The Future or Bust
CrowdSource 12.9.2024
Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements, and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: the ideas driving the Trump coalition, a continuing series. (See previous installments on Economic Populism, National Libertarianism and the alliance between Traditional Conservatives and Tech Entrepreneurs.)
Join us! CrowdSource features the best comments from The Crowd — our cherished readers and subscribers who, with their comments and emails, help make Wisdom of Crowds what it is.
A Divergence of Views
This past week, two commentators put their finger on a divide within the Trump coalition.
Dynamists v. Populists.
wrote about the “dynamists” versus the “populists.” The dynamists are represented by Elon Musk, “the believer in growth and innovation and exploration as the lodestars of American civilization.” Lead by J. D. Vance, the populists are “committed to protect and uplift those parts of America neglected or left behind in an age of globalization.”Protectionists v. Globalists.
distinguished between nationalist protectionists and corporate globalists: “MAGA is deeply divided between those, like [former U.S. trade chief Robert] Lighthizer, who are animated mainly by the impetus to dismantle the global economic order that made Ireland the third richest nation on earth through a series of accounting tricks, and those who aspire to give The Economist’s policy wish list a ‘based’ makeover.”Politico reports that Lightizer will likely not serve in the second Trump administration.
The Dynamists v. the Skeptics
This ideological divide has its roots in a longstanding debate about the nature of progress.
First are those — let’s call them dynamists — who believe that progress requires economic growth, technological innovation and creative destruction.
Progress is Good. In the past few weeks, the libertarian thinker and self-styled dynamist
has been republishing articles she wrote in the early 1990s which are newly relevant:Ecology and Progress. This 1990 piece frames the debate over prosperity, progress and ecological concerns as “Growth v. Green.” Postrel places herself in the former camp.
Criticizing Social Critics. In this essay from 1993, Postrel bemoans the social critics who once “railed about the alienation of the worker. Now they complain about the service economy and the shortage of high-paid, workingmen’s jobs even as they denounce frivolous consumption and planet-threatening growth. They long for dark, satanic mills.”
Save the Future. Postrel summed up her views on progress in a 1998 book: The Future and Its Enemies.
Postrel refers to anti-dynamist thinkers as supporting a “politics of stasis,” but it would be more accurate to say that they support an alternative politics of progress. What would a world not dominated by capitalism and technology look like?
People, Place and Prayer. The English novelist and environmentalist activist
is among the most prominent progress- and economic growth-skeptical voices today. In a recent manifesto “Against Progress,” Kingsnorth articulates his view:
It is that any society worth having is always cored around what I call the ‘Three Ps’: people, place and prayer. Roots in your place, connection to your community, acknowledgement of the spiritual underpinning of all life. A Machine society, meanwhile, is cored instead around Three Ss: science, sex and the self. A reactionary radicalism, in this context, could be usefully defined as an active attempt at creating, defending or restoring a moral economy cored around the three Ps.
Negative Projection. Kingsnorth’s thought is greatly influenced by the 1972 report titled “Limits to Growth,” published by the organization Club of Rome, which predicted an exhaustion of world resources and a gradual decline in economic growth. Kingsnorth revisited and praised the report in this 2021 essay.
Next Steps
Both Postrel and Kingsnorth have announced next steps in their intellectual evolution:
Making the Future. In a long essay published last week, Postrel argues that dynamists need a new vision of the future:
Making the future alluring requires more than reconstituting twentieth-century visions with more greenery. It means understanding an ‘abundance agenda’ as a way to provide a common substrate for many different versions of the good life: not the future but many futures.
Against the Machine. Meanwhile, Kingsnorth has announced a new book, which
attempts to understand this moment by exploring how progressive leftism and corporate capitalism, once supposedly sworn enemies, ended up marching in lockstep to build the world we now inhabit. Those who are swept to power on the back of the rejection of that world do not necessarily have any better alternatives - and this post is not an endorsement of Trump or anyone else.
These two minds need to meet.
From the Crowd
- responds to ’s essay titled, “Yes, the World Ended on November 5”:
Funny thing. I feel like I died and went to heaven on Oct 5.
Hopefully, starting Jan 20, we stop being a banana republic. Hopefully, political partisans stop practicing lawfare. Hopefully the general public looks back at the Mueller boondoggle, the two pointless impeachments, the Hunter laptop denial, the shameful persecution of Trump over things that don't even raise an eyebrow when others do it, and the pardoning of Hunter for anything he ever did in the last eleven years, and realize that we have been flat-out lied to and manipulated for decades.
Some, of course, will remain in denial. Some feel threatened at looking down the throat of reality. Some would rather believe a ridiculous lie than face the truth. But those people are being increasingly ignored, as they should be.
- disagrees with ’s equivalence between “woke” and “anti-woke” mobs in his recent piece, “Having Ridiculous Ideas Doesn’t Make You a Bad Person”:
The “woke mobs” and “anti-woke mobs” are not all that analogous.
Ally Louks will be just fine. She’s shown that she’s capable of propagating ridiculous ideas, and since she lives and works in an academic ecosystem that rewards the adherence to and propagation of ridiculous ideas, there is not much that her online detractors can do to her except call out her ridiculousness.
It’s worth noting that “intersectionality” is not a “ridiculous idea” in the sense that, say, believing in Tarot cards is a ridiculous idea. The whole point of Louks’ thesis is to contribute to an intellectual project with the express purpose of deconstructing and subverting norms and institutions which most people value and wish to preserve. Some measure of anger towards those who participate in that project (to the point that it becomes their career) seems justifiable, at least.
Justine Sacco got fired while she was on a plane and completely unaware of her predicament. All this happened, not because she was part of an ecosystem that huge numbers of people rightly view as deleterious to the things they value, but because she tweeted a Jimmy Carr-type joke that did not land.
Do I want any harm to come to Louks? No of course not. But after the past twelve years of leftist nonsense – the sort of nonsense that dissertations such as Louks’ bolsters – I can’t find a violin tiny enough to play.
See you next week!
Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!