STARSHIP PUPPIES:

Whose Future Is It Anyway?: Jess Maginity reviews Jordan S. Carroll’s “Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right.” (Jess Maginity, November 12, 2024, LA Review of Books)

IN THE 1970s, a group of French right-wing intellectuals coalesced around the idea that cultural influence, not direct political action, determines the future. Led by Alain de Benoist, the Research and Study Group for European Civilization (GRECE) borrowed heavily from communist intellectual Antonio Gramsci to promote the ideas of what would become the French Nouvelle Droite (New Right). At the time Gramsci was writing, communist doctrine theorized culture as something emergent from the economy, and not something with a distinct impact on the organization of a given society. Gramsci disagreed. He argued that ideas, politics, and economics are each active forces in society and while they all impact each other, none of them simply emerges from another. The New Left embraced this paradigm through countercultural movements in the 1960s; what is often overlooked in history books is how a New Right was not far behind. The use of culture as a vehicle for politics (referred to as metapolitics) belongs to neither the Right nor the Left; a culture war needs two adversaries.

In the world of science fiction, this culture war has been evident in online forums, publications, and awards campaigning. The fight is for ownership of the genre. In the mid-2010s, the Hugo awards served as the primary battlefield for this front of the culture war. A group of right-wing science fiction fans and creators calling themselves the Sad Puppies formed a voting bloc to advocate the return to the genre’s supposed roots: pulpy outer-space hero stories. The Sad Puppies’ campaign was a populist one: they argued that elites, disparagingly referred to as “literati,” were pushing a political agenda and were silencing the true values of the people by presenting awards to more underrepresented authors whose stake in the genre was often, the Puppies insinuated, inauthentic. The Rabid Puppies emerged a few years into the Sad Puppies’ efforts. As their name suggests, the Rabid Puppies were unapologetic in their misogyny, homophobia, and racism. Whereas the Sad Puppies wanted the Hugos to celebrate the science fiction they were nostalgic for, the Rabid Puppies wanted to burn the Hugos to the ground. Why did a genre built around speculation and infinite possible futures spark such an impulse towards exclusivity? In his new book, Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right, Jordan S. Carroll argues that the stakes of this cultural battlefield boil down to one question: who deserves to write the future? […]

In his introduction, Carroll discusses the close proximity of science fiction to radical right-wing politics since the early 20th century. To some extent, popular culture was always a tool used by the Far Right. Theorists of the French New Right described intentional ideological influence on popular culture aimed at a distant political victory as “metapolitics.” As Andrew Breitbart summarizes, “Politics is downstream from culture.” Carroll describes this tactic, alluding to his focus on speculative genres, as “fascist worldmaking.” The ideology that structures fascist worldmaking is speculative whiteness: “For the alt-right,” Carroll says, “whiteness represents a matrix of possibilities more important than any actual accomplishments the white race may have already achieved.” There are five “myths” that constitute speculative whiteness: first, white people are uniquely good at speculating about the future and innovating in the present; second, nonwhite people are incapable of imagining the future and making long-term plans for the future; third, the true grandeur of whiteness will only be apparent in a high-tech fascist utopia; fourth, science fiction is a genre only white authors are truly able to produce; and fifth, speculative genres have the metapolitical potential of allowing a brainwashed white population to see their racial potential.

Big Sister Is Watching You (Whittaker Chambers, December 28, 1957, National Review)

One Big Brother is, of course, a socializing elite (as we know, several cut-rate brands are on the shelves). Miss Rand, as the enemy of any socializing force, calls in a Big Brother of her own contriving to do battle with the other. In the name of free enterprise, therefore, she plumps for a technocratic elite (I find no more inclusive word than technocratic to bracket the industrial-financial-engineering caste she seems to have in mind). When she calls “productive achievement” man’s “noblest activity,” she means, almost exclusively, technological achievement, supervised by such a managerial political bureau. She might object that she means much, much more; and we can freely entertain her objections. But, in sum, that is just what she means. For that is what, in reality, it works out to. And in reality, too, by contrast with fiction, this can only head into a dictatorship, however benign, living and acting beyond good and evil, a law unto itself (as Miss Rand believes it should be), and feeling any restraint on itself as, in practice, criminal, and, in morals, vicious — as Miss Rand clearly feels it to be. Of course, Miss Rand nowhere calls for a dictatorship. I take her to be calling for an aristocracy of talents. We cannot labor here why, in the modern world, the pre-conditions for aristocracy, an organic growth, no longer exist, so that impulse toward aristocracy always emerges now in the form of dictatorship.

Nor has the author, apparently, brooded on the degree to which, in a wicked world, a materialism of the Right and a materialism of the Left first surprisingly resemble, then, in action, tend to blend each with each, because, while differing at the top in avowed purpose, and possibly in conflict there, at bottom they are much the same thing. The embarrassing similarities between Hitler‘s National Socialism and Stalin’s brand of Communism are familiar. For the world, as seen in materialist view from the Right, scarcely differs from the same world seen in materialist view from the Left. The question becomes chiefly: who is to run that world in whose interests, or perhaps, at best, who can run it more efficiently?

Something of this implication is fixed in the book’s dictatorial tone, which is much its most striking feature. Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. In addition, the mind which finds this tone natural to it shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them. From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: “To a gas chamber — go!” The same inflexibly self-righteous stance results, too (in the total absence of any saving humor), in odd extravagances of inflection and gesture — that Dollar Sign, for example. At first, we try to tell ourselves that these are just lapses, that this mind has, somehow, mislaid the discriminating knack that most of us pray will warn us in time of the difference between what is effective and firm, and what is wildly grotesque and excessive. Soon we suspect something worse. We suspect that this mind finds, precisely in extravagance, some exalting merit; feels a surging release of power and passion precisely in smashing up the house.

YEAH, BUT OTHER THAN THAT…:

Science and Bias (Kali Jerrard, October 22, 2024, MAS)

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has published the fourth and final report in the Shifting Sands project, Unsound Science and Unsafe Regulation, Zombie Psychology, Implicit Association Test. Through statistical analyses, this report finds that the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a test which is used as a metric in the implicit bias theory—and utilized by scientists, government, researchers, and others—has no scientific foundation.

For years, NAS has warned of the dangers of the irreproducibility crisis and its bearing on the spread of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) and other race-based ideologies throughout higher education, science, and even government. Each of the four reports in the Shifting Sands project address the effects of the irreproducibility crisis on public policy, specifically “how flawed science has underwritten costly policies that undermine liberty.” But what exactly is the “irreproducibility crisis”? For those unfamiliar, irreproducible science occurs when an original study cannot be reproduced with the same results. The irreproducibility crisis occurs when regulations and public policy are swayed or influenced by science and studies which cannot be reproduced with statistically significant results.

Logically, government policies should be guided by sound science, especially when dealing with sensitive subjects like race, sex, and gender. But logic has taken a proverbial hike.

For all four Shifting Sands reports, the authors utilized p-value plotting to demonstrate the weaknesses in government use of meta-analyses. Policymakers and scientists alike use statistical analyses as a means to an end—achieving statistically significant results are useful when arguing for changes to policy and regulation. Oftentimes, these analyses are skewed. False-positive, statistically significant results abound. Why are these results so common? Why is unsound science pervading policy, especially antidiscrimination law? And why should we care?

THERE’S A REASON WE ARE THE ELITE:

What if the liberal elites are right? (Matthew Parris, November 8, 2024, The Spectator)

It’s time we stopped patronizing populists by cooing that we’re sorry we didn’t listen and will henceforward do our best to “address their concerns.” We should treat them as the adults they are, and tell them, man to man, that their concerns cannot be met. In countries like America, where money, talent and ambition gravitate towards clusters where success breeds success, we cannot realistically level-up with scarce public funds when the Treasury’s cupboard is bare.

In a national workforce where whole sectors of the economy are critically short of workers to fill jobs we must either import labor (immigration), hoist wages to a level that attracts native workers (inflation and higher taxation) or starve the health, social care, farming and service sectors of workers (ruination). We can keep out imports at a stroke, but prices will rise and our own exporters will face reprisals.

Actually, we do know better.

THE UNWASHED ELITES:

Never Reelect a Revolutionary: Post-populism in messianic time (Benjamin R. Teitelbaum, 11/08/24, The Point)

[B]eing entrenched is a problem for populism. Populism declares that there is a totalizing antagonism between the people and the establishment. Its raison d’être stems from the claim that elites leading the media, the government and educational and scientific institutions operate in opposition to the interests of the populations they are meant to serve. Some populists cast the difference between the two camps in terms of identity, claiming that “elites” and the “people” are fundamentally different human types. Racism can grow in this environment, but even it can be a secondary tool, a means of stylizing a deeper drive in the populist imaginary: namely, the claim that the oppositions between elites and the people are irreconcilable. For that reason, gradual reform, compromise and moderation will not do. Populism lurches toward revolution and the complete explosion of the establishment.

That’s why political success menaces the populist. How can populists justify managing the very elite institutions they were meant to destroy?

Populists may respond to this riddle by painting their enemies in the establishment as residing outside of their reach, such as when Hungarian president Viktor Orbán claims to be fighting against the European Union and Western liberalism. Some, like the Sweden Democrats, may be lucky enough to be kingmakers for a governing administration without being formally a part of it, allowing them to shape policy while posing as outsiders. Enfranchised populists may claim that the forces they fight against are so embedded in institutions that elected politicians can’t (yet) reach them, and thus that the cause of rebellion must continue even after an electoral victory. Narratives about a deep state running the U.S. government during the first presidency of Donald Trump are an example of the latter.

These are attempts at mitigation rather than cures, however. If, for example, a deep state allegedly remains in control even after a revolutionary takeover, populism’s supporters may deem political action futile and disengage. Elected populists are thus forced into a world of gamesmanship, negotiation, compromise and management. They often become conservers, conservative even—not in the palingenetic sense of resurrecting a lost golden age but merely, and more boringly, through their incentive to maintain the world in which they flourish. Max Weber famously argued that bureaucrats will seldom cross the institutions they run, because with time their personal power and prestige depend on those very institutions.

Such is the condition for many populists throughout the world today, in what we might call an era of post-populism—an era during which yesterday’s revolutionaries now cling to the status quo, where radical “Make America Great Again” gives way to paranoid “Keep America Great.” Elected populists (and particularly reelected populists) now find themselves tasked with instilling a durable mythology that will allow supporters to maintain their commitment to the cause even as it changes.

IT’S JUST ABOUT HATE:

Inside the Ruthless, Restless Final Days of Trump’s Campaign (Tim Alberta, November 2, 2024, The Atlantic)

At the end of June, in the afterglow of a debate performance that would ultimately prompt President Joe Biden to end his campaign for reelection, Donald Trump startled his aides by announcing that he’d come up with a new nickname for his opponent.

“The guy’s a retard. He’s retarded. I think that’s what I’ll start calling him,” Trump declared aboard his campaign plane, en route to a rally that evening, according to three people who heard him make the remarks: “Retarded Joe Biden.”

The staffers present—and, within hours, others who’d heard about the epithet secondhand—pleaded with Trump not to say this publicly. They warned him that it would antagonize the moderate voters who’d been breaking in their direction, while engendering sympathy for a politician who, at that moment, was the subject of widespread ridicule. As Trump demurred, musing that he might debut the nickname at that night’s event, his staffers puzzled over the timing. Biden was on the ropes. Polls showed Trump jumping out to the biggest lead he’d enjoyed in any of his three campaigns for the presidency. Everything was going right for the Republican Party and its nominee. Why would he jeopardize that for the sake of slinging a juvenile insult? (A campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, said the nickname “was never discussed and this is materially false.”)

Over the next several days—as Trump’s aides held their breath, convinced he would debut this latest slur at any moment—they came to realize something about Trump: He was restless, unhappy, and, yes, tired of winning. For the previous 20 months, he’d been hemmed in by a campaign built on the principles of restraint and competence. The former president’s ugliest impulses were regularly curbed by his top advisers; his most obnoxious allies and most outlandish ideas were sidelined. These guardrails had produced a professional campaign—a campaign that was headed for victory. But now, like a predator toying with its wounded catch, Trump had become bored. It reminded some allies of his havoc-making decisions in the White House. Trump never had much use for calm and quiet. He didn’t appreciate normalcy. Above all, he couldn’t stand being babysat. […]

In conversations with nearly a dozen of the former president’s aides, advisers, and friends, it became apparent that Trump’s feeling of midsummer tedium marked a crucial moment in his political career, setting off a chain reaction that nearly destroyed his campaign and continues to threaten his chances of victory. Even as they battled Democrats in a race that refuses to move outside the margin of error, some of Trump’s closest allies spent the closing months of the campaign at war with one another: planting damaging stories, rallying to the defense of wronged colleagues, and preemptively pointing fingers in the event of an electoral defeat.

At the center of this tumult, people close to Trump agreed, is a candidate whose appetite for chaos has only grown—and serves as a reminder of what awaits should he win on November 5.

UNIVERSAL LAWS DRAFTED IN PARTICIPATORY FASHION:

A Principled Revolution: a review of Public Philosophy and Patriotism by Paul Seaton (Richard M. Reinsch, Law & Liberty)

Seaton also looks to identity politics’ binary of oppressed vs. oppressor and its replacement of individual rights with group rights. How does the Declaration’s articulation of individual rights, and its inherent appeal to the rule of law, deliberation, limited government, representation, and a people united under God for its support of liberty against oppression stand against the binary of identity politics, with its insistence that limitless government is needed to serve diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) or what is the same: racial and gender socialism? Identity politics brings tremendous passion in the service of justice but does so in the complete dismissal of every institution in American life that it confronts, promising the transvaluation of every cardinal and civic virtue to achieve group justice for the oppressed. It promises to unleash tremendous injustice on individuals in the service of its future promises.

Who does identity politics speak for, Seaton asks? While identity politics claims to rectify past injustices it revels in present injustice by subsuming the human person into racial and gender characteristics, removing man from his highest feature: reason. Those drafting and approving the Declaration were sent by rebellious public authorities to promulgate a verdict of separation on behalf of the colonies, a judgment accepted by the people. They spoke comprehensively on behalf of the persons in the colonies who were being denied the protections of the law, preventing them from flourishing as individuals in community with others. It was precisely because individuals as moral creatures, made to pursue happiness freely, were being denied this right by arbitrary government, that the colonists rebelled. Contrast this with the understanding of power and speech displayed by identity politics leaders, who state that only the designated victim groups should speak on behalf of their justice. Thus, they are permitted to cast impossible demands for justice on those whose word is officially devalued because of their group trait as historical oppressors. Nothing could be further from the deliberation and argumentation in the Declaration.

Where equality of opportunity requires removing interference with liberty, equality of outcome requires imposing interference.

“IT’S NOT YOUR iDENTITARIANISM I OBJECT TO…”

The Rise of the Conservative Left: As the political left gets more progressive, it’s leaving behind the very people it used to champion, prompting them to search for new leaders (Michael C. Behrent, Oct 09, 2024, Discourse)

The trajectory of the left can, historically, be plotted along two axes. Temporally, the left tries to push society toward greater justice and equality, hastening the work of progress. Socially, it champions the interests of workers and ordinary people as opposed to elites. Most of the time, these axes harmonize: Political, social and cultural progress often advances the interests of society’s lower ranks. In the past, this has meant that political movements seeking to further the interests of ordinary people have tended to be liberal or progressive.

Yet in recent years, a very different situation has emerged. Ordinary people are less and less convinced that the progress progressives are offering is working in their favor. They worry not only about economic forces threatening their way of life—such as globalization, deindustrialization and automation—but also about ideologies hailing from universities and urban centers that classify their beliefs as old-fashioned and even abhorrent. Consequently, many nonelites have gravitated from the left to the right, particularly toward populist parties that, over the past decade, have flourished in many countries. In these circumstances, a space has emerged, almost by default, for an unusual political stance: a conservative left.

…it’s that you’re not valorizing my Identity.”

BETWEEN IRRESPONSIBILITY AND EUGENICS HE’S THE FACE OF ABORTION:

Trump Becomes a Pro-Choice Champion… for Florida’s Abortion Rights Movement (Marc A. Caputo, Oct 11, 2024, The Bulwark)

MOVE OVER, MARGARET SANGER. The new face of abortion rights in Florida is . . . Donald Trump?

One of the groups backing Florida’s abortion-rights initiative is trying to attract Trump voters with mailers and a soon-to-be-released digital ad that highlights the former president’s opposition to the state’s existing six-week abortion ban.

JUST DON’T CALL IT SYSTEMIC:

Police stop more Black drivers, while speed cameras issue unbiased tickets − new study from Chicago (The Conversation, September 27, 2024)

Our research, published in June 2024, used data on the racial composition of drivers on every street in Chicago. We then compared who is driving on roads with who is being ticketed by the city’s speed cameras and who is being stopped by the Chicago police.

Our findings show that when speed cameras are doing the ticketing, the proportion of tickets issued to Black and white drivers aligns closely with their respective share of roadway users. With human enforcement, in contrast, police officers stop Black drivers at a rate that far outstrips their presence on the road.

For instance, on roads where half of drivers are Black, Black drivers receive approximately 54% of automated camera citations. However, they make up about 70% of police stops.

On roadways where half of the drivers are white, white drivers account for around half of automated citations – and less than 20% of police stops.

JUST DON’T CALL IT SYSTEMIC:

The Downstream Effects of Fixing a Racist Lung Test (Felice J. Freyer, Harvard Public Health, 09.24.2024, UnDark)

Before, the computer program that assessed lung function sorted patients into one of four categories: Caucasian, Black, Asian, or Hispanic. It automatically lowered the threshold for what is “normal” for Black and Asian patients. It’s a startling example of how racial bias has literally been written into the machinery of 21st-century health care and how formulas based on supposed racial differences have skewed decision-making in many corners of medicine. Boston Medical Center is among the institutions working to address this problem, after an April 2023 recommendation by the American Thoracic Society that laboratories adopt a race-neutral algorithm, or set of rules, for assessments. But with thousands of lung-function laboratories and clinics scattered across the country, the movement for change faces manifold obstacles and thorny consequences.

Applying the race-neutral algorithm means broadly that Black patients will be deemed sicker and White ones healthier than before. A higher proportion of Black people (and, to a lesser extent, Asians) will be designated impaired — which could make them ineligible for certain occupations but increase their access to disability benefits, additional testing, and referral for lung transplants. White people will experience the opposite, with some potentially seeing their disability benefits reduced or eliminated.