Category: books

This is another in my series of bad high school book reports on selected nonfiction books that I have read recently. I write them to memorialize my thoughts in the hope that I will remember a bit more of what I read.

Author and book

Andrea Louise Campbell, Taxation and Resentment Race, Party, and Class in American Tax Attitudes (Princeton University Press 2025).

Campbell is a political science professor at MIT who I was unfamiliar with. I’m not conversant in the political science literature. There apparently is an extensive research and academic literature on public attitudes on government spending, but very little on taxation. Campbell’s book and research is an effort to rectify that.

By her account, Campbell has long been interested in public opinion on taxation. In particular, she is interested in a longstanding paradox of popular tax attitudes: Strong support for progressive taxation as an abstract matter but opposition to specific progressive taxes (i.e., income and estate) and more tolerance of regressive taxes, such as state sales and payroll taxes. The book attempts to disentangle that paradox.

There isn’t a lot of polling on specific taxes and narrower tax issues (no surprise, I guess). Campbell relies on historical surveys that have been done by Gallop, the long-repealed ACIR which did some more detailed polls, etc. She also added a number of more detailed and probing questions to the 2012, 2016, and 2019 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (now called the Cooperative Election Study), a periodically done large survey of public opinion used by academic researchers.

Why I read it

When I saw reviews of this book, I immediately put it on my reading list. I have had a longstanding interest in the paradox it addresses, notably exemplified by popular opposition to the estate tax. Political acceptability is a core consideration in making tax policy in legislative bodies, where I spent my career working.¹ Legislators are very interested in voters’ preferences on taxes (beyond the usual “I don’t want to pay”).

Politicians have strong instincts about this and parties and interest groups poll on it regularly.² The conventional wisdom is that people’s views reflect their personal interests, captured by the aphorism attributed to Russell Long: “Don’t tax you. Don’t tax me. Tax that guy behind the tree.” Public officials tend to act on that assumption when they have no other alternative and need to raise revenue. That explains Dems (the only party now willing to raise taxes) resorting to “tax the rich,” corporate taxes, or narrow taxes that relatively smaller percentages of the population pay (e.g., on tobacco or weed) to raise marginal revenues.³ But they still are very skittish about doing so. Polling backs up that skittishness.

I also thought that this book might provide more data-based insights on the speculative thesis of Ray Madoff’s The Second Estate. Madoff’s hypothesis is that better tax design (e.g., taxing inheritances under the income tax rather than the estate tax) and better promotion of progressive taxes will fix the public’s opposition to our current progressive taxes. I’m skeptical. Campbell’s book reinforces that skepticism.

What I found interesting

My priors: I’m not a fan of survey and polling data for a variety of reasons not worth repeating. But to determine attitudes (other than classic revealed preferences based on behavior – not an option in this context), that is what you’re stuck with. The book is essentially an extensive analysis and discussion of survey results.

After a chapter that provides an overview of US tax history and basic tax policy,⁴ Campbell attempts to explain what she describes this as a “principle policy gap”: the paradox of public support for progressive taxation in the abstract, while opposing its implementation by specific taxes and tax features.

Self-interest, partisan identity, and ideology aren’t the explanation.

The book has several chapters that dispatch the typical explanations for the paradox:

• self-interest (e.g., people oppose taxes based on how it affects them personally)
• partisan identity (e.g., antitax sentiments are largely a Republican thing)
• ideology (e.g., limited government principles are important)
• tax knowledge (e.g., people just don’t understand that the estate tax only applies to a tiny percentage of the most affluent people)

Campbell finds none of these explain much. (It’s not worth going through the careful way she does that in structuring her survey questions and analyzing responses, including statistically controlling for various demographic and other characteristics, and so forth.) She does find some weak correlations and tendencies that align with conventional wisdom but far from much of a plausible explanation for the paradox.

Some of her findings will likely surprise the uninitiated (i.e., those who have not spent much time reading survey results on tax attitudes), such as:

• Partisan identification and ideology (e.g., supporting limited government or favoring expanded government) are not always a significant factor in the tax context. (p. 131)
• Republicans and Democrats agree on the taxes they dislike most – income and property taxes. (p. 135)
• “Among lower income respondents [bottom half of the distribution], Republicans and conservatives do not have different preferences compared to Democrats and liberals, with the one exception that conservatives are more likely to say the gas tax is unfair.” (p. 141)
• Independents (crucially excluding “leaners”) are more anti-tax than either flavor of partisan. (p. 144) This one surprised me. Campbell suspected they particularly distrust government but not have robust enough data to test that.
• State sales and payroll (FICA) taxes have the least opposition across all groups, even though they are regressive. This is verified in Minnesota by voter approval of multiple sales tax increases – the legacy constitutional amendment and myriads of local sales taxes (w/ few failures to pass them).

It’s important to note, of course, that tax policy and incidence are very complex. That makes knowledge, intelligence, and attention important in forming attitudes on taxes, including judgement about whether a tax or feature is really progressive. FWIW, Campbell tests tax knowledge and finds it is not much of a factor.⁵

The overall pattern was not surprising to me. But I was modestly surprised by some of the details and the consistency of her findings across multiple surveys and the use of regression analysis to tease out correlation effects.

Race and racial attitudes are a big deal.

The book’s most important findings, as suggested by its title, are in chapters 6 and 7: race matters. Specifically, whites’ tax attitudes are most strongly shaped by racial resentment (chapter 6) and minorities (especially Blacks) tend to have antitax attitudes that mirror those of conservative whites (chapter 7). Both were revelations to me. The former probably shouldn’t have surprised me and is profoundly depressing. The latter after reflection makes some sense. I just hadn’t thought about it.

The following quote (p. 158) captures the essence of Campbell’s findings regarding whites:

[R]acial resentment is the strongest factor in whites’ tax attitudes – more influential than income, party identification, ideology, or other correlates that we might think would structure tax preferences.

To reach this finding, Campbell characterizes survey respondents based on indexes of both symbolic racism and old fashion racism.⁶ Whites who score high on this index also score high on all taxes being unfair, even after controlling for demographic variables. (p. 172)

The likely explanation is the linkage between taxes and government spending. A more extensive poly sci literature on attitudes toward government spending mirrors Campbell’s finding: racial attitudes were 4X more powerful than self-interest (income level) in explaining opposition to general government spending, according to one of those studies. (p. 162) Apparently, there is a general perception (shockingly contrary to reality) that government spending mainly benefits minorities (the proverbial tax eaters to the racially resentful part of the population). That translates into a general opposition to general fund taxes, including progressive ones like the income and estate taxes. I guess if you believe you don’t benefit from the spending, the fact that the better off pay disproportionately more does not matter. If you think the recipients are undeserving, you’d oppose any funding. If Robin Hood hands the booty over to a bunch of sponges, your sympathies are with the sheriff of Nottingham.

Social Security and Medicare are exceptions. They are perceived apparently as benefiting the general population relatively even-handedly.⁷ That likely explains the lower opposition to the regressive federal payroll taxes that fund those programs.

Campbell also probes attitudes on tax expenditures. They follow the general views on both spending and taxes:

[R]acial resentment structures white attitudes toward indirect spending through tax expenditures much as it does attitudes toward direct expenditures.

That translates to support for supposed middle class breaks for homeowners and opposition to the EITC and CTC which are perceived to benefit mainly minorities (wrongly, especially for the CTC).⁸

Blacks, by contrast, have more liberal or progressive views on general government spending (e.g., more than 20 to 30 percentage points higher than whites in supporting social welfare spending). But that does not translate into positive attitudes toward the taxes that pay for that spending. Their tax attitudes track more closely to those of conservative whites. Campbell concludes that this results from their long history with the nasty effects of coercive government (slavery, Jim Crow, legally sanctioned discrimination and so forth) and the higher effective tax rates they typically pay.

In her conclusion, Campbell assesses how these attitudes play out politically and their effects. In an understatement she observes how this asymmetry of American tax and fiscal attitudes makes it “exceeding difficult” to finance federal spending. The political scales are heavily tipped toward an antitax agenda, since a large core of the Dem base (i.e., minorities) share conservatives anti-tax views. These attitudes, along with the GOP antitax agenda and abandonment of a conservative fiscal ethos, are a big explanation of the intractable problem of growing federal debt.

What disappointed me

My biggest disappointments with the book were sins of omission.

Campbell fails to explore or test the effects of horizontal equity on tax views of specific taxes. I think “equal treatment of equals” is often more powerful than vertical equity for many people, even though politicians rarely talk about it. Knowing that someone in similar circumstances pays the same or about the same tax is you do likely is more important than those better off paying at higher rates. That may explain the affinity for sales taxes. Their structure and application may lead to perceptions that they are horizontally fair. Everyone who buys stuff pays the same rate. Never mind, that differences in consumption preferences and scads of exemptions lead to quite different effective rates. That’s too deep in the weeds.

I’d also like to see testing of attitudes on tax compliance (or lack of it), evasion, and enforcement and how that tracks with the general views she covers. But that is probably expecting too much.

SALT connection

Although the book’s focus is primarily on federal taxes, it does address SALT as well – attitudes to state sales, income, and gas taxes, as well as property taxes. I would speculate that the tax and spending nexus – i.e., the perception that everyone benefits more from state than federal taxes – is less of a driver of antitax attitudes at the state and local level. The closer government is to them, the more people likely trust money is being spent well. As a result, they probably have less antipathy to SALT than federal taxes. This only goes so far, of course. They still don’t like state income taxes. A halo effect?

My Take

Reading Taxation and Resentment was depressing. I’m not totally convinced that the central hypothesis (racial resentment drives antitax attitudes) is correct, because of my inherent skepticism about putting too much stock in survey data. But it is carefully done and more than just plausible. If accurate, it underlines just how much the US version of slavery (with its racial tie in and the racism it fostered) is the country’s original sin that colors so much policymaking. I hope that’s wrong but fear it is not.

Moreover, it emphasizes the degree of difficulty of resolving America’s under taxation problem, caused by the right-wing (fiscally idiotic) anti-tax movement of the last 5+ decades. The country needs to enact a VAT and make many basic reforms in the income and corporate taxes, if we are going to maintain our current level of federal government services. But as Campbell points out (p. 156), enacting a VAT is “difficult to imagine” given tax attitudes. This been a wrenching political experience for countries enacting VATs in the last half century or so (Canada and Australia come to mind where both governments lost elections after enactment and their countries’ politics were not infected by the Grover Norquist anti-tax virus).

The book also verifies my doubt of political and policy prescriptions like those in Second Estate – better tax design and messaging making tax progressivity clear to the masses – will not fix the problem. Antitax attitudes have deeper roots that must be dealt with. Focusing on how we all benefit from spending is a better place to start.

The fact that the sales tax generates the least opposition explains not only the right-wing promotion of the FAIR Tax but also why the legislature needs to carefully husband use of the sales tax revenues for core government functions – using it for frills (the Minnesota practice with the Legacy Amendment and city sales taxes) puts basic government funding at risk IMO.

Reviews

Joe Thorndike, the tax historian, reviewed the book in Tax Notes (no paywall). He has a modestly different take on the book that I do. I assume (based on the acknowledgements) that he was helpful to Campbell in reviewing her chapter on tax history and probably other elements of the book.

Notes

1. Regardless of what they said, you could always tell it was top of mind for legislators when they requested revenue raising ideas or suggested remedies for flaws in their own proposals. ↩︎
2. Unfortunately, those private polls are not publicly available; a few legislators told me about their results, but I never saw the wording of questions, a key issue, or crosstabs. ↩︎
3. My favorite example is the big tax increase Minnesota enacted in the 2013 session – adding a new income tax rate on high income individuals, a corporate tax increase, and a hefty cigarette tax increase – to eliminate the large deficit caused by the Great Recession. The payers of these taxes – smokers, high income earners, and corporations – are the quintessential guy behind the tree. That was enacted by a DFL trifecta, of course. ↩︎
4. I had a few quibbles about tone, emphasis, and so forth but generally found it a good introduction for someone who has little background in tax history or policy. ↩︎
5. My take on her knowledge questions is that they are more indicative of tax interest and awareness than the kind of knowledge necessary to many incidence questions. ↩︎
6. Old fashioned racism is obvious. Campbell’s and others’ measure of symbolic racism has four elements: essentially a view or attitude that minorities (1) no longer face much prejudice, (2) fail to advance because they don’t work hard enough, (3) demand too much too fast, and (4) have gotten more than they deserve – all as revealed in response to survey questions. ↩︎
7. It’s worth noting that the lower life expectancy of the Black population results in those two program disadvantaging Blacks as a simple actuarial matter, FWIW. ↩︎
8. Also, the perception that the mortgage interest deduction is a middle-class tax break is now false (maybe less so when the relevant surveys used by Campbell were done). Accord to TPC, less 9% of tax filing units benefit and 84% of the benefit goes to those with incomes > $200K. I suspect that most people presented with those facts would not consider it a middle-class tax benefit. ↩︎

This is another in my series of bad high school book reports on selected nonfiction books that I have read recently. I write them to memorialize my thoughts in the vain hope that I will remember a bit more of what I read.

Author and book

Matthew Rose, A World After Liberalism (Yale University Press 2021).

I was not familiar with Rose. The book lists him as the Director of the Barry Center on the University and Intellectual Life at the Morningside Institute. Its website says he is a scholar of modern religious thought. He has a University of Chicago PhD, but the website does not list the academic discipline it is in. He formerly taught at Villanova.

Why I read it

Reading this was part of my quest to better understand the philosophical underpinnings of Republican populism and the MAGA movement.¹ The book was recommended by Damon Linker who has a Substack newsletter that I occasionally read.

What I found interesting

Rose’s premise, which I agree with, is that we are living in a post-liberal moment. That’s liberal in the small “l” sense model of government, i.e., a democratic order based on the values of freedom and equality with protections for individual liberties.

In Rose’s words:

After three decades of dominance [presumably after the civil rights acts expansion of the franchise], liberalism is losing its hold on Western minds. Its most serious challenge does not come from regimes in China, Russia, or Central Europe, * * * [but] from within Western democracies themselves, where intelligent critics, and not just angry populists, are expressing doubts about its most basic norms.

* * *

A new conservatism, unlike any in recent memory is coming into view. * * * There is disagreement about how this intellectual space opened up, but there is no doubt about who is filling it. Nationalists, populists, identitarians, futurists, and religious traditionalists are vying to define conservatism in ways previously unimaginable. pp. 2 -3

The competitors for the radical right’s ideas include the likes of Curtis Yarvin, Angelo Codeville, Adrian Vermeule, Costin Alamariu, and others. The book is not about them, but five earlier thinkers (all except one, now dead), who are profiled and their thinking described, each in a chapter. Rose calls these “essay-portraits that focus on the arguments and intellectual backgrounds of their subjects.” (p. 11) He chose them for their importance and continued fascination for more intellectual righty types. The book concludes with a chapter titled, “The Christian Question,” consistent with Rose’s background in religious studies and the importance of religious themes to some of thinkers and to the movement generally.

In general, I found the book’s short introduction insightful. It describes what seem to me plausible themes explaining why the new right rejects the liberal order that most of us, regardless of partisanship or ideological preferences, have long accepted. The central insight is that they have a different understanding of human nature and its potentialities. In their view, liberalism, which is based on respect for individual autonomy and is dependent on individuals’ ability to make good choices and decisions, is based on a misperception of humanity, which is fundamentally tribal (i.e., dependent on one’s ethno-cultural origins). That reality cannot be denied or overcome. So they consider liberalism empirically wrong as a description of the human condition and society.

Even more important:

It held that as a moral vision of life, liberalism was evil. Not only in practice, where its understanding of human nature encouraged hedonism, selfishness, and mediocrity. Liberalism is evil in principle because it destroys the foundation of social order. * * * Politics is properly illiberal about everything, depending, from its smallest decisions to its highest goals, on judgments about human greatness. Liberalism for its part, promotes equality of lifestyles, declining to tell citizens how to become virtuous or great. And as a result, it slowly renders people incapable of answering life’s most basic question. (pp. 9-10)

These insights explain why the radical Right rejects liberalism and its attraction to authoritarianism IMO. But their agreement ends with rejection of liberalism, not what should replace it. The following are my attempts to capture a few of Rose’s insights for each of his five thinkers. I have not read any of their books or articles and before reading Rose’s account was unaware of a couple of them. Rose comes up with a descriptive title for each, which I list as well as their home country.

Oswald Spengler (GR) – The Prophet

Spengler was one of a collection of influential conservatives in Weimar Germany (Carl Schmitt was another who I was more familiar with).  Weirdly (keep in mind when he was writing), Spengler predicted the western decline at the end of the millennium (i.e., now), which he defined as the colored world attaining parity with West (“white”) world. This was the bigger deal than what was going on Germany at the time!²

In Spengler’s view, people are defined by and captives of their cultures. One’s culture is one’s destiny. He was a cultural relativist. Western culture (“Faustian” in his terms) wasn’t superior to Chinese culture, for example. But, according to Rose:

He advanced a stronger argument, or so he judged. He argued that European peoples and their culture are one, and that any attempt to compromise their unity would be fatal to both. p. 28 (emphasis in original).

For Spengler, the essence of Western culture was the ambition, energy, creativity etc. of the “Faustian man.” Rose contrasts him with Max Weber’s views (“objectivity, restraint, and logic as the motive force Western culture”) as instead irrational passion and energy (“personal striving” in Rose’s formulation. (p. 31)

Given this, Spengler not surprisingly rejected Christian doctrine or the hypothesis that Christianity was at the center of Western culture.

Julius Evola (I) – The Fantasist

I had never heard of Evola who was, according to Rose, the leading theorist of Italian neofascism. (p. 41) He constructed a fantastic world that was the antithesis of the liberal order – one that merged the sacred and the political. He was spiritual, but not religious. A cardinal flaw of Christianity, in his view, was the doctrine of the two kingdoms, the separation of the spiritual and temporal.³

The political problem with modernity was that it denied the core universal truth (“Tradition”) at the foundation of all social orders. That power and authority are top down, not bottoms up, contrary to liberalism’s evils of individualism, materialism, and egalitarianism. The law of life is inequality. (p. 51) Anti-democratic and authoritarian themes abound.

Francis Parker Yockey (USA) – The Anti-Semite

Among Rose’s oddball lot, Yockey’s biography stands out as the most bizarre. Rose characterizes him as “arguably America’s preeminent fascist theorist” (p. 66).  He, like others of Rose’s theorists, connected liberalism and communism as associated evils and posited the need for a cultural, social order that escaped the evils of communist slavery and the anomie of liberalism, in Rose’s formulation.⁴

At its core, his philosophy was based on his weird formulation of the superiority of Western culture (“cultural vitalism”), based on a combination of human risk taking and the great man theory of history. Rose credits him with the development what the Right now calls cultural Marxism. (p. 79)

He, again like most of Rose’s collection, was an anti-rationalist. Rose’s defining characterization of him as an anti-Semite (he clearly was in spades) reflects his belief that Jewish thought was using post-Enlightenment rationality to undermine Western culture.

Alain de Benoist (FR) – the Pagan

Benoist is the only one of Rose’s subjects who is still alive. Rose characterizes him the “principal architect of ‘identitarianism[,]’” the movement that fears cultural dilution by immigration, an increasing fixture on the Right – formerly only in Europe but now here. He explicitly describes his philosophy as illiberal, relativist, and pagan – anti-Christian and inequalitarian. He claims his philosophy is based on nominalism – a convenient way to promote differences and reject universals (e.g., liberalism’s core principle of respecting all individuals equally).⁵

Rejection of liberal democracy follows naturally from those premises. Instead, he favored “folk democracy” which is based on his view of ancient Greek democracy that limits the franchise to a particular people who share a homeland and history. You can see where this is going. The flaw in liberalism is that it “transfers sovereignty from the united ‘folk’ to the autonomous individual” (p. 97). Hence, identitarianism.

There’s even more: not only does identity depend on being part of the group, it also is defined by its opposition to outsiders. The idea that a society could functionally be open to all comers on an equal basis (e.g., as expressed on the base of the Statute of Liberty) is an impossibility. It’s a recipe for the classic blood and soil conservativism.

Samuel Francis (USA) – The Nationalist

I was familiar with Francis as a result of reading When the Clock Broke. Rose’s shorter essay is more nuanced and enlightening than the Ganz book IMO.⁶ Francis’s views track most closely with Trumpism and MAGA, FWIW.

Based on Rose’s description of his writings, I have difficulty considering Francis to be a political theorist or philosopher in the traditional sense (i.e., reflecting upon normative principles of social governance and organization). Rather, his thinking focuses somewhat more on observing/describing the social-political behavior of polities. In Rose’s description:

Francis’s deepening suspicion was that the study of politics is not principally the study of ideas at all. It is the study of power – how it is acquired, lost, used, and concealed by a dominant minority. The primary political question, he concluded, is always which elites shall rule, not whether elites shall rule. (p. 117)

Traditional conservatism, in his view, was an obsolete ideology of an out of power elite (the classic Liberty League, anti-New Deal, crowd, I guess, whose dominant principle was classic laissez faire). To Francis, dominant liberalism purportedly supported egalitarianism but really was about subverting traditional ways of life. He was strongly influenced by James Burnham, a more classic conservative, and Burnham’s analysis that modern societies had become “managerial mega-states” dominated by elites using administrative and technological tools. This regime did not benefit, in Francis’s view, the white middle working class.

His response was to oppose this liberal elite regime with a “Middle American Revolution” (white, middle- and lower-income earners without college educations – i.e., the now core Trump voter). This is a kind of identity politics. And it strikes me as just political tactics rather than a philosophy to animate a set of fundamental rules for governing. But it clearly maps on to the current dominant GOP political strategy and demonstrates how Francis was well ahead of his time in that regard. (He died in 2005 when the GOP was still mostly a traditional conservative party.)

Christianity and the radical right

The book’s last chapter is in some ways its most interesting. Given Rose’s background in religious studies, it focuses on a common thread in the ideas of his five subjects – i.e., their opposition to Christianity. This seems counterintuitive, given the popularity of Christian Nationalism in today’s GOP. But it’s a clear theme in Rose’s characterization of his subjects’ philosophies and as he points out, a theme of the classic alt-right. (pp. 137-38)

As Rose puts it:

To state their views succinctly, if also crudely: the radical right critique Christianity for nurturing individual freedom, not suppressing it; for undermining human inequalities, not upholding them; for being rationalistic, not irrational; for its openness, not its exclusivity; for being apolitical, not political; for living up to its ideals, not betraying them. What is shocking about these formulations is that they invert the conventional terms of intellectual discussion. They accuse Christianity of being the cause of modern values it is often blamed for impeding. (pp. 140-41) [emphasis in original].

The problem is Christianity’s (in the radical right’s view) consideration of or respect for individuals per se, as expressed in the second great commandment (“Love your neighbor as yourself” Matt. 22:29). This makes Christianity’s resulting social justice views the progenitor of liberalism:

Liberalism is a secular expression of the Christian teaching that the individual is sacred and deserving of protection. Socialism is a secular expression of Christian concern for the poor and downtrodden. Globalism is a secular expression of the Christian hope that history is leading to a kingdom of universal peace and justice. (p. 142)

He notes that the movement is only partially anti-Christian and can also “clothe itself in Christianity, claiming a religious mantle for its defense of ethnic and cultural identity.” (p. 147) It can lead to a variant on identity politics (hello, Christian Nationalists). Rose has a number of prescriptive suggestions for dealing with this that I found less than compelling.

What disappointed me

I found the book interesting and a useful short introduction to the eclectic and very unsettling thinking by parts of the populist right. Its brevity and pithy descriptions, while a virtue on one level, left me wanting more extensive discussions – at least in some cases.

Rose asserts he selected each of the five subjects because they were/are influential with the populist Right. I would have liked more documentation and discussion of his basis for that. He does some of that, but it would have been nice to see more to judge how important each of them is to the movement. I’m a numbers guy (unlike Rose and most/all philosopher types), so citation numbers or at least more anecdotal examples would have been helpful to me. He does a good job of that with Sam Francis, but less so the others.

SALT connection

NA

My Take

I found the book to be very interesting and scary: it provided some validation of my perception that the American conservatism as I knew it is largely history in favor of the European, ethno-nationalism version that I assumed was inconsistent with the heterogeneous nature of American society.

What strikes me most is the strong cultural conservatism elements and anti-rationalism that animates this thinking. The anti-rationalism is consistent with the thesis of Enchanted America – Intuitionists have migrated to the GOP and the conservative movement generally. This flavor of political philosophy is something only an Intuitionist could love, as far as I can tell.

I find it perplexing that the limited government, libertarian-oriented element of the traditional conservative movement in America can find common ground with those animated by this type of thinking. Its rejection of respect for individualism, free market principles, limits on government, and similar formerly core principles of American conservativism, one would think, are disqualifying. Wrong. Continued support can only be explained by the idea that the New Right’s authoritarian wielding of government power, as we are witnessing now, is less threatening than a social welfare state, even one constructed and managed by a democratic regime that at least ostensively hews to rationale principles. A true headscratcher.

Notes

1. I continue to be mystified by what its motivating and organizing ideology is, assuming it truly has one. It may be largely a cult of personality, although its strong antecedents that predate Trump suggest otherwise. I think Newt Gingrich is the more central figure than Trump. Trump just saw a vulnerable movement and a party that was ripe for his demagogic takeover. ↩︎
2. Rose takes pains to describe how Spengler attempted to distinguish himself from the typical racialist, decrying the rampant bigotry of his time and country. He also rejected race classifications altogether. p. 37. ↩︎
3. That view reveals a potential seed of Christian Nationalism, which fixes his perceived flaw in orthodox Christian doctrine. ↩︎
4. Interestingly, Yockey correctly predicted the reversion of the USSR to Russian nationalism (i.e., Putin’s Russia) in the 1950s! Yockey both collaborated with the Nazis and worked for communist eastern European governments in the postwar period. A truly weird character, probably partially due to his documented mental health issues. ↩︎
5. Why he rejects Christianity is obvious. That all people are create in the image of God and have equal dignity in God’s eyes is disqualifying. ↩︎
6. This probably results because of their differing professional backgrounds and perspectives. Ganz is a political journalist and evaluates Francis from that perspective, while Rose evaluates his basic ideas as one with an academic philosophy background would. Francis, as I noted, more of a de facto right-wing political consultant than a philosopher/thinker. But Rose evaluates him as the latter. I’m not convinced that Ganz read Francis’s posthumously published book, Leviathan and Its Enemies, that Rose considers his most substantial work and a synthesis of his thinking into a single work. Given Rose’s description of it as long, disorganized, and repetitive, that would be no surprise. ↩︎

This is another in my series of bad high school book reports on selected nonfiction books that I have read recently. I write them to memorialize my thoughts in the vain hope that I will remember a bit more of what I read.

Author and book

John Ganz, When the Clock Broke (MacMillan 2024).

I was unfamiliar with Ganz when I read the book. He’s a journalist, not a historian or political scientist, and has a Substack, which I haven’t read. I don’t know anything about him beyond that.

Why I read it

I’m interested in why the conservative movement and the Republican Party have cracked up (IMO), essentially turning their backs on prudential or dispositional conservativism. By that I mean an approach characterized by caution, respect for institutions, concern about unintended consequences, skepticism about the effectiveness of government programs, insistence on paying for stuff as you consume it, etc.

I grew up in a rock-ribbed Republican and conservative family. Those prudential values were the principles I absorbed in my formative years. As far as I can tell, they are no longer to be found in the dominant political version of conservatism, which instead reflects radical reactionaryism, often animated by conspiracy theories. Instead of caution and concern about unintended consequences, a compulsion to act fast seems to govern, never mind carefully considering the consequences or how to pay for what you’re doing.

Trump is the culmination of this, but the pattern long predated him. He just recognized what was going on and the opportunity that it presented. Trump, as far as I can tell, was never a partisan of either flavor. He just saw the Republicans as a more favorable takeover target.

I’ve been reading books to try to educate myself better about how this transformation over the last 50+ years has happened – both as a popular political movement and as a matter of philosophical ideas. I have written book reports on a bunch, but far from all, of those books. When this book came out, I saw several reviews that suggested it might have insights on that front.

I was particularly interested because the book treats the early 1990s as a tipping point. I had independently concluded that the 1992 election (i.e., Bush’s defeat largely thanks to Pat Buchanan and Grover Norquist) and the ascension of Gingrich as a dominant figure as the death of the old GOP and fiscal conservatism. It’s always attractive to read something that confirms your priors, even if it is intellectually flabby (confirmation bias and all that jazz).

What I found interesting

The book is essentially a narrative account of the political events in the period from 1989 through the 1992 election, mainly focusing on conservativism and the Republican Party. Ganz characterizes the book as a “history of losers” – people who lost elections, operated at the margins of the party, and are now largely forgotten – whose goal was reactionary, to turn back politics and culture to an earlier time (either 1920s or 1950s, I guess), essentially to “break the clock.” Hence, the book’s title.

His thesis is that the political and social turmoil in the 1980s and early 1990s allowed these fringe types to take over the party and conservatism more generally. In his words:

In general, the politics of national despair described here have now taken hold of the Republican Party: it is dominated by figures and ideas that once would have been considered fringe. P. 22.

He views traditional southern politics and values – the paleo conservatism of David Duke, Pat Buchanan, etc. – as the core of the party and movement conservatism now. It started as an electoral strategy by Goldwater, Nixon, and Reagan to capture the presidency. But it transformed the party, replacing standard Burkean or prudential conservatism. The party of Lincoln,¹ TR, and Reagan became that of Ben Tillman and George Wallace. I thought his theory was a bit extreme when I read the book before the election. Recent events make it more plausible.

Ganz spins a narrative of the era’s events that have political, social, and cultural ramifications to support his thesis. I lived through those times and was generally paying some attention. But it’s easy to see the trees but miss the contours of the forest. I had forgotten how many tumultuous events there were and was not paying much attention to how folks on the right were often reacting to them. That is what Ganz describes.

A list of some of the events and people he covers, sometimes at chapter or longer lengths:

• The David Duke phenomenon – I had forgotten he was nearly elected governor of Louisiana (got a comfortable majority of the white vote) and how much impact and turmoil he created for Republicans.
• How repeal of the FCC Fairness Doctrine spawned right-wing talk radio (Russ Limbaugh et al) and transformed Republican and conservative politics. The current situation – an entire right-wing media ecosystem that provides almost all the news to the party’s base – derives from this and is much of the explanation for Trump’s Teflon shield from adverse news and his not being held to account for norm and law breaking.²
• Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaign – I was aware of much of its transformative effects on domestic policy views but not that it was the beginning of the rejection of the neocon approach to foreign policy as well. Trump has now clearly brought that to fruition in favor of some unclear new approach, not so much a return to Bob Taft isolationism as favoring authoritarian dictators. I had paid no attention to Buchanan’s speech to the 1992 Republican National Convention that bombastically threw red meat to social conservatives. It was as much a harbinger of the current state of the party, as it was appalling to Bush’s operatives. In Ganz’s view, which I share, the elder Bush was probably the last prudential or dispositional conservative Republican president. If George W shared that philosophy, his governance did not (e.g., compare the Kuwait and Iraq wars or the deficit-closing tax increase under 41 with the big deficit-expanding tax cuts under 43).
• The Ross Perot phenomenon – I had forgetten just how wacky and conspiracy-addled he was.³
• The beginnings of deindustrialization, wage stagnation, etc. – foreign trade scuffles with Japan over auto and steel imports and so on – contributed to the dissatisfaction with traditional Republican economic policies.
• The Rodney King beating, the acquittal of his police officer assailants, and the resulting riots, as well as other incidents of largely racial-based conflicts, e.g., in NYC, fueled more racial resentment. (A current view of many Republicans, according to recent polls, is that racism against whites is a bigger problem that black racism!)
• Ruby Ridge – the debacle in how the FBI handled this and its political effects – led to more cynicism about federal law enforcement and institutions generally. In Ganz’s view, the martyrdom of the Weavers gave credence to the worldview of the movement they were part of, which was “intent on the wholesale destruction and replacement of America with another America.” Page 306.
• Crime and chaos in NYC of this era; John Gotti as political figure; Rudy Guiliani’s initial political flaying well before his later successful mayoral run.

The book’s narrative weaves together how these events and more that I didn’t list pushed the conservative movement and the Republican Party in an ever more reactionary direction. They made it into a party that is more populist economically and more suspicious of institutions, experts, conventional wisdom, traditional media, etc. I’m not even sure reactionary captures what it is.

What disappointed me

Political movements typically operate on (at least) two levels. One (expressed crudely) is the level of running electoral campaigns, i.e., trying to convince voters to support your candidate(s) through messaging and taking policy positions, and similar. Another is a higher philosophical or ideas level, i.e., expressing the principles that the movement or party stands for and that define its governing principles. The second is generally expressed by more intellectual types, rather than candidates or operatives. Bill Buckley, for example, was likely the defining voice of conservative principles in the decades that immediately precede the period Ganz covers.

Ganz does a good job of describing the nuances of the first level – essentially the retail politics level, less so at the higher or second level.

Ganz searches for one or more individuals who fill this role of defining the more general philosophical principles that defined the changed Republican Party. The principal guy he comes up with is Sam Francis, a newspaper columnist and book author who is generally characterized as a paleoconservative.⁴ I was unfamiliar with him (did not know he existed to be totally honest and have never read any of his stuff). Ganz describes his views generally (very pessimistic view of human nature, Hobbesian infected by a tinge of Nietzsche maybe would be an apt characterization) and reports on his reactions to the various social and political events that the book covers.

His views are very extreme but strike me as tactical and opportunistic, in the sense that they mainly attempt to capitalize on daily events to build political support for the movement. That is the opposite of someone developing and expressing a coherent political philosophy. But it may simply reflect that Ganz largely uses his newspaper columns as a main source (I think), rather than his books. It also nicely ties in with chronology of events, because Francis’s columns addressed those events.

The shape shifting or ad hoc nature of the philosophy probably also reflects a movement whose adherents are intuitionists, rather than rationalists. A defining dissatisfaction with the current order and longing for a return to a perceived better past are not a recipe for constructing a rational set of governing principles, in any case.

Ganz’s coverage of the movement’s animating philosophy is what left me most disappointed. That may simply be because there’s nothing much there to describe other than adhockery.

The other disappointment was that Ganz did not make any effort to discuss how or why the events he chronicles led to the Trump Republican Party. That seems to be the reason for writing the book. The assumption must be that it’s so obvious it doesn’t need to be said or that it would have increased the book’s length materially, requiring describing and tying in later developments. I get that.

SALT connection

NA

I try to connect the dots Ganz doesn’t

Ganz does not make an explicit effort to connect the dots – i.e., to draw a line between what happened in his narrative and how the Republican Party became the party of Trump. After writing the above, I couldn’t resist spinning out my own partial explanation based on his narrative and the subsequent events.

I think the party’s transformation occurred out of a combination of two factors:

1. More people experienced increasing discomfort with trends (the bulleted items noted above and similar) that were inconsistent with their view of an older and better world (1950s America, say).
2. Popular figures in the movement, Limbaugh, Buchanan, Duke, et al, increasingly gave voice and acceptability to these concerns and views. That mainstreamed the ideas in the Party. Even though their protagonists were often losing elections, they were winning the battle for the hearts of the Republican base by making the arguments from legitimating platforms (candidacies that got a lot of votes, popular radio programs, etc.).

These efforts led over time to individuals with high anxiety about social change (aka social conservatives) and economic change (e.g., those in geographic areas hard hit by globalization), and conspiracy minded types who are disconnected from factual reality and who have little respect expertise generally to migrate into the Republican Party. See what Matt Yglesias describes as the crank realignment.

I tended to think of these cranks as a small minority, a lunatic fringe of sorts. That is the way Ganz describes their ideas (“fringe”). But a book I’m currently reading, Enchanted America, suggests that folks with these tendencies are a material part of the population. They formerly were distributed between both parties. The John Birch Society people in the Republican Party were offset by anti-vaxxers, anti-GMO, and corporate conspiracy types in the Democratic Party. The trend Ganz documented is the beginning of the migration of more (most?) of them to the Republican Party.

A core part of the traditional GOP coalition are libertarians or quasi-libertarian (i.e., folks with strong limited government views). The Republican donor class (Kochs, Club for Growth, etc.) illustrate this view. This political philosophy is a hard sell to the general electorate who like social security, Medicare, and other government benefit programs they have come to rely on and/or built their lives around. Moreover, many think the government should solve social problems. But it’s easier sell to social conservatives and the cranks who focus on noneconomic issues or assume that the government is conspiring against them. So, limited government types welcomed them with open arms.⁵ That may have been a Faustian bargain.

This combination made the party and movement particularly susceptible to a form of populism that is mainly defined by opposition to elites and many traditional institutions (big business, academia, etc.). It led, I think, to the mindlessness of much of the Tea Party movement’s ethos and, more importantly, the party’s susceptibility to a candidate like Donald Trump.  They are a large enough cohort to control primary elections, when tapped by the right candidate. To be clear, this is just my spin on the implications of Ganz’s narrative and later developments. Also, it doesn’t explain why Trump, a fundamentally flawed candidate (i.e., in terms of competence and morals) who is often his own worst enemy (i.e., saying what he thinks and doing what he wants, no matter how impolitic), can win elections. That is a different story about the Democratic Party’s failures.⁶

Footnotes

1. To be fair, Lincoln was not a conservative. He was an anti-slavery Whig who actually supported above average government intervention in the economy. Hence, his support for robust infrastructure spending. Government support for building canals, railroads, roads, and so forth were Whig orthodoxy. TR also supported muscular government intervention on various fronts, antitrust, foreign policy, etc. ↩︎
2. His base does not watch mainstream media; if the right-wing media give him a pass or downplay coverage of the events, as often is the case, there are no consequences. That only goes so far, of course. ↩︎
3. Interesting counterfactual question is whether Clinton could have beaten Bush absent Perot’s campaign. If he hadn’t, the GOP’s descent into MAGA populism might not have occurred. ↩︎
4. This piece by Joshua Tait profiles Francis and makes a reasonable attempt at describing why many now pick him as foreshadowing the philosophy of the Trumpian Right. But it too does not satisfy in terms of describing an actual political philosophy, so much as a reactionary strategy for appealing to a group of voters IMO. ↩︎
5. The crank class would be okay with deregulation, since it is consistent with their skepticism of elites and institutions. Cutting social benefit programs, like SS, Medicare, and Medicaid, is another matter. The establishment finessed that (and probably will again in 2025) by enacting tax cuts while eschewing offsetting them with spending cuts in the programs that make up the vast majority of federal spending. That works for a while. How long is unclear. Ultimately, to spend is to tax; you can only keep expanding borrowing for so long. ↩︎
6. This interview is one take on that issue. ↩︎

This is another in my series of bad high school book reports on selected nonfiction books that I have read recently. I write them to memorialize my thoughts in the vain hope that I will remember a bit more of what I read.

Author and book

Robert C. Allen, Global Economic History, A very short introduction (Oxford Academic Press 1911).

Why I read it

I’m trying to bolster my knowledge of economic history. That was not a topic that was covered when I was undergrad (at least at the small liberal arts school I went to) and I probably would have avoided it anyway at that point in my life. (I did read Heilbronner’s The Worldly Philosophers as an undergrad, which is a history of great economists and indirectly economic thinking, not economic history. It’s a great book and still in print, 70+ years after its initial publication.) I have come to believe that economic history is necessary, along with economic theory and empirical research, to understand economics. Or at least to provide helpful context to the current state of affairs or events.

This book is part of a series by Oxford Press intended as short introductions (only 150 pages for this one) to academic topics. The book is well over a decade old, but I saw it on syllabuses for economic history courses at top schools. So, I figured it was a safe bet, and the electronic version was cheap.

Allen is an economics professor at NYU; he was teaching at Oxford when he wrote the book. He has a Minnesota connection as a Carlton graduate.

What I found interesting

There was a lot of interesting stuff in the book that I did not know or had forgotten. I’m listing a few items that stood out.

The book’s basic theme is to describe and provide insight into what Allen calls “the great divergence” – i.e., why after 1500 Northwestern Europe and North America broke out of the pattern of preindustrial economics, quasi-subsistence in most cases, and why that difference has largely persisted until now. He goes through, at a big picture level, the sweep of economic change – colonialism, mercantilism, the Industrial Revolution, efforts by other countries to catch up and why most failed, etc. – describing and analyzing them as an economist would.

Much of the story is about England and why it was the epicenter of the Industrial Revolution, going from 2% of the world’s manufacturing in 1750 to 23% in 1880. I have read other accounts and explanations for this, many of which heavily rely on political geographic and cultural factors (commitment to the rule of law, more stability, respect for property rights, acceptance of market principles, etc.). Allen weights more heavily the continuous application of technology to the production process. That occurred in England and Holland because of three factors or conditions:

1. Better fostering of education, literacy, and numeracy – this is obviously crucial to develop and continuously apply engineering skills necessary for industrialization and productivity growth.
2. England’s relatively higher wages (e.g., compared to France, Germany, Spain etc.) – low wages sap the incentive to expend capital on technology, which is crucial to improving the production function (productivity yields higher incomes)
3. Energy resources – specifically England’s ready access to coal, the mining of which itself stimulated technological improvements and its use powered steam engines.

He makes much of the high wage factor in analyzing many different economies. This was not something that occurred to me, but it makes complete sense, and he provides statistics to back it up.

This is all a matter of relative emphasis IMO. He recognizes that institutional and political factors are important, sometimes in ways that were counterintuitive to me. For example, he counts France’s greater respect for property rights, compared to England and Holland, as a negative because it made using eminent domain for internal improvements (e.g., roads, canals, railroads, utilities, etc.) harder. England’s greater ability to impose taxes similarly (and not so counterintuitively) was also a factor.

I was unaware of some economic effects of the civil and social revolution caused by Napolean – wiping internal tariffs (didn’t realize such a thing existed within countries), rationalizing taxes, and so forth. His indirect stimulation of greater unification of Germany had similar effects. All this was crucial in allowing France and Germany to somewhat catch up with England and the Netherlands.

Western Europe followed the catch-up model, essentially protecting their local businesses with tariff walls, investing heavily in public infrastructure and education, fostering investment banking to finance the necessary capital investments. This enabled most of western Europe, especially Germany and France, to catch-up with England by the beginning of WWI. The model worked less well elsewhere, Russia for example, for a various reasons.

Geography was a key factor in some cases – e.g., North America’s shorter distances to Europe gave its staple exports in 1700s and early 1800s an advantage over South America. South America’s lower labor costs and smaller markets were also a relative barrier to fostering the necessary technological developments. (I still don’t have a grasp on the why of Argentina’s 20^th century failure, despite having so many similarities to and advantages that the US had. Racking it up to political and cultural differences is the easy but unappealing answer.)

The book provides insights into some of the nuances of the economics of colonialism and how that helped and held back both some colonial powers and colonies. Spain and Portugal’s plunder model enriched them enormously in the short run (well, a century) but the results ultimately held them back.

Globalization (even back in the 19^th century!) allowed English manufacturers to rise to over one-fifth of the world’s production. They were supplanting less mechanized and higher cost, local production elsewhere, much of which was only possible because colonial rule prohibited tariffs on English goods and transport costs declined significantly.

The US was able to develop rapidly following the catch-up model (the Hamiltonian system put in place in the 1790s) because it was no longer a colony and could use tariffs and had many of England’s advantages. That option was unavailable to India, by comparison, and England’s textile manufacturing productivity wiped out India’s cotton spinning and weaving industry.

The human toll of colonialism – thanks to triple evil of enslavement, disease, and war – is simply breathtaking. The population of the Americas was 57 million in 1500. By 1750 it had dropped to 5 million! I probably had seen that before but it still shocks.

The book details some of the practical and economic dynamics of the slave trade – both from the perspective of the enslavers and their suppliers in West Africa. I was unaware of immense brutality of slavery in the West Indies, even relative to that in the southern US, as evidenced by this quote:

Mortality on sugar plantations was very high, and slaves were replenished by purchase rather than natural increase. For million slaves were taken to the British West Indies, for instance, but only 400,000 were present at emancipation in 1832. p. 70

The total and complete devaluation of human life is hard to wrap one’s head around.

Allen spends the last third of the book describing how and analyzing why only a handful of countries in the Pacific rim (mainly Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan) managed to successfully use “Big Push Industrialism” to catch-up to the US and Western Europe. Most of the world still has a production function equivalent to where England and US were in the late 19^th century: For example, even after adjusting for standard of living differences (i.e., its lower prices compared to the US and EU), China’s income level was 6X a subsistence level in 2010, about the same as England in 1880. It’s only modestly better now and China has been a remarkable success over the last 40+ years since Mao’s death.

What disappointed me

As a short introduction, the book is great but that was also its biggest drawback. Reading short sections too often led me to want a longer explanation with more basis for distinguishing between Allen simply applying theory to some basic factors (informed speculation by an expert) and more rigorous analysis by others and/or empirical support for the conclusions. But, as usual, that would be a different book than a very short introduction, as this is billed to be.

SALT connection

NA