The Conservative Party here in Canada is going to win power in a (possibly historically large) landslide sometime in the next 11 months, Marine Le Pen is the favorite to be the President of France in a couple of years, Italy is governed by a neo-fascist party. It's not just the US, the whole "Western" world has moved sharply to the right, that trend picked up in the mid-late 2010s and then accelerated sharply after 2020.

Why this has happened is a good question, covid and the lockdowns/vaccine/mask mandates/etc clearly pushed a lot of people to the right and the worldwide inflation that followed exacerbated that, but this definitely dates back further and I want to find a way to say "social media" without sounding like a curmudgeon. I do think there's maybe something to the idea that social media has benefited right-wing political movements way more than it has benefited left-wing or liberal ones

Some vague theories on the asymmetry:

Does anyone have a link to anything on that theory linking fear of contamination/disease to (certain) right wing views?

I think you're overreading this. Britain and Australia both had major wins by the left against an incumbent right-wing government.

Basically every country had (1) a pro-incumbent surge during covid, and then (2) an anti-incumbent surge after covid. If left-wingers were in power in 2021 you're gonna get a right-wing swing; if right-wingers were, you get a left-wing swing. It turns out people really fucking hate inflations.

(The US had a much smaller swing than a lot of other countries! But we also had by far the best-performing economy among developed countries.)

That said there's also a decent argument that social media etc. favor simpler, more intuitive types of argument, which favors conservative "common sense" over intellectual liberalism. Joseph Heath was making this argument in Enlightenment 2.0 in 2014; I wrote a bit about that here.

i think it's very funny that Rawls gave leftists the perfect language to articulate and justify a socialist program within the liberal tradition, and socialists--even democratic socialists!--have mostly failed to pick up that strain of thought because he's a dirty liberal. like. you guys agree on literally everything! it's not like the classical liberals and the neoliberals where there's fundamental ideological opposition on many points. like i think democratic socialism and Rawlsian liberalism are genuinely gesturing at the same point in political idea space, they're just coming at it from two different directions.

You would love this post by Joseph Heath, I think.

lol PLEASE don’t fall for the “they’re banning TikTok bc the Zionists are controlling the media and don’t want people to know the truth about Palestine!!” shit

My guys it’s literally a national security/international relations tiff between the US and China. The ban is fundamentally flawed—not because they’re oppressing “free speech”— but because the US wants to set a precedent to seize or ban Chinese companies. It’s sinophobia, absolutely, but acting like this is a free speech issue or an example of “Zionist” media control (just say Jews, your antisemitism is so obvious at this point) is laughable. US politicians going after TikTok has been ongoing for far longer than the current crisis in Palestine. The push to ban TikTok has its roots in the Trump administration, so there’s been political momentum for over 4 years now.

Social media companies are not venues for protected free speech! They’re profit-seeking corporations and don’t give a damn about free speech if it gets them money. You’re already censoring your speech on TikTok for fuck’s sake. If I have to see this one more post about “Zionists are controlling the media!” from someone that regularly types “unalive” instead of “kill” and has to put a 🐓emoji when they mean “cock” I’m gonna scream.

I agree with most of this, but I do think this bill is a free speech issue.

It's a violation of the Chinese government's first amendment right to run a propaganda channel in the US.

And like, I'm serious about that. One of the two major arguments against TikTok is that it's a source of Chinese propaganda. And, like, of course it is! The people who are arguing it's not are being silly. That just seems like it's really not a justification for banning it.

The Chinese government is not a citizen of the US and has no rights under the constitution., I would have thought?

Looking at the wording, religion doesn't come into this, and the Chinese government clearly is not part of "the people" so we can ignore the right of assembly and petition. That leaves "freedom of speech, or of the press", where it's not made explicit who has that freedom. Is there any precedent on the issue?

Okay, so I wrote up a thing and as I was doing research I found it wasn't as clear as I thought.

Generally, precedent is pretty clear that "freedom of speech, or of the press" applies to basically everyone in the country. The constitution limits a lot of rights to citizens or something, but free speech isn't one of them and there are strong precedents on it being pretty widely applied, legally, although there's some messing around the borders.

However, there is precedent (6-3, Kavanaugh writing for the Court) from 2020 that foreign corporations don't have a first amendment claim, because the first amendment doesn't apply to non-resident non-citizens; so foreign organizations operating abroad have no rights under the first amendment. (On the other hand note this policy was about sex work and thus the conservative justices are more likely to support it.)

But I also tend to think the current legal status of free speech in America—which is a huge outlier in international terms!—isn't extreme enough. I don't like the result in Agency for International Development v. Alliance for Open Society International, Inc II, because it weakens the first amendment more than I'd like.

I'm not sure if SCOTUS would strike down this law, and it might depend on the exact corporate structure of TikTok. But even if I'm wrong, I would want them to.

I could perhaps be convinced that foreign governments should have free speech rights for their own government apparatuses in the US. But TikTok is not a Chinese government apparatus. The mechanism by which the Chinese government "speaks" through TikTok is by compelling the speech of TikTok and its employees.

Of course, the US cannot force the Chinese government to respect the free speech rights of people in Chinese jurisdiction. But it seems rather confused to say that the US should give the Chinese government free speech rights in the speech they're compelling from other people in violation of the actual speakers' own free speech rights.

I don't think compelled speech is a good framework here. The issue is about whether the algorithm is promoting content the CCP favors and discouraging content it doesn't favor, which seems like propagandizing by the CCP. Unless your point is that the CCP is requiring ByteDance to do this, and thus compelling ByteDance to propagandize "against its will"?

To be clear, it's not that I think of this as a deep offense against the profoundly held beliefs of TikTok employees. But it seems like it's straighforwardly an attempt to limit political speech we don't like, which is something I'm extremely leery of.

lol PLEASE don’t fall for the “they’re banning TikTok bc the Zionists are controlling the media and don’t want people to know the truth about Palestine!!” shit

My guys it’s literally a national security/international relations tiff between the US and China. The ban is fundamentally flawed—not because they’re oppressing “free speech”— but because the US wants to set a precedent to seize or ban Chinese companies. It’s sinophobia, absolutely, but acting like this is a free speech issue or an example of “Zionist” media control (just say Jews, your antisemitism is so obvious at this point) is laughable. US politicians going after TikTok has been ongoing for far longer than the current crisis in Palestine. The push to ban TikTok has its roots in the Trump administration, so there’s been political momentum for over 4 years now.

Social media companies are not venues for protected free speech! They’re profit-seeking corporations and don’t give a damn about free speech if it gets them money. You’re already censoring your speech on TikTok for fuck’s sake. If I have to see this one more post about “Zionists are controlling the media!” from someone that regularly types “unalive” instead of “kill” and has to put a 🐓emoji when they mean “cock” I’m gonna scream.

I agree with most of this, but I do think this bill is a free speech issue.

It's a violation of the Chinese government's first amendment right to run a propaganda channel in the US.

And like, I'm serious about that. One of the two major arguments against TikTok is that it's a source of Chinese propaganda. And, like, of course it is! The people who are arguing it's not are being silly. That just seems like it's really not a justification for banning it.

The Chinese government is not a citizen of the US and has no rights under the constitution., I would have thought?

Looking at the wording, religion doesn't come into this, and the Chinese government clearly is not part of "the people" so we can ignore the right of assembly and petition. That leaves "freedom of speech, or of the press", where it's not made explicit who has that freedom. Is there any precedent on the issue?

Okay, so I wrote up a thing and as I was doing research I found it wasn't as clear as I thought.

Generally, precedent is pretty clear that "freedom of speech, or of the press" applies to basically everyone in the country. The constitution limits a lot of rights to citizens or something, but free speech isn't one of them and there are strong precedents on it being pretty widely applied, legally, although there's some messing around the borders.

However, there is precedent (6-3, Kavanaugh writing for the Court) from 2020 that foreign corporations don't have a first amendment claim, because the first amendment doesn't apply to non-resident non-citizens; so foreign organizations operating abroad have no rights under the first amendment. (On the other hand note this policy was about sex work and thus the conservative justices are more likely to support it.)

But I also tend to think the current legal status of free speech in America—which is a huge outlier in international terms!—isn't extreme enough. I don't like the result in Agency for International Development v. Alliance for Open Society International, Inc II, because it weakens the first amendment more than I'd like.

I'm not sure if SCOTUS would strike down this law, and it might depend on the exact corporate structure of TikTok. But even if I'm wrong, I would want them to.

lol PLEASE don’t fall for the “they’re banning TikTok bc the Zionists are controlling the media and don’t want people to know the truth about Palestine!!” shit

My guys it’s literally a national security/international relations tiff between the US and China. The ban is fundamentally flawed—not because they’re oppressing “free speech”— but because the US wants to set a precedent to seize or ban Chinese companies. It’s sinophobia, absolutely, but acting like this is a free speech issue or an example of “Zionist” media control (just say Jews, your antisemitism is so obvious at this point) is laughable. US politicians going after TikTok has been ongoing for far longer than the current crisis in Palestine. The push to ban TikTok has its roots in the Trump administration, so there’s been political momentum for over 4 years now.

Social media companies are not venues for protected free speech! They’re profit-seeking corporations and don’t give a damn about free speech if it gets them money. You’re already censoring your speech on TikTok for fuck’s sake. If I have to see this one more post about “Zionists are controlling the media!” from someone that regularly types “unalive” instead of “kill” and has to put a 🐓emoji when they mean “cock” I’m gonna scream.

I agree with most of this, but I do think this bill is a free speech issue.

It's a violation of the Chinese government's first amendment right to run a propaganda channel in the US.

And like, I'm serious about that. One of the two major arguments against TikTok is that it's a source of Chinese propaganda. And, like, of course it is! The people who are arguing it's not are being silly. That just seems like it's really not a justification for banning it.

@jadagul this is far from self-evident

imo the point of jobs is that the system of people having jobs allocates labor in the most mutually beneficial way that we know of.

The point of an individual job is to be simultaneously to the benefit of the consumer of labor and to the laborer. The employer often needs to be there, and it's good if they're compensated enough to incentivize the creation of companies or whatever, but Y should not be paying X for labor unless Y values what they get from X more than the amount they pay them, and X values the money they get from Y over the time and effort they put into what they do.

I feel like that last sentence is what I’m saying!  Y should not be paying X for labor unless Y values what they get from X more than the amount they pay them.  But I want that to be the standard.  Y’s decision shouldn’t depend on what’s good for X, or what’s good for society; it should depend on the value Y is getting from the transaction. 

And the person who can decide how much value Y is getting from the transaction is...Y.

OK, so this post is going to probably look like I’m critcizing @jadagul quite directly, and I am, but only because he is a proximate example of something I find worth commenting on generally. This does not change the fact that I generally like and respect him, and find him pleasant to interact with.

There is a style of political thinking which seems to have an intuition that the law should work like mathematical formalism or computer programming, with a very close and literal relationship between any act of government (an executive action or an act of a legislature) and the constitutional or statutory text which enables that action. That even if the law is a messy and organic human institution, it shouldn’t be, and in ideal circumstances the whole system would be fairly mechanistic, with little room for human discretion. This line of thinking seems to work itself out in ideas like, “OK, discrimination is bad; but so is the government interfering in private actions; so anti-discrimination legislation is bad, too, in a different way.” Or “democracy is important, but part of democracy is free expression; and how you spend your money is a kind of expression, so limits on how you spend your money when it comes to politics is antithetical to democracy.” Or, in the anarcho-capitalist form I most strongly associate this line of thinking with, “OK, people seem to want a lot of freedom, low taxes, and the government not to tell them what to do; so we can (and should) construct a society where the government does very little–ideally nothing at all–and everything that can be is transferred to the private sphere, to be a matter of contract law and civil litigation. Since government power is very little or nonexistent, and all oppression comes from the government, everyone will be very free.”

This isn’t just wrong in the sense that the law is actually an irretrievably messy and organic institution because all human institutions are irretrievably messy and organic and we’re stuck with them; this is wrong because it is good that human institutions are messy and organic, and it would be bad if they were all purely mechanistic. I know this probably seems like a self-evidently silly thing to say if your intuition is toward the mechanistic and formalistic (and believe me, I share that aesthetic preference a lot of the time!) but it really is true. It is simply not possible for a legal system to reduce all potential coordination problems, political disputes, and breaches of social order to a set of general principles, and trying to would result in either monstrously cruel outcomes, like the ancient law codes that just killed everybody who broke them, or total structural collapse, like that town that got taken over by libertarians and then bears (because the libertarians didn’t understand the specific governance needs of the town, like how regular trash collection kept the bears away).

In particular, trying for this kind of metaphysical purity in your legal system often seems to cause people’s aesthetic preferences to short-circuit their moral ones; and because no legal system actually is metaphysically pure in this way, ultimately neither is satisfied. The thinking seems to go, we want a free and equal society without oppression; but government action is frequently oppressive, especially when it interferes with private business, so we don’t want to have anti-discrimination legislation. So what they get is a society without anti-discrimination legislation, that is also markedly unequal, because it turns out that bigotry just doesn’t go away by people saying “bigotry is bad, people shouldn’t do that.” Or, people want democracy; but they also want people to be able to spend their money how they want (that’s key to the liberal part of liberal democracy), so they don’t want to impose limits on spending around political campaigns. As a consequence, wealth inequalities distort politics by making the only viable candidates the ones who appeal to wealthy donors, putting a whole class of policies that poll really well outside the political pale–i.e., a profoundly undemocratic system where very popular legislation stands no chance of getting passed. Or, people want property rights and healthy markets; commensurate with that, they resist any effort to impose limits on those property rights or redistribute wealth. They get, as a result (and often hand-in-hand with the distortions of democracy that stem from the previous example), a system with a lot of rent-seeking and corruption where fair competition is almost impossible and there are a lot of monopolies that are bad for both businesses and consumers, far from the libertarian utopia of their laissez-faire dreams.

This isn’t meant to be a Chestertonian set of counterintuitive gotchas, where I try to argue that the real democracy was monarchy all along or something, just an observation that you have to look at, and argue from, actual outcomes, and not just what is conceptually appealing, even if you want to further quite lofty and abstract political ideals. Much the same way that abolishing your military does not keep you out of conflicts, if it results in you suddenly getting invaded by your neighbor, or abolishing anti-discrimination law would not result in a freer society, if you have a bunch of racists itching to discriminate against the minorities they don’t like.

I remember a post of Scott Alexander’s once expressing confusion at the idea banks would just decide not lend to black people in the midcentury US, because surely they would stand to make more money if they had more customers, and if they had more customers the banks run by non-racists would outcompete the banks run by racists, and I remember thinking, like, come on dude. There is a whole complex social ecology surrounding race and racial discrimination, which is going to drown out any possible weak effect that you are pointing to here. And he simply could not see it because it was not part of the world he knew, and he lacked the imagination to understand it.

Everything the law touches is like this. Law is not actually, nor can it be, a separate domain from politics, or economics, or private business, or religion, or any other aspect of human life. It is a loose category of thing we have drawn a fuzzy border around, like so much else. And because of the complexity inherent in the problems it presents, trying to decide which policies are best without reference to actual outcomes at best makes you prone to a kind of head-in-the-clouds idealism. But much more often, I think it means people support things actually corrosive to the principles they claim to espouse.

Something worth clarifying here: I think it is tempting to frame anti-discrimination legislation as trading off one negative (government interference in private affairs) against another (discrimination in society), and like I’m coming down on the more progressive side of the progressive vs libertarian tradeoff. But I think that framing is wrong, or at least misleading, in a lot of cases. Racial discrimination, for instance, is fundamentally antithetical to a liberal, democratic, rule-of-law based society; anti-discrimination rules are just straight up better for a society that aspires to be liberal, democratic, and rule-of-law based, and framing them as trading off against aspects of a free society, as if it might be able to make up for that deficit in some other way, fails to understand how corrosive racial discrimination really is to those values.

There’s a better argument to be made that campaign finance laws (or rules around political campaigning in general) trade off against free expression rights, though obviously I think the trade off is worth it. Freedom of expression in a political context is usually aimed at preserving or improving democratic representation, and demanding that democratic representation be skunked in order to preserve that freedom of expression first and foremost gets the important question exactly backwards.

Actually I don’t think I would have read the original post as targeted at me!  (I do appreciate the kind words, and reciprocate them; I disagree with you about a lot of things but I always enjoy and learn from engaging with you.)

Now the critique you make in the beginning of OP feels like the critique I should be making of you right now, in the context of “should we redo the constitution”.  The current US Constitution is an ugly messy compromise incorporating two centuries of organic growth, and it’s weird and in some cases really stupid but it works.  The US has the richest people and the most powerful state in the world.  

And while there are a few countries you can make a reasonable argument have a higher quality of life, it’s pretty damn few—I might buy it for Germany and France but not for Spain, Italy, or the UK, and that puts in the top half of large countries in Western Europe.  (And of course we’re also funding a bunch of global public goods at the same time, from defense spending to research spending to pharmaceutical profits.)

So at the core I’m really wary of scrapping our current constitutional order and replacing it with something cleaner and better.  And this is for reasons very like the argument you make!

@tanadrin This is a side point to a discourse that’s like four weeks old at this point but I wanted to follow up on it a bit.

This is a sentiment I think I’ve seen you express a bunch of times and it always lands really weirdly for me.  It seems that liberal ideals require capitalism for the same reason they require free speech, or voting, or the abolition of slavery.  

The right to own property just seems like one of the fundamental rights that liberalism is supposed to be protecting.  And I know you can have private property in a non-capitalist system, at least in theory, but like what happens if someone accumulates a lot of property?  What happens if someone starts a small business, and scales it up, and then it’s Amazon?  (Or Chick-Fil-A, if you want to object to publicly held stock offerings.  Do you expropriate S. Truett Cathy to keep the means of production in private hands?  That seems fundamentally illiberal.)

There are a bunch of practical advantages to market economies, but there’s also something distinctively liberal about the right to own private property. And that’s why the two seem inextricable to me.

(Incidentally, I struggle with your distinction between “capitalism” and a “market economy”, or at least a version of it which would put current-Sweden not basically on the “capitalism” side of the capitalism/not-capitalism divide.  The means of production are mostly privately held!)

I’m not at my computer atm and typing on my phone is annoying, so I may not address this as well as it deserves but:

The observation that it is weird that we demand a degree of democracy in our political institutions that is essentially alien to our workplaces is not original to me. Once you start imagining more robust forms of workplace democracy, even ones compatible with a robust market economy, you start to get something very far from capitalism as it is usually described, at least in the narrow sense.

Capitalism is not just private property and markets; it in fact requires an incredibly strong formulation of property rights such that it is possible for people with a lot of capital to have a massive claim on the future output of firms they own or own shares in. And I think that’s kind of an unnatural social arrangement, in the sense that it does not strike me as an obviously just or reasonable arrangement, and without strong safeguards it will tend not only to produce inequality but produce politics forced which oppose any attempt to ameliorate that inequality.

There are a lot of leftish economics types smarter than me who have written about market socialism, worker-managed companies, coops of various sorts, and other systems which I think are promising and which deserve more consideration, and there are lots of policy levers you could pull to encourage these kinds of firms beyond “mass expropriation.” My understanding is that private property rights in some form aren’t alien to market socialism, but the kind of accumulation of wealth where one person can own a potentially unlimited claim to the output of firms which with they have no say to say involvement (and might never have, in the case of inheritance) would be a lot harder.

There probably isn’t a firm line between “social democracy with progressive taxation and a robust safety net” and “democratic/market socialist society,” and I think I’ve stated multiple times before there is a point where I definitely think the former can be “good enough” for my own politics preferences to be essentially satisfied (Sweden, though, is not).

But the thing I really worry about is that a system which we fundamentally understand at bottom to be capitalist, a system where unlimited private claims on the future output of the economy are the *default*, and which regulations are meant to be a sticking plaster on, is a system which is never going to entirely be able to tame the politics forces toward dismantling those regulations, and to trying to return to or establish a new golden age of the robber baron. In other words, that the political half of the whole capitalist political economy is broken, and will regress to a pretty illiberal (and unhappy) mean.

I think the most effective counterweight to that kind of thing are reforms which probably feel pretty milquetoast to most hardcore leftists: stronger unions and workplace representation, a stronger social safety net (including a UBI if at all possible), guarantees of housing and healthcare if at all possible, and using the tax code and other legislative tools to encourage more worker owned and cooperative businesses. Ultimately, the goal is to make more of the forced that govern individuals lives more democratic, and to make very large wealth inequalities harder to achieve.

Maybe you can do that within capitalism, as I said; maybe there is an equilibrium state we’re sort of drunkenly staggering toward since the post-ww2 period, especially in the framework of European social democracy, and the big reactionary swing against that trend that started in the 80s will ultimately fizzle out. But I’m skeptical; I think a more aggressive program of reform is needed, and I’m not sure it’s compatible with the default assumptions of capitalism.

See, this is interesting, because

My point was that it does strike me as an obviously just or reasonable arrangement, to the extent that I feel like you can’t really call a society “free” or “liberal” if it doesn’t have that property.  It seems immediately, intuitively right that S. Truett Cathy should get to control Chick-Fil-A in the same way that I get to control my car: there are a lot of regulations around safety to make sure I don’t hurt people and play nicely with others, but it’s fundamentally mine and within those limits I can do whatever I want with it.  

I can waste the ownership of my car; I can leave it sitting idle, I can wreck it, I can refuse to let anyone else ride in it, and those are all my choices because it’s mine. And it would be like intensely offensive if a bunch of my friends got together and said, hey, you’ve been giving us a lot of rides lately; that means we have a say in what you do with your car, and we’re going to veto your decision to sell it, and also you have to go upgrade the stereo because we want to listen to better music when you’re driving us around.

And like obviously no one would think that was a reasonable thing for my friends to do; but I feel exactly the same way about things like “robust workplace democracy”.  The employees don’t own the company!  The company owners do!  It’s a direct violation of them and their freedom to take that control away.

And that’s the sense in which I say you just can’t have a liberal society without something capitalism adjacent.  Taking away that freedom to control your possessions, your companies, is directly on-first-principles illiberal.

Well I was trying to describe an intuition more than argue for it, so it wasn’t begging the question so much as not trying to answer it.

But taking the framework of your metaphor—I certainly didn’t make my car!  And while I suppose I have done some things to maintain it, I have mostly paid other people to maintain it, because that’s not something I’m good at it.  I would be quite put out if my mechanic told me I wasn’t allowed to sell the car because they wanted to keep working on it.

I mean, this is the central intuitive disjunct between people who are more sympathetic to socialism and people who are more sympathetic to capitalism; I can’t make my position seem more intuitively appealing to you without probably more time and energy than we’re both willing to put into drilling down on the central emotional/aesthetic/moral foundations of our beliefs, though I will say I definitely used to think as you did.

There are two perspectives I could share, I guess, to try to make the opposing intuition easier to understand. One is approximately more abstractly philosophical, the other is purely consequential.

The moral/philosophical approach is that physical, personal possessions aren’t like property in the broad sense. That is, much in the same way that intuitions about household budgets map badly to the U.S. federal budget, intuitions about the use and disposition of your car, your only house, your favorite piece of jewelry, etc., don’t map coherently onto abstract corporate entities. For on, how you dispose of the former has a lot less of an effect on the personal livelihoods of thousands of people; in the latter case, they depend on this thing that we call “private property” for their livelihoods, and the manner in which you derive wealth from that property depends on their showing up every day to do their jobs. Functionally, you are dependent for your wealth on the labor of others (if you’re S. Truett Cathy), but legally the relationship runs the other way–they have no control over the operation of the company they work for. That’s unusual, and not a kind of relationship we countenance elsewhere in our society much anymore, hence my point about how we have democratic political institutions but profoundly undemocratic workplaces.

“Means of production” is the relevant theoretical term here, and I think it’s a useful one. In the case of an individually owned business entity, one person has a property called ownership, enforced by a powerful state apparatus of violence, over a bunch of physical stuff, that also gives them the right to anything produced from that stuff, even though they personally cannot possibly generate enough labor to actually use that stuff. And it might be one thing if we could point to a historical process of basically fair accumulation of that stuff–if, say, five hundred years ago, everybody’s wealth had been approximately equal, and a series of basically fair financial transactions that everybody had walked away from happy (at the time) had led to the current arrangement.

But we know that’s not the case. We know that the present arrangement of who owns what stuff is downstream of a pretty violent, exploitative, and deeply unfair set of wars, seizures, genocides, colonial adventures, and other historical episodes of slaughter, and while as a society we have endeavored to correct some of these injustices after the fact (to the extent they can ever be corrected; you can’t undo the trans-Atlantic slave trade), any moral defense of strong, nearly-unlimited property rights has to reckon with the fact that the way we got the present arrangement is pretty fucked up, and trying to mark a bound in history (as some do) and say, “OK, but past this line everything is now basically fair” feels like a pretty unprincipled argument.

And sure, not every fortune is that of Charles III–you can’t trace them all to specific instances of historical feudal conquest, for instance. But that’s also why I don’t propose guillotining Jeff Bezos in the public square. I mean, besides being opposed to the death penalty in general, I don’t think Jeff Bezos is personally guilty of all the historic crimes of American imperialism. But I do think that the ideological framework which would hold that Jeff Bezos’s personal accumulation of wealth is a natural and just outcome of a liberal political economy sure looks like an ex-post-facto justification for the present arrangement, rather than what you would get if (say) you were theorizing what a maximally liberal system might look like from the ground up.

So I think the analogy to the car is bad, and let me offer a different analogy: the burning of country houses in Ireland. So, if you don’t know, in 1916 a failed rebellion, the Easter Rising, happens in Ireland; it gets crushed by the British, but in the aftermath the movement for Irish independence grows even stronger. In 1919 the War of Independence breaks out, this one much more successful, leading into the Irish Civil War, and the establishment of the Irish Free State. Although nationalistic in character (and socially conservative in governance), the Irish independence movement was reacting to a long list of historically real injustices, including religious oppression, forcible expropriation of land from the rural population, and economic injustices that caused, among other things, the Great Famine. During the War of Independence and the Civil War, Irish revolutionaries had the habit of going to the big country estates owned by the Protestant Ascendancy, ordering the inhabitants to clear out, and burning them to the ground.

This happened about three hundred times. To the owners of these houses, this was an atrocity: their family home, their primary residence, was being destroyed. There was certainly no legal process. If you did this to a random working-class Catholic family in Dublin, everyone would agree this was a monstrous act. But this was different, at least to some Irish revolutionaries. Why? Well, because the historical context was different–these estates were the result of centuries of policies of explicit oppression by the Protestant aristocracy, dispossession of the Catholic rural population, and defense of the subsequent inequality by state violence. The big house wasn’t just a personal family home (though it was that); it could not have existed without a pretty brutal legal regime that supported the Protestant Ascendancy, a legal regime which the whole Irish independence movement was directed at overthrowing.

This is not a defense of these house-burnings; I’m not here to litigate the morality or the effectiveness of the IRA during the period in question. What I want to point out, though, is that no matter how long the tenant farmers on these estates worked this land, or how punitive the rents extracted from them were, they never accrued any property rights or interest in the estates whose wealth was dependent on their labor. And they certainly didn’t occupy this particular economic niche because they had entered freely into a particular employment arrangement–their options were tenant farming, or starvation.

This is not the system that Chick-Fil-A employees labor under, but it’s not (so the intuition runs) so different that some degree of analogy doesn’t carry over. Large accumulations of wealth tend to require exploitation to some degree; workers have an interest in how the firms from which they derive their livelihood are run, and so should have some say in how they operate; even more so than the large farming estate which functions also as a primary residence, ownership of a firm (or a mine, or an IP) is not really analogous to other kinds of personal property.

The perspective I want to share is more consequential in nature, like I said, and it’s this: basically, the observation that wealth inequality is corrosive to liberalism, because it leads to political inequality. Property rights in the capitalist formulation are going to tend to lead to wealth inequality, just because they are going to make the accumulation of staggering individual fortunes much easier; to the extent you use redistribution to correct for this, you are moving away from a purely lasseiz-faire conception of capitalism, which is fine, but why try to patch this feature if it essentially breaks the thing you care most about, the liberal project? Why not try to move to a system which preserves other things we like (like a market economy), that also encourages a more equal distribution of wealth?

I’m not proposing vast expropriations, or public beheadings, or a revolution to do that–as far as I’m concerned, S. Truett Cathy and Jeff Bezos can die happy in giant Scrooge McDuck swimming pools of money if they really want–but this intuition that their ownership of their fortunes is really no different than your ownership of your car, or that the big country house in Ireland is no different from the working-class Catholic family’s house in Dublin, seems entirely wrong to me. Property law and the existence of property itself is a creature of state invention, and is coherent really only to the extent the state enforces it; it really seems like we can and should construct property law in a way which benefits society first (i.e., which promotes general and more-or-less even distribution of wealth), rather than treating the ability to accumulate large individual fortunes as in some way ontologically primary, and then trying to design the rest of the system around that. I mean, historically that’s what property law was for–when feudalism was popular. But we have rightly rejected feudalism as illiberal, so shouldn’t we reject its remnants within our conception of property rights?

This continues to be interesting because our intuitions are just so fundamentally different.  (Which doesn’t mean I have any expectation of, like, reconciling them; these are intellectual primitives and don’t necessarily admit justification.)

@tanadrin This is a side point to a discourse that’s like four weeks old at this point but I wanted to follow up on it a bit.

This is a sentiment I think I’ve seen you express a bunch of times and it always lands really weirdly for me.  It seems that liberal ideals require capitalism for the same reason they require free speech, or voting, or the abolition of slavery.  

The right to own property just seems like one of the fundamental rights that liberalism is supposed to be protecting.  And I know you can have private property in a non-capitalist system, at least in theory, but like what happens if someone accumulates a lot of property?  What happens if someone starts a small business, and scales it up, and then it’s Amazon?  (Or Chick-Fil-A, if you want to object to publicly held stock offerings.  Do you expropriate S. Truett Cathy to keep the means of production in private hands?  That seems fundamentally illiberal.)

There are a bunch of practical advantages to market economies, but there’s also something distinctively liberal about the right to own private property. And that’s why the two seem inextricable to me.

(Incidentally, I struggle with your distinction between “capitalism” and a “market economy”, or at least a version of it which would put current-Sweden not basically on the “capitalism” side of the capitalism/not-capitalism divide.  The means of production are mostly privately held!)

I’m not at my computer atm and typing on my phone is annoying, so I may not address this as well as it deserves but:

The observation that it is weird that we demand a degree of democracy in our political institutions that is essentially alien to our workplaces is not original to me. Once you start imagining more robust forms of workplace democracy, even ones compatible with a robust market economy, you start to get something very far from capitalism as it is usually described, at least in the narrow sense.

Capitalism is not just private property and markets; it in fact requires an incredibly strong formulation of property rights such that it is possible for people with a lot of capital to have a massive claim on the future output of firms they own or own shares in. And I think that’s kind of an unnatural social arrangement, in the sense that it does not strike me as an obviously just or reasonable arrangement, and without strong safeguards it will tend not only to produce inequality but produce politics forced which oppose any attempt to ameliorate that inequality.

There are a lot of leftish economics types smarter than me who have written about market socialism, worker-managed companies, coops of various sorts, and other systems which I think are promising and which deserve more consideration, and there are lots of policy levers you could pull to encourage these kinds of firms beyond “mass expropriation.” My understanding is that private property rights in some form aren’t alien to market socialism, but the kind of accumulation of wealth where one person can own a potentially unlimited claim to the output of firms which with they have no say to say involvement (and might never have, in the case of inheritance) would be a lot harder.

There probably isn’t a firm line between “social democracy with progressive taxation and a robust safety net” and “democratic/market socialist society,” and I think I’ve stated multiple times before there is a point where I definitely think the former can be “good enough” for my own politics preferences to be essentially satisfied (Sweden, though, is not).

But the thing I really worry about is that a system which we fundamentally understand at bottom to be capitalist, a system where unlimited private claims on the future output of the economy are the *default*, and which regulations are meant to be a sticking plaster on, is a system which is never going to entirely be able to tame the politics forces toward dismantling those regulations, and to trying to return to or establish a new golden age of the robber baron. In other words, that the political half of the whole capitalist political economy is broken, and will regress to a pretty illiberal (and unhappy) mean.

I think the most effective counterweight to that kind of thing are reforms which probably feel pretty milquetoast to most hardcore leftists: stronger unions and workplace representation, a stronger social safety net (including a UBI if at all possible), guarantees of housing and healthcare if at all possible, and using the tax code and other legislative tools to encourage more worker owned and cooperative businesses. Ultimately, the goal is to make more of the forced that govern individuals lives more democratic, and to make very large wealth inequalities harder to achieve.

Maybe you can do that within capitalism, as I said; maybe there is an equilibrium state we’re sort of drunkenly staggering toward since the post-ww2 period, especially in the framework of European social democracy, and the big reactionary swing against that trend that started in the 80s will ultimately fizzle out. But I’m skeptical; I think a more aggressive program of reform is needed, and I’m not sure it’s compatible with the default assumptions of capitalism.

See, this is interesting, because

My point was that it does strike me as an obviously just or reasonable arrangement, to the extent that I feel like you can’t really call a society “free” or “liberal” if it doesn’t have that property.  It seems immediately, intuitively right that S. Truett Cathy should get to control Chick-Fil-A in the same way that I get to control my car: there are a lot of regulations around safety to make sure I don’t hurt people and play nicely with others, but it’s fundamentally mine and within those limits I can do whatever I want with it.  

I can waste the ownership of my car; I can leave it sitting idle, I can wreck it, I can refuse to let anyone else ride in it, and those are all my choices because it’s mine. And it would be like intensely offensive if a bunch of my friends got together and said, hey, you’ve been giving us a lot of rides lately; that means we have a say in what you do with your car, and we’re going to veto your decision to sell it, and also you have to go upgrade the stereo because we want to listen to better music when you’re driving us around.

And like obviously no one would think that was a reasonable thing for my friends to do; but I feel exactly the same way about things like “robust workplace democracy”.  The employees don’t own the company!  The company owners do!  It’s a direct violation of them and their freedom to take that control away.

And that’s the sense in which I say you just can’t have a liberal society without something capitalism adjacent.  Taking away that freedom to control your possessions, your companies, is directly on-first-principles illiberal.

Well I was trying to describe an intuition more than argue for it, so it wasn’t begging the question so much as not trying to answer it.

But taking the framework of your metaphor—I certainly didn’t make my car!  And while I suppose I have done some things to maintain it, I have mostly paid other people to maintain it, because that’s not something I’m good at it.  I would be quite put out if my mechanic told me I wasn’t allowed to sell the car because they wanted to keep working on it.

@tanadrin This is a side point to a discourse that’s like four weeks old at this point but I wanted to follow up on it a bit.

This is a sentiment I think I’ve seen you express a bunch of times and it always lands really weirdly for me.  It seems that liberal ideals require capitalism for the same reason they require free speech, or voting, or the abolition of slavery.  

The right to own property just seems like one of the fundamental rights that liberalism is supposed to be protecting.  And I know you can have private property in a non-capitalist system, at least in theory, but like what happens if someone accumulates a lot of property?  What happens if someone starts a small business, and scales it up, and then it’s Amazon?  (Or Chick-Fil-A, if you want to object to publicly held stock offerings.  Do you expropriate S. Truett Cathy to keep the means of production in private hands?  That seems fundamentally illiberal.)

There are a bunch of practical advantages to market economies, but there’s also something distinctively liberal about the right to own private property. And that’s why the two seem inextricable to me.

(Incidentally, I struggle with your distinction between “capitalism” and a “market economy”, or at least a version of it which would put current-Sweden not basically on the “capitalism” side of the capitalism/not-capitalism divide.  The means of production are mostly privately held!)

I’m not at my computer atm and typing on my phone is annoying, so I may not address this as well as it deserves but:

The observation that it is weird that we demand a degree of democracy in our political institutions that is essentially alien to our workplaces is not original to me. Once you start imagining more robust forms of workplace democracy, even ones compatible with a robust market economy, you start to get something very far from capitalism as it is usually described, at least in the narrow sense.

Capitalism is not just private property and markets; it in fact requires an incredibly strong formulation of property rights such that it is possible for people with a lot of capital to have a massive claim on the future output of firms they own or own shares in. And I think that’s kind of an unnatural social arrangement, in the sense that it does not strike me as an obviously just or reasonable arrangement, and without strong safeguards it will tend not only to produce inequality but produce politics forced which oppose any attempt to ameliorate that inequality.

There are a lot of leftish economics types smarter than me who have written about market socialism, worker-managed companies, coops of various sorts, and other systems which I think are promising and which deserve more consideration, and there are lots of policy levers you could pull to encourage these kinds of firms beyond “mass expropriation.” My understanding is that private property rights in some form aren’t alien to market socialism, but the kind of accumulation of wealth where one person can own a potentially unlimited claim to the output of firms which with they have no say to say involvement (and might never have, in the case of inheritance) would be a lot harder.

There probably isn’t a firm line between “social democracy with progressive taxation and a robust safety net” and “democratic/market socialist society,” and I think I’ve stated multiple times before there is a point where I definitely think the former can be “good enough” for my own politics preferences to be essentially satisfied (Sweden, though, is not).

But the thing I really worry about is that a system which we fundamentally understand at bottom to be capitalist, a system where unlimited private claims on the future output of the economy are the *default*, and which regulations are meant to be a sticking plaster on, is a system which is never going to entirely be able to tame the politics forces toward dismantling those regulations, and to trying to return to or establish a new golden age of the robber baron. In other words, that the political half of the whole capitalist political economy is broken, and will regress to a pretty illiberal (and unhappy) mean.

I think the most effective counterweight to that kind of thing are reforms which probably feel pretty milquetoast to most hardcore leftists: stronger unions and workplace representation, a stronger social safety net (including a UBI if at all possible), guarantees of housing and healthcare if at all possible, and using the tax code and other legislative tools to encourage more worker owned and cooperative businesses. Ultimately, the goal is to make more of the forced that govern individuals lives more democratic, and to make very large wealth inequalities harder to achieve.

Maybe you can do that within capitalism, as I said; maybe there is an equilibrium state we’re sort of drunkenly staggering toward since the post-ww2 period, especially in the framework of European social democracy, and the big reactionary swing against that trend that started in the 80s will ultimately fizzle out. But I’m skeptical; I think a more aggressive program of reform is needed, and I’m not sure it’s compatible with the default assumptions of capitalism.

See, this is interesting, because

My point was that it does strike me as an obviously just or reasonable arrangement, to the extent that I feel like you can’t really call a society “free” or “liberal” if it doesn’t have that property.  It seems immediately, intuitively right that S. Truett Cathy should get to control Chick-Fil-A in the same way that I get to control my car: there are a lot of regulations around safety to make sure I don’t hurt people and play nicely with others, but it’s fundamentally mine and within those limits I can do whatever I want with it.  

I can waste the ownership of my car; I can leave it sitting idle, I can wreck it, I can refuse to let anyone else ride in it, and those are all my choices because it’s mine. And it would be like intensely offensive if a bunch of my friends got together and said, hey, you’ve been giving us a lot of rides lately; that means we have a say in what you do with your car, and we’re going to veto your decision to sell it, and also you have to go upgrade the stereo because we want to listen to better music when you’re driving us around.

And like obviously no one would think that was a reasonable thing for my friends to do; but I feel exactly the same way about things like “robust workplace democracy”.  The employees don’t own the company!  The company owners do!  It’s a direct violation of them and their freedom to take that control away.

And that’s the sense in which I say you just can’t have a liberal society without something capitalism adjacent.  Taking away that freedom to control your possessions, your companies, is directly on-first-principles illiberal.

much like Men in Black, the Marvel movies rely on the idea that the public need to be kept ignorant for their own protection, when reality shows the exact opposite is true.

the biggest problem with democratic oversight and accountability is that so many people don’t find it sexy.

Yeah, democracies did SUPER GREAT with covid /s

the covid pandemic has exposed a lot of institutional dysfunction across the world; many liberal democracies bungled their response, most obviously the US and UK, and of course so did most dictatorships, autocracies, and one party states like Iran and Russia, while some liberal democracies did okay like Australia, Taiwan, and South Korea, and some one party states still hang in the balance, like China.

covid has also defied a lot of simple narratives over the past two and a half years, and the randomness of its spread continues to take people by surprise; Australia would have done much worse if it had been hit earlier like Italy and the US, and China would have struggled if it had gained a foothold outside of Wuhan in those crucial early days.

however I don’t think any jurisdiction struggled with covid due to having too much democratic oversight and accountability, or would have done better with more public ignorance.

The unique terribleness of America re:masks is largely down to having to heavily triagulate towards the most popular sorts of messages on them early on, resulting in the original messaging being anti-mask. A lot of lockdown resistance in the west comes with having to consistently lie about how long they would last. A lot of the inability of rich, high-state-capacity North American and western European democracies to successfully test-and-trace comes down to them having robust civil rights protections that keep governments from casually tracking the daily movements of those who have committed no crime. Many many people made money off of lying about the pandemic and the best ways (masks and vaccination) to combat it. 

Hey, maybe liberal democracy is still *worth it*. How often will a worldwide pandemic happen? Like 1 per 100 years? But it seems like a downside. 

I don’t think those are compelling examples: oversight and accountability is important to reduce government lying, for example in Victoria we had a public inquiry into failures of the hotel quarantine system in which ministers had to testify and internal communications between government officials were reviewed:

this of course is followed by elections which allow the public to hold government representatives accountable for failures; it’s not a perfect system by any means but I don’t accept that autocracy allows the government to lie less, I think we have substantial evidence that is not the case.

(also the nature of lockdowns is that it’s difficult to know how long they’re going to last, as the residents of Shanghai are currently finding out to their displeasure).

you can still do contact tracing without overreach of civil liberties: Australia had a QR code check in scheme and currently has vaccine passes, and there is active engagement with this to ensure that it preserves basic freedoms, like preventing police from accessing movement data.

and sure, freedom of speech allows you to lie about stuff, but until we have a perfect lie detector and social responsibility calculator we have to put up with a bit of that.

(and of course Chinese traditional medicine authorities pushed various bullshit covid cures hard during the early stages of the pandemic with tacit government approval).

remember what you’re arguing for here: would America really have done better if Trump was facing fewer checks and balances and was still in power today?

would Australia be better off if the newspapers were forbidden from publishing the story of the hotel quarantine breaches and the whole thing was hushed up?

Yeah it’s like in theory a benevolent, competent, non-corrupt surveillance dictatorship could have done better on certain metrics but do you actually know of any?

Yeah, like, there were a few different categories of major mistakes the US made in covid.

1. Stuff that happened because Trump was Trump. Very bad! And yes, Trump was ~democratically elected, but also "the head of state is a little crazy and obsessed with his public image at the expense of good policy" is really really not something democracies have a monopoly on.

2. Stuff that our expert authorities were confidently wrong about, like the whole mask thing early on, or aerial spread. This is easier to correct in democratic states, because people can publicly argue with the experts when they're wrong. This can be somewhat bad when the experts are right, but is very good when they're not.

3. Stuff due to our idiosyncratic federal structure. Specifically, local governments are the primary funders of schools, and derive a big chunk of funding from sales taxes. So "close restaurants but leave schools open" just wasn't on the table on any but the shortest time scales.

That's particular to the US government configuration, but not to "democracy" per se; plenty of democracies aren't set up that way, and plenty of autocracies have problems because of multi-level administrations where various governors are trying to defend their respective turfs.

4. Stuff where the government is responding to popular pressure, but what people want is kinda dumb. This is the locus of the best anti-democracy case, but also can be a solidly pro-democracy case. Who better to tell you how people want to balance two competing risks than the people who are doing the risking?

Putin was Cancelled

I mean, it’s a good thing, obviously.

But still, the response to his speech was widespread mockery that what happened to him was at all similar to the cancel culture wars in the West, a mockery that often delegitimized both Putin and his analogues for how silly it is.

But there’s nothing about “whether a certain tool was used” that depends on whether the target was righteous or not.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but the “cancel culture” critique can be summarized as “using cultural soft power to punish someone, when neither the justice system nor personal conflict will solve your problem.” You may think what the person did wasn’t yet a crime, or the courts won’t properly punish what it should. And you may not want to go toe-to-toe with that person directly given power differences. But you can get the networks and influencers and twitter mobs to enact unofficial but widespread punishment on them, effectively driving them out of public life.

The above has many problems - due process exists for a reason, mobs suffer from a lot of communication failures, proportionality doesn’t exist on the internet - but it’s a response to some very real problems, and it’s certainly possible for it to be a solution in some cases. (Does anyone really object to what befell Harvey Weinstein? Well some legalists, I’m sure. But relatively few other people.)

Russia invaded another country. Russia has in the past century, invaded a lot of countries. And within the past century these are the predictable responses to an unprovoked attack:

The above is understandably what a dictator surveying the international order can expect. And Russia is pretty immune from caring what international courts say. And it expected to succeed militarily, given the use of nuclear threats to keep out other great powers.

What it did not expect was option 3 becoming a coordinated, widespread, overwhelming campaign. It did not expect almost every country and every company in those countries lining up to deny them. Companies aren’t withdrawing from Russia just because new laws tell them they have to, they’re doing it because they think regulators will eventually tell them to and it’s better to get on the right side now. This is actually pretty new in the course of world affairs! It does not look like military history! But it looks a lot like the Western version of canceling.

And it’s actually really surprising to feel all at once? In Putin’s case it’s a wonderful thing if it stops him from bombing the hell out of a civilian population (though even then there is a great deal of collateral damage in how many people are being also isolated just for looking and sounding Russian.) But the terror of the guilty doesn’t feel that much different than the terror of the innocent. He’s still really shocked at this new method of justice.

And honestly, team progressive should take the win. “Yes, this is what it looks like when soft power accomplishes when legal systems won’t and targets of injustice can’t on their own.” Lord knows they have a large number of embarrassing L’s to make up for.

Hm, this is both interesting and isolates a way I think a lot of people have been talking past each other.

To the extent I use the word "cancellation" (which I try not to outside of manipulating equations, because it seems to give more heat than light), I think of it as defined by the justification. It's cancellation when you do it in retaliation for certain types of speech acts. I'd argue even that it only counts as cancellation when it's done by SJWs to certain types of cultural conservatives (and any other form of retaliation for speech is just sparkling illiberalism).

Whereas this post is treating it as entirely about the mechanics of the consequences, and not about the justifications at all. And that's 100% not how I'd have thought.

Like liberals have basically already been reprogrammed to not even know why racism is bad. When people think “never move into a neighborhood with black people in it, never think you’re actual real friends with a black person and can understand their interiority, never engage with a culture that isn’t your own,” are things an anti-racist would believe, then racism is no longer wrong for the reasons anyone used to think it was wrong for.

this is a real thing but a really weird use of 'liberals'

Seems pretty obviously to mean "left-lib Dems" in this context.

obvious to you maybe!

In a generic American context, "liberal" just means "to the left". Moderate democrats are moderately liberal. Left-wing democrats are very liberal. Communists are even more liberal. Josef Stalin is the most liberal.

One of the most confusing things about British politics to an American is the "Liberal Democratic" party. In America, a liberal Democrat [capitalization difference intentional] is someone on the left wing of the Democratic party, and thus about as far left as you get represented in actual legislatures; the opposite of a "liberal Democrat" is a "conservative Democrat", a left-wing-party aligned moderate.

This has the dubious virtue of clarifying nothing and annoying everyone. It annoys people who care about political philosophies, by removing useful distinctions. It annoys people attached to "liberalism" as a philosophy (free speech, democracy, markets, human rights, anti-authoritarianism), which historically has been the dominant strain of American politics and ideology. And it annoys serious socialists and communists, who tend to be ideologically very clear that they are not liberals but no one listens to them because that's not what "liberal" means in American political discourse.

Over the past few years or so this has become less true; more people now are aware of a distinction between "liberal" and "left". But that's still, like, a kind of fringe thing. In common speech, "liberal" and "left" are synonyms.