I find your ideas intriguing and wish to subscribe to your newsletter. Oh, wait. I already did.
I agree with absolutely everything you've written here and thus will now attack it. The problem with this theory is that it doesn't seem to have any tie to our current times or conditions, implying that it's a universal force of human nature. And yet whilst the current years may feel dominated by leftism, in the broad sweep of history leftism (using your definition) has been in near continuous retreat.
2000 years ago societies were run by kings and priest-kings, who claimed a near divine right to rule. Their 'expertise' in ruling was seen as so profound that King Canute famously tried to drag his own court slightly more to the right by showing them he could not, in fact, turn back the tide.
1000 years ago societies were run by the Church, which we can view as a vast hierarchy of 'experts' on all things moral, spiritual and the very nature of goodness itself.
100 years ago there were some democracies, but most of the world was run by empires. Although notionally run by emperors, or Parliament in the case of the British Empire, most empires were in reality run by their bureaucracy. Bureaucrats claimed no divine right to rule, instead deriving their legitimacy from their appointment by the state, their connections, networks, a claimed efficiency at their tasks and so on. The world was full of people who thought communism was a good idea in the abstract, if only its pesky habit of turning into a dictatorship could somehow be tamed. By this point politically powerful priests and kings were an anachronism. The USSR was busy trying to make their entire economy be run by committees of bureaucrats, and western leftists were starting to talk up how the revolutionary power of new computing machines would allow planned economies to beat out free markets.
By 10 years ago the whole notion of empires was more or less dead. The world had seen a large increase in the number of democracies, especially after World War 1 and 2 when the remaining empires almost all collapsed. People now unironically talk about the "American Empire" even though the USA is not an empire by any normal definition, simply because otherwise the word would fall into dis-use. The concept of the 'efficient bureaucrat' cooly using maths and machines to plan economies is now a joke. The fall of the USSR killed off the idea of Soviet economic planning, and the rise of the tech industry - created entirely by nobodies in hoodies who started out life with nothing more than a computer and pizza on autodial - killed off the credibility of "class warfare" or fixed worker/capitalist distinctions. The left has now totally abandoned classical Marxist/Leninist ideas of planned economies, class warfare etc in favour of a re-spin of the same concepts oriented around race and class.
So overall, whilst your analysis feels correct and relevant to our current era, "leftists control everyone else because they are attracted by power" seems incomplete.
Why is this? I think there are two countervailing forces.
1. Leftist domination certainly HAS been true for much of history, and of course sometimes leftists become too powerful in a relatively free society and everything goes to shit for a generation or two, but over and over this ends with the credibility of rule-by-experts taking a massive beating. The left then have to respin their ideas with new terminology and a new surface appearance. Libertarian ideas on the other hand are relatively static, because there haven't been any major world events that would seriously challenge their beliefs in the same way leftism was challenged.
2. Because of their desire to grab hold of power and use it to remake society, leftists are always focused pre-existing power centres. They focus on controlling the present or sometimes the past, but they never focus on creating the future. The closest thing the left had to a visionary was Marx and his writing is a disaster zone: a massive rats nest of staggeringly vague ideas, half finished books with chapters in no coherent order, outright fraudulent citations and made up quotes, a habit of citing problems in industrial Britain as unfixable by citing government reports that had led directly to them already being fixed, and of course the famous near total absence of detail on what his post-revolutionary vision actually was.
Free market libertarianism on the other hand has so many future-building visionaries amongst it, even living today, that it's pointless to even try and enumerate them. Elon Musk is probably the example most people would think of, but go look at the foundations of any tech firm and you'll find strongly libertarian roots: capitalism, free markets, freedom of speech and information, etc. It's hard to see this in 2021 because once the power these tech firms had acquired became clear the left bent itself to capturing them as they try to capture any powerful institution, but the origins are very clear. Bill Gates wanted to put a powerful information device on "every desk". Not the desks of experts: every desk. Amazon built a powerful infrastructure and then flung it open to every other firm, including his own competitors. Google was founded with a mission to "make the world's information universally accessible and useful". Note: universally accessible. Google was not built as a research tool for an "expert" elite, it was open to all, without even needing to register. Twitter once proclaimed itself as the "free speech wing of the free speech party". YouTube beat Google Video because it bet on user generated content. Bitcoin was created by an anonymous programmer who changed the world and then vanished. And so on.
You can repeat this exercise for much of the last few hundred years of history, I believe. The people fundamentally remaking the world were not the ones spending all their time trying to capture existing institutions and then fighting internal wars to maintain control. The people who really changed things were the ones who imagined a less leftist future and then built it from scratch. Thus the "leftism = education = leftism" loop gets broken.
Awesome comment, thank you! And glad you are here!
I would push back on leftism being in retreat all through history. I think that while the notional power of the state (or those who would rule since the state is a more modern idea) was far more universal in the past, the actual range and scope of the ruling class' ability to force people to their will has increased steadily, both in terms of what is acceptable and possible. (I started following your timeline, but whew... it got off track and long as I just brain dumped history. I will try to be more concise.)
Through much of history there was a whole lot of frontier, in the sense of "land the government is not really in control of." In modern African states it is usually the case that the government controls the capital city and maybe another large one, but outside of that it is pretty much just local rule by villages who pay tribute to the central government. Historically this was pretty much the norm everywhere, with the central government relying on local lords who either paid tribute to the king or were appointed by him. Even if the king's army of supporters was large enough to defeat every lordling with a town or village individually, keeping the entire realm under heel was tricky.
At the level of the individual just living his life, to use my favorite ancient Chinese proverb: Heaven is high, and the emperor is far away. The ability of those in power to really run his life from the center was pretty limited, as even keeping track of how many people there were in an area was a neat trick. Of course there were many local power centers that could be a giant pain (all in the name of the greater good!) but most central governments didn't do a lot past fight wars, build some very basic infrastructure and enjoy being wealthy.
I totally agree with your overall notion that religion and government apparatuses were the locus for power grabbing, and so were guilds and other groups. They just were not so good at it.
As time goes on we see an explosion of the number of people employed by the central state, as both standing armies and administrators employed directly by the central power. The first census in Europe is done in the late 1700's in Prussia as I recall, and the next wasn't until the 1800's; without those governments had trouble tracking who was even under their thumb. Now we have huge numbers of administrators in every modern government, and most developed nations spend over 30% of GDP on government.
The reasoning behind ruling others changed a good bit too. At least one good thing pre-moderns had going for them was they didn't generally believe the world or humanity was perfectible. You had some minor cults here and there that went in on that, but in general most people understood you weren't going to "fix" the world or people no matter what, so the best you could do was knock off the worst edges and otherwise do the best you could with an inherently difficult world. Most rulers didn't even bother claiming that what they did was for the good of the people; a good ruler was one who didn't step on your neck too hard, not one who told you about the benefits of pedi-chiropractic therapy while doing it.
The Enlightenment era, or for preference the Scottish Enlightenment era, seems to be one of the few times that not only was the power of the state checked, but that sentiments against even using power became ascendant. Previously in history the power of the state seemed to be kept in check largely by overreach and the resultant collapse of the central authority. The 1700's-1850's seemed to see quite a bit of central powers peacefully releasing power and at least giving lip service to individual rights and freedoms in an official capacity. (Note: this is focused more on the large scale, international level. Lots of places had smaller scale, sub-national recognition of rights and freedoms. Britain and Iceland had two particularly interesting systems, see "Law's Order" by David Friedman. In fact, see that book anyway, it is a great read.)
Then came the dark times, heralded by the rise of the Sith... er... socialists.
I think the modern "rule of experts" model can be pretty directly traced back to the industrial revolution and the explosion of engineering and scientific advances. There really was a staggering difference between doing things in the old way and the new ways. People with some special knowledge really could do amazing things, and the speed of improvement was staggering. A graph of world GDP per capita over time shows basically flat growth for 10,000 years, then a sudden upwards trajectory that continue to this day. All the promises of priests and wizards of old were suddenly seemingly within reach of the modern miracle workers.
Socialism itself required these, as while communal living had been done (sometimes successfully!) at a smaller scale throughout history, it took large scale manufacturing organizations and productivity gains to make it seem possible on the large scale.
Whereas before even the best administrators and rulers could only hope to not mess things up too badly, now that hitherto unknown wealth and prosperity, not to mention health and medicine, were available if you just did things the right way, it seemed like the best thing to do was give the experts power to make everyone else do things the right way. Sometimes this actually kind of worked out, and sometimes it went horribly wrong, but there it was. And so great was the tide of innovation and growth that even if you did it pretty badly, see France and Russia, once people stopped killing each other you were still pretty far ahead of where you were back in the old days.
By the early 1900's those who want power were really grabbing onto this and using it to grasp previously unknown amounts of control over their fellows. For the USA, see "Illiberal Reformers", the New Deal, etc. For Europe, see "1984" or "Animal Farm". Complete control seemed possible, and pretty likely to happen.
Then came WW2 and... well, if you ever need to come up with a reason why Hitler was good for humanity, making fascism and national socialism really, really unpopular was probably it. Remember that fascism was considered the way to go, popular in all western and many eastern nations before WW2, with Hitler and Mussolini being seen as forward thinking leaders to be admired by many in government and society. So, whew... thanks Hitler for being so horrible in such a short span of time that you got people off of that jag in a hurry.
(If only people had seen more of what Stalin and Mao were up to in Russia and China, we might have been spared more communism as well.)
So post WW2 might have been the second big retreat for the left in the west since the 1700's that didn't involve empires collapsing.
Then things got worse, then a little better in the US and UK, but in general there seems to be an ever tightening noose of a bit more control, a bit more safety, a bit more "do things my way or get the fuck out, scum". The last 10 years or so have been driving towards a nadir, definitely.
So I don't think the left (defined as the modern term for those who wish to exercise power over others' lives) has necessarily been in retreat over all of history. Rather I think there has been a sort of ebb and flow of of power and freedom within societies, with one being ascendent over the other in certain time and places more or less. The technological changes of the past 400 years have in some times made freedom more accessible, and in other times less, often for the same tech. See Amazon, Google, YouTube, Microsoft, etc. once the creators got replaced by those who want to use those tools for their own ends of remaking society as they see fit.
I absolutely agree, however, that the anti-power people are the ones who actually drive society forward and grow the possibilities, whereas the left tends to simply take the possibilities that currently are realized and prevent new ones that would threaten their power. I think for the US, breaking the state hold on schooling (e.g. getting rid of the current public school system and moving to... well anything else almost) would be a big move in the right direction. I am hopeful that even disconnecting education credentials from "is well indoctrinated in the left" will go a long way towards rebalancing things. Plus not being indoctrinated against freedom, free markets, free expression and everything else would be a step in the right direction.
My worry is that the current wave of leftism in the world will break only with the collapse of the modern empires. Which I don't think have gone away so much as you think. China is definitely an empire, with many different sub-nations of people speaking different languages and generally not liking the central government much. The USA has started to push into empire territory within its own borders I would argue, as more and more functions get abrogated to the central Federal government instead of to the various states and localities, and so the rules are much less by consent than force. Likewise the EU, although the individual states there are generally not too concerned with consent, either.
With regards to the USA especially, I think the sheer population is one reason it behaves more like an empire as well; representation at all levels has not scaled with population, and so elected rulers are ever more divorced from their constituencies. Even the smaller US states today would have been really high population nations back in 1800, but New York City still just has 51 city councilors for 8.5 million people. The UK had ~10 million people in 1800, and ~650 members of Parliament, for example.
Anyway, great comment! I feel like I should make it its own post, especially since I have rewritten the "Patterns of Thought 3" post about 6 times now and it is still no closer to being published...
Focusing in on tech firms for a second. I go back and forth on this, because I used to work at Google and joined it relatively early. So having seen what it was, and what it has become, is a very thought provoking thing. Obviously the current state of it is depressing. YouTube in particular is a disaster zone and a great example of why you have to be so careful with hiring, even in the early days. Wojcicki is nothing like what a typical Googler was back in the day. Her only merit appears to have been being related to Sergey's wife. She was already beaten by the YouTube guys once when they bet on the world, instead of on hierarchical so-called elite institutions, but she learned nothing from that failure and is now trying to reimplement the same thing with "authoritative" content.
So that's the pessimistic view. On the other hand, how successful is the left at this kind of takeover, really? Yes, with incredibly weak leadership at the top, they are busy running wild and smashing up the china shop. But on a very fundamental level they are playing a game where the rules were set by other people, who didn't agree with their worldview at all. So YouTube is constantly trying to algorithmically shut down anyone who disagrees with 'experts' and it's a total shitshow:
• They are constantly accidentally censoring fellow leftists because their censorship is incompetent. See the latest article by Tabbi for an example of this.
• Even with AI assistance there is an absolute ton of content that they either miss, or which for whatever random reason doesn't trigger their thresholds for removal and yet is entirely destructive to their narrative.
YouTube is constantly playing host to videos attacking experts and spreading anti-elite messages of various kinds. Likewise for web search, content ads, gmail etc. They probably manage to squash the most popular 5% of such videos and whenever they do it triggers attention and outrage, because everyone knows that this is a deep violation of the site's original founding principles. Compare to e.g. Netflix refusing to host a movie and nobody notices or cares, because Netflix has never pretended to be anything other than a source of cheap mass entertainment.
So whilst libertarians feel great outrage at the leftist takeover of institutions, let's try and have some sympathy ;) Their victories are rather pyrrhic: they end up running services that are default open, default libertarian, in which that cannot be changed, and are thus constantly being exploited by their ideological enemies, who don't even pay for the privilege! Anytime it gets too depressing I remember this and go cheer myself up by watching a YouTube video of someone attacking the management of YouTube, or reading tweets by someone with 200,000 followers who's blatantly taunting the moderators. As tools for remaking society they aren't the worst, but they are far inferior to the tools leftist dictators enjoyed even just a few decades ago (e.g. state TV and newspaper monopolies).
The argument about the scale of state intervention vs previous eras is one I'll have to think about. Yes, medieval peasants didn't have to worry about health and safety regulators demanding they nail a permit to their wall. Granted. But that same peasant DID have to worry about the local baron, warlord or king suddenly riding through town and conscripting them into an army and sending them on a 500 mile hike, at the end of which they'd fight for five minutes to reclaim the "honor" of their crappy corrupt ruler before someone less exhausted rammed a giant spike through their arsehole. Or even if they escaped conscription they'd have to deal with the consequent hyperinflation when the king debased everyone's coins to pay for said war. It's still preferable to deal with the modern state's "HR department from hell" tendencies than that.
Good points, and I really enjoyed that bit about empire. I hadn't heard that there were EU leaders trying to start their own mini-empire. That's... interesting.
I think you are right in some sense about the incompetence of those taking over institutions, and the way they kind of flail around in their control. As far as tyrants go, YouTube et al. are not exactly in the same league as the Chinese Social Scoring system. Then again, I am not sure they have to be to do a lot of damage to people and society.
Worse though are the institutions that either have the actual use of force at their disposal (government) or that are fairly unique in their operation (e.g. the university system [which is, due to regulation, pretty close to a branch of government]). Right in the middle are institutions like the public schools that are both government and private but regulated to hell and breakfast to keep competition out.
I think what should be worrying people who don't want force and coercion to become the basis of society is just how much people are ok with force. The scary thing to me is that people fight about what flavor of leftism is preferred, just under the assumption that we all need to be told what to do and how to live by someone. So we fight about whether Democrats or Republicans get to be the ones ruling, and not whether we should be ruled at all. When people can say with a straight face that speech is violence and we are told to take them seriously, then it starts to look like bad times ahead.
Getting into your essay on empires, I think we sort of accidentally got back into the age of empires through population growth and more centralized government. We have elected rulers, or more accurately perhaps unelected but appointed bureaucratic rulers, but the rule is increasingly close to absolute within their realms.
The population thing I think is trickier to see, but super important. We often think of big empires or countries being big because they cover a lot of geographic area, but I think that what matters is the number of people in that area. Especially after the telegraph and railroad conquered distance.
Before then, distance meant you had lots of smaller groups of people who didn't interact much and so had different cultures and such, essentially tiny nations. Distance did a lot to define population and culture. If you wanted to conquer a lot of people you had to conquer a lot of area, then deal with the problem of all those nations under one rule. Empire problems, am I right?
Now we have orders of magnitude more people crammed into the same areas, all connected into a pooling of cultures through communication and rapid travel, and fragmenting into their social groups. Distance, the size of your empire, no longer determines how many different cultures and nations of people you have, because a city with 8.5 million people is going to have just about as many cultural divisions as a widely dispersed state with 8.5 million people.
At root, I suppose what I am arguing is that the difficulties of ruling scale with both population and distance. In the modern world distance is pretty much dead, and so the USA with 350 million people faces the problems of empire just as much as the Roman empire with 65 million people did in 200 AD. (I think that is what I am arguing... I am writing this off the top of my head.)
Now, the problems of keeping the empire together seem to rest on everyone wanting to leave because they are not getting the society, specifically governance, they want. So little bits keep wanting to split off and become self governing. The response of the rulers of the empire always seems to boil down to "NOPE! More control and repression from me until you learn to like it!" More centralization, more aggressive control as things get more and more tenuous. Then there is a bit of a breather and a leader decides "Ok, let's soften up a little bit", then the whole thing collapses. Or there is a war, it does not go well, and then the whole thing collapses.
Now, arguably, the better answer to the problems of empire would seem to be softening up at the beginning. More localized governance, very light handed federal authority, etc. A bit closer to what the early US was, which, despite a lowish population, was actually a very large "empire minus the emperor" in that it was a grouping of states under a central authority. This way there is a much greater likelihood that people can get the governance they want by moving between areas etc. and so remain under consensual legal system instead of feeling forced into a society they hate.
When it comes to conscription, it is probably worth noting that the draft was only ended 50 years ago, and young men still need to sign up for the "selective service." As the late and much beloved Walter Williams put it in class "If someone from the government were come up to me and say "Walter, we aren't going to bring back slavery... but we'd like you to register, just in case," I'd be a bit suspicious." I personally would expect that if the US gets into a serious shooting war with China, or maybe even Russia, the draft will come back as needed.
Still, it really was a remarkable thing to see Milton Friedman on TV responding to the accusation that he wanted an army of mercenaries with "It is preferable to an army of slaves" and then pow, shortly thereafter seeing the draft ended. So yea, when I look to the future I am pessimistic, but when I look to the past I am optimistic about the future of freedom. I just really wish people would focus on why freedom itself is so important instead of arguing over which flavor of ruler is better than freedom.
It may help to know that I'm arguing from a British perspective. There's no selective service registration or equivalent in the UK. Some European countries do have drafts even outside of wartime, ostensibly so the whole population is trained in defense (that seems OK - accidents during military training are very rare). Obviously, if there was another WW2 scale event then the draft would come back. But the UK hasn't had it since then, partly because military commanders hate it. They don't want to deal with badly motivated and untrained volunteers when they could be working with professionally trained, motivated soldiers. Thus, all the "honour wars" like Afghanistan, Iraq, Falklands etc have been done with relatively small volunteer armies.
W.R.T. centralization vs decentralization of control. Again, the UK provides a hopeful counterpoint but also thought provoking nuance. The UK has decentralized constitutionally in two very major ways in the past 30 years or so:
1. Leaving the EU
2. Devolution of Scotland and Wales
So this is an example where the response of the ruling empire wasn't "nope" (well, the EU really wanted to say "nope" but as it's only a half-empire wasn't strong enough to stop it).
Interestingly, the conservatives were where support for Brexit was found but they're also mostly apathetic or outright against devolution, and vice-versa for the left. This can be explained better through the prism of raw power than ideology - Brexit empowered the government in London, where conservatives typically run things, whereas devolution dis-empowered the government in London and empowered it in Scotland and Wales where historically the left dominate.
The real-world experience of British devolution poses many complex questions. It is by no means a clear win for several reasons:
1. As more power was devolved to Scotland it legitimized and empowered the Scottish National Party, which is a party cut out of purely nationalist cloth and riven with anti-English racism. It isn't widely recognized as such of course, because it's racism against whites, but the tendency to blame absolutely everything on the English (for voting non-left, you see) is quite clear when you study this movement.
The SNP's political strategy is thus ludicrously simple: tell the Scots that because they're lefties they're better than the rest of the country and thus require full independence, not just a state-like federal approach. The demand for total independence totally dominates Scottish politics even though the SNP doesn't even fully use the powers they've already been devolved, and even though their policy is to leave the UK then immediately apply to re-join the EU, a logically incoherent approach because the EU is the antithesis of national independence.
Indeed if you try to view the SNP as a party genuinely in favour of decentralization and independence you will fail because its actions are pretty universally against that. Their claimed desire for independence falls apart the moment it's inspected, which is one reason they lost the indyref - pressed for actual detail about how independence would work and what decisions they'd make, they found themselves having to make it all up on the spot because they'd never bothered to lay any intellectual groundwork for what an independent Scottish state would do differently to the rest of the UK. That hasn't changed, they're still devoid of concrete policy ideas.
2. One of the powers the SNP doesn't have is border control, because that would require building a massive new Hadrian's Wall across the middle of the UK. A major consequence of lacking borders is that it's harder for bad Scottish social policies to "fail" electorally, because it's so easy for people to simply move away. This means that despite poor rankings against other countries in many important metrics like education, drug abuse etc, the SNP does not lose electoral support, and the resulting failures end up being externalized onto the whole country via a stream of economic 'refugees'.
3. A justification for Scottish devolution/independence is that it's not fair for them to hardly ever get the left wing governments they want. The logical consequence of full devolution or independence is that the rest of the UK would suddenly have a hostile and (in my view) semi-delusional hard-left country on its border, filled with people who hate the English and have been steeped for decades in a culture in which any failure is somehow their neighbour's fault. The diplomatic and political consequences of this are obvious. No country wants to have a hostile state on its borders, even though that's going to frequently be the outcome of regions becoming more politically independent.
A somewhat related issue is the problem of the border in Northern Ireland, where erecting a "hard" border will supposedly cause terrorists to go on the rampage again, and the EU cynically uses this as a way to both create maximum pain for the UK (by refusing any form of compromise or technology/risk based approach), and scare off everyone else from trying to go independent again. One hostile neighbour state is enough but with the EU you could argue that England has two!
You could say that the problems here come from not reducing the amount of control, just moving around who gets to have it. Granted. However that runs into a democratic deficit problem. There is no appetite for less government control in places like Scotland or France. They are welfare states. Scotland relies on massive subsidies from the rest of the UK, effectively a form of bribe paid by the conservative party because one of the party's founding principles is unionism (in fact its full name is the Conservative and Unionist Party).
Watching all this has made me much more cautious about blithely recommending greater local autonomy as a fix for political issues, even though that's a basic principle of libertarianism and I don't support the alternative either, hence, my positive writings about Brexit on my blog. There are a whole host of practical issues to consider as regions are given more autonomy, everything from how borders are enforced to whether the resulting regions will simply go on a left-wing bender. And it seems difficult to argue for the creation of a highly centralized libertarian state. Such a thing sounds almost like a contradiction in terms.
It was very kindly pointed out to me that I once again misattributed "Illiberal Reformers" to Leonard Reed (famous tap dancer) instead of Thomas Leonard. Updated the essay to correct that.
This is not the first time I have done this. For some reason my brain has decided the Leonard Reed, or perhaps Leonard Read the author of the fabulous "I, Pencil," is the author of "Illiberal Reformers," and no matter how many times I am corrected it just resets and refuses to update.
So, sorry Thomas Leonard. I love your book and keep trying to promote it, but I am really bad at names.
Does the graph include MDs and JDs in their measure of doctoral degrees? This graph also seems to include only the degrees awarded in a single year, not the stock of total doctoral degree holders in the US.
Good question. The graph includes MDs explicitly, and should include JDs as that is a doctorate as well. And yes, it is the number of degrees earned by field, so new ones not the stock. I can see why that would be a bit confusing.
I find your ideas intriguing and wish to subscribe to your newsletter. Oh, wait. I already did.
I agree with absolutely everything you've written here and thus will now attack it. The problem with this theory is that it doesn't seem to have any tie to our current times or conditions, implying that it's a universal force of human nature. And yet whilst the current years may feel dominated by leftism, in the broad sweep of history leftism (using your definition) has been in near continuous retreat.
2000 years ago societies were run by kings and priest-kings, who claimed a near divine right to rule. Their 'expertise' in ruling was seen as so profound that King Canute famously tried to drag his own court slightly more to the right by showing them he could not, in fact, turn back the tide.
1000 years ago societies were run by the Church, which we can view as a vast hierarchy of 'experts' on all things moral, spiritual and the very nature of goodness itself.
100 years ago there were some democracies, but most of the world was run by empires. Although notionally run by emperors, or Parliament in the case of the British Empire, most empires were in reality run by their bureaucracy. Bureaucrats claimed no divine right to rule, instead deriving their legitimacy from their appointment by the state, their connections, networks, a claimed efficiency at their tasks and so on. The world was full of people who thought communism was a good idea in the abstract, if only its pesky habit of turning into a dictatorship could somehow be tamed. By this point politically powerful priests and kings were an anachronism. The USSR was busy trying to make their entire economy be run by committees of bureaucrats, and western leftists were starting to talk up how the revolutionary power of new computing machines would allow planned economies to beat out free markets.
By 10 years ago the whole notion of empires was more or less dead. The world had seen a large increase in the number of democracies, especially after World War 1 and 2 when the remaining empires almost all collapsed. People now unironically talk about the "American Empire" even though the USA is not an empire by any normal definition, simply because otherwise the word would fall into dis-use. The concept of the 'efficient bureaucrat' cooly using maths and machines to plan economies is now a joke. The fall of the USSR killed off the idea of Soviet economic planning, and the rise of the tech industry - created entirely by nobodies in hoodies who started out life with nothing more than a computer and pizza on autodial - killed off the credibility of "class warfare" or fixed worker/capitalist distinctions. The left has now totally abandoned classical Marxist/Leninist ideas of planned economies, class warfare etc in favour of a re-spin of the same concepts oriented around race and class.
So overall, whilst your analysis feels correct and relevant to our current era, "leftists control everyone else because they are attracted by power" seems incomplete.
Why is this? I think there are two countervailing forces.
1. Leftist domination certainly HAS been true for much of history, and of course sometimes leftists become too powerful in a relatively free society and everything goes to shit for a generation or two, but over and over this ends with the credibility of rule-by-experts taking a massive beating. The left then have to respin their ideas with new terminology and a new surface appearance. Libertarian ideas on the other hand are relatively static, because there haven't been any major world events that would seriously challenge their beliefs in the same way leftism was challenged.
2. Because of their desire to grab hold of power and use it to remake society, leftists are always focused pre-existing power centres. They focus on controlling the present or sometimes the past, but they never focus on creating the future. The closest thing the left had to a visionary was Marx and his writing is a disaster zone: a massive rats nest of staggeringly vague ideas, half finished books with chapters in no coherent order, outright fraudulent citations and made up quotes, a habit of citing problems in industrial Britain as unfixable by citing government reports that had led directly to them already being fixed, and of course the famous near total absence of detail on what his post-revolutionary vision actually was.
Free market libertarianism on the other hand has so many future-building visionaries amongst it, even living today, that it's pointless to even try and enumerate them. Elon Musk is probably the example most people would think of, but go look at the foundations of any tech firm and you'll find strongly libertarian roots: capitalism, free markets, freedom of speech and information, etc. It's hard to see this in 2021 because once the power these tech firms had acquired became clear the left bent itself to capturing them as they try to capture any powerful institution, but the origins are very clear. Bill Gates wanted to put a powerful information device on "every desk". Not the desks of experts: every desk. Amazon built a powerful infrastructure and then flung it open to every other firm, including his own competitors. Google was founded with a mission to "make the world's information universally accessible and useful". Note: universally accessible. Google was not built as a research tool for an "expert" elite, it was open to all, without even needing to register. Twitter once proclaimed itself as the "free speech wing of the free speech party". YouTube beat Google Video because it bet on user generated content. Bitcoin was created by an anonymous programmer who changed the world and then vanished. And so on.
You can repeat this exercise for much of the last few hundred years of history, I believe. The people fundamentally remaking the world were not the ones spending all their time trying to capture existing institutions and then fighting internal wars to maintain control. The people who really changed things were the ones who imagined a less leftist future and then built it from scratch. Thus the "leftism = education = leftism" loop gets broken.
> a re-spin of the same concepts oriented around race and class.
Sorry, that should say "oriented around race and gender", of course. I wish Substack had an edit button.
Awesome comment, thank you! And glad you are here!
I would push back on leftism being in retreat all through history. I think that while the notional power of the state (or those who would rule since the state is a more modern idea) was far more universal in the past, the actual range and scope of the ruling class' ability to force people to their will has increased steadily, both in terms of what is acceptable and possible. (I started following your timeline, but whew... it got off track and long as I just brain dumped history. I will try to be more concise.)
Through much of history there was a whole lot of frontier, in the sense of "land the government is not really in control of." In modern African states it is usually the case that the government controls the capital city and maybe another large one, but outside of that it is pretty much just local rule by villages who pay tribute to the central government. Historically this was pretty much the norm everywhere, with the central government relying on local lords who either paid tribute to the king or were appointed by him. Even if the king's army of supporters was large enough to defeat every lordling with a town or village individually, keeping the entire realm under heel was tricky.
At the level of the individual just living his life, to use my favorite ancient Chinese proverb: Heaven is high, and the emperor is far away. The ability of those in power to really run his life from the center was pretty limited, as even keeping track of how many people there were in an area was a neat trick. Of course there were many local power centers that could be a giant pain (all in the name of the greater good!) but most central governments didn't do a lot past fight wars, build some very basic infrastructure and enjoy being wealthy.
I totally agree with your overall notion that religion and government apparatuses were the locus for power grabbing, and so were guilds and other groups. They just were not so good at it.
As time goes on we see an explosion of the number of people employed by the central state, as both standing armies and administrators employed directly by the central power. The first census in Europe is done in the late 1700's in Prussia as I recall, and the next wasn't until the 1800's; without those governments had trouble tracking who was even under their thumb. Now we have huge numbers of administrators in every modern government, and most developed nations spend over 30% of GDP on government.
The reasoning behind ruling others changed a good bit too. At least one good thing pre-moderns had going for them was they didn't generally believe the world or humanity was perfectible. You had some minor cults here and there that went in on that, but in general most people understood you weren't going to "fix" the world or people no matter what, so the best you could do was knock off the worst edges and otherwise do the best you could with an inherently difficult world. Most rulers didn't even bother claiming that what they did was for the good of the people; a good ruler was one who didn't step on your neck too hard, not one who told you about the benefits of pedi-chiropractic therapy while doing it.
The Enlightenment era, or for preference the Scottish Enlightenment era, seems to be one of the few times that not only was the power of the state checked, but that sentiments against even using power became ascendant. Previously in history the power of the state seemed to be kept in check largely by overreach and the resultant collapse of the central authority. The 1700's-1850's seemed to see quite a bit of central powers peacefully releasing power and at least giving lip service to individual rights and freedoms in an official capacity. (Note: this is focused more on the large scale, international level. Lots of places had smaller scale, sub-national recognition of rights and freedoms. Britain and Iceland had two particularly interesting systems, see "Law's Order" by David Friedman. In fact, see that book anyway, it is a great read.)
Then came the dark times, heralded by the rise of the Sith... er... socialists.
I think the modern "rule of experts" model can be pretty directly traced back to the industrial revolution and the explosion of engineering and scientific advances. There really was a staggering difference between doing things in the old way and the new ways. People with some special knowledge really could do amazing things, and the speed of improvement was staggering. A graph of world GDP per capita over time shows basically flat growth for 10,000 years, then a sudden upwards trajectory that continue to this day. All the promises of priests and wizards of old were suddenly seemingly within reach of the modern miracle workers.
Socialism itself required these, as while communal living had been done (sometimes successfully!) at a smaller scale throughout history, it took large scale manufacturing organizations and productivity gains to make it seem possible on the large scale.
Whereas before even the best administrators and rulers could only hope to not mess things up too badly, now that hitherto unknown wealth and prosperity, not to mention health and medicine, were available if you just did things the right way, it seemed like the best thing to do was give the experts power to make everyone else do things the right way. Sometimes this actually kind of worked out, and sometimes it went horribly wrong, but there it was. And so great was the tide of innovation and growth that even if you did it pretty badly, see France and Russia, once people stopped killing each other you were still pretty far ahead of where you were back in the old days.
By the early 1900's those who want power were really grabbing onto this and using it to grasp previously unknown amounts of control over their fellows. For the USA, see "Illiberal Reformers", the New Deal, etc. For Europe, see "1984" or "Animal Farm". Complete control seemed possible, and pretty likely to happen.
Then came WW2 and... well, if you ever need to come up with a reason why Hitler was good for humanity, making fascism and national socialism really, really unpopular was probably it. Remember that fascism was considered the way to go, popular in all western and many eastern nations before WW2, with Hitler and Mussolini being seen as forward thinking leaders to be admired by many in government and society. So, whew... thanks Hitler for being so horrible in such a short span of time that you got people off of that jag in a hurry.
(If only people had seen more of what Stalin and Mao were up to in Russia and China, we might have been spared more communism as well.)
So post WW2 might have been the second big retreat for the left in the west since the 1700's that didn't involve empires collapsing.
Then things got worse, then a little better in the US and UK, but in general there seems to be an ever tightening noose of a bit more control, a bit more safety, a bit more "do things my way or get the fuck out, scum". The last 10 years or so have been driving towards a nadir, definitely.
So I don't think the left (defined as the modern term for those who wish to exercise power over others' lives) has necessarily been in retreat over all of history. Rather I think there has been a sort of ebb and flow of of power and freedom within societies, with one being ascendent over the other in certain time and places more or less. The technological changes of the past 400 years have in some times made freedom more accessible, and in other times less, often for the same tech. See Amazon, Google, YouTube, Microsoft, etc. once the creators got replaced by those who want to use those tools for their own ends of remaking society as they see fit.
I absolutely agree, however, that the anti-power people are the ones who actually drive society forward and grow the possibilities, whereas the left tends to simply take the possibilities that currently are realized and prevent new ones that would threaten their power. I think for the US, breaking the state hold on schooling (e.g. getting rid of the current public school system and moving to... well anything else almost) would be a big move in the right direction. I am hopeful that even disconnecting education credentials from "is well indoctrinated in the left" will go a long way towards rebalancing things. Plus not being indoctrinated against freedom, free markets, free expression and everything else would be a step in the right direction.
My worry is that the current wave of leftism in the world will break only with the collapse of the modern empires. Which I don't think have gone away so much as you think. China is definitely an empire, with many different sub-nations of people speaking different languages and generally not liking the central government much. The USA has started to push into empire territory within its own borders I would argue, as more and more functions get abrogated to the central Federal government instead of to the various states and localities, and so the rules are much less by consent than force. Likewise the EU, although the individual states there are generally not too concerned with consent, either.
With regards to the USA especially, I think the sheer population is one reason it behaves more like an empire as well; representation at all levels has not scaled with population, and so elected rulers are ever more divorced from their constituencies. Even the smaller US states today would have been really high population nations back in 1800, but New York City still just has 51 city councilors for 8.5 million people. The UK had ~10 million people in 1800, and ~650 members of Parliament, for example.
Anyway, great comment! I feel like I should make it its own post, especially since I have rewritten the "Patterns of Thought 3" post about 6 times now and it is still no closer to being published...
Sure, make it a post if you like.
Focusing in on tech firms for a second. I go back and forth on this, because I used to work at Google and joined it relatively early. So having seen what it was, and what it has become, is a very thought provoking thing. Obviously the current state of it is depressing. YouTube in particular is a disaster zone and a great example of why you have to be so careful with hiring, even in the early days. Wojcicki is nothing like what a typical Googler was back in the day. Her only merit appears to have been being related to Sergey's wife. She was already beaten by the YouTube guys once when they bet on the world, instead of on hierarchical so-called elite institutions, but she learned nothing from that failure and is now trying to reimplement the same thing with "authoritative" content.
So that's the pessimistic view. On the other hand, how successful is the left at this kind of takeover, really? Yes, with incredibly weak leadership at the top, they are busy running wild and smashing up the china shop. But on a very fundamental level they are playing a game where the rules were set by other people, who didn't agree with their worldview at all. So YouTube is constantly trying to algorithmically shut down anyone who disagrees with 'experts' and it's a total shitshow:
• They are constantly accidentally censoring fellow leftists because their censorship is incompetent. See the latest article by Tabbi for an example of this.
• Even with AI assistance there is an absolute ton of content that they either miss, or which for whatever random reason doesn't trigger their thresholds for removal and yet is entirely destructive to their narrative.
YouTube is constantly playing host to videos attacking experts and spreading anti-elite messages of various kinds. Likewise for web search, content ads, gmail etc. They probably manage to squash the most popular 5% of such videos and whenever they do it triggers attention and outrage, because everyone knows that this is a deep violation of the site's original founding principles. Compare to e.g. Netflix refusing to host a movie and nobody notices or cares, because Netflix has never pretended to be anything other than a source of cheap mass entertainment.
So whilst libertarians feel great outrage at the leftist takeover of institutions, let's try and have some sympathy ;) Their victories are rather pyrrhic: they end up running services that are default open, default libertarian, in which that cannot be changed, and are thus constantly being exploited by their ideological enemies, who don't even pay for the privilege! Anytime it gets too depressing I remember this and go cheer myself up by watching a YouTube video of someone attacking the management of YouTube, or reading tweets by someone with 200,000 followers who's blatantly taunting the moderators. As tools for remaking society they aren't the worst, but they are far inferior to the tools leftist dictators enjoyed even just a few decades ago (e.g. state TV and newspaper monopolies).
W.R.T. empires, this is really a definitional thing and I've written about it in detail before especially re: the EU. https://blog.plan99.net/the-empire-strikes-back-facceb543a3
The argument about the scale of state intervention vs previous eras is one I'll have to think about. Yes, medieval peasants didn't have to worry about health and safety regulators demanding they nail a permit to their wall. Granted. But that same peasant DID have to worry about the local baron, warlord or king suddenly riding through town and conscripting them into an army and sending them on a 500 mile hike, at the end of which they'd fight for five minutes to reclaim the "honor" of their crappy corrupt ruler before someone less exhausted rammed a giant spike through their arsehole. Or even if they escaped conscription they'd have to deal with the consequent hyperinflation when the king debased everyone's coins to pay for said war. It's still preferable to deal with the modern state's "HR department from hell" tendencies than that.
Good points, and I really enjoyed that bit about empire. I hadn't heard that there were EU leaders trying to start their own mini-empire. That's... interesting.
I think you are right in some sense about the incompetence of those taking over institutions, and the way they kind of flail around in their control. As far as tyrants go, YouTube et al. are not exactly in the same league as the Chinese Social Scoring system. Then again, I am not sure they have to be to do a lot of damage to people and society.
Worse though are the institutions that either have the actual use of force at their disposal (government) or that are fairly unique in their operation (e.g. the university system [which is, due to regulation, pretty close to a branch of government]). Right in the middle are institutions like the public schools that are both government and private but regulated to hell and breakfast to keep competition out.
I think what should be worrying people who don't want force and coercion to become the basis of society is just how much people are ok with force. The scary thing to me is that people fight about what flavor of leftism is preferred, just under the assumption that we all need to be told what to do and how to live by someone. So we fight about whether Democrats or Republicans get to be the ones ruling, and not whether we should be ruled at all. When people can say with a straight face that speech is violence and we are told to take them seriously, then it starts to look like bad times ahead.
Getting into your essay on empires, I think we sort of accidentally got back into the age of empires through population growth and more centralized government. We have elected rulers, or more accurately perhaps unelected but appointed bureaucratic rulers, but the rule is increasingly close to absolute within their realms.
The population thing I think is trickier to see, but super important. We often think of big empires or countries being big because they cover a lot of geographic area, but I think that what matters is the number of people in that area. Especially after the telegraph and railroad conquered distance.
Before then, distance meant you had lots of smaller groups of people who didn't interact much and so had different cultures and such, essentially tiny nations. Distance did a lot to define population and culture. If you wanted to conquer a lot of people you had to conquer a lot of area, then deal with the problem of all those nations under one rule. Empire problems, am I right?
Now we have orders of magnitude more people crammed into the same areas, all connected into a pooling of cultures through communication and rapid travel, and fragmenting into their social groups. Distance, the size of your empire, no longer determines how many different cultures and nations of people you have, because a city with 8.5 million people is going to have just about as many cultural divisions as a widely dispersed state with 8.5 million people.
At root, I suppose what I am arguing is that the difficulties of ruling scale with both population and distance. In the modern world distance is pretty much dead, and so the USA with 350 million people faces the problems of empire just as much as the Roman empire with 65 million people did in 200 AD. (I think that is what I am arguing... I am writing this off the top of my head.)
Now, the problems of keeping the empire together seem to rest on everyone wanting to leave because they are not getting the society, specifically governance, they want. So little bits keep wanting to split off and become self governing. The response of the rulers of the empire always seems to boil down to "NOPE! More control and repression from me until you learn to like it!" More centralization, more aggressive control as things get more and more tenuous. Then there is a bit of a breather and a leader decides "Ok, let's soften up a little bit", then the whole thing collapses. Or there is a war, it does not go well, and then the whole thing collapses.
Now, arguably, the better answer to the problems of empire would seem to be softening up at the beginning. More localized governance, very light handed federal authority, etc. A bit closer to what the early US was, which, despite a lowish population, was actually a very large "empire minus the emperor" in that it was a grouping of states under a central authority. This way there is a much greater likelihood that people can get the governance they want by moving between areas etc. and so remain under consensual legal system instead of feeling forced into a society they hate.
When it comes to conscription, it is probably worth noting that the draft was only ended 50 years ago, and young men still need to sign up for the "selective service." As the late and much beloved Walter Williams put it in class "If someone from the government were come up to me and say "Walter, we aren't going to bring back slavery... but we'd like you to register, just in case," I'd be a bit suspicious." I personally would expect that if the US gets into a serious shooting war with China, or maybe even Russia, the draft will come back as needed.
Still, it really was a remarkable thing to see Milton Friedman on TV responding to the accusation that he wanted an army of mercenaries with "It is preferable to an army of slaves" and then pow, shortly thereafter seeing the draft ended. So yea, when I look to the future I am pessimistic, but when I look to the past I am optimistic about the future of freedom. I just really wish people would focus on why freedom itself is so important instead of arguing over which flavor of ruler is better than freedom.
It may help to know that I'm arguing from a British perspective. There's no selective service registration or equivalent in the UK. Some European countries do have drafts even outside of wartime, ostensibly so the whole population is trained in defense (that seems OK - accidents during military training are very rare). Obviously, if there was another WW2 scale event then the draft would come back. But the UK hasn't had it since then, partly because military commanders hate it. They don't want to deal with badly motivated and untrained volunteers when they could be working with professionally trained, motivated soldiers. Thus, all the "honour wars" like Afghanistan, Iraq, Falklands etc have been done with relatively small volunteer armies.
W.R.T. centralization vs decentralization of control. Again, the UK provides a hopeful counterpoint but also thought provoking nuance. The UK has decentralized constitutionally in two very major ways in the past 30 years or so:
1. Leaving the EU
2. Devolution of Scotland and Wales
So this is an example where the response of the ruling empire wasn't "nope" (well, the EU really wanted to say "nope" but as it's only a half-empire wasn't strong enough to stop it).
Interestingly, the conservatives were where support for Brexit was found but they're also mostly apathetic or outright against devolution, and vice-versa for the left. This can be explained better through the prism of raw power than ideology - Brexit empowered the government in London, where conservatives typically run things, whereas devolution dis-empowered the government in London and empowered it in Scotland and Wales where historically the left dominate.
The real-world experience of British devolution poses many complex questions. It is by no means a clear win for several reasons:
1. As more power was devolved to Scotland it legitimized and empowered the Scottish National Party, which is a party cut out of purely nationalist cloth and riven with anti-English racism. It isn't widely recognized as such of course, because it's racism against whites, but the tendency to blame absolutely everything on the English (for voting non-left, you see) is quite clear when you study this movement.
The SNP's political strategy is thus ludicrously simple: tell the Scots that because they're lefties they're better than the rest of the country and thus require full independence, not just a state-like federal approach. The demand for total independence totally dominates Scottish politics even though the SNP doesn't even fully use the powers they've already been devolved, and even though their policy is to leave the UK then immediately apply to re-join the EU, a logically incoherent approach because the EU is the antithesis of national independence.
Indeed if you try to view the SNP as a party genuinely in favour of decentralization and independence you will fail because its actions are pretty universally against that. Their claimed desire for independence falls apart the moment it's inspected, which is one reason they lost the indyref - pressed for actual detail about how independence would work and what decisions they'd make, they found themselves having to make it all up on the spot because they'd never bothered to lay any intellectual groundwork for what an independent Scottish state would do differently to the rest of the UK. That hasn't changed, they're still devoid of concrete policy ideas.
2. One of the powers the SNP doesn't have is border control, because that would require building a massive new Hadrian's Wall across the middle of the UK. A major consequence of lacking borders is that it's harder for bad Scottish social policies to "fail" electorally, because it's so easy for people to simply move away. This means that despite poor rankings against other countries in many important metrics like education, drug abuse etc, the SNP does not lose electoral support, and the resulting failures end up being externalized onto the whole country via a stream of economic 'refugees'.
3. A justification for Scottish devolution/independence is that it's not fair for them to hardly ever get the left wing governments they want. The logical consequence of full devolution or independence is that the rest of the UK would suddenly have a hostile and (in my view) semi-delusional hard-left country on its border, filled with people who hate the English and have been steeped for decades in a culture in which any failure is somehow their neighbour's fault. The diplomatic and political consequences of this are obvious. No country wants to have a hostile state on its borders, even though that's going to frequently be the outcome of regions becoming more politically independent.
A somewhat related issue is the problem of the border in Northern Ireland, where erecting a "hard" border will supposedly cause terrorists to go on the rampage again, and the EU cynically uses this as a way to both create maximum pain for the UK (by refusing any form of compromise or technology/risk based approach), and scare off everyone else from trying to go independent again. One hostile neighbour state is enough but with the EU you could argue that England has two!
You could say that the problems here come from not reducing the amount of control, just moving around who gets to have it. Granted. However that runs into a democratic deficit problem. There is no appetite for less government control in places like Scotland or France. They are welfare states. Scotland relies on massive subsidies from the rest of the UK, effectively a form of bribe paid by the conservative party because one of the party's founding principles is unionism (in fact its full name is the Conservative and Unionist Party).
Watching all this has made me much more cautious about blithely recommending greater local autonomy as a fix for political issues, even though that's a basic principle of libertarianism and I don't support the alternative either, hence, my positive writings about Brexit on my blog. There are a whole host of practical issues to consider as regions are given more autonomy, everything from how borders are enforced to whether the resulting regions will simply go on a left-wing bender. And it seems difficult to argue for the creation of a highly centralized libertarian state. Such a thing sounds almost like a contradiction in terms.
It was very kindly pointed out to me that I once again misattributed "Illiberal Reformers" to Leonard Reed (famous tap dancer) instead of Thomas Leonard. Updated the essay to correct that.
This is not the first time I have done this. For some reason my brain has decided the Leonard Reed, or perhaps Leonard Read the author of the fabulous "I, Pencil," is the author of "Illiberal Reformers," and no matter how many times I am corrected it just resets and refuses to update.
So, sorry Thomas Leonard. I love your book and keep trying to promote it, but I am really bad at names.
Does the graph include MDs and JDs in their measure of doctoral degrees? This graph also seems to include only the degrees awarded in a single year, not the stock of total doctoral degree holders in the US.
Good question. The graph includes MDs explicitly, and should include JDs as that is a doctorate as well. And yes, it is the number of degrees earned by field, so new ones not the stock. I can see why that would be a bit confusing.