It takes Ross Douthat a very long time to get to his point about “cancel culture” in his New York Times column but he does get around to it eventually:

I don’t expect “The Cat in the Hat” to be unpublished or my own tracts to swiftly vanish. But it was a good thing when liberalism, as a dominant cultural force in a diverse society, included a strong tendency to police even itself for censoriousness — the ACLU tendency, the don’t-ban-Twain tendency, the free-speech piety of the high school English teacher.

Now liberal cultural power has increased, the ACLU doesn’t seem very interested in the liberties of non-progressives anymore, and Dr. Seuss sells as pricey samizdat.

I don’t know what awaits beyond this particular Zebra, and I’d rather not find out.

The problem is that progressives aren’t liberals. Liberals defend freedom. I don’t know what progressives believe in these days. Power, that’s for sure. Beyond that I simply don’t know. I’m not a progressive.

Presumably, he’s making what is another example of a slippery slope argument. It certainly look looks like there’s a chain of steps in a bad direction involved.

I found both things with which I agreed and things with which I disagreed in Gideon Rose’s meandering piece at Foreign Affairs, “Foreign Policy for Pragmatists”. I found this passage, about the events on January 6, thought-provoking:

Was the riot a political protest that got out of hand? An attempted putsch? A heroic defense of the republic against satanic pedophiles? It was all of these and more, because the event was streaming on several platforms simultaneously—not just the conventional tv networks but also the inner mental channels of the deluded rioters. This was history as tragedy and farce combined; the casualties included a woman who was reportedly trampled to death while carrying a flag saying “Don’t Tread on Me.”

The most persuasive reading of the day is as immersive theater, and not just because the marchers came in costume. It played like a mass live production of Euripides’s Bacchae, the tale of a mysterious cult leader who wreaks vengeance on a city that disrespects him by whipping its citizens into a frenzied nihilistic rampage. Some men just want to watch the world burn. And some crowds just like the way it hurts.

The riot’s practical implications are deeply disturbing. But its theoretical implications are more so. For example, one leading proponent of the big lie in question, Peter Navarro, was a crucial architect of the Trump administration’s trade policy. It will be interesting to see how mainstream scholarship on international political economy incorporates conspiracy theorizing into the heart of its analysis.

but I think his conclusion is a gross misreading of American history, recent history in particular:

The Biden administration, in short, does not face a tragic choice of pessimism, optimism, or just winging it. Instead of embracing realism or liberalism, it can choose pragmatism, the true American ideology. The key is to draw on diverse theoretical traditions to develop plausible scenarios of many alternative futures, design and track multiple indicators to see which of those scenarios is becoming more likely, and follow the evidence honestly where it goes.

Wilsonianism, the missionary impulse to spread your philosophy, whether democracy, free markets, or women’s rights to other countries, has dominated foreign policy thought in both Republicans and Democrats for some time. You can find it in Bush’s prosecution of the Iraq War and in Obama’s actions in Syria. It’s only pragmatic to the extent that you consider the acceptance of those beliefs in other countries as a) possible and b) in the U. S. interest. Pragmatic in terms of domestic politics? Perhaps. Pragmatic as foreign policy? That’s not credible.

Additionally, I don’t see American foreign policy as transient and changeable as he does. Quite to the contrary I think it’s been remarkably constant over the years, especially when compared with other major powers. China, Germany, France, and the UK aren’t pursuing the same goals as they were 80 years ago. We are.

Quite to the contrary I see American foreign policy as an emergent phenomenon, composed of the competing forces in American politics, optimistic and pessimistic, pragmatic and idealistic.

Consequently, I see it as highly unlikely that the Biden Administration will learn much from history or that it will be transformative in our foreign policy. It will be buffeted by those forces to form its own synthesis, just as every previous administration has.

It’s gratifying to see others espouse the positions I’ve been arguing here for some time. That’s the case with this Bloomberg editorial, proposing the return of “earmarks”:

Earmarking got a bad rap over the years, and not entirely without reason. Total spending on such measures rose from less than $3 billion in 1991 to $29 billion at its peak in 2006. Tales of misspent funds proliferated. Favors were exchanged. Crimes were committed. You might recall a $223 million set-aside for connecting a remote Alaskan town to a yet more remote island. An uproar over this “bridge to nowhere” was one reason both parties suspended earmarks altogether in 2011.

In fact, though, such boondoggles were the exception. Over the years, lawmakers generally requested small-dollar earmarks to solve local problems or fund workaday projects. The process often made Congress more responsive to regional needs and legislators more attentive to what they were passing. Because earmarks merely directed funds that were already being appropriated, moreover, they required no new spending and added nothing to budget deficits.

More important, they created incentives for compromise. A lawmaker looking to advance a general-interest bill could sweeten the pot by funding local initiatives favored by an opposition member. This gave the minority an interest in governing, encouraged bipartisanship, and helped resolve collective-action problems. Although unlovely, it was often quite consequential: Both George W. Bush’s Medicare expansion and Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act relied on earmarks (broadly defined) for passage.

Eliminating earmarks was seen as a way of cleaning up government and reducing spending. Instead it turned out to be a formula for making it difficult to pass legislation. That is all too frequently the case with such reforms. Take the present civil service system. Please.

As Yogi Berra put it in theory there’s no difference between practice and theory but in practice there is.

While I agree with the editors of the Washington Post that the Biden Administration should take the right lesson from globalization:

BETWEEN THE fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the global pandemic of 2020, the global population grew from 5.2 billion to 7.7 billion. Yet the share living in extreme poverty fell from more than a third to less than 10 percent, according to the World Bank. In other words, hundreds of millions of premature deaths were avoided and a similar number of opportunities for human flourishing were created. While China accounted for much of the progress, World Bank data show that poverty fell at similar rates elsewhere. Not coincidentally, this colossal achievement occurred during three decades of U.S.-endorsed trade liberalization, which brought investment, jobs and income to previously destitute corners of the world.

We reiterate these facts to rebalance the debate over globalization, which is at risk of being won by those who view free trade one-sidedly as a job-destroying disaster for American workers. Alas, Biden administration foreign policy pronouncements this week show how much influence this critique has gained over both political parties.

but somehow they neglect to outline what the right lesson would be. I can tell you what I wish they would learn: China is in a class by itself. There is no other country that is that large, as authoritarian as China, or as dedicated to mercantilist policies that treat trade as a zero sum game.

They also somehow fail to mention that China is presently engaged in cyberwarfare against the U. S. That’s surprising since it’s one of the biggest stories of the day.

Steve Rattner has an op-ed in the New York Times, cautioning against irrational exuberance on the part of Democratic lawmakers in their support of spending plans:

The prices of many commodities are surging — copper and lumber because of a jump in home building. Global steel demand has pushed up iron ore prices. Even tin, heavily used in electronics, has soared as suppliers rush to meet consumer demand for new gadgets.

Inflation expectations are also on the rise among traders. Interest rates on long-term Treasury bonds — a reliable inflation indicator — remain historically low, but have been marching upward. That, in turn, has shaken financial markets, which rightfully view climbing interest rates as the enemy of their investments.

It is against this backdrop that Congress is on the verge of injecting an additional $1.9 trillion into an economy that has already received more than $4 trillion in boosts from Washington. According to several estimates, the measure’s spending far exceeds the extent of the shortfall in economic output caused by the pandemic.

And let’s not forget the effects of easy money from our central bank. The Federal Reserve, which has driven short-term interest rates to near zero, has also injected more money into the economy in the past year than it did fighting the Great Recession in 2008.

advising:

The $422 billion in stimulus checks that will put money in the pockets of millions of Americans financially unaffected by the crisis should be replaced by much more targeted (and less expensive) efforts around those who have been directly hit with economic losses.

Policymakers should explore, for instance, income replacement programs that would help Americans who still have jobs but have had their earnings cut significantly by the pandemic — relying on changes in adjusted gross income from 2019 to 2020, as derived from tax returns.

The $510 billion in aid to states and localities (including for education) should also be dramatically reduced; the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget recently explained how Moody’s Analytics estimates only “an additional $86 billion of aid is needed to cover revenue losses.”

That assistance should also be more concentrated on where the need exists. According to Bloomberg, California’s revenues for this fiscal year are roughly 10 percent greater than expected (partly a result of soaring technology company valuations), while general-fund revenue in New York is estimated to be 11.7 percent lower than prepandemic forecasts.

I have a number of quibbles with his piece. How in the heck did Steve Rattner get to be an economic adviser? His general economic ignorance is on full display in the piece. He jumbles up multiple different things (price increases due to increased demand and inflation) and worries about the wrong things. The Federal Reserve has actually become pretty good over the last 40 years of dealing with ordinary inflation. He is entirely too self-exonerating:

It’s true that, with the benefit of hindsight, we did too little to address that recession. But we are in serious danger of overreacting to this one.

Let me provide an alternative interpretation. Those of us who, correctly, foresaw that the Obama Administration had taken its collective eye off the recession ball and turned its attention to other bright, shiny objects, had foresight. If the Obama Administration had actually believed its proposed measures were necessary and effective, less money would have been spent on politically motivated boondoggles and more would have been spent in recovering from the recession. Maybe funding the politically motivated boondoggles were the point, a motivation Mr. Rattner doesn’t even consider in the present administration’s support for the funds in the “COVID-19 relief” bill to give handouts to people a multiple of the median income, bailouts to state and local governments whose revenues haven’t declined, additional funding for the NEA and NEH, and multiple other provisions.

My concerns are different from his including:

• Economic distortion and deadweight loss
• Reduction in economic growth
• Increased debt overhang
• Risk of loss of confidence in the dollar

At Outside the Beltway James Joyner reflects on the events of January 6, ultimately arriving at this conclusion:

I share Greenwald’s fear of overreaction and the threats to our civil liberties that comes with it. For selfish and ideological reasons, I would like the fences around public spaces in our nation’s capital to come down and the National Guard troops stationed there to go back to their day jobs. They can’t become permanent fixtures “just in case.”

But let’s also not pretend that the greatest danger to our Republic at the moment is coming from Democrats. It would be a lot harder to demonize Republicans if 74 million of them hadn’t voted to re-elect a would-be autocrat and if their elected officials didn’t overwhelmingly go along with his attempt to steal the election and then exonerate his incitement of a physical attack on the seat of government.

Neither James’s piece nor Glenn Greenwald’s, which serves as the point of departure for James’s post, uses the words “slippery slope” but as I see it there are actually four different things going on in the national debate about the events of January 6 and two of them are “slippery slope” arguments.

A “slippery slope” argument in reasoning, rhetoric, or case law is an argument that one step will inevitably be followed by a chain of other steps leading to a significantly negative outcome. For example, it can be argued that the attacks on September 11, 2001 were the culmination of a several different such chains of steps (inadequate airline security, failure to respond to terrorist attacks, etc.). Probably the most famous slippery slope argument in history is the “domino theory”, an argument for the Viet Nam War. Was the domino theory right or wrong? It’s still being debated.

A slippery slope argument may be refuted if the chain of steps can be demonstrated not to occur, if there is no slippery slope.

As I noted above I think there are actually four things going on:

• Extreme right-wing groups are angry and dangerous
• Congressional leaders are pursuing the will o’ the wisp of perfect safety
• It is being argued that we are on a slippery slope to a coup of right-wing extremists
• It is being argued that we are on a slippery slope to becoming a military dictatorship

I agree that extreme right-wing groups are angry and and dangerous. They may or may not be on the rise. I think that extremist groups of all kinds and persuasions are on the rise, facilitated by social media, which makes it easier for like-minded people to find each other. In a country as large as ours there are bound to be a certain number of dangerous extremists, from actual Sig Heil-ing Nazis to anarchists to Marxist revolutionaries to violent radical Islamists to others I probably can’t even imagine. The position presently being argued by the Democratic leadership in particular is that groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers are uniquely dangerous. I’m skeptical. I think they’re all dangerous but in terms of ongoing civil disorder it’s hard to match the record of the anarchists in the Pacific Northwest.

Presently our political leadership is very old—most were born before 1946. In the past I’ve observed that members of the Silent Generation tend to be very insecure, understandable under the circumstances of their early lives. When you combine that insecurity with the precautionary principle and an actual threat, it may provoke an excessive response and IMO that’s what we’ve seen.

I think the notion that we are on a slippery slope to a coupe of right-wing extremists has been refuted by events. Has it been categorically disproven? No. But events subsequent to January 6 have not seen an escalation of the threat. Those predictions have all been wrong. While a vestigial threat may remain there doesn’t appear to be a slippery slope.

I don’t think the same argument can be made about the “security state”. The best way to refute the argument that we’re on a slippery slope in that direction would be to remove the National Guard and the barbed wire from Washington, DC and stop talking about increasing domestic surveillance efforts.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed Charles Lipson contrasts equality with the modern pleas for “equity”:

On his first day as president, Joe Biden issued an “Executive Order on Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities.” Mr. Biden’s cabinet nominees must now explain whether this commitment to “equity” means they intend to abolish “equal treatment under law.” Their answers are a confused mess.

Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton raised the question explicitly in confirmation hearings. Attorney General-designate Merrick Garland responded: “I think discrimination is morally wrong. Absolutely.” Marcia Fudge, slated to run Housing and Urban Development, gave a much different answer. “Just to be clear,” Mr. Cotton asked, “it sounds like racial equity means treating people differently based on their race. Is that correct?”

Ms. Fudge’s responded: “Not based on race, but it could be based on economics, it could be based on the history of discrimination that has existed for a long time.” Ms. Fudge’s candid response tracks that of Kamala Harris’s tweet and video, posted before the election and viewed 6.4 million times: “There’s a big difference between equality and equity.”

Ms. Harris and Ms. Fudge are right. There is a big difference. It’s the difference between equal treatment and equal outcomes. Equality means equal treatment, unbiased competition and impartially judged outcomes. Equity means equal outcomes, achieved if necessary by unequal treatment, biased competition and preferential judging.

Those who push for equity have hidden these crucial differences for a reason. They aren’t merely unpopular; they challenge America’s bedrock principle that people should be treated equally and judged as individuals, not as members of groups.

The demand for equal outcomes contradicts a millennium of Anglo-Saxon law and political evolution. It undermines the Enlightenment principle of equal treatment for individuals of different social rank and religion. America’s Founders drew on those roots when they declared independence, saying it was “self-evident” that “all men are created equal.”

That heritage, along with the lack of a hereditary aristocracy, is why claims for equal treatment are so deeply rooted in U.S. history. It is why radical claims for unequal treatment must be carefully buried in word salads praising equity and social justice.

Hidden, too, are the extensive measures that would be needed to achieve equal outcomes. Only a powerful central government could impose the intensive—and expensive—programs of social intervention, ideological re-education and economic redistribution. Only an intrusive bureaucracy could specify the rules for every business, public institution and civic organization. Those unhappy implications are why advocates of equity are so determined to hide what the term really means.

While I am predisposed to agree with him, to support the now old-fashioned ideas of “colorblindness” and equality, I don’t think we should close our eyes to the problems faced by millions of blacks, particularly those who live in the primarily black neighborhoods of cities.

Those problems have been exacerbated over the last 30 years by the rapid importation of immigrant workers. A generation later some of those immigrant workers have become voters, are competing with blacks not only for jobs but for political power, and don’t feel the same obligations that at least some white Americans do. Problems that were once merely difficult are becoming intractable. IMO that’s among the reasons for the anxiety we’ve seen over the last year.

I’m not as pleased as David Ignatius appears to be with the updated version of industrial policy he says in his latest Washington Post column that the Biden Administration is eager to embrace:

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), one of the commission’s chief sponsors, put the new vision succinctly in a December 2019 speech. He said it was time to recognize “the perils of free-market fundamentalism” in dealing with China and instead embrace “a 21st-century pro-American industrial policy.” That revisionist thinking now animates the Biden administration, senior members of Congress and some leading technology executives.

Like some other big paradigm shifts, this one has become obvious only as it began to displace the old laissez-faire approach to China. Behind the scenes, there’s broad congressional support for the activist stance in both parties: Nineteen of the commission’s recommendations were quietly inserted in the defense authorization act passed in January, including what could be billions of dollars in spending for new semiconductor fabrication plants in the United States.

The changes that artificial intelligence will bring to everything that touches digital technology dazzle even the most buttoned-down experts in the field. That’s why members of the commission and others close to this issue are so agitated about the need for radically increased U.S. efforts: They literally think our future is at stake, militarily, economically and even politically.

What’s driving the move toward government-directed investment in technology is a fear that China’s so-called civil-military fusion will overwhelm American effort, unless it’s matched. Eric Schmidt, the former Google chief executive who chaired the commission, argued in congressional testimony last month that “the threat of Chinese leadership in key technology areas is a national crisis.” Instead of leaving solutions to private companies, he urged, “we will need a hybrid approach that more tightly aligns government and private-sector efforts to win.”

Abandoning “free-market fundamentalism” doesn’t bother me. I’ve been proposing that myself for decades. Mass engineering projects with highly specific objectives, e.g. “We choose to put a man on the moon”, don’t bother me. In the past the federal government has been pretty done pretty well by them. “Operation Warp Speed” may fit into that category. Reshoring industries vital to defense doesn’t bother me, either. I think it’s a scandal and an outrage that we’ve allowed things vital to our national defense to be sourced only from China.

But vague, potentially impossible objectives overseen by a committee consisting of elected officials, federal bureaucrats, and business executives make me very leery.

It goes back more than a century. I’ve written about it before. The chairman of AT&T wanted the entire economy to be run by a relative handful of business executives, meeting “in secret enclave” with the federal government, formulating their plans to rework the American economy. It reminds me too much of Adam Smith’s famous remark:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty or justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.

which in context is less a critique of the evil intentions of businessmen than it is of public-private cooperatives which somehow rarely turn out well. Some people end up getting very, very rich while the country as a whole gets poorer.

At Newsweek Vivek Ramaswamy presents what appears to me to be a creative and novel argument that businesses may face risks for terminating employees because they don’t meet up to “woke” standards:

It’s well established that an employer violates Title VII if it fires an employee because of his religious beliefs. But was Ms. Carano expressing religious beliefs through her social media post? Very unlikely. Nor was Mr. McNeil when he uttered the racial slur, nor was Mr. Cafferty, who said nothing at all. But that’s not the end of the matter.

Often forgotten is that Title VII protects not only religious employees from being fired for their beliefs, but equally protects nonreligious employees from being fired for refusing to endorse an employer-mandated religion. “What matters in this context is not so much what [the employee’s] own religious beliefs were,” the Seventh Circuit federal court of appeals said in the 1997 Venters v. City of Delphi. What matters is whether the employee was “fired because he did not share or follow his employer’s religious beliefs.”

The real question, then, is whether wokeness in America today qualifies as a religion under Title VII. If it does, Ms. Carano has a straightforward claim of religious discrimination—she was fired for refusing to follow an employer-mandated religion.

Surprising as it may seem, the answer to that legal question is almost certainly yes. The Supreme Court’s definition of religion used to require a belief in God, but the Court abandoned that position 60 years ago in Torcaso v. Watkins. Today, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)—which administers Title VII—employs a much more expansive definition: “A belief is ‘religious’ for Title VII purposes if it is…a ‘sincere and meaningful’ belief that ‘occupies a place in the life of its possessor parallel to that filled by…God.'” “Religious beliefs include . . . non-theistic ‘moral or ethical beliefs as to what is right and wrong which are sincerely held with the strength of traditional religious views.'”

The risk then arises from “wokeness” being a comprehensive and closely-held system of beliefs about “fundamental or ultimate matters”.

Don’t dismiss this as inconsequential. People are losing their livelihoods, including people who are not celebrities or in the public spotlight, in some cases for doing quite innocent things as Mr. Ramaswamy highlights in his article.

Is Trumpism equally a religion? I know of no one who’s lost his or her job by failing to conform to Trumpist tenets. Maybe someone can produce an example.