Art, Writing, and Learning: The Clerisy Quarter > Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza

US Politics 2023

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Jubal:
And here we go again: a new year, and one without a major election round in.

...which it turns out doesn't mean a lack of drama, as Kevin McCarthy is on track to be the first lead party candidate for Speaker of the House to fail to get elected on the first ballot since 1923. Seven Republicans have voted for Andy Biggs, an extreme Conservative candidate, and a few for Ohio representative and close Trump ally Jim Jordan: McCarthy could only afford to lose four, and it's possible the Democrat candidate (Hakeem Jefferies) will get more votes than he does. Jefferies still won't get to be speaker as the speaker has to be elected by a majority, not by plurality, but it's still a heck of an embarrassment.

dubsartur:
Umair Haque writes like a prophet not a scientist, but I think he is right on this one: the current generation of radical rightists in the USA and UK don't want to govern, they want to hurt and humiliate people while grabbing money and attention with both hands.  They believe they win as long as government does not function and does not help people.

Until the 19th century the functions of post-Roman kingdoms (and kingdom-like cities such as Venice) were basically negative or destructive: fight enemies, punish lawbreakers, enforce enough standards that foreign traders can do business.  A lot of rightists are nostalgic for that.

Someone told me that he was more scared of Canadian Conservatives than American Republicans because our Tories are still reasonably competent at making plans and using the power of the state to implement them.  American Republicans have trouble with much more than spasmodic actions like raising a tarriff or throwing kids in cages or deciding which girls get to play on the girls' sports team.

Another thing he says in the voice of a prophet is everything the far right touches dies.  The far right is more than touching the Republican Party and the US Congress.

Edit: Duerte, Bolsonaro, the last few UK PMs, Trump - have they even tried to govern in a conventional way, or just hurt and humiliate people, break things, steal things, and hand money out to their supporters?  Radical rightists have been saying that they want to break the helping state for 40 years and now they think they can do it.

Isn't Musk removing or firing the parts of Twitter he does not find useful similar to the British Tories proposing to throw out swathes of EU-influenced law and worry about what will replace them or what other laws depend on them later?  And exactly the opposite of old school 19th century Conservativism with G.K. Chesterton's Fence?  The modern conservative movement is not about stability and resisting change, its about destruction and radical change in pursuit of an imagined past and a full wallet.

Jubal:
So the GOP took fifteen ballots to elect McCarthy as speaker. We'll see how that bodes for the next year or two. The consensus I'm seeing is that his concession on allowing only one member to call a no-confidence probably isn't very meaningful, but him agreeing to include a block of three hardcore far-conservatives on the house rules committee probably is very meaningful especially when it comes to trying to pass financial bills.


I wish there was more readable stuff out there (maybe there is but I've not seen much of it) thinking clearly about the ideological divisions within moden anglosphere Conservatism. The Randian ultra-individualist who believes in the primacy of the isolated genius as the sole mechanism of human progress, the Patrician who wants conservatives to be the voice of institutional wealth, the Nationalist who is primarily in politics to strengthen the state's social penetration but doesn't much care about its post-New Liberal care functions... these are all quite different strands that mix into modern movements on the right, even if I find all of them awful and think they're essentially all engaged in paving the road that leads away from democracy and a generous society.

dubsartur:
I have seen a fair bit of that analysis on Canada, but I also think its important not to take political theorizing and especially theories on the right too seriously.  Even more than political speech, political theories are usually rationalizations - particularly on the right, where people want terrible things and make up reasons why that might be good after all. Its not meant to describe the world, and its not necessarily meant to persuade others.   

Edit: Back when there were communists, they had lots of airy theorizing too, but the authoritarian left and the authoritarian right have a lot in common.  My impression is that the more decent parts of Canadian Conservatism don't have a lot of convoluted theories - rhetoric yes but not as many theories as a Right Libertarian or a tankie.  I think analysis of factions and their goals is more useful than analysis of theory.

Do BoJo, Erdogan, Putin, Orban, Bolsonaro, etc. believe in anything but themselves and their own pleasure?

And the people who verbalize the most tend to do the least.

Jubal:
I think I'd distinguish ideology, something I think everyone has and most people are pretty idiosyncratic about, from theory in the sense of ideological positions formally set down on paper by a philosopher or thinker or journalist or whoever. Even technocrats and corrupt dictators aren't free of sets of ideological ideas that govern what they think is good, where the edges of their moral circle lie, and so on. "Screw you, Jack, I got mine" isn't really a piece of theory but it can be a pretty key ideological position for some sorts of people. If the number of people who agree with Rand's core ideological positions was limited to those who've bothered to read Atlas Shrugged, US politics would be a better place.

So I agree with you regarding theory, but I think there's interesting ideological analysis to do: for politicians especially, you can look at revealed preferences through their actions and the actions of people in their close political networks, rather than focusing on what people say. I do think it's a it too easy to push the boat out too far on the idea that expressed ideologies are all just post-hoc rationalisations though: it's easier for people to understand their opponents being venal or unthinking than understand them having a completely different social-moral framework, and I worry we end up going for the former understandings too quickly. Which isn't to say we should spend much time thinking about conservative theory, because I fail to see much evidence that conservatives read much of it. But it's useful from a political perspective to think about the tensions and divisions within conservatism, if one wants (as I do) a world with a much weaker set of conservative movements, and I think that requires some understanding of the constellation of preferences and ideals that they have.

As for the dictators - certainly Putin and his regime are extremely ideological, and I'd say that's true of Erdogan as well. A rational and simply corrupt Russian regime would never have invaded Ukraine and would never have made so many of the miscalculations on the way, a ton of which were based on an assumed ideology-narrative about Ukrainians being a rustic subject people who would meekly lay down their independence in the face of liberation by the mother country. Erdogan has by all accounts a similar imperialist/neo-Ottomanist view of Turkey's eastern neighbours.

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