From my new column in Taki's Magazine:
The Derbyshire Affair, America’s latest Two Minutes Hate over race, provides a fresh example with which to assess social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s framework for why some people are liberal and others conservative. Although Haidt’s readable new book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, does much to explain this dichotomy, he never quite articulates the most fundamental explanation.
I don't recall ever articulating quite so reductionistically before my theory of what, deep down, distinguishes liberals and conservatives, of what decides who the "Who?" in "Who? Whom?" will be.
So, read the whole thing there, and see if it makes sense to you. I didn't give a lot of examples, but I think you'll be able to come up with some.
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92 comments:
"Who? Whom?"
Can someone explain what this phrase means. I see it repeated often on this website.
In Haidt’s conception, liberals are the ideological descendants of John Stuart Mill, valuing “individual autonomy” über alles so long as it does no harm to anyone else. In contrast, conservatives have a broader range of concerns such as sanctity, authority, and loyalty.
I think you will find that these are all rationalizations for behavior that they subconsciously think is in their best interests.
There's something fundamentally ... pathetic about trying to be overly intellectual about this.
The people who 'hated' on Derbyshire, to the point of wanting to see him/advocating that he lose his job, are abject hypocrites -- cowardly, approval-seeking sycophants of political correctness. Scum. They are the 'intellectual' enemies of what America should stand for (one of its basic freedoms anyway), not to mention the enemies of the traditional demographic nation of America (most of them).
That's my analysis.
Yes, there may be leap frogging among white liberals, but it's not arbitrary. And the blue folks in AVATAR were stand-ins for certain groups over here.
After all, Uighurs seem to be suffering in China, but how much leapfrogging sympathy among white liberals do you see? Palestinians get it in the neck from Zionists, but I don't see much white Democratic outcry about it.
I don't think most white liberals discover on their own what to worry or weep about. Their attentions and sympathies DIRECTED by the powers that be. (Even in this age of social networking, judging by both liberals and conservatives on facebook, I get the impression that most people just wanna nod along or jump on the bandwagon of certain 'hot topic' causes, often cherry picked by media elites and manipulators.)
And who are the powers that control the media?
I was watching the HELLSTROM CHRONICLES. Most people are like drones or worker bees. Who controls the signals that make workers and drones act in a certain way?
I think liberals are under the control of liberal elites, often Jewish.
Conservatives follow a different set of elites. Both sides are drones. Once, liberalism was all about freedom and liberty when its elites said so. Today, liberal elites say liberalism is all about 'gay marriage' and 'hate speech control' and most liberal drones just go along. I mean wow!!
In the past, conservative elites said conservatism is about America First and Protectionism, and most cons went along. Then conzo elites said conservatism is all about MLK worship, free trade, and pro-
Zionism, and lo and behold, most cons now think conservatism is bombing Muslims to 'save Israel'. I mean wow.
Am I wrong on this, or do liberals of other races get to be conservatives according to your definition, provided that they are in favor of continuing the ethnic spoils program?
I'd offer a correction: In contrast, modern white liberals’ defining trait is making a public spectacle of how their loyalties leapfrog over some unworthy folks relatively close to them in favor of other people they barely know.
The problem with discussing "Liberals" is what kind of "Liberal" are we discussing? Jewish Liberals? Black Liberals? Soccer Moms? Your old Aunt who's a "Eleanor Roosevelt type" liberal? Or the young SWPL liberal?
I like your analysis, but I think there's a difference between minority group liberalism which is basically just a variation on "Is it good for the XYZ's" and Majority liberalism which is what you (and the psychologist) seem to be discussing.
Haidt's 2010 short article about the Tea Party notion of "karma" in the WSJ was one of the better things yet written on that phenomenon.
Liberals aren't the only people who have leap frogging loyalties. Many conservative Christians place Israel's interests above the interests of their fellow Americans and of Christians who live in the Middle East.
The emphasis of liberals and libertarians on fighting oppression, but a weaker emphasis on fairness and loyalty explains the disconnect both groups have regarding the state of African Americans and its relation to immigration.
We've seen the Left get foamy-mouthed about the injustice done to Trayvon or any number of young black men, but they never seem to realize that by insisting on America remaining "open" they are economically screwing said young black men over.
It's been my experience that this conundrum is usually only a conundrum for the Center-Left. The far Left will argue for the international destruction of the plutocracy and their bourgeois enablers. Your Democrat Centrist on the other hand can never offer an answer. They often get huffy, and sort of insist everything will come out in the wash if only we all learn to work together and the GOP quit being obstructionists.
Heh Heh. This is brilliant, Steve. But couldn't you have made it a bit longer? As Richard Nixon observed, Politics is the art of over simplifying things. You have an insight into the liberal mindset, but you will gain no traction until liberals themselves look into the mirror and recognize themselves.
In Haidt’s conception, liberals are the ideological descendants of John Stuart Mill, valuing “individual autonomy” über alles so long as it does no harm to anyone else."
Yet that conception of harm to anyone else has been stretched to facilitate the most authoritarian of impulses. From 'second hand smoke' to 'greenhouse gases' to excessive profits to your bad health habits costing me money, modern liberals cannot permit indvidual autonomy in anything save sexual matters.
Everything not forbidden is compulsory.
from a previous post:
As Strobe Talbott wrote in Time in 1982:
" Lenin, with his knack for hortatory pungency, reduced the past and future alike to two pronouns and a question mark: "Who—whom?" No verb was necessary. It meant who would prevail over whom? And the question was largely rhetorical, implying that the answer was never in doubt. Lenin and those who followed him would prevail over "them," whoever they were."
yes yes 1000 times yes.
Example:
a liberal friend of mine, pregnant with her first child, was learning about car seats. I, pregnant with #2, owned a Durango at the time, and explained the various advantages of a big car.
"Big reason: me having a big car means my kids are safe."
"Well, what about the people in the little car???"
Honest. She said this. Happy to leapfrog over me, her friend, and her own children for the strangers in Priuses.
Rev. Right, indeed, that's the entire paradigmatic sinkhole of Millian utilitarianism and its vexing contribution to the (now pretty deformed) understanding of natural rights. Au courant legal thinking has it that anyone's got the right to the same good stuff someone else has, which sort of hits a brick eventually, as a matter of math
"Who? Whom?" Can someone explain what this phrase means. I see it repeated often on this website.
"Who" is used in the nominative case, for the subject of a sentence. "Whom" is used for the accusative case (the direct object) or the dative case (the indirect object).
The subject of a sentence performs the action of the verb. The direct object receives the action of the verb. The indirect object indirectly receives the action of the verb.
Take the sentence "I gave the book to Jack" - "I" am the subject, "the book" is the direct object, and "Jack" is the indirect object. Who gave? I did. What was given? The book. To whom was it given? To Jack.
So when someone says "it's all about who/whom," it means who is doing something (like screwing someones), and to whom is something being done (like getting screwed).
Take that explanation, for what it's worth, from a guy who scored 750 on his SAT Math but came up just shy of 600 on the Verbal. I don't remember shit for English grammar. My memory of grammar comes only from having learned a foreign language.
Noah Millman has an interesting response to Derbyshire, in contrast to point'n sputter. It's amusing that he gives Steve Sailer as an example for empathy!
So my question is this: What do liberals get a thrill out of the most - helping The Other or just hurting those close to them?
I hear ye' Steve, but this is one of your weaker columns, it's a bit unfocused and well, weak.
Another liberal response folks hear might find some agreement with is John Holbo who asked "What exactly was so bad that NR fired him"? He was using it as a stick to beat Lowry and the rest of mainstream conservatism, but later on a commenter asked him what actually is so bad about the Derb's advice when most white liberals seem to practice if not preach it. He responded that liberals are sad that they have to move to "better" schools while conservatives seem to be celebrating the failure of the liberal dream. Personally, I don't view Derbyshire and most sympatico to be happy at all, remember that it's a guy who wrote a book titled "We Are All Doomed".
If Haidt really thinks modern day liberals value individual autonomy, he's a moron. Modern liberals are the most brutally conformist people you can find. Regardless of the subject - race relations, taxes, abortion, global warming, health care - they tolerate no deviation from the party line. Even when it comes to fashion, they are depressingly trendy.
No surprise, they are collectivists. Individual thought is dangerous.
"Libertarians would wait to see if the Martian invaders were free marketeers.)"
Or if the Martians could provide them with cheaper lawn service when they weren't busy turning Earthlings into Soylent Green.
Oh, and regarding iSteve's point about Liberals leapfrogging loyalties, I've noticed the same thing, but I attribute it to a slightly different cause.
Liberals like to claim loyalty to folks they hardly know because those folks are generally too far away to check up on the liberals actual behavior. If I'm a citizen of my actual community, my neighbors can judge whether I'm being a good citizen or not. But if I'm a "citizen of the world" my fellow 'citizens' in Sao Paolo are too far away to catch me flicking cigarette butts out the window and running red lights. The local yokels who might actually see me doing those things don't count.
It's about irresponsibility. Liberals (perhaps because they're so intolerat themselves) prefer to belong to groups that can't hold them accountable to any standards.
I think the Moral Foundations Theory is very weak in terms of descriptive power. Positive Liberal sacrosanct values, which recognisably Liberal people are apt to place more importance on than Harm or Fairness, like Diversity, Art and Knowledge (and Spontaneity) - let's be real, Liberals are happy with people suffering a little Harm for Diversity's sake - are not predicted by the model.
I prefer the Trait Theory Model, where
Conservatives are simply more Conscientious people - generally careful people who place importance on an ordered world and are willing and able to suppress their impulses and defer pleasure and cope with pain
while Liberals are more Open people - people who want and need more novelty and change in their environment, social group and thought patterns
Evidence:
Liberals have plenty of sacrosanct values, but they change more frequently (although they still often change only in nuance and phrasing, and in extremeness, not direction, but this is enough for the generality of Liberals).
Liberals have their authorities, they just like their authorities to change their opinions more frequently (although in a liberal direction!) and don't consider them authoritative if they don't. They also like their authorities to be like them in having low levels of caution and care and to have low levels of ability to restrain their impulses (they do not like people who are "repressed").
Liberals have their groups and factions, they just have more shifting and fluid membership (they're not based on where you were born and what you were born as, but on class and ideology adherence - this is actually weirdly reductive to ideological diversity and the diversity of the labor structure in your society). And their groups are not really put together with a thought to order and structure and function - actually having any of these qualities is less endearing for Liberals than it would be to Conservatives.
Of course, Liberals are less serious about everything but pain and harm - it's pretty easily explained by them simply being less Conscientious. A less Conscientious person will defer his own pleasure and other people's pleasure more, less defer relieving his and others' pain and feel that he and others should both work for their own pleasure and relief from pain more.
The big area where being a Liberal helps seems to be science.
However I'm not sure untrammelled Liberal domination is really good for science.
Ultimately they care more about novel ideas than Conservatives, yes, but are less cautious, care less about an ordered reality and have less self discipline to avoid seductive but stimulating ideas. These aren't things you can toss aside if you want a healthy science. Scientists have to care about an ordered reality and have to be at least as cautious about testing their ideas as they are curious about finding new ones.
Of course, these things actually translate messily into ideologies - a person's trait does not translate simply into a Conservative/Republican or Liberal/Democratic ideology - but this I feel is the chief way in which the constituencies of Conservative or Liberal factions is produced.
Right you are Steve.
IMHO it's all about status games, hierarchy, the need to be accepted, dominance, group dynamics, the 'pack mentality' in a word tribalism.
Not wishing to go too deep, it's basically the same impulse that forces kids to smoke cigarettes and pretend they like them, even though (initially at least), they make them sick and they get no pleasure from them ie the desire to appear 'cool'. Similarly wearing ridiculous 'punk rock' clothing and pretending to enjoy rap 'music'.
This desire to be accepted as one of the tribe, to get the approval of the alphas is very, very strong and unconscious in humans. So strong, in fact, that individuals act out against their obvious and vital self-interest.
"In contrast, modern liberals’ defining trait is making a public spectacle of how their loyalties leapfrog over some unworthy folks relatively close to them in favor of other people they barely know..."
International Socialism: A factory worker in Sandusky has more in common with a factory worker in Warsaw than with his brother-in-law, the plant foreman.
Liberals like to claim loyalty to folks they hardly know because those folks are generally too far away to check up on the liberals actual behavior.
...
But if I'm a "citizen of the world" my fellow 'citizens' in Sao Paolo are too far away to catch me flicking cigarette butts out the window and running red lights. The local yokels who might actually see me doing those things don't count.
Good point.
Also applies to positive provisions of benefits as well as avoidance of being held accountable for behavior - how do these far off people really know what you *need* and what you just *want* (i.e. could get through personal effort and would survive without)?
The Chinese (a people well used to bureaucracy) have a (hopefully accurate) saying, on the efficacy of centralized, distant bureaucracy which governs over all compared to local groupings - "The mountains are high and the emperor is far away". A bureaucracy which was efficient and local was not necessarily what your clever Chinese peasant wanted.
what you describe as the brother of two soon to be rich white liberal sisters is a way for upper class whites to say "i'm above your petty concerns about immigration and affirmative action. I'm so rich and secure that I even support these things that you lesser whites dislike.". By advocating an immigration policy that is not only bad for your kinsmen but bad for your country they also suggest that they see the hidden truth that us lowly whites can't see. And if only you realized what me and my goldman buddies realize you'd realize why we need a NAU or whatever.
Rich Lowry just fired another crimethinker at the urging of leftist rabblerousers. Alex Kurtagic at AltRight put it well: "One can hardly imagine a more emasculated existence nowadays than being editor of a conservative magazine."
Much of the difference between conservatives and liberals boils down to numeracy:
http://justnotsaid.blogspot.com/2012/04/numeracy.html
This theory needs more Occam. Electoral politics of course is groupish. It's a peaceful kind of gang warfare. You need to be in the larger group to win.
People also work hard to fit into a winning group and rise in status in that group. They do that by conforming.
When you view politics as gang warfare, you can easily identify who makes up each gang and describe their strategy and tactics.
When you view individual behavior in conforming to a group, you can describe behaviors that help people fit in or advance socially in that group.
Politically, liberalism calls for redistribution of wealth and racial equality. Those important agendas are esssential to gaining votes from the poor and from racial minorities. Because those agenda items are central to the gang's success, all liberals must treat the policies and the beneficiaries of those policies as sacred and display total loyalty to the redistribution and racial equality agendas.
Given all the probes we've sent to Mars, don't the Martians have a good reason to attack us, Earthist?
(To be fair 2 liberals, Wells and, er, Welles backed Earth over Mars).
Anyhow they would never land here anyways. Much easier to simply use their Illudium Q-36 explosive space modulator.
You can't have an honest discussion about contemporary "liberalism" without [first] acknowledging [and then dissecting] the underlying nihilism which motivates their every [waking] inclination, thought, and action [and doubtless their dreams, as well].
To try to analyze nihilists as though they were responding to the same motivations as are folks who actually give a damn is to tie an intellectual millstone about your neck which will drown you in an ocean of inconsistencies, disingenuousnesses, contradictions, duplicities, and mendacious insanities.
It all begins and ends with the nihilism.
Noah Millman writes, on the suggestions in Derbyshire´s ”The Talk” piece:
Every one of these injunctions is bad advice. To be a good application of statistical common sense, it’s not enough to know that, for example, crime rates (on average) are higher in majority-black neighborhoods. You’d need to know that the disparity was large enough, and the variance around the average small enough, so that following such a rule would actually be a decent heuristic; not to mention that there were no more finely-grained heuristics available and that the cost of applying such a sweeping heuristic in terms of the loss of experience of life and its manifold pleasures was not prohibitive.
Sword:
1: which other heuristics does NM think are better? He does not go into that point.
2: NM makes an assertion of cost to Quality of Life, but does not back it up with any data – he seems to demand of the reader to simply accept that experience of interacting with AA´s is a good in and of itself. Guess what, NM: I do not agree, and I reserve the right to decide what the goals and preferences of my life should be.
NM again:
Because here’s the thing. Granting that nobody has an obligation to be politically correct in their behavior, and granting (for the sake of argument) all of Derbyshire’s premises, what he’s still saying is that the risks are so great that it’s better simply to wall oneself off from African-Americans to the greatest degree possible. But he hasn’t actually measured the risks in absolute terms, only in relative terms: would this action reduce risk; if yes, then follow it.
Sword:
3: No private individual (bar the super-rich and those privy to lots of sociological raw data) can get good numerical estimates on the risks of living in an environment with many AA´s, measured in (say) decreased average life-span. So, the implied suggestion of NM is unworkable – but it is possible to conclude that living beside a lot of unknown AA´s presents some unquantified, but real risk, while not offering any upsides.
NM again:
I live in Brooklyn. I love living in Brooklyn. Do I live in a majority-black neighborhood? No. But there’s a large, majority black neighborhood right across the park from me. We share the park. Derbyshire’s advice to me and to my son is, effectively: don’t go to the park. Or, alternatively, don’t live in Brooklyn. But why? Does Derbyshire know what the crime statistics are like in my part of Brooklyn these days? Is he really that fearful?
Sword:
4: So NM likes living in a super-dense huge city. High rents, lots of sound, and people all around all the time. Guess what: It sounds awful, and I would not want to live in such a place no matter what the ethnic composition was. I am perfectly content with leaving such places to NM and people like him, and ask of him in return to leave the places that I like as they are.
5: As to the suggestions list by Derbyshire: I find them to be no cramps on my lifestyle, provided that I am in a place where the proportion of AA´s is small. If one wants to listen to concerts likely to attract a lot of AA´s: one can always by the CD´s, or look at the artist on Youtube. One can follow a basketball team via media. There are still many places run by a majority-white local govt, so there is plenty of choice there. It is not fun to have to interact with accosters, no matter their ethnicitiy. And so on.
a liberal friend of mine, pregnant with her first child, was learning about car seats. I, pregnant with #2, owned a Durango at the time, and explained the various advantages of a big car.
"Big reason: me having a big car means my kids are safe."
"Well, what about the people in the little car???"
Honest. She said this. Happy to leapfrog over me, her friend, and her own children for the strangers in Priuses.
No, you stupid woman, she has a point, because "vehicle size as protection" is a futile arms race.
And to try to pretend that any nihilist would want a nation of men - living in freedom, guided only by their consciences, and consenting freely to be governed by the rule of law [which must never be confused with the tyranny of legalism] - to try to pretend that any nihilist would want such a nation to even EXIST [much less to thrive & to grow & to prosper] is to wed yourself to an internally inconsistent proposition that will simply drive you mad.
Which is probably about as much as I'll be able to get past Komment Kontrol these days, so let me just shut up now and go away.
"Anonymous said...
"Who? Whom?"
Can someone explain what this phrase means. I see it repeated often on this website."
I believe it means whose ox or sacred cow is being gored and whom is doing the goring.
Or, as one of the other above posters said who is being screwed and whom is doing the screwing.
Asking the who/whom question enables you to read between the lines so to speak and understand the true motivations for certain positions or statments that are in fact double speak. For example, when a NeoCon, who is Jewish, supports reducing Iran to rubble in order to "bring democracy to the Middle East" knowing his ethnic loyalties allows you to cast his arguments in a different light. He might actually be saying we need to destroy Iran because in the far distant future it might be a threat to my sacred homeland Israel (I know ... I know it sounds crazy, but that's why he has to say it is about bring democracy to the Middle East .. people understand that).
As another example, when a Jewish intelllectual says we need more immigrants to stimulate the economy he might actually mean I need fewer Whites around me because I only feel safe when there are lots of other minorities around me, because then I am less noticeable, and more minorities mean more Democratic voters which also makes me happy.
The same can be said of other typcial BS statments made by members of other sacred and protected groups such as women, Blacks, Hispanics, etc...
I think you get the idea.
I agree it's about status games, but that just pushes the explanation back a step. Why is it that in certain elite cultures in America one can gain status by behaving in an anti-kin selective manner? I suppose there is the handicap principle, but I'm more curious as to historically how this came about.
This guy explains it all. Now, it's clear as day.
The nature of nature being what it is, liberalism spawns conservatism and conservatism spawns liberalism. They are like enemies that need one another.
It's like a see-saw.
Many conservatives remarked how the Right has become more liberal over the years, and this is true, but it's also true that the left has become more conservative over the years(in certain areas).
At one time, leftists were anti-capitalist and pro-proletariat. Now, they are pro-capitalist(as the golden goose that pays for stuff they like) and hardly interested in the working class. It's all about privileged gays and the 'creative elite class'. Marx said there will come a time when everyone will have lots of time and do creative things(and not just work). But the elite leftists have made peace with the fact that the masses are low IQ and dumb, and so creativity is for themselves.
Communism was anti-religious and scientific but it turned into a religion, a sacred faith(a conservative mode of thought).
Right used to be for elitism and hierarchy(and conservatism is still controlled by the rich). But now it appeals to populists against those 'elitist liberals'.
When one of the biggest heroes of the Left is Soros, it seems like the left has turned 'right' as much as the right has turned 'left'.
Ultimately, the Derbyshire controversy boils down to the following question: Do Blacks own non-Blacks?
If you have a problem with what Derbyshire wrote, then you have answered the question in the affirmative.
Suppose that Derbyshire's daughters and other non-Blacks followed Derbyshire's advice. What would be the result? Only that Blacks would be deprived of the presence of non-Blacks and the positive externalities they produce.
If you object to this result -- if you think this is wrong -- you are asserting that Blacks have an ownership interest in non-Blacks that obligates non-Blacks to be where Blacks want them to be and to share with Blacks what they produce.
Anon: "No, you stupid woman, she has a point, because "vehicle size as protection" is a futile arms race."
Not futile for me. I bought a Suburban in 1999 to ferry my wife and four kids across the country in part as protection against the proliferation of large trucks and SUV's.
And I had a similar conversation with a friend to that recounted by Allison, regarding the person on the other end of collsion. My response was that whatever the situation, I wanted the vehicle my children were in not to be the one that got crushed.
No leapfrogging of loyalties here; I am certain about my priorities.
I was your typical urban hipster liberal until one day I noticed that all of the other hipsters were either ugly, wussy, or had messed up family lives as children (often all three). All the resentment, spite, and envy of liberalism became obvious to me at that point and I could no longer stand to be associated with it.
"Libertarians would wait to see if the Martian invaders were free marketeers."
Funny and true. I bet Libertarianism correlates well with aspiness. Abstract, impersonal ideas above everything.
I see that NRO has now fired Robert Weissberg, who blogged at NR's Phi Beta Cons, for participating in an American Renaissance conference.
The word "Stalinist" comes to mind.
Derb gave a post "firing" interview here.
It's notable that the leftist Gawker gave him a fair hearing while the "conservative" National Review did not.
do liberals of other races. . .
Liberals, as we understand them, people who willing, gleefully sacrifice members of their own race for purely symbolic reasons, dont seem to exist amongst other non-white races.
Liberals are gnostics. They believe themselves possessed of an arcane, higher knowledge. This gnostic gospel is itself transcendent and disdainful of reality. Race and gender are social constructs. Well-intended central planners can bypass scarcity. Everyone, Haitians, Afghans, Germans and Koreans, is equally educable. Women can have a successful first pregnancy at age 42. I know a black neurosurgeon.
Liberals are also nihilists. Like the Grizzly Man, they will literally get themselves killed on the altar of their belief rather than admit that grizzly bears, young blacks, and Salafists are dangerous. For that matter, they'd rather the whole world collapse in an awful gotterdammerung rather than see history vindicate any opposing view.
But as to Steve's more fundamental question, I have no idea. I'm beginning to wonder if liberalism isn't a mental disorder.
There's liberalism of the mind and liberalism of the heart. Liberalism of the mind is controlled by tribalists of the heart. Jews are tribalists of the heart when it comes to their own power, and they mindfully use liberalism to gain greater power for themselves. Jews are not really liberals of the heart. They turned to liberalism with their minds cuz they know it's to their advantage in the West.
But by controlling it with their minds, they get to control the liberals of the heart, for whom liberalism amounts to images, dogmas, and symbols. Liberals of the mind have the money and brilliance to control the liberalism of the heart, and so liberals of the heart are always manipulated by liberals of the mind.
Same with conservatism. There are conservatives of the mind and there are conservatives of the heart. 'Of the mind' conservatives are less interested in conservatism per se than in how to shape and use conservatism to benefit themselves. They use their minds to shape conservatism, and the dumb conservatives of the heart just follow along since they mindlessly react to images, dogmas, symbols, slogans.
Paradoxically, though both liberals of the mind and conservatives of the mind are more intellectual and 'rational', they are also more tribal(in an elitist way). When they speak of 'rationalism', they don't really mean they think it's the highest value but that's it's the greatest tool for them to serve their tribal interests.
Jewish intellectuals--liberal and neocon--may be the most educated, most rational, and most intellectual, but their core loyalties are not to ideas or values but to their tribe.
Also paradoxically, liberals and conservatives of the heart, though seemingly attached to their values in a deep emotional way, are easily vulnerable to having their loyalties shifted(even over-night)in another direction.
A liberal of the heart who opposed Bush's war can easily be made to support Obama's wars. A liberal of the heart who opposed Bush's violation of civil liberties can easily be made to support those by Obama. Feelings may be powerful, but they attach to images and ideas; and images and ideas are controlled by the people who use the mind.
Dogs are creatures of the heart and easily manipulated to love this or that master.
'Anonymous said...
"Who? Whom?"
Can someone explain what this phrase means. I see it repeated often on this website.'
"Who? Whom?" is a translation of the words of V.I. Lenin (in Russian, "Kto? Kogo?"). It was his response to a comrade who braced him about the inconsistency of his New Economic Plan of the early '20s with conventional Marxist ideology.
The sense of it was, consistency in principles don't matter - it's all a question of who benefits at the expense of whom.
In Lenin's view, and that of his followers, anything that advances the goals of the revolution is commendable, anything that doesn't is not. Thus they need not apply a common principle to two similar situations if in one case the "vanguard of the proletariat" would benefit thereby and if in the other the "class enemy" would benefit.
Liberals want things to change, conservatives want things to stay the same. Those are basically the dictionary definitions of these terms, and they make more sense than anything else I've seen out there.
Basically, all societal change, whether for good or for ill, comes from liberals. Conservatives want things to stay the way they were roughly around the time they were born, so the content of conservative beliefs at any given time are really just the accumulated successes of past generations of liberals. Things like Christianity, free market capitalism, and Martin Luther King Jr. were all initially considered liberal, but are now iconic parts of American conservatism.
The important thing is where liberals get their ideas of exactly how society should change, since ultimately society is going to go where the liberals lead it.
"Who? Whom?"
Can someone explain what this phrase means. I see it repeated often on this website.
It's about identity politics, the opposite of principled universalism. It's a criteria for deciding one's position based on identity: "Who is doing it? And to whom?"
"Liberals want things to change, conservatives want things to stay the same."
Okay, but the liberals of Marin County (78% for Obama in 2008) don't seem to want change in Marin County. It's only change they want at some leapfrogged distance from their own group.
Basically, all societal change, whether for good or for ill, comes from liberals. Conservatives want things to stay the way they were roughly around the time they were born, so the content of conservative beliefs at any given time are really just the accumulated successes of past generations of liberals.
That's a really dumb definition. Liberals want certain things to change, and certain other things to stay the same. Conservatives want certain things to change, and certain other things to stay the same. What makes you a liberal or a conservative is which things you want to change and which you want to stay the same.
Liberals want to preserve certain things in amber. Social security, or the welfare state, or affirmative action, or the "rights" of government unions, or the "right" to an abortion. And conservatives want to change all those things.
In some respects liberals are the most reactionary people in existence.
And it is not correct to claim that all societal change comes from liberals. The anti-slavery movement did not come from liberals. The Great Awakening did not come from liberals. The anti-affirmative action movement is not coming from liberals.
Okay, but the liberals of Marin County (78% for Obama in 2008) don't seem to want change in Marin County. It's only change they want at some leapfrogged distance from their own group.
Well, no group of White people really wants more diversity, but we have no choice on this politically. You seem to be implying that a vote for Obama was a vote for more immigration, but Obama is no different on immigration than Bush or McCain. Liberals have just been better at carving out White enclaves for themselves than conservatives have.
This was actually one of your weakest pieces of writing.
Politics does somewhat tend to be about people you know, but don't like; however, the divisions are not random, and you're theory doesn't really explain why people divide up in the particular way they do. It certainly isn't, for the most part, a class divide.
The lesson we should take is that ethnic divisions usually trump moral sentiments in political conflict. There are all sorts of groups, like blacks, Amerindians, hunter gatherers, recent immigrants, that are treated as honorary liberals, but really aren't. Liberals take them on because their at least ostensibly oppressed groups, while the groups are happy enough to pretend to be liberals in order to be on the opposite team from the majority.
In Haidt’s conception, liberals are the ideological descendants of John Stuart Mill, valuing “individual autonomy” über alles so long as it does no harm to anyone else. In contrast, conservatives have a broader range of concerns such as sanctity, authority, and loyalty.
Which is odd because, my primary line of attack against libtards is along the Freedom axis. Libtards can deny racial differences until the cows come home. They can't deny that they value equality of outcomes more highly than Freedom. That they're absolutely thrilled with the idea of trampling the Right to Property, the Right to Free Speech, the Right to Free Association, the Right to enter contracts, the Right to Self-Defense, etc., in the name of their pet causes.
I suspect that Liberalism is mostly about putting a cute face on authoritarianism. The monied class (or rather, a large subset thereof) wants power over the masses. Pesky little things like rights have to go. The first order of business is to trample them "for the children," or "the Blacks," or "the poor," whatever works.
Libertarians would wait to see if the Martian invaders were free marketeers.
This is one of my favorites. I used it at least twice in comments to Derb's Talk; if 1/5th of the Martian visitors were homicidal maniacs who whipped out their phasers and disintegrated any human within range, libtards would tell us "4/5ths" of all Martians are wonderful people," "there are bad Martians just like there are bad White people," "it's not right to judge the 4/5ths by the actions of the 1/5th," "correlation is not causation," etc. Then they'd push middle class Whites toward the Martians as they fled to Martian free gated communities. They'd insist middle- and lower-class Whites stand their ground and repeat "correlation is not causation" until the phasers started firing.
Ever gone to a Trekkie forum and insulted Klingons?
4/10/12 9:55 PM
I tend to agree with Anonymous. People like to come up with complex ways to "leapfrog" simple, Occam-ready ideas that make them uncomfortable. Ideas like "the TeeVee has immense power over human behavior," and "people are sheep." "Look, my idea is much more complex (thus marking my intelligence for making it, and yours for understanding it) than that simplistic stuff!"
The emphasis of liberals and libertarians on fighting oppression, but a weaker emphasis on fairness and loyalty explains the disconnect both groups have regarding the state of African Americans and its relation to immigration.
There is no such emphasis. Libtards are oppressing people, right now, in the name of "fairness." They trample Freedom in the name of Equality.
It's been my experience that this conundrum is usually only a conundrum for the Center-Left. The far Left will argue for the international destruction of the plutocracy and their bourgeois enablers. Your Democrat Centrist on the other hand can never offer an answer. They often get huffy, and sort of insist everything will come out in the wash if only we all learn to work together and the GOP quit being obstructionists.
Meanwhile, the left (far, center, whatever) is giving the plutocrats a pass and trampling Freedom in the name of Equality.
Yet that conception of harm to anyone else has been stretched to facilitate the most authoritarian of impulses. From 'second hand smoke' to 'greenhouse gases' to excessive profits to your bad health habits costing me money, modern liberals cannot permit indvidual autonomy in anything save sexual matters.
Everything not forbidden is compulsory.
Right. To libtards, who are really just looking for excuses to trample Freedom and gain power, "no harm to anyone else" is like the Commerce Clause.
"Well, what about the people in the little car???"
"He shoulda armed himself."
Noah Millman has an interesting response to Derbyshire, in contrast to point'n sputter. It's amusing that he gives Steve Sailer as an example for empathy!
Sounds like Millman just got triangulated.
Much of the difference between conservatives and liberals boils down to numeracy
I've been reminded of this after reading the comments to Derb's Talk as well. The opposition there is utterly devoid of numeracy (not that this is a revelation). The only people in that camp that we have a hope in hell of peeling away are the numerate ones.
This theory needs more Occam. Electoral politics of course is groupish. It's a peaceful kind of gang warfare. You need to be in the larger group to win.
People also work hard to fit into a winning group and rise in status in that group. They do that by conforming.
Well said. Which inevitably draws us back to the salience of group differentials in activism, ethnocentrism, wealth, and cohesion.
Ultimately, the Derbyshire controversy boils down to the following question: Do Blacks own non-Blacks?
If you have a problem with what Derbyshire wrote, then you have answered the question in the affirmative.
Suppose that Derbyshire's daughters and other non-Blacks followed Derbyshire's advice. What would be the result? Only that Blacks would be deprived of the presence of non-Blacks and the positive externalities they produce.
If you object to this result -- if you think this is wrong -- you are asserting that Blacks have an ownership interest in non-Blacks that obligates non-Blacks to be where Blacks want them to be and to share with Blacks what they produce.
Interesting. I wonder how long it would take the Taki swarm to answer this question (rather than emote/throw fallacies in response), and what the answer would be.
Funny and true. I bet Libertarianism correlates well with aspiness. Abstract, impersonal ideas above everything.
The funny part is, Libertarianism doesn't have to be this stupid. Change a couple lines of code and it can make a hell of a lot of sense.
Liberals, as we understand them, people who willing, gleefully sacrifice members of their own race for purely symbolic reasons, dont seem to exist amongst other non-white races.
It's also noteworthy that other races have no analogue for the YKWs. So, it's entirely possible that Whites are unique in one sense, but not in the one you suggest.
Liberals want certain things to change, and certain other things to stay the same. Conservatives want certain things to change, and certain other things to stay the same. What makes you a liberal or a conservative is which things you want to change and which you want to stay the same.
Most liberals would probably like to see a society radically different than it is now, most conservatives would like to make a few tweaks, most of which would essentially be reversions to the way things were at some point in the past in the past (e.g. the Great Awakening or anti-AA movements you mentioned as examples).
Just about everything that is truly a social innovation (as in, never been done before), whether good or bad, is going to be advanced by liberals.
I forgot to add, about "Who-whom?":
It does a far better job of consistently and concisely explaining libtardism than 99% of the other explanations out there.
"Liberals want things to change, conservatives want things to stay the same."
According to the liberal media, this sometimes applies and sometimes doesn't. So, Russians communists are said to be 'conservative' because they look back to the good ole Soviet days.
Using this logic, neo-nazi skinheads should be called 'leftist' since they're radical and wanna upset the social order. But the media calls them 'right-wing'.
So, both commies and nazis are the right according to the MSM.
and has anyone the media use the term 'leftwing death squad'? It's always 'rightwing death squad'.
"It's notable that the leftist Gawker gave him a fair hearing while the "conservative" National Review did not."
Gawker, having 'progressive' credentials and having played a role in having the Derb ousted, could afford to be maggotnaminous.
"I see that NRO has now fired Robert Weissberg, who blogged at NR's Phi Beta Cons, for participating in an American Renaissance conference."
His theory of the Bimbo Factor is priceless.
Alex Kurtagic at AltRight put it well: "One can hardly imagine a more emasculated existence nowadays than being editor of a conservative magazine."
----
I find this amusing since Kurtagic represents the PC of the far right. He's written that once his side comes to power, their enemies will silenced and put in their place.
And though I admire Weissberg, it sickens me that he attended a conference(of American Renaissance) where Kurtagic was invited to speak. Kurtagic is a neo-Nazi freak. Did you see his list of female heroes? Half of them are associated with Nazism. He even included the nutty Mrs. Goebbels who was even more radical than her hubby and killed all her kids cuz she didn't want them to grow up in a German that wasn't National Socialist. I mean how more fucked up can a mother be?
He even included the nutty Mrs. Goebbels who was even more radical than her hubby and killed all her kids cuz she didn't want them to grow up in a German that wasn't National Socialist. I mean how more fucked up can a mother be?
Everytime "Der Untergang" comes on TV, I change the channels before that scene [or at least what I imagine that scene to be].
To date, I've been successful in avoiding it [and I hope to remain so].
Most liberals would probably like to see a society radically different than it is now, most conservatives would like to make a few tweaks
You strike me as rather resistant to new ideas yourself. Using your definitions, you are a "conservative".
What you write is only true if you get to decide which changes are "radically different" and which ones are "tweaks".
There is nothing "radically different" about any part of the leftist project. National healthcare? It's old hat in many parts of the world.
Conservatives know that there is nothing new under the sun. The new and radical ideas which todays liberals are so excited about have been tried before, often many times.
Just about everything that is truly a social innovation (as in, never been done before), whether good or bad, is going to be advanced by liberals.
You keep repeating your assertions as if doing so makes them true. Was the abolition of slavery "advanced by liberals"?
if you say "yes" then you are simply defining as "liberal" all people who make social innovations.
And though I admire Weissberg, it sickens me that he attended a conference(of American Renaissance)
Thanks for that insight into the "liberal" mindset.
It sickens me that Bush attended a meeting of the NAACP. I still voted for him though.
You strike me as rather resistant to new ideas yourself. Using your definitions, you are a "conservative".
What you write is only true if you get to decide which changes are "radically different" and which ones are "tweaks".
There is nothing "radically different" about any part of the leftist project. National healthcare? It's old hat in many parts of the world.
Look, I can find you many examples of liberal visions of society that are fundamentally very different than anything currently existing. Can you name me one such conservative vision? Groups like libertarians and fascists have had grand social plans, but then these groups are often not considered to be conservative, which sort of makes my point.
You keep repeating your assertions as if doing so makes them true. Was the abolition of slavery "advanced by liberals"?
Was it a conservative undertaking? That would seem to be a strange view. Abolitionism had a long, complex history and was in any case largely the extension of a system (i.e. the absence of slavery) that already existed in the north. It's telling that this is the only example you can come up with.
if you say "yes" then you are simply defining as "liberal" all people who make social innovations.
I'm saying that if you look at it, this is obviously the basic rule. A conservative victory is preventing the liberals from doing something, or undoing something that liberals have already done.
I like this concentric circle idea as a baseline framework for political preferences. Looking around at the people I know and associate with (mostly SWPL Libs) I'd say this framework works for about 80% of people.
This article also brings to mind an article by David Foster Wallace called Authority and American Usage which ostensibly is a review of Brian Gardner's newly edited OED, but is really a tract on political philosophy.
Wallace's thesis, more or less, is that conservatives and liberals can be distinguished, as a baseline, by their linguistic preferences. Conservatives are what he calls prescriptivists, whereas liberals are what he calls descriptivists.
Prescriptivism is a strain of linguistics that begins with Wittgenstein and follows strict logical rules, even if those rules may be arbitrary or outdated.
Descriptivists--Chomsky the most famous among them--instead rely on a natural language that arises out of culture. The rules of a descriptivist language are constantly in flux, bending and changing to fit a particular cultural or historical context.
There's one part of the essay that readers here may find particularly interesting. Wallace, who taught English a Claremont Mckenna, includes a letter he wrote to black students explaining that they would have to forgo Urban Black English in favor of Standard White English if they were to get an A in his class. It's a beautiful piece of writing that gets the point across without being insulting, a lesson those of us who wish to promote these kinds of ideas could learn from.
Mr. Lomez:
Thanks. Most helpful. I've seen the DFW letter and it's quite good. (By the way, you can look up reviews of the late David Foster Wallace as a college teacher on Rate My Professors. Some of the reviews are pretty funny.)
On the other hand, is it really true that liberals are descriptivists and conservatives prescriptivists. Consider The Gap, in test scores, crime, etc. Conservatives seem more inclined toward descriptivism (i.e., empiricism), while liberals lean toward prescriptivism ("It says in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, so that's that!")
"Live and let live" would be pretty innovative. Right-wingers seem to be the only ones advocating it.
De-centralizing the USA would seem to be the recipe for political innovation; States and municipalities could try out their own projects.
Experimentation being the key to discovery, and all.
This recipe for innovation is anathema to libtards.
Millman's responses were sensible enough, but he, too, left out some stuff. The questions you care about in various situations like this are:
a. How big a risk am I taking? (What's the probability of bad outcomes times the cost of those bad outcomes?)
b. How big a reward am I getting?
Different people simply value these things differently. In my job, I get to travel quite a bit. Now, travel involves risks of bad outcomes--you're much more likely to get mugged in a strange city than someplace you know, you're exposed ro more disease by traveling, you can get lost someplace where you don't speak the language, etc. But the benefits are much bigger, to me, than the costs.
I have a coworker who just comes down the other way on this. He finds traveling a hassle he will put up with if he has to, rather than a joy.
Neither of us is right or wrong. It's just a matter of taste.
If you have to give someone a very quick heruistic for deciding if a neighborhood is safe or not, say a foreign grad student visiting from Japan or Gemany, racial composition of the people on the streets is one of the easiest and best ones to use. (Also, are there things worth stealing out in reach? Are there bars on the windows? Are people out with their kids?)
Any such heruistic is wrong much of the time, but it's a first cut and it's the kind of advice I'd give to a foreign grad student or postdoc, someone not familiar with the local culture, in order to keep them mostly out of trouble. Whether the cost of following that heruistic is worth the benefit depends on your values. If Derb doesn't really enjoy much of black culture, then the cost is pretty low for him. If you are a big jazz fan, OTOH, the cost is really high.
Okay, but the liberals of Marin County (78% for Obama in 2008) don't seem to want change in Marin County. It's only change they want at some leapfrogged distance from their own group
Steve, I write from Marin County, and I think you're shortchanging the libs here. The reason they've been against the Lucas development is all about traffic, nothing more. They've been consistently 'consistent' regarding the presence of the dark-skinned among them. For example, the county recently completed a new health center that's delivering, inter alia, free dental care to non-whites.
Look, I can find you many examples of liberal visions of society that are fundamentally very different than anything currently existing.
Can you? Go ahead and do it then. I really want to hear this "fundamentally very different" vision.
Can you name me one such conservative vision?
What about the conservative vision of mostly mono-ethnic countries in which government answers to the people rather than the other way around?
Was it (abolition of slavery) a conservative undertaking? That would seem to be a strange view.
It is only a strange view to you because you start with the axiom that conservatives oppose any and all change while liberals support it.
Spend two seconds looking around modern America and it should be obvious to you that your axiom is false. One of the complaints which "liberals" throw against "conservatives" is that they (conservatives) fail to respect and want to preserve what liberals have done in the past. This apples to the Civil Rights Act as well as to Social Security.
I should have looked up the name first--Bryan Garner, not Brian Gardner. (Who wrote a great book on Scalia, btw.)
In any case, I think the Prescriptivist:Conservative::Descriptivist:Liberal comparison is most apparent when you look at Constitutional Law. Something like Scalia's originalism versus Breyer's idea of "active liberty."
"Consider The Gap, in test scores, crime, etc. Conservatives seem more inclined toward descriptivism (i.e., empiricism), while liberals lean toward prescriptivism ("It says in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, so that's that!")"
I think you're giving Conservatives, as a whole, too much credit. Plenty of Conservatives, to my unending consternation, willfully ignore what they observe, just as Liberals do, if it's politically/socially prudent to do so.
The major difference to me, is how the two groups go about explaining The Gap et al.
Liberals, because of a descriptivist tendency (I think), will invent complicated and abstract cultural/social/economic theories to explain away these inequalities.
Conservatives, on the other hand, when they are being honest with themselves, because of a prescriptivist tendency, will attribute these differences to more fundamental "law," -- i.e. biological determinism.
A conservative victory is preventing the liberals from doing something, or undoing something that liberals have already done.
And a liberal victory is preventing the conservatives from doing something, or undoing something that conservatives have already done.
What about the conservative vision of mostly mono-ethnic countries in which government answers to the people rather than the other way around?
Where are the conservatives who advocate this?
Where are the conservatives who advocate this?
Right here?
So, the party that wants to re-engineer the 70 year old national retirement scheme to achieve ideological aims ("the ownership society"), they're liberals, right?
How about proposals to privatize the postal service and prisons and public utilities? Are those proposed by liberals, since conservatives want to keep things the same forever? Or the proposals to radically restructure the tax code, say by moving to a flat tax with few or no deductions? Or proposals to embark in a grand imperial adventure to remake the middle east in the image of western democracies? All those must be liberal plans. Right?
Noah Millman writes,
Every one of these injunctions is bad advice. To be a good application of statistical common sense, it’s not enough to know that, for example, crime rates (on average) are higher in majority-black neighborhoods. You’d need to know that the disparity was large enough, and the variance around the average small enough, so that following such a rule would actually be a decent heuristic[.]
Whoops - in the course of explaining the rule that Derb supposedly violated, Millman violated the same rule.
He can't say Derb's advice is "bad advice" without performing the same statistical analysis he demands of Derbyshire. The most he can say is that Derbyshire has not proven that it's good advice. Instead, he goes further.
Regarding conservatives and change. I call myself conservative because I prefer an ordering of society more in line of the Constitution as it was interpreted prior to the New Deal.
That ordering was radical and a break with centuries of the "older" order.
The Asian despots, the Kings, the restraints of traditions, guilds, birth, operative for centuries were not swept away in Revolutionary America but certainly lessened. The individual simply had a much wider scope for self determination.
When anyone mentions this, freedom itself is demonized. the rich use freedom to take advantage of the poor. People acquire unhealthy habits, fail to plan for their retirement or accident, shirk supporting the worthy needy, etc. They actually have to resort to quite convoluted arguments why we are all better off if we have less freedom than more freedom.
Anyway, liberty and self determination are rare - brief flickers in Greece, Rome, the UK and the US. The norm is a minority dictating to everyone through physical force to the advantage of the minority. That is the norm of human existence. That is the conservative or status quo.
I view myself as a radical, advocating a social order so rare that perhaps 0.01% of the people who ever lived, lived under anything like it.
In America - given our general direction - it is a turning back of the clock. Looked at against human history it is a radical new idea.
I saw the "Phi Beta Cons" announcement just now in Google News (Media Matters/CAP/Atlantic are piling on) and just guffawed for maybe a split second. I really can't imagine where this will end: their commenters are panicking that Michelle Malkin will be "fired" next (because of Bad Association). Really, now that the template is set how can you stop until you get to Jonah Goldberg who once bragged about a drink he'd invented called "the Marion Barry"--I am actually feeling sorry for Lowry now, and I do wonder how Steyn takes it, given his record of "noxious" Canadian infractions.
"Why not name Morris Dees editor and be done with it"
"where this will end"
The point n' sputter singularity approaches: Elspeth Reeve briefly wrote for Takimag (lnk, 3 articles, all a bit on the "edgy"/pop-fluffy side). I don't know to assume it's the same woman. Drat, where's James Kirchick when ya need him?
"where this will end"
The point-sputter singularity approaches: Elspeth Reeve briefly wrote for Takimag (link, 3 articles, comprising one TV review and two "edgy"/pop-fluffy celeb pieces). I don't know to assume it's the same woman and regret if I'm repeating someone else's discovery in this fast-evolving Watergate. Aw drat, where's James Kirchick when you need him?
If I were among the Taki admins or staffers I wouldn't waste the daylight on publishing an explanatory note, a la "We've just learned about who has written for us and must dissociate ourselves from ourselves"
Sorry for the 2x post, I'm just so stunned by it all
Where are the conservatives who advocate this?
Right here?
Really? Where?
Would someone explain "citizenism" to me again?
And how many conservatives, in general, advocate for "mono-ethnic states"?
"Arne Duncan! What have you discovered about the Racists, Duncan -- tell me. Why haven't we heard from you?"
"My President... I suspect so much. I think they are the allies we seek... they are strong and fierce... they do not give their loyalty easily or quickly.... As you know, various governments have never been able to take a census of the Racists. Everyone thinks that there are but few -- wandering here and there in the South.... My President, I suspect an incredible secret has been kept on this planet... that the Racists exist in vast numbers... vast numbers... and it is they that control the Earth."
"But, they're Republicans Arne."
"Would someone explain "citizenism" to me again" - well, you're a big boy, seemingly capable of using a web browser or your Sidekick phone at the least. Why waste a full minute explaining anything you (as you've just advertised) have no desire to know... etc.
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