Ross Douthat on Trumpism

I wish I could write sentences like this:

For the center, the revelations of 2016 were about policy failures that had been mostly invisible until Trump came along — above all, the way that center-left and center-right visions of post-Cold War “openness,” to free trade or low-skilled immigration or ever-greater-integration with the People’s Republic of China, simultaneously failed to achieve their geopolitical goals and hollowed out communities across the American heartland, creating a deadly, demagogy-ready vacuum where work and church and family used to be.

While I tip my hat to Douthat’s skill as a writer, I have nagging doubts about the content of his message. Let’s start from the rhetorical flourish that ends the sentence:

creating a deadly, demagogy-ready vacuum where work and church and family used to be

Yes, you could argue that there’s been a sort of decline in these three areas. But is this actually what fueled the recent demagoguery? Consider:

1. In the US, evangelical Christians are generally regarded as the most fervently religious of 21st century Protestants, and yet they voted overwhelmingly in favor of Trump. So where’s the evidence that a decline in “church” is fueling demagoguery?

2. I suspect that people with jobs are more likely to vote for Trump than those without jobs, but I can’t prove that. Nonetheless, I’ll call the “work” claim half correct, as those who lost industrial jobs and had to take lower paying jobs were probably sympathetic to Trump.

3. Polls suggest that married people (i.e. “families”) are much more likely to vote for Trump than are single people.

So while Douthat writes in a very persuasive style, I’d say he’s mostly wrong in his diagnosis of the roots of demagoguery.

What about his claim that “free trade” was an important factor? I use scare quotes as Trump was lying when he said America adopted free trade and our trading partners did not. Our trade policies featured many barriers, pretty typical for a developed country (and China’s barriers were not unusual for a middle income country.) It’s also not clear why other high wage countries with equally free trade, such as Germany, were not hurt by globalization. Might the problem lie elsewhere?

But let’s say Douthat is right and free trade is a major problem. What’s his solution? I continued reading, looking for suggestions as to what we should be doing differently. Presumably if free trade is the problem, then less free trade is the solution. But Douthat doesn’t go there, and I think the reasons are pretty obvious. Trump tried an alternative to globalization and failed miserably. Just as free trade economists predicted, Trump’s economic policies made the trade deficit even bigger. Good intentions are not enough—you need to understand economics. Peter Navarro does not.

I suspect that Douthat understood this point, which is why when he gets to his policy recommendations he looks elsewhere:

Of course, all the lost opportunities I’m describing owe a great deal to Trump’s own presidential conduct. Had he governed as he campaigned, had he dropped into Washington trying to cut infrastructure deals with purple-state senators instead of letting Paul Ryan run domestic policy for the first two years, it might have forced real policy adaptation on both parties. 

In American politics, talking about building infrastructure is about as meaningful as talking about “ending waste, fraud and abuse in government”—it’s an empty cliche that I’ve been hearing for almost my entire adult life. We need to “rebuild” our “crumbling” infrastructure. Wake me up when that happens.

Talking about infrastructure is a way for a politician to sound serious, non-ideological and centrist, in contrast to the ideologues at either extreme, of which Douthat is pretty dismissive:

After so much failure and derangement, there are worse things than a reset. But it’s still the case that too many of the figures, Republican and Democrat, who are poised to be restored to their prior positions on the chessboard resemble the restored Bourbons after Napoleon, having “learned nothing and forgotten nothing” across the last four years. Which suggests that what we’ve lost above all in the Trump years is the chance not to repeat the experience soon enough.

Actually, there is no “third way” in economic policy. Douthat dreams of a non-left wing economic policy that is pro-worker and rejects free market ideology. But where is this model? Sure, you can boost the child tax credit and build a few bridges and airport terminals, but neither Democrats nor Republicans are strongly opposed to those initiatives. That’s not a meaningful third way. Neither side of the spectrum will abandon globalization, nor should they.

(You may argue that the GOP is opposed to spending money on infrastructure, but my impression is that places like Texas build more infrastructure than California.)

Ross Douthat really is one of our finest pundits, but his strength is not in proposing new economic policy regimes, rather his forte lies in describing the zeitgeist of our society. Douthat writes as beautifully as Mencken, but with a sensibility that is 180 degrees removed from the cynical infidel that wrote for the Smart Set.

I’m with Mencken.


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51 Responses to “Ross Douthat on Trumpism”

  1. Gravatar of Philo Philo
    18. November 2020 at 10:35

    Well done; I’m with Sumner!

  2. Gravatar of rayward rayward
    18. November 2020 at 10:51

    Douthat’s skill as a writer is that he first makes a statement that seems reasonable enough (the policy failures of 2016), but the statement is used to lead the reader down his path of revelation. His technique is the fundamentalist preacher technique, about which he is familiar, having grown up in a fundamentalist church. Douthat may claim to be Catholic today, but he is evangelical Protestant by nature. In the Great Commission, Jesus instructed his followers to make disciples of all nations. The past 40 years, the period Douthat is criticizing, saw the greatest reduction in world poverty ever. Ever. Jesus would be proud, but not Douthat.

  3. Gravatar of steve steve
    18. November 2020 at 11:17

    Menken was a racist

  4. Gravatar of Lizard Man Lizard Man
    18. November 2020 at 11:17

    “ Douthat dreams of a non-left wing economic policy that is pro-worker and rejects free market ideology. But where is this model?”

    Um, isn’t that Professor Sumner’s model? NGDGLT lead to consistently full employment, which in turn leads both to increases in wages and increasing investment in labor saving technologies and capital? That doesn’t strike me as being in conflict with free market ideology, doesn’t rely upon left wing economic policy, but given how bad monetary policy has been, could likely do a lot to improve people’s well being even in spite of a lot of movement away from free market policies.

  5. Gravatar of Lizard Man Lizard Man
    18. November 2020 at 11:19

    I thought that Trump won in 2016 due in large part to getting by getting people who call themselves Christian, but rarely if ever attend church, to vote.

  6. Gravatar of Mark Mark
    18. November 2020 at 11:39

    The issue is party polarization more so than demagoguery. People who were more alienated from church, family, work, etc. and were more low-trust in general trended to support Trump relative to other Republicans. Then, once Trump won the Republican primaries (in which he originally only had a 30-40% plurality), the vast majority of other Republicans, including the high-trust ones, fell into line, either supporting Trump despite misgivings or rationalizing away those misgivings.

    There are always going to be low-trust people in society who will support demagogues. What makes our society uniquely vulnerable to demagogues now is that if a demagogue gets plurality support in their party, they can count on 95% of the other people in the party to hold their noses and fall in line. A more realistic anti-demagogue strategy is to reduce party polarization so that more people are willing to vote for reasonable people in the other party over demagogues in their own. The lesson for centrists is to compromise more across parties and don’t push supporters of the other party on their most core issues (for example, I think Obama going after Little Sisters of the Poor was a big reason so many religious people used the lesser evil justification for supporting Trump—it was pointless to force religious people to pay for products they consider sinful when the government could just provide those products).

  7. Gravatar of ssumner ssumner
    18. November 2020 at 11:51

    Steve, Basically almost ever human that ever lived prior to WWII was a racist by today’s standards. He was not a racist by the (very lax) standards of his day.

    Lizard, I don’t favor a non-free market model.

    Mark, Very good comment. Perhaps Douthat was correct “at the margin”.

  8. Gravatar of Gene Frenkle Gene Frenkle
    18. November 2020 at 12:29

    Mark, I would argue Trump ran as a Jim Webb Democrat but then governed as a Freedom Caucus Republican. So I have read numerous articles about Trump’s appeal to the white working class in places like Erie, PA and Kenosha, WI and coal country WV and most say things didn’t really improve under Trump but they appreciate his rhetoric for whatever that is worth.

    I am sympathetic to Michael Moore/Pat Buchanan/Trump rhetoric about Fortune 500 companies shipping jobs to China but one must really ask if in 2020 Americans think working in a coal mine or working in a Deer Hunter style steel mill is actually a healthy job environment that leads to a high quality of life. So I had to get a storage unit and the guy that manages it seems like a guy that would have worked in an American factory or coal mine at one time and now he sits in an air conditioned building with a bank of monitors and has to interact with a customer every now and then.

  9. Gravatar of Christian List Christian List
    18. November 2020 at 12:51

    Scott,

    I stopped reading Douthat at some point because I find him quite boring. The texts I know of him strongly indicate that he is a pretty classic catholic conservative. It’s hard to be more boring than that.

    So all the problems of this world for him are ultimately based on the alleged decline of “family values” and the decline of the (Catholic) church.

    By the way, this is also how he would explain your Evangelical “paradox”: They are not Catholics, so ultimately they have nothing to do with the (one true) Church or (true) Christianity. Problem solved.

    He is like a mirror-image Marxist. For Marxists, as we all know, all the problems of this world have one certain cause. They are ideologists, just as Douthat is ultimately an ideologue.

    For Douthat, Trump is only a vehicle with whom he wants to spread his always the same theses, just as every problem of this world is for Douthat only a vehicle to spread his weltanschauung.

    There is a fitting idiom in German for this kind of ideology: if you only have a hammer everything looks like a nail.

  10. Gravatar of Christian List Christian List
    18. November 2020 at 13:13

    Douthat’s skill as a writer is that he first makes a statement that seems reasonable enough (the policy failures of 2016), but the statement is used to lead the reader down his path of revelation. His technique is the fundamentalist preacher technique,

    rayward,

    Yes, yes, yes. Very well put. I love your insights. You can often express what is going on in short, precise sentences. A really nice skill.

  11. Gravatar of bb bb
    18. November 2020 at 15:14

    I read Douthat because he does provide a slightly plausible explanation of what motivates the right. However, he is ultimately dogmatic in that family values and religious institutions are the solution to all of our problems, and he is extremely tribal in that he is completely unable of not engaging in same-sider-ism. He unapologetically claims that the the anti-mask movement on the right, because the left would have gone anti-mask if the right had not. That’s a bold claim. He also consistently moves the goal posts to make excuses for Republican support of Trump, always claiming that there is a strategy, pointing to the red-line and then moving the redline when it’s crossed. He’s essentially a partisan who can’t completely bring himself to blaming the Republican party.
    You’re also right about free trade. It’s a bogeyman. The reason the right is so crazy right now is because right wing media is nuts. Turn on Fox News and they are pushing the view that masks are tyranny and the election was stolen. They simply feed outrage and it is frightening. People are honestly afraid that Biden will turn us into Venezuela if he has 50 Senators, forgetting that Obama couldn’t pass the ACA with 60.

  12. Gravatar of Benjamin Cole Benjamin Cole
    18. November 2020 at 17:08

    Well, the decline in the quality of life in the US it is a big topic, and Ross D spoke in broad brushstrokes, but then he only has a column to explain his view.

    I will simplify to make a point: the de facto policy of the US is to Hong Kong-ify the coasts and Detroit-ify the heartland.

    What conventional macroeconomists worship as “comparative advantage” today is almost always as the province of government manipulation, subsidy, regulation and tax codes. In today’s world there is no such thing as free, fair, or foul trade. Trying to determine so is like bringing an umpire to an NFL game.

    Another curiosity is that David Ricardo eschewed his own trade theories if capital was mobile between nations (as it was not in his time).

    Neither political party appears to be able to generate a program for somehow unzoning property. This is the largest structural impediment in the US economy, outweighing Trump’s trade tiffs by perhaps a thousand to one.

    I love immigrants, I happen to be one myself, but the role of large-scale immigration into developed nations certainly must be viewed for its impact on the lower half of the wage-earning population. Simple sacralization of immigration is not an intelligent policy choice.

    By the way, read the Wikipedia entry on Michele Flournoy, who is evidently Biden’s pick for Secretary of War.

    Sinophiles may need to put on a pair of adult diapers.

  13. Gravatar of xu xu
    18. November 2020 at 17:39

    Germany wasn’t affected because they never outsourced their manufacturing: 99% of German Businesses are small manufacturing businesses. They still make things Sumner!

    And no, you cannot “argue that there’s been a sort of decline in these three areas”. There is no argument! The evidence is clear. All you have to do is leave the tiny desk you’ve been hiding behind for 50+ years and drive through the heartland. All of those shattered lives are the result of your idiotic economic policies.

    Another pro CCP piece by an author (not scholar) receiving funding from the regime.

  14. Gravatar of D.O. D.O.
    18. November 2020 at 17:46

    Republican party is a party of (white people) cultural grievances and small-tax government. Good deal of small-government Republicans who didn’t like Trump voted for him anyway for pocketbook reasons (nevertrumpers are very thin on the ground) and cultural grievance people like him. Ds put up a singularly unpopular candidate in 2016 (I relly don’t know what was wrong with her. What I see is a standard variety politico with a complete lack of charm/charisma. Apparently it does matter) and she lost. Now they put marginally more popular candidate and he won. There are only so many people who are voting for a small-tax platform, it means cultural grievance demagougery has a leg up. Now that the Democrats are perceived (somewhat correctly) as a party of PC/SJ-looneys, Rs don’t even need to put up a demamogue, almost anyone who would routinely say that to get ahead in life you have at a minimum hold your shit together will do. China’s effect on the economy is a complete sideshow. Foreign threat is just a complement to domestic cultural grievances. It was USSR then radical Islam and now China. Douthat is wrong as wrong can be.

    P.S. Obama tried to force Little Sisters to sign a form that they would not provide health insurance with contraception. But even that was too much. If, by some stroke of magic, Ds agreed to never propose any gun regulation ever again, gun rights enthusiasts would still dislike them and insist that they can organize a shooting range in every public park. It’s all a cultur war, top to bottom.

  15. Gravatar of jayne jayne
    18. November 2020 at 17:53

    Rebuilding infrastructure will happen when globalists who moonlight as academics stop advocating for free trade with no tariffs.

    Rebuilding infrastructure will happen when people stand up to ANTIFA, BLM Marxists, and Social justice warriors – both in the classroom and outside of the classroom. It will happen when you stop voting for the same losers who corrupt your communities and cities (say thank you Kennedy). It will happen when cancel culture stops, when free speech is once again allowed, and when tyrannical governors can no longer issue mandates like Kings and Queens. Interesting how they say they “believe in science” yet ignore the 10,000 scientists who sign the great Barrington declaration or countless studies showing that masks are ineffective isn’t it? It will happen when the MSM can once again tell the truth, and when we can no longer fear an army of red book children telling us we are secretly racist and xenophobic.

    In other words, stop voting for communist democrats! And start voting for liberty.

    Civil war? Bank of America seems to be preparing for it in their latest conference call to big investors. I, for one, hope it happens. Nothing would please me more than to see the communists defeated once and for all.

  16. Gravatar of janice janice
    18. November 2020 at 18:07

    “If, by some stroke of magic, Ds agreed to never propose any gun regulation ever again, gun rights enthusiasts would still dislike them and insist that they can organize a shooting range in every public park.”

    – There is a process for changing the second amendment, but it requires 75% of states to agree. If you cannot persuade 38 of 50, then your idea is not resonating with people in those areas. Using other methods to curtail an individuals right to bear arms is a violation of that right. The right to bear arms doesn’t say “the right to bear arms but please take a test first”. It doesn’t say “the right to bear arms but please don’t buy powerful ones”. It clearly states “THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS”.

    What states cannot accept, and will not accept, are totalitarian communist apparatchiks issuing mandates from Washington. Each state has sovereignty. Each state has a vote.

    You may also ask yourself this: “What will you do when the mob comes to your door and you don’t have a weapon to defend yourself”? What will you do when the police are defunded, the 911 line no longer works, and the government apparatchiks are in control of everything?

    You clearly have not thought this through.

  17. Gravatar of harry harry
    18. November 2020 at 18:28

    Americans don’t want:

    to be “canceled”.

    to be called “racist” because of their policy positions on trade or immigration.

    to be compared to Hitler

    to have their cities burned to the ground by crazy lunatics spouting nonsense like black lives matter. Well of course black lives matter. The sky is also blue.

    to wake up the morning after an election and find that the VP of dominion tweeted he would “make sure Trump lost” or that hundreds of thousands of ballots were brought into the office at 4am in the morning.

    to be told what to do over thanksgiving holiday, or any holiday, or at any private event ever.

    to wear masks when studies show that wearing masks can be dangerous to health, or when 10K scientists say its hogwash.

    Our founding fathers would already be fighting back. This is precisely what they sought to avoid.

    In fact, police officers being told to stand down while BLM looney toon characters burn down people’s property is the very definition of “taxation without representation”.

    One thing is for certain. This cannot go on much longer. Something will give.

    And after looking at the ANTIFA BLM groups (mostly fat teenagers and low life losers who cannot find jobs), I would imagine it would be a very quick war. People forget that the majority of our nations veterans (about 22M) are republicans. They are not brainwashed college “activists”. They are professionals. And once they get onto the street: it’s game over!

  18. Gravatar of bb bb
    18. November 2020 at 18:46

    @harry,
    You are frighteningly misinformed, but I’ll share something I heard Ross D say about the idea of a civil war:
    The left can put tens if not hundreds of thousands of young people in the streets of every major city in the country, all at the same time. The right can fill a ten thousand seat arena, with fat old people, but only one arena at a time because half the crowd is the same people traveling around the country like groupies. Until the right can rally more than a golf cart parade, your civil war will need to wait.

  19. Gravatar of Ray Lopez Ray Lopez
    18. November 2020 at 18:55

    Sumner’s “free trade” does not factor in externalities, like China’s massive CO2 pollution (and Indian’s CO2 and ozone pollution). The key to prosperity is not ‘free trade’ (unilateral free trade practiced by the USA since WWII) but ‘fair trade’ (bilateral free trade). Any textbook on free trade can tell you that, without even having to read Douglas A. Irvin (ed.). Free Trade under Fire (2005). In fact that ‘fair trade’ beats ‘free trade’ was first formulated by none other than economist David Ricardo (1772-1823).

  20. Gravatar of sarah sarah
    18. November 2020 at 20:08

    So at Harvard they are now trying to cancel Trumps administration team from working or speaking here simply because brainwashed students disagree with the admins policy proposals. Apparently Harvard now rejects Freedom of Speech and opposing viewpoints.

    And if that isn’t bad enough, AOC launched a “blacklist” for future gulags. Doesn’t anyone find it concerning that she graduated at the bottom of her class, yet somehow gets into congress? What happened to voting for the best and brightest? Gulags? Seriously?

    I’m definitely going to apply for a transfer to MIT next fall. So tired of these socialist warriors.

    And how can anyone take the NYT seriously? They claim “zero evidence exists”, yet clearly the word “zero” is not true.

    https://hereistheevidence.com/

  21. Gravatar of janice janice
    18. November 2020 at 23:20

    Just listen to this loser:

    “I am sympathetic to Michael Moore/Pat Buchanan/Trump rhetoric about Fortune 500 companies shipping jobs to China but one must really ask if in 2020 Americans think working in a coal mine or working in a Deer Hunter style steel mill is actually a healthy job environment that leads to a high quality of life.”

    Another loser that thinks he can determine what is best for everyone else. Talk about racist democrat rhetoric. This is precisely what the “elites” (actually boneheads) believe. Here is the translation: “it is too dirty, so let’s allow Chinese to do it”. Well, the 100K coal mining gig (they do have masks nowadays that protect lungs) is a much higher paying job then working in a storage unit for $10 an hour. Not to mention, relying on 100% importation of coal is a national security risk. YOU AND YOUR CRONIES DON”T GET TO DETERMINE WHAT OTHERS WANT TO DO WITH THEIR LIVES. There are so many proud coal miners in this country and the last thing they want and need is some retard social justice graduate telling them NOT TO BE PROUD OF THEIR JOB OR WHERE THERE NEXT JOB SHOULD BE. Not everyone wants to be a loser sitting behind a desk issuing mandates, or spending their life coding (coding jobs are also being outsourced folks, so obviously that is not the savior democrats pretend it is). How do I know that? I own a tech company, and 80% of my employees are abroad. It’s too easy to pay $4 an hour. Why would I pay $25-30 for a subpar American programmer?

    YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT! WAKE UP FOLKS. OR WATCH YOUR COUNTRY BURN

  22. Gravatar of xu xu
    18. November 2020 at 23:37

    “YOU AND YOUR CRONIES DON”T GET TO DETERMINE WHAT OTHERS WANT TO DO WITH THEIR LIVES”

    Precisely. You nailed it. This person thinks he’s more important than the coal miner, yet he is actually beneath the coal miner. The coal miner powers our cities. He has a real skill. This commentator has no real life skill. Just a 24/7 blowhard who sits behind a desk thinking of how all Americans should also sit behind a desk. There are many coal miners who graduated from Harvard. They chose coal mining because its adventurous. Just like the many farmers in Midwest who went to Harvard, but chose farming because it’s interesting. These people don’t want to sit behind a desk in a tiny office. You shouldn’t force them too with bad policy.

  23. Gravatar of Postkey Postkey
    18. November 2020 at 23:41

    ” Trump’s economic policies made the trade deficit even bigger.”

    You keep mentioning the trade deficit as though it matters?

  24. Gravatar of Postkey Postkey
    19. November 2020 at 00:05

    Ray.
    “Sumner’s “free trade” does not factor in externalities, like China’s massive CO2 pollution (and Indian’s CO2 and ozone pollution).”
    Not only S.B.S.?
    Usually the ‘economists’ who use ‘macroeconomic models’ ‘believe’ that the solution to the current macroeconomic problem is the implementation of the ‘correct’ type of demand side policies. That is, how to increase income/output {‘growth’}.
    Increase M0, M2 or M3, cut r, or make it negative. Increase G and finance it by ‘borrowing’ from the central bank or by borrowing from the private sector. Or ensure that private credit is extended only for GDP transactions.
    All that is lacking is a ‘sufficient’ increase in aggregate demand!
    The neoclassical/Austrian economists, who believe that income/output is ‘supply determined’, will argue that all that is required to generate a large increase the growth of the underlying productive potential of an economy is for taxes to be cut and more ‘competition’, etc be introduced!
    ‘They’ may pay ‘lip service’ to the production of CO2 etc, but, usually, having too much of their lives tied up in their ‘babies’ will ignore the externalities that economic growth will bring?
    ‘They’ are usually old wo/men and unable or unwilling to change?

    And, of course, they fail to consider the ‘supply side’ of an economy?

    If ‘this’ is true then, ‘we’, have about 10 years?
    “we
    34:43 need net energy from oil and [if] it goes
    34:46 down to zero
    34:48 uh well we have collapsed not just
    34:50 collapse of the oil industry
    34:52 we have collapsed globally of the global
    34:54 industrial civilization this is what we
    34:56 are looking at at the moment . . . “

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxinAu8ORxM&feature=emb_logo

  25. Gravatar of rinat rinat
    19. November 2020 at 01:18

    https://nypost.com/2020/11/18/megyn-kelly-pulls-sons-from-woke-uws-school-over-anti-white-letter/

    This is the last straw.

    70% of blacks grow up without a father.
    Many don’t graduate from high school.
    Most don’t go to college.
    They commit 50% of the nations violent crimes, yet account for less than 14% of the population.
    And they have the audacity to write these racist letters to whites?
    The next time I see a black lady running her mouth about how the system is rigged against her, despite her being fat, lazy, uneducated, and without any employable skill whatsoever, I’m just going to knock her out. No words. No arguing. Just a fist to the skull.

    And notice how it’s always the ugly woman who make such stupid remarks. Beautiful woman like Candace Owens don’t play the victim card.

    Whites need to get a backbone and tell her the truth. You are ugly, fat, and disgusting. And to make matters worse, you have no education. Who wants to work with a fat, uneducated, piece of lard? Nobody.

    That’s why you are a loser. Not because people are racist.

  26. Gravatar of rinat rinat
    19. November 2020 at 01:22

    People have to stop treating blacks differently.
    A loser is a loser, regardless of skin color.
    And they already get special treatment. Affirmative action – not just at universities, but in the work place too. Have to meet that quota of blacks, or the business might get sued.
    This is the downfall of America right here. It’s white guilt.
    It’s going to stop real soon. I can tell you that. People are fed up with it.

  27. Gravatar of rinat rinat
    19. November 2020 at 01:25

    The system is so rigged that Oprah couldn’t get to the top. So rigged that MJ and Lebron, couldn’t make millions. So rigged that it kept rappers down despite their record sales. So rigged that tennis stars Serena and Venus couldn’t get to the top. So rigged that politicians and Presidents are black. So rigged that many academics are black.

    of course the system isn’t rigged. But to succeed, you do actually need a skill! Something that doesn’t involve peddling drugs, amateur rapping, or other forms of illegal gangbanging.

  28. Gravatar of Benjamin Cole Benjamin Cole
    19. November 2020 at 01:42

    OT but remarkable.

    “Nearly 1 million people have taken an experimental coronavirus vaccine developed by China National Pharmaceutical Group (Sinopharm) through the country’s emergency use program, the firm says. China launched the program in July, which so far includes three vaccine candidates for essential workers and other limited groups of people even as clinical studies have yet to be completed to prove their safety and efficacy. No serious adverse reaction has been reported, Sinopharm said in an article on social media platform WeChat, citing Chairman Liu Jingzhen from a recent media interview.”

    One million? And it works, no adverse effects?

    (Of course, maybe Sinopharm they had the genetic code of the virus very early, ha-ha)

  29. Gravatar of sty.silver sty.silver
    19. November 2020 at 01:51

    Unrelated to this post (but related to other post), I want to point you to this LW article: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WcHbFLgn3fmFn79mg/2020-election-prediction-markets-versus-polling-modeling

    It feels like a polished version of the argument I’ve been making, plus a bunch of extra stuff.

  30. Gravatar of Benjamin Cole Benjamin Cole
    19. November 2020 at 03:11

    Sumner has been pontificating on conspiracy theories, over at Econlog (where someone conspired to ban me).

    Then this from MR:

    “If you want to attend a virtual conference on this subject (conspiracies-internet), one is being held at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard on December 1.

    Here is a teaser:

    “It all feels like a precursor to a bad joke: What do foreign agents, white supremacists, conspiracists, snake oil salesmen, political operatives, white academics, and a disgruntled bunch of zoomers have in common? The groups have collided in a centrifuge of chaos online, where the tactics they use to hide their identities and manipulate audiences are more prevalent than ever. Social media companies are trying to patch the holes in a failing sociotechnical systems, where the problems their products have created are now shouldered by journalists, universities, and health professionals, just to name a few. What can be done to restore moral and technical order in a time of pandemonium? ”

    Here is a link: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/true-costs-misinformation

    The site also lists other sources of information on this subject.”

    —30—

    So…is this also a conspiracy theory?

    That some groups are conspiring to plant disinformation on the web? (And netizens believe what they read or watch). BTW, was not Russiagate an elongated conspiracy theory?

    Or…

    Are elites conspiring (early stages) at the Harvard confab to control what we see on the web? They sure seem like they favor censoring the web, and they are meeting at Harvard to do something about it

  31. Gravatar of steve steve
    19. November 2020 at 03:43

    Menken was a racist.

    “Steve, Basically almost ever human that ever lived prior to WWII was a racist by today’s standards. He was not a racist by the (very lax) standards of his day.”

    Are you kidding me or that stupid?

  32. Gravatar of Student Student
    19. November 2020 at 04:53

    1. In the US, evangelical Christians are generally regarded as the most fervently religious of 21st century Protestants, and yet they voted overwhelmingly in favor of Trump. So where’s the evidence that a decline in “church” is fueling demagoguery?

    First there has been a decline in “Church”. We see it in attendance, but more importantly we see it in church goers understanding of their own supposed faith. The modern form of Christianity is this weird get out of jail free card Christianity where all you have to do is whisper Jesus name three times in a mirror and you’re good to go. There is no reason to study the faith. There is no reason to live the faith. There is really no reason to even attend Church services. The majority of Christians these days don’t even know what Christianity is. I have “Christian” friends and family that oppose even civil unions for homosexuals yet have kids with multiple women, are on their second or third marriage and show zero preferential treatment for the poor, the lame, the stranger, or the sick among us. Many Christians are so ignorant of their own faith that they fall for wolves in sheep’s clothing. They cannot judge them by their fruits (their actions) because they don’t even know their own religion. They don’t know which actions are even allowed. One of my friends a short time ago attempted to argue that pornography wasn’t even a sin for Christians and cannot even name more than 3 of the 12 Apostles… but is somehow certain that the rapture is eminent and that Bill Gates and all these guys are going to microchip us to mark us by the beast.

    So when trump gasses protestors to march across the street and hold a Bible upside down for a picture… they cheer with the vigor of the crowds condemning Jesus to death… as if all that matters for a Christian is to oppose abortion and same sex marriage and smile with an unread Bible in their hand. And for the righties that call themselves spiritual but not religious or an agnostic or whatever… their religion has become trump and QAnon. These people have replaced the spiritual fervor with conspiracies and Trump. He is their spiritual leader and whatever he says is the truth…

    So I sort of agree with Douthat… the Christian church is in decline even if evangelical zealotry has increased on the surface.

    What it seems Douthat is arguing for is essentially a Catholic social policy. A balanced model that calls for owners and workers to recognize their mutual need for each other and their responsibilities to each other based on the Catholic concepts of solidarity and subsidiarity… and an integration of Christian teachings into every day life. “Were these precepts carefully obeyed and followed out, would they not be sufficient of themselves to keep under all strife and all its causes?” Probably not, but i think he is right in that their is a real decline in “Church” and it has left a vacuum that got filled with wolves in sheep’s clothing.

    Take a look at these extracts from Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum.

    “3. In any case we clearly see, and on this there is general agreement, that some opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class: for the ancient workingmen’s guilds were abolished in the last century, and no other protective organization took their place. Public institutions and the laws set aside the ancient religion. Hence, by degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition. The mischief has been increased by rapacious usury, which, although more than once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless, under a different guise, but with like injustice, still practiced by covetous and grasping men. To this must be added that the hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself. 
    4. To remedy these wrongs the socialists, working on the poor man’s envy of the rich, are striving to do away with private property, and contend that individual possessions should become the common property of all, to be administered by the State or by municipal bodies. They hold that by thus transferring property from private individuals to the community, the present mischievous state of things will be set to rights, inasmuch as each citizen will then get his fair share of whatever there is to enjoy. But their contentions are so clearly powerless to end the controversy that were they carried into effect the working man himself would be among the first to suffer. They are, moreover, emphatically unjust, for they would rob the lawful possessor, distort the functions of the State, and create utter confusion in the community.”
    .
    .
    .
    “19. The great mistake made in regard to the matter now under consideration is to take up with the notion that class is naturally hostile to class, and that the wealthy and the working men are intended by nature to live in mutual conflict. So irrational and so false is this view that the direct contrary is the truth. Just as the symmetry of the human frame is the result of the suitable arrangement of the different parts of the body, so in a State is it ordained by nature that these two classes should dwell in harmony and agreement, so as to maintain the balance of the body politic. Each needs the other: capital cannot do without labor, nor labor without capital. Mutual agreement results in the beauty of good order, while perpetual conflict necessarily produces confusion and savage barbarity. Now, in preventing such strife as this, and in uprooting it, the efficacy of Christian institutions is marvellous and manifold. First of all, there is no intermediary more powerful than religion (whereof the Church is the interpreter and guardian) in drawing the rich and the working class together, by reminding each of its duties to the other, and especially of the obligations of justice.

    20. Of these duties, the following bind the proletarian and the worker: fully and faithfully to perform the work which has been freely and equitably agreed upon; never to injure the property, nor to outrage the person, of an employer; never to resort to violence in defending their own cause, nor to engage in riot or disorder; and to have nothing to do with men of evil principles, who work upon the people with artful promises of great results, and excite foolish hopes which usually end in useless regrets and grievous loss. The following duties bind the wealthy owner and the employer: not to look upon their work people as their bondsmen, but to respect in every man his dignity as a person ennobled by Christian character. They are reminded that, according to natural reason and Christian philosophy, working for gain is creditable, not shameful, to a man, since it enables him to earn an honorable livelihood; but to misuse men as though they were things in the pursuit of gain, or to value them solely for their physical powers – that is truly shameful and inhuman. Again justice demands that, in dealing with the working man, religion and the good of his soul must be kept in mind. Hence, the employer is bound to see that the worker has time for his religious duties; that he be not exposed to corrupting influences and dangerous occasions; and that he be not led away to neglect his home and family, or to squander his earnings. Furthermore, the employer must never tax his work people beyond their strength, or employ them in work unsuited to their sex and age. His great and principal duty is to give every one what is just. Doubtless, before deciding whether wages axe fair, many things have to be considered; but wealthy owners and all masters of labor should be mindful of this – that to exercise pressure upon the indigent and the destitute for the sake of gain, and to gather one’s profit out of the need of another, is condemned by all laws, human and divine. To defraud any one of wages that are his due is a great crime which cries to the avenging anger of Heaven. “Behold, the hire of the laborers… which by fraud has been kept back by you, crieth; and the cry of them hath entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth.”(6) Lastly, the rich must religiously refrain from cutting down the workmen’s earnings, whether by force, by fraud, or by usurious dealing; and with all the greater reason because the laboring man is, as a rule, weak and unprotected, and because his slender means should in proportion to their scantiness be accounted sacred. Were these precepts carefully obeyed and followed out, would they not be sufficient of themselves to keep under all strife and all its causes?”

  33. Gravatar of mbka mbka
    19. November 2020 at 05:01

    Scott,

    “Ross Douthat really is one of our finest pundits, but his strength is not in proposing new economic policy regimes”

    People don’t vote for policies, as far as I know. Policies are the rationalization post hoc. People vote for what they think is their tribe, what they believe aligns with their beliefs and values. It’s group affiliation. Lots and lots of research on that, see here for example: http://www.culturalcognition.net . That’s also why people are immune to new evidence, or facts, once certain interpretations of facts are associated with their group (climate change, gun right). Conversely, once affiliated with a tribe, a lot of transgressions are deemed excusable. That also explains why the left can cut social services and the right (Nixon) can start relations with “Red” China. They’re trusted by their tribe, so whatever they do is OK for the tribe. The scary implication is, how many Americans felt they shared Trump’s values, felt understood by Trump.

  34. Gravatar of Brandon Berg Brandon Berg
    19. November 2020 at 05:21

    Republicans are opposed to spending money on building infrastructure, while Democrats are happy to spend the money but will always find some reason to oppose the actual building.

  35. Gravatar of Ray Lopez Ray Lopez
    19. November 2020 at 05:42

    @Postkey – good points made; somebody once said modern economics is like cancer cells, in that it assumes homogeneity and rapid exponential growth is always good.

    @Ben Cole – I’ve been banned at Econlib too, one reason I don’t read it anymore, what’s the point of reading an opinion site that doesn’t allow one to voice their opinion? I don’t read the NY Times much either, for the same reason (they booted me, ironically I once paid money to read it)

    @Student – too verbose post, needs editor

    @steve – SS is opinionated, part of his charm actually.

  36. Gravatar of derek derek
    19. November 2020 at 06:27

    I think you are kind of missing the point on church attendance. Yes, churchgoers and particularly evangelicals voted overwhelmingly for Trump, but the issue here is not that church makes you less susceptible to demagoguery. Instead, the issue is that the decline in mainstream/liberal church attendance that Douthat is talking about has turned churches into a conservative bubble. Further, the lack of a universalizing shared outlook on life (e.g., Judeo-Christianity, or even a generic embrace of divinity as a source of morality that also encompasses Eastern religions) has greatly increased polarization. It used to be that you would go to church and meet any number of Democrats and Republicans, but you believed that you were all unified by things that superseded politics. This is not really true anymore.

    More controversially, I would claim that people likely to be strong churchgoers (i.e., conservatives) need or crave the authoritative source on morality from a church. When these people stop going to church, they are indeed more susceptible to demagoguery, and pseudo-churches can easily be sources of demagoguery. A common claim of Christian theorists is that God is the source of moral good; otherwise, everything is all post-modern relativism, and there is no absolute morality. I think this is balderdash, personally, but this really may be true for some people. For those people, the decline in overall societal religiosity does play a role in decreasing the strength of their moral code. Continuing to be controversial as heck, I would also claim that BLM’s indictments of the US project and Constitution erode the patriotism that could serve as an alternative unifying force.

    Re: employment/voting and trade issues – you really need to be making comparisons on demographics for this. Douthat is talking about the Midwestern blue collar manufacturing/mining sector, but the Dem votes from unemployed I believe to come mainly from inner cities.

  37. Gravatar of TGGP TGGP
    19. November 2020 at 09:11

    I wanted to comment on your EconLog post College grads and highly specialized societies, but I was permanently banned from commenting there back in 2008. I wanted to point out that Steve Sailer had been writing along somewhat similar lines to you back in the ’00s. He talked about the “dirt gap” between areas where residential construction is restricted and real estate prices are high vs areas that can more easily sprawl outwards, and the resulting “marriage gap” and “baby gap”. Andrew Gelman found Sailer’s correlation between Bush’s support within a state and years married among white women (that correlation was lower for Trump, with Utah in particular making a difference) to be one of the most highly predictive. Sailer’s theory was that if the economics of a place are conducive to “affordable family formation”, more people will form families and that will tend to make them more conservative. David Shor has recently argued that the increasing delay of marriage (which others have noted is associated with more years of education) in younger generations explains their more Democratic political leanings. Someone else, I think perhaps Ed Glaeser, argued that certain areas select for people who prefer “cultural amenities” to family friendliness.

  38. Gravatar of Sean Sean
    19. November 2020 at 10:07

    I never liked the “building infrastructure” policy agenda. It always sounds good but I’ve never seen evidence we have a huge infrastructure problem. Yes our airports don’t look as pretty as other places, but if that was a big deal then I’d expect a bigger push to just charge higher airline ticket prices to fund airports. But I’m guessing Americans prefer ugly airports and cheaper prices.

    The one thing cited is a civil engineering group that always grades our infrastructure poorly. And says its crumbling, but I take that with a big grain of salt when people who get paid to build bridges tell us we need to build more bridges.

    So that leaves trains. If we had a billion people in this country lots more trains would make sense, but as is they are more of a local issue in a few areas.

  39. Gravatar of ssumner ssumner
    19. November 2020 at 10:21

    Christian, You said:

    “By the way, this is also how he would explain your Evangelical “paradox”: They are not Catholics, so ultimately they have nothing to do with the (one true) Church or (true) Christianity.”

    You obviously don’t know much about Douthat.

    Xu, Is that what you call an “explanation”? OK then!

    Jayne, You said:

    “Rebuilding infrastructure will happen when globalists who moonlight as academics stop advocating for free trade with no tariffs.”

    I don’t know about that, but we certainly know that it WON’T happen when we elect Trump as president.

    Steve, Did he think blacks were inferior? Yes, as did almost all whites at the time. But yes, he was more liberal than average on race, for his time:

    “When a second lynching occurred in Princess Anne, Maryland in 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s refusal to speak out on the atrocity was a matter of discussion throughout the country. Determined that this outrage not be dismissed, Mencken joined forces with Clarence Mitchell of the NAACP to promote the Costigan-Wagner Anti-Lynching Bill that would make lynching a capital offense. Mencken’s impassioned testimony in support of the bill galvanized senators on the committee. Predictably, Roosevelt refused to challenge the Southern leadership of his party, and the bill died.”

    If someone called Mencken racist back in the 1920s they would have been laughed at. He was to the left of FDR.

    You are perhaps one of those young woke people who knows absolutely nothing about history?

    (BTW, the Obama of 2009 would be viewed as racist by modern “woke” standards.)

  40. Gravatar of ssumner ssumner
    19. November 2020 at 10:38

    sty.silver. I agree that the post election odds make no sense. I’m told it’s hard to arbitrage that mistake because of transactions costs, but I’m not an expert.

    Prior to the election, the betting markets had a much better grasp on how close it was than the polls.

    I really wish we had markets that gave a point estimate of the margin.

    Student, There has never been much connection between any real world religion and the ideals on which that religion is supposedly based. Today is no worse than a few hundred years ago. Blessed be the peacemakers? Turn the other cheek?

    mbka, I agree.

    Brandon, Good point.

    Derek, If your claims are true, then Douthat did a very poor job of explaining his views. If the rise of atheism makes the remaining religious people more open to demagoguery, then he should have said so!

    TGGP, There are many factors, including some of those you mention.

    Sean, The other problem is that we don’t know how to build subways at the same price point as other developed countries. If we did, then we’d be building massive new subway lines in NYC, as Paris and London are doing.

  41. Gravatar of steve steve
    19. November 2020 at 11:25

    The fact that he abhorred a public lynching has nothing to do with the fact that he was a racist you moron. Sometimes even a racist doesn’t like to see a person hanging from a rope. He was anti-semitic and a racist. I don’t know anyone that thought Obama was a racist – just a Muslim that was not Constitutionally qualified to be our President who happened to be married to a dude.

  42. Gravatar of Student Student
    19. November 2020 at 13:18

    Scott,

    Perhaps there hasn’t been a time period any better than the rest, but people like Peter Wu, Augustine Zhao Rong, Zhang Dapeng, Agnes Takea, Ambrose Kibuka, Augustine of Huy, Maria Goretti, Maximilian Kolbe, or Mary Teresa Bojaxhiu show us the connection.

    Also, and perhaps it’s my bias showing, but I don’t recall a time before when people would say things like you can’t be a democrat and a Christian or that if you are a Christian you must vote Republican like they do now. This seems so objectively false to me based on Christian philosophy that it seems like people must not know Christian principles these days.

  43. Gravatar of sty.silver sty.silver
    19. November 2020 at 14:05

    > Prior to the election, the betting markets had a much better grasp on how close it was than the polls.

    I don’t think that’s obvious. The market made a projection that’s closer to the truth than 538’s, but that doesn’t imply they had a better grasp on the election. They could also have projected a closer race for the wrong reasons (so that they were only correct ‘by accident’. I think the main argument here is that the failure on and past election night is evidence for that latter theory.

  44. Gravatar of Christian List Christian List
    19. November 2020 at 15:01

    Scott,

    He might not say it literally like that, but he writes it figuratively quite clearly. This also explains his actions, for example his transformation from Evangelicals to the Catholic Church. He would not do this if he did not consider the Catholic Church to be the only true church. I am not sure, but you seem relatively autistic to me, at least to a mild degree. You rarely read between the lines, almost everything has to be pronounced literally for you.

    Steve,

    I am not a fan of Mencken, I have no firm opinion about him, I know him too little. But anyone with the brain capacity higher than a slug can easily google that he was not a racist and not an anti-Semite.

    Reason.com has a very good article about him, which deals with the topic “racism” and Mencken in detail.

    And a Mr. David S. Thaler deals extensively with his alleged anti-Semitism in the Jewish Times: he had almost only Jewish friends, he attacked FDR because he did not do more for Jews in danger, and he was virtually the only public figure who advocated the unlimited admission of Jewish refugees during WW2.

    Thalers eye-twinkling, humorous conclusion: The gentile authors have said he was anti-Semitic, the Jewish authors said he wasn’t.

    You are just one of those woke, trendy non-Jews who love to talk bad about other people all day long. A troll. An ignoramus. An idiot. Shame, shame, shame.

  45. Gravatar of bill bill
    19. November 2020 at 16:03

    “We need to “rebuild” our “crumbling” infrastructure. Wake me up when that happens.”

    Great sentence. I’ll go even further. Wake me when somebody fleshes out what they even mean when they say it. Lol.

  46. Gravatar of ssumner ssumner
    19. November 2020 at 17:23

    Steve, You said:

    “The fact that he abhorred a public lynching has nothing to do with the fact that he was a racist you moron.”

    It appears that you cannot read, as I said he’s a racist by modern standards. And that includes my standards, as I obviously live in the modern world. But he was also to the left of FDR on race. It’;s so tiresome when people say “so and so who live 100 years ago was a racist”. What’s the point? They were virtually all racists.

    Roughly 99.9% of people who were born prior to 1880 had “offensive” views by modern standards. Times change. Mencken was certainly better than average, and his contemporaries would not have lumped him in with “racists”. Read Christian’s comment.

    As far as Obama, suppose I went onto a college campus and started saying some of the things that Obama said in speeches to black audiences back in the 2000s? How do you think that would be received? (You seemed to view me as criticizing Obama, whereas I’m actually criticizing the cancel culture.)

    Student, Catholics couldn’t get elected President until Kennedy in 1960. The examples you cite have been around all throughout history. Christians have always ignored the church’s teachings on peace, turning the other cheek, etc. The Bible’s moral teachings have always been ignored by most people.

    Christian, You should just stop commenting on Douthat; you don’t understand him at all. But you are right about Mencken.

    Mencken’s style was to ridicule everyone. If you take him out of context, quote him just ridiculing blacks or Jews or some other group, it presents a misleading picture of what he was all about. That’s not to say he didn’t have some offensive views, but he was relatively liberal by the standards of the times.

  47. Gravatar of Student Student
    19. November 2020 at 21:14

    Fair. Maybe Chesterton was right… Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.

  48. Gravatar of TGGP TGGP
    19. November 2020 at 22:37

    “Predictably, Roosevelt refused to challenge the Southern leadership of his party, and the bill died.”
    He didn’t merely “refuse to challenge” opposition to an anti-lynching bill, he knew Vice President Garner was going to attempt to obtain the Democratic presidential nomination by acting to pass such a bill, and scuttled it to ensure his own third term. And laughed about doing so.

  49. Gravatar of Justin Justin
    20. November 2020 at 10:38

    –“1. In the US, evangelical Christians are generally regarded as the most fervently religious of 21st century Protestants, and yet they voted overwhelmingly in favor of Trump. So where’s the evidence that a decline in “church” is fueling demagoguery?”–

    The Democrats are the secular party so religious people are highly likely to vote Republican regardless of any qualms they may have about the nominee.

    In the late primaries (April 2016), however, only 15% of regular church goers were core steady Trump supporters, as opposed to 28% of those who were not regular church goers, which compares with 30% of his support from those without higher education.

    https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/07/21/churchgoing-republicans-once-skeptical-of-trump-now-support-him/

    In addition to that, people may themselves be religious personally but still vote for the brash, rude, twice-divorced guy because he’s different and maybe someone different will change things. Maybe this guy really can help bring back factory jobs. Maybe he’ll actually get people who will overturn Roe v Wage on the court.

  50. Gravatar of Student Student
    20. November 2020 at 12:25

    Justin,

    He on his way out… and factory jobs haven’t been coming back and he himself says there is no plan to overturn Roe. Given a 6-3 court.. when Roe doesn’t get overturned, then what? 7-2 will do it right? Haha.

  51. Gravatar of Christian List Christian List
    20. November 2020 at 14:43

    Christian, You should just stop commenting on Douthat; you don’t understand him at all. But you are right about Mencken.

    Scott,

    Thanks, that’s half-way, I’m happy with that, so I’ll meet you there and won’t write anything else about Douthat.

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