I wrote a comment under this post at the left-wing academic blog, Crooked Timber, and it was deleted during pre-approval. This has been happening a lot recently, so this time I saved it and present it here, with some additional discussion below:
I guess JohnQ hasn’t heard of the insect apocalypse, or thinks it’s a good thing. It’s weird he thinks that pesticide use is down since he supports GMOs that are specifically intended to allow increased use of herbicides. There isn’t any evidence that their use is going down anyway, this is just wishful thinking. Furthermore, dismissing deforestation in low-income countries as due to “the need for firewood” is really something else. Did you really mean to reduce the entire structure of post-colonial appropriation of ecosystem services in poor countries to “they use too much firewood”??
There is a democratic pathway out of this disaster but enabling it requires choices that aren’t easy reading for the liberal left. That pathway was on clear display in the UK between 2015-2019, and the response of the liberal left was to move heaven and earth to destroy it – first by the action of Starmer and his clique of class traitors in undermining the 2017 election, and then when that failed to dislodge radical democracy from the labour party, enlisting the entire liberal left elite (from octopus Cohen in the Guardian to various enablers in the US blogosphere) to destroy the project with a fake campaign of “anti-semitism”, which allowed an actual anti-semite to win a crushing victory for capital in 2019 and usher in the greatest impoverishment of the British working class in generations. A simple search of past posts at CT will show where its liberal left members stood on this – one of them continued to support Starmer after the revelations of his treachery.
If we want a democratic path out of this we are going to need the liberal left to accept that their ideas have failed, and the campaign to deradicalize leftism in western democracies has hollowed it out and led to a 30-year long string of defeats, while the right has consistently grown more and more radical. This is going to involve throwing away some of the most cherished ideas of the centrists and the liberal left, like “free speech” and “british values” and also it’s going to require recognizing that liberalism has always served as the intellectual and political handmaiden of fascism. It’s going to require a proper commitment to decolonization, recognition that the western left has been complicit in the colonial project, and along with that a far greater tolerance of “authoritarian” and “illiberal” regimes, along with a recognition that the entire concept of “authoritarian” is an empty nonsense intended to hold back national liberation and progressive movements. This is going to require recognition that fascism is an entirely western political movement that is constantly at risk of returning, it wasn’t put to bed at the end of world war 2 and it is our duty as leftists to oppose it everywhere and stridently. This means fantasies like those sometimes put forward here and elsewhere that Trump wasn’t special, or that Ukraine is a liberal democracy, need to be ruthlessly dealt with. We don’t have time for liberal wet dreams anymore.
This is also going to require that the liberal left and its elite allies in media, academia and politics recognize some hard truths about their own disconnection from the realities of political struggle. This can start with a recognition that the entire discipline of economics is a failed joke that exists solely to support the propagandistic needs of capital. We can follow that with a hard look at exactly which political and organizing principles much of the western left has thrown out because of the taint of leftism associated with them rather than any real intellectual or ideological problem with them – e.g. nationalization, which should absolutely be at the centre of every political program in the west, proudly and with force, along with unionism. Pacifism – both locally and internationally – needs to go in the bin. The idea that we can sell out some small parts of our movement to win hearts and minds in “the mainstream” needs to go – trans women is the current vogue for under-bussing in the UK, but they’ve already thrown the entire cis female community in the US under the bus so they can slightly increase their chances of winning a couple of milquetoast senate seats. It’s going to require that the elite left and its remaining institutions – the Guardian, the left wing university departments and organizations that remain – recognize that all the best ideas and action are in the gritty, embarrassing corners of our society, amongst environmentalists and uncool allotment-working grandpas and not the suits and spivs of the Blairite movement.
It’s also going to require a return to the cynicism about western media, intelligence and military sources that we had before and after the Iraq war. They’re lying to you – about everything. This means that you need to reject all their narratives, not just the ones that are politically convenient. This is going to mean asking some hard questions about your own complicity in the ridiculous, facile, and openly far right propaganda campaigns of the past 10 years that too many liberals have supported. That means being full-throated in support of Palestine, putting a Yemen flag in your Twitter profile pic in place of the blue-and-yellow, and listening to the voices of ordinary people in low and middle income countries, not whatever fashionable cipher or white representative the western media have currently chosen to parade about.
I don’t see any of this happening anytime soon, and we’re running out of time. If we don’t re-energize a real left there will be no democracy of any kind within a decade, and no pathway – democratic or not – out of this ecological crisis. But as a first step to that rejuvenation it would be nice to see it start with a few mea culpas here.
The collapse of Crooked Timber (CT) over the past 7 years from a relatively well-subscribed, combative and intellectually engaged blog to a liberal vanity project that serves primarily to recycle Economist talking points and American mainstream propaganda is a microcosm for the collapse of left-liberal thought in the west more generally. The liberal order has completely failed, and while right-wing liberals have largely accepted this and shifted so far to the right that they’re indistinguishable from the fascists who are going to eat them, there remains a rump of “centrists” and leftist liberals who haven’t got the message yet, and somehow think that a political system of moderate leftist democracy with mildly regulated capitalism, coupled to the “rules-based international order” is going to save us from the catastrophes that are coming. It isn’t, and while these left-liberals fiddle with electoral politics through the machinery of empty suits like Starmer’s labour, vapid clown shows like the Liberal Democrats, or hollowed out fund-raising machines like the US Democratic Party, the world is shambling faster and faster towards the inevitable mid-game crisis of full-blown environmental collapse coupled with the demise of late-stage capitalism. The material conditions in which democratic countries attempt to manage their politics are not getting any easier from here, and from now until we find a radical solution to our problems every year of your life is going to be the best year of the rest of it. In the face of this we can see what left liberals and their scammy political parties are doing: nothing, coupled with useless propaganda.
So it is that on the same day that the Uvalde mass shooting occurred Matt Yglesias tweeted out some pro-American bullshit about how America is the greatest country on earth; or on the same month that we learnt about Keir Starmer’s treachery the authors at CT were admitting they voted for him as leader and would do so again; or in another week of multi-thousand COVID deaths in the USA the democrat-appointed leader of the CDC’s covid response proudly stated that he wanted to privatize vaccine provision and testing as soon as possible; or as we learn as many as two thirds of Britons face fuel poverty this winter the Starmer-led “Labour” party refuses to consider nationalizing the bandits that are driving the British population into poverty. We have resource economists like John Quiggin of CT still breezily confident that technology plus free markets will avert climate change disaster even as half of the world is struggling to deal with actually-existing climate change disaster – and dismissing deforestation in poor countries as “too much firewood” (see above my point about leftists having to grapple with their role in the colonial project!)
Ordinary people can see this and are voting with their feet. The UK Labour party recently revealed it lost some 90,000 members after its betrayal of Corbyn and is now millions of pounds in the red, which puts it even more in hock to the corporate donors who wanted Corbyn out. UK unions are considering removing funding from that same party while a wave of strikes rolls across the country, and union leaders demand Labour return to its roots, but Starmer bans his frontbench from being seen near them. The gulf between the beliefs and aspirations of left-liberal public intellectuals, political leaders and organizations grows wider and wider, while the political leadership that represents this political tendency tries to convince itself that it can assemble winning electoral coalitions from the shrinking number of ordinary people who can still convince themselves that this is working – in the face of obvious evidence that it isn’t, and can’t, and most people know it.
The political endpoint of this will be fascism. We can see it in the USA, where this tendency is at its most advanced: ordinary voters have checked out in the face of the Democratic party’s ridiculous oblivious optimism, refusing to engage with either the party itself or the ballot box, as the Republican party carefully and consistently dismantles democracy everywhere it can. There is some hope that the Democratic Party – on the back of a wave of cruelty unleashed on women by the outlawing of abortion – will recover a bare majority of seats in the Senate this Autumn (though they may lose the House!) but no sign that they’ll do anything remotely useful with them, because they value the “institutions” of liberalism far more than the actual political goals they claim to pursue. After they fail to capitalize on even that small gain (or can’t, if they lose the House), and with their liberal blindness paralyzing them in 2024, what hope that they will retain the White House or that they will survive the fascist uprising that follows a Dem victory? And what hope that in the face of Starmer’s prevarications in the UK, the Tories will lose the next election? We can already see that the strategy for UK Labour is going to be a continued rightward shift, that will fail to satisfy anyone and alienate everyone who cares about our future, while the Tories continue to advocate openly fascist ideas. In order to prevent climate disaster we need an active, strong and committed left wing political leadership in every major western economy within the next 5 to 10 years, even sooner in the case of the USA, but we’re going to see nothing short of fascism.
This is the end of the liberal project. It’s not going to win anything anymore, and when it does it will achieve nothing of any good anyway, because there is nothing left within its ideology that is able to stand up to the pressures of these times. We need a return to radical leftist democratic parties, or there will be no democracy left. So no, CT, there is no democratic pathway to civilization survival, until we all give up on the petty little daydreams of liberalism and return to a real left-wing politics that prioritizes the needs of ordinary people over glib liberal shibboleths.
UPDATE (2022/8/25): There is some doubt being expressed in comments as to whether this is a real issue outside of some anonymous commenters on CT, so I present here a screenshot of a tweet from Andrew Harrop, general secretary of the Fabian Society, an important left-wing organization in the UK that forms the intellectual underpinnings of the labour party there. It is a simple, categorial dismissal of a bill strike in the UK, not on the basis that it wouldn’t work, but that it is simply too radical for ordinary British people. There are serious concerns being expressed by some left-wing people about the dangers of acting on the Enough is Enough campaign’s suggestions, but that is not Harrop’s concern. No, his concern is that a payment strike is “far left” politics that ordinary British people wouldn’t be able to support. See how far British left-wing politics has been enervated by this kind of liberal drivel!
Compromise and Conceit 
August 23, 2022 at 12:43 pm
I spend some of my time thinking about the kind of social/economic/political arrangements which I would, ideally, prefer to exist. But I recognise this is essentially a hobby activity, because it’s not within my power to bring those arrangements about.
I spend some of my time thinking about how people in positions of power (for example, heads of government and Cabinet members) could use their power to make (what I would think of as) major improvements. But I recognise this too is essentially a hobby activity, because I don’t hold any such position of power and I’m never going to.
I spend some of my time thinking about whether there’s anything I can do personally to contribute to the project of improving social/economic/political arrangements and making the world a better place for people to live in. This is not purely a hobby activity, because of the obvious identity that anything I can do _is_ something I can do.
These three questions are connected in a way, but they’re not _directly_ connected–answering one of them doesn’t directly reveal the answer to another.
When I think about actions that _are_ within my power, one of those things is voting. It’s not the only thing that matters, and as likely as not it’s not even the most important thing, but people voting is something that does make a difference. But I’m not going to make a difference by voting for a party that has adopted (what I think are) good strong positions on the important issues, because there isn’t one. If I’m going to have any chance of making any difference by voting, I’m going to have to do it by voting for a party with significant faults.
If you have the opportunity to make a difference by supporting a party that has adopted (what you think are) good strong positions on the important issues, then good luck to you! and I envy you that. But if you don’t, then I think you should still vote for some other party despite its faults, because it could still make a worthwhile difference.
When people support parties which represent the best options available to them, I doubt there’s value in berating them because of the faults of those parties.
August 23, 2022 at 1:46 pm
This post isn’t intended as a criticism of people’s voting behavior, which is the obvious immediate example of something people have control of, and it’s also not intended as a criticism of people with no power to change things. It’s a criticism of people who have actual influence, a public voice, and some kind of authoritative role. The CT people have this: JQ is an influential resource economist, Chris Bertram has written for the Guardian and elsewhere, Corey Robins is supposedly a leading intellectual writing on conservative “thought” and ideology, and Ingrid Robeyns has a role in tech leadership. These are people with a voice and influence, and they have some responsibility to (for example, in the case of the resource economist) not dismiss deforestation in poor nations as “too much firewood”. (In fact as regards voting I was vocal on CT in 2015 – 2016 advocating for a vote for a flawed US Democratic Party as a minimum action to hold back the coming fascist tide, while many commenters on CT were absolutely convinced that a vote for Clinton was a vote *for* fascism and that Trump was going to defend medicare; and Corey Robins was writing long articles about how Trump wasn’t special).
In the case of CT we also have a resolute refusal to publish any comment that views the Ukraine war through any lens except that of US intelligence and military organizations; a refusal to publish my comments pointing out that no depression is not actually “just sadness” (I had two censored there), while publishing nonsense about how anti-depressants don’t work that could be actively harmful for any reader who is actually suicidal; and refusal to publish comments in general that point out that the posters are factually wrong. The liberal project is collapsing visibly in front of us, the climate disaster is now on us in full, and not only are these guys still trying to make rosy, simplistic claims about how the world can be changed for the better with minimal effort or sacrifice, they’re flat-out refusing to discuss any evidence their liberal views might be part of the problem.
Remember this is on top of a long-standing refusal to discuss Palestine at all, a blanket ban on discussion of the politics of sex work (especially when done from a labour rights perspective) and recent examples of uncritical reproduction of an increasingly harmful ideology of transgender exclusion from the UK. Since 2015 these people have slowly collapsed into only reproducing the orthodoxy of the Blairite movement in the UK, a kind of JK Rowlingization of political discourse. They’re not nobodies! They have a responsibility beyond that which you or I need to exercise in the voting booth. And I would argue that a good part of the reason that you and I have to make political compromises in the voting booth is because the leaders of the mainstream left in the UK and USA have worked actively to expunge any form of left-wing politics outside of liberalism from public debate. Over the past 10 years this has narrowed the framework of discussion so that we now have a left-wing party in the UK that is basically useless and betrays the class that formed it, and whose leaders actively destroyed their own electoral chances to ensure that nationalization and the rights of Palestinians would never get discussed in Whitehall again. A party leadership which was endorsed by certain of the CT writers after that treachery had been revealed publicly.
If you want to see how our political discourse has been diluted and defanged, just watch the trajectory of any of the usenet/blogger clique from 2000 to now: Yglesias, Nate Silver, the CT crew, those godawful poseurs at Volokh, the anti-“misinformation” specialists who’ve been reduced to spam accounts gloating over dead Russian soldiers and reposting US intelligence agency lies. Liberalism is a disaster, its awfulness is visible to everyone, but almost the entire political and intellectual “left” leadership of the USA and UK have sold themselves to it entirely, and cannot now admit how foolish they have been.
August 23, 2022 at 1:54 pm
I’ll add that another consequence of this is that people who need to influence policy, aren’t necessarily themselves politically informed or active, but have responsibilities in a crisis, find the choices they can advocate for and the policies they can recommend restrained by the intellectual environment created by their more publicly “effective” peers in sociology, political science etc. The obvious examples of this are climate scientists whose primary expertise is thermodynamics, not politics, but who don’t feel they can make recommendations about strict regulation of emitters because the entire intellectual environment they operate in is one of liberal, free-market solutions and minimal intervention, backed up by the breezy confidence of useless economists that change will be simple and easy to achieve and must not affect the economy adversely under any circumstances; and public health people dealing with a once-in-a-generation respiratory pandemic that may have profound consequences for the health of a large % of people who get it, is 10x more deadly than influenza and spreads much faster, but they can’t advocate anything stronger than voluntary mask-wearing, because liberals want to be able to eat out. Meanwhile in countries unaffected by this liberalism to the same extent (NZ, Vietnam, China) much stricter policies have been recommended and supported, with huge benefits for the affected populations.
These public intellectuals in policy, sociology, and political science adversely affect the public policy discourse in oversized ways which lead people who are less familiar with politics and culture, or less politically educated, to restrain themselves from recommending what is really needed because they come to realize it is unacceptable. Which in turn further promotes the idea that only liberal policy ideas are conceivable or accepted. It’s a vicious cycle of fail at a time of cascading catastrophes.
August 24, 2022 at 3:34 pm
I am confident that the bloggers at Crooked Timber have more influence than I do, but I have little or no idea how much more influence, or how they have influence. I would guess that Crooked Timber is an influential blog as blogs go, but I have little or no idea how influential any blog can be. I am not sure who you would consider to be ‘leaders of the mainstream left’, but I can’t figure how the bloggers at Crooked Timber would count as such on any reasonable interpretation, and I doubt the bloggers at Crooked Timber are as influential as the leaders of the mainstream left, on any reasonable interpretation of who those are.
It seems fairly likely that some of the bloggers at Crooked Timber are able to exercise more influence through their other activities than they can through blogging at Crooked Timber. There’s little or no sign of Crooked Timber being designed or used as a mechanism for a concerted effort to influence the world. As far as I can tell, the bloggers use it mostly the way that most people use their blogs, to discuss whatever they feel like discussing, and if that’s what they’re using it for I can’t figure any way it’s wrong for them to do so. There’s an indefinitely large number of topics they could blog about but a very small number of topics they do choose to blog about. I can’t figure any way the topics they do choose to blog about reflect any unified agenda, and I can’t figure any way the topics they don’t choose to blog about reflect any unified agenda, either. The fact that there are topics (many of them) which are not selected for discussion by any of the bloggers doesn’t mean those topics are being censored. You’ve picked out a few topics where you disagree with the position taken at Crooked Timber, or the position you think is being taken; I’m not sure your characterisations are accurate. It’s not clear how those topics are supposed to be connected with each other, or with the more general subject of your post. Supposing that you’re right about all of those topics individually, and supposing Crooked Timber (considered collectively) is wrong about all of them. What would that add up to? I can’t figure any way it would add up to any more general conclusion than this: Crooked Timber is wrong about some things. In particular, I can’t figure how Crooked Timber being wrong about some things demonstrates a general decline, unless you suppose that there was a time when it was right about everything, which is highly unlikely.
Insofar as blog posts have any influence on the people who read them, the effect I would expect from blog posts which talk about political parties in the way yours does (so that means the influence I would expect you to have, if any, and the effect, if any, I would expect from blog posts in a similar vein on Crooked Timber, if any such appeared there) would be to discourage American readers from voting Democrat and British readers from voting Labour, without encouraging anybody towards any particular course of action. If you think there was some good direction in which Crooked Timber used to encourage people but no longer does, you’re giving no clear sense of what that direction is.
August 24, 2022 at 5:56 pm
J-D, I’m obviously using these blog posts and my response to them as a representation of the collapse of liberal political thought, not some kind of final be-all and end-all of political influence. I am obviously not saying that the spate of recent blog posts on CT is the reason that the world is falling apart. Please try to give me at least a little credit!
As another example, the people running CT are largely academics, and they teach students, who then go on to positions of leadership and influence (at least that is what a good academic’s students should do). But here we have clear evidence that their students will be learning an extremely stilted and restricted view of what is possible or acceptable. Or the journalist Emma Burnell, tweeting that she wishes left economics could be more acceptable and not associated with a “divisive” figure like Corbyn. But who made Corbyn divisive? At least partly the kind of liberal intellectuals who repeated the anti-semitism smears unquestioningly because they refused to accuse the establishment of lying, and who constantly rejected his politics as too extreme (remembering everyone laughing about free broadband as a “privilege” of inner urban elites in 2019? How did that look once the nation was forced to work from home by COVID? This is what liberal politics get you).
I’m obviously not saying that it was Chris Bertram’s blogpost on CT in 2019 that got left economics banned from mainstream thought. I’m saying it was the sum total of his and his mates’ work in universities, in consultative committees, in published books, in articles in the Guardian, the NYT, in The Nation, in the academic literature, on radio, in activism and public debates. CT enables us to see what these academics have been saying and what political ideas they have been bringing into their work. It’s also not just CT (CT is just an example), there are many other academics in other fields (e.g. the terrible behavior of the American Public Health Association this week in platforming some absolutely awful voices on covid at their conference), combining to give the impression that there is no action we can take against any of the problems overwhelming us that is more serous than “ask nicely and maybe raise taxes a little”.
Okay?
August 25, 2022 at 4:47 am
So the only solution to all these issues, Climate change, environmental collapse and late-stage capitalism, is to abandon conservative liberalism, flee far-right fascism and adopt far-left radical liberalism?
Personally I prefer a small government unable to interfer with the rights of the common man, moving slowly to address big problems. But it sounds like you are advocating a totalitarian populist state.
Please correct me if I misunderstand.
August 25, 2022 at 10:25 am
Unless you’re spoofing your IP address Ben, you are already living in one of the most totalitarian states on earth. I guess you don’t realize this because you’re the product of the kind of education system that taught you you’re with the good guys, but you’re not. Also you don’t seem to understand what words like “liberal” and “totalitarian” mean, which might help to explain why you can’t see what’s happening to you.
August 25, 2022 at 12:11 pm
I am aware that lots of people make more extensive use of hyperbole than I do, and I am aware that my tendency to react to hyperbole as if it’s meant literally is partly a reflection of my own shortcomings.
However, I am also inured to the experience of recognising hyperbole and then being unable to figure out what the underlying literal meaning is supposed to be. Most probably that, too, is partly a reflection of my own shortcomings, but is it unreasonable or unfair of me to allow some consideration for the possibility that is at least partly a result of other people’s expressing themselves not as clearly as they could have?
It’s been my experience online, and to some extent in person, that if I respond in that kind of situation by expressing my uncertainty about what’s meant, I elicit a lot of irritation but not much clarification. On the other hand, if I respond by taking the hyperbole at face value, the irritation (although not always eliminated) is reduced and the clarification increased (as part of the process of people who knew they were being hyperbolical disavowing literal meanings).
Discussing the actual literal content of Crooked Timber posts, I don’t expect you’ve memorised it all any more than I have. My general impression, though, is different from yours. It’s possible that this is because I’m misinterpreting; but then, it’s also possible that this because you’re misinterpreting. Looking just at the individual post you singled out, my interpretation of its general tenor would be that Chris Bertram has serious doubts about the prospects of doing much about the critical problems which the world faces through the political processes routinely available, and is asking whether anybody else has more encouraging thoughts to offer. Do you think that’s wrong?
August 25, 2022 at 2:01 pm
J-D, if I’ve told you once I’ve told you a million times, I never use hyperbole.
These are the political processes that people like him are at least partially responsible for, though, so when they express despair it’s at least partly at the world they made. Bertram is an emeritus prof, Quiggin was born in 1956, Corey Robin in 1966, some of them have their own Wikipedia pages, they’ve been publishing for 30 or 40 years on topics like this, voting, politically active in several countries. Bertram is a member of the labour party who voted for Starmer, and is now complaining that there is no way out of the problems the world faces? Perhaps not supporting a class traitor who has effectively banned all forms of left wing political action from the UK’s major left wing party would be a good start? Try going onto that blog today and posting a comment to the effect that the climate crisis is more important than defending a bunch of nazis in Ukraine, and that restarting coal plants in Germany so you can boycott Russian gas is a ridiculous idea at a time like this. It won’t get published. Nor will pointing out that Ukraine is the most illiberal country in Europe but the US has given it orders of magnitude more money than it’s willing to throw at the climate crisis, and that these priorities are very skewed in the current crisis. What does it mean when influential people refuse to publish opinions questioning their priorities? It means they refuse to consider criticism of their priorities. In the same way, there is no space for public questioning of the money being spent on defending nazis in Ukraine, the Australian-US alliance (more Aussies are scared of being invaded by China than are Taiwanese – how does that work??), our unwavering support for Saudi Arabia, or of course Israel. The space of acceptable discourse has been ruthlessly narrowed in the past 30 years, and that narrowing is the fault of specific people and the supporters of specific ideologies.
This generation of liberals have baked these ideas into their political reality, and will not accept any change of direction, even as the world burns. The degeneration of debate on CT is a microcosm for how young people in politics are not allowed to advocate for any principle more radical than “let’s raise taxes a little” when they engage in public with these older people. If you doubt that, look at what has been done to Apsana Begum, Jack Monroe, Jess Barnard or any number of other young, slightly more radical people on the left side of politics in countries whose mainstream left is dominated by liberal politics (or, recall what happened to Corbyn and everyone associated with him).
People are responsible for these changes, specific people who did specific things and advocated specific ideas. You can see them now regretting all this stuff, in media or on TV or on twitter, complaining that there is no resistance to skyrocketing energy bills, no political leader or public intellectual willing to advocate for real action on the climate crisis or COVID. But they just spent 10 years making sure that absolutely no genuine ideas are allowed a public airing. You can identify the specific people who did this and the things they said, the campaigns they joined, the ideas they boosted. Yet pointing out that they might be responsible or should reconsider what they did is beyond the pale! But if we don’t do this, if the mainstream figures who drove our politics into this cul-de-sac are not shamed and forced to accept their mistake, what hope do we have of reversing out and finding a path forward?
August 25, 2022 at 2:35 pm
If I were to say something like ‘To me the damage to this object seems irreparable, what do you think?’ and if you were to respond ‘You’re the one who damaged it’, even if your response were entirely factually correct, it would get us no closer to an answer to the question I was asking. One possibility would be that (as you suggested) I was the person who damaged the object but also that (as I suggested) the damage was irreparable.
In general, it could mean many things, but in this particular case one of the possibilities is that you have expressed yourself in a way which has obscured your intentions and that it’s a misinterpretation of your intentions for which you are least partly responsible that has resulted in the decision not to publish your comments.
How can you tell?
I’ve been commenting at Crooked Timber since 2016, and I read some of the posts there before that. If you asked me how it has changed in that time, I would say that the frequency of posts by some of the posters has declined significantly, and also that the frequency of comments by some of the commenters has also declined significantly, and that I am confident that both the total frequency of posts and the total volume of comments has declined substantially. I don’t know why this has happened, but I wouldn’t describe it as a ‘degeneration’. If you mean that it’s degenerated in some other way, how can you tell?
August 25, 2022 at 2:36 pm
No, I can’t. I don’t know how to do that.
August 25, 2022 at 4:02 pm
I think in this case it’s better to say that the machinery isn’t broken, it’s been disassembled and various pieces put on the top shelf where you and I can’t reach them, but the very tall person who did it is sitting in the kitchen pretending they don’t know where the pieces are, can’t reach them or didn’t put them there in the first place. Pointing out that they’re responsible, they’re tall enough to reach the parts, and they know how to work the machine is a necessary first step to getting them off their arses and making them repair what they broke. The machine isn’t irreparably broken but the quickest way to get it working again is to get these people to put it back together.
I can tell the space of acceptable discourse has been ruthlessly narrowed because I have watched as it happened. The entire available public debate has shifted to the right, and small-l liberal participants in this debate have helped this happen by shutting down any discussion of policy options further to the left than Genghis Khan. Even debates which some people see as refreshingly modern and signs of life in public discourse, such as trans rights, have nothing new in them compared to 1991. The same debates were happening then, except that there were no fascists involved in them and liberals were not siding with fascists over patently and obnoxiously silly ideas like bathroom rights or whatever.
If you joined CT in 2016 you probably didn’t realize that a large swathe of the commenters dropped away in 2015, shocked by the vehemence and stupidity of the pro-trump, Putin-fluffing left on there at that time, and the way the liberal posters refused to recognize the dangers inherent in a Trump government. Corey Robin was still around then, trying to tell us Trump and Jeb Bush were the same thing, and laughing at the idea that the Supreme Court or climate change were issues to take seriously. How did that work out? A real case of being too smart for your own good (well, they’re men, so maybe they won’t notice, for a while). I have been reading and commenting there since ~2006 and I am very sure it has narrowed, swung right, and become full of fallacious nonsense (this post is exasperation at that 10 year rightward shift). Their inability to learn anything about concepts of climate justice during the last 10 years, for example, is a sign of how limited their viewpoint is. It’s not just CT either – Balloon Juice and Lawyers Guns and Money are two other liberal “left” blogs (or vaguely left of centre blogs) that have become equally narrow in their view. LGM at least is aware of the slide into fascism that is happening in the USA, but both blogs eat up US intelligence/defense complex stuff, LGM had a member who was effectively admitting to being an active saboteur of Corbyn’s opposition, and they both have former military personnel commenting on defense/security/foreign affairs stuff which should be an immediate disqualifying background for anyone on a left wing blog. As a result they both regularly reprint propaganda from Ukrainian neo-Nazis. This is where liberalism has ended up – boosting propaganda from Neo Nazis. That’s a far cry from the 1990s, when the Australian Prime Minister went onto conservative talk back radio to tell callers they were just dumb racists.
Liberalism – it has failed.
August 25, 2022 at 4:43 pm
J-D, I’ve added an example of the mainstream left being crippled by liberalism to the main post. I hope it will help.
August 25, 2022 at 5:41 pm
Your interpretation of Andrew Harrop’s position is that he is not saying that it won’t work but that he is saying that it is too radical for ordinary British people. My interpretation is that he is saying that it won’t work because it is too radical for ordinary British people. It is not possible for both of these interpretations to be right.
August 25, 2022 at 5:52 pm
If there is a direction which you want people like the Crooked Timber bloggers to take (because you think it would make a positive difference if they did), then your approach was not well adapted to the goal of encouraging them to do so.
August 25, 2022 at 5:58 pm
Both of these interpretations are exact examples of the narrowing of debate.
August 25, 2022 at 6:00 pm
J-D I was permabanned from jq’s posts simply for pointing out he was wrong about “depression is just sadness”, and another comment of mine was reposted under a different name then dissected in multiple comments with no right of reply. What approach do you suggest I should have taken when they won’t approve any criticism of them at all?
August 26, 2022 at 11:22 am
It would be wrong for me to conclude that the space of acceptable discourse has been ruthlessly narrowed without sufficient evidence. If you tell me that you have observed sufficient evidence for you to draw that conclusion, I do not question your veracity, but your telling me that is not sufficient evidence for me to draw the same conclusion. I can’t just take your word for it.
I can look at what you’ve written and notice that–
–something being the same is not synonymous with its being narrower: indeed, it’s very difficult to figure how both descriptions can be applicable.
I started commenting in 2016, but I read a lot of posts before that, although not all of them. Over the time since, when I have been reading nearly all the posts and most of the comments (although I read fewer now than I used to, as I stop reading comments from a commenter at the point where I realise that I am not getting anything out of reading that commenter), I think I have noticed (although I haven’t systematically verified this) a nett reduction in the number of commenters and also probably a reduction in the number of comments per commenter. Even if this is correct, though, there is a difference between knowing that this has happened and knowing why it has happened. I could name (that is, by screen-name) a few commenters that I remember commenting frequently but haven’t seen comment for some time, but I don’t know why they’ve stopped commenting. For all I know, they might have died; maybe the cops caught up with them; there could be a lot of different reasons. I don’t know of any basis for concluding that a lot of commenters have dropped away as a reaction to a change in the content of the blog.
This prompts two responses.
I don’t know whether you feel that the difference between the two interpretations doesn’t matter. Maybe it doesn’t matter to you. However, I am confident that it would matter to many people. For example, if I had a blog of my own and had posted on it a comment similar to Andrew Harrop’s tweet, and if you had responded on the basis of an interpretation similar to the way you interpreted Andrew Harrop’s tweet, I would feel that you had misinterpreted me in a way that mattered, and although it’s not something I would ban a commenter for, I would respond to correct what I would consider an error. I expect many people would react more negatively than I would, and I would regard those negative reactions (up to a point, at least) as natural. You can’t expect people to treat being misinterpreted as acceptable (although reasonable people should consider that if they are misinterpreted it may be at least partly because of the way they expressed themselves).
Now, when you write that both interpretations are examples of the narrowing of debate, you must mean that mine is: that is, if Andrew Harrop says ‘This approach won’t work because it is too radical for ordinary British people’ is an example of the narrowing of debate. How could that be? I can reckon on at least two possibilities.
If Andrew Harrop says that the approach under discussion is too radical for ordinary British people, but in fact it is not too radical for ordinary British people, then I can figure a sense in which it could be said he is narrowing the debate; but if that’s what’s meant, then whether it’s true depends on whether it is in fact the case that it is too radical for ordinary British people. I don’t know the answer to that question. Maybe it is too radical for ordinary British people, maybe Andrew Harrop is right about that, and if so then he’s not narrowing the debate in this sense. There is, however, at least one other possible sense, so I’ll turn to that.
Somebody (such as, possibly, yourself) might respond to Andrew Harrop by saying that it’s true that the approach under discussion is too radical for ordinary British people, but the reason that it is too radical for ordinary British people is that Andrew Harrop and the Fabian Society and other similar people and groups have narrowed debate so much. Something like that might be true, or then again it might not; I don’t have enough information to judge. However, one thing I do know is that if it is true, then the approach under discussion must be one that is too radical for ordinary British people now but which, at some relevant point in the past, would not have been too radical for ordinary British people. If it’s true that the approach under discussion is too radical for ordinary British people, that evidence by itself does not support the conclusion that there has been a narrowing of debate. If it could be shown that the approach under discussion is too radical for ordinary British people now, but that at some relevant point in the past it would not have been too radical for ordinary British people, that would provide at least some support for the conclusion that there has been a narrowing of debate. Maybe that could be demonstrated. It hasn’t been yet, though.
Let’s imagine, for a moment, that somebody had responded to Chris Bertram’s post with a comment approximating this:
‘You express doubt about the possibility of finding/assembling a democratic majority to support the kind of approach to our problems which is required. Probably it would be difficult, but that difficulty is at least partly the result of public opinion being influenced, over decades, to regard the kind of radical approach which is necessary as being outside the bounds of what can reasonably be discussed. The bloggers at Crooked Timber are members of a category of people who collectively have the ability to exert a noticeable influence over public opinion. I would be interested in your thoughts about what you (and people like you) have done over the years to encourage or to discourage consideration of radical approaches, and how you might be able to do more to encourage consideration of them in the future.’
Would a comment something like that have been received in the way that your actual comments were received? It’s possible; but I don’t think so, I think it would have been received differently.
August 26, 2022 at 11:50 am
J-D, I’m not going to give you exhaustive reams of evidence of the narrowing of debate, because I think you’ll just argue that I haven’t given you a systematic proof, which is impossible, and at best we’ll have to differ on this. But here are a few more examples: The labour party has barred frontbenchers from attending strikes; Emily Maitlis in a speech admitted that the BBC has an activist Tory board member who changes its reporting, and journalists in the Guardian are repeating this as fact despite spending the last 3 years telling us that there was no campaign against Corbyn (while not admitting their own guilt of course); various journalists and public figures are refusing to even discuss nationalization of energy at a time of catastrophic price rises; The American Public Health Association is giving a major speech opportunity to someone who opposes any forms of mitigation or prevention measures and thinks we should all just learn to live with it, alongside the lawyer on Dobbs vs. Women’s Health; this week’s Economist is going to publish an article saying that 20k student debt relief is bad policy. 20k! In the USA. The policy options available to us have really been reduced to ” a little more tax but not too much.”
Regarding the Harrop quote, I’ll try to say it simply: if either interpretation starts from not whether the policy works but whether it looks too left wing, that is a narrowing of debate. Whether Harrop thinks it would work but looks too radical, or wouldn’t work because it looks too radical, the result is the same: he is rejecting a policy because it is outside the range of debate. Given how the policy is not exactly radical, this is clearly a narrowing of debate (to push the policy outside of it).
Regarding the appropriateness of my commenting on CT, I’ll say again: I was banned simply for pointing out that JQ should not say that depression=sadness. In fact his comment saying “No more discussion of this” was a response to another comment I posted (not published) in which I pointed out to him the public health harms of what he was allowing to be said, and gave a link to a figure which shows why they are wrong. He wouldn’t publish my comment but definitely read it. At the same time, another comment of mine was copied from one thread to another, pasted by a different commenter under her name, and then she added multiple comments responding to it, but my further responses on that thread were not published. Yet, I have to approach the comments there with some kind of polite and decent manner to ensure publication?
I should point out to you that this insistence on being decent and well-behaved is another example of the way debate has narrowed. I can come onto CT saying incredibly racist stuff, provided I do it politely – but I can’t point out sensible left wing policies if I do it with an aggressive manner, even though in the background something like 40% of my more polite comments are being censored (or reposted by someone else!) because they disagree with liberal orthodoxy. This is clearly the use of pre-approval not to enforce polite debate, but to ensure that certain views don’t get aired. For an example of this in public life see how Angela Rayner was disciplined for saying Tories are scum, at the same time as the Tories are running around advocating gay conversion therapy and saying terrible things about foreigners (not to mention pushing policies that actively kill people).
August 26, 2022 at 2:39 pm
What some people refer to as ‘reading the room’ is a useful skill. I’m not insisting on your reading the room; I’m not telling you that you should read the room or that you have to read the room; but it remains the case that the results when somebody fails to read the room correctly are always or nearly always different from the results when somebody reads the room skilfully. Maybe that’s not fair. Well, the world isn’t fair, and we have to live in the world as it is, not as it should be, even if, or perhaps particularly if, we want to change it to be closer to the way it should be.
August 26, 2022 at 8:46 pm
They’re the ones who need to read the room J-D, as their politics lead us into an abyss of climate change, war and poverty.
August 28, 2022 at 12:10 pm
I liked the comment somewhere else that replacing liberalism or social democracy with something more radical sounds great until you look at the actual post-liberals, whether neoliberal or the Putin apologists with socialism in their bios or the populist right.
Agreed that if you are going to say something in a long essay for a global audience, you need to say it, not say something else then walk it back with “obviously I did not mean what I said.”
August 28, 2022 at 12:17 pm
Another thing I learned in the past decade is that its best to ignore the people who are proud of spending lots of time blathering about politics in the news or online. Often, they have time and confidence for that because they *don’t* go out into the muck of actually forming and enacting policies. The Lawyers, Guns, and Money crowd and the American pundits with an economics PhD definitely qualify, not sure if the Crooked Timber bloggers have gone down that path.
August 29, 2022 at 10:01 am
When I wrote that reading the room is a useful skill, I meant that it’s a useful skill for everybody. That includes me, and you, and anybody else we’re talking about. If I’m doing a bad job of reading the room, anybody who tells me about it is doing me a favour.
Apart from that, I was much chastened when I realised a different error I’ve been making. It’s nobody’s fault but my own; I’ve had this lesson before and should have known better. Maybe I should get a message on a wristband or something to remind me. It would say ‘So, explain to me how that’s a bad thing.’
I’m still not sure whether debate has narrowed (on Crooked Timber, or more generally), but what I should have asked you was in what way you think that’s a bad thing. Some debates should be narrowed, and sometimes it’s a good thing when they are.
I’m not saying that anybody who says a narrowing of debate is a bad thing must be wrong. It can be a bad thing sometimes. It’s just not something that should be treated as a default assumption.
August 29, 2022 at 1:49 pm
J-D, in this case the narrowing of debate has excluded all the possible solutions that will actually work, and instead restricted us to a set of options that have been tried consistently and achieved very little. For example (again wrt CT), John Quiggin spent years trying to convince everyone reading CT (and his own blog) that a carbon tax would be sufficient to achieve carbon zero at very low cost. He has consistently (until recently, anyway) rejected a role for regulation or restrictions or state intervention in the economy beyond taxation, and argued that these small neoliberal interventions will work. I have shown over and over again (e.g. here and here) that the assumptions underlying this economic-liberal approach to preventing climate change and assessing the costs are fundamentally wrong. We simply can’t do it with the changes he proposes. But until recently there was no space in public debate for these broader, much more radical interventions, because the debate had narrowed around liberal discussion of a) the balance of costs and benefits (as if civilization collapse can be calculated on one side of a balance sheet), b) refusal to consider the pace at which climate change is happening, c) an obssession on rates of emission rather than carbon budgets and d) a refusal to consider any “illiberal” interventions in society or the economy. This summer is really showing how badly out of touch with reality that framework has been, yet still the economic establishment (including people like JQ) are only willing to consider the lightest of regulatory touches.
Another example of this (more specific to US liberal approaches to health care markets) is the refusal to consider price restrictions in health, energy, or housing. We have strict price regulation on health care costs in Japan, the UK, Australia and elsewhere, but in the USA they cannot consider such things for health care, and in the UK they still won’t consider price regulation for energy (beyond a frankly nonsensical price cap) or housing. Mick Lynch has proposed a policy of sequestering north sea gas for domestic use at reasonable prices but this would obviously involve a huge intervention in gas production and supply markets, for the public good, and so has been left completely unreported. No journalist can take that proposal seriously because it’s outside the accepted framework of debate (along with nationalization), and the only options allowed to be considered are “handouts” (which are then to be sneered at) and “windfall taxes”. A large proportion of the British population are going to be impoverished this winter if something isn’t done about this, but no options that could actually work are allowed within the range of topics to be discussed by “Serious” people.
Everywhere we look we see the need for regulation and social intervention in markets – directly through laws, not indirectly through taxes – and no one will consider it. Even more off the table is the idea that central bank independence should be compromised. Some countries are looking at double digit inflation due to supply constraints (the Ukraine war, COVID lockdowns, workforce shrinkage), but the only tool that is available to control this is central bank manipulation of interest rates, which will a) induce a recession and b) likely induce a housing market crash and c) won’t touch inflation (since inflation is cause by supply bottlenecks in essential goods and services). This is going to lead to stagflation, massive impoverishment, social upheaval, and the destruction of a generation’s wealth. But removing central bank independence to stop them from raising interest rates at this time and looking for non-monetarist tools for controlling inflation is completely outside the realm of consideration in all western societies.
The consequences of this narrowing of debate over the next 5-10 years are going to be absolutely shocking.
August 30, 2022 at 9:46 am
If you have possible solutions that will actually work, why was that not what you led with? Surely it would be more useful for attention to be focussed on the merits of your proposals than on the meta-issue of whether debate has narrowed.
August 30, 2022 at 10:53 am
J-D, I’ve been making recommendations about solutions that work since 2012 – see the post I linked to above, and others you can access via that post. I have argued with JQ about this on CT and his own blog for years, trying to point out to him that his numbers and assumptions are wrong. I have done specific, explicit calculations to show that the liberal policy options won’t work and made alternative suggestions. I have argued repeatedly here and elsewhere for a regulatory solution and for a recognition that you can’t tax your way out of a civilization-ending crisis. For years JQ would respond to these criticisms dismissively, refusing to engage with the mathematics or correct his own numbers. Even as recently as a few years he was qualifying the risk of climate change as “arguably” humanity’s greatest crisis.
Greta Thunberg is an example of someone else in the public eye who has done this. She started off trying to engage with the liberal establishment in good faith but they just dismissed her as an idealistic child. That’s why her speech at Davos ended up so angry and aggressive. You can’t keep talking to these people in good faith, trying to point out to them that their time frame is wrong, their assumptions are too optimistic, and their numbers are wrong, be constantly ignored, and maintain your equilibrium. Here for example JQ tries to show that a carbon price of $50/tonne will solve the problem. It’s just foolish to work in this way. Aside from the fact that his first equation doesn’t seem to have balanced units, his assumption that the damage from a business as usual scenario is “a 10% reduction in global income” is incredibly naive. That was 10 years ago. Today 1/6th of the population of Pakistan is homeless due to flooding. Greta Thunberg’s anger is a way more productive attitude than this kind of silliness.
And need I remind you that he dismissed deforestation in poor countries as “too much firewood”? How are we meant to deal with resource economists who think this way? After 10 years of banging my head on this wall, what else can I do?
August 30, 2022 at 1:06 pm
Have you ever posted them as a response to a direct question from Chris Bertram, or as a response to any blog post by Chris Bertram?–or, if you have posted them on Crooked Timber as a response to a different poster, has Chris Bertram responded to any such comment of yours?
I can’t see your responses there–were they deleted? There’s a comment there which is the kind of thing I nearly always respond to, so I’m guessing that exchange was before I read John Quiggin’s blog regularly–I can’t remember when I started doing so.
Productive how?
That depends on what you’re trying to achieve, but in general my recommendation for anybody who discovers that they’re banging their head against a wall would be to stop.
Incidentally, I hope I’m not making you angry. I wouldn’t want to. I appreciate your taking the trouble to respond to me–I can’t say whether it’s worth it for you but it feels worth it for me.
August 30, 2022 at 3:04 pm
You’re not making me angry J-D, though you do keep raising the bar of evidence you require. I have been regularly interacting with the CT posters and commenters for years about this. Here I respond to a post of Ingrid’s, talking about the importance of systemic rather than individual choices, and directly engage with Chris Bertram. Here I again approach the problem of individual choices in response to Ingrid (this is a common theme she posts on) and engage with JQ. Here I again engage with Ingrid and some commenters on personal vs. systemic choices. I also engaged with JQ at his blog and in response to posts at CT though I can’t find any quickly (I think he doesn’t tag his posts as well as Ingrid). It’s worth noting that in one of those comment threads Tim Worstall tries to tell me I’m wrong on the likely future costs, and does so by citing a bunch of liberal economists (how are we going on the costs? Looking like the economists got them right?) Also worth noting that a bunch of commenters in the earlier posts are gone. Val, for example, who also occasionally commented here, dropped off CT in 2016 because she couldn’t stand the sexism around the US election coverage. Chethan(?) also dropped off then because he(?) didn’t trust his liberal interlocutors on race.
(I may have got the order of links there wrong and misattributed interactions from one thread to another, but they’re all there). You will also see me in some of my more recent comments alluding to long-standing disagreements I have with some posters, take that as further evidence that I have repeatedly tried to tell them where this is all going.
If you want more evidence than that then feel free to dig through yourself. I think Quiggin visited here once to argue with me, but I don’t know if I can easily find that now …
August 30, 2022 at 3:26 pm
Here is an example of JQ coming here to argue, about his old anti-anti-science crusade. There’s a lot of liberal argumentation there that is stunningly ignorant of how global health works and the systemic factors that affect malnutrition. Interesting!
January 12, 2023 at 12:16 pm
Putting my position very generally, and trying to avoid specific labels which might confuse the discussion because people have different ideas about what those labels mean:
if there are people who you think should be on your side and on board with your position;
but if they seem not to be on your side and on board with your position, or any rate insufficiently so;
and if you still think they could and should be brought round;
then berating them and denouncing them is extremely unlikely to be an effective tactic.
Denouncing your enemies, while addressing people who are not your enemies but who may have the same enemies as you and thus be potential allies, may sometimes be a useful technique for alliance-building and rallying effort. So when you put your energy into berating and denouncing people, it makes it seem as if you regard them as actual or likely enemies and not as allies or potential allies.
So, the question** is how, generally, you regard that category of people (however you label them) who Crooked Timber typifies (at least, for you). Do you think of them, for example, as being potential allies whose real interests are largely consonant with yours but who are, for misguided reasons, taking up positions which are, if they would only realise it, harmful to the cause which should unite you and them, if only they’d let it?
Or do you, as this comment–
–seems to suggest, regard them as diametrically opposed to you and your cause(s)? Do you think that the category of people typified by Crooked Timber, and their politics, are the people and the politics most committed to and most responsible for climate change, war, and poverty?
Or something else?
** I mean, the question for me, if I’m going to have any hope of making sense of what’s going on here–but it’s not a question I can answer without your assistance, which obviously you are under no obligation to provide.
January 12, 2023 at 9:19 pm
J-D, I think you identify the basic issue here quite well, which is that I used to think that the CT crew were vaguely pointing in the right direction, but in the last few years they have become, well, not diametrically opposed to the right direction but definitely not a positive force. And I have tried and tried to make my case over there, but increasingly just been censored and dismissed. It’s not like I just barged in 15 years ago hectoring and yelling. I think the best way to characterise it is that we all have to pick a side as the world slides into the abyss, and they’ve picked their side, and it’s the wrong side. Maybe they don’t realize it yet, but that’s what they’ve done.
January 13, 2023 at 9:43 am
Suppose it is in fact correct** to characterise the situation as one in which the world is sliding into an abyss, and there are only two sides, which I have to take it must mean on one side those who are trying to keep the world from sliding into that abyss and on the other side those who are, if not actively trying to make the world slide into that abyss, at least not doing what they could to prevent it.
Would you, in that case, characterise yourself as making an effort to persuade the bloggers at Crooked Timber not to switch from the right side to the wrong side, or, having done so, to switch back? Would you suggest that their having once been on the right side of this divide is some reason to think there’s more chance of getting them to come back to the right side than there would be for people who have been on the wrong side all along? Do you operate on the assumption that they are less deeply committed to the wrong side than some of the people over there, or more deeply committed, or neither of those?
I have no basis for commenting one way or the other on the diligence of your efforts, but if you have tried and not succeeded then it necessarily follows that the technique you adopted was not effective. (Also, the more diligent your efforts, the more it suggests that you thought they were worth making, that you thought there was some chance of achieving something which you thought would be of value if you achieved it, which suggests the question ‘What made you think that?’) Of course, that still leaves open the possibility that some other technique would also have been ineffective; but it also leaves open the possibility that some other technique would have worked. This suggests that there could conceivably be some value in a critical examination of your technique. Is it possible, for example, that the way you approached them could have encouraged them to feel that you regarded them as the worst, worse than other people on the side they were (perceived by you) as taking, more deeply inculpated than other people; or that your approach could have encouraged them to feel that you regarded the relationship between yourself and them as a purely and irredeemably oppositional one; and that either or both of these things made your approach less effective than it might otherwise have been?
** It might be. I don’t know. I don’t know enough to say that you’re wrong about this; I don’t know enough to say that you’re right.