Increasingly liberal intellectuals out of step with everyone else
Trevor Watkins
Zietsman
The attached article by Charles Murray interested me because it shows
starkly that there has been some influence hijacking traditional
intellectuals (note that includes scientists, writers and media as
well as academics) that has nothing to do with intelligence or
expertise, and which is way out of step with the rest of the country.
Murray controlled for all sorts of confounding variables in his graphs
- race, age, class, income, education and intelligence - and has
isolated an effect peculiar to the intellectual milieu.
One explanation for the left-wing bias of traditional intellectuals is
particularly challenged. The graph shows that academics and other
traditional intellectuals were as conservative as everyone else in
'68. Presumably they had the same government funding incentives then
as they do today, so how come they were not more liberal than everyone
else in '68? Since then they have moved systematically and steadily
'left' in both absolute and relative terms. I don't know if the
liberal-conservative continuum in the US reflects the economic or
social dimensions of freedom or both. Are inteectuals becoming more
pinko-liberal with respect to welfare or more liberal with respect to
gay marriage etc or a bit of both. It matters which I think.
Another interesting inference is that intellectuals have totally lost
influence outside their club. The people are not only not following
them, they are going the other way. It used to be said that
intellectuals gave the people stuff to think about and stimulated them
to do so, it used to be said that they were the group that challenged
tradition and led to change, but now it seems that they have become an
isolated sub-culture who talk only to each other.
It has been said that philosophy has lost its relevance to ordinary
people because it stopped addressing how to live the good life and
started masturbating about the meaning of terms, and esoteric issues
of formal logic, rather than talking about the world and our lives
within it. It seems that lack of relevance is much more widespread
than academic philosophy.
What do you think is happening?
Garth
PS Trevor ad Dave please could you post this to your respective
groups? I haven't done so because for some reason I can't copy and
paste the gragh which is central to everything.
ARTICLE FOLLOWS
The following interested me because it illustrates clearly that there
is some influence that has hijacked academia that has nothing to do
with intelligence or expertise and which is way out of step with the
rest of the country (including its equally intelligent non-academic
part). Note that academics aren't intrinsically left (in spite of the
supposed incentive to be so brought on by government funding) - they
were as conservative as everyone else in '68. Since then they have
moved systematically left in both absolute and relative terms. If you
ask me it's the PC post-modern meme spreading and surviving in an
ivory tower environment where its phenotype is seldom asked to survive
a reality test.
Academic opinion therefore is not a proxy for intelligent opinion
because it is systematically biased. If we are to sample the opinion
of economists we should be careful to make sure they are almost all
economists working in the real world and not academic economists.
The White House and the Pauline Kael Syndrome
By Charles Murray
August 25, 2009, 10:04 am
The late New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael famously said after
Nixon’s landslide reelection, “How can he have won? Nobody I know
voted for him.” My proposition for today is that the entire White
House suffers from the Kael syndrome.
It was the only explanation I could think of as I watched the news
last night about the coming prosecution of CIA interrogators. When it
comes to political analysis, I’m no Barone or Bowman or Ornstein, but
this is not a really tough call. Attempts to put men on trial who
obtained information that most Americans will believe (probably
rightly) saved the nation from more terrorist attacks will be a
political catastrophe, all the more so because I bet that the
defendants will come across as straight-arrow good guys (and probably
are), while the prosecutors come across as self-righteous wimps
(and…). How could the White House not have thought this through?
And then I was reminded of the graph that I put together just last
week, as part of the book I’m working on. Here it is:
[Graphics not displayed in Google groups]
Author’s analysis of the GSS. Sample limited to non-Latino whites ages
30–49 in the survey year.
The General Social Survey, a mother lode of information for social
scientists that has been collected annually or biannually since 1972,
has asked people in every survey to say whether they are extremely
conservative, conservative, slightly conservative, moderate, slightly
liberal, liberal, or extremely liberal. A really simple question.
The graph represents the percentage of people who answered “extremely
liberal” or “liberal” minus the percentage of people who answered
“extremely conservative” or “conservative” in any given survey. I
won’t go into the statistical details (for that, buy the book in a
couple of years), but think of the classes this way:
Traditional Upper: Someone at the 95th percentile of income, with a
graduate degree, who is a business executive, physician, engineer,
etc.
Intellectual Upper: Also at the 95th percentile of income and with a
graduate degree, but a lawyer, academic, scientist (hard or soft)
outside academia, writer, in the news media, or a creator of
entertainment programming (film and television).
Traditional Middle: Same occupations as the Traditional Uppers, but
with just a bachelor’s degree and at the 75th percentile of income.
Technical Middle: Someone working in the many technical specialties
that have proliferated in health, information technology, and
industrial technology, with an associate’s degree and at the 50th
percentile of income.
Working: Someone working in a skilled blue-collar job, with just a
high school diploma and at the 25th percentile of income.
Lower: Someone working at a low-skill job who didn’t finish high
school, at the 5th percentile of income.
The graph is based exclusively on non-Latino whites (because that’s
who the book is about). If you want to see a visual representation of
the development of the bubble that Barack Obama has been living in
since he left Hawaii, that graph is it. Judging from the GSS data,
every white socioeconomic class in America has become more
conservative in the last four decades, with the Traditional Middles
moving the most decisively rightward. But the Intellectual Uppers have
not just moved slightly in the other direction, they have careened in
the other direction.
They won the election with a candidate who sounded centrist running
against an exceptionally weak Republican opponent. But they’ve been in
the bubble too long. They really think that the rest of America thinks
as they do. Nothing but the Pauline Kael syndrome can explain the
political idiocy of letting Attorney General Eric Holder go after the
interrogators.
=============================================================================
Could the reason for this, which studies US intellectuals operating
within a US context, be that the conservatives of today are not like
the conservatives of 1968? In 1968 the dominant conservatives were
still men like Goldwater and Reagan, not the fanatical fundamentalists
that now dominate conservative politics. Intellectuals are faced with
two political camps, as most people see it. One is liberal which
argues that rational policies can be imposed and that central planning
of various kinds can work if smart people do it right. The other side
argues for very harsh, I would argue cruel, policies and claim they
don't need to justify their policies since they are doing what God
wants. The one side actively courts intellectuals as to the
philosopher-kings and the other side pours contempt on the intellect
and demands blind obedience to a faith-held doctrine. I'm surprised
any intellectuals would still call themselves conservative — and very
few do. The few times conservatives try to embrace an intellectual
argument today they usually end up borrowing wholesale from
libertarians like Friedman, Hayek or Mises. When left to their own
devices they turn out "intellectuals" like Beck and Coulter.
The typical Leftist can think circles around today's typical
conservative. One reason is that the Left at least pays lip service to
reason, logic, evidence, etc. The Right threw all that out and cling
to the Bible or some vague concept of "Christian America." The
conservative movement has quite actively purged itself of
intelligence.
I would much rather walk into a den of Lefties, as I did at the
Atheist Alliance International Conference (with Dawkins, Dennet and
others) than go to a meeting of conservatives. I met more libertarians
among the atheists than anywhere else I go. One major funder of
atheist groups told me he estimates that 20 to 25% of atheists are
self-identified libertarians. You'd be hard pressed to find a single
church in the United States where the number would be half that. If
anything the likelihood is much lower. But ask these backwater
revivalists if they are conservatives and you will witness a sea of
hands raised in affirmation and, of course, in praising Jesus for
laying down the conservative agenda of hating immigrants and gays
while loving war and the death penalty.
Modern liberals I can at least respect, even if I disagree with them.
Conservatives today are so vile that I prefer to have no contact
whatsoever with them.
Jim Peron
============================================================================
It is not merely funding that matters to academics but also political
influence. For instance, the British academics who manipulated the
global temperature figures were certainly wanting to preserve their
financial support but it is the huge influence they were having on the
world that would have been like an opiate they could not relinquish.
The climate change phenomenon will have attracted a great many people
to liberalism of the US kind.
A major factor in today's events is the role played by representative
democracy. It results in many evils, which appear to be escalating as
the politicians absorb an increasing percentage of GDP to pay for
their excesses. Citizens find that it is increasingly difficult to
control the activities of politicians, who have assumed the role of
masters and would laugh uproariously at any suggestion that they
should see themselves as the servants of the people.
Eustace
=============================================================================
Jim I understand that the nature of consrvatism has altered and that
intelligent thinking people would recoil from it but then how do we
explain the other upper category of Murray's? That is an group
matched in measured intelligence, education and social class/income to
intellectuals but who work outside the traditional intellectual
circles. Why do they not similarly recoil from conservatism today?
Murray's graph shows them becoming more conservative. We can't say
they are less capable of thinking clearly but can we really say they
are less inclined to reflect on things?
Eustace you point to the money they get from the state but the graph
clearly shows that can't be the main reason. Intellectuals were
always getting state money (Mises refers to that role) but they
weren't more liberal until after the 60s.
Both Jim and Eustace point to the philosopher-king role offered to
intellectuals by liberalism. This makes sense to me and would explain
why those with equivalent brains but not in a position to play
philosopher-kings aren't as liberal.
Even outside of intellectuals there is a positive correlation between
IQ (and its proxy, education) and a liberal bias but the trend toward
increasing conservatism is as manifest in the brightest of the non-
intellectuals as it is among the dumbest. I don't get this - why
aren't the bright everywhere recoiling from today's fundamentalist
bigoted conservatism? Why is it only the traditional intellectuals?
Garth
=============================================================================
Maybe it's because everyone reads too much into 'intellectualism' -
'intellectuals are just like anyone else, just more so' fits nicely -
ie human nature
David
=============================================================================
Well, the first part is very hard to answer with so little info...
there is no explanation of scale etc. etc... but I can take a stab at
the last bit of your question...
I'm trying to quit smoking (again), so brace yourself.
When a culture evolves, in which the smart are called derogatory names
(like nerd or bennie) and it becomes popularly acceptable to dispense
with belts for the sole purpose of showing your over-sized underwear,
then that society is in deep trouble. Put another way... when it
becomes reproductively more profitable to be dissin' all who ain't a
homey thru a rap song (than it is to systematically map the human
genome, for example) den da future of da peeps ain't so phat no more
[fold arms, grunt and jingle da bling].
What I think is happening is that being smart has become less popular
since the 1970's, while the rest of the population have tended to
listen to smarties less and less. People being social animals, I think
the gap between the two groups is widened by the fact that it simply
has become too uncool to pay attention or to admit to knowing
something, lest you be classified as "smart" (the new lepracy). In the
modern world, you either have to be a smart social reject or a
reproducing bafoon - it's no longer possible to be both as it was up
to the 1970's when smart people still got some respect (aka impressed
the ladies).
It also seems possible now to have a decent standard of living without
much effort and with little marginal benefit from any improvements to
the default life... which implies that the value of The Innovator to
the Average Joe has diminished in returns to something rather
insignificant since the 1970's... at least in terms of street cred.
Steve Jobs and his version of the walkman probably made an amount of
money similar to that of what Irving Fisher did with his Rolodex (that
round thing you stick business cards in)... but it seems Irving got
more respect than Steve, despite the beard and poor public speaking
skills (go on, search for Irving on Youtube). So, this is something to
research... but I get the Kael-based impression that small
improvements in people's lives have had greater social returns in
earlier decades than they do today.
In short, if you are smart in the modern world, then you don't fit in.
So having a liberal point of view makes no difference to your status,
unlike what it did before... Being an outcast is boolean, not a scale
of distance. So it's much easier to say you're fine with Chinese
immigrants opening shops on your block, Buddhists walking around your
mall and two men kissing on your sidewalk than it was to say those
things in the 1970's. You were probably chucked out of the local
church a long time ago anyway, so what's to lose ?
Ditto the dummies, just in reverse. Being dumb and conforming to the
popular views (especially the collectivist clap-trap advertised by
politicians) will get you laid more often these days, because it's
cool to be dof, and so there is an incentive to lean towards
conservatism over time so as not to get kicked out / lose street-cred.
Since this state of being is now a central part of the mainstream
culture, the smarties are not part of it by definition, thus no-one is
questioning the in-group from within and questions from without can be
safely ignored.
Of course, the sustainability of this new "populist culture of
dofness" is questionable, since it also spells the end for the
smarties and all that goes with the resultant increasingly oppressive
and dof world... i.e. the end of technological advancement, plenty of
government bail-outs, regulation of international trade, price-fixing,
loose monetary policy, Keynesianism, etc., etc...
Once this happens, there is no need for anyone to actually suggest
giving socialism a shot again, since there will be a virtually
unstoppable movement of dof drones dragging their bling after whatver
Obama-type lemmings is heading up the pack at the time. I rather
preferred the cold war, since the sides were obvious and we could at
least hope for the end of all but the cockroaches to be averted by
some negotiated settlement... but this time destruction is demanded by
a majority.
P.S. On the other hand, comparing recent stock market performance with
the gold price might raise the question of who is really the smarter -
investment bankers with plenty of balanced portfolios, or the rapper
wrapped in gold bling. I suspect the latter may have had a recent nett
increase in asset value while simultaneously grabbing the honeys and
thus being, by all Darwinian definitions, the fittest.
Amen.
S.(tephen van Jaarsveldt)
==========================================================================
What I think is happening is that being smart has become less popular
since the 1970's, while the rest of the population have tended to
listen to smarties less and less. People being social animals, I think
the gap between the two groups is widened by the fact that it simply
has become too uncool to pay attention or to admit to knowing
something, lest you be classified as "smart" (the new lepracy). In the
modern world, you either have to be a smart social reject or a
reproducing bafoon - it's no longer possible to be both as it was up
to the 1970's when smart people still got some respect (aka impressed
the ladies).
Garth: Well I don't know. Anti-smart is something that happens in the
black community because its seen as acting white but I have never
heard of anything like it in the white community. One might expect
the opposite where being dumb is frowned upon because its seen as
acting black. Murray's two upper class groups, intellectual and
traditional, are both white, earn above the 95th%le and have graduate
degrees - I can't see that eschewing smart behavior would be cool in
either of those groups.
In short, if you are smart in the modern world, then you don't fit in.
So having a liberal point of view makes no difference to your status,
unlike what it did before... Being an outcast is boolean, not a scale
of distance. So it's much easier to say you're fine with Chinese
immigrants opening shops on your block, Buddhists walking around your
mall and two men kissing on your sidewalk than it was to say those
things in the 1970's. You were probably chucked out of the local
church a long time ago anyway, so what's to lose ?
Garth: The only group that seems cool with that sort of behavior is
Murray's intellectual upper class. All the rest, including his
traditional upper class, are moving toward a philosophy that opposes
all of that. My question is why would academics, scientists, lawyers,
writers and media (call them society's theoreticians) move in a
different direction to equally smart, educated and wealthy
businessmen, doctors and engineers (call them society's elite
practitioners)? Why are the theoreticians moving away from
intolerance and toward social engineering and the practitioners the
opposite? What is there about theory and practice in today's
political landscape that causes this or is there something about the
political landscape that propels liberals and conservatives toward
theory and practice respectively?
(Garth)
=============================================================================
Referring indirectly to Thomas Sowell's book "Black red-necks and
white liberals", I did not intent any of what I said to have any
colour connection whatsoever... and if I did, then I would probably
say that the "acting white" mentality is something the blacks got from
the white rednecks so that "acting white" is in fact historically
"acting black" and vice versa.
What I meant was simply that we might want to study the universal
tendency of contenporary homo sapiens to become less sapient... my
impression being (completely unsubstantiated and in need of research)
that we are becoming less academically and intellectually inclined
over the recent past. One would also then want to look in such
research at what effect cultural acceptance plays in that shift.
In such a study I hypothesize that you might find a dumbing down of
the population in terms of knowledge while at the same time seeing an
increase in intellectual capacity as measured by IQ... i.e. we might
be getting potentially smarter, but we sure know (use the potential) a
lot less.
My view is that survival has become cerebrally easy and
chronomatically challenging so that we survive better on 30 second
sound-bites repeating mantras like "bail-outs are good" than we would
on 986 page printed works explaining the reasons for fluxtuations in
the prices of silver between 1752 and 1768 (which incidentally is an
exceptionally good reason for staying as far away from government bail-
outs as is humanly possible).
One effect may well be the separation of academia from the rest of the
population, as I see little evidence in the mainstream media of
anything truely intelligent being depicted as cool... except maybe
Phineas and Ferb on channel 303. Only academia still has the time to
read properly and to question the mantras... which I think makes them
a bit less Ayoba in the eyes of everyone else.
S.vJ
==========================================================================
Garth: My question is why would academics, scientists, lawyers,
writers and media (call them society's theoreticians) move in a
different direction to equally smart, educated and wealthy
businessmen, doctors and engineers (call them society's elite
practitioners)? Why are the theoreticians moving away from
intolerance and toward social engineering and the practitioners the
opposite? What is there about theory and practice in today's
political landscape that causes this or is there something about the
political landscape that propels liberals and conservatives toward
theory and practice respectively?
I suspect the pervasive trend towards a more conservative view
reflects a fine-grain behavioural adjustment towards a stance that is
more effective in the current social/ political landscape.
Practitioners follow the trend, because experience compels them to.
Some traditionally (theoretical/ academic) liberal views about human
nature, and consequent social and political attitudes, perhaps do not
hold together in the trenches.
This would mean people naturally inclined to a liberal stance
(apparently there is evidence that a liberal/ conservative tendency is
largely hard-wired) find themselves increasingly confronted with an
environment alien, hostile even, to their beliefs and attitudes. The
only place where such views are welcome, and can survive, is where
they are not continually challenged by experience -- among other
theoreticians.
I'm assuming that the stable, linear movement towards the conservative
position is an appropriate social/ political attitude (in the sense
that it statistically works best for all involved). I'm not sure why
this is. It is really strange that there is a stable trend over such
a long period of time, encompassing significant social and political
change. What else could be changing in that way? Population size?
Perhaps stress induced by population density modulates behaviour?
The Intellectual Upper curve appears to be superlinear, possibly
exponential. This would imply a positive feedback mechanism -- the
more liberals escape to a theoretical environment, the more liberal
and isolated from practice it becomes, making it all the more
attractive to liberals.
So, I see the liberal counter-movement as a simple side-effect
(remarkable in magnitude only because of positive feedback) of the
mysterious stable movement towards a more conservative stance.
Rikus
==========================================================================
What I think is happening is that being smart has become less popular
since the 1970's, while the rest of the population have tended to
listen to smarties less and less. People being social animals, I think
the gap between the two groups is widened by the fact that it simply
has become too uncool to pay attention or to admit to knowing
something, lest you be classified as "smart" (the new lepracy). In the
modern world, you either have to be a smart social reject or a
reproducing bafoon - it's no longer possible to be both as it was up
to the 1970's when smart people still got some respect (aka impressed
the ladies).
Garth: Well I don't know. Anti-smart is something that happens in the
black community because its seen as acting white but I have never
heard of anything like it in the white community. One might expect
the opposite where being dumb is frowned upon because its seen as
acting black. Murray's two upper class groups, intellectual and
traditional, are both white, earn above the 95th%le and have graduate
degrees - I can't see that eschewing smart behavior would be cool in
either of those groups.
In short, if you are smart in the modern world, then you don't fit in.
So having a liberal point of view makes no difference to your status,
unlike what it did before... Being an outcast is boolean, not a scale
of distance. So it's much easier to say you're fine with Chinese
immigrants opening shops on your block, Buddhists walking around your
mall and two men kissing on your sidewalk than it was to say those
things in the 1970's. You were probably chucked out of the local
church a long time ago anyway, so what's to lose ?
Garth: The only group that seems cool with that sort of behavior is
Murray's intellectual upper class. All the rest, including his
traditional upper class, are moving toward a philosophy that opposes
all of that. My question is why would academics, scientists, lawyers,
writers and media (call them society's theoreticians) move in a
different direction to equally smart, educated and wealthy
businessmen, doctors and engineers (call them society's elite
practitioners)? Why are the theoreticians moving away from
intolerance and toward social engineering and the practitioners the
opposite? What is there about theory and practice in today's
political landscape that causes this or is there something about the
political landscape that propels liberals and conservatives toward
theory and practice respectively?
==========================================================================
Garth: Ah that's an explanation that talks to me.
I didn't think of the idea that the theoreticians would be following
rather than leading but it makes perfect sense. It also explains why
scientists are being less than aggressive over the theory of evolution
being taught at school - they are scared of the fundamentalists.
That the political ecosystem should have moved so steadily toward
conservativatism - even over the Clinton years - is really
interesting. It would be interesting to see it continues. The recent
surge in aggressive atheism and the decline in religiosity in the
youth may operate as a brake.
J.M Coetzee's books are usually about the role of the intellectual.
Its curious that in Disgrace he has the intellectual reacting to
rather than directing trends.
I suspect the pervasive trend towards a more conservative view
reflects a fine-grain behavioural adjustment towards a stance that is
more effective in the current social/ political landscape.
Practitioners follow the trend, because experience compels them to.
Some traditionally (theoretical/ academic) liberal views about human
nature, and consequent social and political attitudes, perhaps do not
hold together in the trenches.
This would mean people naturally inclined to a liberal stance
(apparently there is evidence that a liberal/ conservative tendency is
largely hard-wired) find themselves increasingly confronted with an
environment alien, hostile even, to their beliefs and attitudes. The
only place where such views are welcome, and can survive, is where
they are not continually challenged by experience -- among other
theoreticians.
I'm assuming that the stable, linear movement towards the conservative
position is an appropriate social/ political attitude (in the sense
that it statistically works best for all involved). I'm not sure why
this is. It is really strange that there is a stable trend over such
a long period of time, encompassing significant social and political
change. What else could be changing in that way? Population size?
Perhaps stress induced by population density modulates behaviour?
The Intellectual Upper curve appears to be superlinear, possibly
exponential. This would imply a positive feedback mechanism -- the
more liberals escape to a theoretical environment, the more liberal
and isolated from practice it becomes, making it all the more
attractive to liberals.
So, I see the liberal counter-movement as a simple side-effect
(remarkable in magnitude only because of positive feedback) of the
mysterious stable movement towards a more conservative stance.
Rikus
============================================================================
Trevor Watkins
Trevor Watkins
Jim its going to be difficult to explain without visual aids but I'll try.Firstly I have ignored blacks only because Murray's graph is based on whites only (in order to constrain confounding influences). You are of course right that blacks are the most anti-freedom ethnic group (by far) on economic and social questions alike. Nonetheless among themselves they manfest the same pattern I will discuss below.If you read on the psychology of politics you will see that when the structure of political preferences are investigated in a broad representative sample a clear liberal vrs conservatism dimension always emerges. That means that the socially conservative responses, like anti-gay, pro-cappun, racism, all correlate positively - meaning that people who endorse one are much more likely (not certain) to endorse the others. Pro-free market responses and anti-welfare correlate positively with each other too. So far I'm sure we don't disagree. But the socially conservative and anti-welfare items also correlate positively - always, if you have a broad representative sample. That is simply an empirical fact that I won't debate. I will endevour to explain it later though.What I want to address are the observations you made on politics in the US that seem to contradict it. First of all your observations are also an empirical fact that I won't be contradicting. Take the observation that a large majority of all groups, including those for social freedoms, in the US are pro free market. That is true, but even within the pro free market groups there are degrees of being pro free markets and anti-welfare e.g. attitudes to regulation, and that variation correlates positively with social conservatism i.e. the 'family values'/religious fundamentalists are more likely to be anti-regulation of business and anti-welfare than the secular humanist crowd.Judgements of liberal versus conservative are relative to the society you are in, much like judgements of poverty. Of course you can consider these concepts in absolute rather than relative terms, and in that case I agree that social liberals in the US are libertarian like.The original issue was the one dimensional scale used by Murray and whether it has meaning. I think it does. To MOST (not everyone) conservative means traditional/religious/narrow/anti-welfare/anti-immigration/anti-regulation of markets/pro-regulion of morality and liberal means humanist/change/tolerance of dfference/pro-welfare within, and regulation, of free markets/anti-regulation of morality/pro-immigration.You may have noticed that I have been mentioning pro-free market and anti-welfare in one breath. To me this is the key to the positive correlation between market fundamentalism and social conservatism. Social conservatives believe almost any mishap or something different from themselves involves a moral failure on the part of the other. For example they think being gay is a choice and choosing something so different to themselves is immoral. They also think if you are responsibe and stick to tradition you will seek, attain and keep a job i.e. that poverty/unemployment is due to some or other moral failing on the part of the poor themselves, and find the idea of rewarding them with funding particularly distasteful. The immoral should get their just deserts after all. To the extent that social conservatives do support market fundamentalism I believe it is because they believe market regulation is intimately connected to welfare.On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 7:42 PM, Laissez Faire Books <laissezf...@gmail.com> wrote:
I think that the the term that "all other groups... have moved right" is pretty much meaningless. It is so because the so-called Right is a amalgam of contradictory beliefs. The term is used to describe Pat Buchanan, who is opposed to free trade and used to describe others who favor free trade. It is used to describe (wrongly I think) libertarians who believe in equality of rights for gay people and used to describe religious fanatics who would imprison people (or execute them) for being gay. The term allegedly describes the anti-free market policies of George Bush or the pro-free market beliefs of FEE.
On Dec 17, 2009, at 4:13 AM, Garth Zietsman wrote:
> Nevertheless all the other groups i.e. the rest of the US, have moved right. That the shift was steady and consant (rather than up and down) from 1970 to now - through Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush - is very interesting. I agree with Rikus that the intellectual's liberal move is a reaction to the general conservatism but there has to be a reason why the general (white) political ecosystem is moving right.
Hayek argued that there is no real intellectual content to the Right and I think he was correct. The term "Right" is basically used to describe anyone who disagrees with the political Left in some way. It is makes the Left the criteria by which everyone is judged—you are either that or on the Right. This is a false dichotomy and it is pretty much devoid of meaning. All the above statement is saying is that most groups have abandoned some view of the Left. It says nothing about which view, or what they have replaced it with. And, in the end, it can describe a group of people who are united on nothing but who as a collective push an agenda not that significantly different from the alleged opposite view on the Lefl. Bush the Lesser was called "Right-wing" while Obama is not, yet Obama's policies do not significantly differ from the disastrous policies of Bush.
There is no way to contradict the idea that the political ecosystem is moving right because it means absolutely nothing. As a clear example Garth refers to the white political ecosystem doing so thus assuming the black groups are not moving "Right." But Huckabee is consider right-wing and his views differ little from the black community. The vote on Prop 8 in California showed the black community to be more bigoted toward gay people than any other group ---that view is called Right-wing. They are more religious than whites, which is also describe as Right-wing. They tend to be socially conservative but like the welfare state but so does Dubya, Huckabee, and so called "compassionate conservatives."
Personally I find the term "right" to pack as much meaning as the term "god." It means whatever anyone wants it to mean so it is relatively easy to get a large number of people ascribing some meaning to the term even if the meanings so ascribed are wildly divergent and contradictory.
Garth Zietsman
Garth Zietsman
Garth: What in your mind qualifies as enough people to make those quadrants matter? You leave that undefined.
I suggest you are giving out your own assumptions more than anything else or defining the top and bottom so narrowly as to guarantee you are right. Certainly the Cato studies regarding how many people fall into the various quadrants of the Nolan chart DO NOT agree with you at all.
They use Gallup poll data to break down the percentages of Americans into the various quadrants (I don't know of similar polls being done elsewhere). The four quadrants of the Nolan chart are fairly evenly split among the American public. It may different in other countries but data ought to be provided to show that. As far as I know the only studies done of how people fall on the Nolan chart were done in the US, so any discussion outside the US is conjecture.
When the US studies are investigated the evidence indicates that Garth is wrong. The studies used are based on the Gallup Governance Survey and the published data I'm looking at covers the period from 1993 to 2006.
The two groups that Garth insists are so small as to be unimportant are the top and bottom of the chart. In the Cato study that would be the Populists and Libertarians and not the Liberals and Conservatives, who Garth insists comprise most people. Using the data from 2006 the top and bottom of the Nolan chart comprise 41% of the American public. Another 12% are labeled as "undesignated".
Garth says that "liberals" are significant but populists and libertarians are "so few" they "can be ignored for some purposes" such as the purpose of his claims. The 2006 data shows that the percentage of Americans who are "liberals" was 21% at the time. Coincidentally the percentage listed as "libertarian" was also 21% at the time. Is 21% of the population being "liberal" or Left significant but 21% being "libertarian" too few to worry about? The percentage that is populist is 20%, only 1 point below the significant liberals. Conservatives are larger at 25% but there is hardly a wide divergence between the groups.
These surveys are based on how people view the issues not the labels that people use to demarcate themselves. Many people who say they are liberal are libertarian. I ran into that at the Richard Dawkins conference in LA where I had a book table. One woman came up to me and said she was a liberal. But then she started mentioning she was pro-gun, pro-free market, etc. and ended saying that while she calls herself a liberal she was really more libertarians. I would guess that the vast majority at the conference would vote for the Democrats but that about 25% are libertarian (above the norm). Michael Shermer told me precisely that, that he has surveyed atheist conferences and about 1/4th say they are libertarian. A member of the national board of the ACLU and various atheist groups has told me explicitly he is a libertarian and funder of Cato. He estimated about 1/4 of atheists, voting Democratic, were actually libertarian.
I recently read an on-line profile of someone who described himself as "far right" which got a bunch of people upset because he is gay. Yet his own description of what that means to him was that he wanted government to leave people alone, loved Atlas Shrugged, etc. His description was pure libertarianism but he didn't seem to know the word to describe it. Numerous commentators responded to his self defense telling him he's not conservative but libertarian.
Of course the percentages will probably differ from place to place and Garth didn't specify any specific area that he was discussing--another vague area making precise comments difficult.
I would guess that in South Africa the percentage of people who are libertarian would be smaller but the percentage who would be populists would be much higher. So even there the top and bottom are not small enough to ignore because the bottom of the chart would be quite large.
I just see no evidence that Garth's assertion that the top and bottom quadrants of the Nolan chart are so small that they can be ignored in some cases. I don't see that as valid and I think he underestimates the people in those quadrants.
Colin Bower
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Garth Zietsman
Ivo Vegter
> Isn't it strange that the Libertarian party gets fewer votes than Ralph
> Nader if libertarians are as numerous as liberals?
Not at all. I'd wager most libertarians -- consciously so or otherwise
-- would recognise that splitting the vote is rarely a clever voting
tactic, however pure your principles. Absent major moral objections,
they would always choose the least socialist candidate with a realistic
chance of winning. This is why a two-party 50-50 split tending towards
the centre is the stable equilibrium of American politics.
--
Ivo Vegter | 084-210-2003 | @ivovegter
Stephen vJ
Leon Louw (gmail)
----- Original Message -----From: Dawie RoodtCc: Laissez Faire Books ; Neil (nightsbridge) ; Leon Louw (gmail) ; Stephen vJ ; Doug Shaw ; Dave Minster ; Eustace Davie ; Aragorn Eloff ; Eugene BothaSent: Thursday, December 24, 2009 4:25 PMSubject: RE: Increasingly liberal intellectuals out of step with everyone elseI have been following the debate with interest. With some I agree, with others less so.
As an economist it appears as if I have a different view on the meanings of “conservative” and “liberal”.
A conservative is (for an economist) somebody that would like to keep the status quo. Which is not necessarily bad or good for a society. In fact, being conservative is probably “better” for a society because “why fix it if it ain’t broke?”. In this sense of the word, I guess, a liberal can be “conservative” in that he believes that a liberal society should stay liberal.
A liberal, for an economist, believes in gradual change. This can be a gradual change to the “left” or to the “right. For instance, if the argument is that forex controls should be scrapped, the conservative will argue not because it has served us well while the liberal will argue for a gradual change (admittedly probably to less controls). “Liberalism’s” main benefit for a society is pure Darwinism, with the risks involved. However, a liberal (or at least the way I understand it), can always stop change when it becomes clear that it is after all not a good idea.
A radical, however, wants to change everything at once. A radical will argue (probably fight) for the immediate full implementation/scrapping of forex controls, depending on his school of thought. This is rather dangerous for a society if the new idea does not work. For instance, Lenin was probably a radical but Trotsky a liberal within a communist environment. Incidentally, communism is by definition dangerous because it does not allow for other social experiments (liberal). In fact, one can argue that an established communist society is by definition conservative!
Coming back to your original question Garth. I think that most intellectuals in the past were by definition conservative. Reason being that theologians (for instance) accepted the bible as the only word of God but which also limited their thoughts (obviously because God is always right). Similarly, only a very stupid chemist a thousand years ago, will dare suggest that there could be more than the four (later five) elements “discovered” by the Greeks.
There were a few radicals which suggested that the earth is round or that species evolve. But mostly radicals were shunned for good reason; often/usually their ideas are bad for society (communism is an excellent example).
Basically, intellectuals were studying existing knowledge. That is what changed! Gradually since the dark ages (and the process still goes on) intellectuals started realising that there are new ideas and things to be discovered and science changed from studying the old to discovering the new. And by (my) definition that is an evolutionary process which is taking place amongst intellectuals; they became liberal! And since intellectuals have become more liberal the rest (the way I understand the graph) have become more conservative. But why this changed some much since the 60’s I don’t have a clue.
A last point Garth, it has been suggested that conservatives (in your sense of the word) mostly support a free market ideology. I am not so sure. I agree that welfare is a no no for conservatives but “control” over all sorts of economic activities is probably more of a conservative trait. I reckon conservatives will be in favour of time limits on alcohol sales, prohibit prostitution, ban drugs act.
Cheers
Dawie
Efficient Financial Holdings
Dawie Roodt - Chairman/Chief Economist
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From: Trevor Watkins [mailto:bas...@gmail.com]
Sent: 19 December 2009 07:34 AM
To: Garth Zietsman; LibertarianSA
Cc: Laissez Faire Books; Neil (nightsbridge); Leon Louw (gmail); Stephen vJ; Doug Shaw; Dawie Roodt; Dave Minster; Eustace Davie; Aragorn Eloff
Subject: Re: Increasingly liberal intellectuals out of step with everyone else
The terms "left" and "right" are useful shorthand for describing wildly diverse groups of people with some commonalities. Whilst you could personally name all the people you mean when describing the Left, this will probably slow down the conversation.