The comment's author is the proprietor of another neo-reactionary blog: http://handleshaus.com/
Handle shows how progressivism has religious characteristics, but is a religion without a central authoritative text or a single locus of human authority. Consequently, it is maximally adaptable, manipulable, survivable, keeping in power those ruthless enough to ride its snaky path--but its perfunctory logic and its unprincipled basis in rhetoric leave it with minimal social, economic, military, or any other sort of optimality. Note, by the by, that the best of the neo-reactionary blogs attract comments of a higher quality than most articles in standard publications--and, as mostly pseudonymous writers, they even find the freedom to trample presently protected political fetishes--when such impede the search for truth or amusement.
Handle's Comment:
The strongest belief systems is one that can change opportunistically without admitting its changing, pretend it is part of a continuous tradition without resembling even its recent forbears, and become absolutely impervious to criticism or falsification. Like a religion.
I think the ACA-hours thing is a good example of what you see a lot of progressive writers do, and what Yglesias is particularly skilled at doing first.
The pattern of any particular debate is:
1. Progressives develop policy goal A, and implementation B.
2. Opposition says that B will cause negative trade-off or unintended consequence C – that Progressives themselves currently accept as negative, or at least something that is seen by most of the public as negative.
3. Sometimes the argument goes further and deeper with the Opposition saying anyB that is trying to accomplish A leads to C, there’s just no way around it.
4. At first Progressives deny B->C. But that is sometimes falsifiable, or just a total howler.
5. Then Progressives say, well, ok C, which is bad, but A is worth it. This is a matter of subjective valuation, which is why is it a dead-end for discourse, spinning around the same cul-de-sac forever.
6. And if that’s not satisfactory, then someone like Yglesias notices the obvious solution to the problem which is just to come along and say, “Actually, C is a good thing, or at least it has a bright side which we’re ignoring and which can trump the negative side. Only stupid people caught in dead-ends don’t see this. We should have more C! The burden of proof should now shift to people who are opposed to C!” This is the ultimate in ‘spin’ – and ‘flipping the script’ is why we call it spin.
7. And then everybody else suddenly realizes the immense power for winning the debate behind adopting a new set of beliefs where C is a good thing, and a day after Yglesias does it, I see a dozen other high-Alexa county writers repeat it. All of a sudden, the frame of debate shifts and the desirability of C is new dead-end, and the ratchet proceeds one notch at the expense of replacing a former progressive belief with a more useful new one – an adaptive mutation.
An example is the recent minimum wage stuff: The CBO came out and said it would mean less jobs in the midst of a weak labor market for the low-skilled. Since the CBO is progressive gospel – they can’t afford to criticize the number and ruin the credibility of a source they constantly use as a weapon. And all sides agree fewer jobs in this situation is bad, right?
And then, suddenly:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/02/18/cbo_minimum_wage_hike_would_cost_jobs.html
The outcome that the CBO is forecasting—an outcome where you get a small amount of disemployment that’s vastly outweighed by the increase in income among low-wage families writ large—is the outcome that you want.
A minimum wage hike with a small but real disemployment impact is the minimum wage hike you want.
Then it tweets and tumbls and reblogs all over the place. Now the question shifts to ‘what’s the ‘optimal’ number of job losses for a minimum wage hike to maximize ‘prosperity’, which, yeah, is kind of a fuzzy, manipulable notion, but what we were really always shooting for.
Tyler Cowen pushes back against the avalanche here: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/02/the-cbo-report-on-the-minimum-wage.html
This is a perverse kind of Bayesianism where the policy cart is driving the ideology horse. One begins with subjective ideology and an empirical theory of policy implementation. When the data proves your theory produces results that are ideological negatives, then you just switch the valence to positive in your belief system. The means become the ends. Raising the minimum wage isn’t good because it redistributes more wealth from capital to labor without causing unemployment or inflation, raising the minimum wage is good in itself, and if disemployment and inflation are the results then they are also now positives we should have slightly more of.
Once you witness these progressivism adaptive mutation-cycles occur a few dozens of times a year (at least), you realize that change is the only constant
