By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, December 04,
2023
It was really the late 1990s when we started to see the
emergence of the Novelty Cons—the people who figured out that there was a
pretty good career path in Republican politics and conservative media that
consisted simply of being something other than white and male while also being
a conservative, or at least able to do a passable impersonation of a
conservative. Of course, there had long been conservative women of several
different stripes (Jeane Kirkpatrick, Phyllis Schlafly) and black conservatives
(Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas), gay conservatives (a long tradition from Noël
Coward to Marvin Liebman to a lot of people whose old friends still aren’t
ready to hear about it), etc., but those were accomplished people with real
portfolios. Nobody ever put Jeane Kirkpatrick on the cover of a book in a
little black cocktail dress—nobody ever thought to, because readers reading a
Jeane Kirkpatrick book knew why they were reading it.
No, the Novelty Con offers something else: “I’m a
college-educated white woman/black man/gay man/Latina/[some combination of the
previous] under 40, and I am ready to repeat today’s GOP talking points!” That
is the entire value proposition, but it works. Why listen to the Novelty Con?
Why put the Novelty Con on television or on a stage?
For the novelty, of course.
Republicans have long been starved for novelty. From its
founding in the Little White Schoolhouse in 1854 until 2016, the Republican
Party was fundamentally the same thing the whole time: the party of heartland
businessmen’s conservatism. In the 19th century, it was a conservative
anti-slavery party but not an abolitionist party until it was forced; in the
20th century, it was a free-trade and free-markets party in theory but one that
made allowances for a considerable amount of corporatism when that served
Midwestern business interests or, later in its history, agricultural interests.
It was a party that welcomed a certain kind of right-wing populist-nationalist,
but the really excitable ones still had to vote for Democrats (George Wallace)
or independents (Ross Perot). It was a party for socially conservative white
evangelicals, but they were outnumbered 3-to-1 by old-fashioned Protestants and
Chamber of Commerce men who grew uneasy in church any time hands were raised
above handshake level. It was a boring white-guy party in a time when white
guys mostly were content to be boring. A certain kind of celebrity might run in
Republican circles—Bob Hope, Sonny Bono, and other people with streets named
after them in Palm Springs—but Richard Nixon was right: The GOP wasn’t the
party of mink stoles but the party of cloth coats and the middle-class white
people who wore them.
That wasn’t going to last forever, of course. Ruy
Teixeira and John Judis may have got out over their skis in The
Emerging Democratic Majority (Teixeira has been very
frank in his reassessment of his earlier assumptions), but the
changing electorate meant that the GOP was going to have to change, too. And,
more to the point of the Republicans’ immediate electoral prospects, being seen
as a white-man’s party hurt the GOP not only with non-white voters but with the
much more numerous white voters, many of whom were not very interested in
associating themselves with a party, formerly Lincoln’s, that had acquired a
whiff of old-fashioned Archie Bunker racism. The Novelty Cons helped to fill a
demand in the political marketplace. It would not be accurate or fair to call
(most of) them tokens, but what they were—and, in many cases,
are—is the political equivalent of human shields: “Go call Ronna Romney McDaniel
a sexist, go call Michael Steele a racist, go tell Ben Carson how full of white
privilege his life has been,” etc.
There is a kind of devolutionary force at work among the
Novelty Cons. Ann Coulter may play a crazy person on television, but she is
smart and did real work as a real lawyer before she started doing … whatever it
is she does now. Ben Carson is a brain surgeon. Michael Steele didn’t just
wander in off the street and get made head of the Republican National
Committee.
George Santos, on the other hand, is pretty much a guy
who wandered in off the street into the House of Representatives, saying,
“Let’s put on a show!” Marjorie Taylor Greene is a QAnon kook who wandered in
off Facebook. Lauren Boebert is a general-purpose incompetent who wandered in
after accidentally
poisoning people with bad pork sliders at a county fair in Colorado.
Matt Gaetz’s grandfather died
of a heart attack at the North Dakota GOP convention, being at that
time a minor public official and, apparently, a clairvoyant. This gang
represents what you might call the immaculate grift: grift liberated from the
burden of trying to carry forward a real political program or philosophy, grift
for grift’s sake, ars (of a sort) gratia pecuniae.
Putting these people into Congress is like mashing up Carmina
Burana with the Ghostbusters theme—yeah, you can do
that, there’s no law against it as far as I know, but … why?
Santos was—is?—whatever anybody needed him to be, the
ultimate Novelty Con: Gay! Jewish! (or “Jew-ish.”) Latino!
Whatever! He is the epitome of what the Republican Party stands for
(“stands for”) in 2023: the willingness to say anything, however transparently
dishonest, absurd, or self-abasing, in the hope of winning an election. He
mustered some half-formed talk-radio grunts about inflation and crime and the
like, but Santos was a pretty straightforward product: a gay Latino willing to
put an “R” next to his name, the political version of whatever the opposite of
a beard is.
That Rep. Santos finally embarrassed the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt
Gaetz, and Lauren Boebert enough to get him expelled from the House is his
only actual achievement in life. I had thought it was
impossible to embarrass these people into action, and many of them have proved
beyond embarrassment.
Our old friend Dan Bongino, who subsisted on
taxpayer-funded salaries for the entirety of his career until about three
minutes before he decided that “taxation
is theft,” was on the radio last week lambasting Republicans for voting to
expel Rep. Santos. “Politicians are tools,” Bongino insisted. Takes one to know
one, I suppose. But he isn’t alone in his despair over Rep. Santos’ ejection
from the House. Talk radio and the vast sewer that is social media are full of
the same angst and wailing. And the majority of Republicans voted to keep
Santos in the House.
The Republican Party used to be in the virtue business.
Literally, Bill Bennett made a heap of money from his virtue empire before
signing up as an apologist for serial adulterer/pathological liar/pornographer
Donald Trump, who was very famous for … not for his virtue.
Now, the Republican Party is in the sneering-at-virtue business, lambasting
figures such as Mitt Romney for qualities that we are now supposed to regard as
the opposite of real virtues: dignity, honor, gentlemanliness. The Republican
Party—which used to actually be something of a republican party—has decided
that what this country needs isn’t citizens but content-consumers, that the
path to power (if that is what they actually want) is not policy but
entertainment. In the age of social media, one need only be right for a
moment—for one pithy putdown or quick comeback. That kind of superficial
politics inevitably leads to figures such as Santos. Like any entertainer
lacking in real talent, he simply showed himself willing to say or do anything
his audience wanted, to tell them anything they wanted to hear and to pretend
to be whatever they wanted him to be.
Political cynics are not wrong to take a generally instrumental
view of politicians, but the problem with a hollow man is that you can fill him
with anything. Does anybody think for a second that if Rep. Santos thought
embracing socialism or some other crackpot agenda would keep him in Congress
and out of the workforce that he would hesitate to do it? Santos does not
matter very much to anybody except Dan Bongino and Bowen Yang, but the
Republican Party does matter and, as terrible as it is to contemplate, the GOP
has the same problem Santos does: It has become an empty vessel into which any
kind of poison can be poured. If you believe that Donald Trump was the end of
that, then you haven’t
thought about it hard enough. Even in their current attenuated forms,
the major political parties are weapons, and letting them lurch helter-skelter
without any real guiding principles is like playing spin the bottle with a
Glock.
Rep. Santos was a source of mirth and a figure of fun.
But don’t be too sure that it’s going to be fun next time around.
Economics for English Majors
Game theory is not a method for picking up
girls. It is a way of thinking in a formal and rigorous way about strategy and
incentives, which can help us to understand everything from economic
transactions to political ones. It is a kind of science of decision-making.
The classic starting point for game theory is the
“prisoners’ dilemma.” There are different versions of it, but they all go
basically like this: Smith and Jones, accomplices in a crime, have been
arrested and are being questioned separately. The police do not have enough
evidence to convict either of them without a confession by one of them. So,
each is offered the following deal: If you confess and your partner does not,
you will walk and your partner will do the time; if you both confess, you’ll
both be convicted but will receive lighter sentences for your cooperation; a
final possibility, possibly unstated by the police, is that if both refuse to
cooperate, both will go free. The problem is that each prisoner is better off
confessing, irrespective of what his partner does.
Think of it from Smith’s point of view: If you confess
and your partner doesn’t, then you go free; if your partner confesses, then you
get a shorter sentence if you confess, too, and a longer one if you don’t. You
don’t know what your partner is going to do, but you know that he has the same
incentives you do. So, while there is an option that sets both suspects free,
that option requires a high degree of trust in the other party; absent that
trust, the most likely outcome is the one that ends with both in jail. Some
versions of the dilemma offer different sentence lengths for different
outcomes, making things even more complicated.
The prisoners’ dilemma touches on many important
socioeconomic issues: trust, the difficulty of coordinating action to produce
preferred outcomes, the problem of information being local and contingent
rather than universally accessible to optimization calculators, etc. All of
which relates to a longstanding argument—sermon? homily?—of mine: that we talk
about markets and market orders the wrong way because we think about them the
wrong way. (Not the reverse; the reverse almost never is the case, in spite of
what the clever issue “reframers” always insist.)
We think about markets as being mainly about material
resources and competition—and they are about that. But in a much more important
and profound way, markets are about organizing and distributing information for
the purposes of enabling social cooperation. Prices are a way of letting
producers know how much people actually value their
product—not whether the product is good or excellent or better
than something else, still less whether it is meaningful or morally
significant or beautiful, but, with elegant simplicity,
how much people value that product relative to all the other things for which
they might exchange their own resources.
People do care about beauty and status and lots of other
things, so markets do not have to make sense in any kind of narrowly pragmatic way. People’s preferences may be
bonkers, and markets do not have anything to say about that: They simply reveal what
those preferences are to people who might be in a position to help to satisfy
them. This is, again, a simple thing, in a way—but extraordinarily valuable. If
the prisoners in the game-theory dilemma can exchange information and make a
deal, things turn out better for them; if they cannot share information about
their preferences and what they are willing to do to secure them, then they end
up in the pokey—i.e., neither party gets what he wants even though it is
entirely possible for both parties to get what they want.
As F.A. Hayek and others of his school argued, the great
problem with central planners—and with those who would try to direct the
economy even in a less comprehensive way—is that they do not have access to
information. Everybody knows about the shortages and misallocation—and
famines—under planned economies, but economic steering does not work as well as
its advocates would like you to believe in a generally liberal economy,
either.
Pundits and partisans write and speak as though there
were obvious, no-trade-off economic policies that would produce widespread
prosperity and promote social goals such as economic equality (it is somebody’s social
goal, not mine), balance the budget, etc., if only we would put the right
clever people into the right offices and give them the power to act on their
cleverness. If that kind of thing actually worked as advertised, then we would
never have a recession or a financial crisis or problem inflation or anything
like that, because—dark whisperings about Rothschilds and such
notwithstanding—recessions and other forms of economic turmoil are not in the
interests of any political incumbent, political bloc, or political
constituency. If there were a magic formula for economic growth, stability,
rising incomes, etc., then it would be enacted, because the political
incentives for doing so would be overwhelming.
That is one of the reasons we have to tell ourselves that
the other party is run by evil saboteurs: It is the only way to keep alive the
myth of the obviously correct steering strategy. It is a little like time
travel: The best indicator that we will never invent it is the fact that we
haven’t met any time travelers from the future in which it is invented, our
time being part of the past of a future in which time travel exists. (I know
that some of our physicist friends have explanations for why this might be,
and, in a multiverse of infinitely various realities, I am sure that there are
at least a few universes in which they are entirely correct.) Economic steering
of the kind envisioned by progressive fantasists is one of those things we
almost certainly would do if we could, and the fact that we do not and have not
done it across any meaningful period of time in any meaningfully effective way
suggests very strongly that we can’t.
When libertarian-ish types say, “Markets work!” that is,
of course, an oversimplification. But if you want to address the implicit
question—compared to what?—the above is your answer: compared to a situation in
which policymakers try to steer the economy from a position of general
ignorance. Never mind political incentives, the self-interest of policymakers,
and other possible sources of distortion: In a world of economic
philosopher-kings, each of those kings still would be, in effect, a prisoner in
his own cell, with a very clear idea of his own preferred outcome and
absolutely no idea of what the guy in the next cell is going to do.
“Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.”
Words About Words
Inquiring minds want to know: “Since when has different
from become different than?” E.g., a Washington
Post headline: “Why Trump’s Georgia arraignment, trial could be
different than the others.”
First of all: It’s different from. Almost
always. Exception: “Apples are different from oranges, and
hippopotamuses are even more different than apples.”
Than is a conjunction (and sometimes a
preposition: “Smell the Glove is the album with the cover than
which there is none more black”) used in comparisons, usually with a strong
sense of degree rather than in yes/no situations: John is taller than I
am, but not Sally is pregnanter than Jane. Different is
usually a yes/no thing, and it works with from, a preposition used for many
things, including to express distinction: My opinion differs from his or My
view is different from his. So the from/than thing here mostly is a matter
of degree vs. distinction. This is mixed up way back in the Anglophone mind
with from used to express origin: From
Blackstone, we get one approach to the law; from Dershowitz, we get a different
one.
Different than has been commonly used in
English for a long time—centuries—so it isn’t exactly a newcomer. And, if you
really want to make heads spin, you could start using the British different
to.
Elsewhere
You can see my New York Post columns here, in case
you haven’t
heard enough from me about Santos et al.:
As was expected, Congress followed
through with the expulsion
of Rep. George Santos on Friday. The move raises an uncomfortable
question that is going to be with us for the foreseeable future: What should
institutions such as Congress do when “We the People” get it wrong?
The voters of New York’s 3rd Congressional
District had no reason to be surprised by the fabulous fabrications of the
Republican they sent to the House. While the New York Times and the rest of the
national media made Santos a household name after the election, local
newspaper The North Shore Leader had the scoop before
Election Day, reporting on Santos’s financial misrepresentations and comparing
him to the scheming villain of “The Talented Mr. Ripley.“
The information was out there, but
the people of the 3rd District chose not to act on it. Whether
that was a matter of civic laziness or a cynical calculation that they still
preferred the lying Republican to his Democratic opponent does not change the
fact that the people made a choice. Such choices should not be overridden
lightly.
Please subscribe
to The Dispatch if you haven’t.
In Closing
Yesterday was the first Sunday of Advent, when the
liturgical colors turn to purple, a regal color, while the readings turn to one
of the least regal figures in the Gospels, the hard-living, eccentric, and
fanatical John the Baptist, the “one crying in the wilderness”:
His raiment
of camel’s hair, and a leathern
girdle about his loins; and his
meat was locusts and wild honey.
Things ended badly for John—Herod, Salome, head on a
platter, all that—just as they ended badly for so many of Jesus’ followers:
Peter, Paul, etc. On the day after Christmas, Christians celebrate the Feast of
St. Stephen, the first martyr—it is that kind of a religion. I do not know what
John the Baptist would make of our times, when everybody is an aspiring Herod
and when Salome surely would have her own reality television show and a large
social-media following. And who would want to hear what John the Baptist has to
say?
O generation of vipers, who hath
warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bring forth therefore fruits meet
for repentance: And think not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our
father: for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up
children unto Abraham.
Hard words from a hard man in a hard world. How we got
from there to Frosty the Snowman is a tale, indeed.
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