As I recall, that was under the tyrannical rule of Commie dictator Dwight Eisenhower.
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Perhaps because engineering as a profession is more represented amongst the groups that tend to be terrorists. Given how few terrorists there are, the data is pretty useless to say much more.
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Interestingly though, the tax rate on long term capital gains in the mid 50s to mid 60s was 25%, not all that much higher than today. Certainly today, for the 1%ers and .1%ers capital gains are much more important. But then, the stock market was not as speculative then and its performance was much more linked to the actual profitability of the companies being bought and sold on it. So perhaps there simply wasn’t as much money to be made there, and therefore companies didn’t structure CEO compensation as capital gains.
I’m not enough of an economic historian to know, but there also seems to be an intersection with the rise of capital gains as an income vehicle for rich people and companies shedding pensions in favor of 401(k)‘s – which just put employees’ money in the stock market.
Well, engineers know how to get shit done, okay.
But apart from that, what I see so far is a thin argument based on very thin data. Let’s just say that further study is needed to draw any meaningful conclusions.
Engineers aren’t more likely to want to be bombers but engineers who want to be bombers are a lot more likely to actually build a bomb that works is a seemingly sound hypothesis.
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Absolutely correct, but not what the WaPo article (which is an article about an article, really) is about.
James Watson?
Watson is, thankfully, not a politician or pundit but just an intellectual who suffers from a form of Engineer’s Disease particular to bigoted geneticists who have logorrhea.
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This is relevant:
Thomas Frank has been arguing for years that the Democrats have abandoned their working class base and become the party of upper middle class professionals.
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OK then, there’s someone like Charles Murray.
He’s a racist, more or less like a neo-Malthussian, has argued that prison is the best “treatment” for juvenile delinquents and that all money on welfare and social programs is wasted. Had a huge influence on the Reagan era and was the architect behind Bill Clinton’s devastation of welfare as you knew it.
I’d say he fits the bill as a right-wing, intellectual technocrat of the sort the right was alleged to be missing.
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I have a hard-to-suppress tendency to state things in absolutist terms, so please consider everything below to have an invisible “in my opinion” tacked onto it. This is my view of the situation, but I’m no more infallible than anyone else.
I also tend to wander off on tangents a bit. 
Anyway:
The centre of US Congressional politics is significantly to the right. When you instead look at the policy views of the people, they are not dramatically different to what you’d find in Europe.
There is a clear ideological distinction between the voters of the two parties, on both economic and social axes. This distinction is not anywhere near as clear in Congress, because the Congressional Democrats are wildly unrepresentative of their voters.
Notice how a lot of the blue dots are hard against the left edge of the graph, while even Trump voters seem to be relatively moderate on economic issues?
The ceiling effect on the left and the empty right margin of the economic scale shows that the survey was miscalibrated; they assumed that Americans were further to the right on economic issues than they actually are. A lot of those blue dots on the edge would probably be significantly further left if the scale allowed for it.
Full version at https://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/big_ideas-polling_pdf-1.pdf
Those polling numbers are based on 2016 likely voters. If you included the suppressed and disenfranchised nonvoters, they would likely be even further left.
While you can gain more nuance by adding more axes, there is a strong enough correlation between social and economic policy to make the single-axis version still useful.
Social Democrats and Socialists tend to be to the left of the Liberals on social justice issues as well as economics. Most of the modern advances on justice that are claimed by Liberals were only achieved after sustained activist pressure from the Socialist left. MLK, Malcolm X and the Panthers were very much not Liberals.
Yup, there used to be Liberal Republicans and Conservative Democrats. This didn’t end until quite recent times.
Do you think that the American underclass would agree that that system “worked”? How well did it work for the people who were the subject of the segregationist’s malice?
The ideological inconsistency of the parties is not a good thing; parties that have no core ideology are parties that pursue power purely for the sake of power. It’s a consequence of the plutocratic nature of American politics.
And created mass incarceration.
Also worth mentioning are Ricky Ray Rector, the Stone Mountain speech, “superpredators”, “bring them to heel”, the explicitly white-targeted HRC campaign during the 2008 primary and the refusal to concede on the grounds that Obama might be assassinated.
The 1964 Civil Rights act was basically a repeat of the Civil Rights act of 1868. It wasn’t a great advance; it was just a restoration of the late 19th century status quo.
In the view of much of the left, America has two white supremacist parties. One party is just more subtle about it than the other.
Democratic support for minority rights without an economic analysis results in “rights” that are meaningless to the working class. Having more gender/race/sexuality diversity amongst the plutocratic ruling class does sod-all for poor people.
Your local street sex worker is unlikely to give a shit about corporate glass ceilings. Antidiscrimination laws are inaccessible to people who can’t afford a lawyer or the time to participate in a lawsuit. Pro-bono and “no win, no fee” lawyers tend not to accept cases from people who don’t conform to middle class notions of the “deserving poor”.
The ideological distinction between the parties now is Liberal vs Fascist. The GOP abandoned Conservatism some time ago.
The Liberals support deregulated corporate capitalism; the Fascists support corrupt gangster capitalism. The Liberals support civil rights idealism (so long as it doesn’t cost them anything), the Fascists support monocultural domination.
The Fascist politicians have the enthusiastic support of most of their voters. The Liberal politicians have the extremely reluctant support of most of their voters, as most of those voters are actually Social Democrats.
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I was using “classical liberalism” in the traditional sense; i.e. 18th/19th century liberalism, before the 20th century shift to social liberalism. The US right’s distortion of that term is a very recent phenomenon.
Apologies for the ambiguity; perhaps I should have used “historical liberalism” instead.
Yup.
Liberalism is about liberty. Liberty of speech; liberty of religion; liberty to trade freely; liberty to build your factory wherever you like and manage it however you like; liberty to pay your workers as little as you can get away with.
This video does a nice job of describing the differences between the factions; it should be cued to the appropriate bit.
(I realise that you are probably already familiar with that, but I thought it might be interesting to the lurkers)
I would argue that, up until the rise of the Trumpists, both parties were thoroughly committed to economic liberalism. The GOP has now shifted to fascism, the establishment Dems are still where they were before.
I do get that there is a distinction between liberalism and social liberalism. When I say “liberal” here, I do mean “liberal” rather than “social liberal”. As I suggested upthread, I see social liberalism as straddling the border between the liberals and the social democrats.
You can view social liberalism in two ways: liberalism that pays attention to social issues, or liberalism with a hint of socialism. By my definitions, the Democrats spent the latter part of the 20th century as social liberals, but the establishment Dems shifted back to straight liberalism after the fall of the USSR.
The main focus of both FDR and Johnson was on working class economic issues (albeit in a paternalistic manner, rather than an “empower the working class” style).
FDR did very little for civil rights; his sole major achievement on that was desegregating the federal workforce (excluding the military). OTOH, he was also responsible for the internment of Japanese Americans.
Johnson’s first priority was the Great Society program, and his choice to pass the Civil Rights Act was as much a tactical decision as an ethical one.
They lost the South (which was already slipping from their grasp anyway) but gained the North (although the North/South thing is a bit of an oversimplification; Carter briefly regained the South, Reagan temporarily pinched the North).
Eight years after Johnson (i.e. a typical term for one President, not an abnormal amount of time to be out of the White House), Carter took the Presidency. The party shifted from exploiting White racism to exploiting Black fear of White racism.
Yup.
Economic exploitation and guillotines have a cause-and-effect relationship. To avoid the effects, you need to deal with the causes.
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You’re right, Murray is a good exception to the rule, or was. His ideas have been long discredited in reputable academia and he’s found himself amongst the other frauds in the Wingnut Welfare think tank ecosystem since the mid-'90s, but for about 15 years or so he was accepted as a somewhat mainstream intellectual.
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When Reaganism was just starting, it was possible for a person who was committed to reality to actually believe it would work, or at least to not believe that it couldn’t work. You might look at the Laffer curve and think: hey, I don’t have evidence it’s not true. It’s pretty obvious the ideal tax rate is above 0 and below 100, so maybe this guy actually figured out it is lower than we’re currently at.
I think there’s a real naivete in the professional (or expert) class. By mimicking their mannerisms a person can convince experts that they are “one of them”. From there, pull out some fancy graphs and charts and they’ll assume that thorough, good faith research went into making those observations.
Really, I think to be a technocrat you have to be a bit naive. People vie for political power in every system. So in technocracy people will perfecting their ability to appear to have expertise to get into positions of power that will then allow them to remake the definition of what it means to be qualified.
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To be fair, this is in part due to the drying up of humanities/social science tenure track jobs for phds. It’s not just right wing think tanks that are trying to fill that gap, either, Some academics end up at left-leaning/wing think tanks, too. But I also guess lots of those people filling positions at the right wing think tanks are not coming out of less prestigious institutions where their only option is adjuncting till they die.
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So what is next then for Nazi idea, violence? Welcome to the breakdown of civilized society. The reason that people say the answer to bad speech is more speech is because that is how we keep from just killing each other over disagreements not because the bad idea might be worthwhile.
There are a lot of people out there trying to claim to be the heirs to the Enlightenment. It is sometimes true in bits and pieces but most everyone is mainly an heir to the Counter-enlightenment. Liberals tend to argue liberal Counter-enlightenment arguments and Conservatives argue conservative Counter-enlightenment arguments, and they both construct their own narratives about the world that aren’t based in some objective reality.
Since you say:
It would be nice to have some real world evidence of:
I get that it sounds right. Has it consistently worked? In cases where societies have descended into fascism was it because anti-fascists were too violent?
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Sure, German Communists vs. German Nazis in the lead up to WW2. They were fighting in the streets. The Nazis won and used the state apparatus to kill all the German Communists.
Now is it possible that if they had only protested that they would have been killed anyway, intellectuals tend to get ground up by authoritarian regimes in the end. But if we look at the ME, it sure seems that when you engage in violence, you had better win or you are going to die. But in order for it to devolve into that it starts by allowing each side to post up against one another in the streets.
ETA: The Nazis also used the anti-fascist violence as justification for new authoritarian laws cementing their power.
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