Clown Car

My friend Tracing Woodgrains joined me on the live stream today. Earlier this month, he and I published articles in Quillette one day apart on a similar theme, which is the need for a sane centrism beyond woke leftism and the Trump cult. We try to distinguish between a kind of libertarian-statist axis and one that focuses on whether institutions are functioning well. I share some thoughts on whether it’s even possible to be a right-wing intellectual at this point.

We do an AMA near the end. Topics that come up include the future of X, whether Blue Sky will take off (see my account and Trace’s), how Trace started working for Blocked and Reported, and Nathan Cofnas’ idea on the only way to defeat wokeness.

Links

Today’s out-of-context headline controversy

My previous conversation with Trace

Me telling people to shut up about race and IQ, and debating Cofnas

Trace’s post-election reflections, followup in Quillette

Michael Tracey joins me on a livestream today to discuss Matt Gaetz withdrawing his nomination to be Attorney General. We also talk about where MAGA is going, the increasing meaninglessness of the term “neocon”, escalation in Ukraine, and more.

Here’s the video Michael sent me showing the missile attack in Dnipro today.

I’ve found that livestreams are a good way to build a following on Substack. So I’ve been doing them almost daily. I’m not going to send all of the recordings out because that would just be too many emails. The ones that are really good or with other people, like this one, I’ll release to paid subscribers, while others that are less important I’ll just put on X from now on. To catch them live, you’ll have to be paying attention to my X feed or have the Substack app to get a notification. You can download it below.

I had an hour in my car today and decided to do a livestream where I talked about the Trump appointments so far. We had a few normal days and then it sort of went off the rails. The RFK and Gabbard appointments are particularly shocking, as is Gaetz in a different way. I thought that the Gribbles would be tossed aside after the election and now that they weren’t I need to rethink some things. I discuss Trump becoming a kind of mad king as he realizes just how much the right has become a cult of personality around him, along with optimistic and pessimistic scenarios for his presidency. Since he can’t run again, it’s actually an interesting question what Trump wants out of a second term. In the second half of the video, I take questions from viewers.

Join me for my next stream in the app. Download it here to get a notification any time I’m live.

Polymarket gives Trump a 97% chance of Trump winning as I write this. Republicans are taking the Senate, and by a relatively substantial margin. Michael Tracey and I talk about what happened. We get into the Hispanic vote, what a second Trump administration will look like, Trump’s unique magic, how Michael could tell voters’ preferences by their looks, and much more.

See Michael’s three threads of Pennsylvania voters.

Sorry, but there’s like 15 seconds of dead sound at the beginning. I hate to put the podcast out in this condition, but this is time sensitive and I don’t have the time to fix it up tonight.

Just finished a three-hour election day live stream, which started at 1PM ET.

Hour 1: Maxim Lott discusses betting markets and where we’re putting our money.

Hour 2: Alex Nowrasteh on immigration, and what the vibe is like in DC

Hour 3: Rob Henderson, to discuss basic election stuff, the vibes, and we go on some tangents.

This is probably going to be dated in a few hours, but I’m getting it to you all in time where you can listen to the whole thing before we know exactly what happened. There’s a lot that’s valuable here even if you get to it late.

I plan to go back on tonight to talk to Darren Beattie at 7PM ET. I may go on Destiny’s stream tonight, and there might be other things going on. So watch the app to stay up to date.

Note: Rob and I discussed the fact that Google gave you a map if you searched for “Where to vote for Harris” but not if you searched for “Where to vote for Trump.” There turned out to be an innocent explanation of this. We regret the error.

I talked to Michael Tracey last night about the upcoming election, JD Vance on Rogan, Trump’s stolen election claims, Michael’s recent Liz Cheney piece, and other things.

Join me for my next live video in the Substack app.

Today I’ll be talking with Alex Nowrasteh on Election Day at 5ET/2PT. See you there.

Today I talk with Callum Williams (follow on X), senior economics editor for The Economist. I was honored to have Callum on, as I consider The Economist perhaps the most indispensable news source we have. Their latest issue, on the US economy as the envy of the world, forms the basis of our discussion. After talking a bit about what it is like working for The Economist and its ideological orientation, we get into the issue of why the United States is so much richer than Europe. This question has two components: the historical American advantage, and also our unusually strong recovery from the great recession and Covid, the two main economic shocks of the twenty-first century.

Americans have been blessed in terms of both culture and policy. We have a common language, and the cultural differences between various parts of the country are relatively small. Moreover, while Europe has done a good job of creating an integrated single market for goods, there are still substantial barriers to trade in services, which make up the majority of a modern economy. Rigid labor laws also remain a problem. During covid, the United States was more willing to just directly give people money, while Europeans focused on trying to protect already existing jobs.

In addition to talking about economic data, we also explore why current perceptions of the economy in the US are so negative. The two main theories we discuss are the idea that this is about inflation and that there is a general pessimism that has arisen in the culture.

Later, we shift to the surprising state of the Russian economy, which has done a remarkable job of weathering the sanctions placed upon it. Finally, there is a discussion about Callum’s idea that states have become “lumbering leviathans,” today spending more money on pensions and entitlements and less on the greater good.

Callum recently became a father, and so we talk some parenting in the end, along with a bit on the upcoming election, including what I call Gribblism.

I have read The Economist for decades, even though before meeting Callum I could not name a single staff writer for the magazine. It is a unique institution, providing the highest caliber reporting from across the world while also avoiding many of the things that make its peer newspapers and magazines less informative and enjoyable, namely identity politics and anti-market bias.

When thinking about the accomplishments of Western Civilization, people will point to things like going to the moon, modern medicine, and the accomplishments of the tech industry. But the epistemic breakdown of the last decade or so has emphasized the degree to which institutions that simply provide factual and relatively objective information about the world cannot be taken for granted. And even among media outlets that are generally honest and good when judged by realistic standards, The Economist truly stands out. One of the best things about writing for the public is getting to meet people like Callum, and I look forward to having more discussions with him in the future.

Links

Callum on X

The Economist special on the US economy, introduction and first article

The Economist on Russian resilience to sanctions

The Economist on governments as “lumbering leviathans.”

The Economist on the failure of European leaders to create a single market. Video on the small market problem (joke)

Me on Critical Age Theory

Me on labor unions, part one and part two

Andrei Lankov is a Russian-born scholar of Korea, the director of the Korea Risk Group, and a professor at Kookmin University in Seoul. I had been familiar with his work for years, but only recently read his 2013 book The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in a Failed Stalinist Utopia after coming across this review.

I invited Andrei on the podcast to talk about the book, the history of North Korea, and developments since it was published. He begins by reflecting on his time studying in Pyongyang in mid 1980s, and how the experience of being a foreigner in that country has changed over the decades. Even before he studied there, North Korea was known for its ridiculous propaganda and seen as a basket case among the communist states. We discuss the fundamental message of his book, which is that as dysfunctional as the regime looks from the outside, its behavior is rational when considered from the perspective of survival. Andrei was once among a minority of specialists who believed North Korea would never give up its nuclear weapons, a view that has since become mainstream.

We also cover the North Korean negotiations with Trump and the extent to which Korean specialists influence policy. I ask Andrei why North Korea took such a unique path, and he puts forward what I call his Peasant Theory of Communist Brutality. According to this view, when communists took over peasant societies, the regimes turned out to be particularly repressive, while when they came to power in advanced states they were less so.

This was not due to individual variation among leaders in peasant societies, but rather to the masses and party functionaries from below demanding harsher measures and a more authoritarian system. I’m skeptical, and ask how this theory fits with what we know about Stalinism and the early decades of the Soviet Union. I don’t know if I’m convinced by Andrei’s theory, but it is fascinating, and the discussion we have centered around it ends up addressing some deep issues regarding historical causation. In recent years, observing American politics up close, I’ve seen more and more cases of political leaders being pushed from below — something I’ve attributed to new communications technology including social media — and I wonder about the degree to which this has been true in other times and places.

Links

Andrei Lankov, The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in a Failed Stalinist Utopia

Andrei Lankov, “North Korea under Kim Jong-Un: Reforms without Openness?”

Andrei Lankov, “North Korea’s Economic Reforms Were a Wild Success. Just Ask Defectors.”

Me on Stalin and understanding great historical events

People love my conversations with Amy Wax. Fresh off the news that Penn has sanctioned her for making very politically incorrect but mostly true statements, she’s back on the podcast to talk about the whole experience. See here for our first discussion, which focused on immigration, and the second in the midst of the ordeal she was going through with Penn.

The university tried to buy her silence to end this whole affair, but Amy characteristically refused. Penn claims to adhere to the principle of academic freedom, but says here that it is punishing conduct, not speech. This is an old trick that I discuss at length in The Origins of Woke. It is true that speech is a form of conduct, and conduct doesn’t become allowable just because it is speech. Imagine a professor who went around harassing black students by whispering racial slurs in their ears. But this is not that, nor anything that should be considered close to an edge case if the principles of free speech and academic freedom are going to mean anything at all. The position of Penn is in effect that talking about different statistical distributions across groups is conduct that can be punished.

We start by going over the fallout from the Penn controversy and whether she will be planning a lawsuit. The conversation moves on to the state of the academy more generally, why things have gotten this bad, and some of the pushback we have seen and why there hasn’t been more of it.

We then begin to talk about the election, and the unique appeal that Trump has to the Republican base. Amy is not exactly enamored with the man, but as a political pragmatist, she is supporting him anyway. She explains some of her main policy priorities, namely the need to save the academy, crime, and the rule of law. On the last point, I push back a bit by arguing that if this your concern, then Trump is clearly inferior to just about any other American politician one might imagine.

Amy and I go into some of our differences on whether you should talk to the media, even if you think they’re likely to be unfair. In the end, she tells me that I’ve given her something to think about, which I was very glad to hear. I’ve also been on a long-running crusade to get Amy on Twitter. I think she would be uniquely good at it and build an absolutely massive following. She says that she’ll think about that suggestion too, but I unfortunately don’t believe she’ll do it, even though the world would be a much funnier and more interesting place with an Amy Wax Twitter account.

Some of my previous articles come up during the conversation. See “The Biomechanics of Trumpism” and “Coping with Low Human Capital” in particular.

Substack now allows collaborative livestreaming. Rob Henderson and I gave it a try last night. Still got some kinks to work out, but it went well. Give me any feedback you have.

Unfortunately it doesn’t look like you can see what people were typing in the chat. Perhaps that option will be added in later. One thing I like about Substack is you see a constant improvement in the product.