I Want a New Left

Guns and the Left

With the recent Supreme Court decision on guns, it is a good time to talk about guns and the left. Now a continuing theme of this blog is going to be the distinction between what I call Rich People’s Leftism (RPL) and Poor People’s Leftism (PPL). For example, RPL favors communism or socialism, while PPL sees them as nothing but systems which (1) help guilty rich people feel good about themselves and (2) would generally be avoided by actual poor people if they had a choice. As far as guns go, RPL hates them, though it’s not clear why, while PPL favors them. Here’s why:

1. Guns allow poor people to supplement a meager income by hunting, which can bring in some extra food.

2. Guns give poor people some security. Since poor people cannot afford to live in gated communities and are likely to live in crime-infested neighborhoods, or else in rural areas where police presence is minimal, guns allow poor people to protect themselves.

3. In rural areas, the deer population is a problem. They can be kept in check either by hunting them or by accidentally running into them with one’s car. The latter, if it happens to a poor person, means a great deal of bother and expense, while the former means extra food. (See number 1.)

4. The poor are much more likely than rich people to end up in the military, where having some prior experience with guns can be helpful.

Multiculturalist Watch

Yesterday was again a big (if heartbreaking) day for Mexico in terms of soccer. So, how did the Los Angeles Times deal with it? Based on what I saw today on newseum.org, they had an article friendly to illegal immigrants on their front page, but nothing about Mexico's game. This phenomenon is what ought to be called "multiculturalism-except-for-sports," since it's pretty clear that they respect others cultures, except the sports of those other cultures. I hope it's clear how hypocritical this is.

Thanks, Instapundit

Thanks, Instapundit, for mentioning my book the other day. I thought you mentioned every book that was sent to you, if you thought it would be of interest to your readers, but I just found out that you didn't mention my brother-in-law's book Is the Welfare State Justified? (here) I would have thought they'd like that. So, thanks so much.

A Leftist Defense of Capitalism, Part II

In Part I of this essay (here), I argued that the evils associated with capitalism can emerge even when capitalism is absent. They emerge, for example, in academia, which is not part of capitalism and which is currently under the control of liberals and leftists. When confronted with this sort of evidence, liberals and leftists are likely to respond that in fact capitalism is still responsible for these evils because corporations have in recent years begun intruding into academia, so therefore the influence of these corporations is the real cause of these evils.

But I have to say no, and the reason for my saying no is one I have partly given already, that leftists themselves have not behaved anywhere near as well as they could have. Let me lay out my expectations here in connection with the current jobs crisis. Ever since the early 1970s, the academic job market hasn’t been very good, but things were slowly getting better during the 1980s. Moreover, at that time there was talk of a looming professor shortage for the 1990s. This encouraged young people to consider academia as a viable career. Instead of a professor shortage, however, there was a job shortage, and lots of people who had counted on jobs didn’t get them. What should tenured liberals and leftists do about this? I expected a great deal of activity on their part. I expected many papers at conferences to be delivered on this topic, weighing the advantages and disadvantages of whatever solutions could be envisioned. I expected entire sessions to be devoted to dealing with this jobs crisis. In fact, I expected that some enterprising people would organize an entire conference dealing with nothing but this subject. Likewise, I expected that journals (such as Radical Philosophy or Philosophy and Public Affairs) would occasionally publish articles examining and judging the various solutions to the problem, and that maybe even an entire issue of a journal would be devoted to it. And of course I expected that many books would appear on the subject.

However, I saw almost no activity of this sort whatsoever. Liberals and leftists in academia seemed to take no notice whatsoever of what was happening right under their noses.

It has been suggested that people devoting their lives to the study of Jane Austen or anorexia or African-American artists were too focused on their own subjects to notice the jobs crisis and in any case had no time to deal with it. Yet these people could always be counted on to be well-informed about national and international affairs and to bash any conservatives, especially George Bush, whose policies they found annoying. Surely they had the time to become informed about an issue closer to home, one in their own profession.

Another excuse is that tenured liberals and leftists had no power to do anything, so there wasn’t any point in discussing any of this. However, such an assertion is nonsense. Academia has been controlled by liberals and leftists for quite some time now, so it is nonsense to say that they had no power and that nothing could be done. They could have greatly restricted admissions to grad schools, or they could have reduced salaries so that the extra money would go to adjuncts and the unemployed, and so on. But they did nothing. Occasionally, outsiders did things. Here in Ohio, the Ohio State Legislature decided to do something: it closed down some lesser grad schools which it thought weren’t doing very well at placing candidates in jobs. (I know a woman who was the very last person to get a Ph.D. in English from Bowling Green State University.) Anyway, even if nothing could be done, talking about the situation was important, if only to suggest to those who were suffering that those who had tenure cared about them. But they didn’t even do that much.

It is true that a very small number of tenured academics did talk about the jobs crisis and did seem to care, most notably Cary Nelson. But his book from 1997, entitled Manifesto of a Tenured Radical, also told a tale of utter betrayal to the leftist cause, by of all people some leftists. The tale involved a union of teaching assistants that was formed at Yale in the 1990s to deal with the terrible job prospects that even those at elite schools were facing. In 1995, they went on strike. And how did their leftist professors react?

“Sara Suleri, a brilliant postcolonial critic whose work I have taught in my own courses, urged disciplinary action against one of her teaching assistants who joined [the union’s] 1995 decision to withhold undergraduate grades until Yale agreed to negotiate. Nancy Cott, a widely admired labor historian, spoke out against the union, and David Brion Davis, a distinguished historian of slavery, sought college guards to bar his union-identified teaching assistant from entering the room where undergraduate final exams would be given....” (page 143).

The simple, disturbing fact is that tenured liberals and leftists acted like capitalists in the early industrial revolution, in that they exhibited no particular interest in those who were unemployed or exploited and in that they stomped on a union when their own power was threatened. Moreover, by doing nothing about the jobs crisis, they in effect chose a free-market solution, even though they profess to hate such solutions.

So far I’ve been discussing a temporary problem in academia, the jobs crisis. A more permanent problem concerns its hierarchy. But here too liberals and leftists were uninterested in pushing for reforms or even acknowledging the problem. For them, the system by which the best are chosen for elite schools works, and peer review is a system without any problems, even though everyone I talked to could mention an instance when peer review went awry.

To conclude this part of my essay, not only did the evils of capitalism emerge when capitalism was not present, it emerged in a domain that liberals and leftists dominate. In addition, instead of discussing how to deal with these evils and to implement some sort of plan, these liberals and leftists did nothing. They obviously found it much more enjoyable to bash George Bush or Sarah Palin than to actually deal with the jobs crisis or the vicious hierarchy. I have to conclude, then, that blaming the various evils of academia on capitalism just isn’t very credible.

Continental Rates of Success in the World Cup

Now that the first round of the World Cup is complete, we can judge each continent’s rate of success, in terms of how many entrants have succeeded in going to the next round.

Best is South America, with all five countries (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Chile) going to the next round.

Next is the North and Central American region, with two (the U.S. and Mexico) out of three going to the next round.

Then comes Asia, with two (Japan and South Korea) of four going to the next round.

After that is Europe, with six (Germany, England, Slovakia, the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal) of thirteen moving ahead. Especially shocking is the elimination of the two countries that played in the final of the last World Cup, Italy and France.

Near the rear is Africa, with only one (Ghana) of six advancing.

And finally comes Oceania, with the only team (New Zealand) not advancing, though it did much better than expected, especially since it managed to tie Italy. Australia, incidentally, was classified with Asia, but it too failed to advance.

With these results, we can answer a question I had before the beginning of this World Cup, namely, is Europe’s lack of success when playing outside of Europe due to time-zone differences? And the answer appears to be no. The time zone of South Africa is roughly or exactly the same as that of the European countries, while being quite different from that of the other regions. Now it is of course still possible that a European country will win this World Cup, but it seems that Europeans don’t do very well outside of Europe, for whatever reason. For comparison, back in 2006, of thirteen European teams, nine advanced out of the first round, and of the four that were eliminated the only shocking result was perhaps the Czech Republic, which hammered us, but then lost to Italy and Ghana. Still, this was nothing to the shock of Portugal’s being eliminated back in 2002, when the World Cup was played in east Asia. So playing a World Cup in Europe is very helpful to European teams, while playing outside of Europe is helpful to the outsiders. Of course, playing in Africa hasn’t been particularly helpful to the Africans, but this seems to be a matter of bad timing. The best African teams were the ones that emerged in the 1990s, and it is just Africa’s bad luck that the current crop of teams aren’t up to their level.

A Leftist Defense of Capitalism, Part I

For well over a century and a half, capitalism has been a big problem for the left, and for much of that period, it was conceived of as the biggest problem. I want to cast serious doubt on this idea. I want to offer a leftist defense of capitalism. Let me begin with the leftist indictment of capitalism, which goes as follows:

1. Capitalism is correlated with various evils (exploitation, etc.)
2. Therefore, capitalism causes those evils.

For anyone who has taken logic, it is obvious that there is a big logical gap between the first and second statements. I’m not going to bother to see what evidence leftists use to fill that gap for the simple reason that I intend to show that these same evils will arise even when capitalism is absent. And if they arise when capitalism is absent, then it’s not at all clear that capitalism is responsible for those evils. Moreover, the evidence I’m going to introduce shows that these same evils emerge in a domain dominated by liberals and leftists, so even if capitalism were responsible for these evils, liberals and leftists in this other domain would also be responsible for them, and I assume no liberals or leftists would want to admit that. The natural conclusion, then, is that there is no particular reason to believe that capitalism is responsible for these evils.

The domain in question is academia, which is generally agreed to be dominated today by liberals and leftists. Here are the problems in academia that currently exist:

1. There is massive unemployment in academia. This has been the norm since at least the early 1970s, and the problem shows no signs of abating. Indeed, it got worse in the 1990s.

2. There is exploitation. Because of the jobs crisis, many people must settle for less than full-time, permanent work, and such people (called adjuncts) are generally exploited. Notice that I am not even talking here about exploitation of the staff people, but of would-be professors.

3. There is a vicious hierarchy. The hierarchy in academia is like that of an aristocracy or even a caste system. People who graduate from elite schools have the best chances of getting jobs, publications, and grants, while those of us who went to lesser schools have less of a chance of getting these things. This is in contrast with capitalism, in which theoretically anyone can rise to the top. Capitalism is much more meritocratic than academia is. It is true that those at the top in academia think that academia is a meritocracy, but those of us at the bottom do not, and since the left claims to listen to people at the bottom and to value their opinions as much as the opinions of those at the top, then leftists are committed (whether they like it or not) to doubting that academia is a meritocracy. And if academia is not a meritocracy, then it must be very far from being egalitarian.

4. The rich get richer and the poor poorer. I mean this in two senses. First, there is the sense that concerns the wealth within academia. Wealth within academia refers to actual wealth, such as grants or good-paying jobs that require comparatively little teaching, but also to honors that can be used to more easily attain that wealth, such as getting many books and articles published. Now, who are the people who typically get big grants? Why, they are the people who have already gotten big grants. Similarly, who are the people who typically get articles published in prestigious journals? They are the people who have already gotten articles published in prestigious journals. A person who has never gotten a grant at all or never gotten anything published is very unlikely to get a big grant or an article published in a prestigious journal, unless they happen to have gone to an elite graduate school. The rest of us can only dream of such things, and because life is so difficult for us, most of us fail. We get jobs at community colleges or places far away from the centers of culture or we become adjuncts or we are forced to accept employment outside of academia. The rich get richer and the poor poorer.

The second sense in which I mean this phrase is that those at the top in academia are likely to come from wealthy backgrounds. (Some leftists have recently begun to acknowledge this. One of them, Walter Benn Michaels, is alleged to have said that diversity in our colleges means “what skin color the rich kids have”). They get into the best schools, and having graduated from such schools they get good jobs and have great connections that allow them to get published easily. It’s a short step to the top. Those of us who come from more modest backgrounds have a very different fate and have a much more difficult time coping. We are less likely to get into the elite schools, and the schools we do get into turn out not to be very well respected. Failure is hard to avoid.

5. Among those at the top there is, if not greed, at least stinginess. While liberals and leftists in academia generally like the idea of sharing and fairness, this attitude doesn’t apply to their own good luck if they happen to have a big salary or to have gotten a big grant. Even though there are many people who are unemployed or underemployed in academia, people at the top have zero interest in helping them. I don’t know of any articles written by, for example, Noam Chomsky on this topic. Furthermore, he continued to be a professor long after he could have retired, thus taking up a professorial slot that could have gone to another, younger scholar. (And Chomsky could easily have made a decent living simply giving lectures and writing books.) Another example along these lines is Kai Nielsen, a philosophy professor who published article after article promoting socialism at a time when younger scholars needed to get publications in order to get jobs and promotions. That is, publishing in a journal is for the most part a zero-sum game; if one person gets a publication in a journal, another cannot, so his continued publishing, at a time when he didn’t really need to, hurt younger scholars. (With the rise of online journals, all this may change, since online journals have a very large capacity and so can publish anything they deem good. However, the old guard in academia looks askance at this new medium.) Aside from these two examples, the average attitude of the tenured liberal or leftist professor, when confronted with the problem of the unemployed and underemployed in academia, is not, “I ought to donate some of my salary to them so they can get by,” but rather “That is someone else’s problem.”


All of these five evils are associated with capitalism. That they emerge in a domain far removed from capitalism suggests that capitalism has nothing to do with creating them and that they are more likely simply part of the human condition.

Advice to Conservatives Who Bash Soccer

Recently, some conservatives who hate soccer and some leftists who love soccer have been engaged in a cultural battle over soccer. This is what I expected back in 1976 when a soccer team first came to my home town of Minneapolis. I expected “open-minded” leftists to love it, and “closed-minded” conservatives to hate it. But instead of finding myself in the company of my fellow leftists when I attended games, I found myself surrounded by people in the middle and on the right.

And that’s the way it has been for thirty-four years: conservatives supporting soccer and leftists generally shunning it. In fact, I got so angry at the way that leftist magazines like The Nation and In These Times treated soccer that I stopped subscribing to them. I am no longer surprised when the U.S. Marines are among the advertisers of televised games; at this point what would be surprising would be some lefty entity like Whole Foods joining in.

So here’s my advice to conservatives who are bashing soccer: go ahead if you wish, but also bash those leftists who bash soccer. And there are plenty of those people around.

Why fight the left with one hand tied behind your back? Why not take advantage of leftist hypocrisy?

And of course read my book for more ammunition:

Soccer, the Left, & the Farce of Multiculturalism

Global Warming and Peer Review

A continuing theme of this blog is going to be the nature of peer review and how it is not at all the reliable source of information on alleged global warming that leftists think it is. There are many avenues to explore in connection with this issue, but for now I simply want to quote a statement from the Chronicle of Higher Education for June 18th of this year (page A80). The quote is from a piece entitled, “We Must Stop the Avalanche of Low-Quality Research,” by Mark Bauerlein, Mohamed Gad-El-Hak, Wayne Grody, Bill McKelvey, and Stanley W. Trimble. Here is the quote:

“Experts asked to evaluate manuscripts, results, and promotion files give them less-careful scrutiny or pass the burden along to other, less-competent peers. We all know busy professors who ask Ph.D. students to do their reviewing for them. Questionable work finds its way more easily through the review process and enters into the domain of knowledge.... Aspiring researchers are turned into publish-or-perish entrepreneurs, often becoming more less cynical about the higher ideals of the pursuit of knowledge.  They fashion pathways to speedier publication, cutting corners on methodology and turning to politicking and fawning strategies for acceptance.

“Such outcomes run squarely against the goals of scientific inquiry. The surest guarantee of integrity, peer review, falls under a debilitating crush of findings, for peer review can handle only so much material without breaking down. More isn’t better. At some point, quality gives way to quantity.

“Academic publication has passed that point in most, if not all disciplines – in some fields by a long shot.”

This is from an article that has nothing to do with global warming or climate science. It is simply talking about the state of academic publication these days, and it finds that state far from ideal. It nevertheless bears on global warming because everyone who believes in global warming talks about how reliable the science behind it is, and to prove it is reliable they point to peer review. But why believe that peer review is reliable? This quotation suggests it is not.

American media vs. foreign media

Yesterday, I asked my mother about this wedding in Sweden. She said, “What wedding?” My mother is of Swedish descent and lives in Minnesota, which is filled with people of Swedish descent, so naturally I assumed that the big wedding of some princess there would be news in Minnesota. But it wasn’t.

Since I look at media from various parts of the world on the Internet, including the front pages of Swedish newspapers on newseum.org, I knew about this wedding. But apparently, the U.S. media had deliberately ignored it:

http://www.iii.co.uk/news/?type=afxnews&articleid=7951918&subject=economic&action=article

Which is why my mother, who looks only at American media, didn’t know anything about it.

And this rather trivial incident points to something I argue for in my book Soccer, the Left, & the Farce of Multiculturalism. It’s not enough to use just our media when trying to be well-informed, because our media can boycott things. I first noticed this with soccer, but it occurs in other realms as well. More familiar to many people is that they will slant things, of course, but they don’t just slant, they boycott as well. One example of this is the story of Amanda Knox, the American student in Italy who has been in prison for murder. This story was huge in the British media, especially their tabloids, but was hardly covered at all in the American media, except in her hometown of Seattle. Otherwise, it was ignored. A woman I know who loves Italy had not heard of it, and wondered where I had heard about it. “It wasn’t in the New York Times,” she wailed. But one cannot count on the New York Times, or any newspaper or news source, to give you everything. And counting on the media in one’s own country to give you everything is just asking for trouble.

No, I'm not a reactionary, a conservative, or a libertarian

No, I’m not a reactionary, a conservative, or a libertarian, though I now get along with people of those last two categories much better than in the old days.

Before defending myself on this issue by differentiating my position from theirs, let me point out how ordinary leftists have their own identity problems.

1. Regarding the environmentalists who want gas to go to $5/gallon, how exactly are they helping the poor? Aren’t they engaged in a war against the poor? If not, why not?

2. Regarding the leftists who support misogynistic and homophobic reactionaries from the Middle East, is it really accurate to continue to call them leftists?

3.  The sport of soccer is in some sense the sport of the “Other,” and I saw how liberals and leftists of my generation reacted to this sport when it was introduced to them. They went scurrying back to the safe familiarity of our sports. Why bash conservatives for their prejudices when you cannot deal with your own?

4. And while I could say lots more about the ambiguous status of most “leftists” these days, let me conclude with this. While I object to those conservatives who claim that blacks generally have lower IQs than whites, I can’t help but notice that many leftists have their own version of this belief: going to an elite school. Such leftists believe that those who go to an elite school are smart, while those who don’t go to such schools aren’t. Lest one think that this belief is restricted to a small and obscure group of leftists, in fact this belief permeates academia, as well as publications like The New York Times.

Anyway, on to my defense. While I agree with libertarians on a lot of things – as do many leftists – I have a different emphasis. Consider the problem of the exploited workers of the nineteenth century.  Orthodox liberals and leftists blame this on capitalism. Libertarians don’t even see a problem here, arguing that the exploitation didn’t exist (because the profits made by the capitalists were justified and in any case capitalism caused the rise in the wages of the workers by the end of that century). I acknowledge that there was a problem, but I deny that capitalism was the problem. Instead, I say that the problem was the maldistribution of power. The horrible problems of exploitation from that era were at least party the result of the fact that the poor had no political power to change things. Once they got political power (in the form of voting and other similar powers), things changed drastically. It’s hard to exploit the poor today simply because they can vote in politicians who will help them. Likewise, the poor now have wonderful opportunities to get out of poverty by means of a good education (though thanks to the left our schools are much worse these days than they were before). So, while liberals and leftists often hate America, I like it because of the way that poor people have been treated here. And if liberals and leftists find that astonishing, I suggest they think hard about why it is that poor people from Latin America want to come here, a country which is culturally rather distant from their own, when they could just as easily go to culturally familiar countries like Venezuela or Cuba or Bolivia.

As for conservatism, let me talk briefly about feminism. According to feminists, our gender is constructed for us as a result of arbitrary roles that have been inflicted on children in our society (indeed, in every society). These are the roles that tell males to be dominant and females to be submissive. From these two roles nearly all other differences in gender flow. Conservatives hate this sort of talk and insist that there are fundamental differences between men and women that go beyond the obvious anatomical differences. Unlike the conservatives, I don’t have any problem with the feminists’ first claim, that gender differences are constructed. It’s the second claim I disagree with. Rather than choosing dominance in men and submissiveness in women as the roles which are primary, I say that it is a different pair: men are told to be sexually aggressive while women are told to be sexually passive. It goes almost without saying that when I bring this up among feminists, they get furious. They insist that, no matter what I say, I cannot really mean this, and that since I cannot really mean this, I must really be trying to undermine their movement. And why do they think I cannot really mean this? As far as I can tell, aside from a woeful ignorance of what my life and the lives of men similar to me have been like, they reason as follows: “The most important gender role in my life was the role that said I had to be submissive; therefore, the most important gender role in the lives of men must be the opposite role, the one that told them to be dominant.” But in fact the most important gender role in my life was the one that told me to be sexually aggressive, a claim they simply cannot handle. (If I were a Freudian, I would have a delightful time concocting theories about why they cannot handle it.) As I said, I have no problem with their claim that gender is constructed. I just object to their choice of which roles are supposed to be primary.

One last thing. It is true that I link mostly to conservative and libertarian blogs, but that is partly because I agree with them on certain big issues (global warming and the Muslim problem) and partly because the liberals and leftists I like don’t seem to blog. I like what Alexander Cockburn says about global warming, and I like what people like Christopher Hitchens, Paul Berman, Bruce Bawer, Phyllis Chesler, and Nick Cohen (and in fact the whole Euston Manifesto cohort) have to say about the Muslim problem. But they tend to write books and articles for magazines rather than to run blogs.

The preceding should be enough for any fair-minded person who is left of center to see that, no, I’m not a reactionary, a conservative or a libertarian. I’m a rather unorthodox leftist, but a leftist nevertheless. My basic orientation is egalitarian, and if I end up agreeing a lot with libertarians, that is because of powerful reasons that I will be enumerating as time goes on.