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This week on the Ricochet Podcast, we’ve got…us. Once in while we just let the hosts host the show and let them talk off the top of their heads. Not going to synopsize it here except to say the conversation spans the globe from Saigon to Fargo and the topics are as far-flung as well. Finally — we have heard your pleas, faithful listeners: behold the new Ricochet Podcast open!
Music from this week’s podcast: I’m A Believer by The Monkees
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Rest in peace, Peter Tork. You will be missed.
Rob’s pitch for conservatism to the youth was probably the most pathetic thing I’ve heard in a long time. Maybe he’ll never learn that life is more than economics and shiny new things, but he should have people in his life to enlighten him. James tried, I expected more from Peter but maybe he’s just tired. People have been saying for years that youth and changing demographics are going to doom the GOP, but look what happened in 2016 and even during the godlike Obama’s reign. I can stomach a lot, but letting your personal views and wishes cloud your judgment and analysis to this degree makes me ill. So which is it, do people pay attention to Fox or not? Are things always getting better or have they become pretty bad since Reagan left office? The youth have never been decisive in politics, so Rob needs to stop trying so hard to pander them simply because he can’t stand Trump and because he lives in the make-believe world of Hollywood and Glop.
I agree that Rob’s pitch to identity-obsessed Millennials and Gen Z’ers is insufficient. Beyond insufficient. It is almost meaningless.
But I’m sorry, your assertion that “the youth have never been decisive in politics” is absurd. This cohort is a huuge voting block and only getting older and their views are not changing (please read that part again, maybe 2 or 3 times: their views are not changing … they are not changing) and they are so Progressive you can’t believe it.
It isn’t like it used to be in this country, where the kids would get more Conservative as they got older.
It is now like it is in Europe, where the kids get older but remain Progressive.
Denying this fact is one of the things that’s gonna do us in.
Thanks for posting the link to this podcast, it was very informative, particularly Bylund’s review of Sweden’s economic history over the last 150 years. I bookmarked the page for future reference.
I love that guy. Mind like a steel trap. Epic twitter account.
Here’s another one. Really good.
@filmklassik So then how do you explain 2016, 2000, 2004, oh, and when Nixon won twice during the Vietnam War and the hippies were marching and burning things? It may be true that young people aren’t changing their views, though that’s debatable since they’re still young and who knows what they’ll do in the future, but my point was that as voters the youth are unreliable and may or may not actually turn out and even if they do, their votes aren’t decisive. The recent midterms were explained as due to suburban women, so were the youth decisive there? Did the youth get Obama elected? I don’t think so.
If this poll doesn’t concern you greatly — and I do mean greatly — and also persuade you that Millennials and Z are different, in kind, than previous generations of young people, then you are being a Pollyanna.
Everything comes down to culture. Everything. Nothing else matters. Not how many Congressmen, Senators, Governorships, etc, the GOP has. It is all about the culture.
But Conservatives can’t seem to really — completely — in the deeepest recesses of their hearts — bring themselves to believe that.
And yet it is youthful, cultural Progressivism that has uttelry transformed this country since the early 2000s. Gay marriage, gays in the military, #MeToo, out-of-control Political Correctness, nationalized health care — the list goes on and on.
The Overton Window has shifted crazily to the Left, and yet Conservatives still focus obsessively on things like “This Harrison guy who’s running in California’s 8th Congressional District has some good ideas about charter schools and tax reform, blah blah blah blah.”
Absolute insanity.
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2019/01/17/generation-z-looks-a-lot-like-millennials-on-key-social-and-political-issues/psdt_1-17-19_generations-00/
@filmklassik — When I look at it, the chart is simply not as dramatic as you make it sound. Some of it is simply knowing what the “right” answer is; i.e., what you’re supposed to say. This was not a secret ballot, to put it mildly.
In fact, I was surprised to see support for the benefits of “increasing diversity” at only 60-61% — surprised so many young people refused to give the expected answer.
Not that your pessimism is necessarily (or even probably) unjustified. As always, the Left makes a powerful appeal to envy and selfishness.
I think the answers you guys seek are here. I keep putting off reading it.
This notion of a class conflict between taxpayers and tax consumers is a notion within Austrian economics and it is meant to replace the Marxist view that the fundamental class divide in society is between bourgeoisie, the capitalists who own property, and the labour working classes who don’t own property. The Austrian view is that the main class division is between those who on net pay more taxes than they receive in services from the government – this group would be the taxpayers – and the tax consumers are those who on net receive more from the government than they pay. In terms of what a tax consumer can receive, this can range to anything from unemployment insurance payments, social assistance payments, favors provided by the government in terms of inhibiting competitors in your industry. The argument is that in a democracy, if a politician wants to get elected, the name of the game is to get 50%+1. Given that the distribution of the income in modern commercial societies tends to be such that there’s a few rich and wealth tend to be a small segment of the population, and the middle class and lower classes tend to be the majority, the best way to get elected is to offer mostly the middle class all sorts of public goods in terms of social programs and so forth, and then have those financed by the well-to-do who would function as the taxpaying class. That way you get your majority and get elected.
I argue in the book that we now have a kind of financial market-government complex, or a bond market-government complex. The bond market has emerged as a kind of handmaiden to the welfare state, this growth of government.
There was a survey done by Harvard University, it came out just over a year ago, which showed that millennials in the United States – so these are young people from 18 to 29 – for the first time since they’ve been doing surveys, that a majority of them no longer supported capitalism.
Another factor is just the educational system. Despite all the work that the Milton Friedmans and the Hayeks and the Miseses of the world – which is great work, great books, great arguments – all that effort still hasn’t made its way into the educational system where young minds are formed. I think too there’s certain factors of the way the human mind works against the proponents of capitalism and makes it more difficult for the pro-capitalist side to make its argument. The human mind is structured in such a way that we tend to favor the concrete over the distant, the specific over the vague. Whenever you make a case for capitalism you have to make arguments that are abstract, that tend to emphasize longer term benefits, things that are not immediately evident. That’s a problem that the opposite side, the side that the government is having a greater role in the economy, they don’t have that problem.
My favorite example is, let’s say you think there’s a problem with wages, that some people don’t make enough money. The free marketeer could tell you the story, well if you let wages be free eventually people will acquire skills, will have an incentive to do so, will invest in education or work harder to get promoted, and eventually they’ll get up the income scale. That’s sort of a more longer term view and it can be mentally grasped, but it’s a lot more clear and vivid if you could just tell people, or we could pass a law and we can set a minimum wage at x level where we think people are going to be less poor. And there’s the end of the story. There’s an easier story that the other side has to tell, and I think that plays into this situation with the millennials.
I didn’t paste it but the main point of that article is central bank discretion causes socialism to look attractive. It makes some people need it.
All of this stupidity should have been overhauled 30 years ago. Except everyone that did the right thing would be voted out of office.
***EDIT***
Ronald Regan wanted to wipe out Fed discretion. It should have been done the second the USSR fell.
Rufus, I think the example you just gave is spot-on. You’re correct that capitalism — while manifestly better at enobling the human spirit than socialism and infinitely better at lifting people out of poverty — is a much tougher sell than socialism, and I’ll be damned if I know an effective strategy for combatting that.
That being said, there are several additional reasons for explaining why the young are increasingly rejecting Conservativism, and even Centrism.
A few of them:
—The Left’s stranglehold on primary, high school, and college education. God knows how many teachers have imbibed and are passing on the Left wing Kool Aid, but it wouldn’t surprise me if that figure was north of 80 percent.
— The Left’s control of scripted media. It’s no accident that nearly all mainstream movies and TV shows now give off at least a “musk” of PC Progressivism. And in most cases it’s a veritable stench.
— The Left’s utter domination of the news media. (Do I need to even expand on this one?)
— The increased secularization of the West leading to Leftism (and specifically Identity Politics) as a de facto religion. Bob Dylan famously said “Everybody’s gotta serve somebody.” Human beings come hardwired for religion — whether they acknowledge it or not. And if it isn’t one of the “big three” Abrahamic ones, they will channel this (unconscious) yearning for Higher Meaning elsewhere. And for an entire generation, the current new religion is Identity Politics. Thus, like religious zealots, they are hostile to contrary facts and data. And like religious zealots, they have their own list of pieties and blasphemies. And like religious zealots, they tend to severely punish heretics.
@filmklassik
Thanks for the excellent response.
What I keep trying to tell people is in Austrian economics there is a feedback loop between centralizing big government, central bank easy money, and peoples behavior. Then you throw in the education system and the libertarians and conservatives are screwed. This all started under Woodrow Wilson, and then World War II and LBJ sealed our fate.
What happens is initiative, honesty, and productivity doesn’t pay like it should and so people look elsewhere.
There are a few congressmen that get it, but basically no one with any power.
This is a great discussion.
I agree with this whole post, but I am just highlighting this.
A million years ago the dominant Protestant culture really made this country work. Somehow that all got thwarted.