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So where do the boat paraders, brand new $70k truck ralliers, and Trump supporters who flew to the Capitol riot, staying in fancy hotels - fit in with this white working class? Maybe these "petty exurban bourgeoise" are a small sliver of Trump's base. But they're certainly the most visible and vocal.

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I hope the sarcastic tone I read this in is the sarcastic tone you wrote it in.

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This is the project a number of GOP senators, notably Hawley and Rubio, have been pursuing pretty explicitly: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/07/opinion/sunday/republican-party-trump-2020.html

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Possibly worth noting that trade benefits the poor, who spend more of their income than the rich on highly traded goods: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/131/3/1113/2461162

Though maybe the factual question of "are tariffs good?" isn't relevant to the piece, or maybe it is but the economists who route the above article are in the 75% of at-risk experts :)

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I don't think it's correct that the platform of capitalism and liberty does not excite people. I think that what is currently called "capitalism" - where there are companies that are too big to fail, who are de-facto controlling most of the economy and are in the process of taking control over the politics and public discourse - do not excite people, especially ones that are targeted for exclusion and oppression as "basket of deplorables".

I think that when a NYT journalist, fresh from participating in a struggle session where her colleague was forced to grovel and then fired because he dared to suggest that dissent from the Party Line may not be literally Hitler - when such person talks about "liberty", it does not excite people. And when some party functionary speaks about "liberty" one day, and then comes to an MSNBC show and shakes hands and exchanges smiles with people who call his electorate literally Hitler - that also makes it pretty hard to get excited about those words.

Trump got people excited because he actually tried to do what he promised to do. One may agree or disagree about whether those things were worth doing, or whether the approach he chose for doing them was the effective one, but one can see how people can get excited if a person says "I am going to do X" actually tries to do X, instead of half-assing an attempt to do 1/10 of X, failing to do even than and campaigning on "well, the other guy is even worse, so you don't have a choice but voting for me!"

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"I hate you and you hate me. But maybe I would hate you less if you didn't suck."

Stopped reading. Not sure what the rest was but this is just lazy.

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If either party were to actually do this, and do it in a way that didn't leave me suspecting it was a facade for same-old, same-old, I'd sign up, even though I have little use personally for significant parts of the culture described. (Nothing wrong with football, or church, and neither one is less desirable in the grand scheme of things than my personal hobbies, as long as I don't have to do either one.)

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I love Swift's Modest Proposal - is this in the same vein? Am I too stupid now to recognise that encouraging the eating of their children is a better way to feed the poor than providing charity is satire?

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This is making me real fired up.

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I recommend the book "In Defense of Elitism" by Joel Stein. Funniest book I've read in years.

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"Aren't I just describing well-off people? No. Teachers, social workers, and starving college students may be poor, but can still be upper-class. Pilots, plumbers, and lumber barons are well-off, but not upper-class. Donald Trump is a billionaire, but still recognizably not upper class. The upper class is a cultural phenomenon."

This is great. As someone who would like to see a smarter, better conservative movement, I couldn't agree more. For this to work you have to draw a line against the people who would like to hijack the movement and make it about economic class, because it's safer than attacking other things, i.e., wokeness.

I co-authored a report here on debunking the "working-class party myth," and it talks about the consensus in political science that economics doesn't motivate voters all that much. We say it's all about "social issues" (the left-wing academy just calls it "racism" or "racial resentment") but the idea that it's not about money or economic status is important.

https://cspicenter.org/reports/the-national-populist-illusion-why-culture-not-economics-drives-american-politics/

Policy wise, a class based agenda can include smart stuff like war on credentialism, while if you try to do lowest common denominator economic class stuff you just get more left-wing ideas, and we already have one party pushing that.

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1. Awful nice of you to let Josh Hawley ghostwrite a post after banning him from the comments a few weeks ago.

2. Lots of policy judgments are difficult to boil down to a number, or turn on value differences between various numbers. I am not sure exactly how prediction markets could be leveraged to solve climate change, for instance. A prediction market with a long enough time horizon might snuff out skeptics of the phenomenon itself (many bets made by climate bloggers in the 00s are just now being paid/welched) but I don't see it spurring on any action, at least distinct from the market market's consensus of "that's the future's problem."

3. In terms of rhetoric, Republicans pretty much are already here. The problem is that the working class pays the least attention to punditry and debates and therefore this cynical signaling will only go so far without actually delivering the goods. It took a once-in-a-century crisis to get them to un-ass some coin in the form of CARES, but under a Democratic administration things are going right back to deficit trolling.

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I would vote for that version of the Republican party

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This is interesting! Are you going to do a similar post for the Democrats? Would be cool to read them side-by-side.

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"Trump outmanuevered the Republican establishment by finding a front where he could go on the offensive. He ignored the unfavorable terrain of race/sex/etc, and focused on class."

Not sure about this part! His signature issue was immigration, and ran on banning literally every Muslim in the world from coming here. It's clear that was part of his appeal, especially in the primaries.

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I am a young rightist who works in DC. I will attest that already you will find, on staffs and in higher education, bright anti-“Cathedral” people (or whatever actually numinous term you prefer, as opposed to the vacuous ‘anti-establishment’) who not only read such authors as Lasch and Lind, but listen to avowedly “class reductionist” or “post-left” thinkers. We care about policy solutions to economic problems, but consider ourselves constrained by the “white question” within what one could call conservatism. We understand why we attract minority voters — realistic rhetoric about urban crime probably captures much of the variance — but we saw the Trump campaign systematically (some would say intentionally, with regard to Kushner et al) refrain from wholeheartedly pursuing greater gains among demographics that predictably swung to the right. What’s more, we try to persuade our friends who stop at Tucker Carlson (rhetoric) and American Compass (policy) to consider whether they go far enough in their orientation towards these problems. Our self-understanding is that we will see neither a critical mass of our kind with platforms not a growing number of representatives who are able to combine passion with prudence. But our numbers continue to grow, and our ideas will only get better. You do good work with this blog; we don’t hate you. But then again, when you address yourself to Republicans, you might well speak past us, if the party leadership has its way.

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Interestingly the Conservative Party in the UK has done this kind of cultural appeal with great success in the 2019 general election, where they managed to steal dozens of seats from former Labour (the biggest left-wing party in the UK) heartlands in the North of England. They had suffered from being economically 'left behind' due to the lingering effects of large scale deinsutralisation from the 1960s-80s, and the Conservatives managed to win these seats due to a promise to "Get Brexit Done", to "level up" the regional economy, and because the then Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was seen as not credible as a leader. Now they are lauching a so-called "war on woke" to try to retain these voters (see this article: https://www.economist.com/britain/2021/02/20/tories-bet-on-culture-wars-to-unite-disparate-voters). All of this is somewhat similar (if not the same in aprts) to the points in this article and I'm wondering how much of a template this is for Republicans in the US.

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Seems like shameless Douthat-bait to get yourself mentioned in his column ;-) He won't be able to restrain himself, and we all know he lurks here.

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1. You are using "upper class" to mean what almost everybody else means by "upper middle class". Of course "the upper middle class à la lanterne" (well, la classe moyenne supérieure...) doesn't have the right ring to it, but "les aristocrats à la lanterne" doesn't sound Republican either.

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I think this shows that Fussell's class book does not port well to politics in the 2020s. While Fussell's point (or was it Alexander's friend's point? I think the latter) that class is a series of separate ladders is true *to a degree*, it's hard to separate class from money completely. Rich people still vote Republican. People without college degrees who own & run successful businesses are against a minimum wage increase because it will cut into their profits; their employees want it because it will give them more money. Republicans are against minimum wage increases; it's really hard to say that this is a fight for the *working* class, or against the upper class.

Of course, Republicans *already* try and fight this in class language — they don't use the word, and they don't adopt Scott's specific proposals, but they do almost anything else; "elite" means "upper class" in Scott's sense. But it's pretty deceptive when they do: their policies help rich people (most of whom are in the Republican class—rich are still strongly Republicans!), and hurt poor people (opposite.)

Really, what we have here is a good, old-fashioned cultural conflict, of Red v Blue tribe. Class doesn't fit it.

Two additional points: First, Republicans are usually against expertise not out of class warfare but because they dislike what it tells them; above all, on climate change—a topic we really really don't have time to screw around with attacking expertise on—it mitigates against a lot of things that the Red tribe like, e.g. SUVs, suburbs, etc. It also does a lot of things that are straight-up economic: to adapt to climate change and to de-carbonize the economy both take lots of money & government programs, which Republicans are against because they hate high taxes — again, something that already fits very badly into their pre-existing class frame.

Second, I know some people think it's overstated, but there really is a lot of racism in the Republican base. IMS it was a better predictor for voting Trump than any other single variable in 2016. Going to make alliances tricky.

Basically, I think the Republicans already try this; it fits very badly with the parts of their program they are most passionate about; and in some very important areas (climate change) it is leading to utter disaster.

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This is magnificent. Hope some Republican politicians are reading this. A Republican party with this kind of platform is one I could actually wholeheartedly support, instead of only occasionally in the interests of maintaining balance of power.

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I sure hope this will be followed up with a part 2: A Modest Proposal For Democrats: Use The Word "Class"

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So part of me really likes this, wants to agree with everything here, and would probably vote for this republican party. Which raises the alarm bell in my head that goes "This isn't how republicans actually think; this is just how you wish they would think".

I don't think I have any special insight as to why (that is, I can think of some reasons - it's hard to imagine someone like Ted Cruz or Mike Pence or Trump Jr. or whoever explicitly embracing this framing, and if you try to picture it and it feels weird your guess is as good as mine as to why this is). But specific points of disagreements:

Using betting markets instead of experts: This can work for top-level strategies (at least, if you have a lot of liquidity). But like I pointed out the other day (link again https://shakeddown.wordpress.com/2021/02/19/using-betting-markets-to-make-decisions/), there's an issue where betting markets are an order of magnitude slower and more complicated than the decision they reflect. You can use them for something big like "should we approve the AZ vaccine" or "should we build a transit system in Charlotte", but for short-turnaround decisions like "on which side of the street should we put the entrance to this station" You can't replace experts with them. There's no real getting around needing competent people who can make decisions in your organization.

On 4, I just have the minor point that "saying cops are bad because classism and not racism" still seems impossible for republicans because it's anti-cop? Or am I misreading the point of that bit?

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I am not sure that the term "class" is the best candidate for Scott's proposal. In fact, some Republicans are already articulating most of these ideas through the use of the term "elites", which I favour (I thought of using "intelligentsia" but the term is too elitist, LOL.

You can persuasively argue that elitism can be the target: a group of people who consider themselves better than the rest in everything they do: their policies, their diets, their environmental choices, the cars they drive. The Republican party can be the party of those who value hard work, decency and the traditional American cultural experience, Ford F-150 included.

You can then shed (hopefully) the linkages with racism and conspiracy theories and just represent everyone and anyone who is alienated by the sanctimonious speech and actions of the elite. Those part of the elite are detached from reality, they do not understand the real struggles of average people. And average people ought to be celebrated and protected.

Thank you for the engaging piece!

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The site you linked for the "college degree for childcare" has the 404 error page so I went to their homepage. Didn't find that story but saw a link for "How to get pregnant fast". Er, don't we all know how that works? And if you're trying for a baby, what worked for my sister was "have an elderly relative pray to St. Anne for a surprise for you; when your mother conveys this message, tell her "well it worked, I'm pregnant!"

Anyway, by the magic of Google, the original story comes from 2017 https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/district-among-the-first-in-nation-to-require-child-care-workers-to-get-college-degrees/2017/03/30/d7d59e18-0fe9-11e7-9d5a-a83e627dc120_story.html and is partially reasonable. Childcare - or Early Years Practitioner, as we're calling it round here where I work - is more than babysitting. With so many milestones etc. that schools, pre-schools and daycares are meant to be hitting for literal babies - see sample below of standards from the Irish National Quality Framework for Early Childhood Education:

Birth - 18 months

5.1.2 In your care routines, can you indicate how you show sensitivity towards the child’s signals and cues and how you respond appropriately, adequately and consistently?

5.1.3 How do your interactions with the child enhance her/his potential to interact positively with other children?

Describe how you engage the child’s interest (including the child with special needs) in objects, in her/his surroundings and in social interactions with others?

Yep, for a three month old baby, the daycare has to ensure their interactions "enhance their potential to interact positively with other children".

So, all this and more being dumped on childcare providers means that the qualifications needed are becoming more academic. Straight out of school minding kids isn't enough anymore. But a bachelor's degree isn't necessary, either. We have intermediate frameworks - a Level 5 qualification is the medium standard here, and you can do it as a student or mature student on a Post Leaving Certificate course. If you're unemployed/on social welfare, you can get a Back to Education Allowance while you're on the course. You can then go into employment or progress on to a college degree in the field.

So increasing professionalism required, yes, but a college degree not necessary.

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Just one question. Why do you think Republicans hate you?

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This manifesto could be tweaked to appeal to a significant portion of the left too - there are plenty of progressives who are tired of the tyranny of academia on policy and culture. And honestly I’m not sure the GOP is any more a natural fit for this kind of renewal than Democrats. Both parties are stacked with Yale law grads rearranging their nameplates.

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Honestly this might be the best post I’ve ever read, on any subject. I would never join a party like your reimagined Republican Party, but I would certainly get it, and in a perfect world it might make the Democrats work harder to be less offputting.

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Biggest problem I see with this is Republicans would have to decide where they stand on labor unions. If they still are against them, this working class rhetoric seems pretty hollow. If they decide they're for them, there goes the fundraising base.

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I don't say this often, but I don't know if you fully thought this through to the conclusion. This just teaches Republicans to be more persuasive. If they take this on and theoretically win the votes needed to gain power, they'll still be left with the same core policies, more or less. Try using "class" to support a Republican policy you DON'T like, and I think you'll see where this can backfire.

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As a low-income, highly-educated, almost-Marxist, I find this oddly persuasive and kind of chilling.

It's true that the Republicans would be *better* in some sense if they adopted this sort of approach, but is that "better for the country/world" or "better at destroying everything I hold dear"?

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Why did you name this A Modest Proposal? Am I missing the satire? This seems like a legitimately amazing idea to me. Am I somehow a really horrible person without knowing it?

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Thank you for this, really. It's such a joy to read things like that. I feel like you scraped the stew of vague ideas and intuitions in brain and shaped it into a coherent theory.

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>They conspicuously love Broadway

This is the only part you got wrong. Wealthy proles like Trump love the kitsch of Broadway musicals. Tacky tourists visiting NYC love Broadway.

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All legitimate. But replace “upper class” with “credentialed class” to avoid ongoing confusion (much of it deliberately created).

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This is a great piece, and with a good deal of truth in it. However, in France, Marine Le Pen's party has been trying to do that without amazing successes - the main problem is that an anti-immigration agenda is a requirement for a Republican/conservative platform and it's pretty hard to be anti-immigration without looking (and often not only looking) racist.

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Keeping in mind that Scott somehow managed to accidentally become so successful at blogging that he got himself condemned by the NYT, I'm starting to worry that this is going to end with him accidentally becoming chairman of the GOP.

The problem with that is, of course, that the next blogging hiatus would be insufferably long.

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If you divorce class from wealth, what actually makes the class described here the "upper class?" Like, I sort of feel that way too, but that's because I'm in it, and so ascribe higher status within a blue-tribe status framework. But if the "lower class" here has more political power, and sees themselves as having higher status (i.e. a F-150 is certainly higher status than a Prius or a bus pass in at least half the country), why are they the lower class?

This only matters insofar as most people think they should be on the "lower class" side of a class war. I'm not sure in the world described by Scott here that I should support the political power of a party of pilots over the party of social workers unless I'm fully bought into its honest support of a platform broadly helpful to the poor (...and I don't see them shaking off the pathos that led them to elect Donald Trump.)

All that said, I agree that this would be a better republican party than we have now, and would push the dems to be better.

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brb sending this to my consultant friends in the GOP

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I like this proposed kayfabe arc. Republicans and Democrats, make it happen! Last season's arc is getting stale.

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This implies that getting votes should be a goal of a political party, but we already know votes don't matter any more.

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> 3. War On The Upper-Class Media: This is your new term for "mainstream media". Being against the "mainstream media" sounds kind of conspiratorial.

I think you missed a step here. Americans -- except the class designated as the opposition -- LOVE conspiracy theories. Roswell, chemtrails, JFK, Masons, you name it, you can make millions with a miniseries about it that suggests there's something to it. The underclasses tend to have even wilder (and conventional yet unacceptable to the opposition class) ones. So "mainstream media" is great, the only thing that would be better is more scare quotes

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"There's a theory that the US party system realigns every 50-or-so years. Last time, in 1965, it switched from the Democrats being the party of the South and the Republicans being the party for blacks, to vice versa."

No; it realigns every 36-40 years. The current party system (seventh) started in either 2016 or 2000; the previous was either from 1976 to 2016 (Trump had a coalition right opposite that of Carter) or 1964-2000 (2000 was the first election with clear "red states and blue states").

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This is a really compelling idea! You can already see parts of the Republican Party trying to find their way into this position as they figure out what to do without Trump (see Romney's new child subsidy plan and his mandatory E-Verify/higher minimum wage combo plan co-sponsored with Cotton). And they could fit an interest in anti-trust enforcement against tech companies that are disproportionately filled with left-leaning white collar workers into this framework. That position would benefit them in the culture/social media wars, too: if Amazon is less powerful, they have less to worry about if AWS kicks off Parler or if Amazon stops stocking books written by social conservatives. Oren Cass is the most famous intellectual I'm aware of who's advocating a class-forward Republican Party, but it'd be interesting to see who else would come out of the woodwork if the party starts moving in this direction.

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founding

Is this some sort of 'gotcha' post?

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Of course, part of why Scott's essay here is more persuasive than Tucker Carlson to us here is that he's writing with blue/gray tribal language. I don't think that this is coded the right way to actually get traction with most Republicans.

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Donald Trump is not "upper class?" Was that supposed to be a joke?

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As someone currently in a PhD program, I get kinda annoyed when PhDs and grad students complain how hard they have it. Like, we literally get paid to do our hobby and work on cool research. My job is to do something that I would still want to do for free even if I were rich.

If anyone thinks 40k for a PhD job is so terrible...... well, nobody forced you to get a PhD and go into academia. You could have had a boring businessy-type job that you weren't passionate about and made more money. But part of the deal with jobs that are fun/cool/interesting is that they often don't pay as much as boring jobs.

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I mostly agree with this post except for the war on experts bit. I think not all fields with experts are created equal and denigrating the fields with more credible experts as being 75% useless is doing these fields a disservice. For example I would expect 98%+ of Physics experts to agree on how quantum tunnelling or a well understood process works. Sure they may disagree on the subtleties of M-theory but they will present a united front when it comes to pretty much anything we mere mortals are capable of understanding, and the front they present will be the right one. In such fields expert opinion should be treated as second only to divine revelations from God.

Conversely in fields like [redacted] (not wanting to name any names) there is far less certainty and experts will openly disagree on more fundamental questions. E.g. in public policy are mask mandates good or bad (note that this is a public policy question and not an epidemiology question; that would be more like by what percentage would infections next month reduce if R0 goes from 1.7 to 1.3) ? There will be a myriad of experts going both ways and now as a layman it is far less clear which side to trust, since having more experts on your side is only weak evidence of being right if the discrepancy is 75-25 vs 99-1 .

As a TLDR my point is that we shouldn't lump astrophysicists who can predict to the exact minute an asteroid will hit Earth with economists who are still brawling it out over whether a minimum wage is good or bad. Lumping both categories of experts into the same basket is massively unfair to the astrophysicists and just means the public trusts us less on questions where we are able to make extremely accurate predictions.

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There are a lot of good ideas here, but it's so divisive. I get it, it's politics, and division works. But it still makes me feel dirty, and I feel like I have one foot in both classes, so-to-speak, so the divisiveness seems even more acute.

I have a PhD in STEM, I work for an FRDC with an academic atmosphere, I drive a Subaru, believe in climate change, shop at farmer's markets, belong to a CSA, love Thai and Indian and fusion, drink craft beer and locally-made wines and ciders, travel, and got married and had a kid later in life.

But I also work alongside a lot of engineers and skilled technicians and think they're jobs are more valuable than mine is, would kind of like a truck if I thought I could pull it off, think a lot of climate activists are full of shit, also shop at the local chain grocery store, love Taco Bell and Chic-fil-a, love college/pro football, hate what the NYT has become, and feel guilty about not going to church more often.

In the event of a class war, I guess I'd side with Scott's re-imagined Republican party if forced to choose (assuming it actually came into being).

But I really wish that, instead of thinking of ways to more effectively fight the class war, we'd think of ways to more effectively have class peace. Is that so much to ask? Almost definitely.

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I am a HS grad who has worked with his hands and now work online.

I voted for D's since Bill Clinton but then voted Trump twice.

This is brilliant.

I didn't vote for Trump because he would do anything, I voted for Trump because Hillary despised people like me.

Then I voted for Trump because the upper class media said I was a Nazi for voting for Trump the first time.

Fuck you.

Fact is the Joe won because the D party has become the upper class suburb party for people who lived on zoom during the lockdowns.

I HATE their smugness. I hate their condescending attitude. I hate their love of "Experts" who aren't experts. I hate colleges that basically exist to sell student loans to kids to don't know better. I hate Woke because it is a way for upper class to be bigots.

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This is a powerful analysis. I think you underestimate the very well documented historic racism (ergo systemic) against black people. This is not some figment of elite class warfare against the poor majority by dividing them into races at war with one another. If you define a democratic republic as the state treating all its subjects equally (along the principles of liberty and equality), then the US did not become a republic until the late 60s. Two generations ago! We have to contend with this, and honestly.

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Mostly what I learned today is that Scott lurks Twitter harder than I thought.

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The thing which overwhelmingly occurs to me on reading this essay is: wow, thank god I don't live in a country with two party first past-the post voting!

I would love to see universities lose their monopoly status over employment prospects for example, and I'm happy that I have options where I live other than trying to inject that agenda into a party to which I do not belong or support

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If this happens, I'm voting red up-ballot for the first time.

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Classic!

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Very good. It includes a few things I disagree with, such as opposition to free trade based on mistaken economics, and I don't suppose you can persuade them that more immigration will result in more working class people to vote for them, but I would be more inclined to vote for the party you describe than either the present Republican or Democratic party.

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I want to see a post-wokeness that sees/knows the gears of racism and also doesn’t lean on a) lectures from the upper class and b) bureaucratic programs, to address it.

One of the Sanders mistakes was reducing race to class. There’s targeting of very wealthy African Americans (banks, loans, workplaces) which isn’t reducible to classism in part because the situations are higher-class coded in all dimensions. Wilkerson’s “Caste” probably nails this dynamic and so I have to go read that to say this properly. But yes, society needs to get past woke, the whole “now the upper-middle white intellectuals tell us how to think and feel” situation never works long term. There’s a sort of civil rights neoliberalism going on now which will cause the usual reactions to neoliberalism. But now the backlash will be at civil rights too. So I would like to see work for healing and against discrimination, survive the neoliberal coopting . In many ways the Class X bunch benefited the most from US neoliberalism. We think of “BLM” as “socialist” ...but for a lot of fans (not all) the enforcing state is supposed to simultaneously exist, and not cause problems, and that is not a thing, it’s the naïveté of neoliberalism.

Otherwise your platform is great. Make great fights between GOP/DEM if they took it seriously. Productive fights.

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I dunno; I bet there are more closeted upper-class Chick-Fil-A lovers than you'd expect. It's too darn tasty. Politics be damned. (I guess it's possible to love Chick-Fil-A without speaking the name, but it's hard.)

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We kind-of have this in Britain, it's called Spiked Online https://www.spiked-online.com/

Every article I have read on that website says the same thing (I have thought multiple times about making a "spiked online article generator"):

1. Currently many journalists writing about concerns over ___

2. The people making these complaints are all middle-class

3. And they look down on the people who are not complaining about ___

4. Therefore they're assholes who probably drink expensive coffee

5. Therefore ___ is nothing to be concerned about

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I am good with it.

My war on college has a number of immediate action items:

Wage and price controls on colleges: A college education shouldn't cost more than a medium size SUV. The president of a non profit institution shouldn't make more than the President of the United States. And all those vice presidents. done-ions.

Abolish sabbaticals and tenure. If they can't teach four classes they can retire.

Separate all scientific research into separate research companies that keep separate books. No more profs saying the can't teach more students because they have to do research.

Replace all selective admissions schemes with a lottery. Any high school grad should be eligible to go to any college.

Abolish irrelevant course requirements. You shouldn't have to take French literature to get a degree in accounting.

Tax endowments that are invested in anything but Treasuries or Municipals. Harvard shouldn't be a hedge fund that uses a college as a tax shelter. Undergraduates should not be concerned with whether Siwash U. owns shares in Exxon.

Shut down graduate programs if they cannot show that that their students finish within five years and get jobs afterward.

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Tucker Carlson is already banging the class warfare drum along these lines.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5xu32LnDyU

As the one guy with a major media platform who is able to channel the insecurities and articulate the zeitgeist of the Trump era right wing, Tucker is probably the closest thing the 2020s have to a William F. Buckley or Rush Limbaugh. Get Tucker to start proclaiming the virtues of prediction markets, and you might be surprised how quickly they get adopted as a core tenet of a right-wing policy platform. Someone should send this post to his staff.

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'upper-class media' doesn't have the same ring as 'fake news media' tho

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I've been saying for years that some ideological framework similar to this is the winning formula for the Upper Midwest/B1G states (I'm from Minnesota, live in Iowa and have also lived in WI and PA so I know these states and the cultures there well). It's essentially how Trump won (via rhetoric, not actual policy) Wisconsin, Michigan, and PA in 2016 and almost won Minnesota. Minnesota! A state that hasn't gone Republican since 1972. Trump ended up being just a normal (policy-wise) but more overtly racist general GOP figure and that opened the door for a normie old-school Dem like Biden to win those states back.

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> Most of what he said was offensive, blatantly false, or alienated more people than it won

Trump won almost 50% of the vote, so I would not say he alienated more people than he won. I thought the triple crown of being the world's biggest asshole, bungling the coronavirus response, and dishonorably handling the BLM protests was going to be his easy undoing. But he almost won. Liberals need to stop underestimating the Republicans, they are a Tom Cotton or a Dan Crenshaw away from the White House in 2024.

I'm a liberal, but I recently watched a movie called "Uncle Tom" about Black Republicans. It was a shockingly interesting movie. Herman Cain, who I thought was an undereducated idiot, was actually a computer programmer that programmed rockets. I'm well aware that it is as much propaganda as "left" movies are, so I take everything with a grain of salt, but they made convincing arguments. A lot of what they said made a lot of sense, it was old school conservatism where relying on oneself was more important than blaming others for your personal situation.

I think if you got a good, common sense Republican leader that wasn't an outright scumbag likes Cruz, Rubio, etc, they're already half-way there. If she/he lead with honor and grace, and espoused much of the policies you talk about above, the Republicans might have a good chance. I just don't see a single honorable Republican anywhere, which is their biggest problem. They are a bunch of political cowards that bow to perceived strength, which is why they were terrified of Trump, literally a bunch of sniveling Starscreams to Trump's Megatron.

John McCain was the last great Republican, and it's a shame he wasn't 10 years younger. If the Republicans found his moral successor, they really could have a great shot because there's a lot of moderates on both sides that would flock to a president that honorably leads with moderation without engaging in this exhausting identify politics.

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Admit it, Scott, you wrote this letter to yourself.

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In many ways this feels a lot like the brexit realignment we got in the UK. Right now the Conservative party just won a sweep of traditionally working class labour seats and is plotting how to keep them. Though of course there are internal divisions in the party about how much they can shift on economics - their new voters are not small state true believers, and quite like spending on things like the NHS.

(It has been remarked that the political slogan that defines the center of UK politics is "Fund the NHS, Hang the pedos" - https://twitter.com/christiancalgie/status/1196701436882673665)

There's also an internal division about whether they should stoke up the culture war or ignore it. It looks like the consensus from number ten is to strike hard but quietly. Pass new rules protecting free speech on campus but don't tweet like Trump about it. Kemi Badenoch (

However post covid there's a lot of space for the Tories to move leftward economically and they're also playing a good tactical game on the culture wars. Rather than getting sucked into twitter fights they're using their government powers, most recently to tell universities to toughen up on free speech, and building their own ideological coalition. Liz Truss' speech (https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/fight-for-fairness or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0Vhrn82QtE) lays out the rival equality docrtine they're hoping to create. Kemi Badenoch also had a very well received speech on the subject (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqBTWPl-11U)

It's overall a lot less aggressive and warlike that the above suggestions, but you'd expect that in the UK. Being a UK working class party requires some left wing economics; but there's a fair bit in common too.

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As someone who loves prediction markets I feel compelled to defend them from overzealous use on a few points (though I certainly would support a lot of public market-making).

1: How many people could really be replaced by well-functioning p-markets? You want to distinguish carefully between expertise in investigation and detailed knowledge and expertise in predicting. It may well be that a careful predictor can out-predict the working scientist/pundit in an area, and the market as a whole almost certainly can, but the role of most experts is not to predict, and you can't delegate the underlying research to the market or your local fox (busy prowling elsewhere, as per). You might want to center punditry around prediction markets but you still need people to explain, give context and detail, like the best of 538, and calling for better punditry is universal and not easy to legislate.

2: While I love the idea of conditional markets but I don't think we're close to being able to put them into use for major policy decisions. Capturing the relevant dimensions of possible policies is very hard and the true impact of most policies is ultimately pretty small (difference in Metaculus predictions of US emissions between Biden and Trump is approx 1 s.d., and think how many policies in a similar direction that's summing up). Also, prediction markets that have a predictable effect on policy, and especially markets that only resolve conditional on their own values, are prime meme-bait. Look at the 'Keynesian Beauty Contests' on Metaculus where they resolved positive if estimate is >98%, they were a total shambles.

3: What timescale could you meaningfully decide to hire/fire people on? You need a pretty long, statistically significant track record in areas that are relevant, and that demonstrate real understanding rather than just skill at picking base rates - you (probably) don't just want to hand the Fed to the quants, it's the wrong kind of understanding. Caplan's betting record is impressive but it took him decades and the ability to pick and choose (though in fairness he does offer many more than are accepted). It's hard to test important knowledge with regular predictions - for example I don't think that ability to predict weekly Covid cases is a huge signal of epidemiological skill. Year long predictions of covid yes, vaccine and deaths and lockdown impacts yes, but covid is perhaps the most tangible, predictable *event* in modern history, and is a bit of a best case scenario for p-markets.

You might also be interested to know that the UK civil service has an internal prediction market called Cosmic Bazaar styled on the GJP. It's predictions are quite interesting though the number of questions is limited and it's not very well sign-posted.

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Just keep in mind that whenever someone uses a the euphemism, “the less educated.” They mean the stupid. They mean it because it’s true.

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vehemently object to "upper class" being equated with "smart". Yes, a lot of those people do have college degrees - usually in something like English Literature or History at the best, Woke Studies at the common case - but one doesn't have to be hugely smart to get a bachelor's at those. One has to be connected and rich and conformist and coherent enough to not sleep through the paper submission deadlines. Having a brain functional enough to regurgitate back whatever grovel is fed to you by the Woke Studies professor certainly help, but I never actually heard about somebody failing Woke Studies for not possessing the intellectual capacity to grasp the deep mysteries of CRT. If anything deserves the phrase "it's not rocket science", this is.

And that's btw why many people who otherwise wouldn't go near Trump are willing to support him in his stand. Because our supposed betters are so obviously not better in any way, and their claims to being better at anything so obviously and blatantly unearned. I mean at least a feudal lord could tell to a peasant "I can read and compose poems and quote ancient philosophers, and you can't sign your own name, clearly I should rule over you!" - or at least some lords probably could, if they wanted. Current lords are disgustingly and blatnatly unfit for any claim of superiority whatsoever - and yet they are behaving like they earned all of it, and they get away with it all the time. It's not hard to understand how it could infuriate any person with a sense of decency and justice. And this is where the urge to spit in their faces comes from - even though sometimes it's undeserved. But other times it is so, so richly deserved.

Remember NBC lecturing Ted Cruz on Shakespeare?

That's where all pizzagate-type conspiracies come from - they may be very wrong on the facts, but the feeling that those people are deeply no good, very much do not deserve their position, and all they say is deeply false is so strong and palpable that it must have some outlet. So one believes in whatever is easy to believe - that they are victims of their base physiological urges, or paid by Illuminati, or something as easy - instead of figuring out something that may be much more complex, much more true and orders of magnitude more scary (you can jail a person for being a part of a pedophile ring, but can you jail a person for participating in ruining a culture and causing the country to go downhill? Can you even stop it? Can you sleep knowing it's happening and you can do nothing about it? Better to have some pizza...).

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If the Republicans adopted this, I'd actually feel comfortable identifying with a political party for the first time in my life. A boy can dream.

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"Smart people? Now you're burning hot."

This is what makes it difficult to discuss without being very derisive. Now "Working class" may work but everybody already claims to be for that. Instead of making "class" less of a dirty word, why not make "populism" less of a dirty word? The US constitution starts with "We the people" after all. I think I could take the Populist Liberal label myself.

The manifesto would go something like:

I am a liberal. I believe in science and knowledge and expertise and competence.

I am a person of the people. I understand that not everyone has the aptitude for academic endeavors and believe they deserve no less respect.

Democracy is inherently populist with the common person having as much weight as everyone. I believe that this is a feature not a flaw.

I recognize that the common person is inherently in a vulnerable position relative to credentialed elite.

I value education, but I am aware that education can elevate people who are already intellectually privileged and contribute to inequality. When I promote education, I always emphasize respectable paths for people not naturally talented at conventional academics.

I value equality and freedom to be who you want to be, but I understand that skillfully navigating people's differences is very complex and not within everyone's reach.

The best AIs out there is not able to simulate advanced empathy. It is highly complex and involves multilevel recursive counterfactual meta-cognitive logic (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K4eDzqS2rbcBDsCLZ/unrolling-social-metacognition-three-levels-of-meta-are-not). Given the level of complexity, I don't expect everyone to be able to easily navigate subtle empathetic issues.

I understand that good people often require help from moral guides and belief groups. I will never seek to bring down these groups. I will instead offer to participate and help improve them.

I am anti racist and believe structural issues should be solved. At the same time, I understand that wonkish historical facts with lots of gray areas are involved and I don't expect everyone to be able to grasp the subtleties. I will never shame anyone for faux pas or lack of mastery of these subjects.

To deal with structural issues, I will attack and blame the structure, never people that were accidentally involved through their identity. When the issues are structural, fighting people instead of the fighting the structure is poor aim.

I value freedom of movement and trade across the world but I understand that the onus is on the elite to ensure that it elevates everyone's prospects and that the gains are widely distributed, that global channels are not co-opted by a small elite.

etc.

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Isn't this largely what's already happened to the libertarian-leaning republicans like Glenn Reynolds? I could swear that, besides the Free Trade thing, that's been the libertarian-leaning republican platform for somewhere between 4-20 years.

I mean, it's a good idea, but I'm having trouble figuring out what's new here.

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Isn't it likely the Republicans can't do this because their extremely wealthy donors/supporters would have a fit? Which isn't to say the Democrats aren't supported by wealth donors (they are, but they're liberal). I think wealthy Republican donors would have a hard time not feeling attacked by an anti-classist message no matter how much you try to explain that class isn't about wealth but by sneering better-than-you status displays.

The Democrats wouldn't stand aside either. They would do whatever was the equivalent of the Trump campaign running ads with grandma being assaulted in her home at night because she called 911 and a recording said due to defunding of the police they can't respond in less than 5 days. Which I assume would mean drawing connections to the Iranian revolution where all of the intellectuals were imprisoned and now they're an Islamic fascist state. Or at least I assume the Democrats would. Maybe they'd just let this happen because they like losing(??)

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This was great. Except for the point about protectionism (which is just an upper class attempt to insulate their businesses from competition), I actually by and large agree with most of this. As a radically anti-Trump independent, I did not expect that.

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I hate this because it means the further burying of any coherent concept of class beneath a bunch of vague cultural signifiers. In turn this means it will just as likely (continue to) become true, just as every other coherent concept is buried beneath an avalanche of cultural signifiers.

If we *are* using class to refer to cultural signifiers, then the subtitle here - "pivot from a mindless... to a thoughtful..." - is violating your strategy from the start. Go be mindless! It makes the libs so mad! Destroy the "upper" "class" insistence on thinking! Return to monke! Destroy! Kill! No swing voter has ever read a policy paper! Take a shit on the stage! Set up a temple in Washington D.C. and offer up beating hearts to the sun!

Realistically I would like the Democrats to pander less to (((the extremely unpopular cultural values of people like me))) while quietly just allowing social forces to continue making them more popular, but current dynamics mean that the Rs are going to counter-signal against those as hard as they can, which is why the "thoughtful" element of your proposal is the only immodest and unrealistic part. Our current media environment can't do thoughtfulness thoughtfully; you think it can prosecute thoughtlessness that way?

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Why do we feel confident that whatever would replace the college system will be less classist? I would imagine that we’d see corporate not-for-profits like ETS and Collegeboard (I am dubious that we can consider them legitimate NGOs) arise to fill the void. And considering that often their tests measure how good we are at standardized tests rather than actual knowledge, and upper class people have a huge advantage for obtaining such skills, I’m not sure it’s a good solution. I love the idea of banning degree discrimination, but I fear something even worse would take its place.

Do others have compelling reasons to believe my prediction is wrong, or that if this happens it would be less classist than the present setup?

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I have to be honest, Scott... This sounds like a suggestion for a better way to say “Jew”.

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Now I know how an actual cannibal feels reading Swift

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Seems like everybody does a Keynes beauty contest with their tribe for that tribes values. Any attempt to actually control what happens will be broken and devolve quickly due to the sheer size of the tribe needing to be supported. This is why I don't this Marxism will ever work, or any injection to 'fix' politics from the outside will ever work in this system either. I hope this idea does somehow get picked, but I highly doubt it.

It seems you're becoming more vitriol in your politics too, this is written as a proposal of what republican's want by what is a liberal thinking about what republican's want. So excuse me as I can't fully agree with your analysis because I don't think you see across party lines, but I do like some solutions.

I am on the right side of the isle, I came in through Trump. I thought he had good ideas that somebody was finally talking about. The nice thing about him was he was "bullet proof". he could talk about how bullshit the woke ideology is and with the inability due to social shaming in college to talk about how their ideas are counterproductive, it was fun to vote for him as a shot against elites. I can agree with you there. He fucked up the virus response yeah, but during all other times I thought he did good. Peace with North Korea, Conservative Justices, Etc.

At the end of the day it's all tribal shitflinging. A refocus to the accredited elites (as calling them "educated" is both an overloaded word and only used for feeling smug) would be a good idea. Will it be adopted? Probably not, will the democrats be just as batshit insane from the other side of the isle? Absolutely.

I worry that I don't think anything can solve this other than total system collapse, or we somehow all calm down and try working our way back from a low trust society. I think we are heading to system collapse, which would be an awful time had by all. I hope this broken mess lasts 20 more years so we get AGI to singularity us out. Otherwise, I think our progressive policies are progressing us off a cliff, and our conservatives aren't conserving anything

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Scott, I love this article, but I can't link it in the conservative places I inhabit because of the preview image; it sends the wrong message almost immediately.

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I remember when Trump claimed to be a "blue-collar billionaire" and Jon Stewart tore into him saying, "That's not a thing." But yeah, actually, it kind of IS a thing.

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"When a cop targets a black person for a “random” stop-and-frisk, that’s racist. But it’s also coming from same thought process the cop uses to target an unkempt heavily-tattooed white guy in the bad part of town, instead of a well-groomed suit-wearing white guy in the business district."

Trump gained among Asian and Hispanic voters because of Democratic pro-criminal overreach. The solution to that is to not go pro-crime, but to go tough on crime. Also, racism is not a form of classism; the lower the class, the greater the overt Black-White conflict. As a result, Black-WWC coalitions (as seen with the Southern Democrats of the 1970s) are inherently unsustainable.

"Your solution will be prediction markets."

The problem with the proletariat is that they have a low average IQ. They couldn't care less about ideological support for prediction markets, which are highly UMC. Any R war on experts is going to end in overt defenses of astrology.

The war on college actually has a chance of working, if only because so much of the low IQ do not have a college degree and are relentlessly opposed to free college and to employers barring them from consideration if they don't have a degree. The GOP has a strong incentive to be anti-college as well, as college faculty and administrations are extremely anti-Republican and have a fair deal of institutional clout.

Calling the establishment media the "upper class media" is a brilliant rhetorical move, but little more than that. The correct response would be to create a politically-controlled state media free from the grip of the UMC.

"You would argue that capitalism is the system that lets people succeed regardless of class; even the most uncouth and uneducated person can strike it rich if they work hard and make good deals."

No; capitalism is, in fact, extremely classist. The vast majority of American companies which took a stand on the BLM demonstrations stood in favor of them. This is why an unreconstructed pro-capitalist/business conservatism would inherently perpetuate the iron grip of the UMC on the Overton Window.

My take is this: instead of trying to build coalitions, just support the best policies while projecting an image of common sense and moderation. Fight COVID (as China/Thailand/Vietnam do, not as American liberals don't). Tax new immigrants at a 60% rate to create a UBI for the native-born. Hire more police officers in the inner cities. Enforce bans on affirmative action. Fight against attempts to ban teachers from suspending students. Be the sort of party people would want to be ruled by. And, above all, defend your positions forthrightly. Putin and Charlie Baker don't have high approvals because they're anti-UMC. The myth that elections always have to be 50-50 is just that; a myth.

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The thing I worry about is that if you turn a bunch of good ideas into right-partisan issues, democrats will feel compelled to take a stand against them.

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This all seems very conflict theorist.

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"But maybe I would hate you less if you didn't suck." Really, Scott? I stopped there, barely one percent in, and will never read you again.

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> It could appeal to intellectuals. Right now you're doing so badly among this demographic that you're going to have trouble staffing the next generation of think tanks. That's because you have a lot of anger but no theory. Intellectuals love theories. Your theory will be something something classism, details to be filled in later. Intellectuals love filling in details, especially details about -isms, and you can assure them that they'll be very busy

This paragraph is a work of ironic art, particularly the "theory will be something something classism" bit.

> It could appeal to intellectuals. Right now you're doing so badly among this demographic that you're going to have trouble staffing the next generation of think tanks. That's because you have a lot of anger but no theory. Intellectuals love theories. Your theory will be something something classism, details to be filled in later. Intellectuals love filling in details, especially details about -isms, and you can assure them that they'll be very busy

yeah i mean maybe they could write a blog post expressing vague theories about how the blue tribe just hates everyone with the sterling intellectual charity promoted by grays

But it's cool, Republicans will clearly get right on the *real* discrimination in America against people from Tampa and a racial group whose median income is $26,000 a year higher than the national average. I mean, it's not like nearly all of Tampa voted against Trump by overwhelming margins (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/upshot/2020-election-map.html) or like there's a racial group with a median income $24,000 a year *lower* than the national average, right?

Right?

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For what it's worth, pretty much ALL of this is a lot of my own personal political ideology. It's weird...it's like GET OUT OF MY HEAD SCOTT!!! (No not really. You're welcome to come in, but it's certainly at your own risk)

Especially the Collage as Status Signaling thing. Yeah, that's something that Tyler Cowen has talked about, but not quite in that way. There's actually a history of how that sort of signaling has actually built our current system of inequality that almost entirely flies under the radar.

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I think this is basically what happened in Israeli politics.

The Israeli upper-educated classes are overwhelmingly Ashkenazi, and they always voted left-wing. The working classes are majority Sephardic/Oriental and voted Likud in large part driven by class/ethnic resentment. (And no one really votes based on what they think of Palestine).

Then a million Russians came, and though they immediately reached the educational attainment of native Ashkenazis they had none of the class signifiers and were gatekept from many institutions of cultural production. And so the Russians also voted right wing, either for Likud or Likud's allies like Sharansky back in the day and Lieberman today. They are responsible in large part for Netanyahu's dominance in the last decade.

In a lot of ways, Russian-Israelis are like the gray tribe of Israel. They're way overrepresented in STEM and things like the Israeli Rationality community. I wonder if anyone in the Republican party will be the American Lieberman, bringing the gray tribe into the coalition with free markets and class warfare.

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SAS, is it a good idea to alienate many of your non-leftist readers and create a polarization here as it happens in the rest of the country? And is it a good read for non-Americans (a substantial number of your followers) who have neither skin in this game nor a dog in this fight?

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I honestly think most social political problems are made up to give people something to do. I don't think LGBTQ+ problems are important anymore, I don't think racism is a legitimate problem in our country aside for a few edge cases. It seems the Right and Left are in a fun merry-go-round of power to police other opinions. But at the same time. Who gives a shit about any of that? Politics should be focused on international relations, tax allocations, optimized economies with regards to human dignity, and manufactoring. Everything else is just to give people that don't understand math something to do.

"upper class" elites are not educated in anything useful, anything that is not STEM is basically creative writing. If somebody really loves some fiction or history they can be called educated in it, but I would never weight their intellect above a person that likes a different story. I notice most of Trumps criticism is because "Most of what he said was offensive, blatantly false, or alienated more people", I don't believe that. And I don't care if it did. Talk is cheap, I wanna see actual proposals.

Humans suck at governments because they politics bloated with worthless garbage, but I guess since tv got boring during lockdowns political theater is the only thing that entertains anymore.

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My one cavil with this is that tariffs + deregulation + "tax cuts for the rich" did, in fact, help the working class

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Unfair assertion that journalism is a lax job https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/dec/10/42-journalists-killed-over-their-work-in-2020

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Wonderful article. I would love to vote for a party like this. I hope we can see a future like this.

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> Yeah, yeah, "class" sounds Marxist, class warfare and all that, you're supposed to be against that kind of thing, right? [...] Trump didn't win on a platform of capitalism and liberty and whatever. He won on a platform of being anti-establishment.

I sometimes think Republicans are still fighting the 1st Cold War, the one against Russia than America won 30 years ago.

But now America is fighting the 2nd Cold War, against an enemy that calls itself "Communist" but actually represents the red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalism that Marx was railing against.

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founding

So the proposal is another dog whistle to use, in order that it will be easier to continue doing the things that divide us (that you would otherwise be against). But this allows you to frame the platform as Gray tribe approved (instead of more grievance focused?). This sounds like some fantasy to give Gray tribe a political party. It is much more conflict theory than most of what appears here.

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I figure you said it in large part because your US readership is majority Democrat, but opening with "I hate you, Republicans" is sufficiently hostile that my politics-and-hatred related antibodies started fizzing to warn me the air was bad. I think there's a much more toned down version of that establishing common knowledge for the reader that you're in opposing tribes that still communicates the thing that paragraph is meant to communicate.

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Substack seems to have given you more freedom and peace of mind. You spent years and years at SSC working hard to write a single full clause that looks awful out of context (so of course the Times sliced and diced into tiny pieces instead). But now you're free to say "the Republicans might as well say X", knowing that this gives the sneerers the subquote of you saying "X".

Independent of the content of the piece, it's nice to see that fledgeling confidence.

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My Inner Marxist would like to log one complaint, which is that as long as one’s “class” strictly means cultural differences between Arkansas truckers and New York lawyers, and remains divorced from one’s relationship to capital, everyone who is currently being exploited and broken on the wheel of life and everyone who is making out like a bandit will stay there, even if the political currents above them all shift around wildly.

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It's fine to be hypocritical in politics, but I'll note that praising Musk and trashing Jack would require either hypocrisy or some explanation.

Maybe the distinction is about Social Media Being Worse Than Physical Objects! Sure! But then remember that the middle-aged working-class Republican voters are all on Facebook sharing Jesus American Flag Veteran Beer Gun memes. I'm not even being pejorative here; I have extended family members like this, and I acknowledge them as they are.

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Prediction markets aren't unbiasable. It seems like if they are being used for major policy decisions, they should be really easy to bias.

You want to implement a shiny new regulation on industry X, but industry X claims that this will totally cripple their ability to do business and lead to major problems. So you create a market for conditional predictions about what will happen if the regulation is put in place. Industry X spends millions of dollars of lobbying money on the prediction that your regulation will crash the national economy. A few experts realize this is bullshit and bet against them, but don't have the same capital to invest, and so the prediction market is still showing huge odds that your regulation will ruin everything. So you don't pass your regulation and the lobbying groups don't even need to pay up on their conditional bets.

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This Republican party sounds terrifyingly effective, except for the stuff about prediction markets which the average republican voter absolutely will not understand. Most of these ideas would be pretty bad, but honestly the part about colleges sounds genuinely amazing and I would be tempted to vote Republican if they emphasized it enough.

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Agree with pretty much everything here, everyone (both left and right) would be better off if both parties' platform is on competing on dismantling the class system. The fake "experts" making irresponsible decisions risking thousands of human lives deserve a special place in hell (the opposite holds for actual experts).

But as a reminder to myself, the GOP in its current state is an abomination and is not even close to being a viable option. Spewing provably false statements, parading charlatans and Machiavellian politicians, nothing is off limits. As someone that tries extremely hard to stay centered, I always need to be reminded that the existence of 2 options does not mean equal pros and equal cons for both (although for whatever reason I seem to have a natural bias of trying to argue for both sides equally). In my own head, from a utilitarian perspective, the GOP is at a 15% pro (at most). v. 85% dems.

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Scott, you can add a point that minimum wage is a high-class conceit, people who are *uncomfortable* with other people not being paid "enough" but unwilling to just have their taxes raised to give them money.

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On free trade and immigration, rather then embracing protectionism wholesale, the republican program should be: Protectionism for the working class, foreign competition for the upper class. The latter could mean for example making it easier for foreign doctors, dentists and lawyers to practice in the US. Dean Baker has been banging this drum: https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/inequality-as-policy-selective-trade-protectionism-favors-higher-earners

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Anti-credentialism will never survive as part of the Republican party platform; they get too much money from for-profit colleges. That was a critical element of Betsy DeVos's platform as part of the Department of Education. Look up the Promoting Real Opportunity, Success, and Prosperity through Education Reform (PROSPER) Act, which was passed by the House in 2018, with support from Trump and DeVos. There's a shocking amount of money to be made from leeching off the GI Bill money of veterans without college degrees.

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"20% of Americans go to religious services weekly - how many of those work for the New York Times?"

Offhand, I can think of Douthat, Bruenig, and possibly Brooks. Douthat in particular is notable for being an actual token conservative, contra Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin.

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This is so unconvincing and full of epicycles, that I really wonder if it's motivated reasoning from Scott. It ignores tons of research on what politically motivates the "white working class." One quote will do, in his description of the "upper class". "They all have exactly the same political and aesthetic opinions on everything, and think the noblest and most important task imaginable is to gatekeep information in ways that force everyone else to share those opinions too." I can't even tell if this is supposed to be his advice to Republicans on how to posture themselves, serious, or a joke. All have the same opinions? Has he heard of this interesting website called "Twitter", where lefties regularly shred each other over differences in opinions. Or look how Jacobin treats liberals. Or how Ezra Klein treats Jacobin! It's sad, but it looks like Scott is perfoming the Glenn Greenwals/Matt Taibbi triple somersault contortion into "Those who have different opinions from mine are INSANE, I tell you!" I hope not, but that's what it looks like to me.

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So the 1983 book on class completely ignored race, and that is also the big flaw here. Class is cultural, meaning race ultimately takes center stage, unfortunately.

One theme of the previous post was how each gradation of class fights like hell to differentiate themselves from the class immediately below them. Therein lies the problem with an attempt to form a political coalition of various lower classes. The Democratic coalition is often described as a high-low coalition: upper middle class + lower class. That coalition works because they both ally with their enemies' enemy, the white working class.

Flipping this script is specious because to get the necessary numbers the GOP would really need the white, black and Hispanic working classes. That won't happen because they are different classes in too close competition with each other.

I do admire the idealism of the post, however. Wish I weren't so cynical.

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The GOP should start using the work "class" and mean "working class". Now more or less everything they stand for and have done is bad for the working class. So what would the point be?

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Astonishing to see something which pretends to address "class" without addressing economic inequities, unless I missed something. Batsh!t crazy, along with the claim that "they’re understandably afraid experts will smuggle pro-Democrat bias into their judgments." It reads like a college sophomore's parody of Scott's positions, only more hastily written.

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Is that you, Cyrano?

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I thought these were some great ideas. I did however feel this "I hate the Republican Party" was disingenuous - as if Scotts trying to hide his implicit support for the Republicans so he doesn't get attacked by the NYT again. He seems to hate the Democrats' messaging more, but can't bring himself to actually admit it.

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LGBT association with elitism is pretty arbitrary. The phenomenon of "rightspeak and wrongspeak" about black issues that's entirely dissociated from productive or unproductive behavior towards actual black people has corollaries in LGBT issues; Gender studies, Queer Theory and so forth are sinecure factories that produce people who speak a very specific, largely unfalsifiable and meaningless language about LGBT people which exists primarily for signalling purposes. Actual LGBT people are in the same position in respect to the Republican party today that black people were in the time Malcolm X coined his parable of the Fox and the Wolf: We know Republicans are ill intentioned, but they're boundedly and predictably ill-intentioned, whereas we don't know anything concrete about liberals except that they find talking over real LGBT people convenient.

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A suggested alternative framing: Scott's old post HOW THE WEST WAS WON (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won/). This posits a conflict between what Scott calls universal civilization (usually called western civilization, but Scott argues that those were the local cultures that industrialized civilization ate) and local cultures. Scott is undecided on whether one should cheer on the assimilation or the local resistance, asking only for consistency. I would suggest the blue tribe is the side of the universal civilization, and the red one is a local culture being eaten.

Since the universal civilization is described as basically "the best of everything", people may be resistant to associating that with the blue tribe. But consider:

• Scott gives as a paradigmatic example (along with coca cola & so-called "western" medicine) the new, equalized gender norms. The blue tribe is on the side of those, the red on the side of more conservative ones. (These days, I would add LGBT norms to that list.)

• Scott talks about how the universal civilization does better with more immigrants, while the local cultures want to resist them. This is one of the current main points of the culture war.

• Most of the "what works best" things come from experts — universal (i.e. effective) medicine from scientists. Scott has above ascribed them to the democratic (blue) tribe.

• For that matter, Scott gives as one example of a local civilization the Brexiters, for which the red tribe here is a ready parallel.

Why then do conservatives claim to be fighting for western civ? Because the term has two (at this point almost opposite) meanings. On the one hand it means the universal civilization: science, medicine, coca-cola, equal gender norms. On the other hand, it means the previous civilization which has been largely eaten by that—Scott mentions copying Latin manuscripts, which is certainly where someone like Rod Dreher seems to have his comfort zone. What the traditionalists want to go back to is the Christian church and the local culture that industrialism has devoured. (Capitalism is and always has been a revolutionary force & it was always weird for conservatives to embrace it.)

Note this gives both sides a way forward, too. The Republicans can run as a colonized civilization, and say they want the right to their traditional heritage (close to what they're saying anyway). The Democrats, on the other hand, can say that what makes unviversal civilization what it is is that it works & is good, and that we ought to want universal medicine & coca cola is tasty. This captures the cultural grievances which seem to be really the heart of Trumpism, on the one hand, and the desire for social & policy improvement that Democrats seem to love.

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Do you really hate the Republican Party, Scott? I can't speak for all Republicans, but I don't think we hate you.

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Posted this on Facebook channeling a similar vibe:

A theory: social classes don't like their immediate neighbors. At least for the classes in the middle.

The upper-middle class doesn't like the rich, whom they perceive as plutocrats who rig the system. They also don't like the lower-middle class, whom they see as ignorant and bigoted. But they speak fondly of the poor, whom they regard as having been cheated by an unfair system.

The lower-middle class, meanwhile, disdains the upper-middle class for their perceived elitism and entitlement. And in turn they don't like the poor, whom they consider lazy freeloaders who don't want to work. However, they have no problem with the very rich, whom they feel have earned their wealth.

I don't know what the very rich or the very poor think.

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This is probably the most dangerous thing you have written. Congratulations!

Nature abhors a vacuum, and you have written this at *precisely* the right time to slide into the post-Trumpian hole, when the Republicans are looking for reference points but too hung over by the last four years to do anything of this sort. By sheer virtue of the following dynamic: "Well, what else are we going to do? Guess we'll do this. Also, this Scott guy can write! And he nailed what I felt but the leftist control over and turning to garbage of language didn't give me the categories to say! Go Scott!", you may become the next nucleation point of one side of the new alignment, you crafty old dog.

And honestly, this is a far better articulation and condensation/clarification/crystallisation of the positive side of Republican value than they have been able to come up with.

And you're a poster-case for a particular front in the current Kulturkampf, writing this immediately after showing bravely that 'You Shall Not Be Cancelled!', when public attention on you is still high, and you range freely, Lord of the (Substack) Leaderboard! Perfectly positioned to *actually* precipitate a new dynamic! This is a nuclear Tesuji grade move, dude; the strategic genius and chutzpah of this is astounding.

Bravo, maestro, bravo!

Three cheers for the new alignment: Long reign Scott! Long Reign Scott!!! LONG REIGN SCOTT!!!!!

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Heh, if all this happens, and nothing goes horribly wrong in the realignment, and they magically pivot to being pro-immigration as part of it, I suppose i'll have to vote Republican!

But I'm pessimistic about them adopting prediction markets into their platforms, and that really seems essential. Because honestly, right now the Democratic coalition really does seem to be better at finding out important true things.

Like, okay, just look as masks. Mask-wearing started off being the "upper class" vaguely opposed for incoherent reasons; it was only supported by certain nerds. But belief in it was sufficiently justified — and it wasn't sufficiently opposed to Democratic biases — that "masks work" became common knowledge among them... at which point the Republican coalition insisted on opposing it, because they are defined by nothing other than opposition to the Democratic coalition. Same thing happened with a bunch of other true facts about pandemic — first it's common knowledge among y'all, then it's common knowledge among the blues, then it's opposed by the reds.

Since the "upper-class" "consensus institutions" do a mediocre-to-good job of figuring out what's true, if your pitch is for the red coalition to ramp up their identity being "opposition to blue" — then without prediction markets they'll continue being worse than nothing. Hopefully they become the party of legalizing accurate forecasts but I'm not holding my breath. (And in the meantime I guess I'll just keep shilling for prediction markets on our side.)

Plus, like I said, immigration is also a crux for me. The anti-immigration status quo is bad, the Republicans want to make it much worse. If warfare against "the upper class" includes warfare against the poorest people in the world, against the most disconnected people in our society... then fixing rampant credentialism isn't enough to sway me.

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I feel this would only work were the Republican party purged of its activist base-Good luck convincing all the folks at Hillsdale, Claremont, etc. that 4-year college is overrated, nor do I see class being centered while politically conscious conservatives see themselves as waging a cosmic battle against the forces of Evil.

This brings us to the central problem-Social conservatism's primary appeal is as a bulwark against radical lunacy, but its core beliefs are simply obsolete in an industrial society. Traditional Christian sexual mores are not suited to a world with widely available birth control. Abortion is a perfect example of this-Both Left and Right have unpopular positions on the issue, but the Left's is more conducive to what the public wants, legal abortion up to a point, than the Right's.

As I see it, social progressivism has long enjoyed a prima facie advantage; its ideas are more appealing at a glance. It's very hard to argue, in a sexually permissive society, that homosexuality is somehow wrong. If such a case can be made (and I don't think it can), it is neither simple nor obvious. However, the Left may be losing that advantage-Ideas like "sex is on a spectrum" or "worship of the written word is white supremacist" are not, offhand, convincing. A more moderate, more proletarian social conservatism could fill the growing vacuum, but that would in turn need to defeat conservatism as it presently exists. I do not see traditionalists, bible-bashers, and the like coming quietly along.

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As terminology for the elite class I think that mandarins is the correct term like the mandarins of Imperial China they are educated in the sacred texts of their system and have taken many exams to prove it. They also believe that their education gives them the right to rule other classes.

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Aren't you supposed to be above tribalism?

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Paging @oren_cass

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Taxation: The Reagan Republican party spent the last 40 years lowering top marginal rates. The upper income bracket recipients of their largess responded by voting Democrat because Abortion and Gay Marriage.

The last Republican tax bill contained one feature the limitation of the SaLT (State and Local Tax) deduction that clearly made the Democrats in the Coastal States crazy.

Republicans should repay the ingratitude of the high income people by raising the top marginal rates to 50%. They should also "rescue" social security by removing the cap on taxable earnings.

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>This tweet is a bit mean

well i mean

<3

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Rule of law is class warfare. Should some judge be telling ORDINARY WORKING-CLASS AMERICANS like Donald Trump what to do?

Obviously, woke censoriousness is class warfare, but so is formal free speech. Some hippie is burning OUR FLAG in the street and some fucking egghead tells me an ORDINARY WORKING-CLASS AMERICAN like Gavin McInnes can't burn the hippy? Plus, formal free speech allows woke mobs to call people racist, which is the primary threat to The Spirit Of Free Speech. (Sam Francis in "Leviathan and Its Enemies," which anticipated all of these arguments, makes this point perfectly clearly. Speech is primarily used by the speechy classes, therefore when someone says civilization reach for your browning.)

Not dying in a nuclear holocaust is class warfare. You think an upper-class scumbag like an unemployed listicle writer with a degree in Shit I Don't Care About Studies is going to be useful in the post-apocalyse? Not at all! When the bombs drop, we'll all be released from our media-created woken mental prisons, and realize what we need is a REAL WORKING-CLASS AMERICAN with expertise in owning several car dealerships.

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The greatest failing of the Republican party of the last decade is its inability to cultivate support from non-white ethnic groups that strongly skew socially conservative. During a (then) historically unpopular Republican presidency I watched Prop 8 repeal gay marriage in liberal California of all places. On election day non-white people rallied on the main street of my very liberal bay area town to promote it.

I can echo Scott, this cross-race class energy is there but so far the Republican party has no idea how to capture it.

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I note that I fit fairly comfortably into the upper class as described, except that I love football and guns. Much of this seems already to be the Trumpist playbook, minus the use of the word "class". You would never see Trump railing against the "upper class", because he spent the majority of his life trying to convince people that he was the epitome of "upper class". This of course proves that he isn't upper class, since the upper class would never let it look like they have something to prove... which they don't.

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There is a decent chunk of this they already do, and the stuff they don't do is because they are paid not to. I don't know why everyone has this stupid assumption that anyone in either party has any incentive beyond personal ambition to do anything that would be popular or help the country. They clearly do not. Once you've been elected you know you have an easy job waiting for you on K street should you lose your next election. The rest of the job is essentially political theatre; making promises you have no intention of keeping and finding creative reasons why you can't deliver, and finding ever more creative ways you can murder poor people. It's actually easier for them to be in the minority, easier to fundraise without all the hassle of governing.

If they cared at all about anyone in this country besides their donors it would be unbelievably easy to to institute broadly popular policies and soaking the rich to do so. The party that makes it so no one has to worry about going bankrupt if they see a doctor like every other non-3rd world country on the right and left has done for decades would be so popular they would be like the democrats with FDR. They don't because they do not care about winning, they care about being a good place for billionaires to write campaign checks.

That's the hard truth that everyone ignores because they have been spoon fed American exceptionalism their whole lives and reality would create cognitive dissonance. The only thing America is exceptional at is murdering poor people, at home and abroad.

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So, under this strategy, what's the Republican response to something like https://twitter.com/aoc/status/1361916293738192896 ?

They can either try to claim Ocasio-Cortez as one of their own with

> Yes, the working class should not be saddled with the debt of passing through the upper-class meat grinder!

Or they can repudiate the entire concept with

> No! Your upper-class shills won't suddenly get richer under our watch! Our constituents are the ones who were priced out of post-secondary education entirely!

Amy I overlooking any options?

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This is very good. Obviously there's lots of details that could be filled in, but there is plenty of opportunity for Republicans to take this tack in a way that not only do they form a coherent message (for the first time in a long time), but they can scoop up the positions that Democrats have only lazily made any serious gesture to support. One example, and which is coherent with this emphasis on class, is to reform the education system - not by extending the credentialism that has becomes it main basis, but by reorganizing it to give a lot more emphasis to both 1) practical education (think: skilled labor) and 2) aggressive use of standardized testing to find our "best and brightest" (in a completely racially unbiased way) and provide them better concentrated forms of education that seek to maximize their potential, rather than letting them languish. An average kid should have the opportunity to start learning a skilled trade at 14, so that he can be fully independent by 18 - rather than the only track available for substantially improving his outcomes are college. Likewise, a very smart kid, regardless of race, should be provided the resources so they're earning college degrees by 18, and maybe even started on a PhD. It wouldn't require more resources, only a reorganization, and so is not only a practical improvement over the Democrat's bland insistence on a system which is simply credentialism that only helps their sinecured party supporters, but it is in line with Republican principles (such as they are) ostensibly promoting financial thriftiness.

I'm really only adding on to what you've said, this stuff is great, exactly the lines I've been thinking along for a couple years now since NRx.

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The sad descent of a once-respectable blogger.

You're "joking" here in the same sense that your neoreactionary FAQ was "anti" (i.e., transparently bullshitting so you don't scare off the last few naive lefties still taking you seriously).

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I think the words you are actually groping for as targets are "elites" and "elitism." Class resentment does not, and never will, resonate with Americans. Wealth and manners are not objectionable. Talent and success certainly aren't. It is rather the arrogant, undeserved power of the smug, entitled, and mostly mediocre "Ruling Elite." Republicans don't even have to make much effort as the Ruling Elite is discrediting and beclowning itself as fast as it can.

At some point the taboo against politicizing white identity will eventually break down in response to the elite's actual straight-up anti-white racism. It is so mainstream that Coca-Cola is literally browbeating its employees to "be less white." (How would "be less Jewish" go over as its corporate slogan?). The taboo is so strong that even this can't be called "racist" -- instead, it's bad because it's "divisive."

The Republican establishment is constitutionally incapable of being authentic or proactive. But the opposition script will write itself as the left overreaches.

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What complete bullshit. Class in this country is nothing but income, no matter how badly you want to suck up to millionaire paving contractors by telling them they’re being persecuted by English teachers. Trump, assuming he has the money he says, is upper class even though he’s an ignorant ass with terrible taste.

Money buys power; education and good taste do not. If you have money, you have power, and Paul Fussell’s dimwitted sequel to The Preppy Handbook doesn’t change that fact.

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Ugh, that feeling when the American political system is so screwed up that the only way to fix it is for someone to write a completely sensible platform for the Republican party and that someone has to be Scott Alexander.

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Couldn't you figure out how to spin switching to low tariffs? Perhaps to actually help the lower classes, rather than appearing to help some of them while hurting them more in the aggregate?

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This is genius and would be 100% wonderful and unironically great for most Americans.

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Haven't the Republicans been doing this for years with all the "elites," "coastal elites," "flyover," "peasants with pitchforks" and the rest? Also, Reagan, Bush Jnr. being "misunderestimated," Sarah Palin etc.

Also, aren't Americans too aspirational?

In terms of the policies, 3 and 4 are pretty close to where they are now. 2 soundbites down to "so-called experts don't know anything and use long words to trick you, lets trust some college professor's magic truth machine" (even if prediction markets are good, they're not explicable in soundbite form - counterargument is I can imagine Ross Perot explaining them with lots of handheld slides).

1 is an undoubtedly a good idea, given the disaster that is credentialism, but is... directly contrary to American culture? You guys love education. You pretend you don't, but nowhere else in the developed world has adverts for colleges on freeway billboards. 2/3 Americans go to college these days (fewer went in the past, hence the college-educated population is smaller), and among whites the proportion is even higher. Proles want their kids to go to college, and unlike their counterparts in some countries would throw a party if their kid went to Harvard. They're keen enough to sustain private colleges that are basically just cons (the upper middle class aren't going to those), not to mention community colleges. Trump himself endlessly banged on about how he went to the Wharton Business School, and I'd swear I saw vox pops where Trump-voters repeated it! That's how you can sustain a whole class system based almost purely on education (which in turn is why you think you're an anti-education country, as the educated mourn the fact that people who didn't go to college even exist - nowhere else on Earth could manage that). This wouldn't be like running against Jesus, or freedom, or flags, or guns or whatever. This is running against America; like the Saudi Atheist Party, or Irish prohibitionism. The GOP would have better luck if they adopted the hammer and sickle elephant.

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Indeed. Bourgeois elitists have infiltrated the government and society! Let the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution begin!

It always end well.

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I don't understand how prediction markets can answer long-term questions. For example, there are lots of questions on Metaculus right now to the extent of "X will happen in 100 years". What's the point on placing bets on such questions ? In 100 years, both I and Metaculus will likely be long dead. It's not like the stock market, where the stock pays dividends even if I hold it.

This is why IMO prediction markets cannot prove global warming: it's a relatively long-term process. There's no way to make any money off of it.

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Great post and as a center-right guy Id be fully on board except one tiny semantic issue: Use Elitist instead of Class. Class is just too close to Marxism to pass fodder in real Republican circles. Otherwise looks completely doable.

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Totally Agree with this. This describes why my family from Rural Idaho, were simultaneously Sanders Voters and Trump Voters. It all comes down to class.

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As a candid data point from another side of the aisle, I’m what you’d probably call a Rockefeller Republican and I find this policy agenda horrifying, but mostly because it probably would be very successful and where the GOP is going these days anyway.

I’m a lifelong Republican, and I’ve always modeled them as a pro-business party that realizes those policies are hugely electorally unpopular, so engages in conning the poor into voting for them. I didn’t realize until relatively recently that this was even controversial. Growing up, for instance, I always figured that the reason the GOP was usually hawkish on military conflicts was to cull out their lower class ranks a bit. Everyone’s a winner: the poor with their dead-end rust belt futures would get a chance to go play soldier and die in glory, and the upper ranks maintain the careful balance of not letting the type of people that ultimately formed Trump’s base getting too many numbers. I only realized years later that others either weren’t that cynical or at least weren’t open about it. And I suppose I overestimated the casualties from our modern conflicts.

While the above does seem quite cynical after I type it out, I never saw this as ethically problematic. I’m a utilitarian, and I think a lot of policies that are wildly unpopular—free trade, open immigration, eliminating capital gains taxes and the estate tax—pretty clearly result in huge gains in human welfare, and if it takes some cynicism to make everyone on net wealthier and happier in the long run, it’s a huge win for human welfare. While I am deeply saddened by what has happened to the GOP in recent years, I admit we played with fire and got burned. Them’s the breaks.

What does especially sadden me, beyond how close we got pre-Trump before having it snatched away (I loved the Romney/Ryan ticket and Jeb), is what political home this leaves people like me. I know people keep saying the Democrats, but I don’t see it and certainly don’t feel welcome, especially with how aggressively they’ve recently courted the Bernie wing of the party. And it especially galls me how they keep trying to position themselves as the party of science on one hand, while failing to follow through on that so much in practice—if they’d just go pro-nuclear and -Keystone Pipeline I’d be somewhat happy, to pick some relatively non-controversial items.

I remember I thought that in 2016, Clinton would make a hard swing to the center at the convention, basically pull a David Cameron from the other direction as I understood his policies, and gut the GOP by forcing it into becoming a working class party. But that didn’t play out. Maybe my sense of the electorate isn’t all that great.

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The difference between "working class" in the cultural signifier sense and "proletariat" in the Marxian sense (those who labour in subservience to largely unaccountable managers) has been devastating to left-of-centre parties in Europe. Nowadays in most European countries you have a large population of well-educated, mostly younger people who have firmly middle-class values and are capable of doing highly-skilled jobs, but are definitely proles in terms of their real working conditions, generally with less bargaining power than their parents at the same age (even though the parents tend to be less educated and more prolish in Fussell's sense). When left-wing parties try to campaign on material interests, where they are clearly on the side of the majority, their message almost inevitably ends up coded as "white working class" (which upsets the young progressives) or "progressive" (which upsets the socially conservative "working class"), and they struggle to put the two halves of their electoral coalition together. Democrats in the USA seem to have survived this because a) compared to Europe, there are many more voters of colour and/or with a recent immigrant background in the USA, who are pushed away from the Republican coalition even if they are culturally conservative and b) most European right-wing parties have no trouble attracting female voters, whereas the US conservative position on e.g. abortion has driven away a majority of women. If you just look at white men in the USA versus white men in Europe, though, the Democrats look just as weak as their European counterparts (and in pretty much every state too).

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Freshman dribble. D-

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What becomes the reasoning behind the "New Republican's" pro-life/choice stance? It seems to be such an important issue to the current electorate.

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Let’s say the GOP goes with this message. Then what?

It’s true that class != wealth, but there is a strong correlation. Most people would not understand the nuance of difference between class and wealth. Not every reader of this blog even buys it. The imagery in the link is Communist, showing that even Scott, despite explicating the fine distinction, also rounds off class to its economic dimension when looking for a shorthand. (I realize it’s meant to be ironic and that this post itself is dripping with irony, but the kernel of truth is what is worth commenting about.)

Wouldn’t, in truth, the Democratic party be more likely to openly embrace class warfare? Sure, sure, the Democrats are the elites and all that, but their political infrastructure is still more geared for economic class warfare. Perhaps raising the minimum wage is a bad idea economically, but the masses seem to believe it is good for the poor.

I think what Scott is *really getting at* (saying this probably guarantees I am wrong) is how nice it would be if politics weren’t always bleeding at the edges into illegible and unintelligible spaces. Is Trumpism racist or not? It sure would be nice to have an unambiguously non-racist version of Trumpism.

But we aren’t going to get that because ambiguity is a big part of the hustle. That goes for both major tribes, and everyone else in the field of marketing.

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I wrote a Facebook post (yaaay me!) about this exact thing sitting (outdoors) at a coffee shop last summer, and noticing the pandemic had ended the rash of New Yorkers listening to their phones and iPads full volume in public without earphones. Then I realized - all the people who complain about the no earphones crowd are the same types who most likely to be woke/hate tromp/etc. And I realized intersectionality was completely ignoring this rift between npr listeners and reality show viewers. NPR listeners, who have a cross-racial, cross-gender coalition that even spans economic classes, from relatively poor public school teachers to Vice Presidents of marketing at google, and reality tv show fans, who tend to drive Mercedes with tinted windows, like Dunkin’ Donuts, etc, but who may well have more money than the npr listeners. And you’re right: trump stoked the resentment of the no headphones cell phone listeners against the headphones wearers.

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I grew up poor. I am now rich. I have no idea whether I am upper or lower class. AMA

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Tonight, Tucker ran a master class on how to do this:

"One of the most privelidged people on planet earth says she is oppressed by her servants"

https://youtu.be/b6-SAG3OlpI

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In an attempt to be slightly more useful than in my previous comment, this is exactly the topic of Chris Hedges book "Death of the Liberal Class." I'm often surprised I don't hear or see more people discussing him. Maybe he's too cranky.

https://www.amazon.com/Death-Liberal-Class-Chris-Hedges/dp/1568586795

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Yes! Thank you! This is what I have been looking for. This is what I have been trying to say.

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Marxist Republicans. That's something you don't see every day.

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This made me think about how this applies beyond the US. The Trumpist sentiments definitely exist elsewhere. Could the program above be used by Tories in the UK? By Le Pen in France? Some of the important points from the article may not apply: Education may be free and relatively accessible to everyone. Inequality may be lower than in the US. And so on.

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Look, it's an obvious point but, for decades now, we've been pursuing an increasingly meaningless culture war, neglecting issues like "who gets the money", "who goes to prison", "against who do we go to war and for what reason", "what happens to the environment". This proposal continues the trend.

Shameless self-promotion, here's my old take on that: https://deponysum.com/2020/06/23/a-rule-of-thumb-to-determine-whether-an-issue-is-worth-spending-your-political-energy-on/

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African-Americans switched to the Democrats during the New Deal era, prior to Dems shifting on civil rights.

https://www.slowboring.com/p/new-deal

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Based on some previous essay that began with "A Modest Proposal..." I was expecting something a little more tongue in cheek. This looks entirely feasible. It would collect about 2/3 of red tribe and blue tribe voters, and force the remaining upper class twits into a "New Grand Old Party" of some sort.

Anyways, I spent a few minutes looking up relevant anagrams, as one would.

First, "Bull Moose":

Soluble Om

Umbel Solo

Next, "Bull Moose Party":

Absolutely Prom

Playroom Bustle

Outlays Problem

Amours Potbelly

Soluble Om Party has my vote. Anyone got a bumper sticker printing machine?

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Scott, unless you've done so already and I've just missed it, I implore you to give us a Prediction Markets FAQ. Prediction markets are a radical and foreign idea for most people, and one that's often first met with suspicion. Lately you seem to be treating "prediction markets are the future" like it's a foregone conclusion, but I've yet to read a thorough, convincing, and accessible argument for why this is the case. IMHO, you're just the man to write that argument!

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I'm so confused by this. Is Scott being satirical, or does he really not realize that this is basically just populism, but with more intellectual-friendly (?!?) terminology?

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It seems sort of bold to say that Republicans are "post-Trump", if anything they feel like they're in a sort of political fermata, the length of which is definitely uncertain. The discordant eternal Rite of Spring intro that is the Trump Republican Party since 2015 is going to start up again at the very least by 2022.

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I keep waiting for the part of this "Modest Proposal" where Democrats are found to be eating babies. Am I the only one?

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Disagree on prediction markets part. To the extent that prediction markets work, it is because right now they are not on the radar of most people. If they ever do get on the radar then the same oil companies who fork out the money to promote the people and research that makes people doubt warming will also be able to fork out the money to distort prediction markets.

I half-agree with the college part. I agree that there should be no college requirement for babysitting or firefighting. I also think that demanding degree as a prerequisite for med school is stupid. But I disagree that companies should be required to test e.g. engineers and geologists themselves. Waste of effort as colleges would already test a candidate for years.

I completely agree on the woke part, however.

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While I agree with the general "class" analysis I don't like it as the rallying cry.

1- Class (socially) is easily confused with class (economically). The latter being the most well known usage and the right generally not wanting to associate with it due to the mentioned Marxist origins and usage.

2- Social class as defined here has no unifying ethos to it. It is more a collection of behaviors and attitudes that don't seem to have any cohesive virtue to them. Each class feels like a category with no particular moral or relevant quality to them. It feels as hollow as being on team blue because blue is your favorite color, and using that to guide your vote on how to run the country.

3- We have other words with a lot more gravitas that people can actually associate with. Culture (though this doesn't bridge the right left divide as well), The Soul of America, an Ethos. These are things I want to vote for, things backed by the weight of principles.

I don't really have a way to wrap this thought up. Poke holes in it please :)

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I propose S.A. becomes the next U.S. President on the Republican ticket.

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How's this for an inflammatory speech?

"You want to know a REAL conspiracy theory? MY conspiracy theory is that even though the upper class act like they're your best friends and care about you when they're in front of the camera, behind closed doors they despise you and talk shit about you filthy poors. Those aren't MY words, by the way - that's what they call you behind your back. 'Those filthy poors.' MY conspiracy theory is that they steal your money through unfair tax loopholes and then try to convince you that they EARNED their stolen money by working harder and by being SMARTER than you. And you know what makes this conspiracy theory REALLY wild? The fact that it's ALL TRUE. Here's the data to prove it."

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Scott, I think you might want to revive the old "things I will regret writing" tag for this one.

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>I hate you and you hate me.

This is just ridiculous. Scott, it wasn't working class Trump-supporting white Christian Americans who tried to destroy your life not too long ago. It was the Blue Tribe.

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Instead of "upper class" and "lower class," it makes more sense to say "symbol class" and "atom class." For example, it is acceptable in the symbol class to work with your hands as long as you are not handling too many atoms. You can cook a meal for a small family but not work in a fast-food restaurant.

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One thing I noticed, when reflecting on the previous post, is how deeply class has become entangled with politics. Almost by definition, the left is higher-class than the right, and mere association with or proximity to the right wing is enough to make something seen as low-class. Trump ordered the Federal government to make neoclassical architecture its house style, and suddenly everyone who's anyone demands blobby postmodern buildings or nothing. (Doubly ironic, given that Trump's own buildings are mostly glass boxes.) Taylor Swift endorses the Democrats and suddenly she's a critical darling and we forget that we ever looked down on her music as trash for the rubes in Nashville.

So this would just be making it more explicit. It was already a big part of the Trump message, but the problem with Trump was he had no idea how government works and never put in the effort to find out, which does not make it easy to get anything done in government. Well, a problem with Trump. Personally I had a lot of problems with him. But anyway.

The left increasingly has no positive vision for the future and nothing to offer except dour moralism and self-flagellation. I would start turning rightwards if the right were not incredibly, colossally stupid. It's a mixture of guilt and revulsion that keeps me on the left, but if a non-stupid right were to arise, I'd be open to it.

(Also - the bit about appealing to Asians reminds me of Wes Yang's frequent commentary on how diametrically opposed Asian-American activism is to the actual experiences and interests of non-activist Asians. The activists parrot the standard lines about "meritocracy" being a form of white supremacy that needs to be demolished, but many other Asians have done just fine within the system and don't want to change it. But of course it's the activists who get the attention of the media and the political leadership, and so it goes...)

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This is basically the playbook Newt Gingrich brought to Congress in 1994, and it's been working great... well, politically. The country sucks.

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How do you distinguish between populist and non-populist politics? In a democracy where you have to appeal to the populace all politics is populist.

If you use the Wikipedia definition "Populism refers to a range of political stances that emphasise the idea of "the people" and often juxtapose this group against "the elite"." Then what either side is doing is through a justification of a shadowy elite of either the upper class or white men.

I don't see the difference.

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I’m not sure how serious this piece is but the commenters mostly seem to unironically support it so: this is all insane. First of all, class is a total misnomer for the phenomenon described here: any definition of “class” that puts Donald Trump and McMansion owners below a barista with a liberal arts degree is nonsensical. The function of calling it class seems to be to guilt people described as “upper class” into thinking they’re somehow oppressing or exploiting the “lower class”. But why should being upper class under this system be a bad thing or being prole a good one? Class as described here has nothing to do with birth or wealth and much more to do with education, and why shouldn’t the educated have more status than the uneducated? Knowledge is actually better than ignorance, and getting an advanced education requires a combination of intelligence and diligence that many lack. This is why to a certain extent credentialism is actually good - it serves as a valuable proxy for actually good things. I agree there is an over-credentialism problem in this country, but the system simply needs reform, not abolition. As for declaring war on expertise and media gatekeepers - these institutions are correct far more often than not, dismissing them as just like, your opinion man is pomo garbage, and destroying them can lead to nowhere good. Replacing experts with prediction markets can’t work because who decides who gets paid? If someone claims vaccines cause autism, what stops them from asserting they won the bet and refusing to pay up when proven wrong? Finally, the idea of classism as pernicious rests on analogy to racism and sexism, but that doesn’t work. Whites aren’t better than blacks, men aren’t better than women, but “elites” are in fact better than “proles”. If you define class in terms of education, and education is earned by merit, than “class bias” is simply a sign of meritocracy.

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Careful what you wish for.

Their fundamentalists won't get less oppressive, while their power grab will get significantly easier. In other parts of the world, this is exactly how those people win and it's not pretty.

Also, isn't this just populism with a theory on top?

Populism has pejorative connotations because vox populi is believed to lead society off a cliff. The separation of the lower classes from power is _exactly the point of modern system_ (why are we using representational, instead of direct democracy? why are the term limits so long?), even though it's thoughtcrime to consider.

A dysfunctional society might keep the lower class uneducated, full of learned helplessness and unable to govern on purpose, to justify further entrentchment of the elite. But of course we don't do that, do we?

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This is a great strategy but the nazis beat you to it by a century or so. Social conservatism and socialist rhetoric is a winning strategy and its why no one in the american political system would ever use it, it would destroy any semblance of the two party system that we collectively pretend exists.

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How can you write an essay as insightful as this, but not see that it's a contradiction in terms? "Populism" is literally the lower-class incarnation of what you describe as "anti-classism". It's not cool, it's not intellectual, but it's driven by the same resentments you describe here to a T, Pat Buchanan's "peasants with pitchforks." Then your entire essay just becomes complaining that populism isn't a "classy" enough way to fight classism. Yes, well, you know what they say, "if my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle."

If the lower class had a bunch of champions able to communicate their grievances as effectively as you do in this essay (which appears to be more of a thought exercise than something you really believe), then, well, they wouldn't be "lower", would they? (And we'd probably have a civil war by now.)

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Love this 🖤

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"...they prefer a system where powerful insiders get to play favorites, where success depends on who you know and not what you know, and where good jobs are locked behind gates of correct credentials from the right colleges."

Or the right ideas!

"Point out how DC Democrats passed a law saying all child care workers must have college degrees, and how this is just a blatant attempt to take jobs away from working-class people in order to give them to upper-class people instead."

Who also happen to be suspiciously "Child Free".

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> but here in the US class isn't a purely economic concept. Class is also about culture.

This reads oddly. Really, really, REALLY oddly. I would venture that the US is the only country in which any significant group would endorse the idea that class *is* a purely economic concept; anywhere else, you'd just get laughed out of the room for suggesting it.

Heck, I was recently informed that gold jewelry is falling out of fashion in *China* because it is 俗气 ("vulgar").

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If my paid subscription to Scott Alexander gives this plan *any* extra visibility to the people who could conceivably implement it, it'll be the best money I've ever spent and far more effective than mere tax dollars.

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That this article can't help but equate class with economic class (by the use of the term 'working class') is exactly why this won't work. We do need a better terminology than elite, but the word 'class' can't be used unless it gets reclaimed first, which may be a hopeless endeavor.

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I think this runs into some problems when you browse republican twitter for mentions of poor black people which tends to try to paint as many black kids as possible as criminal-by-default.

Republicans love the working class and the rural non-working class... but poor urban black people very much do not seem to be their favourite people such that this would seem to require their base change a lot of their own views.

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What you call `upper class' is usually referred to as `middle class', at least in Europe. Upper class comprises (simplifying, since it's a cultural and not an economic concept) people who have enough wealth so that they need not work if they choose not to. All working professionals are middle class and upper middle class. An Ivy League university professor is still a middle class job (not even an upper middle class job). An upper class job is being a CEO. If you ever fly economy class, you are not a member of the upper classes.

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Truly, there is not a crappy stock photo of a cosmic conciousness sat in the lotus position, chakras perfectly aligned, that can express quite how galaxy-brained this post is.

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Let me propose, since other commenters don't seem to be picking up on it, that Scott put the phrase "A Modest Proposal" in the title as an indication that he considers this suggestion unethical.

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So your plan to help the GOP is for them to alienate graduates in an age of ever-expanding tertiary education, make their rich donors uncomfortable, and throw one of the institutions they love (the police) under the bus for being classist? Good luck.

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I'm pretty sure that this would work, but I don't know, to me it sounds kind of evil, manipulative and populistic...

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