Writing and highlights, week of January 11, 2021
Highlights from articles, books, podcasts and reviews I read this week.
Articles
I believe that all young adults should begin their productive years with the same amount of wealth. What these studies call intergenerational immobility is a special case of opportunity inequality. If I can show that, in my country, 50% of income inequality is due to factors that anyone would agree individuals should not be held responsible for, whereas the standard conservative view in my country is that everyone should be capable of pulling herself up by her bootstraps, I have a powerful argument to reform tax, educational, and healthcare policy. The libertarian attack on common ownership of talents—that it would expose everyone to possible kidney harnessing—is a non sequitur.
A seminal essay about conservatism I had never read.
According to the Gaullist vision, a nation is defined not by institutions or borders but by language, religion, and high culture We should ponder the extraordinary fact that Oxford University, which granted an honorary degree to Bill Clinton on the grounds that he had once hung around its precincts, refused the same honor to Margaret Thatcher, its most distinguished post-war graduate and Britain’s first woman Prime Minister. Modernism in architecture was an attempt to remake the world as though it contained nothing save atomic individuals, disinfected of the past, and living like ants within their metallic and functional shells. He persuaded me that societies are not and cannot be organized according to a plan or a goal, that there is no direction to history, and no such thing as moral or spiritual progress. "the dust and powder of individuality." “prejudice” —by which he meant the set of beliefs and ideas that arise instinctively in social beings, and which reflect the root experiences of social life The real justification for a prejudice is the one which justifies it as a prejudice, rather than as a rational conclusion of an argument Although society can be seen as a contract, he argued, we must recognize that most parties to the contract are either dead or not yet born. Although society can be seen as a contract, he argued, we must recognize that most parties to the contract are either dead or not yet born.
Buildings break your heart, especially when you invest them with your ideas and your identity—especially when you make them symbols not just of who you are but of who you are supposed to be.
Trump's presidency can be described in many ways, but one accurate description is as a relentless, continuous war on professionals and professionalism. Elites are influential by dint of who they are and whom they know. They are elite because they have social connections and powerful positions. Professionals, by contrast, are influential by dint of what they know and what they do. Their status is contingent on both their standing and their behavior For amateurs, "compromise" is a dirty word; every issue should be settled purely on its merits. Transactional politics — the politics of bargaining and negotiating — is thus inherently distasteful to the political amateur, who views "each battle as a ‘crisis,'...each victory as a triumph and each loss as a defeat for a cause." The point is not that amateurs should stay out of politics and leave it to their betters. Not at all. The point, rather, is that professionals and voters, like air-traffic controllers and airline passengers, have different roles to play, and both roles are essential. Pushing aside party professionals and assuming that increased participation will solve every problem is like coping with airport gridlock by firing the controllers while packing the planes with more people.
The attack on the Capitol was a predictable apotheosis of a months-long ferment. Throughout the pandemic, right-wing protesters had been gathering at statehouses, demanding entry. In April, an armed mob had filled the Michigan state capitol, chanting “Treason!” and “Let us in!” In December, conservatives had broken the glass doors of the Oregon state capitol, overrunning officers and spraying them with chemical agents. The occupation of restricted government sanctums was an affirmation of dominance so emotionally satisfying that it was an end in itself—proof to elected officials, to Biden voters, and also to the occupiers themselves that they were still in charge
“We’re a democracy,” Mr. Black said.
“Bro, we just broke into the Capitol,” the America Firster scoffed. “What are you talking about?” “Any chance I could get you guys to leave the Senate wing?” the officer inquired. It was the tone of someone trying to lure a suicidal person into climbing down from a ledge.
“We will,” Black assured him. “I been making sure they ain’t disrespectin’ the place.”
“O.K., I just want to let you guys know—this is, like, the sacredest place.” Fuentes distilled America Firstism into concise terms: “It is the American people, and our leader, Donald Trump, against everybody else in this country and this world. In case anybody was confused about what those options might be, Fuentes explained, “Our Founding Fathers would get in the streets, and they would take this country back by force if necessary. And that is what we must be prepared to do.” Lauren Witzke, a Republican Senate candidate in Delaware, publicly thanked the group for having provided her with “free security.” (She lost the race.) Five years later, in the months before the 2016 election, Stone created a Web site called Stop the Steal She echoed many Republicans I have met in the past nine months who have described to me the same animating emotion: fear
Rather, the picture that emerges of districts represented by the most committed Pro-Trump Republicans is one of fast-growing, rapidly diversifying greenfield suburbs where inequalities between white homeowners and their non-white neighbors have been shrinking and low voter turnout has helped deliver large margins to Republican candidates.
For Strauss, the classical teaching is a combination of wisdom and moderation that's oriented by man's excellence, but that still makes its peace with the necessities of political life. And that the modern teaching has decoupled wisdom and moderation, has let technology loose from moral control, and really is steadily on the way now—to just extrapolate beyond Strauss—to some more radical statements of this, to a post-human universal tyranny, where human nature is going to be replaced by artificial intelligence, the singularity, and the destruction of everything meaningful in human life.
Podcasts
- Bag Man by Rachel Maddow on MSNBC
