Ralph Waldo Porcupine

I’ve been reading the massive, but excellent, World War II novels by Herman Wouk, who recently died at the age of 104.  The Winds of War deals with the situation leading up to the war and the beginning of it.  War and Remembrance takes the story until the end of the war.  Wouk, who was Jewish and a veteran of the war, wrote quite a lot, amidst the battles and conferences and life on the Home Front, about facts and ideas relevant to anti-Semitism and why Hitler rose.

I mention all this because in my mind it dovetails a good deal with commentary on the terrible situation in America today.

Certainly the half-baked comparisons of Donald Trump to Hitler are part of it.  “Half-baked” is the right phrase.  He doesn’t hate anyone, from anything I can tell, except perhaps people who are critical of him, but even them he doesn’t do anything bad to except maybe fire them, if he can.  He hasn’t persecuted anyone or put them in camps.  He hasn’t sicced the IRS or FBI on his enemies.  He hasn’t even denigrated entire groups whose differences are based on something they can’t help.  You can call him a lot of bad things with complete accuracy, but not “Hitler”.

The reason the comparisons are not completely irrelevant are entirely to do with his supporters and the way he rose, and that’s what I want to talk about today.  In essence, the situations are alike, as overreach in a conflict of identities.

Out of many World War II conflicts of identities, two are most relevant.  Non-Jews versus Jews, and the winners in the First World War versus the losers.  Religion and nationality, basically, were the identities.  One could say that it was the uncultured versus the cultured, but that would be revisionist history.  Universities and newspapers went over to the Nazis aplenty.

Anti-Semitism was a centuries-old story, but this particular clash of nationalities was a somewhat new kind.  In response to a war begun and prosecuted in considerable part by German militarism, and whose destructive effect was magnified by technology to a degree with which no one had any experience, England and France in their horror and shock were easily able to rationalize to themselves being self-dealing and particularly contemptuous of and hard on their enemies.  The 1920s roared for them, while Germans were carrying baskets of millions of marks to the market just to buy bread.  But to England and France any analysis of the rightness of their demand that Germany pay the cost of the war in gold, began and ended with “but the War!”  Out of which Hitler rose.

The parallels to 2016 are clear, I think.  Successful, powerful identity-based groups being self-dealing, and contemptuous of and hard on their defeated enemies, both culturally and economically, and having an all-purpose rationalization (something along the lines of “but social justice!”) to deflect any criticism.  Relying, in fact, just as did England and France, on norms that made any escape by their enemies of the box they put them in seem impossible.  We’re just lucky that enough norms remain that we wound up with someone as relatively harmless as Trump.  The warning, however, should be heeded.

A huge percentage of problems crop up as a result of a mismatch between politics and pressures.  Peace and justice frequently depend on there being a norm among leaders to say, in essence, “Yes, we have the power, politically speaking, the self-justification, to go farther against our opponents, but we won’t.  There is a point of taking at which the long-term consequences begin to be poisonous.”  It’s a discounted-future-rewards problem, but also a Prisoner’s Dilemma.  You can’t get only one side to have that norm, because being on the losing side over and over swiftly gets old.  Identities, particularly identities like religions or Wokeism that are based in considerable part on moralizing and righteousness and not being “that other side that’s immoral and unrighteous”, tie our hands and make that kind of norm less likely.

  There’s been a lot of repetition, aimed at the virtuous goal of promoting social distancing in today’s COVID-19 pandemic, of the facts that Philadelphia did not cancel a parade in late September of 1918 and had, ostensibly as a result, a very high mortality rate from Spanish flu, and that St. Louis did cancel one, and had a much lower rate.  There is probably some causation here—it did some good, I’m sure—but less than a casual glance would suggest.

First, Philadelphia was a city in a coastal state.  Looking at the various charts available, both contemporary (such as the one below) and modern, a reader can immediately see that cities in coastal states were much harder-hit than Midwestern cities.  Ports of arrival and nearby places received the illness first.  In an era before most airplane or automobile travel, it took more time to travel inland.  St. Louis’s mortality rate was low, it’s true, but that was true about most other midwestern cities as well.  According to a chart on p. 109 of American Pandemic:  The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic, by Nancy Bristow, over about six months (September 8th, 1918 to March 1, 1919) Toledo, Ohio had an influenza mortality rate of 0.22%, St. Paul, Minnesota had one of 0.35%, and Louisville, Kentucky one of just over 0.06%.  St. Louis’s rate of 0.28% maps very well with distance from seaports.

It doesn’t seem to map well with official reaction, which was more stringent in most places than parade cancellation.  “In San Francisco, for instance, theatres and cinemas were hurriedly closed and the municipal authorities issued an ordinance mandating the wearing of gauze masks in public.”  That was much more stringent than a one-time cancellation of a parade, yet over those six months San Francisco’s mortality rate from influenza was higher (0.66%)¹ than Philadelphia’s (0.50%) and much higher than that of St. Louis (0.28%).  “Boston had churchless Sundays”—0.60%.  In Washington, D.C. “it became an offense for the sick to leave their homes”—0.57%.  (Quotes from Living with Enza: The Forgotten Story of Britain and the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918 by M. Honigsbaum, p. 122.)

Now, I can see ways to poke holes in my own argument, the way I was taught in school and the way most repeaters of the parade-no-parade factoid don’t.  (On average, the shorter facts are, the faker they are.)  Older coastal cities were probably more likely to have a higher population density than midwestern cities and than more recently developed ones like Los Angeles, growing up around trolleys and cars instead of horse and foot.  And, too, exactly what other anti-flu measures did each of these cities enact, and when, and how long did their restrictions last?  What was the average age of their population?  Perhaps most important, as you can see, over the ten weeks when the flu was at its worst Philadelphia was by a small margin the worst city², even when compared only to other major coastal cities, and the short term matters a lot today, because our primary goal is the slowing of the infection rate until science can catch up, and the prevention of the overwhelming of the health care system.  All of these are perfectly valid objections (albeit on the side of we-don’t-know-yet, which suggests to me that we shouldn’t say yet.) and the various social-distancing measures that the target of my critique supports are by and large good.

Still.  My point is this: it bears pointing out that despite the good intentions of the repeaters of the meme and despite the fact that social distancing does work, this is a prime example of how history can be distorted for social purposes.  History doesn’t work that way.  Fake news does, and so in the debate about it we ought to raise the question: what do we do about fake news when it’s proffered with good intentions and has good results?

Aaaand the Washington Post is trying to boost its credibility with the Left, after being guilty of such horrible openmindedness and thoughtfulness as to hire people like Megan McArdle, by calling for an increase in the minimum wage.

Since 2009, the last time the national minimum wage was raised, there have been various and sundry studies about it, including a “very credible” 2017 study in Seattle saying that Seattle’s 2014 high increase in the M. W. hurt workers, which was so significant in its contribution to that field of study that the acolytes of Paul Krugman have been trying to talk down and blunt it ever since.

Now, there are lots of strong arguments against minimum wages.  They’re price-fixing for labor, people say.  They’re discriminatory against the kinds of businesses that employ minimum-wage workers.  They spur automation, which kills that sort of job entirely.  They hurt the poor that don’t have those jobs because they can no longer afford the new, higher prices of the product.

All of those arguments have a lot going for them.  But today I’m criticizing a different aspect of minimum wages: the science being used to try to justify them.   (Minimum wages need justification because labor is claimed to be an exception to the economic tenet that with most goods, price and demand vary inversely.  Price the good higher and the market demands less.)

Put briefly and bluntly, the data suck.  It’s the usual problems of social and economic scientific studies, which are that the data are usually limited in quantity and accuracy, and it’s sometimes a problem that they were often collected for other purposes, from what may have been an unrepresentative group of people, using assumptions and definitions other than those of the study.  This being the case, there is also usually no way for there to be a reliable control group.  This is a really major flaw, because significant political pressure is on this study from both sides.  Not only does it mean that there are a myriad of opportunities for biased scientists to p-hack (that is, to set the study’s parameters according to which ones appear to validate the conclusion that the scientist wants) but it provides opportunities for people that want to justify mild increases in the minimum wage, which used to be the only politically possible move anyway.  Look, they used to say, mild increases in the minimum wage don’t hurt the economy!  (Although nowadays, they substitute ad hominem attacks upon Republicans in lieu of the adjective.)

What wasn’t possible politically to say is that the data we have are too crude to be able to discern the lower levels of economic damage.  But it’s telling that the places where high minimum wages are being offered are places like Seattle, San Francisco and New York that have strong economies for reasons unrelated to industries with minimum wages.  Hey, let’s test a medicine’s effectiveness without regard to the age and overall health of the patient!

Medicine is actually a good area for economic metaphor, because of the parallels of the human body with the human economy in complexity and in our difficulty collecting data deep enough to really tell us what’s going on.  Many times when people have diseases, their experience of the diseases are “subclinical”, meaning that their symptoms are so mild that the person with the disease doesn’t feel them.  The damage of slight increases to minimum wages to strong economies are, similarly, subclinical.  Not Quite Seen, in the Bastiatic sense.  The damage they do to those economies is very real, but the number of dollars flowing into those cities from Silicon Valley, or Wall Street, simply swamp the already-crude information we have about that damage.  Prosperity skews the null hypothesis wildly.

The thing about NeverTrumpers is that there is no Leftist equivalent.

I know that’s kind of an odd statement, but I’ll try to explain.

NeverTrumpers are a bit like Cincinnatus, or George Washington.  “People who are defined by what they are not willing to do to have power” makes it sound as though I am complimenting them.  It makes them sound noble, and in some sense they are.  Only superficially, though.  They aren’t surrenderers of much power themselves.  Washington was powerful and popular and could have been king, and his alternative, the beautiful vision for which he established the precedent of peaceful transfers of American power, was the establishment of real democracy, even though it would mean the election, inevitably, of hacks, and the enactment of folly.  The NeverTrumpers are only giving up mainstream conservative intellectual status, and not for a beautiful and farsighted vision, but to avoid the re-evaluation of their worldview in the face of shocking evidence of its incompleteness.  What they are willing to do is to go back to a pre-2016 situation that amounted to a pack of Mean Girls eating their lunch every day, with compromise, back when such a thing existed, amounting to the Left getting what it wanted only slightly more slowly than its intellectual Young Turks could imagine it.

The Left, too, avoids the re-evaluation of their priors; it’s a human tendency.  But they still aren’t similar to the Right in the main way I am talking about.  During no Democratic administration has there ever been any analogue on the Left to NeverTrumpers.  I can name no time when any significant and prominent component of the Left has visibly refused to go along with some clear moral dilemma to have power.  I can think of no time when they have said, “We want this policy, but this one thing standing in the way that we have the power to get rid of– this part of the Constitution, this pillar of the Rule of Law, the idea of the loyalty of the Loyal Opposition– is too important to sacrifice.”  If they have, it happened in private.

Public or private, the Left is willing to have unity at the cost of the society-poisoning whiny viciousness of victim politics and social media mobbing.  They’re willing to condone the hounding out of office of an executive who, far from even saying anything, had merely donated to a cause opposing gay marriage, or the ruination of bakers and pizza-makers for insisting upon their right not to associate.  They stoop to claiming, in essence, that hurt feelings are on a par with lynching.  They have originated and nourished the idea that foolishness and poor decisions by teenagers are a matter not for a serious discussion and a teachable moment among adults, between the people in question and the people whose feelings were hurt, but for the ruining of lives and decades’ worth of work long after the emigration from the foreign country of the past.  These moral dilemmas lack the personification of a President, but they are none the less equivalent in significance, if not greater, and the Left stands guilty in the spotlight.

By and large, the Left’s capacity for rationalization appears almost completely unfettered, a seemingly infinite intellectualizing force for amoral expedience.   NeverTrumpers and the Left are alike in appearing to be unable or unwilling to see that the Left itself caused the pressures on the Right to come up with whatever seems necessary to counteract it.  To the Right– and to me– the Left winning and getting to terraform the United States is not acceptable– full stop.  NeverTrumpers are like seated passengers on Flight 93 cautioning the chargers of the cockpit to fight fair.