NOAH SMITH

Progressive culture’s substitution of nastiness for persuasion and argument has robbed America of the incisive commentary of which intelligent progressives would otherwise be capable. Progressives got addicted to the power of cancel culture — their seemingly invincible H-bomb — and when it stopped working they just didn’t know what else to do, because they had forgotten everything they used to do in the time before Twitter.

If you want to govern the nation, you should first be able to govern San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles.

Fifteen years ago, the internet was an escape from the real world. Now the real world is an escape from the internet.

The most important thing blue cities need to understand and internalize is that anarchy is not a form of welfare. Many progressives believe that any actions to curb urban disorder — restrictions on sidewalk tents, making people pay for public transit, arresting people for nonviolent crime, and so on — represent the exclusion of marginalized people from public life. In the absence of a full-service cradle-to-grave welfare state, progressives think they can redistribute urban utility from the rich to the poor by basically letting anyone do anything they want. But in fact, permissiveness toward the behaviors that create urban disorder destroy more value than they redistribute. When you don’t make people pay for public transit, you scare people off the train, thus causing the train to go bankrupt. Pretty soon neither the rich nor the poor have a train, and everyone is screwed. This is the tragedy of the commons.

We should all be thinking very hard about whether it’s wise to have a labor system that can allow that sort of thing to happen. Is it right that the livelihoods of millions of Americans should hang on the whims of 50,000 dockworkers? Is it smart to give a single union the power to shut down a large portion of America’s critical infrastructure? Collective bargaining is important, but there should be limits on how destructive we allow that bargaining process to be. … But the worst thing about this strike is the nature of the ILA’s demands. Usually we think of strikes as being about higher wages, and maybe about better working conditions. The ILA’s wage demands are actually pretty close to being met. But the union is also demanding a complete ban on automation at the ports it controls. In fact, port automation is already heavily discouraged, both by the ILA’s existing contract, and by Department of Transportation Rules that stipulate that automation is never allowed to reduce the number or quality of jobs. But now the ILA wants to ban automation completely.

In the wake of the Great Recession, we talked a lot about whether economists and their theories were afforded too much credence, but as far as I can tell there has been no similarly critical public discourse about academic history. But there ought to be. Just as economists became a sort of priestly order that we relied upon to tell us how to achieve prosperity and distribute resources in society, historians have become a sort of priestly order that we rely on to tell us about where our politics are headed and how we should think about our sense of nationhood.

[O]ne of the most problematic unexamined assumptions of modern-day progressivism is the idea that outrage is the most powerful motivation for progress and must therefore be continually cultivated and encouraged.

Fifteen years ago, the internet was an escape from the real world. Now the real world is an escape from the internet.

In the wake of the Great Recession, we talked a lot about whether economists and their theories were afforded too much credence, but as far as I can tell there has been no similarly critical public discourse about academic history. But there ought to be. Just as economists became a sort of priestly order that we relied upon to tell us how to achieve prosperity and distribute resources in society, historians have become a sort of priestly order that we rely on to tell us about where our politics are headed and how we should think about our sense of nationhood.

We should all be thinking very hard about whether it’s wise to have a labor system that can allow that sort of thing to happen. Is it right that the livelihoods of millions of Americans should hang on the whims of 50,000 dockworkers? Is it smart to give a single union the power to shut down a large portion of America’s critical infrastructure? Collective bargaining is important, but there should be limits on how destructive we allow that bargaining process to be. … But the worst thing about this strike is the nature of the ILA’s demands. Usually we think of strikes as being about higher wages, and maybe about better working conditions. The ILA’s wage demands are actually pretty close to being met. But the union is also demanding a complete ban on automation at the ports it controls. In fact, port automation is already heavily discouraged, both by the ILA’s existing contract, and by Department of Transportation Rules that stipulate that automation is never allowed to reduce the number or quality of jobs. But now the ILA wants to ban automation completely.

If you want to govern the nation, you should first be able to govern San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles.

[O]ne of the most problematic unexamined assumptions of modern-day progressivism is the idea that outrage is the most powerful motivation for progress and must therefore be continually cultivated and encouraged.

The most important thing blue cities need to understand and internalize is that anarchy is not a form of welfare. Many progressives believe that any actions to curb urban disorder — restrictions on sidewalk tents, making people pay for public transit, arresting people for nonviolent crime, and so on — represent the exclusion of marginalized people from public life. In the absence of a full-service cradle-to-grave welfare state, progressives think they can redistribute urban utility from the rich to the poor by basically letting anyone do anything they want. But in fact, permissiveness toward the behaviors that create urban disorder destroy more value than they redistribute. When you don’t make people pay for public transit, you scare people off the train, thus causing the train to go bankrupt. Pretty soon neither the rich nor the poor have a train, and everyone is screwed. This is the tragedy of the commons.

Progressive culture’s substitution of nastiness for persuasion and argument has robbed America of the incisive commentary of which intelligent progressives would otherwise be capable. Progressives got addicted to the power of cancel culture — their seemingly invincible H-bomb — and when it stopped working they just didn’t know what else to do, because they had forgotten everything they used to do in the time before Twitter.