Why did you put that nasty sign on a hill in Los Angeles?
Take it down!
Hasn’t Los Angeles been subjected to enough this year?
It’s my favorite city on Earth. And I have deep, everlasting love for a number of our amazing cities: L.A., Washington, D.C., Phoenix, Chattanooga, Manhattan … just the top 5.
My question is whether there's anyone in the Chinese hierarchy smart enough to pick up the baton on scientific/medical research that our new 'leadership' is recklessly throwing on the ground. Someone in Beijing should be looking at every research grant that Musk and RFK is cancelling, and immediately offering the now disappointed researchers the same terms or better.
Incredible piece, thanks Rick. You encapsulated it all in your few but exactingly dark paragraphs...sadly,dark is where we are. Any dim light that shines is our ability, as a country, to persist and desire to reclaim our proper stature in the world...and is not from the China train with things from the 'stuff factory.'
Too bad Donvict didn't hear/listen to the words I heard from Mr. Hooven, my college Poly Sci prof -"...there are no easy solutions to complex problems."
I wish all the people who are still delusional about t. being a great business man, had to partner with him in just one venture...something steaks or water or whatever. Since I've "watched" this jerk for over 50 years, I am really sick and tired of this myth.
A guy you ought to check out, Rick, is the Canadian historian of political economy Quinn Slobodian. He has a new book out called Hayek's Bastards in which he argues that the self-identified neoliberalism that arose in the 30s (Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, etc.) to combat statism both left and right inevitably merged into the hard, cultural, racist right we now know here as MAGA.
I don't know if you'd call yourself a neoliberal, Rick; you more self-identify as a classical liberal. I don't know if you hold the economic sphere as primary to the degree that neoliberals do. You have no problem calling yourself a libertarian-minded economic conservative, though. And I have tremendous respect for that philosophy despite being a big-government, social democratic liberal myself. It is entirely self-consistent. We completely agree as civil libertarians. And you're dead-right about certain matters of the economy, like across-the-board tariffs are a disaster for everybody and that crony capitalism is not capitalism but rather a perverted variety of Maoism.
You've also changed your views over the years. When I first encountered you in '15 as an epic Trump scourger and checked out your Twitter feed, your profile was "Enemy of the State." You're not such an enemy of the state anymore ;). You've recognized that markets only work as advertised when everybody has the same information, and the whole wingnut grift is to deprive people of that information. You've grown very sour on McKinsey-style consultants who advised companies to gut their American plant and ship it overseas, which, you know, capitalists would advise them to do.
But there are still certain shibboleths that free market guys hold dear like "the marketplace of ideas." It's funny, but your flavor of this philosophy is Rousseauvian; people are inherently good provided that big actors don't step on them. I'm a Hobbes guy. I think people inherently suck ;)
Slobodian argues that two things happened that changed economic conservatism. First was when Nixon took us off the gold standard and our place as the global economic leader began to be challenged as the world had dug itself out of the wreckage of WW2 and began competing with us in earnest, not least our two former enemies, Germany and Japan. Critiques of the welfare state began to change from the typical conservative moral arguments to whether we could afford it.
Charles Murray came on the scene in the 80s and reintroduced social darwinism into the equation with The Bell Curve. Some people (races) simply don't have the intellectual firepower and that's why all those well-intentioned Great Society programs failed. That certainly puts a damper on the Jack Kemps of the world who believed that the free market would inevitably enhance equality.
Then the Wall fell and the neoliberals had an orgy. They could rush over to Russia and try all the Reagan / Thatcher crap they couldn't get away with over here, including privatizing all state assets and creating an oligopoly of owners who were formerly bureaucratic managers. Was there any real theory behind this aside from central planning and Communism are bad? Whatever it is, it's certainly not Rousseauvian. It's an endorsement of a deeply cruel, dog-eat-dog world.
Everybody was giddy when the Wall fell. History had ended at last ;). But this represented a deep crisis for conservatives, a wing of which would never be satisfied by shepherding in the New Economy and marginally reducing regulations ("reinventing government") as Bill Clinton was doing, undercutting their standard-issue social arguments with a sly, self-satisfied grin. The Grover Norquist wing, since at least Barry Goldwater, wanted _no_ regulations and _no_ safety net.
And that's when the radical ancap (anarcho-capitalist) wing of the think tank GOP (these are white paper debates until the 90s) began its unholy alliance with the social reactionary wing.
Reagan's three-legged stool of social conservatives, economic conservatives and foreign policy conservatives was always shaky (ask Barry Goldwater what he felt about the Christian right) and without the cold war, it was about to fly apart without a new existential enemy. And they found that enemy by equating social liberalism with Marxism, beginning (thanks to FOX) with Bill Clinton.
Hayek's bastards would have appalled Friedrich Hayek just as they appall you, Rick. They have new tools in their arsenal, not least an essentialist, pseudo-scientific take on human nature. If Murray is right and the majority of people are incorrigible crap who can't be educated and trained beyond a certain point, then there's no point in trying to lift them up and therefore democracy is futile. This is the core idea behind Musk, Yarvin, Theil and the neo-reactionary Dark Enlightenment. This is why "woke" is a mind virus because it aspires to, nay demands, an equality that human nature precludes.
So much for the quaint, Friedmanite belief that the marketplace is always the best solution to social problems. No need to worry about that when social problems are a feature, not a bug.
But these aren't your typical social reactionaries pushing this, or classical racists. They're the most elite sector of society who believes it now has the tools to push for what it has always dreamed of, a world where devaluation of the vast majority of humanity is soundly grounded in "science."
MAGA. One thing every one of them lacks is a basic concept of critical thinking, of analytical thinking. It just isn't worth it to them. It's a buzz kill.
On my 15th birthday I got my driver’s license and a 1950 Buick Special that my dad would not let me drive until I overhauled the engine and 3speed transmission. I listened to Elvis and the Everly Brothers on the AM radio.
This is a perfect description of what is occurring. Sadly. And yet, the spin is that the real estate mogul is wracking up one brilliant win after another. How badly harmed will the MAGA folks have to be before they wake up? Unfortunately, we will all be harmed because of their fecklessness.
Your gift for writing is soul-stirring, Rick. Whenever I hear “This is not who we are” I wonder what it is they’re not seeing. This IS who we are, and no one has been able to stop the devolution. I have learned to stop over-estimating our collective moral compass. Hollow is good. Rotten is better and Democrats are just annoying little dogs peeing on the furniture.
Yes it is. Life is living with the choices we make. The situation we find ourselves in was entirely avoidable. We can bash 45-47 all we want but we elected him. What does that say about us?
Details about past elections are irrelevant. For the first time in our history we find ourselves in a dictatorship so ostentatious it defies comprehension. And Americans did freely elect him. And here’s the rub: once elected, dictators don’t freely leave office. We now face a literal battle for the Spirit of America, and whether that spirit is strong enough remains to be seen.
I generally agree, of course, but you have to view it through the prism of American history. Andrew Jackson was a virtual dictator, telling the Supreme Court where to stick it and we weren't at war. We've been through a civil war and backed off from the edge. FDR did some gnarly things to civil liberties. In the 50s, you could be jailed for your opinions or have your career wrecked because you signed the wrong petition in the 30s. This is not new terrain.
Americans elected him but it matters that it was an extremely close election and not a "mandate." It matters that he has the worst 100-day polling since polling began. And the upcoming elections matter, not just the midterms but the races this year. Democrats have been overperforming. The courts just rejected tossing out 60k votes in the NC Supreme Court race and the Republican conceded. A black Democrat just won a mayor race in Nebraska.
Yes, absolutely, the Spirit of America is under serious challenge right now. But America has been through challenges before.
"Statistical anomalies" was the same argument that Trumpers used for Stop The Steal. It's a bad argument on its face because statistics can only tell you about the past and it leads to things like the Monte Carlo fallacy.
If there was fraud enough to swing the election, arne, don't you think that lawyers like Marc Elias and Norm Eisen would have swung into action and launched lawsuits the way Trumpers did in '20?
I just don’t understand how people fell for that two bit con man. He has zero redeeming qualities and gets worse by the minute. What is this spell he has people under?? I have hated him since the 80’s, a midwestern teenaged girl knew better even then, how can anyone be this snowed, STILL???
I hated him since the 70s reading The Village Voice (Wayne Barrett was the OG Trumpologist) and getting disgusted by punk rock ;). Why do people watch infomercials advertising clearly scammy products and buy them? Why do people watch reality TV? (Trump was a reality TV star for a decade and a half.) And for that matter, who sent all those drooling fan letters to Tailgunner Joe McCarthy? We've always had a rotten underbelly, Kate. We always had racists who supported segregation. We're a nation founded on slavery and genocide.
Trump supporters see him as an instrument to enact revenge on the people they hate. The only thing we can do is to write them off. They are the deplorables in the basket.
I *know* all that—I just don’t understand it—and I guess I’m kind of glad that I don’t…I guess it boils down to the faxt that humanity is pretty shitty overall, it took me a long time to get to that realization but here we are.
There's a species of liberalism at least as old as the French Revolution that has an optimistic take on human nature. People are good, it's just that our institutions let us down. And there's another strain, closer to the American Revolution, that's a bit more jaundiced and believes we need eternal vigilance against the darker parts of our nature. I'm in the second camp, although I'm a bit more jaundiced about people than Tommy J and the gang ;). And that's exactly why I'm a big government liberal. You need to actively protect people's liberties. You need cops on the beat. You can't count on "enlightened self-interest" to make it shake out all right in the end.
This is pretty opposed to Rick's political philosophy.
If at some point in our lifetimes the Trump disease has been beaten into remission and Democrats win a trifecta, I don't expect he'll be trying to undermine us the way he did during Clinton and Obama. Every Never Trumper who I read has gone though a sometimes painful epiphany about not only what the GOP is right now, but what it always was.
Plus, the stuff I agree with Rick on I agree very strongly.
It is worth noting that the core of the German economy is the mid sized family firm that never has been and never will be a public company. Freed of servitude to share holders they can just quietly get on with business.
Why did you put that nasty sign on a hill in Los Angeles?
Take it down!
Hasn’t Los Angeles been subjected to enough this year?
It’s my favorite city on Earth. And I have deep, everlasting love for a number of our amazing cities: L.A., Washington, D.C., Phoenix, Chattanooga, Manhattan … just the top 5.
Hi just found you and live what ya yer sayin’
Would like it even better if you tell us when you are saying it😏
My question is whether there's anyone in the Chinese hierarchy smart enough to pick up the baton on scientific/medical research that our new 'leadership' is recklessly throwing on the ground. Someone in Beijing should be looking at every research grant that Musk and RFK is cancelling, and immediately offering the now disappointed researchers the same terms or better.
Great stuff
Just wondering again, why so many women gave up their right to choose by voting for the rapist?
Incredible piece, thanks Rick. You encapsulated it all in your few but exactingly dark paragraphs...sadly,dark is where we are. Any dim light that shines is our ability, as a country, to persist and desire to reclaim our proper stature in the world...and is not from the China train with things from the 'stuff factory.'
Too bad Donvict didn't hear/listen to the words I heard from Mr. Hooven, my college Poly Sci prof -"...there are no easy solutions to complex problems."
I wish all the people who are still delusional about t. being a great business man, had to partner with him in just one venture...something steaks or water or whatever. Since I've "watched" this jerk for over 50 years, I am really sick and tired of this myth.
Depressing, but great piece.
A guy you ought to check out, Rick, is the Canadian historian of political economy Quinn Slobodian. He has a new book out called Hayek's Bastards in which he argues that the self-identified neoliberalism that arose in the 30s (Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, etc.) to combat statism both left and right inevitably merged into the hard, cultural, racist right we now know here as MAGA.
I don't know if you'd call yourself a neoliberal, Rick; you more self-identify as a classical liberal. I don't know if you hold the economic sphere as primary to the degree that neoliberals do. You have no problem calling yourself a libertarian-minded economic conservative, though. And I have tremendous respect for that philosophy despite being a big-government, social democratic liberal myself. It is entirely self-consistent. We completely agree as civil libertarians. And you're dead-right about certain matters of the economy, like across-the-board tariffs are a disaster for everybody and that crony capitalism is not capitalism but rather a perverted variety of Maoism.
You've also changed your views over the years. When I first encountered you in '15 as an epic Trump scourger and checked out your Twitter feed, your profile was "Enemy of the State." You're not such an enemy of the state anymore ;). You've recognized that markets only work as advertised when everybody has the same information, and the whole wingnut grift is to deprive people of that information. You've grown very sour on McKinsey-style consultants who advised companies to gut their American plant and ship it overseas, which, you know, capitalists would advise them to do.
But there are still certain shibboleths that free market guys hold dear like "the marketplace of ideas." It's funny, but your flavor of this philosophy is Rousseauvian; people are inherently good provided that big actors don't step on them. I'm a Hobbes guy. I think people inherently suck ;)
Slobodian argues that two things happened that changed economic conservatism. First was when Nixon took us off the gold standard and our place as the global economic leader began to be challenged as the world had dug itself out of the wreckage of WW2 and began competing with us in earnest, not least our two former enemies, Germany and Japan. Critiques of the welfare state began to change from the typical conservative moral arguments to whether we could afford it.
Charles Murray came on the scene in the 80s and reintroduced social darwinism into the equation with The Bell Curve. Some people (races) simply don't have the intellectual firepower and that's why all those well-intentioned Great Society programs failed. That certainly puts a damper on the Jack Kemps of the world who believed that the free market would inevitably enhance equality.
Then the Wall fell and the neoliberals had an orgy. They could rush over to Russia and try all the Reagan / Thatcher crap they couldn't get away with over here, including privatizing all state assets and creating an oligopoly of owners who were formerly bureaucratic managers. Was there any real theory behind this aside from central planning and Communism are bad? Whatever it is, it's certainly not Rousseauvian. It's an endorsement of a deeply cruel, dog-eat-dog world.
Everybody was giddy when the Wall fell. History had ended at last ;). But this represented a deep crisis for conservatives, a wing of which would never be satisfied by shepherding in the New Economy and marginally reducing regulations ("reinventing government") as Bill Clinton was doing, undercutting their standard-issue social arguments with a sly, self-satisfied grin. The Grover Norquist wing, since at least Barry Goldwater, wanted _no_ regulations and _no_ safety net.
And that's when the radical ancap (anarcho-capitalist) wing of the think tank GOP (these are white paper debates until the 90s) began its unholy alliance with the social reactionary wing.
Reagan's three-legged stool of social conservatives, economic conservatives and foreign policy conservatives was always shaky (ask Barry Goldwater what he felt about the Christian right) and without the cold war, it was about to fly apart without a new existential enemy. And they found that enemy by equating social liberalism with Marxism, beginning (thanks to FOX) with Bill Clinton.
Hayek's bastards would have appalled Friedrich Hayek just as they appall you, Rick. They have new tools in their arsenal, not least an essentialist, pseudo-scientific take on human nature. If Murray is right and the majority of people are incorrigible crap who can't be educated and trained beyond a certain point, then there's no point in trying to lift them up and therefore democracy is futile. This is the core idea behind Musk, Yarvin, Theil and the neo-reactionary Dark Enlightenment. This is why "woke" is a mind virus because it aspires to, nay demands, an equality that human nature precludes.
So much for the quaint, Friedmanite belief that the marketplace is always the best solution to social problems. No need to worry about that when social problems are a feature, not a bug.
But these aren't your typical social reactionaries pushing this, or classical racists. They're the most elite sector of society who believes it now has the tools to push for what it has always dreamed of, a world where devaluation of the vast majority of humanity is soundly grounded in "science."
MAGA. One thing every one of them lacks is a basic concept of critical thinking, of analytical thinking. It just isn't worth it to them. It's a buzz kill.
Fabulous article Rick! I love your way with words!!
Hey Mary! Yes, he is a wordsmith...Steve from da 'Noke.
On my 15th birthday I got my driver’s license and a 1950 Buick Special that my dad would not let me drive until I overhauled the engine and 3speed transmission. I listened to Elvis and the Everly Brothers on the AM radio.
This is a perfect description of what is occurring. Sadly. And yet, the spin is that the real estate mogul is wracking up one brilliant win after another. How badly harmed will the MAGA folks have to be before they wake up? Unfortunately, we will all be harmed because of their fecklessness.
Your gift for writing is soul-stirring, Rick. Whenever I hear “This is not who we are” I wonder what it is they’re not seeing. This IS who we are, and no one has been able to stop the devolution. I have learned to stop over-estimating our collective moral compass. Hollow is good. Rotten is better and Democrats are just annoying little dogs peeing on the furniture.
That's pretty nihilistic.
Yes it is. Life is living with the choices we make. The situation we find ourselves in was entirely avoidable. We can bash 45-47 all we want but we elected him. What does that say about us?
twice.
Yes it is? So nihilism is cool now? It says nothing about _me._ Trump won by one-point-something percent in the popular vote. That's hardly a mandate.
Details about past elections are irrelevant. For the first time in our history we find ourselves in a dictatorship so ostentatious it defies comprehension. And Americans did freely elect him. And here’s the rub: once elected, dictators don’t freely leave office. We now face a literal battle for the Spirit of America, and whether that spirit is strong enough remains to be seen.
I’ll show myself the door.
I generally agree, of course, but you have to view it through the prism of American history. Andrew Jackson was a virtual dictator, telling the Supreme Court where to stick it and we weren't at war. We've been through a civil war and backed off from the edge. FDR did some gnarly things to civil liberties. In the 50s, you could be jailed for your opinions or have your career wrecked because you signed the wrong petition in the 30s. This is not new terrain.
Americans elected him but it matters that it was an extremely close election and not a "mandate." It matters that he has the worst 100-day polling since polling began. And the upcoming elections matter, not just the midterms but the races this year. Democrats have been overperforming. The courts just rejected tossing out 60k votes in the NC Supreme Court race and the Republican conceded. A black Democrat just won a mayor race in Nebraska.
Yes, absolutely, the Spirit of America is under serious challenge right now. But America has been through challenges before.
I will never believe that
it was a fair and honest election. There were too many statistical anomalies in the so-called swing states.
"Statistical anomalies" was the same argument that Trumpers used for Stop The Steal. It's a bad argument on its face because statistics can only tell you about the past and it leads to things like the Monte Carlo fallacy.
If there was fraud enough to swing the election, arne, don't you think that lawyers like Marc Elias and Norm Eisen would have swung into action and launched lawsuits the way Trumpers did in '20?
And yet they didn't.
I just don’t understand how people fell for that two bit con man. He has zero redeeming qualities and gets worse by the minute. What is this spell he has people under?? I have hated him since the 80’s, a midwestern teenaged girl knew better even then, how can anyone be this snowed, STILL???
I hated him since the 70s reading The Village Voice (Wayne Barrett was the OG Trumpologist) and getting disgusted by punk rock ;). Why do people watch infomercials advertising clearly scammy products and buy them? Why do people watch reality TV? (Trump was a reality TV star for a decade and a half.) And for that matter, who sent all those drooling fan letters to Tailgunner Joe McCarthy? We've always had a rotten underbelly, Kate. We always had racists who supported segregation. We're a nation founded on slavery and genocide.
Trump supporters see him as an instrument to enact revenge on the people they hate. The only thing we can do is to write them off. They are the deplorables in the basket.
I *know* all that—I just don’t understand it—and I guess I’m kind of glad that I don’t…I guess it boils down to the faxt that humanity is pretty shitty overall, it took me a long time to get to that realization but here we are.
There's a species of liberalism at least as old as the French Revolution that has an optimistic take on human nature. People are good, it's just that our institutions let us down. And there's another strain, closer to the American Revolution, that's a bit more jaundiced and believes we need eternal vigilance against the darker parts of our nature. I'm in the second camp, although I'm a bit more jaundiced about people than Tommy J and the gang ;). And that's exactly why I'm a big government liberal. You need to actively protect people's liberties. You need cops on the beat. You can't count on "enlightened self-interest" to make it shake out all right in the end.
This is pretty opposed to Rick's political philosophy.
Yeah, I definitely am in your camp too! And as they say about us being allies with Rick—politics makes strange bedfellows!
If at some point in our lifetimes the Trump disease has been beaten into remission and Democrats win a trifecta, I don't expect he'll be trying to undermine us the way he did during Clinton and Obama. Every Never Trumper who I read has gone though a sometimes painful epiphany about not only what the GOP is right now, but what it always was.
Plus, the stuff I agree with Rick on I agree very strongly.
It is worth noting that the core of the German economy is the mid sized family firm that never has been and never will be a public company. Freed of servitude to share holders they can just quietly get on with business.