“I think we’re overestimating the risks to American democracy,” Marginal Revolution dude Tyler Cowen tells Mario Gabriele, over at The Generalist. “The intellectual class is way too pessimistic. They’re not used to it being rough and tumble, but it’s been that way for most of the country’s history. It’s correct to think that’s unpleasant. But by being polarized and shouting at each other, we actually resolve things and eventually move forward. Not always the right way. I don’t always like the decisions it makes. But I think American democracy is going to be fine.”
Uh, really, Tyler? How often has the U.S. Capitol been stormed by an angry mob? Once a generation? How many times has the presidential nominee of a major party insisted that if he loses the election it will be due to fraud? How many times has such a nominee claimed, without any evidence at all, the millions of fraudulent votes were cast against him?
American democracy has already been severely damaged by Donald Trump. The entire Republican Party has converted itself into a mindless instrument of its maximum leader and “even” the Chief Justice of the United States has demurely kissed Trump’s big, broad ass rather than offend his master. After another four years of Trump—which sadly seems to be what we’re in for—we will not be the same country.
“It’s not Trump, it’s the times” (my words) is the general rap that Tyler is pushing. There was “stasis”, more or less, Tyler tells us, from Reagan to Obama. But now, well, the times they are a’changing:
That ended in the last ten years. The time we all felt it was when Trump was elected, but I think that was misleading. We all thought, “Oh my goodness, everything’s different now.” And ok, it was. But really what I think is changing is that technology is accelerating again with AI and biomedicine. That’s the more fundamental change that would be happening with or without Trump or if Hillary had won or if Biden had been nominated instead of Hillary in 2016. We still would’ve ended up in some very volatile set of circumstances.
If Tyler really thinks that AI and biomedicine are the “story” of the past ten years—that these are the reasons we’re “polarized”—he’s crazy—and, well, he isn’t. It’s “curious” that someone who positions himself as the intellectual heir of Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, and Friedrich Hayek would seek to “normalize” a witless, soulless authoritarian like Donald Trump, but that’s precisely what Dr. Cowen is doing.1 My guess is that Tyler’s hatred of the woke, “socialist” left, as exemplified by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and, of course, “AOC”, is so great that he’s willing to accept Trump as the “necessary” thug who will get the job done—that, regardless of Trump’s vicious bluster, he’ll leave “capitalism” alone, which he certainly will. Despite his supposed embrace of the “rough and tumble”, Tyler’s actually afraid of it, because the “bad guys” might win! We have to cheat, because otherwise we might lose! During the tumult of the French Revolution, the German poet Goethe said that he preferred injustice to disorder. If he were honest—though he is not—Dr. Cowen would say that he prefers capitalism to democracy.2
Afterwords
I previously caught Dr. Cowen in the act of being a dick—to his wife, no less—here.
I have recently discussed—at length—the long descent of the Republican Party into the mire of corruption in which it now finds itself, with Trump serving, to a great extent, as the man who simply removed the mask.
Over at Reason, J. D. Tucille points out that Trump’s plans to deport all 14-odd million illegal aliens in the U.S. would cost around $1 trillion. I wonder if Tyler thinks that would be a good investment.
Tyler says that the U.S. today reminds him of 17th century England, when there was lots of “war and turmoil”, but lots of cool stuff happening too—“the printing press became important, calculus was discovered, the scientific revolution took place”. So if Biden, or Trump, gets his head cut off, he’ll be down with that? As long as they don’t come after Tyler’s stash, I guess.