The Canada Day edition of the ICBW podcast is now available, with part one covering the US Supreme Court (LTEC for, Dan against), part two covering immigration and children in cages (LTEC for, Dan against), and part three discussing various frauds and grifters, with a very obvious, natural jump to the topic of research funding (LTEC for, Dan against).  As always, responses via comments on this post are most welcome, as possible evidence that someone might actually be listening...

I have argued in the past that rioting and similar forms of mass violence are almost always a matter of license--that is, that a certain fraction of the population are generally eager to riot if the opportunity arises, and will gladly do so if law enforcement authorities start showing signs of being unable or unwilling to catch and punish them for it.  An excellent analysis of this phenomenon can be found in Bill Buford's "Among the Thugs", an account of the author's personal experience hanging out among British soccer hooligans during the 1980s.  Buford describes the elaborate instinctive dance that a mob of ruffians would collectively engage in with the police, constantly probing and testing to gauge the response, and seizing on any slight failure to keep the crowd completely in line as a chance to break out and begin wreaking mayhem.  His key point is that such violence doesn't arise from desperation, or righteous anger, or personal anguish over unhappy circumstances, but rather from many young males' strong visceral attraction to it, combined with the lack of sufficiently forceful efforts on the part of the authorities to stop it.

This exact same dynamic applies to the non-physical battles being fought across partisan political lines these days in the US.  Pundits are fond of attributing such events as the mobbing of Republican power couple Mitch McConnell and Elaine Chao, the expulsion of Trump spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders from a restaurant, and harassers disrupting the (separate) restaurant meals of Trump administration officials Stephen Miller and Kirstjen Nielsen, to the desperation of Democrats unjustly deprived of power, or characterizing them as a natural response to Trump's and his followers' own frequent displays of incivility.  What these interpretations miss is that incivility is like thuggery:  there is no need for an explanation for why people indulge in it, because in fact plenty of people naturally take great pleasure in it.  If they are indulging in it today where once they wouldn't have, it's because they believe that they now have license to do so--that is, that their incivility will result in no significant negative consequences for them.

And where does that license come from these days?  Primarily from the country's political polarization.  In a nation so divided, both sides are "cocooned" with a uniformly like-minded cohort that protects them and even cheers them on while they direct their worst incivilities at the "other side".  In other words, like all wars, this one has broken out because both sides, in their insularity, believe they can win.

Of course, at most one side can be correct on that point, and it will likely take some sort of resolution--either a victory by one side, or an unmistakable, prolonged stalemate--to persuade one or the other side to sue for peace.  Until then--or until the extreme isolation between the sides somehow begins to ease of its own accord, perhaps for economic or demographic reasons--we can expect plenty more and far worse outbreaks of incivility, egged on by like-minded partisans on both sides.

The May edition of the ICBW podcast is now available.  In part 1, we discuss a recent Munk Debate on "political correctness", and in particular one of its participants, Jordan Peterson.  In part 2, inspired by Peterson's psychological ideas, we explore various theories in the fields of psychology and evolutionary biology.  As always, listeners are encouraged to respond with their thoughts via the "comments" link.

The April 2018 edition of the ICBW podcast is now available--we discuss Syria (and American Middle East policy more generally) in part 1, and Facebook (with a digression into academic radicalism) in part 2.  As always, listeners are invited to respond via comments, rather than more violent methods.

The kerfuffle over Louis Farrakhan's ties to prominent figures in the Women's March organization and the Democratic party has numerous people--particularly Jews--wondering why so many leftists have trouble distancing themselves from a notorious anti-Semite (not to mention racist, anti-feminist, homophobe and religious extremist).  Of course, they're asking the wrong question--the more fundamental question is why so many leftists are so friendly with Farrakhan in the first place.

After all, the views he espouses--that women should remain at home, subservient to their husbands; that homosexuality is a sin; that racial segregation is good and desirable--have earned the Nation of Islam the Southern Poverty Law Center's designation as a hate group.  It's hard to imagine another organization with such far-right-wing views being on such good terms with prominent leaders of the American left.

A popular answer (or excuse, depending on one's perspective) is political pragmatism (or cynicism, depending on one's perspective).  Former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett, for instance, argued that politicians must sometimes meet with those they disagree with--like Farrakhan--in the interest of "trying to get things done".  But while this argument might justify occasional furtive negotiations over proposed alliances of convenience on specific issues of mutual interest, it hardly explains the Democratic Party politicians' frequent friendly powwows with Farrakhan--let alone the Women's March leaders' gushing, fangirlish encomia to him.

Then again, the Nation of Islam isn't the only extremist form of Islam with that American leftists seem to find politically congenial despite its apparently diametrically opposed views on virtually every major partisan issue.  Radical Islamist organizations such as CAIR, MPAC and even the Muslim Brotherhood also have had friendly relations with the Democratic Party, especially the Obama administration.  Again, these organizations' views seem antithetical to the professed positions of the Democratic Party figures who are hobnobbing with them.  What, then, explains the friendliness?

Under the "ideological" model of democratic politics, in which political parties and factions are united by shared principles and beliefs, this sort of alliance makes no sense at all.  But if one views ideologies as nothing more than contrived pretexts for mutually beneficial coalitions among tribal factions, then it's completely understandable.  Certainly Farrakhan, a charismatic leader of a cult-like organization that exercises strong control of its members, is an attractive partner for any party, given his ability to deliver a captive voting bloc to any party willing to lend him the respect and prestige that he craves.  And the Democratic Party in particular, with its collection of race-, gender- and ethnicity-focused constituencies, is at this point practically built on the model of transacting perks for votes with identity-political movement leaders who can deliver those votes. In fact, it's a natural extension of the party's tradition of urban "machine" politics that has dominated several US cities for over a century.

Most people would consider this kind of identity politics highly corrosive to democratic accountability, since voters judging politicians based purely on racial or ethnic loyalty are likely to be more tolerant of incompetence, corruption or otherwise disastrous governance than voters whose affinities are based on a more clear-eyed understanding of self-interest.  (Consider, for example, the racial loyalty that animates the core supporters of the current US president...)  Fortunately, identity politics, like most other kinds, follows a cyclical trend, and we can hope that its current resurgence will eventually peak and subside, as it did in the case of African-American militancy following the wave of the 1960s-1980s.

The first ICBW podcast of 2018 is now available--we discuss "the memo" in part 1, Aziz Ansari's very bad date in part 2, and the Bitcoin/blockchain bubble in part 3.  Listeners are, as always, encouraged to respond via comments (although, to be fair, merely listening is a formidable achievement in itself)...

The year having seemingly flown by with astonishing speed, we find ourselves once again at the moment when the world celebrates its collective act of metaphorical rebirth:  I'm referring, of course, to the publishing of our annual ICBW predictions post.  As always, we begin with last year's reckless prognostications:

•  All that stuff I predicted about last year's economy will apply this year.  (Or next year--see above.)  If you object that such a prediction is non-actionable, keep in mind Bernard Baruch's (possibly apocryphal) aphorism:  "I made my money by selling too soon"...

To clarify, I predicted "a new recession in the 2016-2018 timeframe" at the beginning of 2015.  Obviously, this prediction hasn't yet panned out, but I remain optimistic, so to speak (see below).

• The right-wing resurgence in Europe will continue in 2017, with several more countries electing new nationalist, anti-immigration governments.  Brexit negotiations will begin in earnest, but will not complete this year.  Continuing sporadic terror attacks will be joined by increasingly frequent and more severe incidents of nativist violence against immigrants.

Not a difficult prediction, of course, but pretty darned accurate.

• Donald Trump's first year in office will be very similar to his predecessor's:  lots of "I won" bluster, but very few legislative accomplishments, apart from one or two bipartisan ones driven by Congress with Democratic cooperation.  (The Republicans will not abolish the Senate filibuster, although they'll keep the limitations on it instituted by the previous Democratic Senate.)  Neither Obamacare nor immigration will be addressed legislatively, although many of the Obama administration's executive actions in these areas will be reversed.  Reaction to Trump's usual bombastic pronouncements will be overwhelmingly partisan, and his approval ratings will therefore track his partisan support, which will hover within the 40-50-percent range. 

Mostly accurate, except for a couple of details: the recent tax bill appears to have done away with the Obamacare individual mandate, and Trump's support has consistently dipped below 40 percent.  

• Trump's foreign policy will sound radically different from his predecessor's, but will in practice be similarly quiescent and timid, at least militarily--although thankfully without the open courtship of avowed enemies (with the exception of Putin's Russia) and sabotage against pro-US friends.  For example, despite the new pro-Israel tone, US reaction to the recent anti-Israel UN resolution will be much more muted than the current torrent of threats suggests.  Any funding cuts or formal status changes to the US' UN membership will be confined to ineffective token gestures, and the US embassy will end up not moving to Jerusalem this year.

The Trump administration has actually been mildly more assertive in foreign policy than this prediction anticipated, driving a UN budget cut, at least announcing an intent to move the US embassy to Jerusalem, courting Saudi Arabia, adopting a more aggressive posture towards enemies such as Russia and North Korea, and speaking out in support of the Iranian protesters.  It will be interesting to see whether it will be able to sustain this assertiveness in the coming years, and apply it to more challenging cases such as Turkey (see below).

• Both ISIS and the Syrian rebellion will continue to weaken, but will not yet disappear by the end of 2017.  As the Assad regime consolidates its hold, pro-Iranian proxies will be freed up for increased attacks on Israel, and Sunni radicals as well, seeking a less ruthless target, will start turning towards Israel in earnest.  Some minor attacks will occur, to which Israel will respond harshly.  Meanwhile, the corruption investigation against Bibi Netanyahu will take many months to complete, and likely won't be completed by the end of this year.  In any event, ultimately no charges will be laid.

The Bibi prediction has held up so far.  Some have claimed full victory against ISIS, although the completeness of its obliteration is as yet unclear.  The most interesting deviation from this prediction, though, is the formation of a moderate Sunni anti-Iran bloc that at the very least prefers to downplay conflict with Israel as a distraction.  Iranian proxies such as Hezbollah, meanwhile, so far looked far more interested in mopping up and consolidating their control of Syria this past year, presumably postponing their confrontation with Israel until that task is complete.

• Venezuela will collapse further into failed-state status in the Zimbabwe mold, with a corrupt and incompetent government using brute force to suppress opposition amid continuing economic collapse.  Meanwhile, the American opening to Cuba will do nothing for its population's destitution, and economic failure will lead to significant popular unrest in Russia, Iran and Egypt.

The Venezuela and Cuba predictions were easy.  There was only a tiny bit of anti-Putin noise in Russia, and Egypt looked pretty quiet this year, but the people of Iran, ever keen to avoid embarrassing this blog, came through in the end.  

• The next Star Wars film will not be named either "The Force Gets Dressed" or "Rogue Two".

Perhaps it should have been...

And now for this year's crop of predictions:

• The long-awaited stock market crash and resulting recession (or at least one quarter of negative growth) will finally arrive this year.  The main market indices will end up below their levels of January 2017, thereby retroactively validating my prediction for this past year.  Real estate and oil prices will fall as well, although not by as much, since their markets aren't nearly as frothy.  And there will be no massive financial near-meltdown this time, since stock market asset ownership isn't particularly highly leveraged.
• In addition, blockchain-based monetary instruments will completely collapse, never to recover (although more bubbles in similarly worthless ad hoc quasi-currencies will no doubt occur at some point in the future).  Megan McArdle has written a nice pair of summaries of why Bitcoin and its imitators are doomed to fail, whether as payment systems or as currencies.  I would add only some history: these technologies are actually the hybrid offspring of two previous failed ones--anonymous "e-cash" of the 1980s and peer-to-peer ("P2P") distributed data storage systems of the 2000s.  Both of these predecessors fooled a shocking number of advocates into believing in the viability of systems whose only remotely plausible attraction was the promise of evading government regulation and law enforcement, and that are otherwise in every way inferior to more mainstream alternatives.  Blockchain-based currencies have merely followed in their footsteps.
• Donald Trump's popularity will bounce around (or just below) the 40% level throughout the year, defying predictions of inevitable collapse but nevertheless staying well below the break-even point.  Parallel investigations into both the current and previous administrations' alleged interference with law enforcement investigations will result in either bombshell revelations of scandalous malfeasance or overhyped non-issues, depending on one's partisan allegiance; in any event, neither will generate consequences of any legal significance. However, a political consequence will be a massive defeat for the president's party in the November midterm elections, similar to those experienced by his predecessor:  Democrats will take both houses of Congress by small margins--gaining hugely in the House, and narrowly in the Senate despite having far more seats up for election in the latter chamber.  This will of course intensify legislative gridlock, which in any event will have existed since at least the first midterm election of the previous administration.  (A possible exception is an immigration compromise this year, in which a limited amnesty is traded for enhanced border enforcement.)
• The Iranian regime will suppress the domestic protests against it within weeks using ruthless violence, but the extent of the unrest will push the regime to restrain its foreign adventures somewhat in order to focus on internal security.  For example, the mop-up operations in Syria will continue and be largely complete by the end of the year, but the shift towards anti-Israel (and anti-Jordan) activity will be put off for this year at least.  Hamas, on the other hand, will try mightily to instigate conflict with Israel, without enough success to ignite another full-scale "grass-mowing" operation.
• Meanwhile, North Korea will quickly fade back into irrelevant obscurity, as will the Jerusalem embassy move, which will make leisurely progress without being officially completed by the end of the year.  Instead, attention will shift to the conflict between Turkey and the various Kurdish entities along its borders, with the US increasingly aligning itself against an increasingly assertive, belligerent and anti-Western Turkey.
• Concern about academia will shift from its toxic politics and chaotic environment to its dire financial straits, as the economic downturn causes a collapse in enrollment, particularly at expensive private colleges, with alternatives such as community college, apprenticeship and online education beginning to look comparatively far more attractive to prospective students.
• The NFL will experience a bounce-back season in the fall, with attendance and viewership recovering markedly despite (or perhaps partly because of) the difficult economic situation.

As always, readers are invited to dispute these predictions, or propose their own alternatives.  But keep in mind the old Danish saying:  "It's difficult to make predictions--especially about the future"...

The holiday edition of the ICBW podcast is now posted--just in time for the holidays!--and ready for your holiday listening.  In this episode, we discuss the rash (so to speak) of sexual misconduct accusations plaguing prominent public figures (part 1); the Lindsey Shepherd "star chamber at Wilfrid Laurier University" caper (part 2); and the recent US policy announcement on Jerusalem (part 3).  As always, we cannot be held responsible for any damage resulting from your listening...

Apparently we haven't learned our lesson yet, because the third ICBW podcast is now available.  We discuss all things free speech-related in part 1, and all things climate-related in part 2.  As always, listeners are encouraged to use the comments feature of this blog to respond as they see fit (within the bounds of basic decency, of course)...

An internal screed circulated inside Google complaining about its "diversity" policies has generated an enormous amount of noise, both for and against (including by some opponents who seem determined to prove it accurate).  Most interesting to me is the document's claim that dissenting views about these policies are actively suppressed within Google.  As I pointed out a couple of years ago, such suppression is usually a symptom of an unaccountable organization, insulated enough from performance standards that it can be hijacked by political agenda-pushers with impunity.  One wouldn't normally think of Google that way, but in fact it makes almost all its money from its Internet advertising business, and many of its other technologies--employing the majority of its employees--may therefore be developing an unaccountable culture similar to that of nonprofit organizations, where various abstract ideals--including political ones pushed by internal factions for their own reasons--compete to replace the bottom line as the primary decision-making factor.

As for the public reaction to the episode, I'm frankly amazed at the number of people--on both sides of the issue--who seem to think that how Google evaluates its current and prospective engineers is a public policy matter, subject to political approval in the same way as, say, oil pipeline proposals.  One could argue that this is a natural extension of non-discrimination law, which first gradually expanded to include such concepts as "disparate impact", which effectively restricts how employers may evaluate job candidates in the name of achieving racial parity in hiring.  But I can't recall a previous instance where such concepts were applied in a white-collar professional context, where evaluation of talent is so crucial to success.  (Imagine, for instance, if medical practices were required to tailor their hiring and evaluation standards to suit current political conventions.)  I personally don't care whether Google adopts an outstanding, average or catastrophically bad set of hiring criteria for its technical employees.  But I shudder to think what will happen to the US economy if companies in general are forbidden to focus on competence in hiring even for positions requiring advanced skills and training.

The second ICBW podcast is now available for your listening...er...pleasure.  We discuss the latest Washington follies, and wonk out on medical care and "AI risk".  Part one can be found here, and part two here.  As always, readers are welcome to add to the discussion via comments on this post.

David Brooks' latest column on class in America is typical of his keen social insight, but perhaps most interesting for what it tactfully omits, rather than what it actually says.  Most of the attention has focused on his discussion of the cultural signals that upper-middle-class Americans use to identify themselves--and thus, implicitly, to exclude everyone else--in both social and workplace contexts.  But the column actually begins with a look at how hard America's elite class works to pass its status on to its children, particularly by pouring enormous resources into education.

And that's where the tactful elision comes in.  Historically, aristocracies have always constructed elaborate systems of social signals to distinguish themselves from commoners, for a simple reason:  such signals are far easier to pass on to descendants reliably than the kinds of traits--intelligence, talent, discipline, diligence--that would allow those children to attain elite status based on merit alone.  Consider accent, for instance--long at the core of the British class system's social sorting process.  The most worthless wastrel can be taught a posh accent simply by being raised among others speaking in it, while only a few talented mimics are capable of overcoming a childhood steeped in lower-class argot.  Americans, as it happens, aren't nearly as attuned as the British to the subtleties of speech--most Americans can't pinpoint a countryman's place of birth more precisely than, say, "South" or "not South", let alone his social status, by listening to his accent.  So members of the American elite instead instill class markers in their children based on domains they're more deeply immersed in:  pop culture and politics.

Of course, America's upper-middle class thinks of itself as meritocratic--college-educated, industrious, talented and ambitious.  And that was largely true of the high achievers of the postwar and baby-boom generations, most of whom climbed the ladder of success on their own merits.  But much of today's upper-middle class is third- or fourth-generation, and regression to the mean is an awfully hard trend to combat, even with the best schools and neighborhoods.  And that's why this aristocracy, like the ones before it, is--as Brooks deftly observes--forced to fall back on cultural signals, rather than truly admirable traits, as its class markers.

What nobody seems to have noticed about this past Friday night's bombshell about a Republican "opposition researcher" trying to obtain the contents of Hillary Clinton's private email server from Russian hackers, while claiming high-level connections in the Trump campaign, is its striking similarity to another recent story about the 2016 election:  that of the so-called "Steele memo".  Consider:

• Both stories center on a middleman figure of questionable ethics who is nominally independent of a presidential campaign, but in practice clearly associated with it.
• In both cases, that middleman, seeking to obtain damaging information about the opposing candidate, is happy to reach out to highly dubious sources--even at the cost of being manipulated by Russian intelligence agencies.  (This aspect of the Steele memo is rarely noted, presumably because it is widely assumed that the Russian government was entirely on Trump's side, and therefore uninterested in planting damaging information about him with Westerners.  Even if the first part of that assumption is true--and it's actually a matter of hot debate within the US intelligence community--the value to the Russians of demonstrating an ability to create and control a flow of damaging information about Trump in the event of a Trump victory should be completely obvious.)
• In both cases, the effort foundered for lack of confirmable information, and yet took on a life of its own later on, with large segments of the press acting exactly as if the operation had in fact been a complete success, and a great deal of verifiable, damaging information obtained.

At this point, there's really no need to belabor the obvious point that the mainstream press has yet again demonstrated itself to be hopelessly partisan, adopting diametrically opposite interpretations of parallel fact patterns in a way that consistently favors the Democrats and harms Republicans.  A more interesting lesson, I think, is the extent to which partisans of both parties treat the rules around "opposition research" as a kind of kabuki theater, in which nominally independent surrogates for the parties handle the unsavory business of digging up dirt on opponents--sometimes by extremely disreputable means--while maintaining only just enough distance to satisfy legal and political obligations. 

In this sense, opposition research is similar to gerrymandering, large-donor fundraising, manipulation of ease or difficulty of voting, and many other seamy aspects of US politics:  partisanship in the US is so strong, and respect for democratic principles so weak, that "fair play" rules--such as the ones that impose limits and transparency on campaign expenditures--are uniformly treated as mere formalities to be circumvented by one's own side, and perhaps occasionally used as legal weapons with which to harass the other side.  Until those attitudes change--an unlikely prospect, given how deep-seated they are in the American body politic--American democracy will no doubt continue to be plagued with its current rampant levels of corruption and dysfunction.

Fourteen years ago, I noted that the primary function of high culture has always been to allow society's elite to use their wealth and leisure to distinguish themselves from the "philistines" beneath them on the social ladder.  By using their position to educate themselves in the finer points of high culture, I argued, members of the elite can signal their status to each other, and exclude the less sophisticated from their circle.  I identified Matthew Arnold as one of the early advocates of this use of high culture, but observed that a modernist bohemian variant of it thrived in contemporary America.

Since then, though, a rather odd thing has happened--even odder for the complete lack of notice it's received:  highbrow culture has effectively disappeared from American society.  Magazines like the New Republic, the Atlantic Monthly, and the New Yorker, which were not long ago full of dense book reviews of even denser academic tomes on serious artistic and cultural topics, are now dominated by political screeds and fluffy pop culture roundups.  The self-important urban intellectuals Woody Allen used to lampoon, who once dropped references to great authors and obscure foreign films, now banter about subscription TV series and mass-market movies on Twitter.  And an imploding academia, obsessed with inclusiveness and identity politics, generates its endless stream of impenetrable humanities papers primarily on contemporary politics and pop culture, and not even on modern avant-garde art--let alone the classics.

Although the cause of this collapse is uncertain, I have a hypothesis: that this dumbing-down of intellectual elitism is a natural consequence of the expansion of the elite during the 1990s boom to encompass both the wealthy and the white-collar upper-middle class. An "elite" that encompasses twenty to thirty percent of the population can't possibly distinguish itself by deep cultural erudition, and must inevitably make do with cruder class distinctions, such as tastes in television and preferred pop culture references.  For the "serious" writers and academics who seek to make a living fostering and directing the shared culture of this elite, it is therefore no longer effective to champion obscure, inaccessible artists that their target audience has neither the time nor the inclination to study and appreciate.  Instead, they must focus on the level of cultural knowledge this audience is capable of collectively absorbing:  low-to-middlebrow commentary on low-to-middlebrow fare.