On suicidal penguins
Adapt or die
Welcome to The Closing Argument, our verdict on the news, plus everything The Argument published and appeared in this week.
The Verdict, by Jerusalem Demsas
“Is there such thing as insanity among penguins?” filmmaker Werner Herzog asked a penguin expert, David Ainley, in his 2007 documentary Encounters at the End of the World. Ainley replied that while penguins get disoriented when they end up “in places they shouldn’t be, a long way from the ocean,” he’s never seen a penguin do anything bizarre like “bashing its head against a rock.”
The scene then cuts to a group of penguins heading to some feeding grounds. One penguin struck off randomly toward the mountains, away from his colony. Herzog called these “deranged penguins.” He then remarked that by separating himself from the pack and heading off into the mountains, the penguin was headed for certain death.
In a remarkably self-aware moment, the American right adopted the suicidal penguin as a symbol of heterodoxy. As one Fox News article put it, to the online right, the penguin isn’t “lost” but a “free thinker … rejecting the colony” and “rejecting secular postmodern orthodoxy and marching toward a greater purpose.”
This wasn’t merely online midwits seizing on an out-of-context image. The president of the United States himself, as well as multiple official White House accounts, embraced a disoriented penguin headed for certain death as a symbol of their version of rugged individuality.
I was reminded of this laudably introspective moment in American politics this week, twice over.
The first was when the Department of Homeland Security announced that it was going to begin requiring legal immigrants (people with jobs, families, homes, and entire lives in this nation) to leave the country before applying for green cards. This could impact over 400,000 people every year.
A second time was when reviewing the bizarre dust-up over Christopher Nolan casting Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy in the upcoming adaptation of The Odyssey. Figures like tech billionaire Elon Musk and far-right professional yapper Matt Walsh called Nolan an “anti-White racist“ and “a coward“ for his casting choices.
In different ways, these dust-ups reveal that when presented with the choice “adapt or die,” the new right will, enthusiastically, choose “die” every single time.
It is a demographic fact that the United States, without immigration, will begin to shrink, and the ratio between old and young will grow increasingly unbalanced. Such a development will make social services increasingly hard to pay for, reduce the innovative capacity of the United States, and bias our politics even more toward short-termism and low-risk decision-making.
Successful cultures are dynamic. They are able to adopt successful people and practices as their own. They don’t cling to a static picture of greatness; they let their foundational myths evolve time and again to meet the moment.
In 48 CE, Roman Emperor Claudius argued to a skeptical Senate that Gaulish elites should be admitted. Sparta and Athens, for all their military might, had ruined themselves by treating conquered peoples as permanent foreigners, whereas Rome made yesterday’s enemies into citizens:
“What was the ruin of Sparta and Athens, but this, that mighty as they were in war, they spurned from them as aliens those whom they had conquered? Our founder Romulus, on the other hand, was so wise that he fought as enemies and then hailed as fellow-citizens several nations on the very same day. Strangers have reigned over us. That freedmen’s sons should be intrusted with public offices is not, as many wrongly think, a sudden innovation, but was a common practice in the old commonwealth.”
This 2,000-year-old speech making the very same argument I do today does not make me hopeful that we will ever put this debate to rest, but it does invalidate the ahistorical purity politics of the new right.
This was not just a rhetorical point. Sparta refused to enfranchise outsiders and limited citizenship to the wealthy. Unable to replenish its citizen ranks, the once-great nation collapsed.
As Matt Yglesias recently wrote, “Part of the point of ‘the West’ is that ancient Greek literature is part of ‘our’ cultural patrimony, even though very few of ‘us’ are of any kind of Greek ancestry.”
Whatever one’s definition of “Heritage American,” that is a dwindling population. If only those who can trace their ancestry back six generations to Kentucky soil can count as an American, then being an American will cease to count.
Top stories this week, by Milan Singh
As we grow, we want to make sure you see everything we’re doing without flooding your inbox with dozens of emails. But for the real libs, you can get every post as it drops by opting into The Mag here.
This week in The Argument, Lakshya Jain wrote about how social media isn’t actually the cause of the “vibecession.” In our modeling, social media news consumption had no statistically significant effect on whether voters thought that the economy had gotten worse (across a variety of measures) over the past 25 years. Instead, the vibecession was more likely a product of falling wage inequality, making services that depend on low-cost labor more expensive for the upper-middle-class households that make up the messenger class.
On Tuesday, Kelsey wrote about the failure of gamifying education. The thesis of gamification is that if schools could incorporate enough game-like elements into learning, such as math, then students would be motivated to learn without as much prodding from instructors. Unfortunately, this hasn’t really borne out: Kids don’t learn that much from doing an activity that is 90% video game and 10% math problems. It’s not always fun to drill practice problems or memorize your times tables, but you need to do it if you want to learn math. Many such cases.
Matt Yglesias answered one of the burning questions of the world: Why is Matt Yglesias not a libertarian, despite agreeing with many libertarian-type views on economics? The answer is because, in his words, “libertarians have a tendency toward extremism.” It’s very easy to imagine someone who is a moderate social conservative (David French) or a moderate economic progressive (Mark Kelly), but the phrase “moderate libertarian” is almost an oxymoron. When you hear the word “libertarian,” one tends to think of people who have very strong views about the age of consent or think that heroin should be legalized. In other words, libertarianism is an ideology that tends to take things too far because it assumes that it contains all the answers to the big questions about politics.
🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟
The House of Representatives passed an updated version of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act by a vote of 396-13. All Democrats voted in favor, while 13 Republicans were against. The updated bill does not include the divestiture requirement for homes built-to-rent, but is otherwise similar to the Senate version when it comes to institutional investors.
North Carolina Attorney General Jeff Jackson and a coalition of other state attorneys general (plus the federal Department of Justice) settled to shut down a cartel of major meatpackers. The meatpackers used a company called Agri Stats to share data and collude on pricing, raising the costs of chicken, pork, and turkey. This is a classic hub-and-spoke cartel, and it’s illegal.
New studies suggest that GLP-1s may lead to better outcomes for cancer patients, namely reductions in tumor progression, lower overall chance of death, and lower odds of developing breast cancer.
Worth watching…
This week on the podcast, Matt and Jerusalem debated whether you (yes, you!) should be allowed to buy a car made in China. Jerusalem made the case for free trade and export discipline, while Matt argued for the benefits of industrial policy and protectionism for strategic industries.
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In light of the Supreme Court’s Callais redistricting decision, Lakshya Jain was joined by RealClearPolitics’ Sean Trende, Split Ticket’s Armin Thomas, and VoteHub’s Zachary Donnini to discuss what “fair maps” even means.
What’s News with The Argument
The Argument recommends, by Milan Singh
Now that I’m done with college, I have had more time to consume media (and sleep). Fortunately for me, the Canadian rapper Aubrey Graham, better known by his middle name Drake, released a veritable abundance of albums on Friday last week. I don’t think anyone else at the office listened to them, which is probably for the best because they’re not very good. That’s okay, I’ll still keep listening to that garbage.
“Habibti” and “Maid of Honour” are both terrible. Genuinely some of the worst music I have listened to all year. “Iceman” isn’t bad, so long as you’re grading on the Drake curve.
Most of you probably don’t listen to Drake, so I will offer this analogy: When you read a Dan Brown novel, you are not expecting Booker Prize quality, and when you go to McDonald’s, you’re not expecting Michelin-level food. You’re indulging in some empty calories. Similarly, when I listen to a man who is pushing 40 rapping about the same stuff he was rapping about at 26 — his exes, fake friends, fame, money — I envision myself as a plump little piggy enjoying my special slop treat.
Thankfully, everyone else at the office had more, shall we say, tasteful recommendations. Jerusalem enjoyed reading a “really fun” fantasy duology by Sarah Hashem called The Jasad Heir and The Jasad Crown. She also wanted to give Hashem her flowers for “just sticking to two books” instead of dragging it out into a whole series. (Certain rappers would do well to emulate this level of self-control.)
Jerusalem also read Silent Spring for her next book club with Matt Yglesias, which she found “incredibly boring” as a book but useful for turning into a podcast. I guess I should read this too, since I think Jerusalem and Matt both probably don’t appreciate the importance of protecting birds enough!
Eli loved the Broadway show Operation Mincemeat and said it was “nice to be reminded of when we were all in it together to beat the Nazis.” Unfortunately, these days, we have multiple Nazi group chats in one political party and one Nazi tattoo in the other.
Kobe saw Foghorn Stringband at The Pearl in Locke, California. He recommended the band, but recommended the venue more than anything else. “It’s an old storefront with a boardinghouse on top in a one-street town built by Chinese immigrants in 1916, and preserved like so. It was more than a concert — a reminder of the little worlds that people exist in, and what’s happening all the time out there without my notice.”
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More to read:
Young people are rich and miserable
On Monday, a clip of Canadian businessman Kevin O’Leary went viral after the Shark Tank star railed against Gen Z for buying $28 lunches rather than saving and investing.
If folks want a click deeper on the nihilist penguin meme I wrote something up a few months back. In it, I said cheekily:
“After all, if the colony insists that its generous welfare states can accommodate millions of refugees while making no effort at their assimilation and then blames you when the outcomes are predictably bad, then you might be excused for wanting to storm away from them towards your certain death. Just saying!”
https://tailwindthinking.substack.com/p/culture-bites-vol-1-untroubled-animals
“In other words, libertarianism is an ideology that tends to take things too far because it assumes that it contains all the answers to the big questions about politics.”
Ironically, Yglesias never explains "what libertarians get wrong about freedom". He needs to drop silly ideas like "extremism" being inherently bad and "democracy" being inherently good and read more libertarian economics. He currently sees the state as needed in cases that libertarian economists have debunked. If he seriously tries to refute those arguments, then he will realise that he can't and so become more libertarian himself.