Long article about a woman who came illegally to the US and made it easier for other illegal immigrants to make a living with fake IDs. As she says, she didn't steal anything, and she's finally free and in the US, but are the regulations, regulations we're supposed to respect because they're regulations, actually accomplishing something worthwhile?
I think the move to legalism in law and the move to language control could be part of the same problem-- it begins to seem like the real world is too hard to deal with, but at least you can be precise about language. Not that language is such an easy problem, but it seems easier.
Yes--the desire to care for and support people gets badly mangled once it becomes a regulatory imperative and gets translated into a huge bureaucratic apparatus--at that point, people in need end up experiencing those original motivations as social control, as remote indifference, or as pure incoherence. The alienation that produces ends up directed not just at "government" writ large but also at the moral consciousness of the social reformers who set the system in motion.
The desire to care for people-- to the extent it's there-- can get so etoliated in the bureaucratic state it's hard to see at all. Who's being taken care of in U.S. immigration policy? Immigrants? The citizens who are afraid of immigrants?
I admit that it could have been much worse. A harsher version of policy could have left Priscilla much worse off.
Please write something about how young people should confront the world were living in-not necessarily the specific politics but the attitudes and historical reference point we can look at to think about the kind of agency we have in these times
Ganz is what is inspiring me to think this way, really, but this is just off-the-cuff--his dive is so detailed and thoughtful. I think he's got the story of the opposition and in some very new ways--including the sources of resentment towards people who thought they were making the world better.
I think in a lot of cases that you describe an issue is that different groups speak different languages. Political conservatives, for instance, speak the language of economist. They boil the world down to an Econ 101 model which not only fails to grasp the limits of both (1) what that model captures (for instance, assuming that the choice to engage in leisure rather than work is “bad” because it lowers output, without considering that choosing to produce and consume less but relax more is a quite valid and often in fact good choice to make for people’s well being), but also (2) how that model works. The Econ 101 model, for instance, breaks down when parties have asymmetric information or when decisions impose externalities.
But on the other hand, self described progressives are often guilty of an equal and opposite error— painting all issues as morality plays where people’s suffering must be caused by some person or entity’s bad character (typically, “the rich” or “corporations”) and not something for which there is a useful toolkit to solve problems.
So you see things like a housing debate where the right declares that if only government would get out of the way, housing would magically become cheap (usually without defining where it’s in the way to start with), while the left declares that if only government would punish landlords and stop them from raising prices, everyone would have cheap rent and/or a house of their own.
When we’ve been at our best as a society, it’s been at times where the market has been allowed to operate subject to reasonable regulation and intervention. Inevitably, that balance fell apart. I’m not sure there’s a way to restore it, but I wish there was.
As I said about the first part, this is a gorgeous essay. This clear-eyed diagnosis of the progressive-liberal mindset combined with fully facing this climacteric political moment is decidedly NOT what I read elsewhere. The current discourse is to obsessed with each writer's own interests. Status and language games trump coalition building. The incentives work against coalition building and speaking plainly about politics.
I continue to think, perhaps too wistfully, of the 1930s as a model for what may come. The intellectuals and artists of that moment were enamored of Red Plenty (how could they know?) even as the New Deal coopted enough of the energy of the popular front to give us actual, if limited, progress. But, in the cultural criticism and literature of the period, I hear the pass-word primeval and see the sign of democracy.
Absent actually existing alternatives, we are faced with trying to tame capitalism through some form of democratic socialism or anarchical resistance, or what?
"We see that while many were supposing things established and completed, really the grandest things always remain; and discover that the work of the New World is not ended, but only fairly begun.” -Democratic Vistas
Thanks again. You really grasp something important about why I stepped away from my own content cycle here--I feel like it's time to stop trying to move various rhetorical and argumentative balls down field an inch at a time within very preset rules. Every single policy commitment or issue that matters to people who still connect themselves to what I'm calling the mindset here needs to be reverse-engineered from its present endstate, with all the incredibly fixed propositional terrain that surrounds it, to find out why we felt strongly about that issue or problem in the first place. And yeah, the 1930s seem one place to look for guidance (and hope, even)--Dan Gardner had a very nice essay this week on his Substack about Huey Long that reminded me that Long, as odious as he was in how he held power, effectively pushed FDR and his advisors to push the New Deal even farther, precisely because Long's national message was gaining so much traction.
Part of the situation is that that the regulatory state can be astonishingly cruel.
https://www.wired.com/story/priscila-queen-of-the-rideshare-mafia/
Long article about a woman who came illegally to the US and made it easier for other illegal immigrants to make a living with fake IDs. As she says, she didn't steal anything, and she's finally free and in the US, but are the regulations, regulations we're supposed to respect because they're regulations, actually accomplishing something worthwhile?
I think the move to legalism in law and the move to language control could be part of the same problem-- it begins to seem like the real world is too hard to deal with, but at least you can be precise about language. Not that language is such an easy problem, but it seems easier.
Yes--the desire to care for and support people gets badly mangled once it becomes a regulatory imperative and gets translated into a huge bureaucratic apparatus--at that point, people in need end up experiencing those original motivations as social control, as remote indifference, or as pure incoherence. The alienation that produces ends up directed not just at "government" writ large but also at the moral consciousness of the social reformers who set the system in motion.
The desire to care for people-- to the extent it's there-- can get so etoliated in the bureaucratic state it's hard to see at all. Who's being taken care of in U.S. immigration policy? Immigrants? The citizens who are afraid of immigrants?
I admit that it could have been much worse. A harsher version of policy could have left Priscilla much worse off.
Please write something about how young people should confront the world were living in-not necessarily the specific politics but the attitudes and historical reference point we can look at to think about the kind of agency we have in these times
This is what I'm going to work towards in the last installment.
I'm really enjoying this series of posts! I've been slowly making my way through John Ganz's When the Clock Broke (https://bookshop.org/p/books/when-the-clock-broke-con-men-conspiracists-and-how-america-cracked-up-in-the-early-1990s-john-ganz/20374722), which provides an interesting alternate timeline. I'll have to do more work to match them up, but it's been a really compelling pairing. So thanks! -cgb
Ganz is what is inspiring me to think this way, really, but this is just off-the-cuff--his dive is so detailed and thoughtful. I think he's got the story of the opposition and in some very new ways--including the sources of resentment towards people who thought they were making the world better.
I think in a lot of cases that you describe an issue is that different groups speak different languages. Political conservatives, for instance, speak the language of economist. They boil the world down to an Econ 101 model which not only fails to grasp the limits of both (1) what that model captures (for instance, assuming that the choice to engage in leisure rather than work is “bad” because it lowers output, without considering that choosing to produce and consume less but relax more is a quite valid and often in fact good choice to make for people’s well being), but also (2) how that model works. The Econ 101 model, for instance, breaks down when parties have asymmetric information or when decisions impose externalities.
But on the other hand, self described progressives are often guilty of an equal and opposite error— painting all issues as morality plays where people’s suffering must be caused by some person or entity’s bad character (typically, “the rich” or “corporations”) and not something for which there is a useful toolkit to solve problems.
So you see things like a housing debate where the right declares that if only government would get out of the way, housing would magically become cheap (usually without defining where it’s in the way to start with), while the left declares that if only government would punish landlords and stop them from raising prices, everyone would have cheap rent and/or a house of their own.
When we’ve been at our best as a society, it’s been at times where the market has been allowed to operate subject to reasonable regulation and intervention. Inevitably, that balance fell apart. I’m not sure there’s a way to restore it, but I wish there was.
As I said about the first part, this is a gorgeous essay. This clear-eyed diagnosis of the progressive-liberal mindset combined with fully facing this climacteric political moment is decidedly NOT what I read elsewhere. The current discourse is to obsessed with each writer's own interests. Status and language games trump coalition building. The incentives work against coalition building and speaking plainly about politics.
I continue to think, perhaps too wistfully, of the 1930s as a model for what may come. The intellectuals and artists of that moment were enamored of Red Plenty (how could they know?) even as the New Deal coopted enough of the energy of the popular front to give us actual, if limited, progress. But, in the cultural criticism and literature of the period, I hear the pass-word primeval and see the sign of democracy.
Absent actually existing alternatives, we are faced with trying to tame capitalism through some form of democratic socialism or anarchical resistance, or what?
"We see that while many were supposing things established and completed, really the grandest things always remain; and discover that the work of the New World is not ended, but only fairly begun.” -Democratic Vistas
Thanks again. You really grasp something important about why I stepped away from my own content cycle here--I feel like it's time to stop trying to move various rhetorical and argumentative balls down field an inch at a time within very preset rules. Every single policy commitment or issue that matters to people who still connect themselves to what I'm calling the mindset here needs to be reverse-engineered from its present endstate, with all the incredibly fixed propositional terrain that surrounds it, to find out why we felt strongly about that issue or problem in the first place. And yeah, the 1930s seem one place to look for guidance (and hope, even)--Dan Gardner had a very nice essay this week on his Substack about Huey Long that reminded me that Long, as odious as he was in how he held power, effectively pushed FDR and his advisors to push the New Deal even farther, precisely because Long's national message was gaining so much traction.