Hands down the best piece ever published on the Commonplace Substack. The author has done a masterful job making very astute and likely accurate observations. My only nit is with Friedman and not the author, I’ve seen plenty of people make hugely irrational money decisions, including me!!!
The fact that people make bad decisions sometimes is not nearly as relevant to policy as the question of how the average of decisions made by people freely exercising property rights compares to the average of decisions made on their behalf by bureaucratic oligarchs.
The real nit is the same as can be made of literally every analysis of the political environment Teixiera has done since 2020, which is that it studiously leaves out
(I) any serious analysis of rightwing populism as its own autonomous movement with its own causes and internal logic, and
(II) any serious analysis of technological change in the past few decades and its effects on contemporary politics
Largely because adding those in would complicate the story beyond “it’s all the cultural left’s fault”, and partially implicate and critique the populist right—which is not what his audience tunes in to hear from him.
So as fan service for his audience, it works fine, but let’s not pretend it’s a truly serious analysis of the modern political economy.
I’m more liberal/left than not. The piece is strong on the points it makes.
To your point on the political economy, I prefer to think of it as a Harlem Globetrotters game, with the Globetrotters on the left, and their perpetual opponents, the Washington Generals on the right. The Globetrotters play a free wheeling, individual, entertaining style of game while the Generals play an old school, straightforward, boring team above self game. The score is always close but in the end the Globetrotters always win. The Left has been winning every season for the past 250 years.
I think you left out an important point: that a significant portion of the "Brahmin left" is anti-capitalist. My impression is that socialism was never that popular among the working class in the US. Those who are socialist or socialist-adjacent are never going to be interested in promoting growth.
I grew up in the 70s and never thought I would see the day where the educated wealthier classes would economically lean so far left, but as I get older, it is making more sense to me. Very far left economic policies are harmful to the economy in general, but is does add a large number white collar jobs to handle the regulatory burden. Its much like the thousands of central planners in the USSR that lived in Moscow and worked in the large office buildings and determined how many of every minute item was to be produced.
No you are correct - they are worse. Central planners in the Soviet Union would do just enough to keep their privileged positions, without a lot of enthusiasm or even much belief in what they were doing. Modern regulatory bureaucrats are often true believers determined to implement their interpretation of the rules with little regard for those effected by those rules or the original intent of Congress.
Deranged nonsense. Congress creates the bureaucracies and Congress has the power to hold them accountable and to alter them. The president also has the authority and obligation to see that the bureaucracies are functioning in the way Congress intended. If you have any beefs, they should be with Congress and the presidents. Besides, there some problems due to some regulators being underfunded and thus unable to adequately carry out the authorities they are supposed to exercise.
I note that you did not address any of the points I made in my comment. Having spent 35 years in a highly regulated field, I stand by my observations. Enjoy your day.
"Having spent 35 years in a highly regulated field." Utter nonsense. Businesses always complain about anything that might tend to limit their bottom lines.
Besides, as I said, if regulators are not doing their jobs as Congress intended, that is on Congress and the president. Take it up with them.
I wrote the original post. My comment focussed on my belief that a heavily regulated economy requires a large number of white collar workers. In the west its the regulators that write the thousands of lines of regulations, that thoroughly monitor all of the private companies actions with regard to those thousands of lines. It is also the tousands of hours absorbed by employees of the regulated companies in making sure the regulations are being followed. That is all good for those white collar workers, so it makes sense that a heavily regulated economy that is supported by the far left would be popular. As for the central planners in the USSR, they were really just regulators in an extremely regulated economy. A US regulator will say say something like a factory must have a temperature of between 50 and 90 degrees farenheit. The Soviet central planner will totally control every aspect of the factory and all others.
You said "Its [sic] much like the thousands of central planners in the USSR that [sic] lived in Moscow and worked in the large office buildings and determined how many of every minute item was to be produced." (Terrible writing.}
US regulations are nothing like that. That is simply intellectually lazy.
Right. Humans in those regulatory positions never succumb to human tendencies towards control and power flex and self-interest. They never listen to lobbying. They never inflate their budgets to insure that next year's budget is not cut, insuring their continued earnings. They never staff their subordinate roster with people who make then feel smarter by never questioning their leadership. All Regulatory Personnel are utopian examples of functionaries focused only on the Greater Good, which never, ever includes imperfect trade-offs or factual misunderstanding or faulty data collection, only conflict with others too imperfect to understand and value their wisdom. I'd guess we need more bureaucratic processes because this imperfect person doesn't understand how wrong I am to seek more local decision- making, less federal planning.
Congress purposely leave a lot of details out to be completed by the regulators. Sometimes its because the legislators lack in depth knowledge and sometimes its so the legislators can avoid taking too much heat for unpopular parts of the regulation.
But that is irrelevant to my point. My point is that many white collar people personally benefit from an heavily regulated economy. Nothing more to it.
A large, complex, modern society requires a large government apparatus, which needs to employ a large number of reasonably well-educated people to make it work. In other words, you are just stating the obvious.
Correct. The only reason why Americans have any interest in “socialism” is because the right has spent nearly a century calling any social spending “socialism”.
Actual socialism is not and will never be popular in the USA.
Except it still isn't that popular. When asked to define "socialism", American "socialists" will describe something closer to New Deal Liberalism than actual socialism.
1. Americans really liked New Deal liberalism.
2. The American right started calling New Deal liberalism "socialism" to discredit it.
3. Americans increasingly say they like "socialism".
Bernie is a socialist, and he has quite a lot of followers. However, they are only a minority of the Democratic party, though a rather large one. It is true that many on the left who say they favor socialism are really thinking in terms of social democracy. However, the number of people on the (mostly educated) left who are antipathetic to private enterprise to some degree is not small. And so-called democratic socialists view social democracy as a stage toward socialism.
I think the reality is you can never have enough insurance and socialism is really just max mandatory insurance. The best risk pool is always the biggest risk pool which is why most countries have universal health care and a more robust elderly care system because the vast majority of people need access to health care and every elderly person needs some form of elderly care. And Western countries are having lower birth rates but having maternity be part of the health “insurance” system in America is the dumbest thing ever…let’s have companies pay for maternity when the worker getting maternity has been with the company a month!! Or that 26 year old woman should have saved $10k for maternity!! Be responsible!! What a dumb country we live in!
People like you always fixate on health insurance, as though that reflects on everything else. If society agrees that health care is an essential need and a civil right, and that private health insurance has proven inadequate to provide for this need and health insurance should therefore largely be a public service, that is not socialism. Socialism views all private enterprise is evil and must be replaced with collective ownership of all industry.
This is not unique to the US, Romance-speaking Europe is full of parties with center-left policy and the word socialist in their name, which defines what the word means in turn for those societies. And in the English-speaking world, UK Labour defines itself as a socialist party in its constitution.
Personally I think the concept of socialism is most useful if viewed as a large historical family of people and institutions that very often disagreed while sharing a lineage, rather than as one narrowly defined set of policies (same as liberalism for the matter).
Socialist parties in Europe are not "center left." They have a radical left agenda. However, since they don't have enough electoral support to convert their societies to socialism, they compromise with liberals and conservatives and hope to gain more support for socialism over time.
Surely anyone that believes in a radical left agenda must have left the UK Labour Party by now, I'd say they are even more centrist that center-left these days.
When will people understand there's nuance to mixed economies? In times of rampant cronyism, it's good to have a social state pull back on the reins.
We don't judge conservatives based on the actions of Patriot Front, why should it work that way for leftist voters who have no chance of holding any real power in America.
We have already seen what radical leftists have done in Cuba, Russia, Cambodia, China, etc. It doesn’t work. And we do judge the right when its radicals seize control, as MAGA has done with the GOP.
This is ahistorical. Socialist countries were very much interested in growth. The USSR elevated what was essentially a feudal society to an industrial powerhouse that reached for the stars in a single generation. This portion of the Brahmin left are essentially kids cosplaying socialism.
That had nothing to do with socialism per se, just wiping out the old authoritarian regime and replacing it with a new authoritarian regime. However, a command economy can only take a country so far.
The Soviet regime forced industrialization on to the country, with much misery for the people for a long time, and the USSR always lagged considerably behind the Western liberal democracies most of the time, in terms of delivering for average people.
The USSR killed far more of its own people and subjugated Eastern Europe, much of which prospered considerably more once the USSR dissolved and capitalism was able to flourish there.
There is no hope of the Brahmin Left opening the gates of their virtual Versailles and mingling again with the commoners as long as they are all baptized disciples of the Social Justice faith, which they believe provides their divine right to rule unimpeded. Social Justice has become the ruling ideology of gentry progressives across the West (which is why we could swap every politician and professor from Australia to Scotland to Canada to California and never notice the difference), as it provides a moral shield and credential that ratifies both their place atop the social pyramid and whatever policies flow fom this.
"We need to open the jails, open the borders, socially re-engineer academia, culture and sex relations, police speech etc...but only because we love the marginalized so much and prioritize their needs and feelings. A vote against us is the moral equivalent of kicking a kitten, and only bigots on the Wrong Side of History disagree," is more or less their mantra and sales pitch.
Social Justice has various problems, but the main problem with it being adopted as the ruling ideology of our globalist gentry ruling classes is that it is rooted in SUBVERSION and is a machine built not for creation but destruction (it's not a coincidence that it's most famous product is called Deconstruction). SJ is anti-Western, anti-liberal, anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, anti-capitalist, anti-empirical (did I forget anything?) and is a steamroller built to take every prior norm, tradition, belief and arrangement etc (up to and including the mammalian sex binary) and tear it up in the name of liberation and a vague utopian future. (I think Philip Reiff predicted this decades ago when he said (I paraphrase): there is no way to build a TRANSGRESSIVE social order, which is a contradiction in terms.) (Sorry Substack needs itals)
But as the Brahmin Left true believers see themselves as the literal and symbolic incarnation of Justice, equality, tolerance and compassion etc, they have stopped doing politics and can't bring themselves to compromise or admit error, as these would feel like blasphemous metaphysical betrayals to them. Once politics becomes sacralized, there is nothing to do but watch the tribes battle and wait to see who wins and who surrenders, as this will be the only time when reason and comity will return.
The Brahmin Left embraced SJ ideology as a way to cohere and fight back against the Peasants' Rebellions of 2016 (Trump and Brexit), so they will not be relinquishing it as long as Orange Julius roams the countryside. We will be stuck here for the rest of the decade...
Trump is far from the first aristocrat (in wealth terms) to use sales pitches to the lower orders as a way to seize power. This is the foundation of demagoguery, as has been known since the days of Aristotle and was best exemplified by Julius Caesar, the aristocrat beloved by the proles.
Brexit and Trump represent the revenge of downscale whites on upscale whites. The wealth of any backers is secondary, as most social change comes top-down and most of politics is intra-elite.
I never said Trump was honest or genuine and as gullible as I may be, I've never been gullible enough to believe he cares about anyone but himself. But he is the champion of our downscale MMA-loving flag-waving border-closing Deplorables and they certainly did use him to strike back hard at our Brahmin Left, however dishonest he may be.
Trump looked like the best weapon available to disrupt the "Brahmin Class" control of the country and he has proved that with his enthusiasm in challenging their power everywhere he can. He is a change agent that will be gone in two years.
I'm always felt that putting up with Trump's ego is worth sticking the Brahmin class in the eye with his policies. He is indeed rude and crude-----but all the others are so much worse.
My parents, members of the Greatest Generation and survivors of the Great Depression and WWII, were FDR Democrats to their dying days. They were generous, hard working people who saw the government as a kind of backstop for extreme suffering but never relied on it during their own difficult times. They raised 5 children in the Boomer era and instilled their blue-collar work ethic, frugality and good citizenship values in all of us. They are precisely the type of people that kept the Democrats in power so long. And every one of the 5 children who now live with the values instilled in them by these two staunch Democrats is a conservative Republican today.
How did this happen? How do the kids of people who could never imagine voting for a Republican become Republicans themselves without rebelling against their own upbringing? Because of precisely the points made in this article. Thanks for laying them out clearly because I’ve not been able to figure out how the party of my wonderful parents is unrecognizable and has become the party of elitist condescension, gender woo, social engineering, true racism, unfettered immigration, atheism and anti-American sentiments so strong they are offended by the presence of the US flag. Not to mention the hoards of “scolds” online and in public office who cannot tolerate an opposing view without threatening to destroy the offender. Now I know. And I don’t see any way you’ll ever get it back, Ruy. Unless someone, many “someones”, grow a spine and take it back from the anti-capitalist socialists whom you’ve allowed to infiltrate and destroy your party because you wanted the power they brought to win elections but ignored that they are absolutely determined to destroy this country. Good luck.
Really nice article and it rings true on many levels.
What I notice is that none of these four “Brahmin” liberal positions is actively advocated by the liberal democrats I know personally. Yet that doesn’t make these positions any less real, or any less damaging for democrats at the polls. The dynamic is a kind of two-step dance with a leader and a follower: (step 1) -Elite opinion hardens around a non-negotiable position at odds with a large majority of voters (all immigrants are good; men and women can just swap sex/gender at will, etc.); and then (step 2) liberally minded followers just follow, and don’t speak up against the over-reach.
But why not?? Because these topics aren’t so motivating to the highly educated liberal; and because going against the grain can earn you the label of racist or trans-phobic or similar. Easier to sit quietly and assume no one really cares about these cultural topics, and instead claim “It’s the economy stupid!” Um: no it’s not.
Dems will lose elections until they advocate for positions that are held by majorities of people. Newsflash: huge majorities agree with enforcement of borders, colorblind principles, and that men and women are different types even with equal rights. The party that cannot or will not say those things, will simply lose. As we are doing now.
Non-PC comment: On the bell curve, female EQ (emotional quota) is significantly higher that male EQ. Therefore, female vote tends Democratic, leading to unintended consequences.
Ah, this explains why the butt crack boys in flannel toting their sidearms are MAGA. Hence the cage fighting on the White House lawn, and the bizarre, antisocial manosphere among the terrified dudes in their basements who can’t get dates. Great point Jan!
What an extraordinary article. Everyone who's come this far should share it far and wide. I've put it up on my X account and tagged a TON of people. I'm more blocked than admired, however... (grumpy old fart has low people skills...)
My family came from Italy the same time too--but they came legally. They had to have a sponsor, be free of diseases, have a job they were heading to, and enough money to get started on their own. They worked hard, obeyed the laws, and built lives while receiving nothing from the government.
The problem with the Left, and I see it at the start of your second paragraph, is that they conflate legal and illegal immigration. Consequently, anyone speaking out against illegal immigration (the position of the majority of the country) is demonized as a hypocrite because "we're a nation of immigrants."
There should be no illegal immigration at all, period. And legal immigration should be structured to benefit the citizens already here--not to benefit the billions of noncitizens around the world--and conform to the will of the voters.
The modern Democrat party would have you burned at the stake for such views! The conflation of legal and illegal into just “immigration” was no accident. Own the language, own the people. The media has played along with this ploy beautifully, too. And the immigrants that brought yours and my family to this country came here to be Americans — not just “immigrants” trying to maintain whatever culture they left (or turn it into that culture). It’s a different ballgame now and fixing the mess is being resisted at every turn by the party that benefits from those masses of individuals allowed to come here and feed off the good our society brings to the world. Which is to be expected from a party that has basically embraced almost every anti-American position brought forth these days.
The real purpose for the Democrats affinity for illegal immigrants is to increase their voting base, or at least their representation in the electoral college. They are facing a do or die situation if they can't import new voters.
By the way, the Italian immigrants did not completely assimilate to the American culture; the bent it with their cuisine and we are all the much better for it.
Exactly. And thank goodness for the Italians interjecting their cuisine into our melting pot! My own ancestors escaping the potato famine in Ireland weren’t quite that successful in their contributions to our culinary experiences — corned beef and cabbage notwithstanding 😬
I'm of Irish decent as well. By the way, I read that the Irish invented corned beef and cabbage in NYC and the corned beef came from their Jewish neighbors.
I didn’t know that! Makes perfect sense. And that means the culinary contribution from the O’Gormans in my family has been reduced to…cabbage 😆 Looks like I’ll have to lean into my German roots to claim bratwurst and really good mustard!
It will be interesting to observe the attitudes of the Brahmin left as AI diminishes their employment prospects. How and when will the political parties react to the emerging economic realities?
AI feels like the dotcom bubble. It’s more hype than revolution.
But if the children of the Brahmin left can’t maintain the status and prestige of their parents, they will become more radical and revolutionary. Revolutions are never led by the workers, who are just trying to survive and whose demands are simple and easily satisfied, but from dispossessed elites who feel they are being denied their birthright of being the ruling class.
The extreme right is already driven by Ivy League graduates locked out of prestigious positions by the Brahmins and the extreme left will be driven by the children of Brahmins who can’t achieve the status of their parents.
What the fuck? You don’t get to just make up a new definition for “social democrats.” No one calls Democrats post FDR “social democrats.” And no one calls US democracy a “social democracy.”
“The idea was that women and men should have equal rights”
The moderate Left has never been able to make this coherent. As Freddie DeBoer points out, trying to achieve “equal opportunity” for women, blacks, etc. is hard to distinguish from pursuing actual equality because equal opportunity requires a lot of distribution.
If Democrats go back to being the party of what is left of the middle class (not upper) and the working class and working poor, you will be taking care of within those groups of what are considered “marginalized groups”, including single mothers. These are the folks struggling to make ends meet.
Democrats have always been the party of the working class…Rush Limbaugh and Fox News simply amplified cultural issues and exploited the tribal nature of humans. Why did Limbaugh (easily a billionaire when he died for talking 3 hours on the radio with zero prep for the last 15 years of his show) and Ailes (lived like a billionaire even if not one) and Murdoch (multi billionaire) do it?? $$$$$$$$$$ duuuuuuuuuuuuuh. No grand conspiracy and no “Pentaverate” or Trilateral Commission necessary, just good old fashioned GREED!
Btw, why don’t Yglesias and Silver believe it’s messaging that matters most?? Because they are the Democrats’ messengers and they have failed and they’ve been defeated by people like Limbaugh and Hannity! Instead of being educated and typing nerdy columns they should have been slinging tribal slop to the masses!! 😝
It’s easy to agree with most of what Ruy writes. Never having been a member of the left, it’s easy for me to criticize them as well. But like all other pieces in this space, it leaves out half the story. The “new” right/MAGA is led by an aging, massively corrupt wannabe authoritarian intent on destroying the pillars of our liberal democracy. Policy debates among establishment elites like AC and Ruy are fine. The silence as Don shreds the rule of law? Not so much. Policy debates are for naught if we’ve lost the structures that allow for us to conduct them.
It was clear when establishment elites on the right accepted and even defended Don’s insurrection the path they had chosen-party over country. Since then, they’ve capitulated on most of what they once professed to believe, all in service of a singular corrupt politician. Don has accelerated his never ending election lies as we speak, and has placed incompetent loyalists in the key positions impacting elections. Here’s hoping that when the inevitable attack on our next election comes, we have more Mike Pence’s than JD Vance’s standing in the breach. Meanwhile, enjoy the measles outbreaks as we seek in vain to claw back the status quo that existed before the launch of MAGA’s Middle East war…
Sorry Jim, it appears I've struck a little too close to home... But I must say, I belly laughed out loud with your chip comment, given how the right so dutifully falls in line behind poor ole Don, regardless of his incoherence. Do you actually ready his daily bleats in their entirety? Do you listen in full to his slurred, dementia riddled rants on the world stage? I'll admit, I'm stumped on why the cult rallies so fervently to him, even folks like JD and Little Marco who once uttered the truth. Don's willingness to gaslight his own supporters while pocketing billions in corrupt crypto loot from foreign adversaries never ceases to amaze, yet they lap it up. Can you help?
Ah yes, Don is operating in 4D chess world, we just can't understand:). It's an interesting, if absurd rationalization. Take good care Jim, but please, just don't buy the $Trump coin, ok?
Jim you've really got this lifelong conservative thinkin. Nuance just doesn't come to mind when I think of Don, he proudly wears his id on his sleeve. He doesn't hide his massive corruption for example, he just openly pockets the loot. Instead, I think we need to laugh in the midst of Don masterminding MAGA's disastrous Middle East war, lest we go crazy.
So, I'm reminiscing on my fave Don quotes and moments for humor. Three come to mind. One is his need to continue bragging that he keeps “acing” tests meant to detect dementia. Coupled with the infamous rose garden Fox interview where Chris Wallace points out that elements of the test were identifying pictures of animals and counting backward from 100 by 7, ya gotta admit it’s just doggone hysterical! Another is, after assuring us that he couldn’t have assaulted the woman who accused him of such because she “isn’t my type”, he then, in a formal court deposition, proceeded to identify a picture of her as one of his ex-wives. Priceless:) And finally, and perhaps the most prescient, his statement that he “loves the poorly educated”. No nuance there...
No, I just can’t help but blurt out the truth, as JD once did. Sorry to leave you speechless:) Help me with a glimpse of the nuance you so admire, I’m just a country boy!
Meanwhile, hang in there, modernity can be terrifying.
An excellent analysis of where the progressive left currently sits and why it's not going to change anytime in the near future. I don't think there's any chance they'll be returning to the goal of "promot[ing] a dynamic capitalism" anytime soon, because for many of them the destruction of capitalism is central to their beliefs. The other challenge with that formulation of social liberalism is that the two goals, promoting dynamic capitalism and channeling the benefits, are mutually incompatible. The more the government interferes to channel the benefits, the less dynamic capitalism becomes. The inevitable results of said channelling are corruption, cronyism, graft, and inflation, all of which are then used to justify even more government interference. It's a vicious cycle that is hard to break until the system is close to collapse. IOW, Friedman was correct. The only reason Keynesianism seemed to work at all was due to the unique circumstances of the post WW2 economic environment. It was doomed to fail.
Hands down the best piece ever published on the Commonplace Substack. The author has done a masterful job making very astute and likely accurate observations. My only nit is with Friedman and not the author, I’ve seen plenty of people make hugely irrational money decisions, including me!!!
The fact that people make bad decisions sometimes is not nearly as relevant to policy as the question of how the average of decisions made by people freely exercising property rights compares to the average of decisions made on their behalf by bureaucratic oligarchs.
Meh. Both sides of that fence can be equally argued. That being said, you’re wrong.
The real nit is the same as can be made of literally every analysis of the political environment Teixiera has done since 2020, which is that it studiously leaves out
(I) any serious analysis of rightwing populism as its own autonomous movement with its own causes and internal logic, and
(II) any serious analysis of technological change in the past few decades and its effects on contemporary politics
Largely because adding those in would complicate the story beyond “it’s all the cultural left’s fault”, and partially implicate and critique the populist right—which is not what his audience tunes in to hear from him.
So as fan service for his audience, it works fine, but let’s not pretend it’s a truly serious analysis of the modern political economy.
I’m more liberal/left than not. The piece is strong on the points it makes.
To your point on the political economy, I prefer to think of it as a Harlem Globetrotters game, with the Globetrotters on the left, and their perpetual opponents, the Washington Generals on the right. The Globetrotters play a free wheeling, individual, entertaining style of game while the Generals play an old school, straightforward, boring team above self game. The score is always close but in the end the Globetrotters always win. The Left has been winning every season for the past 250 years.
Agree 👍
But they were your decisions, not some invisible hand that belongs to someone else with an agenda perhaps differently irrational than yours.
Meh. Both sides of that fence can be equally argued. That being said, you’re wrong.
I think you left out an important point: that a significant portion of the "Brahmin left" is anti-capitalist. My impression is that socialism was never that popular among the working class in the US. Those who are socialist or socialist-adjacent are never going to be interested in promoting growth.
I grew up in the 70s and never thought I would see the day where the educated wealthier classes would economically lean so far left, but as I get older, it is making more sense to me. Very far left economic policies are harmful to the economy in general, but is does add a large number white collar jobs to handle the regulatory burden. Its much like the thousands of central planners in the USSR that lived in Moscow and worked in the large office buildings and determined how many of every minute item was to be produced.
That is an utterly ignorant comment. Regulators in a liberal democracy are nothing like a communist, totally planned economy.
No you are correct - they are worse. Central planners in the Soviet Union would do just enough to keep their privileged positions, without a lot of enthusiasm or even much belief in what they were doing. Modern regulatory bureaucrats are often true believers determined to implement their interpretation of the rules with little regard for those effected by those rules or the original intent of Congress.
Deranged nonsense. Congress creates the bureaucracies and Congress has the power to hold them accountable and to alter them. The president also has the authority and obligation to see that the bureaucracies are functioning in the way Congress intended. If you have any beefs, they should be with Congress and the presidents. Besides, there some problems due to some regulators being underfunded and thus unable to adequately carry out the authorities they are supposed to exercise.
I note that you did not address any of the points I made in my comment. Having spent 35 years in a highly regulated field, I stand by my observations. Enjoy your day.
"Having spent 35 years in a highly regulated field." Utter nonsense. Businesses always complain about anything that might tend to limit their bottom lines.
Besides, as I said, if regulators are not doing their jobs as Congress intended, that is on Congress and the president. Take it up with them.
I think the point is that they pursue their own self interest.
I wrote the original post. My comment focussed on my belief that a heavily regulated economy requires a large number of white collar workers. In the west its the regulators that write the thousands of lines of regulations, that thoroughly monitor all of the private companies actions with regard to those thousands of lines. It is also the tousands of hours absorbed by employees of the regulated companies in making sure the regulations are being followed. That is all good for those white collar workers, so it makes sense that a heavily regulated economy that is supported by the far left would be popular. As for the central planners in the USSR, they were really just regulators in an extremely regulated economy. A US regulator will say say something like a factory must have a temperature of between 50 and 90 degrees farenheit. The Soviet central planner will totally control every aspect of the factory and all others.
You said "Its [sic] much like the thousands of central planners in the USSR that [sic] lived in Moscow and worked in the large office buildings and determined how many of every minute item was to be produced." (Terrible writing.}
US regulations are nothing like that. That is simply intellectually lazy.
Bullshit. Regulators are trying to carry out the laws that Congress enacts.
Right. Humans in those regulatory positions never succumb to human tendencies towards control and power flex and self-interest. They never listen to lobbying. They never inflate their budgets to insure that next year's budget is not cut, insuring their continued earnings. They never staff their subordinate roster with people who make then feel smarter by never questioning their leadership. All Regulatory Personnel are utopian examples of functionaries focused only on the Greater Good, which never, ever includes imperfect trade-offs or factual misunderstanding or faulty data collection, only conflict with others too imperfect to understand and value their wisdom. I'd guess we need more bureaucratic processes because this imperfect person doesn't understand how wrong I am to seek more local decision- making, less federal planning.
Congress purposely leave a lot of details out to be completed by the regulators. Sometimes its because the legislators lack in depth knowledge and sometimes its so the legislators can avoid taking too much heat for unpopular parts of the regulation.
But that is irrelevant to my point. My point is that many white collar people personally benefit from an heavily regulated economy. Nothing more to it.
A large, complex, modern society requires a large government apparatus, which needs to employ a large number of reasonably well-educated people to make it work. In other words, you are just stating the obvious.
Correct. The only reason why Americans have any interest in “socialism” is because the right has spent nearly a century calling any social spending “socialism”.
Actual socialism is not and will never be popular in the USA.
The popularity of socialism in the US has largely been with the educated class.
Except it still isn't that popular. When asked to define "socialism", American "socialists" will describe something closer to New Deal Liberalism than actual socialism.
1. Americans really liked New Deal liberalism.
2. The American right started calling New Deal liberalism "socialism" to discredit it.
3. Americans increasingly say they like "socialism".
Bernie is a socialist, and he has quite a lot of followers. However, they are only a minority of the Democratic party, though a rather large one. It is true that many on the left who say they favor socialism are really thinking in terms of social democracy. However, the number of people on the (mostly educated) left who are antipathetic to private enterprise to some degree is not small. And so-called democratic socialists view social democracy as a stage toward socialism.
I think the reality is you can never have enough insurance and socialism is really just max mandatory insurance. The best risk pool is always the biggest risk pool which is why most countries have universal health care and a more robust elderly care system because the vast majority of people need access to health care and every elderly person needs some form of elderly care. And Western countries are having lower birth rates but having maternity be part of the health “insurance” system in America is the dumbest thing ever…let’s have companies pay for maternity when the worker getting maternity has been with the company a month!! Or that 26 year old woman should have saved $10k for maternity!! Be responsible!! What a dumb country we live in!
People like you always fixate on health insurance, as though that reflects on everything else. If society agrees that health care is an essential need and a civil right, and that private health insurance has proven inadequate to provide for this need and health insurance should therefore largely be a public service, that is not socialism. Socialism views all private enterprise is evil and must be replaced with collective ownership of all industry.
This is not unique to the US, Romance-speaking Europe is full of parties with center-left policy and the word socialist in their name, which defines what the word means in turn for those societies. And in the English-speaking world, UK Labour defines itself as a socialist party in its constitution.
Personally I think the concept of socialism is most useful if viewed as a large historical family of people and institutions that very often disagreed while sharing a lineage, rather than as one narrowly defined set of policies (same as liberalism for the matter).
Socialist parties in Europe are not "center left." They have a radical left agenda. However, since they don't have enough electoral support to convert their societies to socialism, they compromise with liberals and conservatives and hope to gain more support for socialism over time.
Surely anyone that believes in a radical left agenda must have left the UK Labour Party by now, I'd say they are even more centrist that center-left these days.
When will people understand there's nuance to mixed economies? In times of rampant cronyism, it's good to have a social state pull back on the reins.
We don't judge conservatives based on the actions of Patriot Front, why should it work that way for leftist voters who have no chance of holding any real power in America.
Keep the baby not the bathwater.
We have already seen what radical leftists have done in Cuba, Russia, Cambodia, China, etc. It doesn’t work. And we do judge the right when its radicals seize control, as MAGA has done with the GOP.
This is ahistorical. Socialist countries were very much interested in growth. The USSR elevated what was essentially a feudal society to an industrial powerhouse that reached for the stars in a single generation. This portion of the Brahmin left are essentially kids cosplaying socialism.
That had nothing to do with socialism per se, just wiping out the old authoritarian regime and replacing it with a new authoritarian regime. However, a command economy can only take a country so far.
Sure but they were serious people and they delivered. The current bunch, not so much.
The Soviet regime forced industrialization on to the country, with much misery for the people for a long time, and the USSR always lagged considerably behind the Western liberal democracies most of the time, in terms of delivering for average people.
How did the USSR do compared to the czars?
The USSR killed far more of its own people and subjugated Eastern Europe, much of which prospered considerably more once the USSR dissolved and capitalism was able to flourish there.
There is no hope of the Brahmin Left opening the gates of their virtual Versailles and mingling again with the commoners as long as they are all baptized disciples of the Social Justice faith, which they believe provides their divine right to rule unimpeded. Social Justice has become the ruling ideology of gentry progressives across the West (which is why we could swap every politician and professor from Australia to Scotland to Canada to California and never notice the difference), as it provides a moral shield and credential that ratifies both their place atop the social pyramid and whatever policies flow fom this.
"We need to open the jails, open the borders, socially re-engineer academia, culture and sex relations, police speech etc...but only because we love the marginalized so much and prioritize their needs and feelings. A vote against us is the moral equivalent of kicking a kitten, and only bigots on the Wrong Side of History disagree," is more or less their mantra and sales pitch.
Social Justice has various problems, but the main problem with it being adopted as the ruling ideology of our globalist gentry ruling classes is that it is rooted in SUBVERSION and is a machine built not for creation but destruction (it's not a coincidence that it's most famous product is called Deconstruction). SJ is anti-Western, anti-liberal, anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, anti-capitalist, anti-empirical (did I forget anything?) and is a steamroller built to take every prior norm, tradition, belief and arrangement etc (up to and including the mammalian sex binary) and tear it up in the name of liberation and a vague utopian future. (I think Philip Reiff predicted this decades ago when he said (I paraphrase): there is no way to build a TRANSGRESSIVE social order, which is a contradiction in terms.) (Sorry Substack needs itals)
But as the Brahmin Left true believers see themselves as the literal and symbolic incarnation of Justice, equality, tolerance and compassion etc, they have stopped doing politics and can't bring themselves to compromise or admit error, as these would feel like blasphemous metaphysical betrayals to them. Once politics becomes sacralized, there is nothing to do but watch the tribes battle and wait to see who wins and who surrenders, as this will be the only time when reason and comity will return.
The Brahmin Left embraced SJ ideology as a way to cohere and fight back against the Peasants' Rebellions of 2016 (Trump and Brexit), so they will not be relinquishing it as long as Orange Julius roams the countryside. We will be stuck here for the rest of the decade...
Beautiful, biting commentary, Clever!
Thanks!
Much appreciated
>> "SJ is anti-Western, anti-liberal, anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, anti-capitalist, anti-empirical (did I forget anything?)"
Anti-family, anti-democratic, anti-scientific, anti-reality.
Top shelf comment BTW.
Thanks!
I so like clever! This is clever! Thank you!
HA! lol
Thanks!!
If you believe that Trump and the Brexiteers, all extremely wealthy men, are friends of the “peasants”, you’re more gullible than I thought.
Brexit and Trump were more Palace Coup than “Peasants Revolt”.
Trump is far from the first aristocrat (in wealth terms) to use sales pitches to the lower orders as a way to seize power. This is the foundation of demagoguery, as has been known since the days of Aristotle and was best exemplified by Julius Caesar, the aristocrat beloved by the proles.
Brexit and Trump represent the revenge of downscale whites on upscale whites. The wealth of any backers is secondary, as most social change comes top-down and most of politics is intra-elite.
I never said Trump was honest or genuine and as gullible as I may be, I've never been gullible enough to believe he cares about anyone but himself. But he is the champion of our downscale MMA-loving flag-waving border-closing Deplorables and they certainly did use him to strike back hard at our Brahmin Left, however dishonest he may be.
Trump looked like the best weapon available to disrupt the "Brahmin Class" control of the country and he has proved that with his enthusiasm in challenging their power everywhere he can. He is a change agent that will be gone in two years.
You see him as a weapon. He sees you as a mark.
Hey, I never voted for him and have never said a kind word about the man, neither here nor elsewhere.
I just don't come unhinged at the sight of him nor have I felt the need to join the sad, failed "Resistance".
My comments were entirely descriptive and not any kind of endorsement.
I gathered that from your reply.
My comment was directed at James Twigg.
I'm always felt that putting up with Trump's ego is worth sticking the Brahmin class in the eye with his policies. He is indeed rude and crude-----but all the others are so much worse.
Trump gave the system a much-needed high colonic. Just when our rulers in DC/NYC/LA thought they had vanquished the Deplorables...bam!
Nothing will ever be the same, for better or worse.
Voting out of spite has consequences.
My parents, members of the Greatest Generation and survivors of the Great Depression and WWII, were FDR Democrats to their dying days. They were generous, hard working people who saw the government as a kind of backstop for extreme suffering but never relied on it during their own difficult times. They raised 5 children in the Boomer era and instilled their blue-collar work ethic, frugality and good citizenship values in all of us. They are precisely the type of people that kept the Democrats in power so long. And every one of the 5 children who now live with the values instilled in them by these two staunch Democrats is a conservative Republican today.
How did this happen? How do the kids of people who could never imagine voting for a Republican become Republicans themselves without rebelling against their own upbringing? Because of precisely the points made in this article. Thanks for laying them out clearly because I’ve not been able to figure out how the party of my wonderful parents is unrecognizable and has become the party of elitist condescension, gender woo, social engineering, true racism, unfettered immigration, atheism and anti-American sentiments so strong they are offended by the presence of the US flag. Not to mention the hoards of “scolds” online and in public office who cannot tolerate an opposing view without threatening to destroy the offender. Now I know. And I don’t see any way you’ll ever get it back, Ruy. Unless someone, many “someones”, grow a spine and take it back from the anti-capitalist socialists whom you’ve allowed to infiltrate and destroy your party because you wanted the power they brought to win elections but ignored that they are absolutely determined to destroy this country. Good luck.
Ruy always delivers insightful commentary. Always.
Ruy, you don’t have to become a Republican, but you don’t belong in the current Democratic Party.
Great article!
But, until they cleanse themselves of this complete left turn please vote Republican.
I’m thinking 2030 is the next election I personally, think I’ll be able to send a Democrat to Washington.
I've been waiting a long time for someone to write this article. Brilliant!
Really nice article and it rings true on many levels.
What I notice is that none of these four “Brahmin” liberal positions is actively advocated by the liberal democrats I know personally. Yet that doesn’t make these positions any less real, or any less damaging for democrats at the polls. The dynamic is a kind of two-step dance with a leader and a follower: (step 1) -Elite opinion hardens around a non-negotiable position at odds with a large majority of voters (all immigrants are good; men and women can just swap sex/gender at will, etc.); and then (step 2) liberally minded followers just follow, and don’t speak up against the over-reach.
But why not?? Because these topics aren’t so motivating to the highly educated liberal; and because going against the grain can earn you the label of racist or trans-phobic or similar. Easier to sit quietly and assume no one really cares about these cultural topics, and instead claim “It’s the economy stupid!” Um: no it’s not.
Dems will lose elections until they advocate for positions that are held by majorities of people. Newsflash: huge majorities agree with enforcement of borders, colorblind principles, and that men and women are different types even with equal rights. The party that cannot or will not say those things, will simply lose. As we are doing now.
Females appear to like these Democrat positions.
Non-PC comment: On the bell curve, female EQ (emotional quota) is significantly higher that male EQ. Therefore, female vote tends Democratic, leading to unintended consequences.
Ah, this explains why the butt crack boys in flannel toting their sidearms are MAGA. Hence the cage fighting on the White House lawn, and the bizarre, antisocial manosphere among the terrified dudes in their basements who can’t get dates. Great point Jan!
“appear to like” is the right term for it.
What an extraordinary article. Everyone who's come this far should share it far and wide. I've put it up on my X account and tagged a TON of people. I'm more blocked than admired, however... (grumpy old fart has low people skills...)
My family came from Italy the same time too--but they came legally. They had to have a sponsor, be free of diseases, have a job they were heading to, and enough money to get started on their own. They worked hard, obeyed the laws, and built lives while receiving nothing from the government.
The problem with the Left, and I see it at the start of your second paragraph, is that they conflate legal and illegal immigration. Consequently, anyone speaking out against illegal immigration (the position of the majority of the country) is demonized as a hypocrite because "we're a nation of immigrants."
There should be no illegal immigration at all, period. And legal immigration should be structured to benefit the citizens already here--not to benefit the billions of noncitizens around the world--and conform to the will of the voters.
The modern Democrat party would have you burned at the stake for such views! The conflation of legal and illegal into just “immigration” was no accident. Own the language, own the people. The media has played along with this ploy beautifully, too. And the immigrants that brought yours and my family to this country came here to be Americans — not just “immigrants” trying to maintain whatever culture they left (or turn it into that culture). It’s a different ballgame now and fixing the mess is being resisted at every turn by the party that benefits from those masses of individuals allowed to come here and feed off the good our society brings to the world. Which is to be expected from a party that has basically embraced almost every anti-American position brought forth these days.
The real purpose for the Democrats affinity for illegal immigrants is to increase their voting base, or at least their representation in the electoral college. They are facing a do or die situation if they can't import new voters.
By the way, the Italian immigrants did not completely assimilate to the American culture; the bent it with their cuisine and we are all the much better for it.
Exactly. And thank goodness for the Italians interjecting their cuisine into our melting pot! My own ancestors escaping the potato famine in Ireland weren’t quite that successful in their contributions to our culinary experiences — corned beef and cabbage notwithstanding 😬
I'm of Irish decent as well. By the way, I read that the Irish invented corned beef and cabbage in NYC and the corned beef came from their Jewish neighbors.
I didn’t know that! Makes perfect sense. And that means the culinary contribution from the O’Gormans in my family has been reduced to…cabbage 😆 Looks like I’ll have to lean into my German roots to claim bratwurst and really good mustard!
It will be interesting to observe the attitudes of the Brahmin left as AI diminishes their employment prospects. How and when will the political parties react to the emerging economic realities?
AI feels like the dotcom bubble. It’s more hype than revolution.
But if the children of the Brahmin left can’t maintain the status and prestige of their parents, they will become more radical and revolutionary. Revolutions are never led by the workers, who are just trying to survive and whose demands are simple and easily satisfied, but from dispossessed elites who feel they are being denied their birthright of being the ruling class.
The extreme right is already driven by Ivy League graduates locked out of prestigious positions by the Brahmins and the extreme left will be driven by the children of Brahmins who can’t achieve the status of their parents.
The U.S. has no "extreme right" of any consequence.
What the fuck? You don’t get to just make up a new definition for “social democrats.” No one calls Democrats post FDR “social democrats.” And no one calls US democracy a “social democracy.”
Thank you.
“The idea was that women and men should have equal rights”
The moderate Left has never been able to make this coherent. As Freddie DeBoer points out, trying to achieve “equal opportunity” for women, blacks, etc. is hard to distinguish from pursuing actual equality because equal opportunity requires a lot of distribution.
If Democrats go back to being the party of what is left of the middle class (not upper) and the working class and working poor, you will be taking care of within those groups of what are considered “marginalized groups”, including single mothers. These are the folks struggling to make ends meet.
Democrats are seen as party of upper middle class and aggrieved “marginalized” groups.
Democrats have always been the party of the working class…Rush Limbaugh and Fox News simply amplified cultural issues and exploited the tribal nature of humans. Why did Limbaugh (easily a billionaire when he died for talking 3 hours on the radio with zero prep for the last 15 years of his show) and Ailes (lived like a billionaire even if not one) and Murdoch (multi billionaire) do it?? $$$$$$$$$$ duuuuuuuuuuuuuh. No grand conspiracy and no “Pentaverate” or Trilateral Commission necessary, just good old fashioned GREED!
Btw, why don’t Yglesias and Silver believe it’s messaging that matters most?? Because they are the Democrats’ messengers and they have failed and they’ve been defeated by people like Limbaugh and Hannity! Instead of being educated and typing nerdy columns they should have been slinging tribal slop to the masses!! 😝
It’s easy to agree with most of what Ruy writes. Never having been a member of the left, it’s easy for me to criticize them as well. But like all other pieces in this space, it leaves out half the story. The “new” right/MAGA is led by an aging, massively corrupt wannabe authoritarian intent on destroying the pillars of our liberal democracy. Policy debates among establishment elites like AC and Ruy are fine. The silence as Don shreds the rule of law? Not so much. Policy debates are for naught if we’ve lost the structures that allow for us to conduct them.
It was clear when establishment elites on the right accepted and even defended Don’s insurrection the path they had chosen-party over country. Since then, they’ve capitulated on most of what they once professed to believe, all in service of a singular corrupt politician. Don has accelerated his never ending election lies as we speak, and has placed incompetent loyalists in the key positions impacting elections. Here’s hoping that when the inevitable attack on our next election comes, we have more Mike Pence’s than JD Vance’s standing in the breach. Meanwhile, enjoy the measles outbreaks as we seek in vain to claw back the status quo that existed before the launch of MAGA’s Middle East war…
Good luck America.
Thanks for the boilerplate. Do I have to actually study that, or can I have a chip implanted?
Sorry Jim, it appears I've struck a little too close to home... But I must say, I belly laughed out loud with your chip comment, given how the right so dutifully falls in line behind poor ole Don, regardless of his incoherence. Do you actually ready his daily bleats in their entirety? Do you listen in full to his slurred, dementia riddled rants on the world stage? I'll admit, I'm stumped on why the cult rallies so fervently to him, even folks like JD and Little Marco who once uttered the truth. Don's willingness to gaslight his own supporters while pocketing billions in corrupt crypto loot from foreign adversaries never ceases to amaze, yet they lap it up. Can you help?
More boilerplate. Divide the world. Much easier than thinking for yourself. Remember "nuance?" I guess not.
Ah yes, Don is operating in 4D chess world, we just can't understand:). It's an interesting, if absurd rationalization. Take good care Jim, but please, just don't buy the $Trump coin, ok?
You just can't help yourself, can you? LOL
Jim you've really got this lifelong conservative thinkin. Nuance just doesn't come to mind when I think of Don, he proudly wears his id on his sleeve. He doesn't hide his massive corruption for example, he just openly pockets the loot. Instead, I think we need to laugh in the midst of Don masterminding MAGA's disastrous Middle East war, lest we go crazy.
So, I'm reminiscing on my fave Don quotes and moments for humor. Three come to mind. One is his need to continue bragging that he keeps “acing” tests meant to detect dementia. Coupled with the infamous rose garden Fox interview where Chris Wallace points out that elements of the test were identifying pictures of animals and counting backward from 100 by 7, ya gotta admit it’s just doggone hysterical! Another is, after assuring us that he couldn’t have assaulted the woman who accused him of such because she “isn’t my type”, he then, in a formal court deposition, proceeded to identify a picture of her as one of his ex-wives. Priceless:) And finally, and perhaps the most prescient, his statement that he “loves the poorly educated”. No nuance there...
Welcome to the "new" right...
No, I just can’t help but blurt out the truth, as JD once did. Sorry to leave you speechless:) Help me with a glimpse of the nuance you so admire, I’m just a country boy!
Meanwhile, hang in there, modernity can be terrifying.
An excellent analysis of where the progressive left currently sits and why it's not going to change anytime in the near future. I don't think there's any chance they'll be returning to the goal of "promot[ing] a dynamic capitalism" anytime soon, because for many of them the destruction of capitalism is central to their beliefs. The other challenge with that formulation of social liberalism is that the two goals, promoting dynamic capitalism and channeling the benefits, are mutually incompatible. The more the government interferes to channel the benefits, the less dynamic capitalism becomes. The inevitable results of said channelling are corruption, cronyism, graft, and inflation, all of which are then used to justify even more government interference. It's a vicious cycle that is hard to break until the system is close to collapse. IOW, Friedman was correct. The only reason Keynesianism seemed to work at all was due to the unique circumstances of the post WW2 economic environment. It was doomed to fail.