The reality is that government and law are based on values, culture, and moral and religious beliefs. It has always been this way and always will be. I think the biggest mistake in your framing is the incorrect belief the left are not interested in strict social controls. They are absolutely interested in strict social controls, including:
Redefining gender and enforcing it in all institutions. Also, redefining marriage and enforcing this definition in all institutions. The left would love, for instance, to remove non-profit status from churches that don't support their definition of marriage.
Redefining racism and enforcing the definition in all institutions. The idea, for instance, that disparate outcome proves racism is deeply and fundamentally flawed, and yet the idea has been enforced and become entrenched via judicial activism, laws, and executive action.
Redefining sexual norms and force-teaching these norms to children in public schools.
Forcing citizens to pay for taxpayer-funded abortion.
Indoctrinating children with woke ideology in public schools, with support from the federal government. This is morally equivalent to forcing a particular religion into public schools, if not worse.
Cancel culture is a direct manifestation of the left's desire for full control over social behavior.
The left used to say play the anti-authoritarian card when they were the underdog in the culture wars. Now that they are winning, they no longer need to, nor would it be appropriate for them to do so.
Except what you are saying is not really true. Most conservatives want to reduce government power, not extend it. The left, on the other hand, universally wants to extend government reach. I would recommend reading "The Authoritarian Moment" which goes into detail as to how the left are basically winning: https://www.amazon.com/Authoritarian-Moment-Weaponized-Ameri...
To quote from the book's introduction:
"There are certainly totalitarians on the political right. But statistically, they represent a fringe movement with little institutional clout. The authoritarian left, meanwhile, is ascendant in nearly every area of American life. A small number of leftists—college-educated, coastal, and uncompromising—have not just taken over the Democratic Party but our corporations, our universities, our scientific establishment, our cultural institutions. And they have used their newfound power to silence their opposition."
In American politics, yes. The problem is that both parties when in power have extended the power of authority and none have reduced it. It's been going on for so long that I can't take any conservative that says they vote right to decrease government seriously. It's just a talking point now. No one is going to reduce the government's powers and it's gotten us in trouble already. It's always justified as "well I need these powers because <other party> is holding the system hostage" and we've repeated this for over half a century. Authoritarians can be left or right. That's not the axis that matters.
I actually agree with a lot of what you are saying. Often it feels like it doesn't matter who we vote for: no president ever actually does anything about the ever-expanding big government. I wish we had someone like Senator Rand Paul, but more charismatic, who had a chance of winning the presidency. Say what you will, but that man definitely seems to want to shrink the government.
My problem with the right is that they do shrink the government, but also extend it in other ways. Personally I want an efficient government. I don't think that means slashing programs entirely, like getting rid of the IRS, but rather ensuring that programs don't bloat. They will tend towards that through bureaucracy. As the world becomes more complicated we will need more departments than we needed 100 years ago but we should always be ensuring that these departments don't get bogged down by too much bureaucracy. I feel that the conversation often lacks this notion and focuses on too simplistic of an approach. That's why I don't like people like Rand Paul. He's using a first order approximation which we can tell is not going to be a good enough approximation because he's using the wrong causal variables.
This isn't entirely true. While the Reps slash some programs they also extend others and extend the executive power. The only difference between them and the Dems is that, as you said, the Dems are open about their power grabs.
I do think we have to stop talking as if we criticize one side that it implies we align with the other. We should be criticizing all those that hold power. I believe a major problem we are facing today is that we're lacking critique of the parties we affiliate with and justify bad actions with "we need this to defeat the other party who isn't playing fair." There is no "for the greater good" in this. That's why the powers are extending in the first place.
I think saying "left" or "right" is too simplistic of a notion and that we're getting too caught up in labels. Labels are just hints, but we're not using them as hints.
It's definitely too simplistic, and we could argue all day over which side is worse, but I think it's hard to argue against the fact that, right now the, left control the levers of power and are the most immediate threat to American liberty and constitutional government. If we are fortunate enough to vote them down to the minority, we can address the next immediate threat?
I'm not sure I buy this. I think you're saying that just because the left has the Presidential power currently. But that's never been absolute power in this country (though what has been worrying is that there's the increase of this power. A centralization/consolidation if you will).
IMO the most immediate threat to the American liberty and constitutional government is that we, the people, cannot acknowledge that those in power are playing the same game regardless of the political isle that they are on. It is a show. I'm not sure who said it first but the quote
> The difference between you and me is smaller than the difference between us and our respective leaders
is an important thing to understand. That's what divide and rule preys on. Thinking that we're different when we aren't. The game can't be fixed until we recognize this.
We're in a thread talking about a whistleblower from Facebook. A whistleblower who is saying that reactionary content drives more engagement and harms the public. There's a special irony in that we're arguing over the same thing but if the government does the same thing or not. I do believe that politicians on both sides of the isle are doing the same thing we're concerned about Facebook doing. That's the biggest and most immediate threat to American liberty.
I can respect your viewpoint here. I know my response isn't adding much but I think it's important to recognize respect for a differing belief or opinion.
Techbros are notably far-right. The hacker ethos died out when computing became profitable. This is just a case of people's views coming to align with their material conditions.
You may not respect the writer, but what he is saying is demonstrably correct. The takeover of the Democratic party is not so well known (it happened fifty years ago), but there is a contemporary account [0]:
The election of 1972 has demonstrated that the “democratization” of the Democratic party under the guidance of such notions has only served to make it less representative of the interests and wishes of the majority of Americans than it has ever been before. For a majority party in the United States—especially if it is, as the Democrats have traditionally been, a party of change—faces a particular difficulty: that of drawing together a variety of potentially hostile racial, economic, cultural, and regional elements into a more or less united front against the vast power of corporate conservatism. In many respects the requirements of a coalition party, which must serve as a mechanism for brokerage among various interests, run counter to the plebiscitarian and individualistic currents that have long nourished both liberalism and radicalism in this country. The ethos of the New Politics in particular is hostile to the very idea of such a party. It has raised the social experience of its own affluent, educated constituency to what is, if not a world view, then at least a powerful conviction about the future of American politics. In this view, most of the “old” social problems which produced a politics of bread-and-butter self-interest are solved by the new affluence, or are well on their way to solution. The old interest groups—save perhaps for the blacks—are therefore superfluous. New forces are arising, not out of earthly needs, but out of the desires of those who have transcended such needs and are motivated only by the wish to do good.
But of course these new forces themselves constitute an interest group which differs from the “old” interest groups chiefly in its refusal to acknowledge the degree to which it hungers for political power and patronage. Unless steps can now be taken to restore the disaffected and disenfranchised elements of the Democratic party to influence, the party will remain in the control of this new interest group, and the Democrats will become the voice of an affluent minority speaking for and responsive to no one but itself.
There's entire schools of left-wing thought that are deeply anti-authoritarian, many types of anarchism for instance are deeply rooted in collectivist ideology. There's also all manner of socialist schools of thought that favour strong degrees of civil liberties. The kind of Enlightenment-era ideologies that many modern Western democracies build their very foundations on today would have been considered radical, uncompromising left-wing zealotry by the hereditary nobility and strict social elitism they attempted with various degrees of success to overthrow.
Political ideologies in general are much more varied and in my opinion much more interesting than that tiny slice of the political compass the American overton window occupies. Authoritarianism is a property that can be attached to any ideology, left or right wing. It's not really useful to view politics as a one-dimensional axis from left to right, I think at a minimum two axes are needed, a collectivist-individualist axis and an authoritarian-libertarian axis to adequately compare ideologies relative to each-other. You could add even more axes such as traditionalist-reformist, localist-globalist, and probably many more.
So you sound like you are probably a lot more educated about politics than I am, so hopefully I can learn something from you, but I think one problem in practice is that collectivist views always seem to end in authoritarianism. Even in the U.S., the unions that resulted from collectivism became authoritarian and corrupt in their own right, the teacher's unions of America being a prime example of corruption and authoritarianism. Similarly, the auto workers unions have been a death knell to the American auto industry.
Anarchism isn't really a valid practical stance. Once you burn down the existing system, something has to replace it, and, to my limited knowledge, that has always been a dictatorship of some kind. Maybe that's just the simplest government one can form. Similarly, collectivist organizations always seem to result in top-down totalitarian regimes when they win the government.
America worked because the original founders were willing to give up power even though the people wanted to make them kings. At the same time, they established a system that made it hard for any one person or group to quickly amass political power. It seems like the left have, for the past century, been successfully dismantling the separation of powers, starting with Woodrow Wilson.
The problem is that people who can successfully enact a revolution or who aspire to become the decision makers of the collectivist society (it's never run democratically) are not temperamentally individuals who would actually govern with a light touch.
Once people like that are in charge, it can take many generations for government to become more liberal (in the classical sense). When individual rights are lost, they are very hard to recover.
Amusing you seem to have some idea of consequences of politics movements - however, so-called conservatives (and libertarians), by unseating government power (which is the only organization large enough to challenge corporate power) leaves a power vacuum for wealthy/corporations to usurp that power.
So anti-government-reguluation leads to a different flavor of fascism by corporate elites (all owned by the very wealthy).
I'm glad you find me amusing, but I actually agree with you that the concept of power decentralization needs to be applied to corporations as well. I definitely don't claim to have the answers to how to accomplish this, nor did I think the U.S. founders would ever imagine the power that corporations would eventually wield.
Well, perhaps your considerations should take that into account. Many (not all - there are some authoritarian ones) leftists are about seeing the threat to any centralized power. As the saying goes, "power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely".
Currently, the USA in an oligarchy and that power is actually vested in corporations who essentially control the government because they've infested all the regulation agencies.
The best way to fight that is with protests, strikes (there are dozens going on right now - tens of thousands at picket lines) and transparency (FOIAs and investigations to see where corporations control the government and vice-versa).
If the founders never understood the power of the uber-corporation, then they must've been blind. Dutch East India Company was a complete powerhouse in that era that controlled many countries.
But leftists vote Democratic (to the extent they vote for one of the two major parties), and I don't see the Democratic party doing anything whatever to rein in either big government or big business. In fact, these days the Democratic party is the party of big government and the Fortune 500, as is surely obvious.
Lots of activity, but little action forthcoming, I'm afraid.
Somehow, I don't think that the best solution is to promote a governmental and economic structure where a massive central government spends much of its energy battling massive corporations, while they both collaborate to surveil, regulate, and control the citizens.
> Similarly, collectivist organizations always seem to result in top-down totalitarian regimes when they win the government.
Substantially, that's a matter of history rather than ideology. Collectivist organizations that aren't top-down organized tend to be unsuccessful in overthrowing states and remaining in power in the face of more authoritarian opposition. The fact that the Russian revolution led to Stalinism is more survivorship bias than anything else.
You may also be underestimating the authoritarianism of right-wing institutions in US society just because they seem natural and normal to you.
I have to say, I find your "survivorship bias" argument novel, but also a bit ridiculous, considering that Karl Marx openly called for violent, bloody revolution:
“there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror."
So the ideology claims violent overthrow of government is needed, but it's not the ideology's fault when the overthrow leads to a murderous totalitarian regime arguably far worse than the government it replaced? I don't know how you can seriously hold this world view.
Violent bloody revolution is fine! It's what comes afterward that leftists disagree about. Compare, for example, Revolutionary Catalonia (unsuccessful) with Soviet Russia (lasted 70 years, never achieved communism).
You're right that two axes are not enough. Even within the two-dimensional model, authoritarian leftists regard authoritarianism as a means to an end (Marxism-Leninism endorses the eventual withering away of the state, even if it never got around to practicing it), whereas the authoritarian right regards authoritarianism as good in and of itself (the leadership principle).
Conservatives want to increase the power of those government institutions that are the least accountable, and are most connected to the use of violence: the police and the military. They want to reduce the power of any government institutions that would serve to provide public accountability to other power centers in US society, mainly corporations and the wealthy. Corporations and the wealthy need police: to protect their property, to enforce property relations and quell unrest. They need the military: to ensure them access to foreign resources and foreign markets. They're also willing to take advantage of any other government expenditures that benefit them (infrastructure), but generally want to see any expenditures be under their control if not eliminated.
The Left ultimately wants to abolish government power and create a stateless, classless society. Leftists differ among themselves with regard to the value of government power in achieving this, with the two opposite poles of the discussion being anarchists and Marxist-Leninists. But in general, leftists realize that they have nowhere near the organizational power to even think about those goals, and just want to improve the material conditions of working-class people, who make up the majority of society.
The Democratic Party is far from being controlled by leftists: I can count the number of actual leftists in the US House on one hand, and in the Senate on one finger. The Democratic Party is a center-right party, dedicated above all to the stability of the existing ruling class. They sometimes virtue-signal cultural values that are shared with the left (feminism, anti-racism), but largely as a means of providing an outlet for those values that is not threatening to capitalism, and which can be co-opted to protect it.
> Conservatives want to increase the power of those government institutions that are the least accountable, and are most connected to the use of violence: the police and the military.
That's just not true. Conservatives want to balance the need for police to enforce the law with the risk that the police acquire too much power. Also, conservatives recognize far more correctly than the left that we need military strength. It was the leftist call for demilitarization prior to WWII that contributed to Hitler's success. The left-leaning Jimmy Carter found his policies wholly inadequate for dealing with the Soviet Union. In contrast, it was Winston Churchill that saved Britain in WWII, and it was Ronald Reagan's expansion of military spending that bankrupted the Soviet Union. Leftists have grand ideas of defunding the police and military that simply don't work in reality.
> The Left ultimately wants to abolish government power and create a stateless, classless society
The left think they can create utopias. Again, their grandiose visions never work in reality. Where has this stateless, classless, society ever succeeded? The 20th century is littered with the bodies of those slain in pursuit of false utopias.
> The Democratic Party is far from being controlled by leftists:
Biden's administration is by far the most leftist we have seen in history. It makes Obama's administration seem almost reasonable. 6-10 trillion in projected socialist spending on socialist programs, unconstitutional eviction moratoria, authoritarian health mandates, and woke agendas with regards to race, gender, and public education, all provide a wealth of evidence that your current view on the democratic party may not be grounded in reality either, at least when it comes to what they are actually doing.
I'll skip over the theoretical stuff, and just skip to talking about the Democrats (whomst I hate).
With Biden, you need to watch the hands, not the mouth. Biden only proposes stuff that the left likes when he knows it won't pass — and he has a couple of thumbs on the scale (Manchin and Synema) to ensure that they don't. It's a matter of optics. On the eviction moratorium, for example, Biden knew he'd be overruled, and he knows that the Senate won't allow any extension by legislation to pass; all he actually did was get the actual leftists to stop camping out on the capitol steps. The Biden administration isn't practically governing to the right of the Obama administration, which was itself right wing. Look at the notable accomplishments of the Obama administration: a massive bail-out to investment banks, blocking socialized health care while enforcing/guaranteeing the revenue streams of private insurance companies, and maintaining the Global War On Terror, in part by ramping up the drone war.
On the other hand, if you consider health mandates authoritarian...I don't know that we have any common ground for speaking. If public health isn't a legitimate government concern, then probably nothing is.
I can't say I agree with you that Biden is putting on a show just to keep his party together, but I'll leave it at that for now.
I do actually think public health is a legitimate government concern. That doesn't mean the government needs to exercise authority to the fullest extent for every health concern.
The 2010 and 2018 flu epidemics both killed far more children than COVID has killed. Where were the child vaccine mandates, school mask mandates, and school lockdowns then?
Once the COVID vaccine came out, the need for government intervention was mostly over. The authoritarianism comes from the continued over-reactions and unnecessary use of authority that lasts to this day.
> "There are certainly totalitarians on the political right. But statistically, they represent a fringe movement with little institutional clout. The authoritarian left, meanwhile, is ascendant in nearly every area of American life. A small number of leftists—college-educated, coastal, and uncompromising—have not just taken over the Democratic Party but our corporations, our universities, our scientific establishment, our cultural institutions. And they have used their newfound power to silence their opposition."
This is just an emotional quote that doesn't help reinforce your original statement:
> Most conservatives want to reduce government power, not extend it. The left, on the other hand, universally wants to extend government reach.
So I am not sure what I am supposed to conclude from your citation here; It seems a bit circular in its logic. (i.e., it assumes that "the left .. want to extend government reach", and the quote indicates that group is in positions of power in the private sector, and thus wants to extends government reach?)
The two are connected in that authoritarianism can occur in any institution of authority, not just government.
The left want more centralized government power, but they are also happy to wield power and authority anywhere they can obtain it.
I didn't think I'd need to provide evidence that the left want to extend government reach, though. What do you think the 3.5 trillion dollar reconciliation bill will do? What do you think the failed "for the people" act tried to do? What do you think Biden tries to do when he has the CDC unconstitutionally ban evictions, or has OSHA force employers to vaccinate their employees against a disease with a .2% IFR?
Conservatives, in general, are strongly pro police, judges and other members of the judicial system. These people are authorities (that ultimately use violence to enforce the law). Conservatives want to increase the number and power of these authorities. Thus, many conservatives are authoritarian.
That's not what authoritarian means. It doesn't mean "pro authority". It means "of, relating to, or favoring blind submission to authority". What does the support of police or judges have to do with that?
For a society to function, it has to have officials that enforce the law. If you aren't "pro police", then you are probably an anarchist. Let me know when you find a successful example of an anarchist society.
Conservatives aren't pro police. Sane individuals grounded in reality are pro police. And sane individuals across both political aisles are also concerned with police and judicial overreach. There is a balance to be found here.
Given the right’s decades long push to invalidate a woman’s right to obtain an abortion, I find it pretty hard to accept the idea that most conservatives aren’t authoritarian.
Left's perspective: women have a right to abort their unborn children.
Right's perspective: unborn children have a right to life and protection of the law.
Both sides are arguing a moral argument. Do women have a right to abort their babies? They certainly haven't had this right throughout the entirety of human civilization. Do unborn children deserve the protection of the law? Again, this wasn't really a major issue because abortions as a medical procedure didn't really exist until recently.
But trying to claim that conservatives are being authoritarian is where I think you are wrong. It's no more authoritarian to them than it is to enforce that you can't murder people outside the womb.
"Except what you are saying is not really true. Most conservatives want to reduce government power, not extend it. The left, on the other hand, universally wants to extend government reach."
Well, except for abortion. And official support for Christianity, in various kinds. And, of course, the military, the biggest part of big government and big government power. And keeping the poors and minorities in their places. And conversely, the rich in their place.
But yeah, they'd want to get rid of Social Security, Medicare, the Postal Service, the EPA, OSHA, and all that froo-fraw that gets in the way of true Americans.
("But, but, but, no true conservative..." Don't go there. Trust me.)
"A small number of leftists—college-educated, coastal, and uncompromising—have not just taken over the Democratic Party but our corporations, our universities, our scientific establishment, our cultural institutions. And they have used their newfound power to silence their opposition."
I'm just going to leave that one lay there.
No, I'm not.
Darn those leftists with their college education and science and their book learnin' and their economic productivity! They've squashed anyone who disagrees with them, oppressing us right-thinking, red-blooded Americans past the point of tolerance! Why, we've had to gerrymander the hell out of the place to keep them from crawling in and hiding in the pantries!
The right frame anti-abortion as pro-life. Do you consider murder laws authoritarian? Pro- and anti-abortion arguments are both grounded in morality, but claiming one is more authoritarian than the other is showing willful ignorance as to what the right believes.
> And official support for Christianity.
There is practically zero scientific evidence backing the transgender movement. Or the world-view that western civilization is systemically-racist. Or the left's views on sexual norms and marriage. Yet these and other woke ideologies are taught in public schools with support from the Biden administration and national teacher's unions. Wokeness is a terrible state religion, much worse than Christianity ever was.
> And, of course, the military, the biggest part of big government and big government power.
Wanting a strong military does is not the same as wanting authoritarian government that controls every aspect of our lives. You can have a minimal government with a large military, or an authoritarian government with a small military.
> And keeping the poors and minorities in their places.
The left wish they were the righteous ones helping the poor and minorities. I'd suggest reading the first essay in "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" by Thomas Sowell. He argues strongly that the "white saviours" that are liberals have made the plight of minorities far worse than had they never intervened. As Sowell often emphasizes, results matter more than good intentions.
> And conversely, the rich in their place.
Biden's spending spree and proposed tax increases will hurt the middle class the most. Socialism and communism are the great equalizers; they eventually make everyone poor except a few elite that are connected to the government.
> But yeah, they'd want to get rid of Social Security, Medicare, the Postal Service, the EPA, OSHA, and all that froo-fraw that gets in the way of true Americans.
I don't even know how to address this straw man argument.
> Darn those leftists with their college education and science and their book learnin' and their economic productivity!
Thomas Sowell calls you folks the "intelligenstia". I suggest you read "Intellectuals and Society". The arrogance of America's ruling oligarchy and intellectual elite will be a major contributor to our country's destruction or downfall.
You wrote, "Most conservatives want to reduce government power, not extend it." Note "government power", not "authoritarianism". Those are two different things, something you seem to understand with "You can have a minimal government with a large military, or an authoritarian government with a small military." However, a large military is almost the definition of "government power".
I would like to note that there is zero scientific evidence that "Wokeness is a terrible state religion, much worse than Christianity ever was." Also, I'm not a Thomas Sowell disciple. I will cheerfully accept the charge of "intelligenstia" (When did being educated and intelligent become a bad thing?) although I note that Thomas Sowell is more of an intelligentsia than I am.
"The Republican Party has always been associated with opposition to Social Security...." Oh, hell, just read it---it has the whole history. (The paragraph about Senator McConnell is likely referring to https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-mccon..., by the way.)
"President Trump’s push to privatize the Postal Service and his party’s antipathy toward government partly explain Republicans’ reluctance to provide the same pandemic relief to the Postal Service as it has to airlines and other private companies facing a similar collapse in demand. Privatization is a long-standing goal of conservative think tanks and corporations that stand to gain from weakening or dismantling the Postal Service."
Oh, c'mon, who hasn't heard more than they strictly need to in order to know that conservatives don't like regulations, even necessary ones?
"As George W. Bush’s former EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman wrote [...],
"'If his actions continue in the same direction, during Pruitt’s term at the EPA the environment will be threatened instead of protected, and human health endangered instead of preserved, all with no long-term benefit to the economy.'"
Destroying these and similar government services would, indeed, reduce government power. They're also fairly popular among voters, but that shouldn't stop anyone.
I think we are arguing using a different definition of "big" government. If a government has a large army but is not authorized to use it to do whatever it wants, and there are sufficient checks and balances in place to prevent military abuse, the government is not "big" in my eyes. Does that make sense to you?
I don't think there's much scientific evidence that any religion is good or bad. The point is that wokeness is a religion, it is being pushed in schools by the left, and in my opinion it is far worse than Christianity.
There is plenty of evidence Biden's tax plan will impact the middle class more than the rich. Historically when taxes are raised businesses move wealth out of the country and prices rise, and the government even ends up collecting less taxes than before. This happened during the Obama administration and Obama even admitted he would rather raise taxes even if it meant less tax revenue.
Conservatives aren't necessarily against the idea of things like social security; they just question whether government is the best organization to provide these services. It can easily be argued that the government botched social security big time, for instance.
EPA was started by Nixon, a conservative president. Just because we want small government doesn't mean we necessarily want all of government shut down.
No it means she's biased and we should evaluate if she has another motive because she's connected to the party now interviewing her who want to censor Americans.
I wonder if she'll be a professor or an ambassador for her service.
I think there have been enough studies now to show that the problem with most public schools in the U.S. have little or nothing to do with underfunding. Thomas Sowell's recent book, "Charter Schools and their enemies", shows that Charter schools with less funding can insanely outperform public schools they compete with in inner cities, even though the public schools have more funding per student.
I have not read Sowell's book. Do you know how he addresses the issue of self-selection? For example, with cost: Some kinds of students require orders of magnitude more resources than others due to health/behavioral/developmental/poverty-related issues. A school that is able to attract specific families or expel specific students should logically attempt to minimize the number of these kinds of students and therefore we would expect them to have significantly lower "per pupil" costs than average. Comparing such a school to one that must accept all students is an apples-to-oranges comparison.
As a personal anecdote I used to manage an academic department that was highly ranked. I'm proud of the faculty and curriculum but to be perfectly frank the biggest factor in our success was that our ranking attracted top-tier applicants. At the level we were at, the differences between us and similar institutions mostly boiled down to that initial self-selection.
He addresses all of self-selection, demographics, and discipline directly in the book, if I remember accurately.
First, to address self-selection as a primary cause, Sowell specifically compares the outcomes of students who won the charter school lottery versus those who didn't, and shows the performance gap between public and charter schools remains even when only considering students who entered the lottery.
Second, Sowell purposely compares schools that have as similar demographics as possible, including racial makeup and economic status. He also attempts to control for location differences by comparing schools that are co-located in the same building or are located within a small distance of each other.
Finally, he specifically calls out charter schools' ability to enforce stronger discipline and even expel students as a distinct competitive advantage, one that the teachers unions recognize and are trying to undermine. He also believes that relaxing discipline in the name of reducing disparate outcome among identity groups has a direct causal effect on worsened education in public schools.
To me, with regards to discipline, the lesson to be learned is that public schools need to be empowered to enforce stricter discipline as well. There is no justice or fairness in allowing a small minority to disrupt the education of a willing majority. A few of the discipline-related anecdotes Sowell shares in his book are heart-wrenching, including one story of a student punching a pregnant teacher in the stomach, telling her he was going to punch the baby right out of her, and finally returning to school the next day with no imposed consequences for his violent behavior. I don't know how any student could learn in an environment like that.
With respect to cost, I'm not sure any of these points refute the hypothesis that charters cost less per pupil primarily because they are able to offload the most expensive students. And if that is true then increasing the number of charter schools will simply increase the concentration of the most expensive students into fewer schools that have less funding to deal with them. At that point we can either acknowledge that expensive students require an order of magnitude more money or we let them pass through to the welfare and justice systems. In either case it doesn't seem like we're saving society money by switching to charters, we're just shifting it to other parts of the budget.
With respect to educational opportunities that seems more compelling. But as Sowell alludes, I suspect you could get a similar effect by allowing public schools to enforce stronger discipline and make it easier to suspend or expel difficult students. On that note I'm surprised to hear that teachers unions are opposed to that now. I've certainly heard that unions are an obstacle to getting rid of poor-performing teachers, but I rarely hear of them being an obstacle to dealing with difficult students. At least a couple decades ago the AFT was actively pushing to make it easier to expel students for things like drugs or weapons in school.
So I think an underlying assumption you have that I want to scrutinize is that misbehaving students are costlier from a monetary perspective, or that they require more money spent to handle them, or that spending more money will result in better outcomes for these students. This assumption may or may not be true, but I think it is valuable to question it and expect some evidence to support it. For instance, it is quite possible that stricter and more rigorous discipline in schools could benefit misbehaving students far more than any spending increase in the school system. Likewise, there may be certain cultural norms or expectations in charter schools that have far more impact on misbehaving students than spending increases.
I think the far more important point, however is that some charter schools are working phenomenally well for the underprivileged and doing so with less funding, and that there are valuable lessons to be learned from that fact, which lessons are at risk of being ignored or lost. However, instead of either trying to learn from these charter schools or allow more of them to be created, teacher's unions and the government officials they support via campaign funds are openly hostile to them, as the book details. These adults are clearly acting in their best interests, not in the interests of the children they are claiming to serve.
With regard to government policy in general, there seems to be a complete disincentive to analyze policy in retrospect honestly, determine successes and failures, and learn from the past in order to influence future decisions. With government policy, intent often matters more than results, as intent earns votes. This can easily lead to perverse incentives.
As an example, it's easy to claim good intent when proposing to spend more money on schools. But, if we want to actually help children out, results matter more than intent, and it seems very clear that, past a certain point, pouring more money into the public school system has little to no impact on educational outcomes. Instead, we should both be looking at other factors, and we should be allowing for more competition so that we can iterate on more ideas more rapidly. The relative monoculture of the public school system, combined with perverse incentives among both the government and teacher's unions, seem unhealthy for society and for our children.
To be clear, I am not arguing in favor of teachers unions or short-sighted politicians. I am not arguing that our education dollars are being well-spent since it is clear that we are spending more to get worse results. I am not arguing that increased funding has a bigger impact than improving discipline.
But it does seem logical to me that given a set of students, some of them will end up costing more than others. To give a trivial example, a student who repeats a grade costs more to educate than a student who skips a grade, just by virtue of spending an extra two years in the system. Similarly, it seems logical to me that students who can't afford lunch, need additional ESL or special-needs teachers, are physically handicapped, are violent, etc will cost more than the average student. (And sure, kicking that violent kid out lowers your costs, but it simply shifts that cost to the juvenile detention system.) Assuming the above is true, any school that is able to attract slightly more low-cost students or discourage slightly more high-cost students (however they are able to do so) should enjoy substantial cost savings.
> some charter schools are working phenomenally well for the underprivileged and doing so with less funding
I do not dispute that there are positive examples. From the statistical analysis I can find the overall effects seem mixed: in some states charter-school students do better (on average) than public school students, in some states worse, and in some states like Ohio there's simply more variance between charter school students. And since I do not know is what this effect is due to I'm not sure to what degree this approach scales. For example, do charter schools work equally well in a region where there are no more public schools left for them to dump difficult students onto?
One way to test this would be to randomly assign a population of students into a public school system and a charter school system, give them the same funding, and require that each system accommodate even the most difficult students who have special needs or disciplinary issues. (Not necessarily in the same classes, just that they are responsible for their education.) If charter schools have better educational outcomes in such an experiment then I would find that truly compelling.
I think it's absolutely useful that states are taking such different approaches to charter schools though, and I think eventually that will give us the data we're looking for.
Public charter schools can't pick and choose their students the way private schools do. They have to take students with special needs, discipline problems, etc. Expulsions can only be done in extreme circumstances.
The real advantage of charter schools is parent engagement. Parents usually have to specifically ask for their children to be placed into charter schools. That's a signal that the parents take education seriously and will impose some discipline on the children.
The US spending is on a per student basis is on par with other OECD nations[0], it is incumbent upon the teachers unions and department of education to explain why they can not achieve what the rest of the world has with the same funds, not the taxpayer to throw more money onto the bonfire.
US schools serve as a de-facto provider of social services. Think free lunches and breakfast, school nurses, screening for disease/disabilities, sports and multitudes of after school activities to keep kids occupies until parents return, transportation to/from school, etc. Those services are a separate line-item i (I imagine) every other country.
A better and more instructive comparison would be money spent only on instruction, adjusted for PPP and maybe student poverty.
I can't find that data, but I doubt that a couple of minimum wage lunch ladies and a school nurse are why our schools have to cost twice as much as everywhere else. Other nations provide transportation as well, all of Europe doesn't live in areas with public transit, despite that perception.
As for sports, if sports aren't moving the needle academically then we shouldn't be funding them. If other nations priotized education over sport, and got better results we should learn from them.
Just throwing more money at probably won't do anything, what is likely is that they will double down on the strategies that aren't working.
My point is that its not as simple as concluding the US wastes money and is ineffective at teaching. The schools in the US do a lot more than instruction, and work with a different set of students.
We certainly could learn from what works around the world, but comparing raw numbers is simply not helpful.
We can also learn from what works in different states. For instance, Massachusetts, as a state, has PISA scores that are on par with the best in the world.
I just don't see a basis for calling them categorically underfunded.
For example, New York State has the highest spending per student $24,040 and is ranked 14th in this survey[0] while Virginia is ranked fourth and only spends $12,216. Massachusetts spends $17,058 and tops the list.
A honest look at the school system may reveal that some parts of it are underfunded, but it will likely also reveal parts that are overfunded. I suspect a lot of progress can be made by being better stewards of the money they currently have, and therefore suggest starting there. Ultimately any taxes come from the wallets of families supporting the children we are trying to help here, making them poorer needs to show benefit to be justified.
I'm not a rust user, but I would argue you are still managing memory manually, you're just doing a lot of it through rust's type system, which can check for errors at compile time, rather than through runtime APIs like the C or C++ standard library. The question then becomes whether it is easier to manage memory through Rust's type system versus via standard runtime APIs.
From what I've read, Rust memory management actually requires more work but provides fantastic safety guarantees. This could mean that rust actually lowers productivity at first, but as the complexity of the code base grows, some of that productivity is restored or even supercedes C/C++ because you spend no time chasing runtime memory bugs.
For some products or projects, the costs of shipping a security flaw caused by a memory bug exploit could be high enough that a drop in productivity from Rust relative to C is still more than justified due to external costs that Rust mitigates.
More importantly, GC'ed languages tend to use at least 2x the memory of un-GC'ed languages and have to deal with the consequences of GC-induced pauses and generally inferior native code interop. Whether that matters to you or not depends on your application. No one is going to use a GC'ed language in the Linux Kernel, but practically 100% of backend applications are written in GC'ed languages because the productivity benefits are of automatic memory management are massive.
I’m not really sure if that 2x figure is accurate. I’ve seen charts on both sides of this and a lot here depends on your programming language and the things it can optimize: with Linear/Affine types, I’m fairly sure Haskell could, in theory, eliminate GC deterministically from the critical sections of your code-base without forcing you to adopt manual memory management universally.
But, there’s just the fact that people writing real-time/near real-time systems do, in fact, choose GC languages and make it work: video games are one example with Minecraft and Unity being the major examples. But also HFT systems: Jane Street heavily uses Ocaml and other companies use Java/etc. with specialized GCs.
This is not even to mention the microbenchmarks that seem to indicate that Common Lisp and Java can match or exceed Rust for tasks like implementing lock-free hash maps and various other things https://programming-language-benchmarks.vercel.app/problem/s...
I am aware that you can hit really good latency targets with GC'ed languages, like in the video game and finance industry. Whenever I investigate examples, though, I find the devs have to go through a ton of effort to avoid memory allocations, and then I ask if using the GC'ed language was even worth it in the first place?
I'm actually fascinated with the idea of going off-heap in the hotspots of GC'ed languages to get better performance. Netty, for instance, relies on off-heap allocations to achieve better networking performance. But, once you do so, you start incurring the disadvantages of languages like C/C++, and it can get complicated mixing the two styles of code.
"Whenever I investigate examples, though, I find the devs have to go through a ton of effort to avoid memory allocations"
Yep, also the median dev in a GC'ed language is simply incapable of writing super efficient code in these languages because they rarely have to. You would have to bring in the best of the best people from those communities or put your existing devs through a pretty significant education process that is similar in difficulty to just learning/using Rust.
The resulting code will be very different to what typical code looks like in those languages, so the supposed homogeneity benefits of just writing fast C#/Java when it's needed are probably not quite true. You'd basically have to keep that project staffed up with these kinds of people and ensure they have very good Prod observability to ensure regressions don't appear.
Yes, and I think one important aspect to this is the necessary CI/CD changes needed to support these kinds of optimizations. If your performance targets are tight enough that you are making significant non-standard optimizations in your GC'ed language, you're probably going to want some automated performance regression testing in your deployment pipeline to ensure you don't ship something that falls down under load. In my experience, building and maintaining those pipeline components is not easy.
Look at 2.cl, though: the lisp solution is faster than everything except one c++ solution. (And, aside from the SIMD intrinsics, the lisp solution is fairly idiomatic)
I mostly agree with what you're saying, but I'll also add that GC pauses are mostly a problem of yester-year unless you're either managing truly enormous amounts of memory or have hard real-time requirements (and even then it's debatable). Modern GCs, as seen in Go, Java 11+, .NET 4.5+ guarantee sub-millisecond pauses on terrabyte-large heaps (I believe the JS GC does as well, but I'm less sure).
I downvoted you at first and then changed my mind. I think I would like your comment more if it were more worded like: "buried in here are great examples of important optimizations that did not require a rewrite". Or something like: "this article does a great job of showing that you can hit many reasonable performance targets while using a GC'ed language like Go."
You can pretty much always get better performance with more control over memory, and more importantly, you can dramatically lower overall memory usage and avoid GC pauses, but you have to weigh that against the fact that automated memory management is one of the few programming language features that is basically proven to give a massive developer productivity boost. In my corner of the industry, everyone chooses the GC'ed languages and performance isn't really a major concern most of the time.
You should read Michael Knowles' Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds. Political radicals have explicitly defined tolerance to mean "don't tolerate dissenting views". I don't have the exact quote on hand at the moment or I would share it, but they were very explicit about their censorship goals.
The book also discusses how there has never been unbridled free speech. There has always been a standard of speech that allows some things said and disallows other things said. What's changed over time is the standards themselves, and many would argue they have changed for the far worse in recent years.
A better analogy is if you don't intend to run over someone with your car and they jump out in front of you, then you are not at fault, nor were you doing anything wrong.
Results do matter more than intentions, but sometimes results are out of your control or even disconnected from your actions. You may say something perfectly reasonable and yet someone takes unreasonable offense. Who is to define what is reasonable to say and what is reasonable to take offense to? In the past decades, the political left has taken us too far in the direction of giving a small minority tyrannical censorship power to silence by taking offense at whatever they dislike, and then cancelling the person who said it.
Every generation thinks the next generation’s rules are tyrannical. Speech and culture is messy and it’s not black and white. To say it’s all been bad is ignoring a lot of violent speech that is no longer acceptable and the benefit that has brought to the the same small minority groups you’re referencing, from being less subjected to verbal attacks.
If this is what you honestly think they're referring to then I feel like that says a LOT more about you then it does about them. They were very clear that they aren't talking about situations like this one you've just described.
Are you being disingenuous or do you honestly need someone to explain what they meant? They're talking about crybullies who will disingenuously misinterpret what someone says and take offense to it. Very much like you've just done.
Were you alive in the 80s? I literally heard this complaint multiple times from multiple people. The point is is that calling someone a “f_____ f__” would be considered a “micro aggression” by some in the 80s that only the “radical left” would get upset about.
The point is that if you’ve lived long enough you’ve seen people complain about culture changing enough times to know that it’s always changing and always uncomfortable for those that don’t like it.*
I'm pretty sure name calling with malicious intent has always been considered a macroaggression.
Even today, using that terminology in jest may be completely acceptable and benign with no malicious intent at all, depending on the social circle it's being used in. Cultural norms do not translate to universal cultural axioms.
Things go too far in one direction, and the speech restrictions in the former Eastern Bloc were considered unacceptable for more than 20 years after its collapse.
Now some people are trying to reestablish the same control mechanisms.
P.S.: No one is asking to permit the slur you cited to make a point, it isn't a great example.
> if you don't intend to run over someone with your car and they jump out in front of you, then you are not at fault, nor were you doing anything wrong.
Not if you are in a pedestrian crossing (especially unsignalized one).
If you're at risk of covid, you can get vaccinated and are protected from covid. That's all the defense you need in order to not worry about anyone else being infected.
If you're in an at-risk category where you feel the vaccine isn't enough of a defense, you can wear n95 masks, get a third booster shot, or do whatever other extra mitigation measures you feel you need.
The reality is that covid isn't dangerous enough, given the tools people have at their disposal, to warrant authoritarian government or societal overreach. That unfortunately hasn't stopped the government, or it's political allies, from trying anyways. I firmly believe this overreach will backfire on the US democrat party and they will feel the backlash in the midterm elections of 2022.
I think I would much rather mildly inconvenience people and have my favorite political team’s score go down than the alternative of Italy-style medical system collapse with massive death totals.
> If you're at risk of covid, you can get vaccinated and are protected from covid. That's all the defense you need in order to not worry about anyone else being infected.
Vaccinated people can still get coronavirus variants, albeit with seemingly milder symptoms and at a lower rate. There is some evidence that they can still be transmissible as well.
More importantly, there are also whole categories of people who cannot get vaccinated or who are not allowed to get the second vaccine dose due to an allergic reaction to the first. My mother is in the second category.
https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/who-cant-have-covid-19-vac...
> If you're in an at-risk category where you feel the vaccine isn't enough of a defense, you can wear n95 masks, get a third booster shot, or do whatever other extra mitigation measures you feel you need.
Masks work in part by catching and redirecting particles that come out of your own mouth. I am not an epidemiologist and have limited understanding of the effect, but my limited understanding is that models that epidemiologist have used suggest that effect might be more important than the filtering effect of the mask itself given the other mucus membranes like the eyes or gaps in most masks. So your mask helps protect others as much as yourself if you are carrying the virus asymptomatically.
https://science.thewire.in/the-sciences/covid-19-pandemic-ma...
> I think I would much rather mildly inconvenience people and have my favorite political team’s score go down than the alternative of Italy-style medical system collapse with massive death totals.
That's a nice false dichotomy you have there. Florida's average death rates in the US despite having a highly vulnerable elderly population prove that.
Of course vaccinated people can still get COVID. Everyone knows that. Why repeat it? The point is that covid becomes a very low risk to the vaccinated. Once vaccinated, you are more likely to die of the flu than of covid.
Most theoretical mask studies were done when we thought COVID was primarily spread by droplets, not aerosols. To this day I haven't seen any study plausibly show that others' masks protect you as much as your own mask. I'd be happy to be proven wrong if there's any real scientific evidence out there.
I'm not sure I understand the Florida example. Deaths per Capita are currently spiking in Florida again and not in places with strong vaccination rates.
The reason I repeat the point about "breakthrough" infections is that vaccinations are not a cure all and we can't just leave everyone to personal responsibility on vaccination/no vaccinations.
Also, importantly, not everyone can get vaccinated, they are more likely to be infected by those unvaccinated and are affected by the unvaccinated's use of our scarce hospital resources.
Mask mandates and higher vaccination rates seem to result in lower infection rates in pretty much every empirical study I've seen. And in places where they are fought tooth and nail like Florida, people disproportionately tend to die.
I was literally in the military and we would train to meet body standards that were based on minimizing the long-term statistical risk of death. We also got vaccined for the same reason. I'm not sympathetic to your argument that a bunch of people should pointlessly die in your wasteland of misinformation so you might feel "free". We didn't say "comrade" so much too.
Redefining gender and enforcing it in all institutions. Also, redefining marriage and enforcing this definition in all institutions. The left would love, for instance, to remove non-profit status from churches that don't support their definition of marriage.
Redefining racism and enforcing the definition in all institutions. The idea, for instance, that disparate outcome proves racism is deeply and fundamentally flawed, and yet the idea has been enforced and become entrenched via judicial activism, laws, and executive action.
Redefining sexual norms and force-teaching these norms to children in public schools.
Forcing citizens to pay for taxpayer-funded abortion.
Indoctrinating children with woke ideology in public schools, with support from the federal government. This is morally equivalent to forcing a particular religion into public schools, if not worse.
Cancel culture is a direct manifestation of the left's desire for full control over social behavior.
The left used to say play the anti-authoritarian card when they were the underdog in the culture wars. Now that they are winning, they no longer need to, nor would it be appropriate for them to do so.