I think Sen. Murphy should read up on some French Revolution history because he sounds very Jacobin here.
I think it’s good to ask him directly how he plans on enforcing his cult on non believers. That’s usually when this kinda stuff can go from well meaning to state mandated oppression.
Yet every political commentator would not describe a 55/45 split as close even though most people would. I've never really understood this. I don't think you're out of "close" until you're around 70/30.
That Ann Hibbens story is absolutely wild. The carpenters were so upset they couldn't move on even after 16 years!!
On topic, I'm not religious and don't believe that God gives life meaning. Meaning is constructed from the relationships we build with each other. If you use an established community for that (such as Church or some other group like EA) then that's your prerogative, but by no means a requirement.
I'd argue a core challenge for abundence liberals is that the success of liberalism has led to diminishing marginal returns of skilled technocratic economic management. Yes, inflation and housing are critical problems amenable to economic solutions, but immigration is an economic boon that voters have turned against for non- or post-materailist reasons.
I think Lindsey has an empirically grounded theory of the case that [focuses] on expanding the number of paths to dignity by carving out spaces buffered from both market and government power. His main focus is meaning for those on the other side of the educational divide who are needed by the economy in fungible ways that reward skills to address demand gaps but often not than dignity enhancing ones. As fellow left liberals, i suspect you'll object to his neglect of some of the ways localized power can be just as oppressive (at one point, I think he accidentally reinvents a company town but in start up effective altruist community style).
But while we are in different ideological camps I think he's makes a worthy go at the question of how do we make more room for *communities* of meaning while retaining exit options and not seeking national level thick shared meaning.
Jerusalem, the cases you describe share another structure.
“The common good” cannot punish anyone by itself. The change occurs when a judgment about what is good acquires public legitimacy, enters institutions, and gains the power to interpret, enforce, and punish.
At that point, it is no longer merely a value judgment. It begins to change the actual conditions faced by people who do not share that value.
So the question is not only who defines the common good, but: At what point does a value judgment stop being a judgment and become power?
Fundamentally I've always been in your camp, but I increasingly struggle to vote left to get closer to this vision; If anything, for all my disagreements with the right on various policies, they often seem on-net more willing to entertain the notion that people who disagree with them are not all evil.
Another huge problem is family-formation. Left and far-left societies and policies, simply put, fail entirely at it. Current stats I'm aware off is that rightwingers have almost perfectly sustainable birth rates slightly above 2, while moderates have ca 1.5, and leftwingers have atrocious sub-1 averages, going down as far as 0.5 for some urban/academic milieus. Yet, it's the most basic form of investment into the future, and retirement as a concept requires a decent number of children - not to mention how fundamentally nihilistic a society is that can't even be bothered to procreate. If western societies plunge further towards or below 1, first state finances will stop working out entirely, and long-term, they'll stop existing altogether.
I'm myself an atheist, and have always considered myself left-leaning. But ever since having children, I despair a little everytime I talk with various of my friends and acquaintances about the topic. No matter the gender, class, ethnicity, home country or any other sociological measure you might think matters, it's always the conservative religious types - again, it's irrelevant *which* religion - whom I find the most common ground with on parenthood. They know it's going to be a sacrifice; They know it will irreversibly change them; They know it includes large responsibilities; But no matter what, they not only consider it their duty, they are looking forward to fulfilling this duty, happily. Not all of them, and not that they have not faults, but at least they reach a minimum level of basic functional prosociality.
Meanwhile, my old atheist liberal buddies whom I used to feel very connected to, all seem to devolve into myopic hedonist utilitarism. Sure kids are nice, but aren't they expensive? I really don't know whether I want that responsibility. Maybe I'll raise them wrong? Better not try. Also, parents seem weird, you can literally watch them drift rightward. But reality has a liberal bias, so they must be wrong, right? Also, I've heard it's bad for the climate, and anyway, we're really looking forward to the next 3-month world cruise. Maybe afterwards. My gf freezes her eggs just in case, we have all the time in the world. Or we'll just adopt (cue pikachu shocked face when I tell them about the current adoption landscape in western countries).
Dunno what to do about it. I don't like restrictive conservative cultures, but yet, the attitudes that liberal culture reliably seems to create are horribly self-focused in act, with only a small polish of public statements of left-wing politics to feel good about themselves. Again, not all of them, and they're not bad people, either; They just live a life that collectively will predictably crash their own society.
I feel like Murphy’s book is mostly just a sloppy take, flailing around at a case for a 2028 run but not really understanding how to win or defeat Trumpism.
That story about the nails seems nuts to me. Why did people not just buy nails from someone selling them for less? I find it hard to imagine that a business in the mid-1600s could secure a wide monopoly on nails such that this caused a nail shortage for lots of people. The severity of the sentence for something that seems so trivial makes me suspect the accusation of price gouging was just an excuse to punish him for something else that people hated but wasn't illegal.
Edit: I was significantly wrong on the economics of 1639 Boston, the town only had ~1200 people and there very well may have been only one major supplier of nails. See the rest of the thread for more details.
Nails were a painstakingly handcrafted artisan in the preindustrial era. Prior to mass produced nails, one would carefully remove all the nails from old construction as you took it apart. 6 pence is 2-3 hours labor back then. That'd be like if nails cost $40 today and someone decided to charge $50
Edit: I looked it up and this is the price per pound not per nail.
On a side note, this is why joinery used to be a big deal. Carpentry used to carefully fit wood together, whether in furniture or for structures specifically to get around this problem of nails being effectively a luxury good
Yeah, I think it's pretty clear I was wrong about how labor-intensive nails were and just how small the colonies were at the time. That said, the price of manufactured goods raising from $40 to $50 seems like a reasonable adjustment after moving to the middle of the woods an ocean away from the markets you're used to. That kind of thing changes market prices pretty drastically.
> After the court had censured him, the church in Boston called him also in question, where (as before he had done in the court) he did, with tears, acknowledge and bewail his covetous and corrupt heart, yet making some excuse for many of the particulars, which were charged upon him, as partly by pretense of ignorance of the true price of some wares, and chiefly by being misled by some false principles, as, 1. that if a man lost in one commodity, he might help himself in the price of another; 2. that if, through want of skill or other occasion, his commodity cost him more than the price of the market in England, he might then sell it for more than the price of the market in New England, etc.
So his crime was that he sold nails for more than their standard market price in England while in a vastly less well-developed area that was an ocean away from the economic conditions that decided a market price of six pence. That seems like a valid reason for increasing the price by a third of its original value. The source continues to describe the rules of commerce as they see it:
> A man may not sell above the current price, i.e., such a price as is usual in the time and place, and as another (who knows the worth of the commodity) would give for it, if he had occasion to use it. . . .
> When a man loseth in his commodity for want of skill, etc. he must look at it as his own fault or cross and therefore must not lay it upon another.
> When a man loseth by casualty of sea, or etc., it is a loss cast upon himself by providence, and he may not ease himself of it by casting it upon another; for so a man should seem to provide against all providences, etc., that he should never lose; but where there is a scarcity of the commodity, there men may raise their price; for now it is a hand of God upon the commodity, and not the person.
The local Puritans instead claim that the natural value of nails is six pence everywhere and if your procurement costs are greater because of limited local industry and unreliable trans-oceanic shipments then you just have to eat the loss personally. I acknowledge that in such precarious conditions one can't let the market run wild, but the kind of attitude expressed here is downright delusional. It's also reminiscent of how the post-liberal left and right often talk about economies, so it's no wonder they cite it as a positive example.
Politics has emerged as a putative meaning-purveyor because, IMO, of the decline of other vectors of identity-bolstering meaning-providing worldview. Because politics i) is legibly related to issues that extend beyond the self, related to ordinal moral vectors of what is right; and ii) legibly capable of being participated in, it makes sense to me that it's risen as a vector of meaning-participation when other load-bearing institutions and superstructures have correspondingly eroded. But it's super ill-suited for this job, because iii) conflict — including defeat — is embedded into the process by design, and iv) politics is not designed to deliver *reconciliation*, in such a way that the conflict dissipates out.
That’s just the problem. Fewer people go to church (for better and/or worse), fewer people belong to civic organizations, fewer people in general identify strongly with something larger than themselves. Politics has rushed in to fill the void, but, as you noted, politics is *not designed to be a meaning-making institution!* It’s designed to *govern*. That’s it. Make laws, keep the lights on and the water flowing, make society run smoothly. To do a good job, a Representative or Senator (or Mayor or whatever) really doesn’t need “charisma”, they need competence. Yet with politics-as-meaning, we look for charisma. Sometimes we are lucky enough to have both (hello Barack Obama).
Together with the fact that, in the words of Michelle Goldberg, social media has made us know too much about one another and we could do well to NOT know as much about otherwise perfect strangers who pose in family pajamas with everyone holding guns, because that fills us with a nebulous and vague misanthropy and hate; and we have the perfect storm for the kind of loneliness, generalized hatred and misery we see everywhere.
Our inability to truly know what The Good Life is even for ourselves, let alone for the rest of society, necessitates a liberalism where it isn't imposed from the top down.
There likely isn't one Good Life. Human beings, with all our diversity, are too complex to allow that. The closest we can maybe find is something so broad that it could never be turned into a top down political enforcement. There's Paul Ricoer's "to live well, with and for others, in just institutions." Good luck creating something besides liberalism that supports that.
Doesn't the idea of a "common good" repeat the problems of left or right populism? What does "common" mean? And liberalism doesn't operate on the idea of a single common good. Liberalism means pluralism, especially in The Federalist Papers no. 10, and the idea of checks and balances and the tyranny of the majority issue from that belief -- mutilple sources of power spread throughout democracy. I subscribe to value pluralism: politics means managing irreconcilable conflicts between goods, and not optimizing towards one. This is what Issiah Berlin and William Galston argue. And I believe that America is a pluralistic, multi-cultural society.
Back when I was politically homeless after I left the Republican Party over a decade ago, I went through a phase where I was interested in Communitarianism and I kind of got caught up in some of this kind of thinking, maybe a sort of pre-MAGA common good conservatism. Basically, I liked a social safety net and pro-family policies, but I was otherwise culturally conservative, though I was wishy-washy on abortion and "none of my business" on trans and gays.
But the problem with it is that it doesn't really make sense. It essentially requires you to either narrowly define how people should live (kind of like a far-right dystopia) or else make the definition so wide that nothing would actually change. I couldn't seem to square the circle. Either you make people live like "decent Christians" or you don't. There is no if and or buts.
I eventually came to the conclusion that even to have a relatively mild "common good" system would require the forcable upending of the lives of others - a.k.a. tyranny. Bascially, you can't define the good life and demand that others live it without going down a slippery slope to fascism (or else just being an ineffective nothing).
And that is when I started to come to the conclusion that maybe people should just choose for themselves how they want to live, and the government should protect their rights. And I realized that this was more or less the system we already had, and the ideology that most represented this was good old fashioned Liberalism. I registered as a Dem within a year or so of this.
I'm still for the social safety net, but I'm not keen on the government telling others how to have a meaningful life.
Good post
I think Sen. Murphy should read up on some French Revolution history because he sounds very Jacobin here.
I think it’s good to ask him directly how he plans on enforcing his cult on non believers. That’s usually when this kinda stuff can go from well meaning to state mandated oppression.
Are there people who read the Scarlet Letter and root for the town? O.o
Your comment made me laugh out loud! No! Nobody roots for the town!
Eloquent. I especially liked your point about the electorate being closely divided. And even if we were 55/45 that would still be close.
Yet every political commentator would not describe a 55/45 split as close even though most people would. I've never really understood this. I don't think you're out of "close" until you're around 70/30.
I know! In almost every other type of contest or “fandom," 55/45 would be considered pick ‘em.
"I want political leaders whose moral convictions constrain their exercise of power, not leaders who use power to impose their moral convictions."
Well said, J' ! ~eric. MeridaGOround.com
sure is funny that Murphy wrote an entire book about bad American cults and then decided the solution was "start one more cult"
this old SMBC comes to mind: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/groups
That Ann Hibbens story is absolutely wild. The carpenters were so upset they couldn't move on even after 16 years!!
On topic, I'm not religious and don't believe that God gives life meaning. Meaning is constructed from the relationships we build with each other. If you use an established community for that (such as Church or some other group like EA) then that's your prerogative, but by no means a requirement.
I would recommend Brink Lindsey's Permanent Problem for a Niskanen Center style take on the same issues (here's a representative [post] from his substack https://brinklindsey.substack.com/p/the-limits-of-liberal-neutrality ).
I'd argue a core challenge for abundence liberals is that the success of liberalism has led to diminishing marginal returns of skilled technocratic economic management. Yes, inflation and housing are critical problems amenable to economic solutions, but immigration is an economic boon that voters have turned against for non- or post-materailist reasons.
I think Lindsey has an empirically grounded theory of the case that [focuses] on expanding the number of paths to dignity by carving out spaces buffered from both market and government power. His main focus is meaning for those on the other side of the educational divide who are needed by the economy in fungible ways that reward skills to address demand gaps but often not than dignity enhancing ones. As fellow left liberals, i suspect you'll object to his neglect of some of the ways localized power can be just as oppressive (at one point, I think he accidentally reinvents a company town but in start up effective altruist community style).
But while we are in different ideological camps I think he's makes a worthy go at the question of how do we make more room for *communities* of meaning while retaining exit options and not seeking national level thick shared meaning.
Huge Lindsey fan.
Jerusalem, the cases you describe share another structure.
“The common good” cannot punish anyone by itself. The change occurs when a judgment about what is good acquires public legitimacy, enters institutions, and gains the power to interpret, enforce, and punish.
At that point, it is no longer merely a value judgment. It begins to change the actual conditions faced by people who do not share that value.
So the question is not only who defines the common good, but: At what point does a value judgment stop being a judgment and become power?
Fundamentally I've always been in your camp, but I increasingly struggle to vote left to get closer to this vision; If anything, for all my disagreements with the right on various policies, they often seem on-net more willing to entertain the notion that people who disagree with them are not all evil.
Another huge problem is family-formation. Left and far-left societies and policies, simply put, fail entirely at it. Current stats I'm aware off is that rightwingers have almost perfectly sustainable birth rates slightly above 2, while moderates have ca 1.5, and leftwingers have atrocious sub-1 averages, going down as far as 0.5 for some urban/academic milieus. Yet, it's the most basic form of investment into the future, and retirement as a concept requires a decent number of children - not to mention how fundamentally nihilistic a society is that can't even be bothered to procreate. If western societies plunge further towards or below 1, first state finances will stop working out entirely, and long-term, they'll stop existing altogether.
I'm myself an atheist, and have always considered myself left-leaning. But ever since having children, I despair a little everytime I talk with various of my friends and acquaintances about the topic. No matter the gender, class, ethnicity, home country or any other sociological measure you might think matters, it's always the conservative religious types - again, it's irrelevant *which* religion - whom I find the most common ground with on parenthood. They know it's going to be a sacrifice; They know it will irreversibly change them; They know it includes large responsibilities; But no matter what, they not only consider it their duty, they are looking forward to fulfilling this duty, happily. Not all of them, and not that they have not faults, but at least they reach a minimum level of basic functional prosociality.
Meanwhile, my old atheist liberal buddies whom I used to feel very connected to, all seem to devolve into myopic hedonist utilitarism. Sure kids are nice, but aren't they expensive? I really don't know whether I want that responsibility. Maybe I'll raise them wrong? Better not try. Also, parents seem weird, you can literally watch them drift rightward. But reality has a liberal bias, so they must be wrong, right? Also, I've heard it's bad for the climate, and anyway, we're really looking forward to the next 3-month world cruise. Maybe afterwards. My gf freezes her eggs just in case, we have all the time in the world. Or we'll just adopt (cue pikachu shocked face when I tell them about the current adoption landscape in western countries).
Dunno what to do about it. I don't like restrictive conservative cultures, but yet, the attitudes that liberal culture reliably seems to create are horribly self-focused in act, with only a small polish of public statements of left-wing politics to feel good about themselves. Again, not all of them, and they're not bad people, either; They just live a life that collectively will predictably crash their own society.
I feel like Murphy’s book is mostly just a sloppy take, flailing around at a case for a 2028 run but not really understanding how to win or defeat Trumpism.
That story about the nails seems nuts to me. Why did people not just buy nails from someone selling them for less? I find it hard to imagine that a business in the mid-1600s could secure a wide monopoly on nails such that this caused a nail shortage for lots of people. The severity of the sentence for something that seems so trivial makes me suspect the accusation of price gouging was just an excuse to punish him for something else that people hated but wasn't illegal.
Edit: I was significantly wrong on the economics of 1639 Boston, the town only had ~1200 people and there very well may have been only one major supplier of nails. See the rest of the thread for more details.
Nails were a painstakingly handcrafted artisan in the preindustrial era. Prior to mass produced nails, one would carefully remove all the nails from old construction as you took it apart. 6 pence is 2-3 hours labor back then. That'd be like if nails cost $40 today and someone decided to charge $50
Edit: I looked it up and this is the price per pound not per nail.
On a side note, this is why joinery used to be a big deal. Carpentry used to carefully fit wood together, whether in furniture or for structures specifically to get around this problem of nails being effectively a luxury good
Yeah, I think it's pretty clear I was wrong about how labor-intensive nails were and just how small the colonies were at the time. That said, the price of manufactured goods raising from $40 to $50 seems like a reasonable adjustment after moving to the middle of the woods an ocean away from the markets you're used to. That kind of thing changes market prices pretty drastically.
You're not wrong but people had different values. Usury (lending money for interest) was illegal for Christians for a long time.
Depends on how many local artisans were actually around who knew how to make nails and could get their hands on the supplies.
This source cites the population of Boston as of 1640 at around 1200, so I admit it would have been possible for there to be only one major provider of nails: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w10166/w10166.pdf
However, reading the original record of the incident shows some poor reasoning on the part of the prosecution (https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/admonishment-and-reconciliation-of-robert-keayne-with-the-church-1639-1640/):
> After the court had censured him, the church in Boston called him also in question, where (as before he had done in the court) he did, with tears, acknowledge and bewail his covetous and corrupt heart, yet making some excuse for many of the particulars, which were charged upon him, as partly by pretense of ignorance of the true price of some wares, and chiefly by being misled by some false principles, as, 1. that if a man lost in one commodity, he might help himself in the price of another; 2. that if, through want of skill or other occasion, his commodity cost him more than the price of the market in England, he might then sell it for more than the price of the market in New England, etc.
So his crime was that he sold nails for more than their standard market price in England while in a vastly less well-developed area that was an ocean away from the economic conditions that decided a market price of six pence. That seems like a valid reason for increasing the price by a third of its original value. The source continues to describe the rules of commerce as they see it:
> A man may not sell above the current price, i.e., such a price as is usual in the time and place, and as another (who knows the worth of the commodity) would give for it, if he had occasion to use it. . . .
> When a man loseth in his commodity for want of skill, etc. he must look at it as his own fault or cross and therefore must not lay it upon another.
> When a man loseth by casualty of sea, or etc., it is a loss cast upon himself by providence, and he may not ease himself of it by casting it upon another; for so a man should seem to provide against all providences, etc., that he should never lose; but where there is a scarcity of the commodity, there men may raise their price; for now it is a hand of God upon the commodity, and not the person.
The local Puritans instead claim that the natural value of nails is six pence everywhere and if your procurement costs are greater because of limited local industry and unreliable trans-oceanic shipments then you just have to eat the loss personally. I acknowledge that in such precarious conditions one can't let the market run wild, but the kind of attitude expressed here is downright delusional. It's also reminiscent of how the post-liberal left and right often talk about economies, so it's no wonder they cite it as a positive example.
Now this is REAL LIBERALISM!!! (A compliment! This is what both woke AND MAGA are casually destroying without realizing it.)
Politics has emerged as a putative meaning-purveyor because, IMO, of the decline of other vectors of identity-bolstering meaning-providing worldview. Because politics i) is legibly related to issues that extend beyond the self, related to ordinal moral vectors of what is right; and ii) legibly capable of being participated in, it makes sense to me that it's risen as a vector of meaning-participation when other load-bearing institutions and superstructures have correspondingly eroded. But it's super ill-suited for this job, because iii) conflict — including defeat — is embedded into the process by design, and iv) politics is not designed to deliver *reconciliation*, in such a way that the conflict dissipates out.
That’s just the problem. Fewer people go to church (for better and/or worse), fewer people belong to civic organizations, fewer people in general identify strongly with something larger than themselves. Politics has rushed in to fill the void, but, as you noted, politics is *not designed to be a meaning-making institution!* It’s designed to *govern*. That’s it. Make laws, keep the lights on and the water flowing, make society run smoothly. To do a good job, a Representative or Senator (or Mayor or whatever) really doesn’t need “charisma”, they need competence. Yet with politics-as-meaning, we look for charisma. Sometimes we are lucky enough to have both (hello Barack Obama).
Together with the fact that, in the words of Michelle Goldberg, social media has made us know too much about one another and we could do well to NOT know as much about otherwise perfect strangers who pose in family pajamas with everyone holding guns, because that fills us with a nebulous and vague misanthropy and hate; and we have the perfect storm for the kind of loneliness, generalized hatred and misery we see everywhere.
💯💯💯. Very well-diagnosed.
Our inability to truly know what The Good Life is even for ourselves, let alone for the rest of society, necessitates a liberalism where it isn't imposed from the top down.
There likely isn't one Good Life. Human beings, with all our diversity, are too complex to allow that. The closest we can maybe find is something so broad that it could never be turned into a top down political enforcement. There's Paul Ricoer's "to live well, with and for others, in just institutions." Good luck creating something besides liberalism that supports that.
Doesn't the idea of a "common good" repeat the problems of left or right populism? What does "common" mean? And liberalism doesn't operate on the idea of a single common good. Liberalism means pluralism, especially in The Federalist Papers no. 10, and the idea of checks and balances and the tyranny of the majority issue from that belief -- mutilple sources of power spread throughout democracy. I subscribe to value pluralism: politics means managing irreconcilable conflicts between goods, and not optimizing towards one. This is what Issiah Berlin and William Galston argue. And I believe that America is a pluralistic, multi-cultural society.
Back when I was politically homeless after I left the Republican Party over a decade ago, I went through a phase where I was interested in Communitarianism and I kind of got caught up in some of this kind of thinking, maybe a sort of pre-MAGA common good conservatism. Basically, I liked a social safety net and pro-family policies, but I was otherwise culturally conservative, though I was wishy-washy on abortion and "none of my business" on trans and gays.
But the problem with it is that it doesn't really make sense. It essentially requires you to either narrowly define how people should live (kind of like a far-right dystopia) or else make the definition so wide that nothing would actually change. I couldn't seem to square the circle. Either you make people live like "decent Christians" or you don't. There is no if and or buts.
I eventually came to the conclusion that even to have a relatively mild "common good" system would require the forcable upending of the lives of others - a.k.a. tyranny. Bascially, you can't define the good life and demand that others live it without going down a slippery slope to fascism (or else just being an ineffective nothing).
And that is when I started to come to the conclusion that maybe people should just choose for themselves how they want to live, and the government should protect their rights. And I realized that this was more or less the system we already had, and the ideology that most represented this was good old fashioned Liberalism. I registered as a Dem within a year or so of this.
I'm still for the social safety net, but I'm not keen on the government telling others how to have a meaningful life.