This podcast is brought to you by the Albany public library main branch the generosity of listeners like you. What is a podcast? God daddy these people talk as much as you do! Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning.
Hey everybody. This is Razib Khan and today I am here to talk about American culture and international relations with Tanner Greer. Tanner, can you introduce yourself?
Sure. Thanks for having me on the show, Razib. I'm Tanner Greer. I'm a writer, essayist, now a podcaster. I've written for a lot of different magazines and stuff. A lot of people know me through my blog, called "The Scholar's Stage", you can find it at scholars-stage.org It's also where my new podcast is at. And that's where a lot of people know me best
Yeah, I want to talk about your blog later. But first, I want to talk about some essays that you wrote. Let's talk first about American Culture. You wrote "culture wars are long wars", and then a couple of pieces on the new right. So first of all, before we get to the culture wars one, which is it's a newer one, the new right. I have a pet peeve. I don't like the term new right - Because there's already been a new right. In the 1970s. Right. So when you're getting Gen X, people grouchy with terminology. I feel like you're circulating through it too quickly. Can you talk about the old new right, and the new new right, And whatever the old right was, I mean, can you just give...
You can add an extra group. What is neoconservative mean? Except new conservative, right? It's - there's a little bit of a self own however, the phrase isn't one that I chose it was when they chose for themselves. Or at least some folks associated with Claremont Center for the American Way of Life, they started using the phrase new rights to describe this broader project. I think a few of the people in this group are uncomfortable with the phrase for the reasons that you just explained that the new rights not so new - at least the phrase isn't, but it seems to stack and it works well enough. So that's what I used on my, my series of essays about this, this group of people.
Yeah, just to give listeners a little bit of context, for those of you who are not in the know or are not interested in conservative intellectual history, the new right is it kind of dates back to the 1970s. And it refers to a bunch of social conservative activists and also economic conservatives, like, you know, not a sort of libertarian but free market activists and anti-communist activists that kind of came together, fueled the rise of Reagan were associated with Reagan and the conservative revolution of the 1980s. And they're kind of people who came onto the scene. Well after say someone like William F Buckley, Jr. And definitely after figures from what you would call the old right, which probably you'd say date back dates back to the 1930s, kind of anti New Dealers and maybe even earlier, anti Wilsonian 's and whatnot, like, radical libertarian types, radical America first types, that sort of stuff would be old, right? Traditionally, someone like Pat Buchanan kind of harkens back to that old right in some ways, and even though he was probably the 1970s, more with the new, right, so the terminology is a little weird, and it changes historically. I would say that, one thing that's obvious to me is the term New right. A lot of Zoomers, you know, people born after 1995 that I meet in places like clubhouse, they love the term. But that's because they're so young. They don't know who Paul Wyrick is, or was I mean, they don't know any of these old new right figures. So it gets a little confusing to me, because I don't know which right, they're talking about. And then I look at the the face of the person and I'm thinking, Oh, they just started shaving five years ago, they mean the new new right, you know, because they don't know how these old people are. They don't know that Heritage Foundation is relatively new. So can you talk about the new right, and how it differs from let's just say the, you know, conservative Republican voters in general, the elite versus popular distinction that you're making, which I think is correct distinction Can you outline that for us?
Yeah, sure. I think you're absolutely right about there being a generational divide. I associate a lot of the figures that are now calling themselves new right with basically millennials and under. There's a few who are older are older. There's one or two boomers and a few Gen X'ers. But this really is a young man's movement. And it's a reaction to the failures of conservatism. In the past, I don't know four decades, since the first round of people calling themselves the new right came to prominence. And if you think about what conservatism like modern conservatism in the American context has meant, it's kind of been described as three legs of a stool. In the face of communism, you have three different groups who came together and kind of define themselves against the communist world. These were number one, libertarians, free marketers, your Milton Friedman types who believe that statism was the enemy and that we needed to have more freedom, the better. The second group might be called the foreign policy realists, the people who took a very hard edge on foreign policy questions, they want to have a large military, they wanted to confront the communist world, contain it and ensure that there was no geopolitical revolution that the communists could take advantage of. And then finally, you have the traditional, you might consider them social conservatives, or American traditionalists, who see in communism a threat, a godless threat to the American way of life. They see a lot of liberal currents in American society as domestic parallels to what the communists are doing abroad. And they kind of they all three groups are able to kind of coalesce because they share the same threat. And they have some theories about how things work together, for example, they have this idea that if you can make government smaller, and this will allow civic communities and churches and the normal American way of life to prosper and be strong, whereas if you were to allow government interference, then you're going to have this sort of wiltering of traditional American values, as a government controlled by elites saps it's vitality, ah, it's a very, very small in some ways, superficial summary of what this thinking was. But this was kind of the coalition that emerges and wins elections. The Reagan Revolution embodies all of this to strong anti communism, the strong pro market, small government side, that insure the expression of defending traditional American values, it's all there, but it starts to fall apart when the Cold War is over. One of the reasons it does is because well, the Cold War's over who's your new enemy going to be the neoconservatives the military foreign policy wing of the party, once that new enemy to be sloppy jihadists, the whole Arab world, something or another, and their adventures in Afghanistan, Iraq, discredit them, most of them have left the conservative movement and many of them march with the left right now. Or they're very marginalized. They're part of you know, the bulwark, a lot of things...
Irving Kristol you know... not Irving, you know, Bill Kristol, Bill Kristol, you know, his son. It's interesting, just you know, it's it's, it's kind of surreal that Bill Kristol is such a fan of a lot of Democratic politicians right now, in 2021. If he could, if he could talk to himself, If past, Bill Kristol and future Bill Kristol got in a room together, that would be a fascinating conversation, say Bill Kristol of 2001, who was a, you know, I don't know if people of your generation tend to remember this, but he was instrumental, Bill Kristol, and the neoconservatives around the Weekly Standard, were instrumental in giving Sarah Palin kind of an inside track to the vice presidency with John McCain in 2008.
Yeah, I do remember this, actually. And I mean, there's lots of people like him and David Frum is another easy example of somebody who was extremely conservative stalwart you know flagbearer and now is more or less an honorary member of the left although he would deny that but it's true so that's that's one side and then that leaves kind of so one leg of the stool is gone. And that leaves last tool last two legs. One is the kind of free market libertarian tinged ideology sometimes conservatives call this fusionism. This attempt to bring social conservatism and libertarianism under one banner. And then the last is the traditional social conservatives, and both of them have had their own setbacks. The traditional social conservatives lost the culture war, so there's not a lot of space for them to continue with traditional approaches, and then the Libertarians are blamed for many of the party's current problems or the movement problems. This is meant in two senses. In the one sense there's a lot of distrust of libertarian or free market outcomes. When America when conservatives look at the problems that have overcome America in the last 30-40 years, the kind of problems that led to Donald Trump being elected, they see libertarianish ideas everywhere. They say free trade as an example, help deindustrialize the American heartland helped lead to the opioid crisis helped create the situation where people are desperate. And where you know, the living standards of American whites have been cratering, and they'll go out and say this is libertarians fault. This has served the interests of financiers and corporate bigwigs, but it hasn't helped average American people. And then the other side of it is that they also blame libertarians for maybe hobbling their own movement. Their argument kind of goes like this. When the left is in power, they do not fear using the government to pursue their own social ends. Why do we lose the cultural war because when the left is in power, they use the government to make sure that everyone believes what they want. But we never do that. We believe in things like the Constitution, we believe in things like limited government. And because we put these constraints on ourselves, it's almost like tying our hands behind our back and a duel. The other side is willing to use the weapon of government, but we aren't. And that is why we're losing. And it's because of that narrative. I think that's actually in my mind, the central reason why the new right is really anti libertarian. I mean, they they do care about the other stuff. But at the end of the day, they feel like they lost the culture war, and they feel like they lost it because their side wasn't willing to play rough enough that aside, felt bound by rules and procedural niceties. That the left itself is not bound by and we need a kick out the libertarians, we needed to kick out all these people who care about procedural niceties about limited government so that we can steer the culture the way we want to steer it. That's more or less their setup. So these are people who - there's a wide range of how extreme they'll go. At one end, you have people like maybe Oren Cass and the American Compass, which is a think tank, which is pushing for industrial policy, they would more or less except Reaganism without the free market stuff and instead you have American government led economic programs. On the far side, you have people like the Catholic integralis, who more or less want to have a - throw out liberalism, and live in an America that's run by a Catholic social teaching from the 19th century. That's the range. But generally speaking, people are either anti libertarian, or they'll go one step farther and just be against liberalism writ large. Does that answer your question?
Yeah, no. And, you know, I think it's really orienting a lot of the listeners who might not be familiar with all these different strains in conservatism. And I mean, some of you might wonder, like, why does this matter? Well, you know, for those of you who are younger, the world that you live in, was created by by Reagan's 1980s, and the reaction to Reagan's 1980s. So if you had not been paying attention to the counter reaction to the 1960s, that occurred on the right, you would not realize what that world was, and where it came from. So you do have to pay attention to these kind of somewhat abstruse intellectual developments, these cultural developments that are happening at the elites in a given time, even if they seem kind of weird and marginalized. I mean, arguably, Sarah Palin's rise as a populist conservative in 2008, when she was she's definitely something different from John McCain, or Mitt Romney. And she's much more like what Trump channeled - the energy, I think the Trump channel even though Trump himself is not from that background, I mean, his his dad was a self made man, he was not. So I think it's important to like, consider these things because you know, what one season's marginality can be at the center of the next, you know, act. I want to ask you, your so your essays you got well, I wanna talk about three essays in the domestic sphere, but they start with the problem of the new right, further notes on their new right. And then I kind of think, you know, the culture wars or long wars, kind of are paired with that. I mean, I would argue that, you know, there's a group on the new right, who think the culture wars are the only wars and that everything else is just commentary. But at first, I want to talk about the problem with the new right where you're illustrating the essay with a picture of a book I love and I think the listeners, you know if I can get David Hackett Fischer on this podcast, I'm gonna get him on the podcast, but I've actually tried for a couple years he doesn't respond to emails. So that's "Albion's Seed the Four British folkways in America". Can you talk about what relevance that has to the new right in American politics today?
yeah certainly. And just as like a, you know, one minute overview of what that book is David Hackett, Fischer, more or less, analyzes some of the major founding cultures of America. Some people have argued, doesn't quite get them all. But he wants to say this, there's four main groups that found America, all from England, in each had a very distinctive settler culture, which in terms would have large effects on American culture where they went. And some of them are ones we, like everyone knows about the Puritan settlers in New England is one example of these groups. And if you look at the Puritans, they're very different from the rest of the settlers. One of the like, obvious examples is in terms of education, they came from a part of England that was overly educated themselves, they brought this over to the United States, because they believe that everyone needs to read the Bible, they need to not be deceived by the old deceiver, as their first law mandating schools describes it. So they have, you know, unit kind of something like universal primary school education for kids. Whereas settlers who went to the south, the Chesapeake area, they tended to be aristocrats, you know, the third son who couldn't inherit the estate and the indentured servants they were able to convince to come over. And that group didn't care at all about reading really, except for the small, narrow class at the top. And you can look at these - he goes through all kinds of different things, the way they thought about religion, sex, the food they ate, what they thought about education, what they thought about wealth, all these things, set each of these four cultures apart. And my argument is that in many ways, these cultural patterns have persisted over time. So if you look at American history, if you want to see like waves of moralism, and crusading, you'll notice that it's almost always Puritans or descendants of them. Not always literal descendants. There's a bit of cultural melting partners, people who go to New England, I'll end up grouchy compared to you know, people who enter the South, no matter where you're from, it's just part of the culture there. And likewise, New Englanders, northeasterners they're always at the center of these these big moralizing movements be at the Second Great Awakening, be it the progressive movement, or be it our great awokening right now. I identify Trump supporters - or especially I would say his base with the Scots Irish immigrants who moved to America in the 1700s. Scot Irish immigrants were from the Scottish English Borderlands. It was an area of a lot of anarchy kind of clannish and people there, they their conception of life was well violent, but also independent. People that are strived to have a certain independence and living. That was what success meant not to rely on outside forces and not to be subordinated under them. Whereas the Puritans from the beginning had a very communal oriented way of life. They immigrated as congregations. And when they continue to settle further out, into the western parts of the United States, you know, first the Midwest and further on, they tend to emigrate in large groups have basically whole towns popping up. And historians like Daniel Walker Howe noted that you can look at the number of Springfield's across United States and kind of draw a straight line from Massachusetts outward. And you can see where large groups these towns just go, boom, boom, boom, boom across the frontier. And these folks, the Puritans, they were always okay with having more rules, having a much more, I would say society oriented worldview and a very moralizing one at that, whereas the Scots Irish when they settle, they try to not live close to each other. They ended up inventing phrases that came to be associated with the American Revolution as a whole phrases like Don't tread on me, was especially popular with them. Patrick Henry's Give me liberty or give me death, he was a Scot Irish guy. And I argue that their spirit, their way of thinking about things, is at the core of a lot of what has happened on the right. In recent decades. Certainly the Tea Party is one manifestation of this. But I argue that's also kind of Trump himself. His appeal appeals most to these cultural descendants of this, like Scot Irish tradition.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's interesting. So there's a book called Clash of Extremes, that explores the economic origins of the Civil War. And this is, my understanding is this is a bit of an outmoded form of analysis in the field, which, you know, went towards this form of economism, economic inevitability for a while, and then shifted away and, you know, focus back on cultural slavery, these sorts of things. But there's some interesting facts in this book. And one of them is you can look at the founding of Arkansas and Michigan, as you know, around 1850, about the same population. And Michigan had, I think hundreds of schools, and Arkansas had a handful, these are, you know, primary schools, just like, you know, simple schools to educate the children of farmers. And he was just illustrating here, for the purposes, you know, from an economic analysis, the differences in investment, human capital that occurred really early on, because these are two states with about the same populations, you know, they have the same number of settlers that were coming in, and the settlers just decided to invest in very different things. And you can look at the fact that the southern states, you know, they had a problem, the Confederacy had a problem getting loans during the Civil War, because some of the southern states had defaulted on debts was a very, very different, let's say, cultural orientation, the northern states. were, you know, none of the northern states did anything like that. And where does this come from? Where do these differences come from? I think a lot of people would argue their deep seated cultural differences in perhaps what we would call the common good if I can use that word. And so can you loop this back into the New Right? And, okay, you made some observations. So I'm not I'm, you know, Tanner, I'm not in DC. I'm not, you know, personally in these circles in real life. So I don't get a sense of these people as human beings, I see what they write. And so I have come to some of the conclusions you have, partly because maybe I haven't interacted with them in a more informal way. Can you talk about the New Right, and its relationship to these folkways and just the broader America?
Sure. I mean, I will say the new right isn't just a DC phenomenon. In fact, I think California is one of its, its strong basis, in a sense, Clermont down in Southern California, I think there's a I would include Thiel-ite type folks in San Francisco as being of this this sort. Although they kind of come from it from a different background. A lot of them are reformed libertarians in their case. But my argument basically, is that so if you if you have this distinction between the Scot Irish kind of Appalachian view of the world where they want to maximize like their their worldview is basically get off my lawn. And that's what they want government to do is get off their lawn. That's what they want the larger culture to do is leave them alone, let them do their own thing their own way and not impose cultural values on top of them. And so in modern terms, you know, this is a lot of the say, the Trump supporter who doesn't really care about gay marriage is just fine with it, but likes Trump because he stands up to these liberal elites. Yeah, that's, that's this energy. The new right, folks are different. Not all of them, but a lot of them are very religious. They view America's problem as too much libertarianism, liberalism, too much individualism. And that's really the difference, I think, between the two groups, is that the Trump base supporter, the average Trump supporter, he's an individualist at the end of the day, whereas so much of the conservative intellectual energy at the moment is being run by basically communitarians people who have extremely communal visions of what the good life should be people who want to be part of communities that transcend their normal individual concerns and that kind of want to sublimate themselves into something bigger than themselves. A lot of the Trump supporters they just want to grill the New Right has grander visions, and this is a contradiction. This is essentially what I say with the problem of the New Right I just that's what the problem the new right faces is, is that at the end of the day, they're kind of like Puritan heretics, they share the same emotional impulses that I would say a lot of the social justice folks do. They just want to direct that culture towards their ends, and not towards leftward ends. But they still believe in this idea of the country as a community. And this attempt to create community through state force, I just don't think has a lot of resonance with the average Trump supporter and their goals. And this this was clear to me like one of the things that caused me to write this essay is I spent some time last early this year, about a month or so visiting extended family members who were very Trumpy, but not super political. And it was really clear that what they cared about was not at all close to what the communitarian anti liberal, new right thought leadership cares about. They want to defeat you know, many of them like actually think that the American Revolution was a mistake, that the idea of life liberty, pursuit of happiness was a wrong turn, that once you do that, you end up with today's hyper capitalist, decadent far too free society of the moment. And that sort of stuff. I just don't think it resonates with average Trump supporter, perhaps in time, it could, but at the moment, it doesn't now.
Well, so I guess a question I would have about that is, you know, that that seems like analytically plausible to me. On the other hand, you can, you know, think about the cultural war, or the cultural elite on the left, they have some views that are very, very distinct from the typical democratic voter, as we, you know, we can kind of tell this by the fact that Biden was nominated. And, you know, had like, zero traction, like literally zero traction with Democratic cultural intelligencia online and in the major thought publications. So they've kind of managed that, that fusion, in terms of getting it to work and keeping it stable. I mean, do you think something like that can happen?
Perhaps, and you could perhaps argue that the super free market version of libertarianism is just as connected from what the average Reaganite actually wanted. Right, the average Reaganite perhaps is closer to what I've been describing, then they are to this... Well, we need algorithms to decide everything, because that's more efficient than then - government bureaucracy. That we kind of have. So I'm sympathetic this argument, but I think you can only go so far. And there's a few contrasts give you examples of where I think these really split. Education is a perfect one, the New Right, really, really, really cares about what is being taught on Ivy League campuses. The Trump base wants to care less about what is being taught on Ivy League campuses. The new ... t the Trump base wants less elite appearance in their life, the new right wants to be a new elite. They want more just more of it in the way they want. And things like these are potentially reconcilable. I think it's hard. I think it's very hard. And I don't think the new right will be able to successfully reconcile unless they can actually build these connections downwards. I think this is the other problem with a lot of conservative reform movements is that they they have these discussions between, you know, 20 journalists and Hill staffers and think tankers. And you know, some tech guys from San Francisco and think they're accomplishing something. When in reality, you have 20 guys in a room, not a whole country. And so there's a there's a practical aspect of this too. And that's why I often sometimes compare them to the reformer cons, which was another earlier attempt to reform conservatism in some of the same ways I'm describing, but less extreme
Tanner, can you talk about the reformer cons are really quickly for the listener? Well, sure.
So reformer cons were basically Okay, so like, a tea party movement happens in the early Obama years. There's this huge new like rush of energy in the conservative movement. And there's this real question of what kind what should conservatism be and so you have a group of people mostly journalists and Hill staffers. Yuval Levin is kind of the poster boy for this group, who call themselves the reformer cons they want to make a conservatism that moves past Reaganism and is maybe like those a few things they want to do. They want to make conservatism more about the working class. They want to make conservatism more about strengthening these these lower, below government levels, society, churches, neighborhoods, whatever, a lot of them have this idea of if we can de federalize politics, we can solve a culture war by letting each area do its own thing. These are some of the ideas they have. And what they really are an attempt to do is an attempt to kind of capture the the Tea Party intellectualize the problems of the Obama era, and provide intellectual leadership to these energies. But their problem was that they never actually traveled the country and talk to all these Tea Partiers and build a organization that went down into the conservative base or to the rest of the country. At the end of the day, it was, you know, 20 people in New York and DC talking to each other. And they were completely blindsided when Trump came and overturn the old system. And I think the same thing is gonna happen with these new righters, a lot of these new right people. Just to give you an example of politically why they're failing at the moment, they're big backers of JD Vance and Ohio, they really want him to succeed. But do they have real connections to Ohio? Have they built a political machine out there? Or even just the community connections? It doesn't look like it looks like JD Vance is gonna lose his election. And they won't will they do? Like his primary election, they they don't really have anybody. Right. And that's kind of their problem is that they're just they're happy to debate philosophy and ideas and talk about the future. But because they don't actually have to sit and talk to you 20 normal people who aren't especially political and get them to buy on to their ideas, their ideas often have a disconnect with what the actual base they lead thinks. And I think that's, I mean, that's a big problem. Practically speaking.
So here, here's, this is kind of inside baseball, so most of the listeners just ignore this, it's not gonna make any sense. But for those who are in the know, imagine, James Poulos doing a tour of America across diners, having conversations about his ideas with the average American
He should! Well, I'll say this, I actually feel like James Poulos , the American Mind, they're probably the closest to the Trumpist spirit of all the different new right projects, like the actual New Right itself quite divided, and has lots of different arguments among itself, in many ways, mutually incompatible. They're united, mostly by their sense of who the enemy is, you know, Libertarians inside their own party squishes inside their own party, and then the left abroad. But that is kind of what they need to do. They need to be able to, you know, get outside of their little urban enclaves, which most of them are born in and raised in, a lot of them are themselves the products of Ivy League institutions. So it makes sense, they care so much about these things, but they lack the ability to even be proper traitors to their class, because I would assume knowledge of the other classes that comes beyond just, you know, the internet. And a lot of them just don't have that.
Yeah. So I mean, if that makes sense, and you know that, I do want to say that I am friendly to James and I just wanted to make fun of him there because he can be quite oracular and opaque to normal people. Sometimes when he speaks, you know, he lets his Thumos get off the hook, but
I don't have any particular argument with him either. But I do think this is the - if the new right is very serious about changing American politics. This is what they have to do is they have to sit and think well, okay, how do we expand this beyond the world of think tanks and journalism and into the broader country? And until they do that, I think they'll probably fail to achieve their political goals, just as the reformer cons before them.
All right. So I mean, this is very interesting. Again, I have to wonder, um, so you wrote a more recent piece. The culture wars are long wars, okay. We are talking about Latinx people or Latinx, whatever you want to call them in the New York Times, like they use that word now. That word was created like 10 to 15 years ago. How is it that the left is reshaping language as we speak? You know, I apologize. I didn't ask you what your pronouns were Tanner, you know. So, I mean, like, you're talking about how these people are too academic or they're like too urban. They're too cosmopolitan. So how is it that the left is able to reshape the culture In such a, you know, frankly radical directions even in relation to their own base, which is getting dragged along, um, is moving, but it is getting dragged along. How could the right... could the right ever do something like this?
I think it could eventually it will just take a while for us to be in that position. And that's more or less my take. In fact, I think it said before, that's one of the points of that article. Like one of the case studies I use is the the rise of these libertarian that we've been talking about, where you if you go back to this a 1949. And you look at the free marketers of the world at that point, it was a very sad and sorrowful little group, they didn't seem to have a lot of hope in the world. If you look at what had just happened, there had been a giant Great Depression. The government had been credited with taking America and the rest of the world out of it. command economies had just won World War Two, the Soviet Empire was posting economic growth rates above anything in the West, it seemed like laissez-faire economics was utterly discredited. But fast forward 40 years and with Reagan Thatcher and the lot, all the sudden, this is the Zeitgeist and even ordinary people who are not sophisticated economic thinkers are repeating these libertarian shibboleths. And then it becomes encoded in, you know, early 1990s for the whole world as the economic orthodoxy of the time. How does this happen? Well, my argument is it didn't happen on accident. Go back to 1949. I chose that your particular because that's the year where Frederick Hayek, who's one of the main thinkers behind this movement, he writes an article called "Intellectuals and Socialism". And his article has two parts one, he wants to explain why socialism has succeeded even though he believes that it is economically irrational and only leads to bad outcomes. And two, he tries to provide almost like a war plan for how the Liberals as he calls himself can regain the control of the world of ideas, which he believes they have lost. And he makes a few points. He argues that number one, in 10-15 years policy will be what the intellectuals of today are thinking and feeling. The other word he used for intellectuals as he calls them, secondhand dealers of ideas. So not exactly experts. But the people who take ideas, popularize them, share them, both you and I would probably count as secondhand dealers of ideas, in this sense, anytime that we're not talking about very narrow areas, areas of expertise. So in your case, I guess population genetics, whenever you beyond that phrase, you're you're in your general intellectual. And so what what folks like us are talking about ends up determining the basic ideas and principles that normal people accept as like, well, normal. And intellectuals also tend to be the people who implement policy in large organizations. Thus, you can have an organization which might have a determined said, stated policy, what they want to accomplish. But if all the staff are actually in charge of implementing it have very different values and beliefs, it usually is kind of transmogrified into something else as it goes down. And so that's that's the first part of his argument is that this is the world we live in that we and And he's not alone to make claims like that. Right? There's that very famous quote by Keynes about how practical men who don't think themselves intellectuals at all are actually the slave some defunct economists from a few generations back is don't know it. So the question is, how do you change these things? And Hayek's answer is, well, what we need to do is - number one, we need to understand what sort of ideas what shape ideas must take, for the non experts, intellectual to engage with them, fall in love with them, share them, use them. And then number two, you must build up a set of institutions, which are capable of sheltering these ideas which are capable of explaining and basically providing meat to the bone of an ideology of working out many of the problems and if you can do this, if you can build these institutions if you can create a coherent and importantly utopian that's one of the things he says that intellectuals need they need - they like utopianism.
They like the ability to to strive for a better future. If you can package your ideas in such a format, then you might be able to win over in time, the next generation. And now it's a little more complicated than that. There's two things in general that I think, need to be added to this process that Hayek sketches out. The first is that generally speaking, you need something of a crisis. The old set of ideas, the old orthodoxy needs to be shown to be insufficient. So in the case of Hayek and free marketism, what did that was stagflation. The old economic orthodoxy didn't predict stagflation didn't know what to do about it. And then all these free marketers who had spent the 50s and 60s Slowly sharpening their ideas, building these institutions, that all of a sudden they had a ready made explanation for what was going on, the policymakers and the rest of the world could grab on to, and
and the rest is history. Like there moment, their moment came, their moment came in, they grasped it. Well.
And then the second thing, though, and this is why I think Hayek misses and this is what I tried to bring out on my piece is that there's another aspect to cultural change and idea change that is important. And this is the generational aspect. And what I mean by this is that if you actually look at most sociological work on values, political beliefs, ideas, you find out that most people more or less set on an ideology, a set of committed political values between the age of about 15, and 30. And they hold those ideas for the rest of their life. Why this is, I don't know, people can talk about how this is when your brain stops trimming off its neurons and Crystal intelligence goes up. But the other kind of intelligence does, and I'm not going to get into those arguments. But we know that once you hit about 30, most of your main framing through which you understand the world has already been been set in place. And only extraordinary events, say like September 11, might shift that framing and even then only by a little bit. And so what that means that if you're fighting a war of ideas, you're not actually fighting for your own generation, the generation that lived through the Great Depression and World War Two, never found the free market explanations very convincing. They never really converted very few of them converted over to what Hayek wanted them to he converted the next generation down the line, the generation that did not grow up with the same set of problems, but had experienced this new one, this the stagflation problem. And even when you don't have a crisis of that size, you still kind of have this dynamic because and Hayek talks about this in his essay, and he's right to say so he says, Orthodoxy is kind of like a toxin to intellectuals, because of ideas and exploring new problems and thinking that you can come up with an answer yourself, is the oxygen in which intellectual life uses to survive, thrive, and so any old set of orthodoxies is going to have problems with the next generation, because the next generation wants to develop their own things. And then on top of that, the next generation isn't living through the same circumstances that caused the previous generation to create the orthodoxy, which they are now imposing. So there'll be attracting new ideas. And if you have a set of people and institutions which can provide those ideas, you might start winning them over. This won't be apparent for a while though it takes a bit of time It means even if you're convincing the young generation, the next generation, that you are right, the next generation are young people, they don't have a lot of power. They're not in positions of authority. And so you have this dynamic that I described in the essay, I say that cultural change happens both gradually and then suddenly, and the gradually is the slow process of convincing the generation that's coming up, the intellectuals in it at least have what you believe. And then this process of the intellectuals influencing all the normal people of their generation and the ones below it. But this process isn't really apparent, until there's a breakout moment, either an event or simply a demographic transition, or suddenly it becomes apparent that the two generations or sometimes the three generations are in very different positions. You kind of see this in the New York Times over the last I think, four years, where all the sudden it's become apparent that Oh, like all these Boomer editors who believed in the old liberal nostrums are suddenly realizing, oh, all these young people don't think the way I do. How could this happen? And the answer is I happen because the old people were never actually seriously engaged in the debate over ideas the young people were in, they never needed to it wasn't necessary because in their demographic among their friends, those ideas had no purchase, or all of a sudden one day they wake up and they realize all these young people are now you know, controlling the newsroom and they're a minority in their own institution. And now That's how it happens. This is why any and there's lots of examples, American history, you can look, I use the libertarian one. But you could say the whole wokeism thing is a good example of this. Most of the woke ideas were invented by intellectuals and activists in the 1980s. And it took about 40 years for them to get in a position where they can now kind of dictate the culture, which makes me argue that if we want to win it back, it'll probably be a similarly lengthy campaign.
Yeah, you do argue that in your essays. So I guess the last question on this topic - I want to pivot to China, before we end - is where do you think that these cycles that you're talking about, which are, you know, human generational cycles, do you think that they might be modified at all by social media and the internet? Do you think culture the rate of cultural evolution is increasing in these sorts of things? Or do you think it's pretty steady?
I don't actually think it's that different. It seems like it's really fast. But I mean, I think that's my entire point is that it's always like this, it's always kind of gradually, then suddenly, and if you look at past examples of this kind of cultural change, if you were a, you know, average American who's looking at the 1960s, or if you're in the 1910s, or if you're in the 1770s, the rate at which Americans go from, you know, we're loyal English subjects to we are Americans as just an example of this seemed to contemporaries very extreme, especially to the contemporaries that didn't, didn't sympathize with it. A loyalist in the 1770s might have said, Oh, you know, all these pamphlets false. And maybe it might have been the mediums fault. But I think there's a broader issue here. And it has to do with this dynamic I've described where cultural change kind of happens beneath the radar, but then when it breaks out, it really breaks out and surprises all sorts of folks who were not prepared for the moment before them. And I think it's gonna happen again, too, I make the prediction in my in my essay that the Democratic Party is going to go socialist sometime soon. Because this is exactly what you see, you see the whole younger demographic, basically, everybody who's a Democrat under the age of 45, thinks that capitalism is bad, just straight out. And they think that they often happen to think Socialism is good. And what socialism means is still to be determined. But that's where the younger party is, if it was just Democrats voting under 45. In fact, if it was just Americans under 45, voting this last election, Bernie Sanders would be President right now. You don't see the significance of this, because we're still very Boomer weighted, the leadership of the Democratic Party is very, very old. But give it five, give it 10 years, and you're going to see that demographic change. And then all these people who were kind of satisfied, moderate Democrats on economic issues, who thought they kind of were in control are gonna realize, oh, maybe I should have spent the last decade or two fighting this fight instead of, you know, being smug about how those people are out of touch.
Yeah, you use the word socialist, as kind of a just like, you know, you can like use words and certain labels like, liberal, like, you know, like when conservatives would just say, liberal, so-and-so is a liberal, you know, that was, that was just that was all you need to do in the 90s of the 2000s. In a political ad, I don't think it works anymore. Or, here's one thing that really annoyed me 10 years ago, during the Obama era, the use of the word, socialism, I'm just like you socialism, for everything. People are gonna start to think socialism is cool. I mean, you're gonna you're gonna lose the power of that, you know, term when you overuse it. And so I think that's, I mean, to be frank, on the other side, I think a term like white supremacy, I think I think that term is being overused. And I just don't think people care anymore on the right. And I think it's just it's having a corrosive effect on us utility. So one of the things that you mentioned, I want to pivot real quick, one of the things you mentioned, is, you know, the new right, and it's focused on China and nationalism. And, you know, you've been, I don't know, if you want to call yourself a China hand. But you know, until recently, that was, you know, what I mostly knew you for, for, you know, your commentary on China. Do you kind of get the sense? I mean, I think you were ahead of the curve here. To be frank, I'll give you credit for that. Do you kind of get the sense that the American elite kind of just came to becoming China hawks, almost like overnight, or is that just my impression?
I do think it was a very fast transition. It doesn't. It's not the suddenly gradually thing that I just described. I think that's true. overnight. I think that there was a The trouble is that, for far too long, the narrative that people had about China was fundamentally incorrect. And it probably should have been done with almost eight or nine years before it was. But the point was reached where the old narrative just couldn't hold up anymore. And that fell apart very quickly. And then what replaced it was a very, it was a much more hawkish consensus and narative. You can give some credit to Donald Trump for this. But China itself deserves a lot of credit. The streak of things that happen between 2015 and 2017, which is where I think the beginnings of this shift really start. If you look at what happens in these years, Xi Jinping has kind of declared general secretary for life. More or less, we'll see if he lives up to that. This is when the Xinjiang situation becomes quite bad in this starts getting out. Hong Kong starts riling up again, China itself, under the leadership of Xi Jinping becomes very, very assertive in its rhetoric and its language abroad. You have some very prominent cases of the Chinese state trying to censor or or harm people abroad. And all these things really kind of add up. And then of course, you have the trade war and Trump and this this new situation where because Trump unsettles all the old consensus, there's now room for people to make a new argument. And the China hawkish side took advantage of that to say, Okay, guys, here's what you're missing before. China's not doing what you what you thought they were going to do listen to us, and a lot of people did. And so yeah, I mean, I do you think it's new bipartisan consensus that, like hawkishness on China. I think that's true.
And so I mean, are we? I don't know, are we are we in a new Cold War here? Like, I mean, what's going on? Like, what is the path for the next decade or two? You know, you do have a rep as a China Hawk, but I mean, what is your attitude towards issues like whether China is a real threat or whether its structural demographic issues are eventually going to mean that, you know, it comes back down to earth? Maybe it'll have lost decade like Japan? I don't know. You know,
I think it's, I don't think those two things are mutually exclusive. RIGHT? I A falling power, in many ways can be very desperate one. But I'm towards towards the broader question is, is China's rise going to keep on going or not? A lot of people have very arrogant answers to this. They think they know, I do not. I will not claim that I know the answer to that. There's way way too many factors that could intervene. I think the argument I can explain if you want me to why, like one of the arguments from why things might not go so well.
Yeah, can you can you outline a worst case scenario just so that people can have a really cheery podcast, you know, but like, No, keep it real man.
I mean, okay, so like, just in terms of like thinking about China's future, what might bring them 'down to earth' in your phrase, I would say that there's a few really big problems they the Chinese face, and the Chinese are very aware of this themselves, although they've been very triumphalist, I think just the past year, mostly because of how they handled COVID versus us. It's given them a lot of confidence to declare that their system is superior. But - so the thinking about China, China's essentially a collection of super advanced cities stapled on to like Africa, you have the gap between the large places like Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, where, you know, sometimes I feel like FUTURE CITIES when you visit them. And the Chinese countryside is really, really big. And this is seen in many different areas. You see this in terms of I mean, even in IQ tests, and the various like, PISA scores and stuff. The the gap is gigantic. A recent book came out "Invisible China", which talks about some of those things. You have and so, this this fact by itself, of trying to get the 600 For 600 million people who live in the countryside and get them up to standards and not have them drag everyone else down, that's a big problem. That's a really big problem. And it's not clear that they have any good solutions for it at this point, especially as the old model of economic development has kind of run its course right. For most of the last 30 years, Chinese economic development has been a game of infrastructure spending, it's what it's mostly been built on, with a little bit of export on the side. But you can only build so much infrastructure until you've reached the end of amount of cement, you can lay out a number of skyscrapers you can build, at some point, you have to be able to transition to something stronger. And we're in this place now, where a lot of the migrant workers who were fueling this have started going back to their villages. And others another book that talks about this is "The Myth of Chinese Capitalism" by Dexter Roberts kind of gives a grounds eyye view of what some of these problems look like, at the ground level. So there's that that's a huge thing. Another one has to do with economic reforms. Xi Jinping in came into power, with the idea that he would bring about structural reforms to the State Owned Enterprise
Complex, he failed. He was not able to do it, he was not able to push it through.
And this is kind of interesting to me. I've been reading a lot of books recently about the failure of the Soviet Union to push through its own economic reforms. And it occurred this is about 1/4 of the Chinese economy is these these large state owned enterprises that we're discussing. And the the so - the reason the the Soviets couldn't reform while the Chinese could, in the 1980s. I very convinced arguments given by people like Frank De Cotter and Arthur Waldron, who more or less argue that during the Cultural Revolution, the party was kind of destroyed. Most of the economic bureaucracies were ripped out to pieces, all of the vested interests were gone. That it was a clean slate. And so under a form of opening up under Deng Xiaoping, he could a lot of this began before at lower levels, not even Deng Xiaoping leading, but when Deng did lead, there was no one there to oppose him fast for 50 years, 40 years, and this is no longer true. Now you have this gigantic, gigantic system. You know, more people work for the Chinese government than live in South Korea. Okay, that is unwieldy and huge and full of vested interests, and very difficult to, to make proper reforms to and if you do reforms, you have to do it by you know, throwing 120,000 people in jail, which is what Xi Jinping did. And still, he wasn't able to do the economic side, he was able to do some more political reforms. And so these these are, these are real challenges. And then on top of that, you have you know, the rest of the world kind of waking up to the challenge that China faces and thinking about how to to mitigate the problems. And then on top of that, you also have the demographic issue, where China's quickly becoming old, they are making all these desperate reforms to try to get people to have more kids, they just banned. People having more than 60 minutes of homework. This is one of the things they just made a new law to declare a new regulation that schools are not allowed to give more than 60 minutes a homework because they want to make family life more enjoyable, so that people will be more willing to have kids. Will this work, probably not, they just open it up, you know, they've gone from having one kid to two, now three kids being legally allowed, but people aren't doing it. And so you're going to be in a situation where China is going to be very old, very quickly, and still having huge parts of it at the development level of third world countries. That's another challenge. And then on top of that, the other big challenge I think about is Xi Jinping has personalized power around himself to an incredible extent. So what happens if he has a stroke or even if he dies, but he dies before he's able to figure out a secession plan, succession plan, in this situation, it would be very easy for, you know, civil disturbance or whatever that happens in authoritarian countries. That's another, you know, a wildcard. No, I don't know if any of these things -perhaps the party will be able to overcome all these things. They've been very good at overcoming challenges of equal weight in the past. I just think that these challenges are significant enough, that there's a there's a good chance that combined, they might frustrate China in a way that you know, the people who predict that there's no way China isn't going to be deciding the picture. They might be wrong. It's possible. It's well within the realms of possibility and I won't be arrogant enough to say, Oh, that can't happen or that will happen. I likewise, I won't be going the other way and say oh for sure. China's doomed. I don't know, but I think they have enough problems problems, which they themselves worry about, that the future of China is not decided. That's my two cents.
Hmm. All right. Um, yeah, you know, and people should should follow your blog to get your more than two cents on China, which, which I do, although you have been writing on a more diverse things. So I, you know, I want to finish up, just talk a little bit about your blogging. Your, your blog scholar's-stage is, you know, I feel like it harkens back to an older style of essay blogging, that's it's kind of faded in various ways. Now, one thing that I want to ask you about is, and you don't have to answer this question, if this is, you know, part of your brand, but I feel like some people their identity, as you know, just their background, their biography is, is clear in people's minds. But with you, I feel like it's more about your writings, aside from the fact that you taught English in China, you taught in China, that's a big deal. But aside from that, a lot of other things I feel like are just so faded away. I've talked to multiple people Tanner, who don't remember your first name, who don't know what your first name, they just call you, Greer, because they don't know what your because you go by T. Greer's or handle and they just don't know your first name. I mean, is this a conscious thing where you kind of don't put yourself at the foreground of your blog and your intellectual production?
I think so. You know, I originally started my blog in 2007. I turned 30. Next month, so I was in high school then. And I mean, I'll say that, like, my first things were all terrible. I've deleted almost the first year and a half of things I wrote. But at that time, when I was joining the blogosphere and participating in these discussions, no one knew who I was, I was just T. Greer. And I was very gratified with my ability to go, you know, toe to toe with these PhDs and I was just, you know, first year of college. And I think that was part of my strategy that a lot of my writing texts that I do now, or I tried to pry at copious sourcing was a reflection of the fact that yeah, I was a nobody, I was just a citizen blogger, and that my biography did not add anything in particular, to my analysis. And I, you could argue that in the days since then, my biography has come to give me - has more to speak for itself than it did when I was.. you know, in 2008. But I still kind of like that spirit of arguments standing on their own feet of writing standing on its own feet, and then not just being kind of like a reputation game. If I could, I would still not have my first name out in the world, but magazines won't let me write for them. under T. Greer. No one will let me write for them that way. So I had to bite the bullet and say, Okay, I want to write for some of these magazines and get - reach a slightly larger audience. And I have to at least use my full name.
Yeah. And there are other there are other Tanner Greer's that are out there. Like, I'm just looking at the Google images
None of them are me. None of the Google Images are me.
None of them?
None of them.
Okay, okay. So yeah, I still think you're reasonably. I mean, you're not necessarily anonymous, but it's just interesting. You're, you continue the spirit of how you started, is, I think the best way to say it.
Well, I like it. I like the old way of doing things. And I think with substack we're seeing a little bit of a return to that. I've been very gratified to see the number of people start up substacks, a lot of them you know, semi anonymously or synonymously. I mean, I have some criticisms of substack as a as a model. It's why I didn't join it ever and a piece about that called "Why I did not join substack" but basically, I have positive feelings about the future of discourse moving away from Twitter, which is terrible towards things like substacks. Blogs I think is all good
and podcasts
well and podcasts although what I dislike about podcasts as a medium I mean, although I'll say just started one so everyone wants to go find scholar's-stage podcast. they thought this interview was interesting. They can. What what is interesting, or difficult podcast is that you don't it's hard to have interaction With the readership with the community in the same way that blog, blogging kind of allows. And that's what I think is actually the key to the old blogosphere was the amount of interaction that went on, you would write something other people would write back 10-12 People might write back sometimes in the comment threads times our own blog, and you'd have this little community of discourse. And it was permanent. I Twitter kind of has this little bit, but it all disappears too fast or gets shared too, too widely. It's not serious. It's mostly just about, you know, insulting people. Podcasts do allow for some stuff, but that I feel like they don't have the same level of conversation through time.
Yeah, no, I think I would agree. I think, you know, there are multiple different mediums. Um, there's also YouTube, which you probably will not do, but you know, I've done some of it. There's some upsides to YouTube, some of the visualizations and whatnot. So, um, you know, whatever works
for if I do a YouTube, given my readership, demographics, which trend towards the younger side, I could do a YouTube channel and probably get a bunch of followers. That's how that's how it works. But then, you know, everyone has to, like, Look at me. And, I don't know, at some point, if my book gets finished, I might have to go on a speaking tour, which case maybe I'll just bend to it and make my youtube channel at that point. But for the moment, I'm happy being the guy who's just not always about promoting themselves.
Well, Tanner, Tanner, you're gonna have to take a picture for your book jacket. You know, once, once you're done with the book.
Well, yeah, send you know, all the contracts, say things like, you know, you'll go on TV this many times to talk about it. So like, if I get to that point, then then yes, I might have to bite the bullet and accept and fully be the public intellectual that people can make fun of on Twitter. And mess up... you know, but until then, I'm happy to be a little bit behind the scenes, because I don't really want the arguments to be about me, I want them to be about the ideas. I don't like this is gonna sound a little bit weird, perhaps, but I don't particularly mind if people use my ideas. Like without citing me all the time, like this whole idea about culture wars, gradually, then suddenly, I heard somebody use it the other day, I'm pretty sure they read it, that it's entered their mind because of my thing. And they didn't reference me but like, it doesn't really matter to me. I originally started blogging for the sake of having my ideas explored and responded to not for the sake of bolstering my ego of having lots of people say, Oh, Tanner, you're so great. You're so brilliant. And you know, cuz back then, no one knew who you were. So you didn't have that benefit. And then back then to when you started blogging, like a lot of people at that time, like blogging was almost seen as a professional risk. Right? It wasn't something like academics and stuff did to promote their material. You just, You just wrote back then because you really wanted to write and you wanted people to engage your ideas and be a part of the conversation. Yeah. And maybe people won't believe me, but I that's really still my motivation today is I like being part of the conversation. I like getting ideas out there and seeing people's response to them. Yeah, and that's, that's really what motivates me. I feel like in many ways, you're kind of in a similar boat because you've been blogging forever. Razib
Yeah, back when you were in elementary school, probably.
Yeah. Right. Why did why did you start the first "gene expression"?
Gene Expression started in June 2002. So it will be
Yeah, I know. I was definitely an elementary school. When you started gene expression. Yeah. But you've - you know, you consistently. I mean, you wrote something. Back in the aughts and the late aughts, I remember reading, it was a response to, I think it was when on your Discovery Magazine version of your blog. And it was a response to the the journalist, Nate Theyer who had basically had problems he was, you know, he's a kind of famous guy who went discovered Pol Pot in the wilderness. And then he went to the Atlantic and said, I want to publish an article with you. And the Atlantic comes back and says, you know, what, we will not pay you, but we'll do it for the exposure. And this is a journalist who had, you know, done incredible things already. And so this became a bit of a, you know, frokost, everyone's comment and your comment was on this event, is that the problem with with Nate Theyer is that people like you exist, that you just want to keep on saying stuff. And that no, no matter what the situation is, you're going to just, you know, if you can get paid for it nice, but otherwise, you're going to just keep on saying stuff. You're going to keep on being part of the conversation because you want to and you've been given the technology that allows you to that you won't I think you call it people who won't shut up and you put yourself in that category. And I guess I'm in the same categories you for good or for ill,
yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Well, um, I think we should probably shut up at this point you know, the podcast format is is quite open ended. But um, you know, I think I think we reached a good time. It was great talking to you, Tanner. And obviously people know where they can find you. Your your blog, which there is member only content now. So check that out. You know, you've been doing what you've been doing for a while now. I mean, not that much. You know, I don't have that many more years over you. So, you know, you started at a young age. It's really great. You have a lot of influence now. That's, that's cool. That's important. And I really appreciate your insights man.
