Nobody knows the trouble they’ve seen

I attended two schools with conservative departments and could easily list a half-dozen well-qualified conservative Phd’s who didn’t get jobs, so the idea that conservatives never bother to get to the Phd stage is wrong. In my department, females outnumbered males in securing tenure track jobs, even though they were a fraction of the department. So there’s one conservative faction doing very well, female conservatives. But I don’t think it’s discrimination against conservatives per se. If an economics department never hires historians and the history department doesn’t study financial or economic history outside of labor unions, then it’s not a matter of excluding conservatives but of defining a certain kind of history out of the curriculum.

It is equally maddening that conservatives understand this about potential conservative graduate students, but not about potential black CEOs—and yes, I think this remains a problem today. I’m not sure that affirmative action is the answer, but that’s a different post.

Ach! Just when McArdle might draw the conclusion that structural discrimination exists and that it might warrant some kind of intervention, she stops short. Why? Because it sounds like ‘affirmative action’ is required, and though the cause is just, the term is not. Fortunately, McArdle will transcend this contradiction in a different post. A different post which isn’t written yet, but surely it will appear soon!

I was tempted to say “Nicely done!” but that’s when the depression set in that you even had to write this post.

I’m not sure why Holbo thinks he should have all the fun when it comes to libertarians and history.

Et tu, Bérubé?

novakant and I have both independently declared an admittedly-hopeless goal of introducing more fine-grained distinctions into the blanket term “libertarianism.” And then you decide to join the libertarian-slapping hootenanny by focusing on … Megan McArdle? The poster child for what many distinguished analysts of the Left refer to as “schmibertarianism”? It’s already been bad enough dealing with repeated rounds of casuistry from Sebastian, as he manages to serially deny the relevance to right-libertarianism of virtually any publicly-known right-libertarian scholar one cares to name. Thanks for allowing him the chance to follow your lead in discharging a firearm into a drum full of fish.

And what about poor Professor Brighouse’s post seeking help on improvements to teaching methods? Sure, with enough three-digit comment threads, the propertarian menace is bound to be defeated. But will no one think of the children? At least the ones at UW-Madison?

At what point do conservatives bemoaning the lack of conservatives in academe notice that academics in the liberal arts do not make much money?* Or that people in Hollywood, especially the “talent” and the “creatives”, don’t make much money on average, either? And that writers, painters, musicians, and other “cultural elites” spend a lot of time living in garrets or their cars, depending on the century?

Maybe conservative students like jobs that make money.

*The exception being economists, who are (a) quite likely to be conservatives, (b) quite likely to be well-paid as consultants, Cato Institute Adjuncts, etc., and (c) quite likely to be peddlers of not just nonsense, but *pernicious* nonsense.

Thanks for this well-argued post.

It’s worth noting that when McArdle tries to explain why conservative discourse is so stilted, and so controlled by absurd shibboleths… she says that it’s because they are oppressed, rather like blacks in the 1950s were.

The cult of conservative victimhood runs deep. Even when one of them tries to engage with reality, it turns out that the root cause is those mean ol’ liberals in the classics department and at CBS.

In reality, though, conservatives don’t face oppression. They don’t need to create their own alternative reality– it’s not like selling the Iraq invasion, or tax cuts that we couldn’t afford, or welfare reform, or whatever, couldn’t get a fair hearing in the MSM.

“Because back in the day, black people took stock of social networks, subtle bias, and tacit norms, and decided (being rational beings and all, trying to maximize their happiness) that they were better off starting their own businesses than trying to become bank managers, where they would be socially isolated. ”

This is painfully funny, not just mordantly funny. I would ask why you all continue to discuss this woman’s ridiculous arguments but I can see how irresistible they must be.

We have witnessed The Birth of a New Internet Tradition : “as I wrote years ago, somewhere” will soon join “central to my point.”

People didn’t try because they sensed that it would be both socially isolating, and professionally dangerous, to be a conservative in institutions as overwhelmingly liberal as academia and media.

Just the other day, I passed a homeless guy begging for spare change, because his op-eds supporting the Iraq War had proved utterly mistaken, and he was fired from his media job and unable to work in TV, print, or internet media, so stigmatized was he by his utter lack of judgment. I gave him a quarter.

Nobody knows the trouble they’ve seen

Sometimes I feel like a tenureless child.

She always has “a friend in the business,”

Any argument premised upon McArdle’s having any sort of friend whatsoever is immediately suspect.

If McArdle’s thesis is correct, you should see lots of academic conservatives in math & science departments, where there is a pretty broad consensus on what constitutes excellence, and one’s politics are completely irrelevant to one’s teaching or research.

You don’t. Indeed, natural science has probably drifted leftward with time. The modern conservative movement has a tenuous relationship to reality and logic. That doesn’t play well in the natural sciences. Or, for that matter, in any field of academic inquiry that does not receive Big Funding from Big Business.

But then there’s no way to salvage that analogy

I read this as “no way to savage that analogy” and I thought, yes there is, and I think I’m reading it.

Jonny:
In my field, (I.R. and U.S. Politics, but taught in the UK) it doesn’t feel like conservatives are in the minority. But, at the same time, how does one qualify as conservative or liberal? Is it as box we are supposed to tick on our job applications? Maybe I missed that bit of the equal opportunities monitoring form!

Conservatives are the ones who show up at the job interview wearing their Sarah Pallin button and demanding to see the dean’s birth certificate.

Thanks for the read, Professa Danga, but now we’re in for a lengthy and insufferable series of posts from Ms. McArdle in which she attempts to clarify her position and/or tries to walk it back and/or contradicts herself several times during the meandering course of exceedingly verbose posts and/or claims she was misunderstood and/or claims victimhood and/or compares Teh Blacks to Himalayan salt. Brace yourself. Or ignore her.

Of course Megan in her search for a home in DC will suffer from conservative redlining as well. All those conservatives have the hardest time getting their hands on the most important source of power: capital.

Also, why are people who think that basketball is a useless waste of time and the downfall of American society so underrepresented on basketball teams?

We’re talking about a group that is practically defined by its anti-intellectualism and McArdle is publicly wondering why it contains few intellectuals?

(There’s a joke here about members of oppressed groups aspiring to lead their oppressors, but I’m not going to dignify the oppressed-conservative narrative by making it.)

To say nothing of the role of educational policy as it interacts with self-interest — academics voting for/publicly supporting conservatives are essentially asking for the elimination of their own jobs, which is a position not likely to receive much support even if it might be merited in some abstract sense.

And how did they get into those jobs in the first place if they agreed with conservative doctrine on the subject? Does anyone actually *aspire* to the status of useless excrescence on the body politic?

Furthermore, some conservative articles of faith *specifically* interfere with particular academic disciplines, e.g. creationism.

Heritage Foundation, AEI, et. al. are the Pullman porters of academic liberal fascism- at least you have a realistic shot at making a decent income.

I wonder if McGargle would be willing to make the same case if the more obvious substitution for “conservative” was not “black,” but, rather, “self-entitled asshole.”

“What now, liberals?”

We point out that there are, in fact, no such screening procedures aimed at conservatives? Huh, that was easy.

I’ve heard this plaint many times that “conservative ideas” and “conservative theories” are dismissed out of hand. But when I ask specifically, what ideas or theories were dismissed by academics because they were conservative, I never seem to get much of a reply. Apparently there’s some quota system that I was previously unaware of where, no matter how ill-defined or poorly supported, some conservative ideas must be taken seriously just because they are conservative. For balance, you know.

Funny how there were no conservatives (as far as I could tell) in the climatology or ecology depts. at my school. I wonder why that was. Must be conservative bias.

And, John Yoo.

Obviously there’s been an enormous amount of ink shed about why this is, but my experience of talking to people who might have liked to…work in Hollywood, but went and did something else instead, is that it is simply hogwash when liberals earnestly assure me that the disparity exists mostly because conservatives are different, and maybe dumber.

1. This sentence was obviously constructed with cheap non-union labor.

2. My experience is that the class of “people who might have liked to work in Hollywood” is very large indeed. But that in itself is not a sufficient qualification. Come watch auditions some time and see for yourself. And in any case,

3. Hollywood isn’t for quitters.

Thanks for the read, Professa Danga, but now we’re in for a lengthy and insufferable series of posts from Ms. McArdle

It has begun.

To unravel the perplexity of Libertardianism, I consider these recent social research results to be highly illuminating:

A recent study reveals that the perception of a relative wealth advantage over one’s neighbors is more strongly correlated to self-reported happiness than absolute wealth.

This might help reveal, for example, why the lower middle class glibtards’ SHOUTY OUTRAGE at the thought that somewhere, some poor kid might be receiving a free school lunch seems to completely dominate any concerns about the possible unfairness of corrupt corporate executives’ bonuses or inheritance tax giveaways to the megawealthy trust fund babies.

I think it’s hard for conservative tribalists, always obsessing over what it means to be “conservative”, to realize they are “conservative” (more “authoritarian-friendly” than actually conservative in any non-ideological sense) because they are stupid. They are not stupid becase they are right-wing. That gets the causality backwards, which makes it seem like it’s some bias. If seen in the proper chain of causes, it’s a simpler, better explanation of why there are fewer of them in academia.
They aren’t content with dominating the economy and politics; they demand that their very special brand of stupid be given the deference due academic disciplines of far greater rigor than their miserable “philosophy”, “economics” and “””””wisdom””””” (extra scare quotes for extra stoopid) warrants. When analyzed objectively, their intellectual houses of cards collapse rather easily.

Apparently there’s some quota system that I was previously unaware of where, no matter how ill-defined or poorly supported, some conservative ideas must be taken seriously just because they are conservative. For balance, you know.

This “balance” quota system is the diametric opposite of “bias” and, as such, is the only priority for accurate news coverage. For examples, see every political story in every issue of every US newspaper over the past forty years.

The entire legal apparatus of segregation and Jim Crow!

And, of course, the extra-legal apparatus of intimidation and destruction and duress and murder by lynching.

As I wrote years ago, somewhere, I doubt many bank hiring committees in the fifties got together and voted not to hire any negro bank managers. Yet, somehow, they didn’t hire any negro bank managers.

That’s probably true! Instead the half of ’em that lived in the southern part of town donned white pointy sheet hats on the weekend and planted a cross on the black guy’s lawn and poured oil on it and lit it on fire! (The other half were busy working on their tennis game.)

I posted this at http://www.balloon-juice.com/2010/04/13/weird-comparison-of-the-day/ earlier and then he added it to the main post.

I think the identities of black and gay are a lot more mutable than you think. A lot of the discrimination that blacks now face is against choosing to be black identified—to name their children identifiably black names, and so forth. A black man who strips away all of the cultural identifiers of blackness is going to face substantially fewer barriers to advancement than a black man who chooses to maintain black speech patterns and so forth. The point is, he shouldn’t have to.

Likewise, a gay man who stays in the closet is, at this point, not a victim of discrimination . . . but we don’t think they should have to choose to remain in the closet.

So saying, “Well, conservatives could choose to be liberals” strikes me as not very interesting. Having to stop believing what you believe in order to get a job is not something that we think should happen—particularly not in a milieu which purports to be committed to open inquiry. Nor is it really reasonable to ask everyone in Alabama to turn themselves into Manhattan.

I’ve wondered why, if conservatives want more ideological quotas, they aren’t campaigning for more liberals in the oil business. As far as I can tell, petro pretty much supports ninety percent of rightwing think tanks, and has financed the conservative movement since WWII in America – pretty convincingly, they are conservative! So shouldn’t we have more Al Gore types on the boards of Exxon and Shell and Chevron, etc.? What dyou say? left to right trade – the right gets an T.S. Eliot scholar and a festshrift honoring Harvey Mansfield, the left gets a CEO of Exxon. .

The entire idea of conservatives as an ethnic group, particularly the blue state rich kid variety represented by McArdle, is incredibly dodgy. It’s one thing to recognize that socialization plays a role in ideology, but it’s quite another to assert that people holding a particular set of ideas are a discriminated class.

McArdle went to the same high school as Matt Yglesias. If she ended up with logorrhea, dodgy analytic skills, and massive sense of entitlement, it’s hardly Society’s concern that she gets called on it.

Segregation wasn’t just legalized discrimination. It wasn’t just black people being refused nice jobs in the nice part of town.

It was also black people locked out of opportunity in the white world saying, “fine, I’m gonna make a nice place for myself here.” And succeeding beautifully in making a nice place for themselves somewhere. And then a mob of white people showing up and burning it all down!

Has she never heard of Rosewood, Florida? Has she heard of the “Black Wall Street” in Oklahoma? WTF did she think the Klan did?

This era wasn’t just discrimination, it wasn’t just giving them less than what whites were given. There was widespread, institutionalized terrorism against black people, to take away what they had if, in spite of all the forces arrayed against them, they managed to become successful.

It’s beyond offensive to suggest a lack of conservative professors in women’s lit compares to the crimes committed against African Americans in this era.

Jonah comments on the MMcA post

I am underwhelmed by the chorus of complaints about the lack of conservative ideas. It’s not that there isn’t some merit to the concern. My National Review colleague, Ramesh Ponnuru, has been ringing this bell for quite some time and, in the process, he has offered quite a few new ideas in precisely one of the magazines McArdle is presumably criticizing. Yuval Levin has been doing similar work in NR but also in his new magazine for new ideas, National Affairs. AEI has offered lots of ideas, on everything from health care to carbon taxes.

Also, just to throw it out there: As a libertarian, McArdle should know that when it comes to economics, libertarianism is largely the default philosophy of mainstream conservatism. The Republican Party may be a poor champion of free market economics, but since she is addressing herself to conservative intellectuals, she might as well be addressing her criticisms to libertarian intellectuals as well.

Which I think means that he thinks libertarian economics has no new ideas. Beyond returning to 1880.

O, the McStupid! As with most of her incoherent dissembling, McMegan’s latest is so wrong on so many levels that it transcends being right and goes all the way back to completely wrong. Black bank managers in the 1950s? I used to work in a large commercial bank. There was exactly one African-American executive. He was the diversity/community relations shill. Conservatives in academia? Which academia are we talking about here? True, you don’t see too many conservatives in the humanities, and only a few more in social sciences, but there are scads of conservatives in the med schools, law schools, and the engineering, bio-medical, business, and even music faculties. In fact, we could easily argue that the humanities constitute a last bastion of liberal thinking in academia, with as much or more evidence than McMegan deploys (and we have done this of course.)
Not enough conservatives in Hollywood? That’s a larf. Who greenlights all those racist Disney movies? Where do all the Magical Black Person films come from? Hollywood and Mad Ave are businesses. They’re about buying cheap and selling dear. Where’s the liberalism in that?
So absurd.

I’ve wondered why, if conservatives want more ideological quotas, they aren’t campaigning for more liberals in the oil business.

Don’t kid yourself – those oil guys are a bunch of leftists, too. After all, how many of them are willing to employ creationist geologists?

Thank’s for giving me a name for the Salem hypothesis. I’ve noticed the same thing informally. I always thought it was because engineers spend lots of time looking at complicated things that actually were designed by someone.

I’ve also knew a very smart creationist guy back in college who was pursuing an advanced degree in biology specifically to acquire credentials with which to argue-from-authority at some “institute”.

I wouldn’t be able to go very far in the field simply due to a prevailing culture of post-modernist liberalism that tends to dominate.

In history I can maybe buy this, for a sufficiently expansive definition of “post-modernist.” But the idea that political science is dominated by post-modernist liberalism suggests, well, a lack of acquaintance with the field.

What’s missing is that one’s ideology IS A CHOICE (as conservatives so like to scream about on another issue as a basis for denying civil rights to certain Americans…), while one’s race/skin color is an innate, immutable characteristic.

What on earth are you on about, Jeremey? To name one famous example, Barack Obama could have made himself white just by checking the appropriate box on his census form. Just ask Professor Althouse.

Can we separate the taking seriously from the identity, MSG?

It’s the one that says Shakespeare is really great. Never hear that.

“You could, if it hadn’t already been proven that the white man is the Jew of liberal fascism.”

Well Michael, it hasn’t been “proven,” but it is a very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care.

Rich, that may be true and prudent in the private sphere but if, say, someone was a member of Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and they were to be considered for a new hire in my department, I certainly wouldn’t hold it against them. That’s nothing to do with the law, btw, I just fail to see what that has to do with mathematics. Otoh, if he told the review committee that he thought pi was exactly three because that’s what is in his inerrant religious text, then yeah, he probably wouldn’t make the cut.

“I would say that political science and history are my intellectual passions, but as much as I would have loved to have been able to pursue a PhD in either field, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to go very far in the field simply due to a prevailing culture of post-modernist liberalism that tends to dominate.”

Setting aside the obvious absurdity of “post-modernist liberalism,” for a moment, surely the field of Political Science, which is dominated by quantitative analysis, has a home for someone who rejects post-modernism.

> Salem hypothesis

Ah, you are *that* Doctor Science.

Good to see another of the Howler Monkeys still posting in this brave new bloggy world.

Not to criticize a well-deserved piling on Megan, but I do have to take issue with those who seem to argue it would be legitimate to discriminate against conservatives because conservatism, unlike race, is chosen. People should be able to choose their political affiliations without fear of employer or potential employer retribution.

There’s currently some evidence of a trend of conservative employers firing Obama supporters. At least, we’re seeing chatter about this on the net. They’re bragging about it on the Internet. In most states, there seems to be no legal redress. Personally, I think this is likely to backfire. If they just shut up and did it, it wouldn’t. The biases of liberals are such that Obama supporters claiming to have been selectively banned would be ridiculed as “paranoid”. But they can’t help bragging about it and rubbing the fired employee’s noses into it. Every fired employee has family and friends, not necessarily liberal, who are going to react to this, and, if it becomes widespread, every conservative firing of an Obama supporter will become suspect.

Just out of curiosity: how many of you are aware that the man scheduled to become president of the MLA just ahead of monsieur Bérubé, Russell Berman, is an actual conservative (in a literature department)? Anyone?

Now back on topic…

“Honest question (I’ve been having a little trouble finding the answer): is there a great deal of ideological/political diversity among military officers?”

I don’t have any statistics, but in my work a deal with a substantial number of military officers. In my experience they tend be fairly conservative but try to present themselves as apolitical, which, while kind of ridiculous, is in the end probably better than an assertive right-wing officer corps.

Paul J Reber @ 52: Why put yourself through 4-10 years of penury as a grad student and post-doc for a decent but decidedly mediocre professorial salary when the reward of that kind of time in investment banking or consulting is so much bigger?

Yep, that’s basically my argument in What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts — namely, that liberals outnumber conservatives in academe because conservatives are so much smarter than we are about how the world actually, you know, works. Why some conservatives have read this as “Bérubé denies that academe is largely liberal” is beyond me.

Colin Danby @ 66: Didn’t we establish the other month that it was academia’s concealed-carry rules that were screening out conservatives?

Yes. But after rereading Myles SG @ 31, I have decided to ban all commenters with Jewish-sounding names, beginning with you, Martin Bento, kth, and Substance McGravitas.

“What is this “conservative thought” that people sneer at in academia because it is conservative? Be specific.”

Goldwaterism, Catholic conservatism, Hayekian conservatism (yeah I know the semantic controversies, but let’s just hang on in there), Straussian conservatism, and of course, Buckley wrote God and Men at Yale.

This is neither specific, nor does it indicate any ideas that were rejected by “liberal” academia because they were conservative. If by any chance you think your laundry list of vague -isms fulfills either of those two criteria, then I’d suggest this is yet another reason why you don’t see too many “conservatives” in academia.

But this reminds me – I’ve actually had people who tell me that “black culture is responsible for blacks being not being successful” is an example of serious conservative thought that is given short shrift because it is a conservative idea. Telling them multiple times that this is poorly articulated, vague, and virtually untestable didn’t seem to dissuade them in the slightest. This is not unlike the time I – a currently nonpracticing heterosexual – was propositioned by a gay man at an after-hours party, only to be indignantly informed that the only reason I wouldn’t sleep with him was because I was prejudiced against black people

gah! Democrats actually pledge money towards academia, so academics vote Democrat and identify as such in a binary choice. Is that so hard?

If we look at it by issue rather than by party, social-conservative causes are inherently in conflict with intellectualism: abortion, gay rights, intelligent design, even immigration policy are issues that are quite clearly more in line with culture/religion than with critical thought or empiricism. If you actually looked at the economic sentiment in academia, I’m sure the right/left divide would not be nearly as wide as party affiliation … the preponderance of academic blogs on economy without clear leanings is at least anecdotal evidence.

“pv, I’ve met a few US marines in Japan and they always seem to be largely left wing-ish, with conservative views about war and duty. They don’t seem to come from very wealthy backgrounds. Maybe they’re not officers.”

Enlisted men are generally thought to be more left than the officers, so the disctinction matter. But I did meet a Marine officer, once, who meets your description, so who knows.

” is there a great deal of ideological/political diversity among military officers?”

When I was in, 1970s-1990s, it was solidly conservative. Since 2001, a lot more have turned to the left.

Steve

”’is there a great deal of ideological/political diversity among military officers?’

When I was in, 1970s-1990s, it was solidly conservative. Since 2001, a lot more have turned to the left.”

Why? Did something happen?

As many people of pointed out, one of the real difficulties in Megan’s post–other than the fatuous whitewashing of Jim Crow laws, etc.–is that she provides no determinate content for what counts as “conservative.” Given that post-Reagan “conservatism” in the United States is driven by an extremely destabilizing neoliberal economic agenda, combined with a nearly fascistic support of military “strength” and a faux populism directed against the educated “elites,” it is questionable whether the term refers to anything that is *actually* conservative at all.

Rather, what seems to have happened is that, within the broad tent of, say, post-enlightenment liberalism, “right” liberals have in recent decades come to dominate positions of business, policy, and power while “left” liberals have come to occupy positions in higher education. But this is a curious dynamic internal to liberalism itself, and can be rendered intelligible by appeal to all sorts of considerations (many of which have been covered above).

A *real* conservative in academia is actually as rare as a *real* radical. Myself being partial to Augustine and Marx, I think we could use a bit more of both.

You write wonderfully and wittily.
Why bother with MMcM?

Jorge Chaim explained part of the problem.

Ugh. How many of these articles do we have to read before we admit that it really is because conservatives actually are dumber?

Obviously not every conservative is dumb, nor every dumb person conservative, but if you lined up the entire population of the country according to intelligence, the smarter half would be more liberal than the dumber half, and if you lined them up according to politics, the liberal half would be smarter than the conservative half.

The institutional conservative political party explicitly believes in creationism and disbelieves in global warming; you don’t get to do that and have your complaints taken seriously when you whine that science Ph.D.’s are all on the other side.

This isn’t particularly isolated to scientific concerns, but instead reflects a condescension for higher education that pervades the political right. The last three Democratic presidents have been an editor-in-chief of the Harvard Law Review, a Rhodes Scholar, and a nuclear engineer. The last three political icons of the conservative movement were Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Sarah Palin—successful politicians and dim bulbs all. How can anyone look at the condescension towards Al Gore’s intellect in the 2000 election, or watch Sarah Palin’s derision of Barack Obama’s now, and still pretend to be surprised that conservatism is still the stupid party? They’re celebrating being the stupid party. Can we not at long last admit that?

Renato illustrates the game-theoretical aspect of the problem beautifully. Liberals by definition are tolerant; conservatives, in their present-day American aspect, are not.

I think this illustrates a different aspect of game theory. Renato’s conservatives are simply people like him. They don’t want to support people with ideological stances they despise, and they don’t trust their ideological opponents to treat them fairly. And, in Renato’s telling, both Renato and his opponents are correct to feel this way.

“I knew that I wouldn’t be able to go very far in the field simply due to a prevailing culture of post-modernist liberalism that tends to dominate. ”

I would also suggest that maybe your conversative outlook let you define things you don’t like as “post-modernist liberalism”. I say this because your impression of political science and history departments is laughable. Could you be more specific?

I think this illustrates a different aspect of game theory. Renato’s conservatives are simply people like him. They don’t want to support people with ideological stances they despise, and they don’t trust their ideological opponents to treat them fairly. And, in Renato’s telling, both Renato and his opponents are correct to feel this way.

Well, since Renato initially did not behave this way, in fact, was extremely cooperative, I’d say this is more like the classic tit-for-tat strategy for playing (and winning) the iterative Prisoner’s Dilemma game:

Tit for tat is an English saying meaning “equivalent retaliation”. It is also a highly effective strategy in game theory for the iterated prisoner’s dilemma. It was first introduced by Anatol Rapoport in Robert Axelrod’s two tournaments, held around 1980. An agent using this strategy will initially cooperate, then respond in kind to an opponent’s previous action. If the opponent previously was cooperative, the agent is cooperative. If not, the agent is not. This is similar to reciprocal altruism in biology.

The irony is that po-mo is as conservative as you can get

politicalfootball @109,

Renato’s conservatives are simply people like him

It would be difficult for you to be more incorrect about that.

In terms of an iterative game of Prisoner’s Dilemma, Renato is the “tit for tat” strategy, one of the most effective there is. Actually, Renato seems to have been a bit “nicer”, in the technical sense, than TFT; more like “two tits for tat”, which can be even more effective but is less so under certain conditions (essentially, in an environment otherwise full of pustulent arseholes).

Renato’s right-wing Roman Catholic former supplier, by contrast, is the “always defect” strategy, which is just about the stupidest known to mankind.

“it would be standard fare in a certain sector of elite American media.”

… where affirmative action, wingnut welfare division, thrives.

There is clearly more than one problem, and McArdle gets her commenters riled up by conflating them.

At various times between 1972 and 1992 I have heard or read academics say, “Young people who believe they are going to make more money than their parents did, be upwardly mobile, are fooling themselves. The economy is contracting, industrial society is at an end.” Liberal, obviously. Obviously, intended to sneer at the first-generation undergraduates. In other words, at conservatives. At people who didn’t pick up on the social cues McArdle says should be there to tell young people whether or not they will succeed on a certain path.

surely the field of Political Science, which is dominated by quantitative analysis, has a home for someone who rejects post-modernism.

Actually the emphasis on quant. is exactly why I ended up going into political economy rather than political theory which, at my school, alternated between either being colonized by the classics department or having a fixation on a bunch of culture-war gobbledygook.
I actually like the classics and I can understand why I need to have some familiarity with feminism and all the other forms of subalternism studies, but when that’s all you ever do it gets kind of old. We’ve essentially gotten to a point where all you ever read is people trying to quote some sexy-new jargon or develop a new way to frame things that everyone already knows rather than actually trying to, you know, seek truth.

How is that fair? Renato said that initially he was indifferent to his employees’ politics, until the failure of conservatives to reciprocate began to harm his business.

SoV in 113 gets at what I was trying to convey about tit-for-tat, but SoV’s analysis omits the important fact that there are more than two individual players in this game.

Renato feels aggrieved because people have discriminated against Renato for ideological reasons. Renato doesn’t retaliate against the individual oppressors, but rather against anyone in the class of people identified as the ideological class of those oppressors.

Renato’s original complaint is that Renato is subject to oppression based on factors that Renato, as an individual, did nothing to merit. But Renato’s victims have an identical complaint.

“They started it” isn’t a useful piece of analysis, since the same argument can be made with equal legitimacy by Renato’s victims. We aren’t hearing the side of Renato’s oppressors, but I’m going to guess they feel aggrieved by liberals.

the fact that I’m a simple-minded idiot

Gee, one wonders why people who don’t toe the line might not want to spend their careers rolling their eyes at people like you. . .

The irony is that po-mo is as conservative as you can get

You really don’t know what “conservative” means in this context do you?

ScentOf @122,

I can see a scenario where once the Unitarians, the Agnostics and the Atheists are gone, the Fundamentalist types will start harassing the more liberal denominations, the Catholics will do for the non-Catholics, and every Christian will declare open season on Jews, Muslims, etc.

First they came for the Bullies, but I said nothing for I was a Retaliator…

Politicalfootball’s analysis is dead on.

No, it’s just that game theory gets complicated in the real world, like everything else in the real world. Exactly how many conservatives is Renato supposed to hire and get burned by before he’s justified in optimizing his strategy by ceasing to hire conservatives?

The point is, American conservatives are intolerant as a matter of principle. Hiring someone whose beliefs commit him to disrespecting you is not, I beg to submit, a liberal’s duty.

(N.b. that I’m granting his factual premises, which of course we have no independent way to evaluate, unless maybe TheAmericanist is an ex-employee of his.)

“In Renato’s case, he simply doesn’t hire some political conservatives (who, presumably, have done nothing to him) in order to return fire at other political conservatives (the ones who actually did refuse to do business with him). ”

This is not about tit-for-tat. It’s about making economically rational decisions with limited information.

Hiring carries a lot of risk, and it’s done with precious little information. You really cannot tell how a person will perform. The best information – impartial evaluation of how the applicant performed in prior jobs – is closed to you. So you use proxies – recommendations from someone you trust; length of time in prior position; academic records; skill-set (generally self-reported); documented successes or achievements, if available (often not); and how the person did in an interview. What you’re looking for are characteristics that in your experience correlate with good performance – you’re not interested in causation. Such proxies aren’t perfect, and mistakes are costly. So a proxy that correlates even slightly with performance and thus marginally improves the odds of picking a good employee may well be worth using, even if it eliminates many applicants who would be just as good.

Some proxies are illegal. Race, gender, age, marital status, religious belief. These may or may not be useful in predicting performance for some jobs – we’d like to think not – but it makes no difference, you can’t use them, for compelling social and historical reasons.

But “I didn’t like the guy” is a proxy that’s not illegal. It’s the most commonly used proxy, in fact.

And “I didn’t like the guy’s politics” is also not illegal. So if Renato’s experience is that people of conservative views don’t work out, he’s free to refuse to hire them. It’s not like they’re not going to be able to get work elsewhere – discrimination against conservatives is not a genuine social problem, regardless of what McArdle thinks.

Of course, Renato is relying on a small sample set, and maybe he’s making a mistake. In that case, he’ll miss out on some good hires. Big deal. His firm will be less profitable, but he’ll be happier because he’ll feel less uncertainty about his staff. And the overall level of employment will stay the same, because he’ll have hired someone else.

This isn’t about punishing anyone. It’s about running a business in the way that seems best for the business.

Politicalfootball: The difference here is that, at least in my observation, American conservatives are initiating the aggression, and liberals and others are responding to it. It’s not like a lot of us are going around keen to downgrade our treatment of blocs of people, and if we ran into a bunch of conservatives who were good neighbors, employees, contractors, and so on, we’d be happy to say “you know, the picture’s too ambiguous to warrant any ‘because they’re identifying as conservative’ special treatment”.

If only there were some objective test that could be used to tell if someone is stupid or not.

Wait a moment…

PF, I’m not arguing any form of the “tit for tat” scenario, so I don’t know that the “unitary group” bit is an issue. There’s nothing wrong with treating “conservatives” or “liberals” as a unitary group — that’s what’s implied by the categories. Your question seems to go to whether that’s valid in a particular game-theory scenario that I am not addressing.

Liberal: “I believe in hiring people with a diversity of viewpoints, even if they disagree with me.”

Conservative: “Your liberal beliefs make you a virtual traitor and an enemy of everything American.”

Liberal: “Thanks, I’ll call you if anything comes open. Next, please!”

Is the liberal being a hypocrite here? No. He’s not denying the conservative’s right to despise him. He’s declining to associate with someone who despises him.

Politicalfootball: The difference here is that, at least in my observation, American conservatives are initiating the aggression, and liberals and others are responding to it.

See the last paragraph of my 131 or the last paragraph of my 140.

My participation in this conversation began as a discussion of game theory, and I’ve tried to continue in that vein, but as a practical matter, I’ll tell you this: I’m a liberal and I won’t buy a beer in a tavern that flies the stars-and-bars. If a drycleaner had a Bush ’08 sticker in the window, I’d go to the drycleaner down the street.

I don’t feel at all bad about doing this, and I expect the same from conservatives. If a conservative wants to boycott me because I vote for babykillers, the problem in my view isn’t the boycott, it’s the political views that led to the boycott.

I’ve worked with conservatives who knew my liberal views and whom I respected and regarded as friends. I’ve worked with conservatives who knew my political views and did their best to damage my career. In each case, I was a pretty straightforward tit-for-tat player.

Nowadays, I don’t have any bumper stickers on my car, nor do I ever express political opinions in professional situations.

SoV’s analysis is interesting but real life isn’t like a two-player game. People with work to do don’t use all their time up with some abstract game against their coworkers and clients. And even so: If someone’s social capital score drops to zero, they don’t lose their job immediately–when they lose their job depends on how much their boss dislikes firing people, how fast s/he can find an excuse to let them go, and their pay relative to others’–and may be never (even without legal tenure!).

Neither do most people in the US who employ blatant Humpty-Dumptyism to call themselves “conservatives” but are actually radical liberals in the 19 century sense- a political philosophy which is actually highly disruptive of existing social institutions rather than tending to conserve them.

The only thing they want to “conserve” is white male privilege. You certainly sound like a member of this tribe., and ipso facto not too bright.

The fact that you jump to this conclusion despite my mentioning “in the tradition of Edmund Burke” and “staunchly Democratic for want of options” just indicates to me that you’re more interested in dismissing contrary opinions out of hand as either “dumb,” “bigoted,” or “crazy” because it’s easier than having to actually stop and think about what anyone outside your ideological tribe has to say.

P.S. I’m not White, immigrated to the US from India when I was eight as a matter of fact, but don’t let that get in the way of your stereotype.

sorry, should be “tigris,” not “NV”

NV: “I would say that political science and history are my intellectual passions, but as much as I would have loved to have been able to pursue a PhD in either field, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to go very far in the field simply due to a prevailing culture of post-modernist liberalism that tends to dominate.”

I suppose then those academic positions will have to go to people who decided to follow their passions rather than what they thought they “knew” about academia in it’s entirety.

Seriously, if you choose not to follow your passion, at least take responsibility for that choice rather than blaming the perceived prevailing attitudes of others.

What would Burke have said?

(disclaimer: I have no idea)

Brian,

But is that really a viable argument in light of the fact that getting a good adviser, getting a good tenure-track job offering, getting good grants, getting departmental support, etc. can all be affected by your personal beliefs?

I’m not saying that you CAN’T succeed if you aren’t part of the majority, but let’s face it: there aren’t too many Marxists in the top 10 economics departments.

Seriously, though, I didn’t just delurk to give NV a hard time. I think (based on one sentence that he wrote in a blog comment) that he’s making a pretty big mistake here. Maybe he’s found something he really likes where he is — if so, fine. But academia is a tough gig, and if you don’t love it, you’ll find yourself leaving it.

“It’s hard to make a well considered critique of secularism because doing so makes you a tool of the Falwell/Dobson types.”

Well, depending on your definition of secularism, I guess that would explain why no one’s ever heard of Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre and William Galston and Michael Sandel and Amitai Etzioni. For starters.

“It’s hard to critique Darwin’s theory of evolution because that makes you a creationist. And woe betide anyone who advises caution based on the fallibility of climate models!”

These claims are just plain false. No one will blame you for appreciating being outside academia, NV. But we may question your account of how it happened.

SoV’s analysis omits the important fact that there are more than two individual players in this game.

So the real question is: For game theory purposes, are there only two actors here? I’m thinking that in the SoV/Tilton/Anderson scenario, the two actors are Renato and The Conservatives. As Heur notes, however, The Conservatives don’t deliver the “tit” as a group, and don’t experience the “tat” as a group. (I was going to say “The Conservatives don’t feel the tit as a group,” but thought better of it.) Therefore tit-for-tat doesn’t apply.

I apologize for the confusion; there are many generalizations of the Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. One set of variants was called (many years ago) the game of Hawks and Doves. In this version (or rather, the many different games grouped under this name), there are many players interacting with each other; it’s not just two people:

Bourgeois

The concept of Evolutionary Stable Strategies (ESS) relies upon the notion that animals can assess the relative pay-offs for the different roles within a strategy. For example, in our earlier Hawk-Dove game imagine that each individual could assess whether to play Hawk or Dove. The frequency of Hawk behaviour would remain at 66.6% and that of Dove at 33.3%, but individuals would exert a choice, playing each role when they thought appropriate. This is a Hawk-Dove Evolutionary Stable Strategy (ESS) – as opposed to the Hawk-Dove Evolutionary Stable State described earlier – because role choice based on assessment is now involved.

Lot’s of good stuff there. So now there’s not just “Prisoner’s Dilemma” and “Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma” to google on, there’s also “Hawks and Doves”. I would also suggest looking at the original papers published by Robert Axelrod.

you’re more interested in dismissing contrary opinions

I’m interested in dismissing stupid, uninformed, unsupported opinions like those of McMegan and the people echoing her whining. You should be too. Why you were instead interested in pretending they have a case I have no idea. But there’s a lot of thought-free contrarianism going around these days, sometimes emitted by people who should know better.

By the way I’m a natural scientist and a non-academic so I don’t have any personal stake at all in defending the academic departments that supposedly discriminate against poor, little, not very bright wingers. I just happen to value intellectual honesty of which McMegan and her crowd have not even a homeopathic dose.

Dang it, I was in a hurry and forgot how the tags work here. Let me try to make this more intelligible:

SoV’s analysis omits the important fact that there are more than two individual players in this game.

So the real question is: For game theory purposes, are there only two actors here? I’m thinking that in the SoV/Tilton/Anderson scenario, the two actors are Renato and The Conservatives. As Heur notes, however, The Conservatives don’t deliver the “tit” as a group, and don’t experience the “tat” as a group. (I was going to say “The Conservatives don’t feel the tit as a group,” but thought better of it.) Therefore tit-for-tat doesn’t apply.

I apologize for the confusion; there are many generalizations of the Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. One set of variants was called (many years ago) the game of Hawks and Doves. In this version (or rather, the many different games grouped under this name), there are many players interacting with each other; it’s not just two people:

Bourgeois

The concept of Evolutionary Stable Strategies (ESS) relies upon the notion that animals can assess the relative pay-offs for the different roles within a strategy. For example, in our earlier Hawk-Dove game imagine that each individual could assess whether to play Hawk or Dove. The frequency of Hawk behaviour would remain at 66.6% and that of Dove at 33.3%, but individuals would exert a choice, playing each role when they thought appropriate. This is a Hawk-Dove Evolutionary Stable Strategy (ESS) – as opposed to the Hawk-Dove Evolutionary Stable State described earlier – because role choice based on assessment is now involved.

Lot’s of good stuff there. So now there’s not just “Prisoner’s Dilemma” and “Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma” to google on, there’s also “Hawks and Doves”. I would also suggest looking at the original papers published by Robert Axelrod. Once again, the Prisoner’s Dilemma scenario that I am using is the one where it’s been extended to multiple players with multiple strategies.

rickm,

Sure it is. Methodology is a common field, and I’ve read plenty of papers devoted to methodology in poli sci. Truth is, there is plenty of grappling with how to apply rational choice, but few people are really bold enough to come out completely against it.

Hell, I still can’t find many people who will go against efficient markets hypothesis, which I know in my heart of hearts to be complete rubbish.

http://pan.oxfordjournals.org/

“I don’t know about polI sci journals, but nearly every journal in History uses a double blind review, so having ‘clout’ is a moot point.”

Depends on the field, and many are not double-blind. History may be, but even double-blind has its limitations. Many senior scientists will reference their own work quite a bit.

http://blogs.nature.com/nn/actionpotential/2005/12/doubleblind_peer_review.html

I’m not necessarily disagreeing with you, but I’m saying that there are funny ways of circumventing double-blind reviews. But your point is well-received.

I’ll give another example of this phenomenon: My friend who is something of a Soviet apologist argues that the US was in fact that aggressor in the Cold War. Whether or not I agree with him (I do not,) he was told by a number of departments, including his own undergraduate department, that he was nigh unacceptable to most history departments in the US– particularly the top ones. The fact was that he was too off the beaten path to get any advisers up his alley. They told him to try out universities in Europe instead.

I just happen to value intellectual honesty of which McMegan and her crowd have not even a homeopathic dose.

Sorry, I’m afraid I’m having trouble parsing through all the assertions of how much the people you disagree with suck to actually find any explanation of why they’re wrong. Other folks here are doing a much better job of it than you so if you don’t mind I’ll just continue on with them.

Well, depending on your definition of secularism, I guess that would explain why no one’s ever heard of Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre and William Galston and Michael Sandel and Amitai Etzioni. For starters.

Unfortunately, there are only so many Charles Taylors out there who could have taken me under their wing. You must remember that you must first be inducted into the order and only then do you get the chance to speak credibly. The alternative is the road I opted into: to make a name elsewhere in a related field and maybe eventually make a lateral move in. In fact, I think the need for a space for conservative viewpoints to be argued can serve as part of the explanation for the rise of the pseudo-conservative think-tank. Not that it’s a place for scholars to go, but that it’s a place for people inclined towards certain attitudes to be able to find arguments that support them. When the institutions that value the intellectual honesty Steve prizes hold a bias against that kind of scholarship, it leaves a vacuum that less intellectually honest institutions can fill, thereby muddying up the space with specious bullshit.

But back to my point, it just strikes me as naive to suggest that when an induction process has gatekeepers and those gatekeepers predominantly tend to agree on certain things, they’re somehow not going to impact the resulting outcomes. Remember, the minds of future leaders and definers of culture are only influenced by the perspectives of the intellectual juggernauts insofar as they are filtered down to them by the lowly professors and adjuncts who comprise the bulk of the instruction.
The fact is, if my intention is to actually have a career that goes somewhere the deck is stacked against me. Trying to dispute that by pointing at titans of the field makes about as much sense as pointing to Chris Gardner to justify the claim that a scrappy and capable homeless man has a decent shot at becoming a stock broker.

And honestly, I don’t know of anyone under the age of 60 in poli-sci willing to discard rational choice theory. I suspect that the quant fetishism in vogue now would rebel mightily against any attempt to undercut its foundational premise. If you can point me to anyone that would be appreciated.

Hell, I still can’t find many people who will go against efficient markets hypothesis, which I know in my heart of hearts to be complete rubbish.

I feel like most decent economists even know it’s rubbish. It’s just one of those things they only discuss obliquely or in hushed whispers for fear of being labelled apostates and horsewhipped against a tree.
That bothered me more than anything about Hayek’s critique of Keynes. He was basically saying Keynes’ ideas about priming the pump in recession gave states an excuse to keep priming it in normal times and inflating bubbles. He’s technically right on that count, but just because you can break your finger with a hammer doesn’t mean you should stick to only using thumb-tacks.

One of the hallmarks of intolerance here, though, would be a tendency to paint all conservatives (or liberals) with the same characteristic color

Notice I took some care to define “conservative.” In the sense I’m using, they just *are* intolerant. It’s something they’re proud of, not a stereotype. They don’t disagree with gays, they want it to be *illegal* to be gay. Etc.

Beautiful takedown of McArdle. I think she needs to spend the rest of her life unemployed (I am a huge fan of Fire Megan McArdle). But lately, I think she really needs to fucking die.

Considering that I’m currently sitting in a room at a major and well respected US university where, through the wall, I can hear an economics professor (who uses Ron Paul’s book as a textbook) explain how liberals are indeed all Marxists, I’m inclined to disagree with McMegan, but that is nothing new.

Now the point that such conservatives may be dumber? From what I hear through this wall, I can’t disprove that notion.

After her 3 paragraphs of meandering introduction, she runs straight into the wall with:

Conservatives are, not to overlabor the obvious, marginalized in the cultural elite

Since she neither defines “the cultural elite” nor provides evidence that Conservatives are marginalized within it, it’s impossible to evaluate this “obvious” assertion.

Obviously conservatives love to bitch about the “liberal media”, but — self-pity aside — the idea doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, as conservatives have ample opportunity to voice their opinions. Andrew McCarthy, Liz Cheney, Bill Kristol, and Eric Erikson (to name only a few) have no trouble getting airtime. McMegan herself is published by the Atlantic (for reasons unknown to me), and the NYT regularly wastes space on Ross Douthat.

If she means to refer to academia, it’s hard to see how they belong to any “cultural elite”. Even well(ish) known leftist academics like Noam Chomsky hardly capture the public imagination. Even the NYT last mentioned Noam Chomsky most-recently in December 2008 in his wife’s obituary.

To try to create a comparison between the not-in-evidence discrimination against conservatives with the very much in evidence discrimination against black Americans in the 1950s is, of course, ludicrous yet unsurprising.

The problem with McArdle’s angle to this issue is that she doesn’t seem to have noted that in every country, academics tend to be ‘liberal’.

She might say she can extend her argument to other countries, saying that everywhere, there are tacit structures that weed conservatives out of academics.

But many legs on which she’s based are argument are specific to US society.

I personally think the reason that academics tend to be left or left-leaning is to be found in the most simplistic definition of ‘Conservative’. Anyone thinking the present order, the present body of knowledge, the present anything, is to be conserved is unlikely to seek changes.

What I’m clumsily saying is that academics are left wing because the very nature of academics is to change things, challenge established ideas, and question things.

“Renato’s conservative employees weren’t burning him. Rather some conservative businesses were choosing not to do business with him, and he chose to retaliate by not hiring conservative workers.”

The impression I got from Renato’s post was that one particular conservative employee was poisoning other businesspeople against him. I may be reading into it, but based on my experience with conservatives (and businesspeople – small business can be very gossipy and subjective), particularly Catholic conservatives, I would not be surprised. Catholic conservatives believe they have a duty to be intolerant, and even screw liberals over, lest they be complicit in Evil. Renato observed this firsthand and instituted precautionary measures. People in business for themselves don’t enjoy huge margins for error. If Renato’s city or market niche were small enough, he could actually be rendered non-viable by people like this.

I also know a story of a conservative employee of one of my previous workplaces, who revealed secret information to the press in order to prevent the business expanding in ways he didn’t approve of. This was definite, deliberate sabotage for political ends. In subsequent developments, we had to be very very careful about who was told what.

I actually subsequently employed another conservative as a database developer, and aside from a few rank comments and some entertaining arguments, he was the best staff I ever had. So I don’t know that it’s a common trait. But Australian conservatives seem to be much less vicious and vindictive, in general, than what I see of Americans from afar, so I can imagine this process could get one burnt, in particular parts of America, though one hopes what one sees of conservatives online in the US is unrepresentative of what they’re like as a whole, in reality, out of the spotlight.

If you are guided more by commonsense, the school of hard knocks and a deity than by intellectual enquiry (like most conservatives) you have no business frequenting a secular tertiary educational institution, other than to acquire a vocational ticket.

Few pygmies grouse about their under-representation in the NBA. Conservatives appear to be less realistic, but it’s actually quite politically realistic to complain about liberals, however flimsy the basis.

OK, not real, but my point is that there is plenty of room for ideology even in the physical observable sciences. Tons of debates in biology today, debates that have party lines drawn.

Okay, I’ll bite: what are these arguments in the “physical observable sciences”, these debates that are drawn along party lines? Be specific. I’ve had hundreds of people tell me that this is so and yet – strangely enough – I have yet to hear of a real, concrete, specific, and verifiable example. Not once. So here’s your opportunity to be in on the ground floor.

But McArdle just wants to pine & whine about the liberal elite.

I really think that’s the full story. McArdle is well-compensated for sloppy, lazy, shoddy work. Why leave?

I worked in consulting for a long time, and now I’m working on a doctorate in the social sciences. Every single f****** time she’s pulled the ‘friend in the industry’ or ‘studies say’ shtick in an area I know well — and our areas of alleged expertise overlap quite a bit — I’ve seen gross errors and omissions.

If every bit of professional and academic experience I have says her work is pure garbage — and it does — I refuse to grade on curve because of a supposed ideological difference. In truth, she’s lucky to be working in an area — big-time ‘opinion journalism’ — that does exactly that.

It’s one thing to say that you’re willing to critique, but if you claim something paradigm-bendingly big, odds are not in your favor when it comes to big journals unless you already have clout.

This is actually true, to some extent. Journals such as Science and Nature most assuredly sometimes play favorites, which is why I’ve frequently muttered imprecations against their disproportionate stature. Then again, any “big” scientific journal will weight the odds against claims of something paradigm-bendingly big, because the evidence and the argument had better be especially strong. See, e.g., AGW deniers who cry censorship over dramatic paradigm-overturning manuscripts that have basic statistics mistakes starting on page one.

but look at the relationship between the Big Bang Theory characters Leonard and Leslie Winkle breaking down because he believes in string theory and she believes in loop quantum gravity.

Such a hostile divide is only still possible because neither camp has produced distinguishing testable predictions. Ideology only intrudes to any meaningful extent when there isn’t sufficient evidence.

ScentOfViolets @191,

what are these arguments in the “physical observable sciences”, these debates that are drawn along party lines?

Oh, you know, evolution vs. intelligent design, AGW vs. Algore is fat, that sort of thing. Teach the controversy!

Ceri,

In fact, in my somewhat extensive experience with liberals, we are often enough trusting to the point of gullibility. So, “way less likely to . . . rebroadcast”? Sometimes it’s true.

Anderson: “But McArdle just wants to pine & whine about the liberal elite.”

bh: “I really think that’s the full story. McArdle is well-compensated for sloppy, lazy, shoddy work. Why leave?”

First, it’s the classic ‘they’re oppressing me/attacking us, so our attacks on them are justified’ approach.

Second, McArdle is basically a failure at earning an honest living. She graduated with an MBA from one of the world’s top B-Schools; this gave her an in (and presumably technical skills) to an amazing variety of industries and jobs. She failed out of Wall St, and then failed in business, and finally found a niche – not in real journalism, but in partisan lies and punditry. She’s like her finance, Peter ‘Astroturf’ Suderman, except that Megan has a better cover story, working for The Atlantic (motto: ‘we’re such swine that we have an actual award named after Michael Kelley!’).

Now, this will provide Megan with a comfortable living (unless she swings to the left, in which case she’ll be outta there), but she still resents the fact that she’s not respected by anybody worth respecting. It’s much like the resentment that some right-wingers have over Sarah Palin.

Ceri,

You sound a bit annoyed and I have no idea what’s bothering you. You spoke from your experience and I spoke from mine. Whether you call this disagreement, or what you imagine “in fact” always means, or whatever, I again have no idea.

Jeez, this was written by an big-league prof? I’d berate my students for the 2nd paragraph alone. I know lots of very well-off conservatives, and the reason they’re well-off is because they rarely go to France, eschew country clubs, and don’t own planes. In fact, his description would seem to apply to many of liberal neighbors in Burlington, VT. They carry their own shopping bags (with prominent eco-friendly labels, of course), but jet to Vail to go skiing instead of driving and hour to Stowe, and drive Lexus SUVs with ‘Save Nepal’ stickers. If being a big-league prof means getting any crap you write published, I’ll be content with my small state U job.

MB writes:

“It is indeed hard to be a conservative in American media. One is always wondering, what if I get something wrong? About something important, like maybe a health care debate or a war?”

I love progressives when their imputed snark is contradicted by real world reality. Health care fascism? Endorsed by a Cuban dictator named Fidel Castro? The Left has lost the public’s support. In fact, according to one poll, Tea Party (mind you, informal membership) grew by 50% from before fascist Obamacare to after – from 16% of American’s to 24%.

Better still, another poll shows that the public think s “Tea baggers” know more about the subject than Preesident Obama does. (Its not hard: Right-wingers can read, unlike Democrats, especially those in Congress who demonstrably don’t.)

And war? Like that war Michael Moore got everyone on the Left to believe was invented by corporate-connected “neo-cons”? The one that Vice President Biden now touts as an Obama Administration triumph? Twice?

Enough of reading MB. I’m a life-long atheist, but just to piss-off his intolerant sycophants, I’d rather read the Bible. Perhaps I will tonight. Probably Jesus on Caesar, another topic his minions know nothing about.

I like the fact that people use the term “arrant nonsense” on the i-net. Anon!

Jesus on Caesar

Hot!

What you all did not know is that McArdle’s post is merely a side consequence of a conversation she and I have been having, which I will reproduce for you here:

McArdle: “I think there are not so many black bank managers because black people don’t feel like they fit in on that side of the bank counter, kinda like how conservatives don’t fit in at university.”

Salient: …

McArdle: [tapping foot, awaiting a response]

Salient: That’s not the most horrifically stupid thing I’ve heard this week.

McArdle: [disappointed]

Salient: I mean, you can try again if you want. This game can be fun.

McArdle: It’s… pretty hard to top that, though.

Salient: It’s not like you are unskilled at being obtuse, Megan. You can do better.

McArdle: Give me a moment.

Salient: …

McArdle: Ok, uh… I think historically, Chinese people must have really liked working outdoors, because so many of them worked on the railroads back in the day.

Salient: …

McArdle: [smiles hopefully]

Salient: …Nope. Still not the most horrifically stupid thing I’ve heard this week.

McArdle: Wow. Just wow. Well, let’s see.

Salient: [waiting]

McArdle: Ooh, got one. I think, uh… I can’t even bring myself to say this in jest.

Salient: I bet it still won’t win.

McArdle: Fine. Here goes. I think historically, black people must have really enjoyed working outdoors, given the number of plantation positions they filled prior to the 1860s!

Salient: That’s pretty amazingly horrific, Megan. Nicely done.

McArdle: I win?

Salient: No. It’s still not the most horrifically stupid thing I’ve heard this week.

McArdle: You are lying to me. You have got to be lying to me.

Salient: Byran Caplan said that women were more free in the 1880s than they are today…

McArdle: –that’s pretty bad, but c’mon, I came up with worse–

Salient: …and he said that the legality of marital rape back then was totally trivial, so he could dismiss it.

McArdle: WHAT?

Salient: I am not kidding to you.

McArdle: My god. That’s the most horrifically stupid thing I’ve heard all week.

Salient: I know!

Whereas I, middle-class lawyer that I am, know perfectly well that there’s a conservative elite as well, a very rich, very well connected conservative elite …

… that I have NO INTEREST in joining, because they would bore me to fucking death.

My dad, who was born to poor immigrants in the Chicago slums, was an elementary school teacher with 4 kids. I went to a public university on scholarship. Eventually my husband and I made enough that we could move to a pretty expensive neighborhood, Beverly Hills PO — city of LA, but with a BH zip code. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the neighbors — all college grads, accountants, lawyers, doctors, etc. — had only three topics of conversation: real estate prices; who was sleeping with whom; and how difficult it was to find housekeepers who would accept $50 for an eleven-hour day in an area with no bus service. I asked one of my neighbors once where the books were in his house; he said he had an old accounting textbook in the garage somewhere, and his wife proudly pointed to her stash of Danielle Steel novels.

” “What is this “conservative thought” that people sneer at in academia because it is conservative? Be specific.”

Goldwaterism, Catholic conservatism, Hayekian conservatism (yeah I know the semantic controversies, but let’s just hang on in there), Straussian conservatism, and of course, Buckley wrote God and Men at Yale.”

Goldwater I’ll leave aside. Since Straussians teach or taught at such elite places as Harvard (Mansfield, Riley, Mahdi), Yale (Smith), Wisconsin (Riley, Yack), Michigan (Saxonhouse), Virginia (Ceasar), Duke (Gillespie, Grant, Spragens) and numerous others at first rank institutions, it seems hard to credit that it’s truly a (major) difficulty. My own personal experience as a junior Straussian of the East Coast/Stanley Rosen variety is that the only difficulty I encountered was that I didn’t want to spend as much time on figures like Chantal Mouffe or Laclau as others did. But that’s incredibly minor, and it’s not like Chantal Mouffe is a completely worthless writer either (she definitely has some potentially interesting things to say, even if I think my own time is better used elsewhere.)

Hayekian conservatism – well, Hayek himself taught at LSE and the University of Chicago, so that’s hardly a sign of academic rejection (sure, other places didn’t like him, but he was employed by institutions of the very first rank). Since Hayek influenced a huge number of people at the University of Chicago, many of whom ended up getting Nobel prizes and being at the very pinnacle of American economics academe, again, while there was initial resistance to Hayek in the 1940s through 1960s, his intellectual children did extraordinarily well for themselves.

Catholic conservatism? Well, you do realize that there are over 1,500 Catholic universities and colleges worldwide? It’s by far the largest university system in the world by number of schools (though not by number of students) – the public university system of China only contains about 300 universities, for example. The current pope (certainly a conservative) was a professor at two highly respected public universities, including teaching at one of the finest universities in the world (Tubingen). Gilson taught at multiple secular public universities. George teaches at the Protestant Princeton. Maritain taught at Princeton too. MacIntyre has primarily taught at public or Protestant institutions (including Princeton, Duke, Vanderbilt and Oxford) and only recently has taught at any Catholic universities.

the public university system of China only contains about 300 universities, for example

The number’s higher if you count institutions that call themselves universities, much higher if you like institutes and academies and so forth. Not that it has anything to do with your argument…

MacIntyre taught before his conversion at the school William Bennett said went downhill after they started admitting non-Presbyterians. Which happens to be the same school Howard Zinn taught at most of his career. Where the president and provost were said to vet dissertations and faculty publications to remove citations of e.g. the Frankfurt School and other leftist scholars. I have no idea what this is supposed to mean.

Is that a no-true-Scotsman argument?

Which one?

I think you can blame me entirely for not getting that.