I disagree that the working class is not going to radicalize itself. They too are out here on the internet, talking to each other and culturally evolving at an unprecedented rate, like everyone else. For the first time they have the power to publish and think in public uncoupled from professional barrier. Better believe it’s being used, and that they will assert their awareness.
Agreed. The author is looking through slightly blue tinted glasses.
The "working class" put "their guy" in a certain colored house in the US and got together to tell the EU to screw off in the UK. They might not be using their political power for things we all agree with or you could argue they're all being duped but they certainly aren't powerless.
Furthermore, I think the author is over stating the homogeneity of white collar political professionals. Tech and academia are very homogeneously blue/left leaning (relatively speaking) but other industries less so.
The author seems to be very confident in his predictions of where politics will move over the next decade or two but I see some massive variables that are not controlled for. Things could go any which way.
American Affairs Journal was actually founded by a conservative nationalist as a pro-Trump journal, designed to "to give the Trump movement some intellectual heft." The editor changed his mind (and his political position) 6 months after the election, after Charlottesville.
I think that what you see here may be some amount of bitterness after watching how events play out and what actually changes. The working class he decries as powerless were his people (he grew up in a small town in South Dakota); it's just that now that we've had 3 years of Trump he sees just how ineffective it's been.
The author explicitly acknowledged that the deplorable majority can pull the lever once every four years, “At most, working-class voters can cast their ballots for an “unacceptable” candidate, but they can exercise no influence on policy formation or agency personnel, much less on governance areas that have been transferred to technocratic bodies”
But once in office their guy maintains the status quo even though populist rhetoric got him into office.
So far this theory appears to be true. Historical data corroborates. What is less certain imho is that grassroots activism has ceased to be ineffective. Nobody expects the pitchforks and guillotines until they show up on their doorstep.
I agree with you, the author seems to assume that Brexit/Trump/France are all one-off political movements.
I'm not even so sure as to how homogeneous tech i if the drama at Google is any indication. Academia probably is as they have a financial interest in the federal government expanding.
The working class is already radicalized, however it's powerless through division. A poor minority in the city and a poor majority in the countryside have a lot more in common than either of them might like to believe; their economic interests are shared as they are both simply the working class.
However, the poor person in the city is unlikely to vote at all, and the poor person in the country is likely to vote against their own economic interests in favor of perceived social narratives. As long this remains true, I wouldn't hold my breath on a working class awakening anytime soon.
IIRC, revolutionaries in Russia didn't wait for the proletariat class consciousness to arise on it's own, as it had been predicted by Marx.
The middle class helped spark the revolution hoping that the proletariat would come around eventually.
The fact that the article, and many of the commenters here are mentioning this again makes me wonder if socialist movements have always been primarily middle class movements.
> The middle class helped spark the revolution hoping that the proletariat would come around eventually.
That resulted in several decades of false starts by what Krein would call the Russian "secondary elite", in the form of the Narodniks, in the 1870s and 1880s. They had almost zero experience with the real "narod", only an idealized mental picture, and when they moved out of the big cities into the countryside (where the majority of the poor, Russia being vastly unindustrialised, lived), most of them got homesick and went back again.
Have a look at the cadres of the early Bolsheviks. Stalin - the supposedly uneducated thug - quit seminary school through disillusionment and decided the join a revolutionary party instead.
At a time where the majority of people in Georgia got 4 years of part time schooling at best he spent over 10 years in education.
> They too are out here on the internet, talking to each other and culturally evolving at an unprecedented rate
If by "talking to each other" you mean "increasingly consuming only whatever media the machine learning has been trained to foist onto them", yes.
> uncoupled from professional barrier.
This was true ten years ago, but not today. The recommendation algorithms run by the big tech companies are the window most people use to look into the Internet now.
I think the author's take would be that the working class can radicalize all they want, but it probably won't change anything without the support of a significant part of the 10%-0.1%. I wish he had gone into detail on why he thinks the upper-middle class is required to effect political change. Is it because they have just enough capital? Or maybe they are closer to and more familiar with institutional power?
Because his class consciousness is with them so he sees their participation as pivotal to anything taking root across the whole of society because they are how he relates to the whole of society
On the off chance some unsubscribe from their media streams to create then platform X is well prepared to flag their ideas as too similar to other quarantined fake news items.
I think it's more likely due to the echo chamber of the media/pollsters and big cities who didn't count of all the 'fly over' areas actually coming together.
I remember working a temp job at a polling call center and although I was just doing grunt work of calling people, it was clearly obvious they were doing polls to hear what they wanted. There was only 1 survey out of maybe 200 that was what I would consider unbiased and didn't have any leading questions or pre-picked answers.
You would screen out people in the beginning of the survey that were obviously not interested in whoever candidate you were calling in regards to, and more often than not the survey itself would have leading questions to get the answers they want so they can take the results and be like, "See our Candidate is winning!!!" - yet they only called people and did the survey with those who were already willing to vote for said candidate.
Polls are literally circle jerking people who were voting democrat and those regarding republican candidate were always negative.
It also could be that the particular call center I was working out of only had contracts with Democratic parties/PACS but from my time there it was clear that polls are a racket.
I’m not sure why you’re downvoted, this is definitely true at least for the white uneducated working class. Yes, it is a reflection of old ideology that was used to exploit them in the past, so it is tragic that this is where their expression of group assertion is getting its start.
Yet I think as the public discourse among this group continues to grow in sophistication it will develop a more nuanced worldview and will assert its power with greater wisdom.
I would guess (completely based on personal experience) that most in the service class voted for Clinton, while working class is more centered around manufacturing, which does pay better than the service industry.
A big part of the issue is that people have different definitions for all the various social classes, so it's hard to compare things correctly.
I think that's evident in the Bernie Sanders movement (and to a lesser extent, Warren). Folks like myself support him even though we're some sort of "upper middle class" or some form of middle-merchant class. Not owners, not truly capitalist/investment class, but solidly aligned with everyone else who also has to show up at 9AM daily to get their checks.
This more affluent middle class of information workers are leading the rest of the folks who punch a clock for a living to a better life. It's not everyone though, there's older folks who are fully committed to a dog eat dog existence, because it worked out easily and well for anyone willing to even try their hand in the post-WW2 era. It's understandable that they don't see the connection between relatively easy prosperity, and destroying all of your industrial competitors. Some of the younger conservatives don't have the life experience of being exploited and tossed out to form well-informed views on labor, and are often afraid of challenging their tribe's view, with their fathers often being the aforementioned Boomer. Then you lose another chunk from those who are not very capable, but inherited wealth. Insecurity that they couldn't duplicate their position in life from scratch leads to extremely anti-social behaviors that we see from the capitalist class.
Claiming some defectors from each of those groups, add in the blue collars who know the score, and add in the "Bernie Sanders" educated folk and I definitely am seeing more support for the movement in American society today than I do for any other grassroots movement. Judging from the strength of support of someone like Sanders, the only competent base of support that rivals it is Trump's. It may not be tomorrow or next year when it succeeds, but we're definitely seeing what you're describing and I suspect it'll continue to build until big money can't stop it any longer.
I was referencing the article which states, it's (almost) against class interests for these people to do so. That said, I disagree with any distinction in classes other than their actual function, workers vs owners. The upper/middle/lower descriptions don't mean much to me.
No, the article explains that Warren and Sanders are popular among exactly the professional class and that this is their natural electorate. Which it is.
Sanders’s left-wing challenge to Clinton found significant support among educated, relatively affluent voters, especially younger ones (similar to Obama’s). As one 2016 Vox headline put it, “Bernie Sanders’s base isn’t the working class. It’s young people.”32 Within any given age group, the article explained, higher-income voters were actually more likely to support Sanders.
Elizabeth Warren’s campaign more explicitly appeals to the professional class, both in form and content.
Your citation is only stating that they receive support from the professional class, not that it's the natural electorate. The article never states as such, you're asserting that. The actual content reads and suggests just as I recall, offering this point as a clear preface-
>This underappreciated reality at least partially explains one of the apparent puzzles of American politics in recent years: namely, that members of the elite often seem far more radical than the working >class, both in their candidate choices and overall outlook. Although better off than the working class, lower-level elites appear to be experiencing far more intense status anxiety.
This assumes that internet radicals are working class , which they are really not. Not even the majority. Isn't it mostly college kids and older boomers?
Isn't there something patronizing, even patrician, about saying "the propaganda machine has so effectively manipulated the working class"? Why aren't their views as legit as yours or mine? There seems to me a great assumption in saying that they are "manipulated". Who isn't?
This is the idea of false consciousness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness), and it has always seemed questionable to me. Who are we to say that someone else's way of relating to their own life and their own concerns is wrong? Why should their priorities be any different than they are?
By the way, I'm not trying to start an argument. These are questions that I worry about myself, and I'm genuinely interested.
> Why aren't their views as legit as yours or mine?
Could it not be argued that the legitimacy of views depends on how much information the person has access to? The average working-class person, due to lack of free time and interest may be unable to acquire more information than is conveniently delivered to them through a handful of sources, and if those sources are controlled by certain actors and not balanced by other sources, then that would appear to place a limitation on how informed their views might be.
Some influential 19th-century traditions of working-class radicalism heavily emphasized learning for the sake of it, but I am not sure that conditions today are conducive to that.
The average working class person knows more than you think.
They probably don't have a lot of time for abstract theory, but they do have experience dealing with the government. They've seen how broken their local public schools, VA care, and Medicare are. They've been overwhelmed and overborne by the complicated rules of government programs, and faced harsh penalties for slight missteps.
They also know that Democratic programs generally exclude them because by working for slightly more than minimum wage they earn too much to qualify. And they usually know people receiving government benefits, and they see the lifestyle these benefits impose, and they don't want that for themselves.
> The average working class person knows more than you think. They probably don't have a lot of time for abstract theory...
Yet there are traditions both within working-class leftism and working-class libertarianism that emphasise that what you call the "abstract theory" is key to activism and informed participation in the democratic process. After all, the argument for why whatever political system is just and fair is based on a canon of writings that goes back centuries. Thus, as I said, in the past political thinkers have urged the working class to read, read, read, and not just go off their anecdotal experiences of interaction with government and society or their gut feelings.
> the argument for why whatever political system is just and fair is based on a canon of argument that goes back centuries.
Those would be the same kind of arguments that justified communism, which was once popular among the intelligentsia? Abstract theory often leads people astray.
I think the working class might be wise to ignore those arguments in favor of their own experiences.
We've seen what the government is actually doing, and theory doesn't match reality. Those who advocate more government intervention should first improve those government interventions that already exist, so government programs can serve as an advertisement for their ideas, instead of a warning.
> Those would be the same kind of arguments that justified communism, which was once popular among the intelligentsia?
Or the arguments for American democracy and the nascent European democracies, whose founding fathers advocated for such systems by citing literature from Ancient Greece to the Enlightenment. The 19th century saw a wave of low-cost, mass-market editions of the classical canon precisely because it was thought that democracy required an educated citizenry.
Or modern libertarianism, which points to many of the same sources but adds more recent thinkers like Hayek or von Mises.
With your third paragraph, you seem to be suggesting that I favour government invention, but I have made no such suggestion in my posts. Rather, as I said, the need to be informed and aware of the tradition of political argument holds regardless of where a person might be situated ideologically, whether on the "left" or "right".
You did more than argue in favor of staying informed and aware of the tradition of political argument. You suggested that the political opinions of those who do not spend time on that are illegitimate:
> Could it not be argued that the legitimacy of views depends on how much information the person has access to?
But politics is not mathematics. Political ideas should be judged by their outcomes, not their theoretical validity. And everyone gets a vote about whether those outcomes are good.
> But politics is not mathematics. Political ideas should be judged by their outcomes, not their theoretical validity. And everyone gets a vote about whether those outcomes are good.
With voting based merely on a gut feeling, a politician’s charisma, or the candidate’s party affiliation, one may well have to wait until the next election cycle to express one’s feelings about whether the outcome was good or not, and try all over again. But an informed voting public has a better chance of getting the outcomes they want the first time around. There has always been that expectation in American democracy and some of its analogues elsewhere that the populace, beyond merely having the right to vote for its representatives, would be keenly self-educating. If a voter fails to live up to the ideals which were considered crucial for democracy to run smoothly, then I think it is fair to question the legitimacy of their views.
Also, simple, straightforward voting is not the only action or mechanism for “outcomes” in modern democratic states. There are things like strikes, tactical voting, lobbying, resorting to legal action, etc. (Radicals on either end of the political spectrum would add uprisings, too.) It is the political literature of the past that lays out all these options for the citizenry, explains the pros or cons, and lets them make an informed decision on how to better their lot.
> But an informed voting public has a better chance of getting the outcomes they want the first time around. ... It is the political literature of the past that lays out all these options for the citizenry, explains the pros or cons, and lets them make an informed decision on how to better their lot.
A bold assertion that you should provide evidence for. I'd argue that, in practice, things rarely happen the way political theory predicts. Politics is not physics, either.
I can't believe you have to defend democracy in this day and age. Reading your interlocutors, I feel like I fell into the Queen Victoria's reign. But it seems the old patricians never die, they just become deluded members of the working classes trying to keep other members of the working classes away from their bit of the pie.
> The average working-class person, due to lack of free time and interest
The average American watches three hours of TV a day. People have plenty of free time. If they’re not interested their political opinions are irrelevant, politics will happen to them, not with them.
Yet they still get a vote. And if they vote for something you don't understand, then it just proves that watching the news helps you know what journalists think - not the public.
That's a good argument, but let me continue the other side: I wonder if this doesn't just repeat the question. Who are we to say that the information we have is the true information? At least on the internet, we all select the information we want. I listen to my preferred sources, and I bet you listen to yours. Why are the working class doing something less legitimate if they do the same?
It's a very tricky problem. My awareness of false consciousness is more from feminism.
So what if a woman aspires to being nothing more than a good housewife? But what if she's been brought up in a culture where she has been told from early childhood that being a good housewife is all she every should aspire to? I don't think you can tell that person that their desires are wrong but you can point out what other options they have. It's up to them how they personally live.
Voting and public life are different, however, because they have an impact on wider society. I think is then reasonable to critique others' decisions because those decisions impact us. On the big, high-level stuff there will always be disagreement about objectives, their relative importance, the best way to get there and so on. I don't think you can do too much there.
But on more focused things you absolutely can question someone's rationale, their evidence base and how their vote or political activity will achieve their stated objectives.
Take Brexit as an example. If you just don't want foreign people around then voting for Brexit probably makes sense. I disagree with your objective but there's a consistency to what you're doing. If you're voting for Brexit because you think the NHS needs more money then it's absolutely incumbent on you to explain what kind of economic impact you expect Brexit to have, how that'll affect tax receipts and the evidence for all of those expectations because I'm not aware of any informed analysis that says Brexit is consistent with increased NHS funding. It's not sufficient to just say "well they said on the bus that we give £350m a week to the EU and now that's going to go to the NHS".
You're entitled to have whatever concerns you want, relate to your own life however you like. You're not entitled to have inaccurate beliefs based on a poor understanding of how things work.
(I don't mean to be rude or argumentative, just interested.)
Don't you think this is patronizing in the way I described above? By all means point out options, but if people decide not to choose those options, I don't see what entitles us to call that false consciousness. A caricature of this view might go as follows: "if you accept my political agenda then you have true consciousness and are entitled to your beliefs; if you do not then you have false consciousness and are not entitled to your beliefs." What is missing in that caricature?
I think it's the distinction between intrinsic beliefs and beliefs based on knowledge of the world. Maybe I didn't make the distinction clear enough. The former, though we may want to change them, can't usefully be called "wrong" but the latter can. False consciousness is then wrong beliefs deliberately propagated to achieve some end.
What is missing from your caricature is whether the beliefs expressed make internal sense and fit with what we know about reality. Are you entitled to a belief that we shouldn't fund space programs because they're too expensive? Of course. Are you entitled to a belief that we shouldn't fund space programs because the world is flat? No.
Another good UK example is government austerity over the last decade to reduce the deficit. The government gained popular support for it using analogies about household budgets that in fact aren't very applicable to government spending. This and other arguments got picked up and repeated by the media despite not being accepted by mainstream economists [1]. This led to a divergence between popular and academic understanding of the economy's strength and weaknesses. Given all of that, how much weight should be put on the economic beliefs of someone whose only macroeconomic knowledge is gleaned from the headlines? I would say that this a classic example of false consciousness.
Of course, in politics and economics neutral knowledge is a tricky concept. That's why this is inherently discursive. My economics knowledge is mostly from reading a few introductory textbooks and reading blogs. Some economics expert might come along here and say I'm totally wrong on austerity and here's why. That's fine. I don't have an inherent right to be wrong.
I think the way you portray Brexit is rather telling.
There's actually a ton of very informed analysis that could be boiled down to "leaving the EU will result in increased NHS funding". Some of it is academic and wonkish, some of it is intuitive and working-class. But it's there. If you aren't aware of it that says more about how much you tried to expose yourself to such arguments, I think.
A simple version goes like this:
1. The Eurozone is an economic backwater and Brussels a monolithic quasi-socialist archetype of Big Government.
2. So, growth in the EU is terrible and will remain terrible for a long time. The UK's economy is actually beating the other big mature economies in growth, even Germany, despite Brexit related uncertainty, so there are good reasons to believe the UK has it more right than the rest of Europe does, economically speaking.
3. But in the EU the Euro is sancrosanct, it cannot be questioned and EU institutions will do "whatever it takes", to use Monti's phrasing, in order to avoid it breaking up.
4. Inside the EU the UK is a sitting duck politically. It's unpopular with other member states because it's not populated by true-blue starry-eyed EU ideological believers and tends to argue for smaller government. But its political elite feels like it literally can't leave, which means its membership fees can be set arbitrarily high and money can be and should be extracted from its economy at will.
5. We can already see this happening with the entirely political and arbitrary "exit bill", a so-called bill that's written in no treaty or legal text anywhere. The EU demand it purely because they can and they know the psychologically weak and ideologically addled governmental classes will roll over and do whatever Brussels wants. We can also see it in the rapidly rising membership fees, which are tied to GDP and not any kind of actually delivered services.
6. Thus to Remain is to signal vast weakness to the Brussels conglomerate, who will then extract as much wealth from the country as possible. In case of Eurozone recession or bank collapse the UK will certainly be called on to fund a bailout, despite all the treaties saying this won't happen. Anyone who believes that hasn't studied the EU's history: it is a dead cert thing.
7. As a consequence, remaining in the EU will drain funding from all local government services, and especially the NHS, which will be hit by a double whammy of reduced UK government budgets due to the EU taking tax revenues and becoming a free hospital for all of Europe as a Eurozone financial crisis knocks out health insurers and freedom of movement ensures the NHS can't separate Brits from everyone else.
What I outlined above is a scenario you seem to believe isn't supported by any "informed analysis", but it's not complex, or absurd, and you can read about the individual components in many informed analyses. Just search for it.
Moreover, all the above is considered obvious by the working classes. Look at the Conservative election adverts that spell it out specifically - switch to an Australian style immigration system and there will be more money for the NHS because fewer low-earning immigrants will be using it.
My belief that Brexit will lead to lower NHS funding is as follows: assuming Brexit results in higher trade barriers with the EU, our biggest trading partners, it will dent trade, which will lead to lower growth, which will lead to lower tax receipts, which will lead to lower funding available for the NHS (and other things). The unknowns are by how much trade with the EU is affected and how quickly trade with other countries grows to fill the gap. Given current trading patterns [8] I feel justified in thinking it'll take some time. The other points are basic macroeconomic principles.
Leaving aside the factual points addressed below, your belief is based entirely on how you think Brussels thinks, how the UK elite think and how they will respond to some hypothetical event. It's basically playing out a possible sequence of future political events. I would be interested in links to the informed analyses you mention (I'm not sure what search terms you think I should use).
What's interesting about it is that it's not falsifiable. It's your political opinions, which can't be proven either way, and playing out a hypothetical, which is unknowable. My belief can be disproven easily by demonstrating how Brexit won't harm overall trade or some plausible offset that I haven't considered. Your belief is correct if your reading of the entire EU and UK political classes is correct and you correctly predict their intentions. My belief is correct if we have a correct understanding of how trade affects growth. Do you think that both beliefs are equally robust?
On factual points, recent data [1, 2, 3] shows that the UK is actually underperforming the Eurozone in growth, including Germany (though it's also experiencing negative growth). In addition, this is from a bad start as the UK has recovered very poorly from the GFC [4], especially relative to other major economies [5]. On your final point it is at best highly questionable [6, 7] that fewer EU migrants will lead to higher funding for the NHS.
The fact that this is considered "obviously true" in the face of evidence to the contrary is a very good example of what I'm talking about. I agree we should challenge our own views. In particular, I worry that the argument that EU migrants are a net benefit overall is all well and good on paper but ignores the localised impact in places that experience high immigration and don't see a corresponding increase in central government funding. That said, given the evidence of the relative economic consequences of austerity and EU migration I feel justified in saying that people "should" direct their anger at the government that mishandles migration, not migrants themselves.
The unknowns are by how much trade with the EU is affected and how quickly trade with other countries grows to fill the gap.
Yes, this is an entirely reasonable perspective, but I'd note that it's also a projection of hypothetical future events (large trade barriers) based on a projection of what Brussels thinks (no trade deal with the treacherous Brits regardless of the mutual costs).
My projection is not less valid than yours, even though it may appear that yours is more projected or more common than the other. My own research led me to conclude that the facade of 'expert consensus' is mostly a creation of journalists and (at the time of the referendum) the Civil Service operating under direction from Cameron and Osborne. There's really much less agreement in the field of economics on the topic of Brexit than is first apparent.
Now, you say this:
My belief is correct if we have a correct understanding of how trade affects growth. Do you think that both beliefs are equally robust?
Actually, yes, I think my beliefs are slightly more robust. Mainly for two reasons:
1. I don't think we have a correct understanding of what economists call growth theory.
2. I think EU realpolitik is significantly easier to analyse than something as large and complex as an economy. It's far fewer people for one, but also, I have made my own predictions about how things would play out both economically and politically with the EU, and so far I've been more right than most of the so-called experts (but not completely right).
The second is hard for me to prove without giving up my identity: I did write publicly about my predictions at the time of the referendum but prefer to post on HN anonymously these days. But anyway, the first will more interesting both for us and anyone reading this thread.
How well do we understand economic growth? The evidence suggests: very badly. It can be easily argued that our understanding hasn't really advanced since the 18th century.
Let's start with one piece of evidence: economic projections are basically always wrong. The only time they're right is when economists are just extrapolating the current trend line and predicting a continuation of whatever's happening now. But they more or less never successfully predict changes from the current trend.
To read about this Google "economic forecast accuracy". There have been many studies. But most working class people don't need studies to know economists don't understand the economy, they just need two events:
a. "Nobody" forecast the 2008 financial crisis.
b. "Everyone" forecast recession in case Leave won.
For example, the Treasury department published an economic forecast that said if Leave won the vote, the 2 year period of Article 50 negotiation would create such massive uncertainty that the economy would enter a year long recession in which it would lose 500,000 jobs in the best case, and 800,000 jobs in the worst case.
Clearly this prediction can be tested against reality: the British economy grew strongly (for Europe). These forecasts weren't just wrong, they were wrong in the wrong direction and of course anyone outside of the London elite's knew that was going to happen: they were being told by idiot Londoners in Whitehall that leaving the EU should be the scariest thing that ever happened to them, and it just isn't.
The total corruption of the field of economics can be supported in many other ways. Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winning economist and staunch left wing anti-Brexit writer for the staunchly pro-EU New York Times, wrote this:
"I believe that Brexit is a tragic development, which will do substantial long-run economic harm. But what we’re hearing overwhelmingly from economists is the claim that it will also have severe short-run adverse impacts. And that claim seems dubious. Or maybe more to the point, it’s a claim that doesn’t follow in any clear way from standard macroeconomics – but it’s being presented as if it does. And I worry that what we’re seeing is a case of motivated reasoning, which could end up damaging economists’ credibility."
One of the most frustrating things about Remain supporters for me - and very relevant to the class war this HN thread is originally about - is the complete refusal of so-called elites to update their priors in response to failed predictions by so-called experts.
It doesn't matter that economists get it completely wrong again and again. It doesn't matter that famous economists themselves are saying the field is riven with "motivated reasoning" i.e. politically biased BS posing as expertise. Working class people who draw their own conclusions based on their own lived experience and get it right are ignorant and bad; people with a bachelors degree who put their faith in professors and get it wrong are superior and should be in charge.
How long will it take until EU supporters recognise that many of their predictions have been tested and failed? My guess is never. I've never seen a single one say, gee, I believed the predictions of recession if Leave won and it didn't happen. Maybe I shouldn't have listened. It's a psychological and political decision for everyone in the end, not really about facts or economics.
Now, how badly will trade barriers affect the EU and UK? Honestly, I'm skeptical it will have any noticeable impact on the average British person's life. I think we're overdue for a global recession anyway and thus when the UK does next tip into recession, there will be a brief argument of the form "see! we told you Brexit would create a recession" because of the timing that will be answered with, "Europe is in recession too and America is sliding, because the world economy is cyclical and we were overdue". But that will pass and I don't think Brexit will have much impact on the real economy (except maybe currency prices, which are mostly reflective of the consensus of the sort of people who are hired as traders).
The reasons are pretty simple. Firstly, free trade is less important to economies than experts tend to say. I actually work with an expert in global trade, someone whose entire job is to be a specialist in trading policies, and she's said publicly that one of the lessons learned in recent years by the field is that free trade policies seem to have less impact than they predicted.
Secondly, the UK economy is primarily services oriented and its exports especially so. Services are tariff free under WTO GATT rules so wouldn't be affected, and anyway, the EU has never really created a single market for services and selling services into the EU is difficult, so the UK is less exposed than you might think. For instance I work for a company that sells software and services, so the EU can't impose tariffs on us without exiting the WTO framework.
Thirdly, the EU actually needs UK services much more seriously than most Remainers realise (because the newspapers they tend to read don't want to admit it). For instance there was much talk of the collapse of the City right after the vote because the UK would supposedly lose its so-called financial passport i.e. the EU would ban member state firms from buying UK financial services in retaliation for the UK leaving. You don't hear much about that anymore, because the Commission folded very quickly when it became clear Brexit wouldn't be immediately cancelled and granted "temporary" permission for trade with the City to continue due to the EU's dependence on London's financial services. Likewise for air travel and a variety of other things that would supposedly all be banned outright by the EU. All given "temporary" extensions (but not much will have changed by the time these extensions expire, so what will they do then?).
Add it all up and I think it's fair to say that the people who do understand growth theory the best aren't the ones being put in front of the British public, and even they don't really understand it that well.
Even if they did though, so what? Leaving the EU isn't actually about economics to most people. Polling showed the top issues for Leave voters are immigration and sovereignty. Pretending it's merely a cost/benefit calculation to be decided by discredited economists is exactly why Remain lost. The EU is structured as a dictatorship pretending to be a democracy: the average British person, working class or not, has no say whatsoever in its decisions and the EU elites routinely enjoy reminding them of that.
On factual points, recent data [1, 2, 3] shows that the UK is actually underperforming the Eurozone in growth, including Germany
You can't compare UK GDP growth to the Eurozone directly because the Eurozone includes a lot of ex-Soviet economies that have high percentage growth because they're poor, and that pushes up the percentage-wise average. Nobody would claim Romania has a better economy than Germany though. If we compare UK and Germany directly:
We can see that the graphs look pretty similar. The UK compares very well to the best "100% European" case. In 2018-2019 UK growth has been lower in some quarters and higher in others, although German growth benefits from an artificially weak currency vs the pound. France was doing great until Jan 2018 when growth dropped off a cliff and has never recovered (what happened there? is that the gilets jaunes?). Italy is stagnant at near zero. Spain is doing better than I expected, actually: consistent growth, albeit very low.
Of course, this misses the bigger picture. British and German growth is all peanuts compared to the USA. The UK is doing pretty well compared to other EU member states. They're all doing terribly compared to a culturally and technologically very similar country that's not in the EU. The firehose of money the NHS would get if we had American levels of growth would render most existing political bun fights irrelevant.
I don't believe the British government will actually adopt US style economic policies and get US style growth anytime soon, even if we leave the EU, but that's partly because the policy-making classes can't psychologically escape the EU's moral and social philosophies. Leaving the EU completely and then getting a good trade deal with the USA is still a necessary step if we want to get there ... and I think we do.
It seems that you are not disagreeing with the concept of false consciousness. You just believe that a different group of people suffer from it. I hope you don't consider it too much of a caricature of your position for me to say that you think the elite labour under a lot of false beliefs but the working classes are able to see through all of this based on their own experience and clear insight.
I think at the core of this discussion, and false consciousness in general, is the question of how can we know what knowledge is true. I certainly agree with you, probably more than it appears in this thread, that we shouldn't take economics as some objective science. That's why I said up-thread that this is all discursive. But I think we are in real danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water and dismissing any economic knowledge at all. Larry Elliot has a good article here about economists' failings [1]. What I take from that is that, yes, forecasts are very shaky but economics itself analyses the failings and uses it to build better understanding (whether HMT uses that knowledge is a different question). SWL talks here [2] about the benefits of trade and compares dismissals of economic knowledge to climate denial. I think that's too strong but I am reluctant to dismiss the idea that we can gain empirical economic knowledge. (Incidentally if you know any good, pro-Brexit economics blogs please do let me know).
It seems that you implicitly rely on economics in some of your scenarios, thinking etc but then when you come against an economic idea or prediction you disagree with you just dismiss it with "oh well, economists are always wrong". I mean, if they are then how do you know the economics implied in your scenarios are correct? Why bother trying to get trade deals? Why bother making any economic arguments for Brexit if it's all unknowable? How do you know which of the US-style economic policies are the ones that created the growth? Surely there is some validity in testing hypotheses?
Continuing this skepticism, maybe you don't intend this but your comments read as if you think working-class people have some kind of natural, clear-headed insight from their lived experience that the elite and their academics don't have. I'm not sure from where you draw your certainty that you know what the entire working class is thinking, nor why a judgement based on individual lived experience should be any more reliable than one based on broader evidence. I don't think "economists missed the 2008 crash and got post-Brexit wrong so I can ignore them all now and go off what I see around me" is really a strong argument.
If all these expert economists with their models and their papers can't make a prediction why should you or I believe that you can? Maybe, like some economist, you've got a model that worked a few times but is going to come crashing down any day now. Shouldn't the same skepticism apply to you? Your whole scenario was based on the idea that the EU coveted the UK's growth rate but when I linked to World Bank data showing that in 2018 the UK underperformed literally every member state but Italy (ok, level with Germany) you still say that we're doing very well compared to other member states. See [3] for more recent data -- hardly comparing very well either. France is comparable and I wouldn't say the US is in a different ballpark. It doesn't seem like you update your priors in response to new data so what makes you think you are any more likely to be right? Or, to return to falsifiability, what would make you think you're wrong?
Coming back to false consciousness, I don't think it's the views themselves that are problematic but the way in which they are reached. I am doubtful that many people complaining about immigrants overcrowding their hospitals have looked at any evidence to decide whether the complaint is valid. I don't think "lived experience" is enough to make an objective, accurate assessment. You are right of course that we should critique arguments and not just take them at face value. For what it's worth, I'm a lukewarm remainer and I agree entirely with you about the Remain campaign's terrible campaigning. They also failed to mention the impact on N Ireland, which is far more significant and it's a terrible indictment of the British public that neither side bothered to think about the border. That didn't last long anyway...
I suppose I didn't quite understand what you meant by false consciousness. It sounded a bit like "people want what they're told by others to want and that's bad" in the example of feminism, but isn't that just the process of opinion forming? If the governing classes have been told their whole life the EU is good, the future, peace, civilisation etc and then support Remain, are they labouring under false consciousness? Or what does it mean, precisely?
I think there is economic knowledge we can know to be true. A lot of the basics is surely sound, but also quite obvious and simple (supply and demand, printing money creates inflation etc).
The problem and question is to what extent things go off the rails after that? It's worth calibrating our expectations against other fields of science, for example:
1. Ioannadis argued in a very well known paper that about half of all published research findings are false.
2. I've heard repeatedly that Big Pharma/VC supports this, and biotech doesn't get more investment (vs say software firms) partly because about half of all academic microbiology doesn't replicate.
3. Psychology as a field has witnessed large areas collapse completely during the replication crisis: entire careers and phenomenons with hundreds of papers investigating them just turn out to be based on nonsense.
It's entirely reasonable to assume that most academic output is false, and that average is significantly biased upwards by hard sciences that are empirically testable. If you focus on subjects that produce explanations of observed data independent of large scale experiments (psychology, economics, history, sociology, yes also climatology etc) then it's fair to assume the vast majority of published output is wrong.
This may seem radical or absurd, but I think this view will become more widespread in future. For instance even in psychology, where experiments are possible (unlike economics), many studies are statistically underpowered to a level that can't plausibly be fixed:
It's certainly going to be the case that economics is more wrong than psychology; at least in psychology you can run experiments, even if they're too small.
Thus, given the structural and financial setup of these fields, we can assume they will continue to produce spurious findings indefinitely.
Now, you pose the following question:
If all these expert economists with their models and their papers can't make a prediction why should you or I believe that you can?
You and I have a major structural advantage over professional economists when it comes to making accurate predictions: our careers are not judged by our output.
This gives us a huge edge because we can be as imprecise, simple or intuitive as we like and nobody will care. My Brexit economy prediction wasn't very precise, it was literally "We're being told there will be a huge recession caused by uncertainty and I think that's completely wrong". No recession, thus, my predictions were better than the economists! But mine also didn't have any numbers in it. This is the right level of precision for such a prediction given the state of economic knowledge, and for a non-professional that's fine. For a Treasury official, not so much.
The underlying cause is social: academics and related professions (like government economists) are required by their peers to "publish or perish", preferably in reputable journals. Like speakers on the dinner circuit, they must speak even if they have nothing insightful to say right now. If they come up with something novel or clever sounding they will be promoted and become one of the judges themselves, where they apply the same criteria.
I've been referring to the working classes because Brexit is so often positioned as the 'educated' vs the 'working class', and the article is about class distinctions. But that's actually kind of a gloss over what I really mean. My point is really about specific professions or classes vs everyone else.
Your whole scenario was based on the idea that the EU coveted the UK's growth rate but when I linked to World Bank data showing that in 2018 the UK underperformed literally every member state but Italy (ok, level with Germany) you still say that we're doing very well compared to other member states.
For UK vs France/Italy, remember the UK has a much lower unemployment rate:
You're right that my original point about "growth" was over-stated. I was thinking of some quarters where the UK had better GDP growth than Germany along with better employment stats than France, wage growth etc. There's been lots of positive economic news lately.
But it doesn't actually matter - the overall point I was making remains even if the UK would have weaker growth at the moment. Namely, there are plausible scenarios in which leaving is good for growth and you don't have to be ignorant to believe them. We can see how the EU seems to be scared of the idea of the UK deregulating and becoming more competitive. For instance Angela Merkel stated outright that in future Germany may have to face the UK as a competitor alongside China and the USA (implication: today they don't). The French Secretary of State for European Affairs has said outright about the UK, "I don't want a tax haven on our doorstep". It seems like they take the scenario of a stronger British economy outside the EU seriously, and I guess that's enough to validate the scenario.
Re: economics blogs. Unfortunately I don't read any economics blogs. The Telegraph has columnists who lay out some of the ideas and Leave campaigners (including Boris, to his credit) have in the past proposed various things the UK could do to increase competitiveness, like the free ports.
Finally, falsifiability. Yes, I do think about this. One thing that makes it hard is my own predictions are a mix of short range which were proven true already, and long range, but those are only about a specific scenario that probably won't happen (Conservatives get more conservative and significantly liberalise the economy). But the advantage of not being an economist is I can happily say "I don't know what will happen next year" and nobody will care, which is why I can be more accurate than them :)
My understanding of false consciousness is that it's a false belief knowingly spread by others to achieve some aim. When someone justifies their political views as "just common sense" it's often an indicator because what's taken to be self-evidently true changes over time.
In my view, what matters is not so much the belief itself but the way in which it's reached. Let's return to the hospital example and assume that your local hospital is overcrowded and underfunded. If you look at immigration levels in your area, read about the economic impact of migration and the levels of government funding to your area and decide that, on balance, hospital overcrowding is due to immigration then I would not consider that false consciousness. Possibly incorrect, but not false consciousness. If you just see a lot of Romanians on the street and read lots of anti-immigration stories in your newspaper and conclude that the overcrowding is due to immigration then I'd consider that false consciousness because you are relying on a notion of "basic common sense" and haven't even considered the possibility that the migrants are contributing more than they take or that the government funding has been inadequate.
The whole questions of knowledge that we've been debating, though very important, is in a sense secondary to this because the person relying on common sense isn't actively dismissing the claims of economic truth, they're completely unaware of them.
And in this particular example I think it's pretty clear that the government sought to deflect anger at austerity to immigrants. Assuming that Cameron and Osborne shared the kind of elite worldview we've been discussing, they would have known that the deflection couldn't be justified. They were deliberately spreading a view of the world that, in their minds at least, they would have known to be wrong. So that's why I think it's false consciousness - knowingly spreading a false belief.
Where it gets complicated is when the elite come to believe the idea as well, and then it's just a received wisdom (and the original intent has completed succeeded). I think you're right to call out remainers' unquestioning belief that the EU is a good thing, though I disagree on how much we can rely on economic. You're right that we should be skeptical of that too, of course.
One important thing that neither of us has mentioned that much is the role of the media in propagating beliefs and the extent to which the British public's view of the EU has been shaped by the likes of Boris Johnson printing knowingly false stories about the EU ("knowingly spreading a false belief"...). I'd argue that all of these [1] are examples of false consciousness. Either the official figures are all totally wrong and a person looking down their street can make a more accurate estimate than teams of statisticians measuring the entire country, or views are shaped by distorted reporting of these issues. And if the media aren't trying to present a factual account of reality, that raises the question of what are they trying to do instead...?
Edit to add: I used to read the Telegraph but then they went down a weird spiral of clickbait mixed with making everything interesting premium-only. A pity because it used to be very good.
My understanding of false consciousness is that it's a false belief knowingly spread by others to achieve some aim
Hmm. Isn't that just a lie? What makes it false consciousness and not just a more ordinary concept like manipulation?
If you just see a lot of Romanians on the street and read lots of anti-immigration stories in your newspaper and conclude that the overcrowding is due to immigration then I'd consider that false consciousness because you are relying on a notion of "basic common sense"
Is the key issue here newspapers vs government sources or is it the inclusion of personal eyewitness observations? I'm not sure newspapers are really worse at spreading false beliefs than government sources are, but that would seem to be the only distinction based on who's speaking here. Indeed there'd seem to be less risk of false consciousness in this scenario because claims by third parties are being augmented with 'reality checks' against personal observations, whereas in the first scenario you seem to be relying almost entirely on government sources.
And in this particular example I think it's pretty clear that the government sought to deflect anger at austerity to immigrants.
Did they? The UK has had strongly pro-immigrant governments for decades. It only started getting serious about reducing immigration numbers recently and even then only in rhetorical terms: non-EU immigration has now hit record highs, and they could already control that. People want reduced immigration but they don't get it. As for austerity, the Tories blame Labour overspending/structural deficits and Labour blamed conservatism and the financial crisis. Only UKIP made an explicit link to immigrants, and UKIP collapsed after Farage left because they took a stronger anti-immigrant turn that got painted as racism.
So I'm not sure that telling matches my own recollections. I remarked on the Tory poster about immigrants and the NHS partly because it's remarkable: this is the first time I recall seeing Conservative campaigning that directly blames overloading of public services on immigration. It's a ... bold ... move? Given that it's pretty clear they've been supporting high levels of immigration for a long time and Boris is also a big supporter of it.
Either the official figures are all totally wrong and a person looking down their street can make a more accurate estimate than teams of statisticians measuring the entire country, or views are shaped by distorted reporting of these issues.
Are you sure the press is less reliable, or deliberately distorting things? If it contradicts elite sources like academic studies, or government statistical reports, many people assume the elite sources are true and the newspapers are false. Especially papers that the working classes tend to rely on like the Daily Mail.
OK, I think we agree that economists should be treated with some skepticism. What about statistical agencies?
The reason I keep hammering on the unreliability of supposedly neutral and informed elites is because there's so much evidence that they're hopelessly compromised, to the point that average man on the street can beat their reliability. Certainly they shouldn't be shamed for taking their own experience into account.
Here's another piece of evidence I encountered today in support of that view. Above, you're suggesting it's unlikely official statistics about immigration are wrong. I used to believe this too. Fine, academic analysis may be wonky, but surely basic numbers are free of political bias and being measured correctly?
[Priti Patel] We don’t really know how many people are in the county either. Earlier this year, the Office for National Statistics downgraded its immigration statistics to “experimental.” In other words, they don’t know how many people are coming into the country or who they are.
So now the Home Secretary is admitting publicly the UK's immigration data is so wrong that "we don't really know". She's the most important consumer of the stats! If she doesn't believe them why should anyone else?
Seeing a Cabinet member admit this so unambiguously was surprising. The conclusion itself less so. I've been suspicious about UK population data for some years now, ever since learning they had stopped correlating with other stats like electricity and water usage in the way they always did historically. You don't read much about that because in fact, most newspapers are also pro-immigration.
My estimation of Patel has gone up for her unobfuscated and honest language. But that just makes the unvarnished truth even more horrible: the left/globalist consensus of "more immigration is always good" has saturated government and academia to such an extent that basically nothing from it on the topic can be trusted. The sort of people who completely ignored what economists, statisticians etc were telling them and just went by "is my hospital waiting room full of immigrants" had an equally accurate or quite possibly more accurate understanding of the impact on public services.
And yet they were so slated for it! So much scorn poured down on their heads, they were called ignorant and racist, and yet now we know the economic analysis was wrong, the stats were wrong, all the sources supposedly superior individuals were relying on for decision making were just completely wrong. We don't even know by how much!
It makes me so sad. I'm not even against immigration. I am myself an immigrant! But watching how deeply this issue has compromised every institution it touches makes me sad for the state of epistomology.
Because it's not just economists and statisticians. Every institution that claims to be neutral, informed and unbiased is shredding its credibility. Ofcom is supposed to enforce political neutrality on broadcasters but the people who work at major TV channels are constantly tweeting their political allegiances, with no consequences. The Speaker of Parliament claimed to be neutral whilst driving around with "Bollocks to Brexit" on his car, then admitted he wasn't the moment he retired. The Electoral Commission claims to be neutral and most of its board have expressed anti-Brexit views in public. The Civil Service ... well, you get the idea.
Not only are these people not neutral, they don't even pretend. Yet constantly they feign offence at any suggestion they might be anything but 100% trustworthy and neutral. It's obvious to the man on the street that nobody claiming to be politically neutral in public life actually is, that they're mostly in the bag for the EU and willing to systematically lie/distort to get their preferred outcomes. So why shouldn't the working classes ignore them and make up their own minds?
I don't know where all this goes, but you're completely right that over time I find my respect for ordinary common sense and 'street logic' going up. Not because it's getting better or more accurate: it's not. It's more that the alternatives presented as better keep getting revealed as being just 'common sense' and 'street logic' of different social classes.
I think you might be having a completely valid emotional response to your consciousness being called false.
False Consciousness, like Dictatorship of the Proletariat, are specific terms within Marxist thought that are popularly misinterpreted, and often used by more cynical capitalists to misdirect.
False consciousness has to be understood as false as it relates to 'class consciousness', the true consciousness of the Proletariat as the Proletariat relates to its position within the dialectical materialism applied by Marx to the historical process. This has nothing to do with psychological consciousness.
The Proletariat has class consciousness when it collectively realizes that capitalism is simply a phase in history, and not an eternal state of nature.
It's awfully pompous. Marx wasn't infallible. False consciousness developed a lot after Marx, and you truly can't see it when you're in it. Krein, for example, is in false consciousness. He can't properly conceptualize that capitalism will be replaced, and has developed his own asinine class analysis not on the bedrock of Hegel, but on dividing the working class by race, gender, and ethnicity. It blinds him from seeing the real class antagonisms in society between the Proletariat and the bourgeoisie.
He doesn't seem to know he's a prole like the rest of us, for instance.
The definitions may be as you say. But you seem to be assuming that the Marxist definitions are correct; that is, that they correspond to reality.
Here's what I mean: By your definition, I'm a prole. I should have "class consciousness" that I'm a prole, and since I don't, I have "false consciousness". But try and expand your mind to the point where you can consider the alternative: People like me might actually see our condition reasonably clearly. When Marxist theory puts us in the same bucket as a ditch-digger, that could be because Marxist theory doesn't correspond to reality, and it's not reality's fault. And telling us that our understanding is false could betray the weakness of your analytic framework rather than the weakness of our understanding of our own position in society. If this alternate position is correct, then we really don't need to care very much about what bucket Marxist theory puts us in, or about what it says we ought to think.
You've got your position, which you think is correct. But at least consider the possibility that it could be mistaken.
> Why should their priorities be any different than they are?
Because we are all humans with the same priority, to carry on the species / tribe.
> Who are we to say that someone else's way of relating to their own life and their own concerns is wrong?
Humans don't consider their way of life they act on instinct (of self / human preservation) first and only consider their life upon reflection if at all.
Personally I find it difficult setting aside time to consider my life and even more difficult to reflect and deal with the fact that i'm usually wrong, at first.
I know the average person doesn't bother doing this, maybe they are just way smarter than me and don't need to but more likely they have the same default as me and are wrong and just haven't considered.
I know a lot of working class people, and their views are just as valid and often they are smarter/more well informed about some particular low level details of the way the economy/society operates. But without a college education in today’s complicated world its really hard to be a sophisticated consumer of information (even with one many fail) so working class people are more susceptible to manipulation by propaganda, oral information, conspiracy theories, availability heuristic etc. Being able to google something vs being able to search skeptically and critically are two different skills.
Isn't there an argument that many people currently saddled with college debt made poorly informed decisions? Maybe the working class people who knew not to do that actually processed information better than many people who took massive amounts of debt on for degrees of dubious economic value.
I’m not following how a college education somehow inoculates someone from being susceptible to propaganda. Aren’t they just trying to install their own branded software on your OS anyway? Searching skeptically and critically is, at least judging based on some recent hires coming from well-know and (ostensibly) “elite” universities, not necessarily part of the base install.
100% not saying you intended to imply this, but the “sophisticated” qualifier can imply that the people or group in question is simply not reading the “right” things. Which is an interesting thought (again I don’t think you meant to imply that).
You’re right many college educations still fail to teach these skills (as I said) but I disagree completely about installing their own OS. That was not my experience at all, though maybe its changed. My professors encouraged open minded critical inquiry. College failed me in other ways but forcing an agenda was not one of them.
Sophisticated is probably the wrong word but what I mean is like paying attention to which news sources are accurate and push which agendas requires a fairly lengthy process of learning the institutions themselves, politics, economics etc. I think college gives most people a better shot at doing that but obviously isn’t the only way.
This is a very elitist and condescending ran. Assuming everyone who disagrees with you is being manipulated is not going to bring anyone to your side and will further distance people who disagree.
It's not "everyone who disagrees with me", it's one very specific point: public intervention - be it healthcare, infrastructure, job training for people in dying industries, workers' rights, etc. - is the only way to stave off the natural gravity of economic stratification. But I've seen more Fox News than most people here probably have, I listened to hours of conservative talk radio in the car with my mom over the years, I've argued the points and heard theirs.
They think the solution to everything is faith and the free market. They vote for reduced taxation and deregulation when the only people it benefits are the 1%. They buy into the meritocratic view that the ultra-wealthy earned it, and that it's somehow immoral to try and redistribute some of that insane wealth. They do not - cannot - accept the idea that the meritocracy is a sham, and that they need help from their society if they want things to get better. And I truly believe that most of the strength of that entrenchment is from hours and hours of exposure, day-in, day-out, to the ranting and raving lunatics (or perhaps masterful orators) on Fox News and talk radio.
A lot of what you say is true, but also applies to the likes of MSNBC and (even) CNN. Raving, frothing at the mouth, 'journalism'.
I grew up in a commumity much like the family life you described. Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, etc etc 24/7. There were some non-ideological types who - while staunchly conservative - actually thought through their beliefs. They were the exception.
I left and attended an elite school, where... almost the exact inverse of that existed. Sure, it was more 'educated' types in that in general they had attended better schools, had more degrees, etc. than the people from the rural area I grew up in. However, most of them were startingly dogmatic and could not reason through their beliefs to provide a proper justificatory ground. Just the same tired slogans and phrases recited by academics and students who all already agreed with one another.
To quote David Foster Wallace, "human beings are generally pathetic." You will find many people on either side of the divide who just go with the flow.
And sadly this honestly is just a given with human nature. We should encourage higher levels of critical reasoning and the like in politics, but at the end of the day people are going to choose their communities.
I didn't mean to imply that the left is any less emotional and irrational with its beliefs. I find it equally exhausting.
What's special about the right-wing case, at this present moment, is the profoundly self-defeating nature of it. It isn't just dogmatic, it's actively self-destructive.
The only thing I'd say is that we treat should treat the claim about it's self-destructiveness as possible, and remove the certainty (some conservatives think progressive economic policies are self-destructive).
I would also add that there is a moral element here. Some conservatives take economic policy to be not only an empirical matter but a moral one. Some will interpret poor economic conditions as, say, their lot in life before thinking it right to tax someone more. Is it right to claim that someone who morally detests non-minimal taxation is being self-destructive?
Yep, and I suspect that particular moral conviction may be the root of the whole thing.
The overly-complex moral system that conservatives have is one of the main reasons I left conservatism behind. A plethora of things that should be practical matters just become all gummed-up and given significance they shouldn't be given. And in addition to the cases like this one where it's self-destructive, there are many many more cases where it inspires undue judgement towards others.
That's why, for me, morality is being good to others. That's where it starts and ends. Everything else is just deciding how best to accomplish that in context. If a moral assertion can't be traced back to the good it does for real people, it isn't valid in my book.
So to take this case: "Each person is responsible for his or herself and it's immoral to depend on the government for support or for the government to tax citizens to that end."
I mean, sometimes. If your government is a corrupt dictatorship that does nothing for its citizens with those taxes. Or if you actually are in a position to fully support yourself without any outside help. But there are too many exceptions for me to list them here. Raising generalities like this to universal moral assertions just causes them to crumble like a skyscraper made out of bricks and mortar.
The answer is staring at you. You base all your arguments on agreement that the free market is under attack and being regulatory captured. The govt. is the only institute that can help level the playing field.
Yes, but I think a lot of people are worried about the kind of radicalization that blames everything on intellectuals, foreigners, minorities and women.
Unemployment is at historical lows, consumer confidence is at historic highs. It can get so much worse. Look at Venezuela and Colombia for modern examples of what happens in failed states
>>>Or, better yet, taxes the massive, useless dragon-hoards of the 0.1%.
You do realize that "net worth" != cash/liquidity, right? Even if the billionaires were all sitting on piles of literal money that you could confiscate, it would be a mere band-aid on the Federal government's budget[1], let alone the state and local budgets. So what's the plan past the next few years those few trillions buys you, when you won't be able to dump the wealthy upside down and shake all of the change out of their pockets a second time?
The kind of radicalism that raises my taxes to keep our country from falling apart
How is that “radicalism”? It’s a common mainstream opinion that people do often vote for. In fact I would say that radicalism starts with options that aren’t even represented in mainstream politics.
You make an interesting point that I found easy to overlook. “Radical” is thrown around a lot but when you ground it in its definition a lot of “radical” things aren’t radical by virtue of being a mainstream political topic.
Another definition of “radical” that might be helpful here is “the root of something” so when you propose a radical idea you’re proposing to fundamentally change basic policy.
>If the working class turns to radicalism what makes you think it will be the kind of radicalism you agree with?
This is something I like to mention whenever I see HackerNews talking about revolution.
The odds that the "rednecks" from fly-over country (the people with guns) will partner with the California intellectual cognoscenti, who enabled a massive concentration of wealth and built the state surveillance machine, is practically nil.
In all likelihood, the tech-elite will be seen as the enemy: "what were you doing when this machinery was being built?"
This is more about the middle class professionals who where Eisenhower republicans or on nation torys (in UK terms) finally waking up and realising that their part has been taken over by entryists.
The reaction against the trinational working class who Trump and Boris have used, could be brutal as they are the ones who will be hurt, I bet like the foolish CP fellow travellers aka useful idiot.
It’s more likely to be the kind of radicalism you find terrifying.
Exactly this. The “woke” at lavishly expensive colleges or in richly rewarded tech-adjacent jobs are kidding themselves if they think their solidarity with the genuine Workers will in any way be reciprocated. They will be up against the wall with the investment bankers.
I wouldn't say never, but it is the current frontier and so far disruption has seemed remote without being able to just buy Fox, Sinclair media etc off the air or some other free speech impediment.
>Instead of frankly acknowledging their own professional class interests, they project their concerns onto the working class and present themselves as altruistic saviors—only to complain about a lack of working-class enthusiasm later.
