Welcome to my weekly digest for January 27, 2023. For new subscribers, this contains a roundup of my recent writings and podcasts, as well as links to the best articles from around the web this week. You can control what emails you get from me by
"My observation has been that once women reach the point around age 45 at which they are definitively childless and unlikely to marry, there’s a trend towards them hardening and becoming even more militant."
The other day I was listening to a conversation between my wife and an older friend of hers who fits into the "over 40, single, childless, and basically resigned to never marrying" category and, unlike my wife, mostly seems to socialize within this category. Though this woman is churchgoing and not exactly militant.
And one thing she said to my wife that stuck with me was, "You know, I think you're the only friend of mine who isn't on anti-depressants, anti-anxiety medication, or both." Which, statistically, ought to describe less than 25% of women in their 30s-40s (half that rate for men), but it wouldn't surprise me at all if spinsters were heavily overrepresented in this category of being permanently medicated on mild-altering chemicals.
It's also a good reminder about this entire world of chemicals that's otherwise basically invisible to men like me, for whom the idea of medicating the blues away is literally unthinkable -- it's a course of action I've never given a second's thought to for myself.
The incredibly poor Democratic governance of flagship US cities is a gift that conservatives and the Republican party is likely to squander, based on what I have seen.
While I would never expect a majority of SWFs to go conservative, 25-30% would be in play if there was a real conservative push for decent governance and quality of life in the cities.
SWFs as defined here would see greater than average benefits from public safety improvements. This group deals with the same housing cost issues as anyone in a coastal city. This group is likely to be more technocratic in their leanings, and could be made to be quite skeptical of the dubious organized labor influence on flagship cities.
Culture war and immigration fights are not going to be a winner with this group (and a lot of other people for that matter). But conservative of good conscience could keep those things in the back pocket, or ignore them, while running completely sensible campaigns based on good governance in the cities. The Giuliani playbook is alive and well even if its namesake is doing everything to assure that he will not be for very long.
Right now the cities are so un-competitive that I am a registered Democrat just to vote in primaries. This seems like an opportunity too good to waste when you have plenty of people who would go the other way given an even slightly-matched alternative.
Immigration is directly related to quality of life and "good governance." You can't have a community with high social trust when it's residents have nothing in common and many of them carry loyalties to other places. Immigrants who come from countries ruled by despots are going to vote purely on tribal lines, they aren't going to vote for a member of the outgroup running a quality of life campaign.
SWF's are also as Aaron pointed out in both his column and comment below extremely easy for the left the manipulate. Supporting the "current thing" is a religion for many of them so they become more militant as they age. The overwhelming majority of the incidents that inspired the Stop Asian Hate campaign involved black males beating up Asians on camera. Predictably, the movement was built around stopping "white supremacy." These women marched with Black Lives Matter while they were burning down the neighborhoods they lived and worked in.
With all due respect. With large flagship cities, immigrants have quite a bit more in common with their communities than you realize. I live in a majority immigrant community, and they set the tone, not me. This is what I mean. It's understandable to have that posture in rural or exurban communities, but it is a 10,000% loser in the big cities.
American assimilation is a success story compared to Europe. The best things urban conservatives can do is make the appeal to these communities and recognize that their (usually) cultural conservative tendencies are an asset to be built upon. But they have to show up. Complaining about it at a distance is a losing strategy. I am here, I am ready to vote. No candidate shows up.
I don't know what the term "flagship city" means, but I have seen what Somalis have done to Minneapolis. They aren't assimilated into anything good, and that the city is a worse place to live because of them cannot be seriously disputed. Perhaps American assimilation is a success compared to Europe in a, "in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king," kind of way. Why anyone would want immigrants or why immigrants would want their children to assimilate into our depraved popular culture is beyond me. This is part of the reason why you see a lot of cases of absimilation, where the children of immigrants show more loyalty to the country their parents came from than they do to this one.
I've long had a thought that crime is one of the few issues that can cause basically non-ideological people to show up and get angry at the powers that be. And women as a whole are both less ideological than men and more personally afraid of violent crime than us. At the same time, leftists just can't help themselves when it comes to being soft on crime. It requires strong message discipline for them to avoid getting caught in a pro-criminal signaling spiral, and right now that discipline is out the window and they're very much caught in one.
The trouble is that, despite the roughly 50% increase in crime since the 2014 Ferguson incident, crime needs to see roughly another 30-50% increase before it's touching the heights of the period from the late 1960s to early 1990s. I'm inclined to believe that our society is just structurally less prone to crime now, due to some combination of technological changes and an aging population. So under current conditions, replicating the late 20th century crime waves might require an order of magnitude increase in pro-criminal leftist insanity. Which could well happen, signaling spirals being what they are, but I'm not exactly rooting for it.
This is why I think it's a huge opportunity for urban, conservative governance.
The program I recommended for the SFWs is also one that works just fine for a number of other groups that are seem alienated from the conservative tent. Black, brown, immigrant, gay, etc. people who live in cities also would be happy to join a coalition for good governance. And it's not even that hard to develop the program (winning is a different thing) because it's been so un-competitive for my entire life.
That sounds good on theory, but I can't point to great examples of it. You might think, for example, that rising crime directed at Asians would prompt such a rethink. Yet it has produced mostly the "Stop Anti-APPI Hate", which reframes things in an ideologically left manner. The only actual conservative shift we are seeing among minorities is among Hispanics, who seem more motivated by cultural than governance issues.
One of the issues here is that there are distinct sets of attitudes toward the questions of crime and policing across race, ethnicity, nationality, and other variables which make it close to impossible to find a policing or crime policy that doesn't become a political football. I saw a study a while back that showed that Hispanics are more comfortable with a higher police presence in their neighborhood than any other group, while major gaps existed between races on the question of what kinds of offenses should be considered a "real" crime that leads to the police being called at all.
Overpolicing to one group is underpolicing to another, a level of crime that is unacceptable to one is considered reasonable to another. When we have a large faction of people saying that mugging is a fact of life and you shouldn't call the police unless you've been physically harmed, there's not going to be a single policy platform that's going to make everyone happy. The fact of urban diversity is going to always make policy on this level a political minefield.
I'm sorry to say it, but I don't see any possibility of running a good governance platform that isn't going to run afoul of the disparate policy expectations of your urban population groups. "Good government" sounds good, but it doesn't mean anything when peoples' definitions of what a "good government" should do are radically different.
You're definitely an expert here, so I will remain less optimistic. My frustration arises primarily from living almost my entire life in Democratic run enclaves and seeing very few competent Republican challengers who can stay on message. Even Republicans who can win in the suburbs often lack the kind of messaging they would need in the cities. Not to mention the fact that Democrats run unchallenged with no concrete plans to do much of anything in terms of quality local governance.
If American Reformer can support the kind of institutions that build up a conservative playbook for the cities, I think there is a huge opportunity ready to go.
"My observation has been that once women reach the point around age 45 at which they are definitively childless and unlikely to marry, there’s a trend towards them hardening and becoming even more militant."
The other day I was listening to a conversation between my wife and an older friend of hers who fits into the "over 40, single, childless, and basically resigned to never marrying" category and, unlike my wife, mostly seems to socialize within this category. Though this woman is churchgoing and not exactly militant.
And one thing she said to my wife that stuck with me was, "You know, I think you're the only friend of mine who isn't on anti-depressants, anti-anxiety medication, or both." Which, statistically, ought to describe less than 25% of women in their 30s-40s (half that rate for men), but it wouldn't surprise me at all if spinsters were heavily overrepresented in this category of being permanently medicated on mild-altering chemicals.
It's also a good reminder about this entire world of chemicals that's otherwise basically invisible to men like me, for whom the idea of medicating the blues away is literally unthinkable -- it's a course of action I've never given a second's thought to for myself.
The incredibly poor Democratic governance of flagship US cities is a gift that conservatives and the Republican party is likely to squander, based on what I have seen.
While I would never expect a majority of SWFs to go conservative, 25-30% would be in play if there was a real conservative push for decent governance and quality of life in the cities.
SWFs as defined here would see greater than average benefits from public safety improvements. This group deals with the same housing cost issues as anyone in a coastal city. This group is likely to be more technocratic in their leanings, and could be made to be quite skeptical of the dubious organized labor influence on flagship cities.
Culture war and immigration fights are not going to be a winner with this group (and a lot of other people for that matter). But conservative of good conscience could keep those things in the back pocket, or ignore them, while running completely sensible campaigns based on good governance in the cities. The Giuliani playbook is alive and well even if its namesake is doing everything to assure that he will not be for very long.
Right now the cities are so un-competitive that I am a registered Democrat just to vote in primaries. This seems like an opportunity too good to waste when you have plenty of people who would go the other way given an even slightly-matched alternative.
Immigration is directly related to quality of life and "good governance." You can't have a community with high social trust when it's residents have nothing in common and many of them carry loyalties to other places. Immigrants who come from countries ruled by despots are going to vote purely on tribal lines, they aren't going to vote for a member of the outgroup running a quality of life campaign.
SWF's are also as Aaron pointed out in both his column and comment below extremely easy for the left the manipulate. Supporting the "current thing" is a religion for many of them so they become more militant as they age. The overwhelming majority of the incidents that inspired the Stop Asian Hate campaign involved black males beating up Asians on camera. Predictably, the movement was built around stopping "white supremacy." These women marched with Black Lives Matter while they were burning down the neighborhoods they lived and worked in.
With all due respect. With large flagship cities, immigrants have quite a bit more in common with their communities than you realize. I live in a majority immigrant community, and they set the tone, not me. This is what I mean. It's understandable to have that posture in rural or exurban communities, but it is a 10,000% loser in the big cities.
American assimilation is a success story compared to Europe. The best things urban conservatives can do is make the appeal to these communities and recognize that their (usually) cultural conservative tendencies are an asset to be built upon. But they have to show up. Complaining about it at a distance is a losing strategy. I am here, I am ready to vote. No candidate shows up.
I don't know what the term "flagship city" means, but I have seen what Somalis have done to Minneapolis. They aren't assimilated into anything good, and that the city is a worse place to live because of them cannot be seriously disputed. Perhaps American assimilation is a success compared to Europe in a, "in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king," kind of way. Why anyone would want immigrants or why immigrants would want their children to assimilate into our depraved popular culture is beyond me. This is part of the reason why you see a lot of cases of absimilation, where the children of immigrants show more loyalty to the country their parents came from than they do to this one.
I respectfully disagree.
I've long had a thought that crime is one of the few issues that can cause basically non-ideological people to show up and get angry at the powers that be. And women as a whole are both less ideological than men and more personally afraid of violent crime than us. At the same time, leftists just can't help themselves when it comes to being soft on crime. It requires strong message discipline for them to avoid getting caught in a pro-criminal signaling spiral, and right now that discipline is out the window and they're very much caught in one.
The trouble is that, despite the roughly 50% increase in crime since the 2014 Ferguson incident, crime needs to see roughly another 30-50% increase before it's touching the heights of the period from the late 1960s to early 1990s. I'm inclined to believe that our society is just structurally less prone to crime now, due to some combination of technological changes and an aging population. So under current conditions, replicating the late 20th century crime waves might require an order of magnitude increase in pro-criminal leftist insanity. Which could well happen, signaling spirals being what they are, but I'm not exactly rooting for it.
This is why I think it's a huge opportunity for urban, conservative governance.
The program I recommended for the SFWs is also one that works just fine for a number of other groups that are seem alienated from the conservative tent. Black, brown, immigrant, gay, etc. people who live in cities also would be happy to join a coalition for good governance. And it's not even that hard to develop the program (winning is a different thing) because it's been so un-competitive for my entire life.
That sounds good on theory, but I can't point to great examples of it. You might think, for example, that rising crime directed at Asians would prompt such a rethink. Yet it has produced mostly the "Stop Anti-APPI Hate", which reframes things in an ideologically left manner. The only actual conservative shift we are seeing among minorities is among Hispanics, who seem more motivated by cultural than governance issues.
One of the issues here is that there are distinct sets of attitudes toward the questions of crime and policing across race, ethnicity, nationality, and other variables which make it close to impossible to find a policing or crime policy that doesn't become a political football. I saw a study a while back that showed that Hispanics are more comfortable with a higher police presence in their neighborhood than any other group, while major gaps existed between races on the question of what kinds of offenses should be considered a "real" crime that leads to the police being called at all.
Overpolicing to one group is underpolicing to another, a level of crime that is unacceptable to one is considered reasonable to another. When we have a large faction of people saying that mugging is a fact of life and you shouldn't call the police unless you've been physically harmed, there's not going to be a single policy platform that's going to make everyone happy. The fact of urban diversity is going to always make policy on this level a political minefield.
I'm sorry to say it, but I don't see any possibility of running a good governance platform that isn't going to run afoul of the disparate policy expectations of your urban population groups. "Good government" sounds good, but it doesn't mean anything when peoples' definitions of what a "good government" should do are radically different.
You're definitely an expert here, so I will remain less optimistic. My frustration arises primarily from living almost my entire life in Democratic run enclaves and seeing very few competent Republican challengers who can stay on message. Even Republicans who can win in the suburbs often lack the kind of messaging they would need in the cities. Not to mention the fact that Democrats run unchallenged with no concrete plans to do much of anything in terms of quality local governance.
If American Reformer can support the kind of institutions that build up a conservative playbook for the cities, I think there is a huge opportunity ready to go.
And given your expertise Aaron, I do think you are the guy to provide that insight.