Two Links and My Ramblings

First: This is the best thing I've read this week.

Scott Alexander's post is worth a read in its entirety. The idea of cost disease is, to be simplistic, that stuff costs more for no good reason. Economists differentiate this from easily understood reasons for price increases. The idea originated in the 1960s as an attempt to understand why salaries in some fields were going up even though productivity was flat. Labor was costing more but not producing more therefore generating costs to the company. 

Alexander looks primarily at two fields which are near and dear to my heart, education and medicine. He notes repeated examples about increases in spending not translating to increases in outcomes. He also puts some analysis on transportation spending and rent costs. What I find refreshing and insightful is how he departs from both the left and right orthodoxy in his evaluation of the problem. Typically the right doesn't like to compare US outcomes to other developed countries because it explodes ideas of American exceptionalism and anti-socialism yet Alexander doesn't shy away. 

So, to summarize: in the past fifty years, education costs have doubled, college costs have dectupled, health insurance costs have dectupled, subway costs have at least dectupled, and housing costs have increased by about fifty percent. US health care costs about four times as much as equivalent health care in other First World countries; US subways cost about eight times as much as equivalent subways in other First World countries

He is not, however, ready to find fault with the government, with regulations, with unions, or with the typical right boogeymen. One area he zooms in on is worker salaries in education and healthcare. 

The overall pictures[sic] is that health care and education costs have managed to increase by ten times without a single cent of the gains going to teachers, doctors, or nurses. Indeed these professions seem to have lost ground salary-wise relative to others.

The piece is heavily linked throughout with charts and graphs and all the goodies that good analytical blogging should have. He considers at least eight different causes but finds them all lacking and explains why. 

But here's the part I thought was best:

I don’t know why more people don’t just come out and say “LOOK, REALLY OUR MAIN PROBLEM IS THAT ALL THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS COST TEN TIMES AS MUCH AS THEY USED TO FOR NO REASON, PLUS THEY SEEM TO BE GOING DOWN IN QUALITY, AND NOBODY KNOWS WHY, AND WE’RE MOSTLY JUST DESPERATELY FLAILING AROUND LOOKING FOR SOLUTIONS HERE.” State that clearly, and a lot of political debates take on a different light.

Alexander later remarks that framing the issues facing our nation in this way helps us see the current policy debates as arguments about how to distribute the losses. When more money is spent but less and less come out of your hospitals, schools, public transit, and housing, then somebody is going to be left out. Somebody faces a shortage. The debate Alexander says we're having is about picking who gets left out instead of trying to understand why we have a system which is prone to leaving people out.

For example: some people promote free universal college education, remembering a time when it was easy for middle class people to afford college if they wanted it. Other people oppose the policy, remembering a time when people didn’t depend on government handouts. Both are true! My uncle paid for his tuition at a really good college just by working a pretty easy summer job – not so hard when college cost a tenth of what it did now. The modern conflict between opponents and proponents of free college education is over how to distribute our losses. In the old days, we could combine low taxes with widely available education. Now we can’t, and we have to argue about which value to sacrifice.

I hadn't been thinking about our economy in this way. Indeed, I haven't read anyone who has. Go check the post out because I think Alexander has a very good point here. 

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Second: The Skynet that elected Trump is watching you. 

If ever you needed a reason to quit social media, this is it. A taste:

By leveraging automated emotional manipulation alongside swarms of bots, Facebook dark posts, A/B testing, and fake news networks, a company called Cambridge Analytica has activated an invisible machine that preys on the personalities of individual voters to create large shifts in public opinion. Many of these technologies have been used individually to some effect before, but together they make up a nearly impenetrable voter manipulation machine that is quickly becoming the new deciding factor in elections around the world.

Most recently, Analytica helped elect U.S. President Donald Trump, secured a win for the Brexit Leave campaign, and led Ted Cruz’s 2016 campaign surge, shepherding him from the back of the GOP primary pack to the front.

Propaganda has entered the 21st century and the combination of big data, psychographic modeling, and neural networks is making it more effective than ever. Twitter, Facebook, and other forms or media are being used to promote political ideologies. That much is not news. But Analytica works. That's worth knowing about.

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Third: Intersectional Conservatism

This is the rambling part I mentioned at the top. I was thinking while listening to NPR on the ride home that republicans became a "big tent" party following Nixon's southern strategy and culminating in the complete coopting of evangelical christianity by republicans in during the Bush era. In some sense this is still the same base that elected Donald Trump. It's white, religious, racist, and economically bifurcated. Then I thought to myself, isn't that intersectional?

It may be really controversial to suggest such a thing. Thankfully I'm not an academic writer or I might be tempted to publish such an idea just to start a firestorm. But let's tease this out. I write, after all, to find out what I think.

Intersectionality came into being to address a critical problem in the social sciences and humanities. We had Feminism. We had African-American Studies. We had Gender Studies. We had Class issues sitting across several areas of study. Despite all these and more existing in academia and increasingly becoming part of public discourse, they all existed in somewhat separate arenas. If you want to understand exactly why intersectionality needs to exist, I think this now famous image from the Women's March on Washington captures it perfectly.

Intersectionality was coined by Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989 in her article Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. She was very critical of how modern Feminism dismissed and marginalized other marginalized people and their equally valid struggles. She singles out how black women were mostly excluded from mainstream antiracist and feminist theory. It's a controversial article to this day and generates a lot of debate. This debate spilled over into the Women's March as seen above. It has been criticized as a march for wealthy white women who are privileged enough to take a day or two off work and spend money traveling. I'm not arguing that these are valid or true criticisms. Instead, I want to point out that this is exactly the kind of debate that intersectionality demands of the public. Issues of race, culture, gender, sex, and class all require solutions and all need to be addressed. We need intersectionality because it is a framework for thinking through equitable solutions to complex problems.

You may notice, however, that these are basically issues and ideas dominated by the political left. The right wing of American politics is famously ignorant of its own use of identity politics and rejects acknowledging fundamental differences between people as a grounds for broad kinds of  social and political inclusiveness. How, then, can I say that there is Intersectional Conservatism.

My thesis, if you could call it that, is that Donald Trump was able to create intersectional conservatism. He more or less identified all the disparate ideologies and movements within conservatism and created a movement (intersectionalism) built to support all of them. As noted above, intersectionality is a framework for managing social and political issues. A framework like that is not exclusive to ideas which are comfortable for the left.

Trump united the racists and nationalists with his overtly anti-immigrant and anti-muslim rhetoric. He united the libertarians and the christian wings of the republican party with his anti-regulation and anti-1st Amendment stance. He united the suburban mom and the Wall St. billionaire by promising to focus on jobs and reduced taxes.

Now, before you point out, rightly, that none of these groups are truly marginalized and therefore don't need the nuanced advocacy that intersectionality seeks to provide, think about their self-image. How do these groups see themselves fitting into America's fabric?

Christianity is basically a gigantic persecution complex and it is obvious that the Christian right in the US thinks it is under attack and being marginalized. Racists and White Nationalists argue that an inclusive America will bring an end to the white race. They further argue that trying to say such a thing makes them marginalized. Other facets of right wing racism in the US include a belief that minorities have an easier time getting jobs because of affirmative action, getting housing because of HUD, getting food and medicine because of welfare and medicaid, and numerous other supposed advantages bestowed by the government on minorities to damage whites. (Never mind that the majority of recipients of government aid are white!) The anti-government attitudes are natural stances to be adopted by the pro-business and libertarian right. Libertarians are constantly complaining that the government tramples their rights and taxes them to death. Indeed, many libertarians act as though taxation is the gravest form of oppression. Suburban soccer moms? They want their kids to go to good schools with the white right kind of children. They want their communities to feel safe (feel, you know, because they are safer but they don't feel safer).

The point is, these groups may not actually be marginalized but they see themselves as such. Trump's entire campaign and presidency is built on the support of all these groups. These are not groups that normally agree on much but Trump's genius is making a platform to appease all of these groups.

Here's another thing. Intersectional Conservatism plays off some very real malaise facing all Americans. There are more than 30,000 annual deaths from opiate overdoses in the US. Many of these deaths are concentrated in areas that heavily favored Trump. It's a blight on the community and is something which contributes heavily to to the perception that America is in decline. Add to that the multi-decade loss of jobs in the midwest. Add to that the rising healthcare costs, premiums, co-pays, and out of pocket maximums faced by many Americans. (Sure, the medicaid expansion rejected my most red states would have helped alleviate many of these problems, but that's not how Obamacare played out.)

At some point it became clear to a large number of Americans that the standard republican party was not addressing their needs. Trump, by creating an emotive platform addressing all these groups' concerns, effectively created intersectional conservatism. He is going to bring jobs back by being racist. He is going to cut regulations on small business by pursuing anti-environmentalist policy. Trump will destroy Obamacare but somehow also stop runaway costs. He's giving people whatever they want to hear because he's selling them the idea that all of their struggles are related. They're all on the same team just like how Feminism, Antiracism, LGBTQ rights, and class struggle are all allied by intersectionality. Trump has created intersectional conservatism.

I am right about everything all the time

Am I overstating the case a little bit in my title? Probably. I think I've made plenty of mistakes and been wrong quite a bit but I've been thinking about writing a post like this since Trump's election.

You see, I called it. Maybe I did not predict the election itself, though I was much more willing to believe it possible than many. Instead, I noticed a core thread of the right-wing tapestry that is the Trump administration. At the time it was going by the name "neoreactionary" and was a fringe movement with a surprisingly vibrant following in Silicon Valley. Here's a bit what I wrote about it almost exactly three years ago:

Neo-reactionaries hold that democracy can't ultimately provide a high degree of freedom for its citizens. Any time freedoms do exist under democracy, it's a temporary state of affairs at best. Indeed, the old adage, often misattributed to Tocqueville, that democracy will survive until the people discover they can vote themselves money is a great summation of the neo-reactionary view of democracy.

Instead of a democracy, the neoreactionaries seemed to prefer a monarchy or tight knit aristocracy run by the "smartest" which was mostly a way of saying successful white men in the tech industry. The idea that men should run things is central and obviously recognisable in the current incarnation of the right. You may also recognize another feature of nerractionary thought, The Cathedral

Neoreactionaries believe “The Cathedral,” is a meta-institution that consists largely of Harvard and other Ivy League schools, The New York Times and various civil servants. Anissimov calls it a “self-organizing consensus.” Sometimes the term is used synonymously with political correctness. The fundamental idea is that the Cathedral regulates our discussions enforces a set of norms as to what sorts of ideas are acceptable and how we view history...

The Cathedral is a central idea of neoreactionary thought and was coined by one Mencius Moldbug, a pseudonym for the author who is considered the philosophical godfather of the movement. Major tech industry players like Peter Thiel were interested in Moldbug's thoughts about creating a "dark enlightenment" in which a technologically advanced patriarchy tore down modern liberal democracy. Destruction of The Cathedral appears to be a major aspect of Trump's governing strategy.

At the time I was connecting the movement with misogyny found online. Now we know that misogyny is a major component of the alt-right and one of the primary ways they politicize the disaffected who come across their path.

I concluded my short discussion like this:

Neo-reactionism is quite a rabbit hole but I think it sits at a unique moment in our culture and nation. It's rhetoric is attractive and it shares much with anti-Wall St. populism and anti-government libertarianism. This isn't the last we've heard from these guys.

Imagine my surprise today when Moldbug's name popped up in my reading list. You see, Steve Bannon seems to be a fan of neoreactionary thought. Politico:

Before he emerged on the political scene, an obscure Silicon Valley computer programmer with ties to Trump backer and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel was explaining his behavior. Curtis Yarvin, the self-proclaimed “neoreactionary” who blogs under the name “Mencius Moldbug,” attracted a following in 2008 when he published a wordy treatise asserting, among other things, that “nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth.” When the organizer of a computer science conference canceled Yarvin’s appearance following an outcry over his blogging under his nom de web, Bannon took note: Breitbart News decried the act of censorship in an article about the programmer-blogger’s dismissal.

and

Moldbug, who does not do interviews and could not be reached for this story, has reportedly opened up a line to the White House, communicating with Bannon and his aides through an intermediary, according to a source. Yarvin said he has never spoken with Bannon. During the transition, he made clear his deep skepticism that the Russians were behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee, the source said—a message that Trump himself reiterated several times.

Trumpism seemed so wildly different and yet radically familiar all at once. Perhaps this is why? These are not new ideas. Trump's political strategy seem to have come from a Silicon Valley political philosophy outlined a decade ago and supported by people essential to Trump's success.

Do read the Politico article. It is very disheartening. If you're interesting in reading more about neoreactionary thought, check out my post from three years ago for links to a lot of other coverage.

So, I am right about everything all the time. Remember when I presaged Snowden's revelations and warned about the possibility of our government one day turning into a horrid Orwellian nightmare? Fine. Enough gloating. We can talk about that another time.

How's that Triumvirate thingy going?

I posted a few weeks ago about how our new government is best thought of as a ruling Triumvirate split between the Trump administration, the GOP, and the right-wing base. The tensions between these three and the way in which they seek to gain each other's favor seemed particularly useful when trying to think through how our government is going to function.

How is that working out? I'd say good. While we haven't seen much movement yet on the three areas I identified, (education, infrastructure, and health care) the Triumvirate has been active in regulatory reforms and immigration. In both of these areas the Triumvirate framework works.

Immigration reforms by the Trump admin took two forms. The biggest and most covered is the ban on travel from 7 majority muslim nations which were set aside as being terrorist havens. Now, this is really stupid for a number or reasons and basically aids our terrorist enemies in the recruitment of a new generation of extremists. It's a shit policy top to bottom. However, the Triumvirate makes clear that having an effective policy was never the goal. Security was never the goal. Enhanced vetting of potential refugees was never the goal. Instead, this was the latest in what is sure to be a long line of executive orders designed to appeal to the right-wing base that elected Trump.

His latest approval ratings are only 44%. That's the lowest of any new president yet that's a measure of support across the entire public. As I said before, Trump does not care one single bit about the public that did not vote for him. Not only does he question their existence (3-5 million illegal immigrant votes) but he actively pursues policy to piss them off. He does this because it appeals to the millions of voters who got Trump elected. If you single out immigration, 42% approve. If you single out this specific ban, 47% favor it.

You don't have to dig deep to realize that his executive orders on the border wall and muslim bans are meant to build the perception that he is keeping his campaign promises. The people who elected Trump like these policies. Keeping the public that elected Trump happy with and engaged in the White House's activities is absolutely key to Trump's strategy. The public supporting him is the bludgeon he needs to keep the GOP Congress under control. The only dissent that's been seen so far from the Republicans is on his education secretary and even then it's mostly meaningless. Congress fears being voted out of office for appearing unsupportive of the president. They also stand to gain several Senate seats in two years as there are Democratic senators up for reelection in places that flipped from Obama to Trump. Trump knows this and will use it as leverage.

In addition to pleasing his base, we saw Trump sign executive orders to move against environmental and financial regulation. The base is, at best, ambivalent about the specific regulations he is seeking to undo, the Republican Congress on the other hand loves it. Obviously repealing regulations is a Republican wet-dream but executive orders are limited in that scope. The president can't undo laws. What congress loves is that Trump is outlining a direction for them to use the power of Congressional Review.

Congressional Review gives congress the power to pass resolutions of disapproval to effectively nullify laws, sections of laws, or updated enforcement practices of older laws passed 60 "legislative days" before the end of a president's term of office. In this case 60 "legislative days" means anything president Obama did after June 3rd, 2016. The areas Trump identified in his executive orders this week are pointers to congress for where they will not see any pushback from the executive should they disapprove. Dodd-Frank's scope was expanded, for example, to include a new Fiduciary rule which can be removed by Congressional Review. Others include the stream buffer rule, methane waste rule, the extraction rule, the blacklisting rule for federal contractors, and a restriction on giving guns to the mentally ill.

The base is happy. Congress is happy. Trump remains large and in charge. The Triumvirate is, for the moment, stable. Coming up this week, we'll see the Trump admin promoting the Christian right. We received a preview of his plans at the National Prayer Breakfast this week.

Our republic was formed on the basis that freedom is not a gift from government, but that freedom is a gift from God. It was the great Thomas Jefferson who said the God who gave us life gave us liberty. Jefferson asked, “Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?” Among those freedoms is the right to worship according to our own beliefs. That is why I will get rid of and totally destroy the Johnson Amendment and allow our representatives of faith to speak freely and without fear of retribution. I will do that. Remember.

The Triumvirate implications ought to be clear. Buckle in for another week!