What gives you the idea that The Atlantic didn’t want to employ him?
They didn’t fire him until they came under ferocious public pressure. The claim that they then “discovered” how bad he was is transparent bullshit. They knew what he was. Everybody knew what he was.
The Atlantic fired him not because of his repugnant views, but because he had unexpectedly become unprofitable. If they thought that they would gain readers and advertisers by hiring him back, they’d do it in a heartbeat.
He was a fool, but that wasn’t all he was.
Explicitly white supremacist.
It’s worth remembering that the Nazi genocides began in Germany’s hospitals and asylums. About 300,000 dead.
And lawyers drafted the Nuremberg laws.
This discussion reminds me of Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West by John Ralston Saul. it is a liberal left of center critique of technocrats being used to justify conservative policies. And about how rationalism is essentially without any morality, but can be used to hide underlying assumptions.
Que?
Engineers are notoriously right-leaning, and statistically over-represented amongst terrorists.
In Australian campus politics, the Conservatives are usually led by law students, but most of the rank and file are engineers.
Liberals aren’t left of centre.
Any attempt to squeeze a multiplicity of political beliefs on a single left-right axis is simplistic and flawed. It may well be useful, but it can often confuse as much as it illustrates. “Liberal” as a word has a number of different meanings. Certainly “neo-liberal” economic policies have almost no overlap with the meaning of “liberal” when it is used as the opposite of “conservative.” This was a widely accepted usage in the 60s and 70s. That is the meaning of “liberal” that is alluded to in the term “libertard.” Being an older person, I am comfortable with that usage, but that is why I said “liberal, left of center” to clarify that is what I meant, not some neo-liberal libertarian sense of the word.
edited to add. Indeed, I think confusion over what people mean by the term “liberal” is why the term “progressive” is making a comeback.
While “liberals aren’t leftists/yes they are” is always a “fun” discussion, I’m requesting that @orenwolf split it off into its own thread starting with this comment. There’s already enough on-topic debate here about definitions and categories in re: the ideologically neutral word “technocrat.”
“Voltaire’s Bastards”, in an effort to seek attention, over-stated the problem of technocrats. Saul could have started at Taylorism and scientific management as being where things went really (as in Eichmann) wrong but instead turned chose to make it a blanket condemnation of the values of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. Meanwhile, he downplayed the fact that, over the period he covers, the moral debates he claims were lost still existed but had degenerated into religious debates (or ones about ideological purity). If the word “driving trollies” had been used as it is now back in 1992 it would be a good description of what much of the book does.
What we have now are plutocrats, in an effort to blunt the power of the technocrats they believe should be their unquestioning servants as in “the good old days”, using right-wing populist rhetoric to stir up the Know-Nothings against them. It’s Enabling Fascists 101, and we’ve seen how it played out before (it’s no co-incidence, for example, that many of those who filled technocratic roles in Germany from the late 19th century to 1933 were Jews).
In the latest iteration, the jealous plutocrats take Saul’s flawed core critique (“technocrats have no moral compass guiding them”) and re-phrase it in a way appropriate to their audience (“those snooty elitist experts don’t believe in God and patriotism.”).
I hear what you’re saying, and I’m not trying to nitpick. But I do have a few issues with this.
The rise of Trumpism has blown the US Overton Window wide open, and the language is now shifting back towards international/historical norms. Overt socialism is no longer absent from American politics, and pretty much all socialists actively reject liberalism.
The American use of liberal as a synonym for left is not just a quirk of linguistics. It’s an artefact of the 20th century suppression of American socialism.
Both international and American centre (when measured by policy-based opinion polls) is around the Social Democrat position, which is basically the Berniecrats. Moving rightwards from the left, we have:
Revolutionary Socialists → Reformist Socialists → Social Democrats → Liberals → Conservatives → Fascists
The right wing of the Democrats (AKA the establishment/corporate wing, which is pretty much all of the Congressfolk) are true liberals. Liberalism began as the party of deregulated capitalism, and it still is. There is a reason why it’s called neoliberalism rather than neoconservatism.
The establishment/corporate Democrats did not abandon or betray liberalism; they’re returning it to its roots.
Once the threat of Cold War competition dissolved, the concessions to the working class that characterise social liberalism (AKA the right edge of the Social Democrats) were seen as no longer necessary. Hence the rightward shift of the Democrats over recent decades.
Only in the economic sense of the term. A distinction has to made between economic liberalism (deregulation of markets) and social liberalism (e.g support for reproductive choice, separation of church and state, etc.), which as @simonize noted requires transcending a single left-right axis.
Well the center of US politics is significantly to the right of the center in Europe or Canada.
In a larger sense, I argue that attempting to align politics along a single axis has masked a huge change in US politics over the last 60 years or so. Having played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons, I am comfortable with using two axes to describe politics. Here, instead of lawful vs chaotic and good vs evil, we’ll use free market capitalism vs economic progressive populism and socially conservative vs enforced egalitarian*. Through the great depression and into the post war period, the major division between the two major US parties was along the economic axis. There were Rockefeller Republicans which tended to be more “liberal” on social issues, and union card carrying Democrats that supported segregation.
But starting with LBJs support for the Civil Rights act, and progressing through the GOP pursuing it’s “Southern Strategy” and Regan’s attempt to unite lower taxes and less federal interference in civil rights under the “less government” banner we have seen a shift. This process continued under the “third way” Democratic Party under Clinton, which supported “welfare reform” even as tried to woo minority votes.
Now the two parties are split along the Social axis, with the Democrats supporting the individual rights of a variety of minorities, while the Republicans want to defer to the states which are more easily swayed into a majoritarian disrespect of individuals. Both parties have a economically populist wing and a Wall Street Wing. A persistence in the view that the parties main division along economics is part of why people were so surprised that Trump won the GOP nomination. Another part is just how people thought that a “to the manor born” NYC real estate speculator became the point man for the downtrodden members of the GOP.
The dynamics of the American Electoral system make the rise of a third party, very rare. Instead one usually sees the incorporation of a third party’s policies into the policies of one of the major parties. Even if one centering on structuring the economy for the broadening of the benefits of economic growth beyond the top 10% could theoretically have broad support
Free speech and freedom of religion are classical liberalism rather than social liberalism. Tom Paine, JS Mill, etc. And although Paine and Mill’s motives may have been pure, the political forces behind them were at least in part motivated by a desire to reduce the competing power of the church and the monarch.
What I see as social liberalism are FDR’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society. Economic concessions to the working class, motivated at least in part by a desire to avoid socialist revolution. It’s the liberal equivalent to the conservative Bismarkian welfare state: guillotine insurance.
“Classical liberalism”, at least as discussed in the contemporary sense, is focused on economic freedom and gives it primacy; social freedoms are either integrated or not as the particular proponent chooses (in modern times they’re often not integrated by those who call themselves classical liberals, leading to the jarring phenomenon of the Libertarian who’s against a woman’s reproductive choice).
Locke’s original formulation, remember, was “life, liberty and property”. The last was replaced by Jefferson with the broader “pursuit of Happiness”, implying (in all his unexamined privilege) that the good life is about more than accumulating money and things to keep score (not that a majority of modern-day Americans have taken that to heart).
This is why it’s important to separate out the formal definitions of economic liberalism (mostly associated with the political right wing these days) and social liberalism (mostly associated with the political left wing these days).
That’s using the term “social” in a broader sense, essentially conflating it with economic philosophy in a different way. When Americans talk about FDR and Johnson being “socially liberal” they’re generally referring to their support for civil rights for various identity groups.
At the same time, both Presidents can be seen as economically liberal (in the formal sense) in that, while they did press for increased regulation and intervention by the state (definitely non-liberal economics in the formal sense) they were doing so for the reason you lay out: to save “free” market capitalism from its own worst excesses. That the plutocrats did not understand this (esp. in FDR’s case) has led to the two Presidents (and subsequent Dem ones, including Clinton and Obama) being vilified as “socialists.”
Since few sane people actually want to see kind of situation where the figurative guillotines are rolled out, it’s a sound approach. The citizens of European nation-states have internalised this for a long time, those in the U.S. only for a brief period after a major trauma.
[I’m going to hold off on commenting further on this sub-topic until it’s split off. The main topic deserves more discussion.]
I think there’s a big problem in the article with equivocating between classes and political philosophies. Short version is that today I think the professional class is largely technocrats, the investor class is largely plutocrats and the majority of people are “democrats” (adherents of democracy, not Democrats). But you can’t extend that backwards in history because the middle class were also largely technocrats, and it’s the collapse of that class that brought us to where we are.
I think when we say technocrat we mean believer in technocracy but with plutocrat we usually mean the actual rich people who are running things (this may just be because of our bias that we don’t believe anyone who isn’t the rich people running things could think plutocracy was a good idea). I also think when the article talks about plutocrats it’s not talking about the merchant class, but the investor class. Merchants actually buy and sell, investors merely take “extract rent” (i.e., take a cut of other people’s work).
But if I think of the words as equivalents (all meaning “adherent of”; so “democrat” will mean adherent of democracy, not Democrat) then I agree that the professional class and the technocrats are not identical but they are heavily overlapping. I am in the professional class and I hobnob with the professional class, and it’s technocrats up and down. People who believe that the best way to run society is to have experts run things they have expertise in.
With apologies to Jeff Foxworthy:
This is how doctors and lawyers and bureaucrats and scientists feel about society. They think they are democrats because they want to govern by consensus, but they only want to govern by consensus after the people who don’t understand what the best decisions is have had things explained to them so that the consensus can become what the experts agree it should be.
That’s not how all members of the professional class think, but I think it’s a large majority.
I doubt the merchant class is largely plutocrats, but I also think that the population (especially in the US) is full of plutocrats. It’s not just the people at the top.
So where the article seems to go into full equivocation between adherents of a political philosophy and members of a social class is when it talks about plutocrats and technocrats having an alliance in the post-war period. Plutocrats and technocrats can never have an alliance (basically all -cracies are incompatible with one another). But members of the professional class and members of the investor class can.
So I found the description of history strange. When the article talks about an alliance between the professional and investor class in the post-war period shutting out 85% of people, it’s pretty important to realize that during that period the wealth was flowing pretty well. The middle class - who are not the professional class - had every reason to trust that the experts had things right. Everyone was getting richer, their kids were going to college, home ownership was skyrocketing, they had washing machines and dishwashers, polio was eradicated, etc. Their parents were beaming at what a bright future they had.
Technocracy isn’t just the majority opinion of the political class, I think it was probably the majority opinion of the middle class. The middle class was larger than the professional class and probably composed the bulk of the technocrats.
When the 1970s came along and economists - who passed themselves off as just another kind of expert - said they had a great new way to run the economy, the middle class easy to sell on Reaganism/Thatcherism. So I think the article is right that the technocrats lost, but not in the way it suggests. The professional class held on to status and power during that era, but the middle class crumbled.
When median wages stopped going up and the middle class started to fall apart. And if it had fallen into the working class things would probably have been okay (or at least better than they are), but in many places it fell apart into the “forgotten class”, people who society simply didn’t have a use for anymore (the unnecessariat). The people who were in the middle class lost faith in technocracy and reverted to democracy (that is, the belief that their opinions ought to count even if they weren’t experts) or kakistocracy (fuck-you-cracy?).
I’m not sure this vision I have corresponds to reality in any meaningful way, but my experience is that I’m a prophetic genius so it’s probably at least half right. I think the article is very good, but it requires sorting out techno-/pluto-/demo- crats from investor/merchant/professional/middle/working/forgotten class. Classes likely have predominant political philosophies, but they aren’t the same as political philosophies.
You’re closer to it than the guy who wrote the original article. This is why it’s important to tease out the distinctions.
I would consider changing your small-d “democrat” to “populist”, which I think better reflects what you’re trying to get at in that regard. This allows room for proponents of illiberal democracy as well as liberal democracy and makes what I agree is a majority.
I’d agree. The professional elites in Western countries understand the value of popular legitimacy in governance, but as professional elites we also know the value of deferring to subject-area experts in a modern society.
There are lots of aspiring plutocrats, but most of them won’t realise enough net worth in their lifetimes to achieve the political power that’s the hallmark of a true plutocrat. American movement conservatism’s genius has been collectivising all that never-to-be-fulfilled aspiration and forging it into a formidable political weapon.
Another key strategy was shifting the general public’s perception of who American society’s “elites” were. The elites were no longer ultra-wealthy people (who were now “job creators”) but rather educated professionals and experts and academics, like those climate scientists who talk about global warming and make big bucks that salt-of-the-earth Real American™ coal miners who do Real Work™ will never see.
That was partially due to an economic anomaly that made the plutocrats comfortable allowing some mobility under the banner of meritocracy. Also, that 85% figure is way too large especially if applied from the late 1940s to the 1970s. Reeves pegs it at 80%, and only after the final end of the anomaly we’re coming to now (an ending accelerated by the bad-actor economists and politicians you mention). From 1945 to 2000 there was still room allowed by the powers that be for a strong middle class.
I was thinking about that as I wrote it. Then a thing occurred to me. (This is where I’m really going off the reservation, though)
People with different political philosophies disagree on what should get you political power. People with the same political philosophy vie to have the most of whatever it is that gives you power among themselves.
Technocrats believe expertise should get you political power and vie to determine who has the best argument.
Plutocrats believe that money should get you political power and vie to have the most money.
and (I’m going off wild here, but it seems to make a huge amount of sense)
Democrats believe that being a person should get you political power and vie to be people
So to make another “joke”:
I think that at least in part what happened was that by the 70s, a new generation was taking power that did not really remember the Great Depression and WWII. They didn’t have personal experience with what happens when economic gains flow almost exclusively to the already wealthy, as a result of the money coming as returns on capital rather than labor. For ~20 years after the end of WWII, there was a golden age (at least if you were white) when even many 1%ers realized that you have to share some bread with the oarsmen if you want to get anywhere, even if you own the boat.
Glenn’s “both sides are equally bad and there’s no daylight between Hillary and Trump” attitude has been less than helpful. Granted the mainstream Democrats have been just as happy to engage in surveillance as Republicans, but there’s more to the world than that.
Some relationship here to Matt Taibbi’s column about how the “Trump Nation” idolizes rich people precisely because they never meet them, and have a romanticized view of their lives, one that Trump embodies with his “dictator chic” home decor and trophy wives. The DO interact, however, with the professional class that Schwarz is calling “technocrats” though they only rule over the lives of the workers, not society. They know these people as the hated supervisors and managers and MBAs that boss them around and fire them. And don’t actually understand how the factory or store, or job-site work, not really - leading to the disrespect of their “expertise” and contempt. Combine with the perception that this professional class also loves all kinds of societal values that threaten them, and you have the way that these folks seem almost more delighted by the way some initiative “infuriates the Libs” than they are by its direct effect. (It’s not like some guy having the right to refuse to bake a cake actually changes their lives, after all…)
From 1945 to 1982, the top marginal income tax rate was never less than 69 percent (and was as high as 92 percent). This prevented (too much) wealth from concentrating at the top and coincided with increasing real wages across all income levels. Ever since then, as the top tax rate has steadily decreased – now to almost half of what it was when Reagan first came into office – wealth concentration has not only increased, but real wages across income levels have remained unchanged, even as worker productivity has increased. (Even these low rates were too much for some rich people, who used the much long-term capital gains rate to technically take no wage income and pay a mere 15 percent on millions in investment income.)
I’d say the powers that be got sick of not being as absolutely filthy stinking rich as they could be somewhere in the late 1970’s, then managed to get everything they wanted in Reagan.
