The Politics of "Muddling Through"

"Muddling through" seems to me definable as managing to accomplish a task or solve a problem in spite of a lack of suitable organization, vision or even understanding of the issue, or any decision to acquire any, as when one gets by by on the basis of small ad hoc adjustments.

Those who have a high level of confidence in the wisdom of existing arrangements, messy though they may be; and who are not much given to planning, science, system in meeting major challenges, and may be inimical to them as such; tend to have a high level of confidence in the chances of "muddling through" even in the face of large and/or novel economic, social, political problems.

Those who have less confidence in existing arrangements, and who think that planning, science, system have their place, tend to be less confident in muddling through.

As this implies different political tendencies have different attitudes toward muddling through--with those leaning right more inclined to it, those leaning left less so. Thus was "muddle" a bugbear of H.G. Wells, while that champion of that form of conservatism called "centrism" Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. was a vehement proponent of "muddling through" as the only approach suitable to the pluralistic, pragmatic, "free society" for which he stood, and (showing his, and centrism's, conservatism again) sneered at those who disagreed with that position as sad head cases unable to deal with life's complexities.

However, one should add that besides general predisposition there is the matter of how seriously they take the problem in question. Confidence in "muddling through," after all, is often a matter of complacency toward an issue, or more cynically, an evasion. Those on the right can and do have a capacity for supporting quite drastic action--as seen in their greater readiness to support a use of military force--while the confidence of many on the right that society will get along in the face of, for example, climate change reflects that they are simply not all that exercised about the problem. By contrast those who really do see in climate change an urgent problem are apt to look at society's record in regard to redressing climate change and see in it the affirmation of their worst suspicions about muddling through as the do-nothingism of people who simply don't care about the issue and have no interest whatsoever in inconveniencing powerful interests over it.

The Professionals and the Public

That social category we consider to be the "professional" occupational groups in society is less studied and discussed than it ought to be, but has not been wholly ignored by social scientists--as Thomas Frank shows when giving the general reader a handy round-up in the first chapter of his 2016 book Listen, Liberal.

In considering that category--and especially how the professionals see themselves standing in relation to the rest of the society--it is useful to remember the root of "professional" in "profess." If many identify professionals and professionalism with modernity, rationality, science, the professional's perception of their place, now as much as ever, can be understood as that of a priest in relation to the laity, in their having a monopoly of activity and (presumably) wisdom in some important sphere of human life. This puts them in a position of power and privilege over them which has as its obligation an ethic of service to the public--but they also regard themselves as unaccountable to that public on the grounds that it is incompetent to judge of what they do.

For those who are egalitarian or rationalistic or both in outlook, who distrust authoritarianism and hierarchy, who think that those who have power are prone to abuse it and must be held accountable accordingly, this situation can be described as "problematic" at best--all as a great many of those who may not have particular ideas about society generally find it very uncomfortable dealing with professionals. This is especially when they are not used to dealing with professionals, when they are looking up at them rather than down at them socially, when poverty forces them to have an eye squarely on the bill, when in the likely emergency situation they are desperate for straight answers and for assurances professionals too rarely give--the "god in a white coat" who responds to a frightened and desperate patient's questions with evasions and condescending smiles. Professionals, whose training and position makes them creatures of authoritarianism and hierarchy, and scornful of those "not of the priesthood" who would dare judge them, or even just try and make sense of that sphere in which they consider themselves supreme, tend not to be terribly sympathetic or accommodating to their clients' anxieties and disadvantages, with this carrying over to their larger view of the world--with, as Frank argued in that book, important implications for our politics today.

The "Crisis of Masculinity" and the Conservatism of Prescription

I previously remarked how, speaking of a "crisis of masculinity," feminists have often sounded like conservatives--making similar arguments in similar ways. Admittedly for those who, in contrast with the mainstream's simple-minded and false equation of "feminist" with "left," regard the feminism prevailing within the mainstream as "bourgeois feminism," and the postmodernism supplying it with intellectual foundations an ideology not of the left but of the right, this may not be a surprise. However, this parallel seems to me to bear some examination for those at all interested in a deeper understanding of the point at issue, not least because of how the whole conception corresponds to one of the classic canons of conservatism as laid out by Russell Kirk, the valuation of "prescription"--for the purposes of this discussion, people unquestioningly doing what unquestioned custom says that they should do simply because unquestioned custom says so. One of society's most fundamental prescriptions, of course, is that reaching "adulthood" a young man should let go his passions, pleasures and freedom as "childish things" as they instead concentrate on establishing and raising a family, and then proceed to do the latter by marrying and having children, with their role as "breadwinner" for said family the center of their existence--as, indeed, they argue that men failing to take this path, with all its burdens and sacrifices (it is not for nothing that the stereotypical paterfamilias is, by middle age, pretty grouchy and grumpy), will mean nothing less than the downfall of society.

Of course, one can hardly have a prescription for men centered on marriage and family without also having a prescription for women--and indeed there is a traditional expectation that women similarly let go their passions, pleasures and freedom as "childish things," and, assuming their mate has succeeded at being a family's breadwinner, acquiesce in financial dependence on him as they concentrate on having those children and making a home for them and for the spouse who supports them. In short, women had to play their part so that men could play their part, but all this, as a George Gilder complained a half century ago, was complicated by social developments such as what was then called the "Sexual Revolution" and "women's lib." Gilder's response to these developments was that men and women alike ought to return to the old ways rather than going down what he held to be a disastrous path. Of course, the conservative call for women to center their lives on motherhood and children never went away (indeed, prior to her marriage becoming the only thing the Media Masters of Distraction wanted to talk about Taylor Swift's singleness was a culture war issue), with, indeed, it seems talk of "trad-wives" resurgent. Still, the right would seem to have on the whole become less insistent on women adhering to the entirety of the traditionalist package, while being no less insistent that men play their part to the full--as one sees comparing a Ross Douthat to a Gilder.

As it happens feminists speak the same way as they raise the "crisis of masculinity" they see as a matter of men's old script no longer being viable, but, even as they insist on women's right to decline marriage and children for the sake of pursuing their passions and pleasures and retaining their freedom viewing men who would do the same with suspicion. This is at least partly a matter of feminists associating "men going their own way" in this manner with certain tendencies within the alt-right, but it is also a matter of feminists' essential conservatism--as well as the plain and simple fact that conservatives, supportive of a society with "orders and classes," do not recognize it as incumbent upon them to treat everyone the same way, with their judgments gentler in the case of some than others, and frankly seeing those whose privileged positions they are given to defending as able to honorably refuse what is conventionally required of "everybody." Thus, just as natalism-minded conservatives may see a genteel man of means being a "confirmed old bachelor" as not wholly without honor because of their respect for socioeconomic privilege, feminists see respectability in, even valorize, a woman's refusing the old script, while seeming little concerned that women should have a new one--the very suggestion that there should be a script, that a woman shouldn't write her own script--oppressive, even as they take it quite for granted that men need one, and hold that their eschewing the obligations of the old script is something feminists should not countenance. The upshot is that they sit in judgment on a male gender they see as both dysfunctional and, at the same time, without any claim on anyone else's consideration if it is to make itself otherwise. Indeed, considering feminist criticism of male behavior generally one may be put in mind of how much they sound like conservatives speaking of the poor, or of minorities or foreign groups they view with distaste or worse, particularly where the combination of Othering and harshness is concerned. Thus they say that they are the authors of their own problems, and no nonsense about "society" or anything else is to be brooked, no claim for sympathy or support recognized. Indeed, if they want to improve their lot they had better "take responsibility" and "get their act together." And if in the meantime in protecting ourselves from them a few of them get treated unjustly, well, they have only themselves to blame for that because of their collective failings. That the prevailing feminism is, in the main, the feminism of those highly privileged likely makes it very easy for an upper-class bourgeois feminist to simply apply upper-class bourgeois attitudes regarding one group they do not like to another as, conservatives that they are, they readily express admiration of and offer apologia for the associated injustice, misery and brutality.

Traditionalists and Feminists in Agreement?

I think it worthwhile to repeat that I have been, and remain, skeptical of the claims made for the current cohort of males just reaching adulthood turning right, and in particular the idea that the much talked-about "manosphere" and its message has great appeal to them. In fact I think it worthwhile to repeat that the belief that this is so is a matter of politicians and the media endeavoring to keep attention on the culture war, with the Democratic Party's (pseudo)intellectuals in particular continuing to repeat the line (the lie) that they were defeated by the right-wing sympathies of "deplorables" rather than their refusal to break with the neoliberal-neoconservative policy positions that not just their traditional electorate hates, but which even the Republican's own voters despise. It is also the case that the functionaries of the "liberal" media like the manosphere's brutal attitude toward young men, that brutality is what they want those young men to want, and so they persuade themselves and the public that they do want it, in spite of at best questionable evidence.

Still, I do not go so far as to deny that the "manosphere message" should thus be ignored, and indeed there is an aspect of its message that I have been thinking about as of late, namely the way the manosphere's personnel insist that men live up to traditional expectations, often without being insistent on women doing so, as even figures the aforementioned media condemns as toxic tell men "Don't blame women for your frustrations." Nevertheless, traditionalism for one gender is simply impracticable without traditionalism for the other, men unable to marry and start households the way they are expected to do unless women are prepared to do so with them, and just like women men are unlikely to do so unless it seems to them to be worth doing (all as, however much many do not want to deal with the fact, it is undeniable that under the current dispensation men are expected to give more and get less than before, within a marriage and family life as well as in an economy where the returns to effort have been falling for a long time).

I have tended to think of this as a matter of these right-wingers being hesitant to take on feminism in a head-on way, all as men have less protection against such admonitions or pressures. (Putting it bluntly, they would like to tell women to get back into the kitchen, but know it would be counter-productive to do so--the more in as bourgeois feminists, at least, have been such consistent and helpful allies to the right--and so they focus on browbeating young men who can expect no succor from the feminists, all as they have no movement which will push back against the way the kulturkampfers bully them.) Yet it also seems possible that they simply do not worry so much about women's break with traditionalism as others may think. So far as they are concerned, however much we hear of the social construction of gender it is genetics that calls the shots, and in the end women will act as they have traditionally done, embracing marriage, family, domesticity, and doing so on the most traditional lines, not least in their favoring the high-status male who is a promising provider and protector. That indeed, much of what feminists say on this score is a hypocrisy it is better to ignore than to call out. (Thus feminists treat as illegitimate the idea of men thinking of women as prizes--but women still expect to be courted and "won." Thus they consider it an outrage to say that women care how much money a man has, but no one denies that the rich, high-status man has opportunities with women that a poor, low-status man doesn't, as seen in how for all the feminists' denunciations rich old men continue to marry attractive younger women, as women despise and moralize at the low-status man, insisting that he is that because of his personal flaws, that he is lazy, irresponsible, immature, and that is why they have contempt for him, not his lack of money, which is the proof that he is contemptible. And women wouldn't really have things any other way, benefiting too much from things as they actually are.) And so their propaganda tells their audience "Hold up your end of the bargain," implicitly because the game has not changed, relations between men and women, in spite of much sound and fury over the matter, and perhaps even actual perturbations (they will admit that #MeToo didn't make things easier for men), the same as they ever were and always will be, and any "crisis of masculinity" only a matter of men having believed the hype about a change.

Larry Summers, and the Stupid Person's Smart Person

I have had occasion here in the past to write of the "stupid person's smart person"--someone who will seem intellectually impressive to a stupid person, but not to the more intelligent, who can see right through the impressive c.v. and the showing off and is unlikely to be impressed by what is behind them. There are different dimensions to this, but underlying them is the claims conformists make for differences in intellect being the grounds for society's extreme socioeconomic inequality, and the deference of the public to figures of the Establishment, such that the perks of position and the arrogance that goes with them are in their small and feeble minds proof positive of superior intelligence. Larry Summers is an excellent example of the latter, given his lifelong association with elite institutions, and attainment of very prestigious positions in academia and policymaking at a relatively young age--and of course, his notorious personal arrogance and contempt for other people.

David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin's crappy Facebook movie seems to me worth reexamining from that standpoint, because of how it presented Summers as insensitive and impatient and graceless with the students coming to him with their problems when he was President of Harvard, certainly to go by the experience of the Winklevoss brothers. Watching the scene where they turn to him for help, I think, the intelligent viewer will note Summers' lack of regard for his responsibilities as administrator of an educational institution and its students. But the stupid person will instead be impressed by Summers' being a large man behind a large desk in a large office, the more in as he is identified to them as President of the supreme object of the Cult of the Good School that is Harvard University (a cult that the deeply elitist makers of the film champion rather than challenge). Moreover, being impressed by all that they will take his impatience and gracelessness and disrespect as indicative of a man too much concerned with higher things to attend to such "trifles," not least because they have no idea what else Mr. Summers was up to during his time at this post. (Ask them who Andrei Shleifer is. They won't have a clue. Ask them about the investment of Harvard's endowment, and you will have to explain what all that means in very small words.) However, this will also be because the stupid, in spite of likely being a Facebook addict, will not make much of Summers' obliviousness to the potentials of the technology and the stakes of the conflict over what has become a trillion-dollar company. They give him a pass for an error of judgment as they would not others, and go on insisting "But He's So Smart!" to anyone who would doubt the Not So Great Man's pronouncements.

The Two Bills

Remembering the 1990s one may remember quite pointedly the prominence of two men named Bill through it. There is the Bill who, son of a poor single mother, became a Rhodes Scholar and rose to the highest office in the land, from which he presided over an era of unexampled national prosperity. And there is the Bill who not unlike him a "self-made man," followed the path of business rather than politics and became the richest man in history through the part that "the good things he brought to life" played in that '90s boom over which the other Bill presided, central as the "tech industry" and the proliferation of personal computing and the Internet were during it.

Of course, this view of the two Bills--Bill Clinton and Bill Gates, respectively--is the Establishment claptrap version so beloved by singers of nonsense about "meritocracy." What Bill Clinton's political career teaches is in fact the benefit to be gained by siding with the winners in a political battle (the Neo-Liberals, and neoliberals, ascendant in the Democratic Party and the country at that time, at whose forefront Clinton put himself), as well as the lucky break one catches when a competitor self-destructs (for had Gary Hart remained a "frontrunner" Clinton might never have become a national figure).

Meanwhile Bill Gates' story is not, as some have it, that of a rise from rags to riches but of the rich getting richer because in fact born rich they have the inherited capital and family connections (say, a mother who knows the chair of IBM through her position on a charity's board) that enable them to take advantage of opportunities with which others can do little or nothing--such as exploiting the genius of others. Rather than a tale of opportunity for all it is, properly understood, a tale of how the system works for the few and not the many, especially in the era of which the other Bill was such an icon, his eight-year presidency representing above all the neoliberal-neoconservative consensus that was virtually unchallenged in any significant way for a generation (1993-2016) that was itself part of a half century of neoliberal-neoconservative dominance (1978-), with all it meant for the chances of the other Bill to enrich themselves in a time in which talk of national "prosperity" usually meant a paper boom benefiting the super-rich as the long-run decline in the standard of living of the many just went on and on.

It seems highly symbolic of that time, and this one, that both Bills' faces are being seen so much in the news lately--along with a certain other famous face, that of Jeffrey Epstein, as said individual's secrets are drip-fed to the public. In its coverage of the revelations the mainstream media is, of course, being its usual, cowardly centrist self, downplaying the aspect of political scandal--especially insofar as political scandal meant more than the "embarrassment" of political figures by revelations regarding the sordid details of their sex lives (Epstein was a player in some very high-level affairs of the other kind)--and the way in which this is an indictment not merely of certain high-profile figures that knee-jerk defenders of the status quo consider Great Men who merely lapsed, or at worst bad apples, but a whole elite stratum.

Thus true to its relentless fixation on identity politics over class the Guardian's Marina Hyde's relentless reduction of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal to the gender first, last and always, male villains and female victims, narrative her paper is ever ready to flog, with any reference to class and politics a mere distraction from the "real" and indeed only issue at hand in tones implying that anyone paying attention to anything else is an idiot. Fortunately, obtuse as the public so often appears to be where these matters are concerned, I suspect that no amount of spin will allow that particular bit of obfuscation to fly, however slight the consequences are likely to be for the friends of Epstein in a context where the malefactors are so squarely among the "protected but unbound" as the outraged can only wail and gnash their teeth as they endure the lot of the "bound but unprotected."

What the Web of Today Teaches Us

Rather than some gigantic cyber-agora where wide, deep, societal participation makes the shape of the web and of its traffic a reflection of genuine consensus the Internet has proven to be an essentially broadcast-type media, gatekept by a handful of profit-driven corporate colossi, all as resources, the leveraging of legacy media, and the support of the more privileged part of the public, decisively affect what is likely to be seen on it. Especially with past success being rewarded with greater visibility and vice-versa, such that those rich in the "attention economy" get richer and the poor poorer; and the increasing elusiveness of success for the newcomer and small-timer as the web fragments, and the pattern of usage becomes less exploratory and involved in a way making "surfing the web" a thing of the past (don't expect comments or backlinks for your little blog these days); the result is that a small number of well-resourced platforms may be increasingly monopolizing Internet traffic, the story going that a mere hundred domains account for ninety percent of all activity as the part played by the smaller fry dwindles, and these indeed seem to be going extinct amid the Internet's "Maximum Era."

Unsurprisingly the discourse is no more democratic now than it was before, as indeed the web is dominated by those who dominate everywhere else, with a predictable result the fact that they have succeeded in making it another prop to their power, enabling them to that much more thoroughly dictate the political agenda (the web has been very useful indeed to those who wanted the culture war with its obfuscations and diversions to be at the center of political life), and rehabilitate extremist views previously thought permanently marginalized. (Remember the talk about a post-racial era when Barack Obama was elected President? Don't see anyone talking that way now, do ya?) Still, it isn't just leftists and liberals who have been disappointed, those on the broader right endlessly feeling themselves betrayed by those personages and institutions to which they lent their support, online as in other places. The result is that those who championed cyber-utopianism--I suspect, much less a view of liberals or the left (or any sort of grass-roots right for that matter) than the propaganda of corporate PR in the '90s (before woke capitalism there was market populism--would seem to have earned every bit of the contempt that those skeptical of the stupidities they talked held for them, with even those who are not dissenters, experiencing the general enshittification of online life. Alas, I suspect very few have learned the lesson, let alone shown the mental capacity to remember its significance as the successors of those who foisted that particular dreck on the public perpetrate the frauds of the present day in a world falling apart.

Of the Question "Will the Future Need Us?"

In discussing the possibility of automation it is a commonplace for those speaking or writing of the matter to ask whether in a world where machines do all of what we conventionally call work more efficiently than humans can there will be any "need" for human beings. Indeed, the question is so much a commonplace that so far as I can tell few if any register its implications, which seem very telling of the essentially elitist and misanthropic outlook that is the conventional wisdom about human life in this society, unpacking which it is not inappropriate to start with Aristotle's Politics. In Book I, Chapter 4, of that work, Aristotle observes that were tools capable of obeying humans' will--if the kind of automation that had already been imagined in the mythology of his own time had actually existed--humans would not need slaves.

Note that Aristotle spoke not of humans, but slaves. Humans, after all, do not need to justify their existence through toil to serve the needs of other humans, and so were unthreatened by any possibility of tools that rendered such service. Only slaves--less than fully human--could be so threatened, because they existed to serve others, such that Aristotle termed them "animated instruments." That we should see automation as calling into question the need for people bespeaks the conventional wisdom's still being the same slave-owner's mentality in which nearly all people--the few masters, perhaps just the van Arkady-Rothkopf-Davos Man 0.0001 percent who certainly act as if they consider themselves the real human population of the planet excepted--are "animated instruments" which cease to have any warrant for their existence when the technologists replace the crude animated instrument that is a trained, conditioned, order-executing slave with a fully artificial alternative superior in every way for their masters' purposes.

In the absence of that disgusting slave-owners' mentality the response to the prospect of an automated world would be that it is one in which no person need ever be degraded to the level of an "animated instrument," let alone devote their whole education, their whole life, to being one; in which every human could actually be human; and, as H.G. Wells had it in The Shape of Things to Come, the Martyrdom of Man would be at an end. Look for such thinking--and its absence--as you watch the dialogue about these matters for what it says about much, much more than how "society" will deal with the mere "technological displacement of labor" in an age of automation.

Crisis of Masculinity, or Crisis of Economic Individualism?

A particular view of the male lot in life goes something like this:

Males are from early childhood subject to a deliberately brutal and brutalizing upbringing in preparation for a life which will be centered on a brutal and brutalizing status-resource competition for the sake of winning and keeping females by way of his ability to support them and the offspring he has with them materially. Said competition will have far more losers than winners; exact its toll on the humanity of the indisputable winners; and by and large make men miserable--to the decreasing extent that they are still able to feel anything at all.

It is not a particularly pleasant vision of life. Many call it tragic, and hold that men for the most part know it, such that it is far from uncommon for men to desire to escape it one way or the other, in spite of the extreme disapproval of attempts to do so on the part of "society" as it insists that every male cheerfully throw himself into the competition and "give it his all," that doing so is what it means to be an "adult" and a "man"; and judges those less than successful in the scrum less than adults and men--even as the already horrid terms of the contest grow ever more removed from reality. After all, the game sets up women as the prize in the contest, and in Life After Feminism the conventional wisdom no longer abides men seeing women as a reward or a prize, all as it no longer countenances men expecting women to conform to the standards that traditionally made men think of them as prizes (a sweet and deferential temperament, sexual attractiveness and availability, will-make-a-house-a-home domesticity, etc. in that way Jerry Hall rather pithily summed up years ago). Indeed, today men are collectively chastised on a constant basis for "entitlement" for expecting, or even simply desiring those qualities in women, as indeed they demand that men value women for other qualities (not least, traditionally masculine qualities such as intelligence, self-assertiveness, "toughness," and conventionally masculine achievements in the aforementioned "game") which, frankly, may elicit less genuine feeling on men's part than those they traditionally sought in women, and even contradict what they really do find attractive. Moreover, feminists also demand that men, even while given no respite from the aforementioned competition and its costs, and judged as harshly as ever for how they do in it, bear an equal share of traditionally female burdens such as care for the home or the rearing of children, and doing the "emotional heavy lifting" in the relationship. Indeed, the thinking now goes that the man should be as prepared as his female partner to be the supportive helpmeet to his spouse--sacrificing his own "career" to hers if need be (never mind that according to the logic described here that career is the sin qua non of his being with her, or anyone else).

Without the prize the (again, miserable) competition and all associated with it lose their incentive structure--all as men find themselves subject to increasingly numerous and contradictory demands, such that a man can feel that he is increasingly punished for what his upbringing makes him, for his being what society requires him to be as that hardened competitor whose ways of thinking and acting he cannot simply "turn off" and would surely suffer even if he could in the "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation (with it feeling all the more bewildering, and unjust, that the same feminists so often celebrate what they denounce as "toxic masculinity" in men as exemplary #Girlboss behavior in women). Still, society brooks no balking at their declining to throw themselves into the competition for all that, doubling down on its demand for conformity--as it panics that young men understandably refuse to submit to that demand, opting instead to play video games all day long.

This incoherence is not a very surprising response where the cultural traditionalists are concerned. After all, they are traditionalists because they are committed to the old ways, and hostile to any sort of critical thought about them, the more easily in as they are not too anxious about the world being a fair or peaceful or comfortable place for its less privileged inhabitants, or for that matter, any sort of rational consistency in lifeways. It is more surprising that a great many feminists seem to also think that men should go on living in the old ways--embracing the competition with all the old earnestness, just not expecting the old satisfactions, or any compensation for the loss of those old satisfactions, out of it. After all, if the patriarchy feminists denounce is indeed more than a piece of rhetoric, is this vision of life as a brutal competition not central to that order to which they are so opposed? Is it not therefore imperative on feminists to oppose the brutality and brutalization for which women as well as men ultimately pay a very high price? And indeed would doing so not win to their cause a great many "male allies" who would be ecstatic at the thought of putting a stake through the heart of this heartless vision of life, of a vision of "women's liberation" that would bring "men's liberation" as well? Moreover, if such enlightened self-interest of this kind does not avail, would women's own increasing subjection to the same demands and pressures, the same brutalizing experiences in school and work, sports and military service and all the rest, producing similar alienations, not make women question this vision of life and what it does to women for their own sakes? (Even if it sits poorly with a media narrative that prefers to counterpoise female triumph and male failure it is not just men who, confronting the raw deal that is "adulthood," elect to drop out of what they also see as a scam--and even spend their life playing video games instead.)

Alas, the reader has likely already registered a factor preventing all this from figuring significantly in their position, namely that the competition we are talking about is ultimately economic individualism. A left-wing feminist--left-wing in the sense of her desire for a world beyond economic individualism, beyond capitalism--may very well countenance a different kind of society, in which a different kind of male life-path is at least a plausible, honorable, choice. By contrast a bourgeois feminist, for whom the issue is not the social system but the share of the more privileged women in the rewards going to those at its top, does not. Indeed, for her economic individualism is non-negotiable, There Is No Alternative, and so to the competition the men must go (and the women too). That men, brutalized, become brutal, is just an occasion to turn a structural, systemic, societal issue into an individual one and moralize at them about "choice" and "personal responsibility" in that way so dear to every cold, cruel, sanctimonious bourgeois heart (or whatever it is they use for hearts). Acknowledging that what the "thought-leaders" of today would have us believe to be a matter of gender--a supposed "crisis of masculinity"--proves on closer inspection to be a matter of economics, the crisis of masculinity in fact a crisis of economic individualism, whose outcome is unlikely to be settled by hectoring from either the traditionalists, or the sort of feminist who gets so much of a platform in the media from which to make her pronouncements.

The Guardian Reports on the African "Manosphere"

As readers of this blog are likely to be well aware I have long been skeptical of the claims made for the popularity of the "manosphere" and its cultural influence among young males--the extreme media attention to it less a reflection of the manosphere's actual part in their lives (as yet little studied, still less understood, and perhaps actually rather small) than a matter of that media's own reactionary sensibility, susceptibility to getting sucked into and fueling moral panic, and as always, its desire to talk about identity, gender, the "personal," rather than the large issues confronting all of us, let alone doing so in an intelligent way precisely because proper attention to that is the last thing those in charge of it want. (Consider, for instance, how much more congenial it is for the Democratic Party and its supporters to go on flogging the stupid lie that the manosphere brought the young male vote over to them than to admit that the voters once again refused to "hold their nose and vote" for them as they rejected their umpteenth neoliberal-neoconservative-centrist Democratic presidential contender carrying forward the unhappy Clinton-Obama-Biden tradition--">even after the polling data that gave this a semblance of plausibility was debunked by validated voter information.) It was thus no surprise that a major purveyor of the "panicked" view of the matter, the Guardian, was on about it again, and only slightly less surprising that it found a way to take this seemingly covered-to-death subject and "make it new" by talking about how sub-Saharan Africa now, apparently, has its own online ecosystem of the manosphere type, with Zimbabwe having its own Andrew Tate in Mr. Shadaya Knight.

As I have argued over and over and over again, not just in regard to this issue but every other, the hacks of the media don't "do" context, or background, or real analysis, instead bombarding us with disconnected factoids and offering as the only aid to making sense of it "opinion," most of the time simply the Establishment position on a topic, and that not even in the manner of the notorious "both sidesism," but the "one sideism" of which we hear too little. It seems to me fair to say that they are par for the course in this article, starting with how the article neglects to mention that as of 2025 only 36 percent--roughly 1 in 3--people in Sub-Saharan Africa even has Internet access, with the figures actually lower in several of the countries from which the personalities they focus on hail, namely Kenya (35 percent), Somalia (28 percent) and Ethiopia (22 percent, just 1 in 5 Ethiopians online). This seems to me not just a reminder that the digital divide remains with us decades after it seemed "everyone is online" to many in "the First World" (and this, a reminder of the miserable failure of economic development everywhere on the planet in the past half century on the whole, save in orthodoxy-flouting China), but properly a significant piece of the background to any news story presumably telling us about the use of the Internet in the developing world, and the influence that it is having on its people. But if, as I have remarked many a time in the past, the Guardian affords more space to discussion of such matters as the failures of neoliberalism than, say, any major newspaper in the United States (especially in the era in which the New York Times brought Bret Stephens onto its staff in the name of ideological "diversity"), it remains a centrist organ that, while reliably fire-breathing on identity politics, is also far, far less interested in matters like poverty, economic inequality and neoliberal failure, with which the impulse of those running that publication to give us yet another moral panic-feeding tale of the manosphere and its vicious idiocies is all too consistent. So, too, is the fact that overlooking the detail would be cause for doubt as to the actual reach of figures like Mr. Knight--for if it is very possible that the young men of the far better Internet connection-supplied First World "barely know what the manosphere is," let alone look to it for guidance, one may plausibly imagine it matters that much less in countries where Internet connections are relatively few--and time online a comparative luxury.

Getting Neoliberalism Wrong

I recently had something to say of the debate about the salience of "neoliberalism" as a descriptor for the character of economic life in most of the world, and not least the U.S. and Britain, these past fifty years--and how those determined to deny that salience made the most of the limitations of particular observers in describing the concept. Treating it as a matter of market fundamentalist--"libertarian"--ideology and a package of particular reforms (deregulate, privatize, redistribute taxation and spending in a manner more congenial to the direct needs of business, etc.) they failed to give neoliberalism its due as a full-fledged economic model, one whose real-life realization, one may add, has been unthinkable without colossal state support, they necessarily fail to reconcile with the ideological libertarianism. Connected with this they often failed to recognize the centrality of financialization to the model.

In themselves these have been major weaknesses, which have contributed greatly to the muddying of the dialogue, but they fall far short of exhausting the limit of failings, not least the tendency to overgeneralize from one part of the neoliberal experience to the rest, Those going by the experience of the early '80s were prone to make much of tight money policies--for example, the conduct of a Paul Volcker--and pay too little attention to the loose money policies that have prevailed since (in the U.S., from Alan Greenspan forward), and the purpose they serve, holding interest rates down with "war on savers" fanaticism not for the sake of old-fashioned Keynesian investment and job creation in the "real economy" (much as its supporters constantly give Keynesian excuses for their actions), but rather keeping speculators in cheap money, in keeping with that aforementioned financialization that has, to use Keynes' words, seen us go from a situation in which speculation comprises "bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise" to one in which enterprise is "the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation," and "development of the country . . . a by-product of the activities of the casino," such that their idea of development is keeping the roulette wheels spinning in the hope of more "by-product." This may be especially the case where observers lay stress on secondary features of the phenomenon. For example, those particularly attentive to the British experience (not unnatural given that the matter of neoliberalism is likely more discussed in Britain than in the U.S.) sometimes argue that neoliberalism has tended to go with centralization of government functions, because this is indeed what happened under Margaret Thatcher, whose government took the authority to set taxation, and decision making about privatization, out of local government's hands. However in America the opposite has been the case, with the Federal government delegating regulatory and welfare functions to the states in the expectation that their conduct will be more in line with neoliberal ideals--this relatively secondary feature an adaptation of the program's implementation to local conditions, even though the larger means and ends of the program (privatization, deregulation, etc., and the financialized model resulting) are the same. Meanwhile they have missed other features of far greater importance, like the interconnection of economics and technology, not least the nexus between finance and an age of "information technology," and the stagnation of technology in other areas, certainly as compared with the progress seen in a more manufacturing-centered era--as well as how neoliberalism has been linked with the ideology of an "information age" relentlessly used to promote it, not least by way of the cults of "innovation," "entrepreneurship," the "startup," and of course, much-ballyhooed "Silicon Valley."

A still more fundamental weakness, however, may be how so many observers have stressed ideas above interests in understanding neoliberalism, a factor certainly in their failure to cope with the seeming contradiction between libertarian ideology and statist policy (and its obvious explanation that the game was not about making the state go away but reorienting the state's functioning at working people's expense). It has also factored in their failure to explain how the neoliberal turn happened--writing as if the persuasiveness of the associated schools of economic thought to "society" at large were decisive. However, the evidence overwhelmingly seems to be that neoliberal thought aligned with the business elite's more practical objects rather than shifting elite thinking--let alone the thinking of the broader public. Certainly the effort to "sell" neoliberalism to the broader public, in spite of being helped immensely by the fact that those predisposed to sympathy to neoliberal economics dominated the relevant corners of the academic and media establishments from the outset, they never came close to making a majority of the electorate supporters of the obviously elitist and anti-popular program. Rather neoliberal politicians got elected by pretending to a greater moderation on the campaign trail than they would display when they got into office (as one sees considering both Thatcher and Reagan), that these were also the beneficiaries of an anti-incumbent mood that had come about because the incumbents had already angered the public by embarking on the neoliberal path (as some regard Callaghan as having done, and one may still more regard Carter as having done), and by changing the subject away from economics (as seen in the extreme attentiveness to the culture wars, and rally-round-the-flag foreign policy crises). It was also increasingly the case that the public did not have a non-neoliberal choice on the ballot at election time the major contenders were all committed to such a program (as seen in the "Neo-Liberal" capture of the U.S. Democratic Party, and Britain's "New Labour"), with said capture proving exceedingly resilient with these years. Thus is it the case that today a Democratic Party which has suffered defeat after defeat because of its commitment to neoliberalism, remains committed to it, such that after a half century of neoliberal policies that consistently caused immense pain while failing to "deliver the goods" (deindustrialization, long-declining living standards, etc.) attempts to sell the public on the solution to the problems neoliberalism caused being . . . more neoliberalism under the banner of the "Abundance" agenda. Indeed, those looking at the rather sorry spectacle will not see in it any reason to doubt that when push comes to shove public opinion has no effect whatsoever on policy, all as the Democratic Party, true to the essential nature of the centrism for which it has historically been the standard-bearer, shows itself to be much more concerned with deflecting even the mildest of progressive pressures than competing with those to its right, for all the grandstanding and theatrics we see in the news as given us by addicts of politics-rather-than-policy.

The Centrism of 1964: A Few Thoughts

Writing about centrism for some years I have consistently emphasized that it is a conservative political philosophy in the classical sense of the term, and moreover rather more conservative in practical policymaking than is generally appreciated. I have also emphasized that it is the conservatism of centrism, not the optimism and reformism associated with the term "liberalism," that has dominated the Democratic Party since the era of the Second World War. Yet there seems to have been a patch in the 1960s, perhaps extending to the 1970s, when the party was less centrist, and more liberal, than that characterization suggests. In contrast with centrists' tendency to treat the left as their enemy, and give the right a pass no matter what it did, called out Barry Goldwater as an extremist in the 1964 election. Centrists are hostile to mass movements, but in this period they supported a mass movement in the civil rights movement. And if centrists stand for a "pluralist," "pragmatic" minimalism in reform that tends to result in doing little to nothing about society's problems, and especially the concerns of the disadvantaged, it proposed, and to some extent pursued, a "War on Poverty." How is all that to be reconciled with centrism as both conservative and dominant?

It is less difficult than one may imagine. Where Goldwater is concerned the issue was less a "liberal" party opposing a figure of the "right" than of, going by Richard Hofstadter's own characterization of the politics of the era, the "true" conservatives of the center standing against a "pseudo-conservative" tendency that, in contrast with the pragmatic and compromise-minded conservatism of the center offered a reactionary type that seemed to many impracticable in its prescriptions to a degree they could not countenance, be it in a foreign policy stance that showed "Goldwater's imagination had never confronted the implications of thermonuclear war" in his "strangely casual about the prospect of total destruction," or his "state's rights"-singing opposition to the civil rights movement, or his desire to undo the New Deal. (After all, it was one thing to oppose the tentative, pragmatic, limited reforms of Franklin Roosevelt in 1935 when this meant change, another to, after those changes had been part of the fabric of American life for decades, try and tear them out of that fabric.) This was all the more the case given that, as the outcome of that particular election demonstrated (a victory for the Democratic Party over the Republicans by a margin of 62-38 percent, to which no presidential election since has come close), Goldwater's positions were hugely unpopular with the public as a whole. Where the civil rights movement is concerned it mattered that the movement's purpose was not changing the system (and certainly not the economic system), but correcting the system's imperfect protection of those rights it grants all citizens--with respect for this incumbent on centrism not just because of the strength of domestic pressure, but the international political demands of a Cold War where opinion in Africa, Asia and elsewhere regarding the West's racial attitudes was important. And it is worth acknowledging that the center undertook a "War on Poverty" at that moment because the centrist lie that poverty had become a thing of the past stood debunked, while amid the political challenge of the Cold War and the bounty of the post-war boom the center was eager to show the country and the world that capitalism could resolve its problems, with the means to do this at acceptable cost seemingly at hand. As a result the limits of centrism were evident in how it came to be in that situation in the first place, while its motivations are entirely consistent with its essentially conservative imperatives (upholding the existing system in the face of leftist challenge, not changing that system, with a war on poverty waged under capitalism, rather than through a shift away from capitalism), all as in any event the project was never allowed to get very far. Indeed, consider the center's response to that combination of mass movement and demand the government make good on its War on Poverty promises, the Poor People's Campaign that Martin Luther King organized but did not live to conduct in its march on Washington. Said campaign was quickly quashed to become a historical footnote as the center (good Anti-Communists that they were) focused on fighting the war they really wanted to fight, the Cold War globally and the portion of it that was a hot war in Southeast Asia particularly (breaking another promise, that the young men America drafted would not be fighting another land war in Asia). Meanwhile in the face of the economic strains just then emerging that showed that the center's limited reforms had not resolved the troubles of industrial society, rather than intensifying reform dispensed with it altogether as the Democratic Party became the party not of Michael Harrington and Irving Howe's Democratic Socialists of America, but "Neo-Liberals" like Gary Hart and Bill Clinton. In doing so many regard the party as having betrayed its best traditions. However, at a deeper level it was all too consistent with its principles, which remained the same, even as its application of them changed with the times, to the point of normalizing what had seemed untenable in Goldwater's day--as we are reminded with "duck and cover" returning to American life, while demonstrating that there is nothing the right can do to which it will not, in the end, accommodate itself to the point of insisting upon "unity," "bipartisanship" and "reaching across the aisle."

Centrism, Neoliberalism and the Democratic Party

Over the years innumerable authors have purported to explain the decay of the Democratic Party from the robust contender of the era of Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson in the middle decades of the twentieth century into the hapless and hopeless train wreck that it has become in the twenty-first century. Some do better than others at this--like Thomas Frank in Listen, Liberal, where he describes the party's eagerness to abandon working class concerns in the late 1960s, and its gravitation to the concerns and mentality of urban professionals (less "populist" than "progressive" in the nineteenth century sense of the term, to which distinction Frank devoted his later book The People, No).

Still, so far I have yet to see any one author give the matter its proper due, which seems to me to require acknowledging the fundamental limits of the Democratic Party's "liberalism" even in its heyday--and indeed, that the emphasis on liberalism, which misleads, should be set aside in favor of attention to centrism—and with it, to the conservatism of that centrism. Conveniently articulated by a considerable body of work, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr's The Vital Center set forth most of the essentials early on in a highly influential way. Reading that book with attention one sees that there is nothing in the essential philosophy at odds with Russell Kirk's canons of conservatism (indeed, Schlesinger arguably affirms the lot, and very forcefully too), and nothing in its economic thinking that would have prevented Schlesinger from signing the Mont Pelerin Society's Statement of Aims. All this is precisely because centrism is an application of classical conservatism to a liberal capitalist society, with all its fear of the common man as a political actor, and aversion to change, all as centrism gives away that the officially pox-on-both-your-houses anti-extremism so often summed up as the "horseshoe theory" is really a flimsy cover for a view of the real enemy as the left--with not just the Communist, but those Schlesinger called "progressives" and "liberals" objects of his disdain--and this, if anything, recognized at the time. (Thus did Irwin Ross in Commentary remark that Schlesinger displayed no real fear of the right, just the left in his book, while Richard Hofstadter was to remark a few years later that in American politics those of the center were the country's true conservatives.)

None of this ever getting the attention that a proper understanding of the situation required, it was subsequently the case that between the essential conservatism of their ideology; their (not unselective) respect for the authority of experts (not least, economists generally libertarian in inclination and hostile to big government); their reliance on supporters among the relatively affluent, and in business, with no great liking of reform; their own hostility to mass politics that did that much more to limit the influence of the working class base on the party's policies; the strength of the opposition among the still more-resistant right, which was not only a practical obstacle to a reform program but an excuse not to pursue it; and to a greater degree than elsewhere pressure to attend to matters of race domestically and foreign policy internationally that competed with other objects for attention; they were relatively tepid reformers compared with (for example) their West European counterparts, with all this mattering when after the unraveling of a post-war boom that seems to have been the product of a unique, unforeseeable combination of circumstances they found themselves confronted with the necessity of reexamining their favored line of policy. Some called for a shift to more activist government, with John Kenneth Galbraith calling for social democracy, and Lester Thurow to industrial policy. Instead the Democratic Party's leadership gravitated toward neoliberalism--and Neo-Liberals--the latter so named because they defined themselves in opposition to the New Deal-Great Society-minded "old liberals" they sneered at as having gone decadent. Thus did Jimmy Carter renege on his big social promises (an employment guarantee and universal health care) as he prioritized balanced budgets and halting inflation through the means of a Paul Volcker who declared that American working people's living standard simply had to fall, and proceeded to make it happen--broadly beginning the Reagan Revolution before Reagan. And thus did the Gary Harts sideline the Walter Mondales (and certainly the Jesse Jacksons), while if Hart self-destructed none other than that avowed champion of Neo-Liberalism Charles Peters hailed the rise of Bill Clinton as the movement's "Second Coming."

The shift on the part of the Democratic Party was not popular with the public. It was in fact hugely unpopular, as neoliberalism has always been. But the party leadership never looked back, for the following half century continuing to stand by neoliberal (and neoconservative) policies its old base hates as the party's leaders offer them nothing better than the counsel to "Hold your nose and vote"--and, unsurprisingly in light of the essential repugnance of the sales pitch (assuming "Hold your nose and vote" even deserves to be called a "sales pitch") a critical portion of the electorate refusing to do that. The result has again and again been the advantaging of its Republican rivals, and of the form of conservatism the Democratic Party represents--centrist, modern, cosmopolitan, science-respecting, technocratic, capable of pragmatic compromise at home and abroad--as against the intransigent-to-the-point-of-reaction traditionalism and nationalism of the Republicans. Those loyal to the Democratic Party's leadership insist this to be the fault of those who, sick of being corralled behind policies they oppose through the party's blackmailing of them in backing candidates whose elitist positions they despise, refused to do as they were instructed, did not hold their noses, did not vote in the manner they were told. Of course, the insistence on the bottom being to blame is, of course, reflective of the leadership's contempt for public opinion, and sense of entitlement to public support, evident in its repeating what failed again and again--most recently, in the name of "Abundance" as said leadership shows that it is only ever willing to compromise with the Republicans who treat them with contempt, not those voters whose support it keeps demanding.

Of Neoliberalism and Feminism: Emmanuel Todd

In the United States the attention to the scholarship and commentary of demographer and anthropologist Emmanuel Todd has been exceedingly inconsistent and uneven, reflecting the biases of its publishers and its press. Exemplary of this Todd's Où en sont-elles? Une esquisse de l’histoire des femmes was almost totally ignored, precisely because for the Park Avenue which rushed to release an English-language edition of Todd's fellow French author Pauline Harmange's Why I Hate Men to a rapturous reception from les claqueurs of the review pages (remember, though, you're not allowed to even mention misandry exists, let alone say that any feminist anywhere has ever hated men, ever) was absolutely not going to give his study of gender a major release in the American market, or even any at all (even, it seems, after an English-language translation did get published in Britain as Lineages of the Feminine: An Outline of the History of Women).

Nevertheless, from what I have seen of the discussion of Où/Lineages the book does, as can be expected of Todd, offer a great many arguments sufficiently original and striking to warrant some acknowledgment. Not the least of these is his argument that the ascent of feminism helps explain the <>neoliberal era. Todd specifically argues for an innate difference between men and women with regard to the capacity for collective action rooted in the prehistoric sexual division of labor between male hunters and female gatherers. (The hunt was a collective affair, requiring men to cooperate in the pursuit of big game, which was for the sake of feeding the tribe as a whole--while the hunters' other distinct province, physical defense of the tribe, entailed the same stress on cooperation to collective ends. By contrast the female gatherer gathered food individually, for just her family--often in competition with other females. And the associated selection process conduced to a male orientation to collective action on behalf of the needs of the group, and a female orientation to individual self-interest.) The result is that the increasing participation of women in formerly male spheres meant increasing participation by people less inclined or able to support group action in furtherance of a common interest, undermining the capacity for doing so--such that as neoliberalism goes from disaster to disaster the opposition to the ever more unpopular consistently fails to win any meaningful successes (with, of course, Todd's France under the rule of Emmanuel Macron a case in point).

In considering this unconventional position it is only fair to acknowledge what Todd gets right. He is quite correct to note that the era of feminism's ascent has been the era of neoliberalism's ascent; and that, contrary to what some "idealist" analysts fixated on intellectual history seem to think, it has not been the result of popular credence in Friedman and Hayek, at least. Meanwhile, if Todd's conception flies in the face of the conventional stereotypes (ruthlessly competitive men, empathetic and cooperative women) the image of men as having the greater capacity for concern for the welfare of the group and collective action to that end in comparison with more individualistic women may be something one ought not to dismiss too quickly. Certainly looking at mainstream feminism today one is struck by how ultra-individualistic, and indeed, ultra-capitalist, it is, the prevailing vision one of the release of women from the traditional constraints of society and family so that, unencumbered by husband or children, they can most fully participate in capitalist society's labor force to take their chances in "life's race" as atomized individuals--and they are sure, flourish, because THEY DON'T NEED ANYONE, LEAST OF ALL A MAN. Exemplified by the cult of the "career woman" climbing the corporate ladder or founding a startup (like girl genius Elizabeth Holmes!), feminists conventionally judge women's advances not by the condition of working women broadly but how many women have made it "to the top"--and never miss a chance to punch left at those who prefer as a metric the good of the many rather than the privileged few, and see the gap between the bottom and the top as something to reduce. Indeed, it may seem significant that if in America there is a patron saint of selfishness, especially as it relates to capitalism, that would be a woman (Ayn Rand), while if Britain has a comparable figure that would be the woman who said "Society--there is no such thing," all as it does not seem unreasonable to, given her extreme hostility to ever letting the Social Question enter into politics, count alongside them Hannah Arendt, all as one would be hard-pressed to name a female thinker of the left of comparable standing in society at large. Meanwhile what we see of party politics hardly contradicts the image. In our "first"-obsessed age it is notable that the "first" woman to head government in nation after nation has done so at the head of a party of the avowed right, and indeed headed government only as heads of parties of the right (Thatcher in Britain just the first of three Conservative female Prime Ministers versus zero for Labour as a fourth woman now also heads the same party in opposition, with the sole female Canadian, German, Italian, Japanese heads of government to date likewise of the parties of the right), while women also lead the predominant far-right movements in many a country (Prime Minister Meloni in Italy, Le Pen in France, Weidel in Germany).

In its way even popular culture seems to tell the story. Popular fiction for men often validates the sense of worth of the low-status man at the expense of his so-called betters, as with the blue-collar heroes of so much action-adventure, who save the day as the white-collar higher-ups snivel or get in the way, whereas fiction for women seems more inclined to validate the hierarchy and those at its top. Endlessly valorizing the high-status male, and with him the system and hierarchy of which he is a part (often pointedly celebrating men in many quarters seen as economic and social villains, like Jack Welch acolyte-type "restructurers" of corporations), it is equally prone to denigrate the low-status male, the more in as, rather than admitting to finding him undesirable because of his lack of wealth and status (because of course only a vile sexist would believe the lie that any woman anywhere cares how much money a man makes!) attributing his lack of "net worth" to his lack of worth as a human being because if he were worthier he would be richer in the most cruelly conformist manner imaginable. Meanwhile the tale validates its core audience by telling it that it is worthy to be up on the heights by showing it rising to the top and being accepted there to live above the hoi polloi rather than finding pride and satisfaction at the bottom. Often this is through marriage to a higher-status male--marrying the prince, often literally, as in the endless output of made-for-TV romantic comedies by Hallmark and like outlets that present royalty from the apparently innumerable English-speaking countries of continental Europe marrying working American women who in the end win over their skeptical mothers-in-law. However, the tendency seems to transcend that convention, with the work of Shonda Rhimes striking for its particular combination of strident feminism with the most reactionary romanticizing of feudalism and monarchism from The Princess Diaries to Bridgerton, generally to the delight of the idiots of the commentariat.

Still, I am less inclined to explanation by way of evolutionary biology than I used to be--not because I disbelieve in biology, or dismiss the possibility of biological differences between the sexes a priori (the pharmacology industry shows just how much biology does matter, while I'm not big on a priori anything), but because as yet we are in a far better position to generate hypotheses than properly test them given the limits of our knowledge of both human genetics, and the evolutionary record. Not knowing much about how genes specifically interact with an environment to generate behavior we can only speculate, in however informed a way; while even if we could establish that on a firmer basis than we have done (as, indeed, I imagine sustained, robust, research into the matter would do in time) we would still be hard-pressed to reconstruct why people evolved as they did rather than how, such that claims of this kind for now may be just so many "Just so" stories. (Indeed, if many do argue logically and sincerely for their positions on this basis it still seems telling that people so often refer to evolutionary biology when they want others to accept something they find unpalatable on the grounds that "It's science!"--alas, without the science being there yet, with Francis Fukuyama nicely summing up the tendency when he pointed to how conservatives attribute almost everything they see as a societal problem to genetics except homosexuality, while liberals see nothing at all as genetic except homosexuality, two positions that are as absurd as they are self-serving.) At the same time Todd's own arguments about women's propensity for the public sphere over the private, and for traditionally feminine care work, seems to me to at least complicate any argument of this kind. And in any event, it seems to me that the emergence and endurance of neoliberalism is all too easily, and more satisfactorily, explained in other ways.

Even so, I certainly do think that there are important connections between feminism as we know it, and the neoliberal era. If the feminism we have has for the most part been "bourgeois feminism" that seems to me to reflect the fact of that feminism's emergence within and adaptation to a bourgeois society that will not stand any other kind. (Consider, for instance, what became of environmentalism as a result of the pressures and enticements to that movement to play by their rules of "legitimate discourse.") If it is female thinkers of the right who have had the most visibility influence, that seems to be because it is the intellectual right that has had visibility and influence, such that female thinkers of the left, like all other thinkers of the left, cannot get the same level of attention. If it is as politicians of the right that women have risen to high political office, that is because it is the right that has predominated electorally, though I would also be prepared to argue that the right's particular position within the system has made giving the party a female face a different matter for them than it is for their at least nominally leftward counterparts. (For a left-leaning party to run a woman for office is, especially in a time when they have alienated their bases and depend on winning undecided voters, a source of anxiety that doing so will alienate some voters who might otherwise be won over. For a right-wing party more confident in the loyalty of its base, doing so seems a good way to take advantage of the pseudo-left's a-candidate's-gender-is-more-important-than-their-platform identity politics, and allay women's concerns about the right's indifference to or hostility to their preferences with regard to such matters as reproductive rights. This is all the more in as, one should remember, whatever may be decisive for them here, women are historically more likely to vote for the left option than their male counterparts, with all that implies.) And if those forms of popular culture directed at women seem more blatantly affirmative of the status quo than those aimed at men on this particular level, one should not underestimate the fact that those blue-collar heroes are themselves still individualists upholding the status quo whose principal beneficiaries are those white-collar types they mock at, and the sop to their pride meant to reconcile them to society as it is, with all its inequities, rather than a serious criticism or call to change. Meanwhile one can hardly dispute that like the other forms that identity politics has taken in our time it has deflected attention from class and its associated material issues as it fosters division among a public increasingly reduced to fighting over the table scraps in an ever more unequal order--with that seeming to me far more important than any innate difference in gender in enabling the politics of the neoliberal turn.

Ross Douthat and the Times: Thoughts

I have previously remarked how many a young man early on in his intellectual journey finds himself attracted to the far right, and something of why this seems to me to happen so often. Certainly it seems relevant that, to those looking beyond conventionalities for the sake of understanding the world, the ideas of the far right are so much more easily available than those of the left, within an essentially conservative mainstream enjoying the sponsorship, visibility, tolerance, respect unavailable to those desirous of a more egalitarian order even in the absence of a regime of formal censorship. (So it went with Martin Eden's discovery of Herbert Spencer and Friedrich Nietzsche, and so goes it today with the young person finding their way to the manosphere, on those perhaps rarer-than-the-hype-has-it occasions when they do so.) It also seemed possible that many of the ideas of the right have a particular attraction for those in that phase of life. After all, if questioning the world around them it is safe to say they may be more individualistic than most--and the ultra-right can be very flattering of the individualist. Facing, often while feeling very much alone, a forbidding adult world they have no choice but to enter, or which they have already entered and been brutalized by, they want to see as themselves as tough enough to take it on, tougher than the others around them, and certainly the far right makes much of toughness--indeed, has been accused of making a pornography out of toughness--all as the young man believing the things it tells him may get the illusion that doing so they are also tough. (They know how the world works, unlike the namby-pamby optimists surrounding them who just don't get it. Or so they tell themselves.)

However, there is also the fact that the far right can say things before the mainstream that the mainstream's preferred thinkers generally will not, including things the left would say to a mainstream audience were it ever allowed a platform. This is even the case in regard to what the guardians of respectable opinion in American society hold most sacred, capitalism--enabling the right to appeal to any misgivings they have about that (as so very many of them do), with Ross Douthat an excellent example of the tendency. The coiner of the term "woke capital" in the very pages of the thoroughly Establishment New York Times, he acknowledged that the public does have discontents with capitalism, and that Big Business' exploitation of identity politics for public relations purposes was apt to make "anti-wokeness" an outlet for social frustrations that the bounds of discourse in America do not permit to be expressed in a franker way.

Douthat's analysis will probably not impress a well-read leftist, indeed likely strike them as unoriginal and shallow in its manner of raising the point. They have long been well aware of the reality, and seen others treat it in a far more sophisticated fashion likely better aligned with their thinking. Indeed, even those who are not leftists but merely liberals may remember Thomas Frank and his concept of "market populism" from the turn of the century. Still, the leftist or even liberal critic of wokeness has rather less access to the pages of anything like the Times (consider, for example, how little attention the mainstream media was paying a Frank by the time of Listen, Liberal), precisely because its tolerance for criticism of neoliberalism in the era of Bernie Sanders vs. Hillary Clinton, and the Squad vs. Nancy Pelosi, fallen to zero, and so it was that Douthat and his fellow travelers monopolized mainstream awareness of woke capitalism with all its dodges, and perils for the things that those who genuinely do support wokeness stand for, all very much to the right's advantage, such that "woke capitalism," which one could be forgiven for thinking a leftist epithet, actually became a right-wing one. Indeed, the resulting situation seems to me to be well summed up in a remark I once saw in one of the fora at a site devoted to pop cultural news with an avowedly right-wing editorial line. The user thought it ironic that "leftists have programmed young people to blindly accept that major corporations are selfless and good" when really "they are machines to make money and all that virtue signaling is a smokescreen." To the leftist, who is unlikely to go to such sites or otherwise come into contact with such thinking, this remark may be shocking in just how much it gets the reality of the situation completely backwards. It is not the right but the left which warns the public against credulousness in corporations, and about the dangers of an economic system sacrificing all to the interests of business. Yet the remark is entirely consistent with the conventional wisdom of a milieu in which people confuse what is left with what is woke, all of which has been so much to the advantage of the right in the political battles of our time.

The Rhetoric of the "Knowledge Economy": Legacies

The term "knowledge economy" was more or less synonymous with the "information economy"--certainly in the usage of Alvin Toffler and his cohorts, for whom "knowledge" was "refined information." In this "knowledge" or "information" economy as Toffler explained the term the creation of wealth, and the organization of human society, would increasingly shift away from centering on the production, storage, movement, processing, ownership, buying, selling, exploitation, of things to centering on the production, storage, movement, processing, ownership, buying, selling, exploitation of knowledge, not least because knowledge would be used to substitute for things--enable the engineers and administrators of the world to economize on the labor, energy, raw materials required for every unit of economic output--in a radical fashion. From reducing the number of parts and the assembly required per piece of good, to creating replacements for rare and expensive materials from abundant ones, one key aspect of this was supposed to be the change civilizations energy base from relying on an extraction and burning of finite fossil fuels to, through a higher state of the art, the renewable energy of the sun. In the process this drastic "dematerialization" of our economic life was supposed to lead to other changes, down to the operating "code" by which that economy is organized, with the synchronization and centralization and hierarchy and drive toward "bigness" that made modern life so rigid and stifling replaced with the opposite, a flexible, decentralized world of flattened structures where "small can be beautiful."

Toffler estimated that this really new economy--indeed, the new civilization that economy brought about in as profound a revolution as the Industrial revolution had been--would be well-established on the Earth by 2025, the very year in which I am writing this post. However, it is clear that the decentralized world he imagined never came, just as the dematerialization that he anticipated never came, because the requisite productivity revolution that replaced so much of the material with KNOWLEDGE never came. Indeed, it seems symbolic of the reality of the era that after the Great Recession the Obama administration bet not on the "knowledge economy" and the technologies of the future but the shale boom yielding oil and gas sustaining the fossil fuel-driven technological base of the past--a story too little told or appreciated--as the consequences of that decision endure in a 2025 in which the energy transition Toffler envisaged has scarcely begun, and indeed yet to prove itself a genuine transition rather than a false start of the kind we have seen in the past. It seems symbolic of the reality of 2025 that the very "tech billionaire" who was the face of the "information" technology with which it is common to identify the "information" age has also become America's largest private owner of farmland--pouring the proceeds of his piece of the purported knowledge economy into amassing vast holdings of the oldest, most foundational, of natural resources. It also seems symbolic of the reality that when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the knowledge economy besotted nitwits of the board rooms were reminded just how much of the hard, tiring, dirty, boring old drudge labor of the kind they discounted keeps the world running, and presented grand visions of the automation of the world--of which next to nothing has come five years on in the very year in which the knowledge economy was supposed to have been a well-established reality. And symbolic of the same reality, too, that the robotization of drudgery what has excited the idiots who have created the biggest bubble in history with their "THE SINGULARITY IS NOW!" foolishness has been "large language models" which cannot flip a burger or hook up a house to an electric grid or drive a truck but may, according to recent reports, be beginning to displace the highly touted knowledge workers of the software world, all on the basis not of some transcendence of the resource throughput-expanding industrial economy but the exacerbation of that model's strains as the data centers powering it ramp up world electricity consumption, driving the burning of yet more of the world's finite supply of fossil fuels (and its still more finite capacity to absorb the resulting pollution).

Indeed, as things stand in the actual 2025 the rhetoric of a knowledge economy seems to have been an extravagant piece of technological hype that deflected calls for the address of social and environmental problems, and generally served as propaganda for neoliberalism--for we only had to let capitalists do their thing, and it would deliver abundance and sustainability and FREEDOM together! Indeed, it entailed a particular devaluation of the physical labor and even much of the mental labor that keeps the world running as it exalted instead the well-graduated legal or technical professional, the business executive, the financier, and above all the startup -founding entrepreneur as the creators of value, the makers from whom others are mere takers, justifying and defending economic and social inequality. Indeed, it is easily recognizable as part of the long libertarian-right tradition of devaluing working people and their contributions as it valorizes instead the possessors of property, wealth and power (before George Gilder there was Joseph Schumpeter), given a modern veneer because instead of speaking of the divine right of property they spoke of knowledge, and skills, and EDUMACATION! as the driving forces in that way that sets the Tim Taylors grunting behind their fences as at the Big Thinks of Good Neighbor Wilson, all as the unconvinced were likely inhibited about challenging the claim, for who dares to question the value of EDUMACATION!? And altogether the package seems to have been at best a delusion, at worst a cynical lie that useful idiots helped to promulgate, and to have in any case played its part in creating the disastrous situation the world faces today as we consider a near half century of such thinking and its associated politics paralyzing action on global problems that have been permitted to worsen--with a stagnant world economy that has left per capita Gross World Product outside China pretty much where it was before the Volcker shock, and much of that public actually even worse off than such a figure suggests given the ways in inflation may have understated the rise in the cost of living, the increased inequality with which income and wealth are distributed, the social rot attendant upon the associated changes, and ecological decay as a world economy which had just breached the "limits to growth" in the 1970s is now approaching a rate of consumption that would require two whole Earths to sustain it. As indeed was inevitable given that the neoliberal model, certainly when one appreciates its insufficiently appreciated finance-centricity, not only did neoliberalism not yield the productivity revolution promised but that it was in every respect inimical to everything that would enable such a productivity revolution to happen, from the long-term thinking and planning required, to the state support required to get business over the bridge between the idea and its successful commercialization, to the disruption that inevitably means many rentiers being made unhappy as the value of the assets they hold declines in a world where the state of the art moves on. The best that one may be able to say for it is that it has been a learning experience--from which far too few seem to have learned anything.