Michael Lind Stands Up For The Oppressed
Enlightened Centrism Wins Again
Michael Lind hates the idea of a biological elite. It runs against everything he has fought for. If people believed it, it would justify the rule of Democrats, Woke Capital, and worst of all, Libertarians. It’s a dangerous idea.
It is so dangerous that he will not read a single scientific study on the topic. It is rumored that if you show Michael Lind a scatterplot of national IQ and per capita GDP, his eyes will burst into flames. The occasion is Lind’s hitpiece against Richard Hanania, Steve Sailer, Bo Winegard, and Charles Murray.1
Tyler Cowen wrote of Lind’s compatriot, Patrick Deneen, “I would say that reading and trying to review [his] book most of all raises the question of what a review is for”. This is my view of Lind.
Yet here I am, reviewing his column. Why? Because it shows that the right comprises two completely parallel systems of thinking and action, often reaching similar conclusions in theory, but fundamentally incompatible in practice. At their root, these separate systems aren’t about policy or faction. Someone can end up at any corner of the right with either of these systems. It’s not about populism versus elitism, or Nationalism versus Libertarianism. It is about the driving force behind why you come to your politics.
The Detective
Leave no bullet unbitten, no social desirability uncrossed. That is the credo of the Detective.2
An idea shouldn’t be discarded because it makes some people uncomfortable; if anything, that’s all the more reason to search where something might be hidden. Though they had some choice insults for each other, the interaction between Curtis Yarvin and Richard Hanania is a great demonstration.
Curtis:
If you think about it for five seconds, you will realize that each side in a war is blind to some truth, some vision of the good, seen clearly by its enemies. No one but a few psychopaths would sign up for a war of evil against good. Nothing could ever happen this way. Nothing ever did.
…
Pinker has simply oversampled WEIRDness. Liberalism “simply works” in Iceland. Anything would work in (21st-century) Iceland. Iceland is roughly as hard to govern as Burning Man. It is not only postpolitical—it is post-human. Nietzsche’s Last Man is a natural libertarian and needs no government at all—just condoms, seed oils and weed.
…
The Supreme Court can unleash the power of a movement with the will and force to rule. Civil-rights law, which was written to confirm a uniformly color-blind America, could unleash the power of race communism. No law and no court has a thousandth of the power it would take to put this regime back in the box.
Richard:
The gist of my critique of him is that I think that understanding and changing the world requires one to seriously grapple with policy and social science arguments. I see Yarvin thought as presenting “Revolution!” and “Monarchy!” as his trump cards to deal with every issue from affirmative action to entitlement spending to urban crime, which is fun, while I do boring stuff like think about rational policy responses that I think can work. His idea that only ***revolution*** can ever change anything is simply wrong. Conservatives have won on specific issues when they have prioritized them and devised intelligent strategies.
At the root of the debate is what will work. Not what feels good, not what is ‘just’, not what is in the best interest of your pets. Even when there is a fierce contest of visions, there is no doubt that both Richard and Curtis will fight fair: neither fists, nor women’s tears will be involved.
The Attorney
In the other corner is the Attorney. From this perspective, the core question is “whose interests are being spoken for”. Everything follows.
In Lind’s view, a class of managers is oppressing the multiracial working class. If left alone, the working class would band together and choose Christian Social Democracy. In order to stop them, elites imposed a dual program of neoliberal economics and socially progressive cultural policy – stripping them of the economic power and cultural solidarity necessary to defend their own interests. The solution is populist Representation: someone like Donald Trump, or maybe Michael Lind, has to come along and bring the jobs back, shut down the border, remove the woke HR department, and get the working class on his side.
To understand Lind’s framing, start at the end:
Beyond partisan politics lies civilizational politics. In this century, the ultimate struggle will be between the religious and secular heirs of the Abrahamic tradition of ethical monotheism, on one side, and the believers in eugenics, transhumanism, and other pseudoscientific new faiths, on the other. The former will be disproportionately working-class and possess fewer educational credentials, and the latter will be disproportionately wealthy and powerful and schooled at prestigious universities. In the interwar American South, the greatest opposition to involuntary eugenic sterilization came from evangelical Protestants, and in Nazi Germany, the most potent resistance to National Socialism was mounted by Catholics and Jehovah’s Witnesses, along with social democrats and communists. In the coming battles over eugenics and human dignity, let us hope that the sons and daughters of Father Abraham defeat the heirs of Nietzsche.
Lind lumps all non-Christians together. “eugenics, transhumanism, and other pseudoscientific new faiths” is one hell of an alliance. Envision this: Hanania, Sailer, and Murray fighting side by side with Anthony Fauci, Ibram Kendi, and Joe Biden to oppress the Christian working class.
Well your honor, they aren’t my client.
Smile and Wave
I started with Lind’s conclusion not because it was the weakest part of the essay, but the strongest. It gets to the core concern that resonates with people. It gets to the spiritual and political nature of the Attorney’s fight. After all, that’s what motivates the fighter. Lind openly admits this.
Here’s a saying among lawyers: “If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts; if you have the law on your side, pound the law; if you have neither the facts nor the law, pound the table.” Leftist journalists have a secret: it’s even better if you just point and wave. Take a factual claim, make fun of it without making a counterclaim, then walk away. It’s been a lynchpin of leftist reporting on race and sex for decades.
Lind is happy to use these tactics for the right cause. He brands his enemies “Eugenicons” and opens the piece with some good ol’ guilt by association with names including Francis Galton, Mary Harriman, and “some on the left in the 19th and early 20th centuries [who] believed in blending eugenics with socialism or progressivism”. Sailer’s review3 is excellent in rebutting these point and wave attacks one by one.
It only goes down from there. Lind combines his fear tactics with a complete and total disregard for the facts:
And here is Hanania, again under his own name, as recently as July 5, 2023, writing on Substack: “Even in a world without any social advantages based on class background, you would expect rich kids to be overrepresented at Harvard and [the University of North Carolina], because qualities like intelligence and conscientiousness are highly heritable.” For the startling proposition that “conscientiousness” is “highly heritable,” Hanania cites another hereditarian, Gregory Clark, an economist who argues that the Industrial Revolution launched in Britain because the higher fertility of the British ruling class spread their genes throughout the whole population, rendering the British biologically preadapted to industrialism and capitalism, unlike other nations. One wonders if even more potent proto-industrial genes explain why Germans, Americans, Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese have long since left the British behind when it comes to industry, commerce, and technology.
There are so many things wrong with this paragraph that I imagined it to be either satire, or written by ChatGPT. That Lind finds the heritability of conscientiousness, one of the most replicated results in psychology, “startling” speaks to a total ignorance of the field.
And so on, and so forth.
Moreover, the evidence for IQ being a major factor in converging East Asian development is so abundant that it is a consensus amongst economists, including even those on the left.
From Garett Jones’ Hive Mind:
But Hanushek and Kimko did more than just find out that test scores are better predictors of national prosperity than years of education. They also found out that higher test scores have a much stronger relationship with national economic performance than with individual economic performance. Looking at how individual student test scores predicted those students’ wages later in life, they found that individuals with higher test scores earned only slightly more than average within a given country, but nations with higher average test scores grew exceptionally fast. Here again is the paradox of IQ: standardized test scores—whether we call them IQ tests or math tests or something else—predict big national differences but only modest individual differences.
I strongly recommend reading the whole thing, as Garett explores in much greater detail the myriad ways economists came to the same conclusions.
After that paragraph, I surprisingly find myself defending Lind.
Eugenicons abuse statistics in much the same way that the “antiracist” left does. For instance, consider the standard progressive claim that white Americans as a group own vastly more wealth than black Americans. But when you control for class, it turns out that working-class whites aren’t that much wealthier than working-class blacks.
This paragraph is the subject of many dunks, including Steve Sailer’s, but in my view it’s far less wrong than the previous one. Let’s dig into the report Lind cites, because by itself, it’s not quite as bad as you think.
What this means is that the overall racial wealth disparity is being driven almost entirely by the disparity between the wealthiest 10 percent of white people and the wealthiest 10 percent of black people.
…
what would happen to mean black wealth if the bottom 90 percent of black families were given the exact same per-household wealth as the bottom 90 percent of white families?
The answer is that mean black wealth would rise from $140,000 to $311,100. The overall racial wealth gap would thus decline from $760,600 to $589,500, a fall of 22.5 percent. This means that even after you have completely closed the racial wealth gap between the bottom 90 percent of each race, 77.5 percent of the overall racial wealth gap still remains, which is to say that the disparity between the top deciles in each race drives over three-fourths of the racial wealth gap.
The original report correctly argues that interracial wealth gaps are intra-elite driven. This is because wealth in general is intra-elite driven, but not a completely absurd point. It isn’t as bad as some critics portrayed. But at the end of the day, given the relative disparities in outliers driven by the distribution of the bell curve, this report is a data point against Lind’s thesis.
“Fuck Libertarians”
By now you know the leftist drill. Take some quotes out of context, point and wave, then pin the tail on the victim. The victim is typically Nationalism or Populism, often unfairly. Here’s the plot twist: Lind himself is a Nationalist and a Populist. So he has a different target in mind.
Lo and behold, the story of Richard Hanania, Steve Sailer, Bo Winegard, and Charles Murray is that Libertarianism is evil.
Nevermind that of the four, only Richard Hanania would call himself a Libertarian, while Sailer and Winegard are definitely closer on policy to Michael Lind than the Cato Institute.
The overlap between libertarianism and eugenic conservatism can be considerable. In public, libertarians usually defend their anti-statist creed in terms of individual rights or Benthamite utilitarianism, arguing that a minimal state would produce the greatest good for the greatest number. Yet eugenic conservatism and libertarianism have often complemented each other. For libertarians at a loss to explain why wealth and power are concentrated in market societies, eugenicons have an answer: Rich people and rich families are genetically superior. And for eugenicons in search of a political program short of radical “ethnostate” proposals, libertarianism provides a second-best solution. The danger that resources will be redistributed from the productive, eugenic rich to the parasitic, dysgenic masses can be minimized by shrinking the state and lowering taxation. So can transferring functions from the government, where numbers count, to the market, dominated by a small number of wealthy capitalists defined as “the cognitive elite.” When Hanania, outed as “Richard Hoste,” declared that he had seen the light and abandoned eugenic racism and classism for “classical liberalism,” that is, libertarianism, this was just flipping the same coin over to the other face.
Here he is in even more detail:
The policy prescriptions:
-Taxing the eugenic elite hurts both them and the dysgenic majority, by redistributing resources that the creative rich can put to best use for the long-term benefit of the benighted majority.
-Antipoverty policy, beyond establishing a floor of basic income for the poor, a proposal of Milton Friedman and Charles Murray, is doomed to fail, because poverty has a genetic basis.
-Public policy should encourage the limitation of the numbers of the genetically unfit, by voluntary or involuntary contraception, abortion, and euthanasia.
-Immigration by inferior races and intermarriage between members of superior and inferior races should be discouraged to prevent the reduction of the genetic fitness of superior races.
-One-person, one-vote democracy is dangerous and intolerable, because the genetically inferior majority might vote to tax and redistribute the income and wealth of the genetically superior minority.
This is such an absurd failure of the ideological turing test that I doubt you could find even a single person on twitter who supports such an agenda. The first one comes from his caricature of Libertarianism, the second comes from Murray, the third and fifth are from posts that Hanania now rejects, and the fourth is a caricature of Sailer. The purpose of this rhetoric trick is to pretend that Richard’s old beliefs, from when he hated Libertarians, combined with the belief of other people who are explicitly not Libertarians, is representative of Libertarianism? Am I getting that right?
But keep reading the next paragraph and the conspiracy-addled logic slowly unfurls.
From all of this it follows that the Democratic left’s nightmare vision of rural states filled with inbred, knuckle-dragging, white-nationalist Neanderthals plotting to overthrow democracy is ludicrously wrong. The eugenicons are no friends of workers.
Why does the Democratic left fear “inbred, knuckle-dragging, white-nationalist Neanderthals”? Are they also eugenicists now? Is there a living Democrat who would sign on to such a critique? Three paragraphs later, he says:
It isn’t hard to imagine neoliberal centrists in the years ahead being attracted to some hereditarian themes, scrubbed of unsavory white-supremacist associations. Indeed, there might be an alliance on antipoverty policy between eugenicon supporters of a universal basic income as a stipend for the dysgenic poor, like Charles Murray, and many left-liberals who favor targeted redistribution over class-based empowerment of the kind championed by the old left. Race-realist proposals for eugenic abortion and euthanasia are also more likely to find a receptive audience on the neoliberal left than on the still-forceful Christian right.
It’s strange that the range of “eugenic” policies have shrunk to basic income, abortion, and euthanasia. It’s funny, because a few paragraphs ago, he listed the following as key “social darwinist” policies:
-Immigration by inferior races and intermarriage between members of superior and inferior races should be discouraged to prevent the reduction of the genetic fitness of superior races.
-One-person, one-vote democracy is dangerous and intolerable, because the genetically inferior majority might vote to tax and redistribute the income and wealth of the genetically superior minority.
Since we’re playing this game, who do you think would be more likely to support these two? How about you specifically, Michael Lind? You seem to be on the side of immigration restriction, Are you a eugenicist? Similarly, who is called ‘a threat to democracy’? Is it Libertarians, or is it anyone who wants to do something with the government?
I wouldn’t suggest anyone use this tactic for anything other than to show a contradiction. I wouldn’t call populists, restrictionists, or post-liberals “racist” or “eugenicist”. Even if you are in total agreement with Michael Lind’s policies, don’t you think that opening yourself up to such a smear is a complete self-own?
And unlike me, some people are happy to pull the trigger:
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1690046237855072256?s=20
Class War is Thinking In Reverse
There is a method to this madness, though it is completely indiscernible to many Detectives. There’s a reason why Michael Lind is afraid of a coming Libertarian-Nietzschian-Neoliberal-Democrat alliance.
I told you upfront that to understand the article, you needed to start with the conclusion. You need to understand what Michael Lind’s moral framing is in order for his arguments to begin to make sense. This is the core divide in the right today.
One way is to start at the beginning and see where the evidence takes you. Try to establish truth, regardless of its moral outlook. Maybe even let the truth change your mind about what is right.
The other is to start at the end. Start with who you want to fight for. And make the box fit.
One of the most stunning things about this hitpiece is that by the time you get to the end, Michael Lind admits that is exactly what he is trying to accomplish.
One needn’t be a genetically superior genius descended from generations of aristocrats to understand that “race realism,” and the libertarianism that is frequently its natural political expression, are utterly incompatible with broadening the appeal of the Republican Party to working-class Americans of all races. From the standpoint of the eugenicons, “the multiracial working class” is doubly damned—it is working class and multiracial: two forms of dysgenic inferiority rolled into one.
The question is, does Lind really think the game of Attorneys will end with something other than the current regime? Once this way of thinking is activated, what stops a voter from choosing race or sex instead of class? Another word for Representational politics is equity, after all. If I were to starman this case, it would be that outside economic and geopolitical factors, namely Chinese trade wars and Mexican illegal immigration, will make voters more likely to identify with their class than with their current identities and political allegiances. How much evidence does he have for that causal claim?
When you are consumed by the fervor of tribal politics, you don’t stop to think who tribal politics benefits and why. Lomez puts it in a less generous, but probably more correct way:
Putting aside that this is another lame smear that (willfully?) mischaracterizes the actual claims of its targets, it's funny that the people branding themselves as "post-liberal" most adamantly insist that we abide by all of the old liberal pieties
The Attorney Begets Conspiracy Thinking
The underlying fear of a cross-elite coalition is one that Zaid Jilani articulated in a clearer form.
I think a lot of people missed what was going on with Hanania’s appeal because of the fixation on race so many pundits have. White supremacy ain’t that appealing in modern America but elitism sure is. Hanania’s philosophy is anti-populism.
Show me the elitist coalition.
Zaid and Michael think elitism is on the rise in America. Supposedly, these ideas are all gathering momentum. It might just be Richard Hanania today, but soon enough it might be our whole elite. Perhaps they will all emerge from Galt’s Gulch one day, hand in hand.
Or perhaps Lind is wrong, and no such elitist coalition exists. We are at the edge of a rematch between two octagenarians. A sitting senator is senile. This is the worst day for cognitive elitism in American history.
To Michael Lind, it is a shock that Richard Hanania, Matt Yglesias, Nate Silver, Robin Hanson, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Marc Andreessen, Steve Sailer, Ezra Klein, and Steven Pinker can put aside their differences and agree that biology and economics are real. They cannot comprehend such a thing happening, and must resort to unified elitist ideology or something more conspiratorial to explain it.
The Attorney is perpetually motivated by a zero-sum objective in which he is trying to justify his position by increasing the share of mindspace his ‘client’ occupies. When others all adopt an inconvenient fact, his only explanation is that they are teaming up on him. They see him as a threat. They see his client as the threat. And if that’s the case, what’s to stop them from ganging up in adopting more inconvenient threats until Michael’s client is in the slammer?
Once you understand this zero-sum metaphysics, you start to see it everywhere. Work back from the conclusion. The primary object is not the fact, but who supports the fact. Who likes to hear it? What is the instinctive reaction people have to it? It’s a metaphysics most flagrantly demonstrated by woke progressivism or Lysenkoist communism, but reaches far beyond. An Attorney might read this sentence and say “no fair, stop comparing me to woke progressives or communists”, completely proving the point.
The Attorneys are the majority of Democrats and Republicans. They are almost the entire professional managerial class. They are precisely the cause of the problems Lind decries. Yet he cannot draw the line there. He must draw the line anywhere else. It must be Christian versus Nietzschians or Nationalists versus the Libertarian-Nietzschian-Neoliberal-Democrat alliance.
Let’s reread the carefully crafted prose of Lind’s second to last paragraph.
One needn’t be a genetically superior genius descended from generations of aristocrats to understand that “race realism,” and the libertarianism that is frequently its natural political expression, are utterly incompatible with broadening the appeal of the Republican Party to working-class Americans of all races.
Here we can notice a very important omission. What is race realism and libertarianism incompatible with, according to Lind. He doesn’t say it’s incompatible with the interests of working-class Americans. Lind wouldn’t be able to explain Steve Sailer and Bo Winegard, who have extremely similar policy views, if he said that. He also doesn’t say it’s broadening the appeal of the Republican party in general. Creating a Libertarian-Nietzschian-Neoliberal-Democrat alliance, as improbable as that is, would do precisely the opposite.
Instead, it’s incompatible with “broadening the appeal of the Republican Party to working-class Americans of all races”. It’s incompatible with Lind’s job, as an Attorney. Lind is nothing more than a good little manager, acting in his own class interest.
Being reality-focused is a necessary precondition for post-liberalism. In a world where feelings matter more than facts, liberalism is just closer to human nature.
Two guests of the From the New World Podcast and two people I’d be happy to invite.
A reviewer asked if I knew about Julia Galef’s book, The Scout Mindset, which uses a similar comparison (Scout/Soldier instead of Detective/Attorney). I have read it, but I deliberately avoided using her terms since I think there are differences between what we’re talking about.
I swear there was no coordination between Steve Sailer and I, but there is conveniently very little overlap between our reviews.
Nice comparison and contrast Brian. I'm m still pondering your critique.
Thanks. Good points.
But you seem to attribute this policy proposal to me:
"Immigration by inferior races and intermarriage between members of superior and inferior races should be discouraged to prevent the reduction of the genetic fitness of superior races."
That doesn't much sound like me.