffered this crisis of confidence, and while rejecting populism have not allowed themselves to be cowed into believing that either MAGA or the woke have any point. George Will, Peggy Noonan, Jonah Goldberg and many others are still adamantly principled Reagan conservatives. And David French and Tom Nichols still defend the Iraq War. If anything populism has just excited the contempt of George Will, Tom Nichols and Peggy Noonan thankfully. Will denounces Trump’s politics as “cry baby conservatism.” Tom Nichols has no qualms about blaming mass culture and narcissism for our political problems. In one of his newsletters recently, I was exhilarated to read his announcement that it’s time that rather than trying to understand Trumpers, we acknowledge their “moral failure.” Peggy Noonan in a recent column on Ron Desantis’s candidacy said he struck her as someone who might unplug your life support to charge his smart phone. My friend Claire Berlinski’s Cosmopolitan Globalist Substack is also wonderfully unfriendly to populist nonsense. Martin Wolf of the Financial Times has also gone out of his way in some brilliant opeds to warn against what he considers in his latest book the crisis of democratic capitalism. And Brink Lindsey on his the “Permanent Problem” Substack, wrestles very intelligently with the psychological discontents afflicting markets and democracy.
Those above and some others frequently exhibit the kind of noble centrist pure-minded faith in the old system the western world needs now more than ever. I think there’s still too little of it. As Reilly says in this National Review column after my own heart, we need a “revenge of the jocks.” That is to say we need our lax bro establishment Romney Republicans to have the confidence in their own principles and stand up and take back the right, and not to be ashamed of their class privilege or their income status, or their belief in markets or intervening using hard power abroad to protect the liberal international order. Rather we should give the woke antiracist left and the white working class right: no pity. We should be working to fireproof democratic capitalism against rentseeking capture by aggrieved status-envying collectivists, crippled by their utterly nonsensical absurd cultural despair which is entirely without merit.
Unabashed and unapologetic white collar moderates of each left or right leaning, need to stand on principle now. People who want to reform social security, and admit that our economy desperately needs more immigration, and that Putin has to be defeated in Ukraine at all cost, who has the courage to admit that a nuclear Iran must be prevented by any means necessary since it would create a whole new axis powers between the IRGC, Russia, China and North Korea, and who believe free markets are the best means for addressing climate change.
More people need to stand up and decidedly put abortion, climate change, workers, and social justice transgender issues and cultural grievances on the backburner, perhaps never to be taken seriously, and instead prioritize: reducing deficits, reforming budgets, reducing inflation, entitlement reform, tax reform, welfare reform, writing new free trade agreements, and defense, defense, defense!!!
I. A Great Encounter
In the grocery store recently I was ringing up a mom whose young kids I used to teach tennis a few years ago when I was a tennis instructor at a private club. She asked me what I had been up to, and I was telling her how I want to pursue a career in writing, that I had written two novels, and then I ended up telling her about the Neoliberal Standard of course. I told her I started this blog because of how deeply unnerved I had become with the hard left and the hard right, pulling the country apart. I told her how my blog is all about defending the last few decades of Washington Consensus- Milton Friedman-Austrian School assumptions about the role of government, trade and foreign policy against the new postmodern collectivists. When I mentioned reading WSJ she said you’re a Journal guy?” My husband reads the journal too. Not the Times.” I said do you know what neoliberalism is? Yeah kinda she said. As I started going on about “market solutions,” and “free trade,” she was nodding and smiling, and she said, “I think we’re on the same… Capitalism,” she added.
“Yes. Capitalism!” I affirmed.
I was thinking afterward as I packed her groceries and we briefly shared anxiety about the harrowing idea of Central Bank Digital Currency— referring back to Wilfred Reilly’s National Review op-ed— these are the people who really matter. This is what America is really about. This should be the focus of all reasonable political discourse. Smart educated uppermiddle class moms like her, who just want the space, the peace and the stability to rear their families with the minimum of interference and stress, preferably with lower taxes, and less regulation. I’m sure she doesn’t want her kids to grow up to pay skyhigh payroll taxes to fund Social Security and Medicare for Trump supporters retiring at 60 with heart problems. I don’t either.
So it is not LGBT people, or college-educated millennials who want the government to cancel student debt, BLM, and it is not people overdosing on Fentanyl, or workers in unions who matter, or prolife evangelical Christians. Those people are only a fraction of the population, and anyway what do their grievances have anything to do with the rest of us who aren’t complaining, who aren’t doing deadly illegal drugs we know will kill us, and who aren’t transgender, or don’t own guns nor care about them, and taking our own lives from excess social media use?
Why should upper middle class moms like that decent, moderate, also beautiful, center-right mom—consumers and taxpayers— have to be sacrificed for the sake of entitled Trump supporters and violent insurrectionists, and progressive young people and LGBT people with their infinite grievances! You can’t use the god damn government to pay a marginal cohort of people’s bills for them, at the taxpayer’s expense, not student loans any more than mortgages and car payments! It is unjust and also mathematically infeasible to demand the rich to pay for our massively bloated entitlement programs, not just because they’re rich, as Biden proposes! What about people who don’t need the government to pay for social security (like wealthy people)? What about low income immigrants, who did not go to college, who don’t want to cancel educated millennials’ outsize self-incurred debts with their taxes? What about highly skilled, hard working Asian immigrants who know they are being discriminated against by affirmation action policies? What about those of us who aren’t doing Fentanyl? What about people like my mom, who does not have a mental illness who uses Tik Tok as a platform for her real estate job? Why do Republicans want to label drug cartels terrorist organizations, even threatening invading Mexico—when the vast majority of us aren’t addicted to Fentanyl and don’t even do drugs, period? Why are we letting people who do drugs off the hook for their degeneracy, and expecting that our soldiers should fight in Mexico on behalf of drug addicts? Why is Joe Biden all but forcing us to buy expensive, inefficient electric vehicles, just because John Kerry and some activists demand that our whole economy goes totally electric?
II. Why We Need to Have the Courage to Empathize with the Disempowered a Lot Less
I am low in empathy as far as personality goes. I just about never feel someone else’s pain directly as my own. Almost never. In addition, I am not a warm nor a sensitive person. I do not stoop to pet cute dogs in the street (contra Jordan Peterson who apparently advises in one of his books, when you see a cat, pet it). I do not intuitively understand the appeal of having kids even. The main reason I plan on not having kids frankly is that I am unconfident in my ability to love them. However I do have cognitive empathy, and on the cognitive level, I can feel sad how many people are dying of Fentanyl, and I am not immune to anxiety that Tik Tok is controlled by the CCP, and I can understand that transgender people in sports or prisons is unsettling, I agree it’s terrible that young people are committing suicide from social media use. I get all that. However as sexy—meaning fun, sensational that is—as it is to obsess over that stuff—America and the western world has much more to fear from Ukraine being conquered by Russia, or China invading Taiwan and seizing control of the South and East China seas, and/or Iran becoming a nuclear-armed power aligned with Russia and China.
We need to cut spending and reform entitlements now, not just to reduce the deficit and help the Fed fight inflation, but to make room to rapidly increase defense spending. While America retreats from the world militarily and economically to fight absurd domestic culture wars and subsidize clean energy and worker’s wages, authoritarian rogue states armed with nukes are threatening to hijack international energy markets, seize control of trade routes, and commit grievous human rights abuses and even genocide in order to do so.
III. How We Should View The West
America needs to live up to its own original philosophy. It needs to be a city on a hill, a haven for immigrants looking for economic opportunity, and refugees seeking asylum. It needs the dynamism of a free, open market economy, where anyone can succeed with hard work and a little luck, and perhaps become rich. It needs to be a decent, polite, and welcoming commercial republic, not a tribal, coarse, nativist, retaliatory, hostile, protectionist, reactive, explosive, closed society, shooting each other to pieces with assault weapons, defunding the police, shouting each other down at colleges, and cancelling each other, subjecting each other in all events to our own deliberately manufactured grievances to stoke civil unrest just to temporarily self-flagellatingly alleviate our bottomless misery, the product of a generation of self-induced inferiority, and perpetually blaming everybody else for one’s issues but oneself.
It needs to be an individually responsible, meritocratic free society, where jobs and higher education favors the disciplined, the industrious, the talented, and the gifted, with high aptitude scores and good work ethics. We need to be a country that looks up to people who do well for themselves, and we must value expertise. In our service-driven, knowledge-based economy, we need not to pity the working class, but rather to actively admire the doctors, lawyers, journalists, judges, scientists, teachers, surgeons, artists, bankers, entrepreneurs. In short, we need to appreciate the masters of the universe who make us wealthy, and innovate new technologies, and expand the realm of human endeavor. We need to have the courage to admit that resentment, pity, jealousy, envy, and hate is un-American and beneath us. We need to put strong character and bourgeois values like honesty, predictability and punctuality above shallow personality and mediocre entertainment, and the vain pleasure of crass hot topics and hot button issues and all this gross hot this and that. Above all we need to value rational intelligence, dispassionate calm, and reasonable discourse over emotive ignorance and the irrationality of baseless, willful reaction. We need to understand that if there is one single enemy of progress, it is the darkness of ignorance and impulsiveness.
We need to make normalcy, understatement, dryness, self-restraint, humility, privilege, fortune and moderation: affirmative virtues to be proud of, not elitest emblems of privilege of which to be cynically ashamed. American Individualists of all backgrounds and income statuses—black, white, gay, straight, male, female, rich and poor—all of us who believe in liberty, opportunity, freedom and equality must unite to stop the collectivists from gaming the system for their tribe. And in all events, this necessarily involves pitting the rights of the individual against the demands of the group.
IV. The Very Obvious Peril of Submission to Collectivism
If the collectivists succeed, it might not just be the end of America and moral universals, but it would be the end of the liberal capitalist world, ushering in a darker nihilistic zerosum, multipolar, autarkic, feudal, almost medieval age of particularism, subjectivism, and moral relativism, nihilism and certainly mass violence.
Conclusion—Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan are a Fucking Million Times More Important than Braincell-Killing Culture War Disputes
So I exhort my fellow Americans and westerners in general not to think about racism or workers or wokeness or transpeople or the working class, gun rights or gun control or abortion or the climate or any of this irrelevant nonsense—but instead consider the prospect of a nuclear Iran, allied with a genocidal Syria, just readmitted into the Arab league. Consider an Israel under siege from Hamas and Hezbollah. Consider Ukraine against a revanchist Russia that wants to split NATO.
Think big.
Think about your unassuming upper middle class suburban mom, and her subdued wealth, and the future of her kids in the free world. Think about how we can guarantee the security of the normal American family that everything else depends on.
For liberalism’s sake.
— Jay