Long War

BECAUSE THEY DEFINE THEIR IDENTITY IN OPPOSITION TO GREENS:

Why Conservatives Turned Against the Environment: They’re busy making accusations of “eco-radicalism” while the world burns. It wasn’t always like that (ARNO KOPECKY, Jan. 10, 2024, The Walrus)

These tactics are part of a larger strategy that has come to define modern Conservatives: frame ecological protection as an assault on freedom and affordability. This goes well beyond climate policy, encompassing everything from forest protection and efforts to save endangered caribou to the federal government’s failed attempt at banning single-use plastic bags.

It hasn’t always been this way. It was Conservatives, after all, who convened a global treaty to save the ozone layer in 1987, who wrote the original Environmental Protection Act that became federal law in 1988, and who signed a historic accord with the United States to curb acid rain in 1991. It was also Conservatives who first proposed a carbon tax. As recently as 2007, Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper called climate change “perhaps the biggest threat to confront the future of humanity.” Almost two decades later, with ecological warning lights blinking red across the planet, Conservatives have transformed themselves into a national vessel of denial.

They’re not alone. From US Republicans to Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro and India’s current government under Narendra Modi, anti-environmentalism is now a hallmark of the global right. How did we get here?

Conservatism is a disposition. Identitarianism is emotion.

“THAT YE ALSO LOVE ONE ANOTHER”:

Our true feelings about race and identity are revealed in six words (Michele Norris, 1/11/24, Washington Post)

I printed 200 black postcards at my local FedEx Kinko’s on upper Wisconsin Avenue asking people to condense their thoughts on race or cultural identity into one sentence of six words. The front of the cards simply read:

Race. Your thoughts. 6 words. Please send.

I left the cards everywhere I traveled: in bookstores, in restaurants, at the information kiosks in airports, on the writing desks at all my hotels. Sometimes I snuck them inside airline in-flight magazines or left them at the sugar station at Starbucks. I hoped a few of those postcards would come back, thinking it would be worth the trouble if even a dozen people responded.

Much to my surprise, strangers who stumbled on the cards would follow the instructions and use postage stamps to mail their six-word stories back to me in D.C. Since my parents were both postal workers, this gave me an extra thrill. Here I was, doing my part to support the Postal Service. Who says snail mail is dead?

Half a dozen cards arrived within a week, then 12, then 20. Over time, that trickle became a tide. I have received more than 500,000 of these stories — and more arrive every day, though the vast majority of submissions now arrive through a website portal online. They have come from all 50 states and more than 100 countries. […]

To keep the conversation going, I created a complementary website for the Race Card Project, where people could submit their six-word stories online. Over time we added two words to the submission form: “Anything else?” That changed everything. People sent in poems, essays, memos and historical documents to explain why they chose their six words. The archive came alive. It became an international forum where people could share their own stories but also learn much about life, as if it were lived by someone else.

YUP, THAT’S ANTI-WOKE IN A NUTSHELL:

Scientist cited in push to oust Harvard’s Claudine Gay has links to eugenicists: Christopher Rufo, credited with helping oust school’s first Black president, touted critic associated with ‘scientific racists’ (Jason Wilson, 14 Jan 2024, The Guardian)

The 2019 paper is entitled Polygenic Scores Mediate the Jewish Phenotypic Advantage in Educational Attainment and Cognitive Ability Compared With Catholics and Lutherans. It argues that the high cognitive abilities of Ashkenazi Jews are “significantly mediated by group differences in the polygenic score” – that is, genetically caused. They speculate that “culture-gene coevolution” may influence “Jewish group-level characteristics” like high cognitive abilities.

The basis of the paper was an interpretation of publicly available data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, one of the longest-running population surveys in the US.

Pallesen’s co-authors were Emil Kirkegaard, Michael Woodley and Curtis S Dunkel.

The paper was demolished in a direct response from academics from universities including Stanford, Georgetown and the University of Wisconsin, who wrote that “researchers have been warning against using polygenic scores for comparisons across race/ethnic groups for some time now, and a closer look at the data results [in Pallesen paper] provides another illustration of why”.

The lead author of the paper criticizing Pallesen’s paper is Jeremy Freese, a professor of sociology at Stanford. Freese was also part of a team that integrated genetic data into the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study – the same data the original paper draws on.

In a telephone conversation, Freese said that “we were moved to write something because the paper seemed to mistake correlation for causation in a question that obviously deserved more care”.

Freese added: “The problem we pointed out didn’t take a detailed interrogation to notice.”

Aaron Panofsky is the director of, and a professor in, UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics, and one of the authors of the paper How White Nationalists Mobilize Genetics, which includes the Pallesen-co-authored paper in its survey of the misuse of genetic data by scientific racists.

On the paper’s claims about Jews’ innately high intelligence, Panofsky said that this was a persistent trope among white supremacists that “fits into a larger narrative about Jewish conspiracies and the idea that Jews are controlling the problems of the world from behind the scenes”.

The paper Pallesen co-authored repeatedly cites Kevin MacDonald, a retired psychology academic whose antisemitic publications argue that Jews engage in a “group evolutionary strategy” that explains their financial and cultural successes, and that antisemitism is an understandable reaction to this phenomenon.

DENYING THE FALL:

Weaponising Emotion (LORENZO WARBY, DEC 21, 2023, Not On Your Team, But Always Fair)

The imagined future progressives use as benchmark isn’t real. This gives them a huge rhetorical advantage: a future from which there’s no information is free from complicating sins and trade-offs. It can be imagined to be as perfect as one wishes.

That rhetorical advantage comes at huge cost for human flourishing. The problem is not the wish to do better. It is using one’s vision of the future as the benchmark for judgement rather than testing it against the accumulated experience of human action. This is especially so when mechanisms are adopted to block any testing.

Using the imagined future as one’s benchmark naturally inclines one to adopt a perfectionist outlook as perfectionism shines most brightly. However, perfectionist standards devalue human achievement, because all achievement is imperfect. Any failing can readily be construed as a de-legitimising failure.

The Right, in turn, does the same with the past.

“ALL MEN”:

What is the oppressor/victim mindset and how did it conquer the academy?: A condensed version of Chapter 3 of The Coddling of the American Mind (JON HAIDT AND GREG LUKIANOFF, DEC 21, 2023, After Babel)

Two Kinds of Identity Politics
“Identity politics” is a contentious term, but its basic meaning is simple. Jonathan Rauch, a scholar at The Brookings Institution, defines it as “political mobilization organized around group characteristics such as race, gender, and sexuality, as opposed to party, ideology, or pecuniary interest.” He notes that “in America, this sort of mobilization is not new, unusual, un­-American, illegitimate, nefarious, or particularly left wing.” Politics is all about groups forming coalitions to achieve their goals. If cattle ranchers, wine enthusiasts, or libertarians banding together to promote their interests is normal politics, then women, African Americans, or gay people banding together is normal politics, too.

But how identity is mobilized makes an enormous difference––for the country, for the group’s odds of success, and for the welfare of the people who join the movement. Identity can be mobilized in ways that emphasize an overarching common humanity while making the case that some fellow human beings are denied dignity and rights because they belong to a particular group, or it can be mobilized in ways that amplify our ancient tribalism and bind people together in shared hatred of a group that serves as the unifying common enemy.

Common-Humanity Identity Politics
The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., epitomized what we’ll call common-humanity identity politics. He was trying to fix a gaping wound—centuries of racism that had been codified into law in southern states and into customs, habits, and institutions across the country. It wasn’t enough to be patient and wait for things to change gradually. The civil rights movement was a political movement led by African Americans and joined by others, who engaged in nonviolent protests and civil disobedience, boycotts, and sophisticated public relations strategies to apply political pressure on intransigent lawmakers while working to change minds and hearts in the country at large.

Part of Dr. King’s genius was that he appealed to the shared morals and identities of Americans using the unifying languages of religion and patriotism. He repeatedly used the metaphor of family, referring to people of all races and religions as “brothers” and “sisters.” He spoke often of the need for love and forgiveness, hearkening back to the words of Jesus and echoing ancient wisdom from many cultures: “Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend” and “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” …

King’s most famous speech drew on the language and iconography of what sociologists call the American civil religion. Some Americans use quasi-religious language, frameworks, and narratives to speak about the country’s founding documents and founding fathers, and King did, too. “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence,” he proclaimed on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, “they were signing a promissory note.” King turned the full moral force of the American civil religion toward the goals of the civil rights movement. […]

King’s approach made it clear that his victory would not destroy America; it would repair and reunite it.

The former is the essential characteristic of the Left/Right, the latter of liberalism/conservatism.