By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, May 03, 2024
I haven’t written anything about the Kristi Noem story. Nick
Catoggio beat me to it here at The Dispatch and was pretty
exhaustive. I appreciate his reluctance to eat off my plate, as it were, by
writing about the intersection of dogs and politics, or well, dogs and anything
else. But that’s okay. And I don’t have much to add to his analysis. But I do
think the way Noem has responded to the story is a good example of why politics
is so exhausting these days.
Noem screwed up. I don’t mean she screwed up by killing
her 14-month-old dog in one of the great modern examples of victim-blaming. She
was a bad dog owner and blamed the dog for it. Nor do I mean her decision to
parlay her adrenalin boost into some goat slaughter. I mean she screwed up by
putting the story in her own book, and telling the story so badly that she shot
herself in the foot. I mean that figuratively, of course (though she should
probably avoid wearing those slippers that
look like dogs for a while, just to be safe).
Whatever her motivation for telling this story the way
she told it, it’s inconceivable she got the reaction she’d hoped for. She blew
her chances to be Trump’s running mate out of the sky like a poodle out of a
skeet launcher. She may have even hurt her chances to be a pundit on Fox News
after she leaves office.
But Noem hasn’t given up. She’s now going around blaming
the “Fake News” for her problems. “Don’t believe the #fakenews media’s twisted
spin,” she
tweeted. “I had a choice between the safety of my children and an animal
who had a history of attacking people & killing livestock. I chose my
kids.” On Hannity, she made it sound like she
killed Cujo to protect her kids. We can give her the benefit of the doubt that
there’s truth to all of this. The fact remains that she didn’t tell the story
that way in her own book. She played down the alleged threat to her
kids while hyping how happy the dog was and how bad a hunting dog Cricket was.
And, as for the poor goat, she basically threw that in because … I don’t know
why. It needed killing or something.
She had every opportunity to tell her story however she
wanted, honestly or dishonestly. She chose poorly, to the point where everyone
from the ultra MAGAs to the cast of The Five were aghast.
Rather than own it, she tried to turn it into a story about how she’s a
victim-martyr to the “media.” And, of course, Sean Hannity was all too happy to
help. He could have asked, “So, are Brit Hume and Jeanine
Pirro part of the ‘Fake News’ media?’” I mean he couldn’t ask that,
because, Hannity. But you get the point.
DeSantis’ beef with ‘beef.’
Since I started out playing clean-up to Catoggio, I’ll
keep going. Yesterday, Nick wrote about
Ron DeSantis’ decision to make it a crime to make or serve artificial meat.
Again, I don’t have a lot to add to his analysis. But there are a couple of
things I’d flesh out—organically flesh out, of course.
First, I was a little surprised that Nick didn’t connect
the dots between DeSantis’ position(s) on Disney and his position on fake meat.
(I’m only surprised because Nick is one of the great dot-connectors and
receipt-holders of our age.) When DeSantis signed a law designed to punish
social media for censorship or something, the law had a special carve out for
Disney. “Theme parks” were immune to the regulations. But, later, when Disney
(idiotically) waded into the culture war stuff on the falsely misnamed “don’t
say gay” law, DeSantis went after Disney’s special tax advantages in the state.
The details are wonky, but the relevant point is that DeSantis was for special
treatment for Disney before he was against it. He was also against ethanol
subsidies as a congressman but for
them as a presidential candidate. Where he was consistent, at least as a
presidential candidate, was talking about the evils of “corporatism.”
Unfortunately, he rarely used the word correctly. Corporatism is
an actual form of political economy with deep roots in medieval European and
Catholic thought. It’s not “rule by corporations.” That’s how he meant it when
he constantly attacked
Nikki Haley’s “warmed over corporatism.”
(Corporatism, as promulgated by the church in the 19th
century, was a “system of social organization that has at its base the grouping
of men according to the community of their natural interests and social
functions, and as true and proper organs of the state they direct and
coordinate labor and capital in matters of common interest.” The church was
trying to find a “middle way” between laissez-faire capitalism and
authoritarian socialism. But before that, the basic idea of corporatism was
that nobles, guilds, clergy, and other stakeholders, would work in coordination
to maintain the social order. The root idea of corporatism isn’t a
“corporation” like Intel or Exxon-Mobil, but “corporeal” as in “corpus
mysticum” or “corpus politicum.” The whole society working as one
body—no surprise that the economic system of fascism is corporatism.)
In his defense, I suppose, you could say DeSantis was
more consistent in his approach than I’m suggesting, given that he often
specified that his real target was the “woke
corporatism” of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing in
general and the “Magic Kingdom of Woke Corporatism” in particular. But just as
“common good” has become right-wing speak for “social justice,” “woke
corporatism” is right-wing speak for “corporatism we don’t like.”
Now, I don’t like corporatism, full stop. And I probably
agree with DeSantis on most of his criticisms of ESG and the like. But
banning—criminally banning—artificial meat is right-wing woke corporatism, in
the sense that he means it, and quite consistent with the way the popes of yore
meant it. He’s pretty honest about it. He justifies the move as a way to
protect cattle interests in the state against competition. Nick writes:
The governor himself was explicit
about the ban’s protectionist intentions. “What we’re protecting here is the
[cattle] industry against acts of man, against an ideological agenda that wants
to finger agriculture as the problem, that views things like raising cattle as
destroying our climate,” DeSantis said at
his press conference, reminding the audience that Florida has “one of the top
cattle industries in the country.”
That’s domestic protectionism, crony capitalism, and
corporatist on his terms. Culturally fashionable economic interests get
protection from innovators and disruptors. When DeSantis issued his “Declaration
of Economic Independence” he bemoaned how “large corporations have secured
massive carve outs and bailouts. This has become a form of venture socialism in
which gains are privatized at the top, whereas the losses are borne by you, the
hardworking American taxpayer.” DeSantis vowed, “No more socialism for the
wealthy and rugged individualism for small businesses and for individuals. and
for working class people.”
Well, DeSantis is providing a carve-out for
natural—carvable—beef. If you’re a rugged individual or small business in the
artificial beef business, DeSantis wants to put you in jail. This is precisely
the sort of thing that happened under the corporatist systems of medieval
Europe. I wrote a lot about this in Suicide of the West.
Guilds—i.e. incumbent industries—hated innovation. Here are some examples I
quoted (via Joel Mokyr):
• In 1299, Florence banned bankers
from adopting Arabic numerals.
• At the end of the fifteenth
century, scribe guilds of Paris managed to fight off the adoption of the
printing press for two decades.
• In 1397, pin manufacturers in
Cologne outlawed the use of pin presses.
• In 1561, the city council of
Nuremburg made the manufacture and selling of lathes punishable with
imprisonment.
• In 1579, the city council of
Danzig ordered the secret assassination of the inventor of a ribbon loom— by
drowning.
• In the late 1770s, the Strasbourg
council barred a local cotton mill from selling its wares in town because it
would disrupt the business model of the cloth importers.
These things were done to protect the established order,
the world as God willed it. One of the backers of the fake meat ban explained that
he opposed fake meat because it is an “affront to nature and creation.” I agree
with that, aesthetically. But in the 19th century, this was the sort of thing
people said about anesthesia.
Women should experience pain in childbirth, for instance, because the pain was
God’s will.
I know I’ve ventured from my promise of bloggy punditry,
but there’s a second point worth making. Stifling innovation isn’t just bad for
the economy and hypocritical for supporters of free enterprise—it’s dangerous.
Many of the greatest inventions and innovations in human history were
discovered by accident. Smart people trying to do one thing ended up doing
something much better. Swiss scientist Walter Jaeger was trying to invent a
poison gas detector but discovered his device was triggered
by his cigarette smoke. British pharmacist John Walker was messing around
with some chemicals and discovered that the congealed gunk on a stick burst
into flame when he scraped it on his hearth. That’s how matches
were created. Percy Spencer was working on a magnetron for Raytheon when he
discovered that the candy bar in his pocket had melted. That became the microwave.
Alexander Fleming discovered
penicillin by accident. Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen discovered X-rays while
mucking around with vacuum tubes. The stories are endless: pacemakers, Teflon,
popsicles (by an 11-year-old), safety glasses, vulcanized rubber, etc. Tea bags
were originally just some packaging, but customers started just dunking the
whole package in hot water. Bubble wrap was deliberately invented—as
wallpaper.
This gets at the very heart of why humanity started to
get rich once—and only once—in all of human history. Innovation was given free
rein. That’s the thing about technological and scientific exploration—it’s a
process of discovery. Innovation was kept under a wet blanket for millennia to
protect the established interests, who rightly feared what the genie would do
to them once let out of the bottle.
I don’t know if artificial meat will ever catch on or be
successful at scale. If it is, it will definitely be disruptive. But for it to
be actually successful, it will have to be popular, and it can only
be popular a) if it’s an affordable substitute for natural meat, and b) if it
tastes good. That can only be discovered through competition in the
market.
I’m not for giant subsidies for the fake meat industry
for the same reason I’m not for DeSantis’ de facto subsidies for “traditional”
meat: I don’t know. And neither do the people who think they’re smarter than
the market and the innovators. As Virginia Postrel writes in
her wonderful book, The Future and Its Enemies, “With some exceptions,
the enemies of the future aim their attacks not at creativity itself but at the
dynamic processes through which it is carried.” Fake meat might be a flop. But
if it’s a success, it will be a success for a good reason: because it satisfies
real human needs.
The people who want to stop innovation in the present are
always reluctant to answer the question, “When would you have stopped it in the
past?” Before the invention of seat belts, penicillin, the printing press, the
microwave, the pacemaker, fertilizer, crop rotation?
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