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October 8 - November 8, 2018
America has been for much of its history an empirical society, devoted to reason and organized around fact.
Independence was to be justified by the application of intellect to fact, not by sentiment alone—it
As a result, the nation that won the Space Race could, by 2011, no longer put a person in orbit.
Judged by the hard reality of the national budget, science and technology commanded much less importance for the Boomers than other twentieth-century generations.
Nondefense R&D spending peaked at almost 6 percent of the budget in 1966 before declining to around 3 percent for most of the 1970s; it has never meaningfully exceeded 2 percent since 1982.
Most of the pipeline of current wonders depends on work done decades ago, and the alarming decline in basic science now seems to be translating into slower innovation overall.
But Americans, especially older Americans, cannot be bothered to even learn (or anyway, remember or believe) the basics.
Oddly, when they are finished, many graduates are forced back home due to bizarre immigration policies.
“You don’t know how I feel” became a common response to authority figures from the 1960s on.
In a complex world, deference to experts should be rising instead of, as has happened, falling.
The triumph of murky relativism, over universal values of the sort enshrined in the nation’s founding documents and exposed by constructivism as patriarchal nonsense, exacerbated matters.
Representatives would now be mere transmission mechanisms between government and an antisocial electorate.
the Founding Fathers did not fashion an Athenian democracy, but a Roman republic.
they feared sociopathic passions should an ignorant mob be produced. As it happened, their fears were borne out.
The more intemperate the people, the more intermediation was necessary.
“men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral cha...
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For the true conservative confronted with a sociopathic electorate, the correct strategy was more experts, more voting of conscience, less catering to the passions of the masses;
quality is measured by doing what a plurality of voters want in the moment, rather than what’s best for everyone in the long run.
“The nine most terrifying words in the English language,” the Gipper opined in 1986, were “I’m from the Government and I’m here to help.”
For this, the essential political asset from the 1970s onward became status as an “outsider,” immune to the warping forces of the bureaucrat’s lifetime of issue analysis.
the key attribute of outsider candidates was not inexperience of politics or actual distance from the establishment, but hostility to the Axis of Elitism that ran from Harvard through Washington,
“Education is being redefined at the demand of the uneducated to suit the ideas of the uneducated. The student now goes to college to proclaim rather than to learn.
It’s hard to see how this conservative transformation could have happened without the culture of self-orientation and antiauthoritarianism.
Many evangelical churches became less vehicles for Christian ministry than political action committees organized by political ideology.
population untethered by reality, unwilling to defer to experts, increasingly self-interested, with personal access to incontrovertible truth and abetted by the tax-free apparatus of a politicized evangelical movement swollen by rebellious Boomers.
DISCO AND THE ROOTS OF NEOLIBERALISM
The faltering of an economy previously so good at delivering mass prosperity made some changes inevitable.
A key feature of Boomer sociopathy is maximizing present consumption regardless of future costs,
The “paleo-” liberalism that preceded the “neo-” version was classical liberalism, which dominated Anglophone policy from the Industrial Revolution to the Great Depression.
Liberalism in its purist form and in aspiration—though not practical instantiation—remains relevant as the capitalist utopia to which diehards desperately seek a return;
Deal and its successors were neither Keynesian nor not-Keynesian, but rather wholly American: pragmatic responses to specific problems informed by, but never slavish to, theory.
The Keynesian Left argued that the modern economy was prone to problems only the state could address.
The original neoliberal Right argued that too much intervention would produce a sclerotic, ever-expanding welfare state, as it indeed would in pre-Thatcher Britain.
Influential thinkers like von Mises as well as Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, and Milton Friedman founded the Mont Pelerin Society to fight for laissez-faire.
“danger in the expansion of government, not least in state welfare, in the power of trade unions and business monopoly, and in the continuing threat and reality of inflation.”
For many Leftists, “neoliberal” is just a polite term for capitalism rampant, a doctrine that leads straight from Ronald Reagan to the dystopia of Blake’s satanic mills, operated by enslaved child laborers and belching soot and inequality.
Individuals are best suited to take care of themselves, and therefore the default position is that government has no role.
every variety of neoliberalism depends upon key and problematic assumptions: that individuals are rational, prudent, and informed, and that they therefore can be relied upon to meet their own needs.
The third way was not Goldwater’s; he hewed instead to the classical liberal position, demanding that government butt out as a matter of both sound economics and morality.
His and other conservatives’ failure to do so explains the hard Right’s fixation since the 1980s with controlling the courts, to achieve by judicial means what politics could not.
but by the late 1960s, the United States was running low on gold and the system destabilized.
None of these tactics sufficed, and in August 1971, Nixon took the United States off the gold standard.
The 1970s provided Boomers with an invaluable education, and they would manipulate inflation policy in ruthless service of their own ends.
Prices abated over time, but the legacy remains in America’s enduring commitment to protecting Gulf oil supplies.
By 1979, it was back to 5.6 percent, before another oil shock wrought more havoc, but through the 1970s, conditions never quite achieved the same severity as what happened post-2008.
The 1970s were also the last decade in which the working class experienced meaningful wage growth.
In the meantime, to cultivate a patina of fiscal responsibility, Reagan turned to a new theory that held that tax cuts would pay for themselves.
The government would return dollars to the people, the people would use them more productively than the government, and the economy would grow so much that even at a lower tax rate it would provide as much or more in total taxes paid.
To halve taxes but still collect the same total dollars, the economy would have to essentially double. That outcome was plausible only over the long, long term—to achieve a doubling in the economy would require a tax-driven increase in the real growth rate of 5 percent over its base rate, and it would still take fifteen years—and in the meantime deficits would abound.
The only unambiguous benefit would be a near-term increase in consumption.
