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The Great Decoupling
After listening to last week’s Ricochet Podcast, it struck me that Donald Trump is a lot like a loud TV at homework time. He makes it really hard to focus.
But Trump is only a small part of what is happening in this country. He is a result, not a cause. I’d like us to get back to our studies. So let’s begin at the end of the podcast. At about 1:20:30, @peterrobinson says:
“…we need to provide the intellectual undergirding for what’s taking place because he [Trump] won’t do it.”
Here we find the whole of it.
Why won’t Trump do it? Because he rejects intellectual undergirding.
Earlier in the podcast, we heard a discussion about what Trumpism is. Well, that’s it. Our undergirding is too restrictive. We need to drop our undergirding and fight free.
But there we go looking at the TV again. This isn’t a sudden Trump-down movement. This is a people-up movement. It’s been going on for years. I’ve been trying to make sense of it here on Ricochet for quite some time. So let’s get back to it….
What we’ve just lived through is the end of a Great Decoupling. Not just in politics but in all of society. Talk about religion today and you will very likely hear someone chime in with, “I’m very spiritual and I want to be a good and moral person, but religion isn’t for me.” Which is like saying you believe in the importance of words but don’t care for definitions. Once you’ve decoupled morality from any definition of morality, you can never be immoral.
In @tooshy’s post, Why Do We Believe What We Do?, we are asked the following question:
“How directly do these underlying assumptions lead to certain policy positions?”
What we need to understand is that in America today, most people do not begin with underlying assumptions. They begin with desires. These desires can only be sated with certain results. Those results can come about only with certain policy positions. So that’s the position they take.
If you desire to be moral without the burden of changing your behavior, then you need the definition of morality to be fluid enough to match your behavior. If people oppose your fluid morality, then you’ll need a policy that forces them to stop that.
This is the way of modern man.
Andrew Klavan spends a minute or so at the end of his Podcast 256 discussing the friendship of Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston. They apparently maintained a close friendship despite their political differences. I suspect this was possible because they differed in their underlying assumptions. These assumptions could be discussed and argued about at a distance.
Today a friendship like this might be impossible. The two men would begin with different desires, leading them to different policy positions. Advocating for one position at the expense of another would necessarily mean that one man seeks to deprive the other of his happiness and fulfillment.
They aren’t in disagreement, they are combatants.
Conservatives have provided the intellectual undergirding for the Republican party for decades. What Trump should reveal to us is that Republicans are fed up with conservatives. They saw Democrats swinging freely while conservatives forced Republicans to fight with tied hands.
No longer. The people have spoken. Republicans are no longer tethered to an -ism. We are free and equal combatants.
For a time that means we conservatives will get our shots in. We’ll get some policies. We’ll get some appointments. But untethered also means we’ll float. We’ll float like everybody else.
And a world that floats is not a conservative world. Nor is it a liberal world. It is a Thrasymachan world.
In a 51-49 world, it’s 51 or bust. 51 does not need an -ism.
Responding to this is our homework. This is going to be really hard homework. So please, look away from the TV.
Published in General
Nice thesis statement.
I think you are right about the decoupling of conservative ideology and Republican politics.
Very good. I’ve quoted above some of my favorite parts of this essay.
You should have titled it, “The Great Decoupling.” Oh, wait. You did!
A profound statement.
I don’t know yet if it is good or bad, but it is definitely different. :)
More like an abstract, though…
Great conversation starter, Casey.
Is wrong to argue that Republicans have never been tied to and “ism”? Or could one argue that their “ism” is Hamiltonian mercantilism, devoted to central banking to finance government backed industry at the expense of the middle class? Whatever we want to call it, there is not now nor has there been for quite sometime anything conservative about the Republican Party.
One more time. Americans favor nationalism over any other ism out there.
Conservatives have done yeoman work to decouple nationalism from conservatism and as a result became untethered from reality. Their bubble is as impenetrable as the progressives but far less populated.
Americans live in America. Forget that at your peril.
Peter Robinson, tearing down this wall was done in the voice of America or Conservatism?
The trick for conservatives is to catch up to the speeding train and re-attach conservatism to a home.
Excellent post and thoughts – I’m not sure about the statement we are now untethered to be combatants? It seems Republicans in the political sense stopped being conservatives in the spiritual sense. There’s no other explanation for the silence while Obama rolled out the most liberal policies in years. You make a great point Casey, how changing the meaning of words and belief systems changes the culture – the words still mean the same, but to others they are totally different, and there is the soup of mis-communication and division, one of the devil’s favorite tools.
Although that is true, I think it is also true that America has a lot of self-confidence. We believe in our unlimited ability to help people when it is the right thing to do. That’s why Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George Bush had an open-door frame of mind when it came to immigration. We were strong, capable, and there’s-always-room-in-our-inn Christians. We didn’t want walls that kept out people who needed refuge or kept in people who wanted to leave.
I admire that point of view very much. I think we are not there now. We have reached a tipping point with immigration where our standard of living is faltering because there’s been too much too fast. If we don’t fix this, the people coming here won’t be gaining much by doing so.
But I greatly admire the confidence and generosity of Americans in the past.
The world is in flux, there is little agreement on what to tether it to, and I expect it to be so for a very long time to come.
Americans favor no ism. We want to be nimble and dance in the sky.
The agreement is that we ought not tether.
Try destroying two skyscrapers in a major city and see what happens by Americans. Just a theoretical exercise…
I used to do all my homework in high school in front of the TV, especially calculus. Got a 5 on the Calc BC exam. That’s the trouble with analogies, isn’t it? They don’t really work for everyone.
I also listened to the podcast and fancy myself as a bit of an intellectual too. Here’s the problem with intellectual undergirding: we’ve had a bit too much of it lately and not enough effort to make contact with reality. This theme is elaborated in this piece in a Catholic publication, and I’m not even a Catholic, though I am catholic in my tastes. Brief excerpt:
My daughter listens to loud music when she’s doing her math. It must run in the family. She’s almost at good at math as I am.
That’s been done. Now what?
Nope, you could’ve done better.
Exactly. Such is the consensus.
It demonstrated that Americans are nationalistic in large measure. That was the discussion. We sent our sons and daughters, husbands and mothers around the world to fight and die in response. Did we do it out of progressivism or conservatism? No. We did it out of nationalism. Or do you contend there is no nationalism in America in significant measure?
Your “Now What” is a classic non sequitur.
Thanks. I hadn’t known that bit about Trump and Phyllis Schlafley.
If you popped me in the nose, my desire to pop you back could hardly be said to have emanated from my philosophical druthers.
Certainly there is nationalism. And where is it getting us now? Well, it got us rid of Clinton, and that’s something to be thankful for, but we’ll see what happens next.
It’s about as sequitur as you can get.
I get sequitur below wholesale.
Yes, it could. All philosophy is at core driven by our needs and wants. We are emotional creatures.
An interesting, albeit unintentionally revealing, statement. Quite the opposite is true. A strict pacifist would not have the desire to pop anyone, or at least would refrain from acting on a muted desire. The US response to the acts in question was not muted.
As it turns out, philosophical ideas underpin (or undergird, if you like) much human action, whether the human in question is conscious of it or not. The wide differences among various cultures of the world are testament to that fact, even as most individuals in these cultures could not cite the origin of their ideas, desires, or impulses. Certainly, human nature is also a factor but ideas modulate the expression of human nature, often greatly modifying behavior.
We are all captive to the philosophical ideas from the past. Some are just better at identifying them than others.
Not unintentional at all. What you describe one might call pacifism. An ism of its own.
Yes, that’s what is being rejected in modernity.
How do you know those who are philosophically opposed to hitting back in that case don’t feel desire?
Isn’t it a normal experience – at least for conservatives – to refrain from acting on a seething stew of desires, despite their intensity? I know it’s why I’m not a murderer – and why several close calls with seduction in my youth (including those which caused me to seriously question my sanity at times) didn’t result in the revocation of my V-card. Revealed preference doesn’t mean absence of desire, it means assigning a lower priority to “unwanted” desires.
Now, the murderous desires, I’m glad I didn’t act on. One other time I was possessed by overwhelming desire to do violence but refrained instead, I kinda wish in retrospect that I’d showed less restraint and done some (though the restraint was not philosophical). But only kinda – odds that violence would have helped much aren’t that high.
I sometimes did my calculus in high school with the TV on. Got the same score on the AP exam. But nearly all my happiest memories of productive work (math or otherwise) are of working undistracted. Even music, a passion of mine, only goes with other work sometimes, maybe because of the passion.
You sound like a Stanford student: Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go!
We just have to stop listening to those dead white men.
Quite the opposite, drlorentz. Casey doesn’t consider the rejection a good thing at all.
Read what I wrote again. I acknowledged that they still might have the desire but would not act on it. I quote myself:
Edit: It never ceases to amaze that even when I put qualifiers in explicitly, they are simply glossed over to make the desired point.
Casey is arguing that Republican’s have always been tied to an “ism”, except now with Trump they are free to fight the Democrats without following an “ism”.
You should probably let Casey speak for himself. The implication of the previous discussion was that philosophical ideas were not important in this context. If the author has a different view, let him clarify the meaning of his terse riposte.
Read what I wrote again – the desires I was describing were hardly muted!