Based Camp： Were Progressives Good⧸Benign Before They Went Woke？
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Summary
In this episode, my wife Simone and I discuss why Progressivism is not what it was in the 80s and 90s, and why it isn t what it is today. We discuss why this is a problem, and how to deal with it.
Transcript
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Hello, Simone, my wonderful wife. It's beautiful to be here with you today.
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Glad to be talking. What are we going to talk about?
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So on a recent podcast, you had brought up something where I disagreed with you. And
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whenever we disagree on something, we like to hash it out so that we can get on the same page
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with the topic. So we both agree that right now, progressivism in the far left has been
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eaten by this super virus that has hollowed out the old predominant ideologies and just wears them
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like a skin suit. And we agree that this super virus is primary objective or like the objective
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ideological function of it. It's to remove in the moment emotional pain from people. That's
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what it optimizes most of its decisions around. So those two things being agreed, where we disagreed
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was the movements that it ate. What the progressive movements were in the 80s and 90s before the age
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of the internet, before this super virus arose, what was their real objective and what were they
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Yeah, my position and the general impression that I'm under is progressivism is the move fast,
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break things approach. Whereas conservatism is the hold on, wait, things are okay the way they are.
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Let's not change things so quickly. And so I don't see progressivism as inherently bad. I can see it as
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risky, obviously, because things do break when you move fast and when you're not careful. But it is
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just one philosophy. And ultimately, both progressivism and conservatism must work in concert. Because if you
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don't have advancement, if you don't have people moving fast and breaking things, you don't deal with new
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existential threats, you don't advance. But if you only advance, if you only try new things and
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constantly change, you both lose a lot of value collectively and a lot of efficiency and also
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subject yourself to maybe more existential risks than you're building solutions to, if that makes
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sense. Do you have a differing definition of these things?
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I do. Yeah. So I think the progressive movement always had an aesthetic element to it that contained
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what you're talking about and has always professed to care about that. For a long time, it's professed
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to care about that. But I think we need to remember that something could be called the Patriot Act and be
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totally unpatriotic, right? Like just because something professes something doesn't mean it doesn't.
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And I think that when we're talking about when we talk about conservatives, modern or even older
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conservatives, they'll often say that their movement, one of the big things they care about
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is small government, right? And yet they almost never do anything that actually makes the government
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smaller or that really deconsolidates executive power or that. And so just because a movement says
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and a lot of members believe that this is something that they do, I don't think that we should take that
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to mean that's actually what they're optimizing around. So when I look around progressive policy
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pushes in the 90s and the 80s, they all really seem to me based around optimizing equality,
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specifically equality of outcomes. And the more equality you had, the more equality you had in the
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way people were treated, in the opportunities people had access to, in sort of everything, the better.
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And this is not what it optimizes for anymore. An example of how much it doesn't optimize for
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equality now can be seen in insane things that it's done recently. So it's a lot of people,
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they might not agree with our original premise that it's been eaten and now it does something
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entirely different. So if you look at what progressivism does now, so you have Simone's
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vision of progressivism and my vision of progressivism, and we can talk about why each
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of those visions might be negative in some ways, and we can get to that. And I think that the
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equality drive is actually a pseudo-communist drive and that it's driven with the long-term plan to a
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communist-like society, but, or very socialist-like society, like, as close to communism as you can
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get. But if we go back to the main claim that we made at the beginning, which is that progressivism
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today isn't that anymore. So when we look at something like the recent fight in California,
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which was to have kids, like, not take tests or remove the amount of testing that kids get,
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because some kids get bad grades on tests and that hurts their feelings. So let's remove this
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thing that's hurting people's feelings. Now, obviously in the long-term, if you remove testing,
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that testing was primarily motivating the kids who didn't have parents who were motivating them.
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The rich kids' parents still send them to SAT prep. They're still sending their kids to forced
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environments where they are in some way socially or economically or emotionally punished for not
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continuing to achieve, to not continuing to do well. Whereas when you have less socio-economically
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advantaged people, often they don't have as much time to spend on their kids in those ways. They
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don't have as much time to engage those kids on those things. So the people who are vastly
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disproportionately hurt by removing things like that are going to be the economically less fortunate.
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So you are increasing inequality, but removing in the moment suffering. And you see this across
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the board. Again, I always come back to the Hays movement as being a great example of this,
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but I really think it is. The Healthy in Every Size movement saying that it is bigoted to teach
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or publish research that shows that it might be unhealthy to be severely overweight. That causes
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in the moment emotional pain, and therefore it is bad, regardless of whether or not it is true
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and might help people in the long run. That's just, you then rework what is true and what is being
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communicated to be the thing that hurts people less. Another area where you see this progressive
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policy of not at all being like what progressives used to be is these drug programs where they're
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giving hard drugs to people on the streets really at high levels, because not having your drug when
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you want it causes emotional pain. Therefore, it is evil. Therefore, we should give it to people,
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even if it causes more long-term suffering and exasperated social inequality caused by things
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like mental disorders. And you can see this in polyamory, like the social movements that you
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see today, right? I want sex now, right? And I might have some set of rules, but all of those rules I
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have with my partner are based around removing emotional pain for me and the partner while doing
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All right, but I'm going to push back on your premise around equality. I think that-
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Yeah, I don't think that's what progressivism is really about. I think that equality maybe correlates
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more highly with Christianity. That's like a concept that was introduced with Jesus in the New Testament,
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and it's all about like now the meek shall inherit. And this is about, that's where victimhood became
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cool. That's where helping the poor became cool. That's where helping everyone became like a
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desirable and virtuous thing. And I think that Christianity or like pro-religion groups have
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isolated, sorry, sorry, oscillated between progressivism and conservatism. So I think that
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there's a lower correlation between equality, which I very much like connect with Christianity
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and conservatism or progressivism. And I think more of it has to do with who is in favor of
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changing things and who is not in favor of changing things. There has been time when the
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Catholic church and then broader Christianity has been very pro-change. And there have been times when
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it has been very anti-change. So I don't agree with what your like basic argument is.
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I really find the point you just made very fascinating. And I do agree that you're right,
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that before Christianity, and this is actually a really interesting thing. If you study the
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history of like early Christianity, the idea of looking with reverence on the less fortunate in
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society was not really done. There was very little cultural precedent for doing that, at least within
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the traditions in those geographic regions. And this is something you can actually see Romans talk a lot
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about in the early Christian tradition, is they saw it as really interesting the way that
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Christianity did that, and potentially even morally superior to their existing pagan practices.
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As to why Christianity does that, I suspect it's because their original, like the progenitor of it all,
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was somebody who was suffered, who was downtrodden, and that they showed their dedication through
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suffering and unpraised suffering in the moment. And that is why for a long time after this,
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and if you're not familiar with the early Christian church, the core thing you would do to be cool in
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the Christian church was to become martyred. That was the highest act of devotion. And then when the
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Roman government mission, Christians started freaking out about this because they could no longer do the
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key thing, the end state, right? And so then what, that's when the monastic tradition started.
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So they would, they just get, they got fed up that they couldn't get themselves killed. So they just
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walk into the desert and then say, okay, I'll live this sort of life of suffering. But this elevated
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this, this life of suffering, which really elevated the poor, which is really philosophically
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interesting, but I don't know. I actually think both the progressive, the communist, and the
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conservative faction, I love the conservative factions, like you guys aren't the Christians. And then the
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Christians say, you guys are the progressives. They're like, you guys aren't the good Christians.
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And the truth is that Western civilization has been so inundated in Christian values for so long.
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I actually think both perspectives are different parts of the Christian kaleidoscope and represent
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different Christian denomination values and different ways of relating to those values. And so I think
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it's wrong to say that the conservatives are the Christian influence side and the progressives aren't
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the Christian influence side. However, I think I, well, okay, but here's where I don't agree with you.
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So when I look at the actual policy decisions that they were pushing, they were pushing for a very
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specific and stupid kind of equality. And that is equality, regardless of what you do, that you can
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dress any way, take any action, act in any way, put any amount of effort into something,
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and you should still be socially treated the same and get the same rewards. You should be able to
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not go to work and still get the same rewards as somebody who does go to work.
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That is one progressive group that has made arguments like that. And again, like there are,
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that's, this is what I personally, cause I'm going to hold out. Like I'm trying to stand
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progressivism here. Progressivism is about letting ideas out there, trying them, but it's not about
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enforcing them and it's not about forcing them on other people. It is, Hey, let's try this social
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experiment. Hey, let's try letting people dress whatever way they want. Let's try and see what
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But they never had a fail state. That's the thing about social experiments is they're supposed to
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have a fail state. Like we know if X or Y happens.
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Progressivism and conservatism are about the next step we take. They're not about determining what,
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what fails or what succeeds. And in fact, a very progressive system would have a higher
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revolution, a higher respawn rate than like a conservative system because the progressive
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system would say, Oh wow. We all just tried like being naked for a year. That was dumb.
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Here's a new progressive idea. Maybe we should wear clothes. Cool. Let's try it. Whereas
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someone would be like, I don't know, man. I don't know. Did you see the article like advice
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or something? And they're like, there's this cool new thing people are doing in San Francisco
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called radical monogamy. But see, that's the progressive way. The conservative way in San
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Francisco would be like, no, let's stick with polyamory. We know it works and let's not go
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around changing things. And progressivism is... We tried this polyamory thing. Let's give it
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another few centuries. Yeah, exactly. And that's what I'm saying. Like progressivism is great
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because it allows for greater adaptability. I think conservatism is the also very necessary
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hesitation before doing something crazy so that you don't end up hurting a lot of people. Because
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a point that you make about governance, for example, is progressivism within governance models,
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especially on the state level, is incredibly dangerous because when you do something wrong,
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hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people may die. So there is a place for these things.
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So here's how you convince me. Can you think of actual mainstream progressive policy positions?
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You have a window here, okay? You have the 90s to the 50s, all right? And you've got progressive
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positions from that period, okay? I want you to find a single one that was an actual policy position
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that they pushed for that couldn't be argued to primarily be about equality instead of just
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social accelerationism. Because what you're describing is social accelerationism. And you
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get social acceleration, like Calvinist tradition, which we're both from, is a very socially accelerationist
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position. They were always experimenting with new cultural practices. Gay marriage.
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What? Gay marriage. Gay marriage? I don't think that's about equality. Hey, if it were about equality,
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then we would have animal marriage too, all right? Like, this is for the gays.
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What are you talking about? Come on. It was 100%. If you were about social change,
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you would have animal marriage. Gay marriage was saying, this isn't hurting anyone, and it's not
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involving any non-consenting entities, and therefore it should be allowed because equality explains the
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push towards gay marriage much, much, much more so than just social experimentation.
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And in fact, I would bet that many gay proponents would find that quite an insulting reason to say
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why progressives were standing gay marriage. Was what? They just wanted social experimentation?
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They just wanted social change? No. They were fighting for equality. And anyone would have told
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you that. Perhaps you're right. I think it's acknowledging that an old social institution
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was no longer relevant and allowing that social institution to evolve. That is to say, marriage.
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Conservatives change their practices all the time. So if you want to talk about a big social change
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that happened during that time, was the conservative antagonism towards abortion. That just wasn't true
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before like the 50s. Conservatives were pro-abortion?
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Yeah, they were pro-abortion. In fact, there were surveys done and conservatives were much more
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Yeah. So the abortion thing only came about because they were trying to capture the Catholic voting block,
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So I looked this up after recording, and at the Republican National Convention in Kansas City in 1976,
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the majority of the constituents there were pro-choice.
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But like evangelicals being anti-abortion? No, that was not a thing historically. That was social
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experimentation. Now you look at the highly derived evangelical movements. They're constantly coming
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up with new social practices, like speaking in tongues, or weird types of parades they do, or,
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uh-oh, now we're going to talk with each other with these words. You know, they're always socially
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experimenting. What you are seeing here is progressives have defined a specific type of
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social experimentation as good, as progressive. And because you grew up in that environment,
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that was the only thing you saw. You saw all of the conservative social experimentation as intrinsically
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regressive. When it wasn't, it was trying out new things. All of these quote-unquote
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conservative cults, or like extremist conservative religious factions, that was social experimentation,
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just as much as a hippie commune. Now, here's a separate argument. If you look across cultures,
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you have cultures that are called, I want to say accelerationists or derivative, and they change a
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lot. But you don't just see this in cultures, you see this with languages. So if you look at
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specific language groups, as they've derived from Indo-European, some languages, just for whatever
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reason, are really highly retained. They just don't change. They keep saying,
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things the same, et cetera. Other groups that deviated from the same cultural evolutionary
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tree at the same time, they just have a cultural tendency of changing really quickly in the way
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they say things and the speed they adopt new words, everything like that. If you look historically,
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actually the core differentiation here wasn't progressives versus conservatives. It was the
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Catholic and Orthodox versus the Protestant traditions. The Protestant traditions, oh, it's derived.
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The Protestant tradition has always been a highly derived tradition with certain iterations of the
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Protestant tradition, specifically the Calvinist iteration being the most derived iteration of the
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Protestant tradition. That's why when you look at the founders who were predominantly Calvinist,
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you would see them doing things like editing their Bibles to try to make them more like up to date
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with modern science and stuff like that. That was both highly derived, but a very conservative practice
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because they still really followed this new social structure that they had created.
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And I would argue that conservatism today is still the same in terms of its long-term objective as
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conservatism in the 90s and 80s. And this is where you can see your core thesis falling apart,
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I think, is that it is about intergenerational cultural fidelity. What they care about is their
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culture surviving into the future. Yet, if you're looking at the Protestant traditions, specifically the most
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fervent of the Protestant traditions, they're often highly derived cultural groups. Look at the Mormons
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talk about a derived cultural group. They have very odd sorts of practices.
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And they do innovate. They do adapt. It takes them a little while, but they adapt.
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They do adapt. Yeah. They do a lot more social experimentation than I'd argue progressives do.
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And their social technologies are really cool. Like we can get into the Mormon dating and stuff like
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that. Like they've developed some pretty interesting social technologies. But let's actually talk about that.
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So let's talk about how a single ward works. Just as an example, derived in newish social technology.
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So just to provide a little bit of context, like on Sundays, different waves of people will go to church services
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and a singles ward would meet at a certain time, like maybe at 8 a.m. when like the rest of all the families
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And yeah, then it's, yeah, it's a church service followed by, you know, activities after where they hang out,
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they go to lunch. But hold on, it's not just activities. So what they would do is they would
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pair up usually people who were like dated or interested in each other in the ward to play
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mother and father of the ward. And so instead of going back, like you would, if you were married
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and going to your home and then doing family day with the kids, you would do family day with the
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ward where this couple plays the role of mother and father and then hosts like an event, like a party,
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like a mixer for the other people in the ward in the same way that they would do for their kids.
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If they were older and it allowed them to try out relationships in a way that I think probably
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led to healthier relationships forming. So that's an example of a newish social technology.
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Okay. I looked it up after recording and it appears that it gained prominence in the 1970s,
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but was invented in the 1950s. So yes, a very new social technology.
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It's more of a conservative tradition because that social technology was experimented with the idea
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of forming relationships and transmitting the culture onto the next generation. So it was
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towards conservative ends and not towards progressive ends where when they experiment
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with new social practices, historically before they were eaten by the virus and now they're just
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like a ghoul wearing a flesh suit. They were about maximizing equality.
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Okay. Hold on. I don't think it's about maximizing equality. I think it goes back to a different
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definition that you've given about both the present, but also past difference between progressivism
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and conservatism with conservatism fighting for intergenerational wellbeing and progressivism
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fighting for intragenerational wellbeing. So progressivism optimizing around the wellbeing of
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people here and now, we don't really care about our grandchildren's grandchildren and conservatives
00:20:07.980
So the one big deviation from all this is global warming. Where does this fit into things for you?
00:20:13.860
Because it's the one area where progressives actually take a long-termist perspective.
00:20:18.860
Don't you think it's one of those things that's arbitrary, like with the war in Ukraine,
00:20:23.840
how in the United States, like it's almost, it's a little counterintuitive how we'll say Democrats
00:20:30.200
and Republicans decided to support different angles on the conflict. And I don't think necessarily
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it had to be. So I'll give you my answer to this. Okay.
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I think what's happening is the progressive institution has predominantly, when we talk
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about the super virus or where it really began to spread, it was at university campuses. Okay. And
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at that time, the conservative institutions, though, a lot of people think of it as conservative
00:20:56.400
as anti-academic, but that really wasn't true. If you go back to the conservatism of the seventies
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and eighties, there were a lot of conservatives in academia back then. But once the progressives
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had really captured the academic system as a means of replicating their ideology, because
00:21:08.960
they weren't having as many kids, so they needed to proselytize somewhere, then the conservative
00:21:13.600
institutions began to distrust anything that was coming out of academia. And global warming
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really requires a law, an academic perspective to judge how dangerous it really is. And so I think
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that what we're really seeing here is more a distrust of academia from conservatives and
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the progressive priesthood, if they have a priesthood, which they do actually, it's academics.
00:21:37.440
That's the height of the, that's who tells them what's true and what's false. And the same
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way that if you look at the older Catholic tradition and you wanted to go determine what
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was true and what was false, and we can go over a different video in this, you'd go to your
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priest, right? And that was the core divide between them and the Protestants. The Protestants said,
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oh, you should determine this on your own. And obviously some Catholic traditions have different,
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but the progressive faction, when they're trying to determine what's true and what's false about
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the world, they say, ask the experts. But what do they really mean by experts? They mean people who
00:22:04.440
have been accredited by this university system where you can be fired for saying something too
00:22:07.920
conservative, right? That's not experts. That's just what's the progressive status quo,
00:22:11.900
which is really, especially now, right? Really, it just makes it a priesthood.
00:22:16.300
Yeah. Yeah. Maybe you've convinced me a little bit. I guess growing up with progressive culture,
00:22:25.880
one wants to believe that it's more well-meaning than it perhaps is, or more deep than it is.
00:22:35.220
Equality is well-meaning if you don't think about it.
00:22:36.920
No, yeah. If you don't think about it, but equality is a complete farce. There is no such
00:22:41.780
Explain what you mean by that. That was fine words to a lot of people.
00:22:44.520
I know. But once you think about it, yes. So this happened, I realized this upon reading a book
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called Policy Paradox by Deborah Stone. In one chapter, she describes a professor bringing a
00:22:57.720
cake to a class and dividing it fairly or equally. But then she describes all of the different ways
00:23:04.060
in which the cake can be equally divided. And I'm not going to give exact examples based on
00:23:08.980
who gets the best grades, who's the hungriest, who has the best way to tolerate a glycemic load,
00:23:13.940
who really likes cake the most, who she likes the best, who walked up first to get a piece of
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cake. There are many ways to eat. I think I don't like the examples used just easier. I think a better
00:23:24.520
way to say it was, is it who's the hungriest, who needs calories the most, like who's physically the
00:23:30.020
biggest? Is it exactly equal distribution? Is it to the people who have less access to cake at home?
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Is it people who have less money so they couldn't get a cake in class as much?
00:23:42.160
Yeah. Yeah. Or the people who got more cake last time get less cake this time.
00:23:45.580
Yeah. Yeah. Depending on sort of who you are and where you stand in this and how much you want cake,
00:23:52.280
it might, an equal division of the cake might feel very unfair to you, very unequal to you.
00:23:57.180
You could always manipulate what equality means.
00:23:59.520
Yes. And because you have to make a judgment call on how we define equal, and there is no
00:24:06.700
one universal thing that you can use as criteria, there is no such thing as true equality. There's
00:24:12.800
equality along one dimension, and it's a very one-dimensional way to think about things. So
00:24:17.640
yeah, if you base an entire political philosophy around equality, especially if that equality is not
00:24:24.700
something that also is core to that political philosophy, if equality were defined in
00:24:31.060
progressivism, I don't even know how it could be defined.
00:24:34.840
The reason it's not defined is because it's defined loosely so everyone can believe that if
00:24:39.820
things were divided more equally, they'd have more stuff.
00:24:42.180
They would benefit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And what's really interesting about intersectionality
00:24:45.860
as a concept is that it's like a moving goalposts for equality that enables people to cheat. It's like
00:24:52.140
a cheat code for having things made more equal in your favor.
00:24:55.720
Yeah. Because it has allowed people to say, I deserve more and I am more excluded and have
00:25:00.880
a bunch of exclusionary labels. I think as progressivism began to be eaten by the virus,
00:25:06.020
as it began to optimize itself around removing emotional pain, it did begin to define this equality
00:25:12.020
that it was trying to create. Where equality is the people, the people who deserve the most are
00:25:17.780
the people most susceptible to emotional pain. And this is why you have these emotionally fragile
00:25:22.960
deserve so much special treatment when no sane culture would be like, oh yes, the emotionally
00:25:28.300
fragile, that is who should have the most resources and run the society. But within progressive culture,
00:25:35.620
yeah, of course the emotionally fragile, because it is their emotional fragility and their susceptibility
00:25:40.220
to emotional harm, which means they mean more protection in a society where the core promise,
00:25:44.240
the core thing that's getting people on board is we will protect you from pain. So I will say that
00:25:49.560
you have seen this transition, but I think yes, in 90s and 80s progressivism, they didn't know what
00:25:53.580
equality meant. And this is why those communist systems always fail. It's because they say, oh,
00:25:59.280
we're going to create equality. And then what happens just because humans are humans is that the groups
00:26:05.540
in power within these systems end up defining equality in a way that favors them. And if you're not
00:26:11.820
in power, then you can't do anything but revolt, create a new system. And then inevitably in a few
00:26:16.480
years, you end up redefining equality to what favors you. And so that's the problem with equality is it is
00:26:21.140
such a slippery concept. I think that we now have a progressive ideology that does define equality. It
00:26:26.900
does define who deserves more. The problem is it's just a really stupid definition. Even worse, it's a stupid
00:26:31.760
definition because, okay. How does it describe equality? Yes. The people most susceptible to emotional
00:26:38.060
pain deserve more. So the most mentally ill shall get all of them. Yes. Yes. Yes. You have seen this.
00:26:46.800
We're like, don't you understand? I have PTSD. I can't handle this right now. And the problem is
00:26:53.140
some people really do have PTSD and we need to create special things for them so that they don't
00:26:58.980
suffer for no reason. But when you incentivize this, when you create a system where the people who feel
00:27:04.960
emotional pain most easily, well, then you created a system where their entire social group, their entire
00:27:09.740
society is constantly rewarding a lack of emotional control. And so within their groups, within their
00:27:16.640
little governance structures, you constantly have these meltdowns. And this is bad for the individual in
00:27:23.000
these groups, because one, you're teaching an external locus of control, which like all of the research shows,
00:27:27.500
it's just horrible. And it makes you have lower your ability to control yourself emotionally. But true, when you
00:27:32.620
reward people for a lack of emotional control, then they at like a biological, like hard-coded level
00:27:39.400
lose the ability to control their emotions. And so this means that they experience a lot more pain over
00:27:46.960
the long run. Ironically, when you create an entire system, an entire ideology, an internal governance
00:27:55.100
framework around a moving emotional pain, you cause infinitely more emotional pain. And this is why
00:28:01.040
since Pew started doing the research on this, conservatives have always been happier than
00:28:07.340
progressives. Always. It's markedly happier. And it's because they do not have these systems
00:28:13.160
that are rewarding them for feeling bad. Yeah. Yeah. That's, uh, well then, I mean,
00:28:21.380
where would you say that this version of progressivism emerged?
00:28:26.460
I didn't. This is a different video. Yeah. We got to talk about the virus in a different video.
00:28:31.920
And I would love to. I'm not referring to the virus. I'm talking about the roots of progressivism.
00:28:37.660
Probably as an intra-generational well-being movement. Yeah, yeah. So progressivism as communism,
00:28:43.140
as an equality maximizer, this came from communism. It came from communist groups.
00:28:48.040
Oh. And before that, there was no focus on... So would you say, and communism rose around the
00:28:56.140
industrial revolution, right? Yeah. So if you look at things that my family fought for,
00:29:00.900
like historically, right? Like my family was never progressive family in terms of the ideology that
00:29:05.920
was motivating them. They were always motivated by maximizing individual agency was in the system.
00:29:10.180
But when they were in politics, you look at a few generations back, big supporters of women's
00:29:14.040
suffrage, big supporters of stuff like shorter work weeks during the age of robber barons,
00:29:19.600
trying to increase autonomy by being very workers' rights. I think you can be adaptive in what
00:29:25.100
maximizes individual well-being and autonomy, while also saying that just trying to optimize for these
00:29:31.740
things that the... That iteration of progressivism existed before the communist ideology really took
00:29:37.800
over the Democratic Party and made them into what they are.
00:29:40.600
What you're describing is, I think, maybe more like my original definition of progressivism. Like,
00:29:45.060
we're open to change and fixing things more quickly. No? You don't think so?
00:29:48.540
No. What I'm talking about is conservatism. All the things that I'm talking about, I consider
00:29:50.840
conservative ideas. And they were conservative ideas. They were Republican ideas. And a lot of
00:29:54.800
people say the Republicans and the progressives switched, but they didn't really. What happened is
00:29:58.740
racism switched between the parties. That absolutely happened. But if you look at the policy
00:30:04.180
positions that the various parties were having, what really happened is this communist strain basically
00:30:09.920
infected one of the groups. And it became the Communist Party and had no sort of ties to its
00:30:15.740
former self. Whereas the Republican movement did adapt to that. Like, it reactively took positions
00:30:21.340
that it hadn't taken before. But it maybe changed as much as the conservative and progressive movements
00:30:25.860
did during the Trump era. Where, like, there was definitely huge party switches. Like, the
00:30:29.900
protectionists became the non-protectionists. And, like, the populists became the non-populists. And
00:30:34.220
all of the people who were pro-war became the anti-war party. There was a huge party switch
00:30:38.680
then. But fundamentally, mostly the people who were still on one party were still in the
00:30:42.700
same party. And yet our grandkids will say, don't you, the party switched when Trump took
00:30:46.760
power? Which I think would make most progressives, like, what? No, you can't say that. No one
00:30:52.300
will say that in the future. But, like, it's so obvious that's going to be the way people
00:30:59.440
I don't agree with that. I'm just saying that's what people will say. And so I think
00:31:03.420
that we can mislabel this sort of, quote-unquote, flip that happened with the parties when it
00:31:08.280
really wasn't a full flip that happened with the parties.
00:31:17.000
A little bit. I think a lot of it might, for me, be caught in the weeds. I would need
00:31:22.360
to go through the history of, you know, what, yeah, what all these things stood for in
00:31:30.860
Well, I love you, Simone. I love that we disagree about things and we make a point of trying
00:31:35.660
to come to, like, we haven't done this in a podcast before, where we, like, genuinely
00:31:39.160
hadn't really talked through something before the podcast. So now you guys are seeing how
00:31:43.560
we try to align on issues in our relationship and we'll keep talking about this until both
00:31:48.480
of us come to a position where I'm like, either you convince me or I convince you. So actually,
00:31:53.940
an argument she didn't make now that did convince me a lot, because we did talk about this
00:31:57.440
a little bit before the podcast. And it is that progressivism before the virus was much
00:32:02.520
more pluralistic in its aims and that I am overly simplifying it. And that did actually
00:32:07.520
convince me. And I do think that she's right. Is these equality-driven angles of progressivism
00:32:12.920
were only some of the most dominant factions, but there were many different factions within
00:32:17.440
the progressive movement before the virus that had many different objectives. And that
00:32:21.920
thought through that they were much more pluralistic and I'm overly simplifying them.
00:32:25.800
And so I did change my mind based on that argument, which didn't come up in this podcast.
00:32:29.280
Do you think you're oversimplifying them by saying that they were all fighting for equality?
00:32:35.380
Or are you still going to hold that all of these-
00:32:38.000
No, I'm just saying the predominant factions that had power to get things passed in the
00:32:40.920
legislature and stuff like that. I think that they were fighting for equality more than anything
00:32:44.680
else. I think that was their primary objective function. But I do also believe that it was a
00:32:49.280
diverse party back then, and it is wrong to paint the progressive party circa 80s, 90s, 70s, 60s,
00:32:55.860
as one group. In the same way that today, I think that you can't really ideologically dissent
00:33:02.620
Yeah. Yeah. Oh, and maybe I'm thinking also more about my original point that progressivism is
00:33:10.540
more about being in favor of change and conservatism is not. Because I think you made an interesting
00:33:15.840
argument that a lot of conservative groups have been very innovative, but I think it can also
00:33:20.760
equally be argued that the progressive movement, especially today, is so ossified. It's so,
00:33:29.420
And to talk about what you mean there, some people might be like, oh, I disagree with that.
00:33:32.360
The TERF movement, historically, it would have had differences of opinions with other progressives,
00:33:37.380
but it fundamentally would have still been allied with the progressive party. Yet it has been,
00:33:41.460
these are feminists. These are old school blank slate as feminists. The reason they believe what
00:33:45.160
they believe, if you actually look at, they call themselves gender critical feminists. If you
00:33:48.800
actually look at why they hold the positions they hold, it's because they believe in the older
00:33:53.680
orthodoxy. And the older orthodoxy was that humans aren't born with anything. The only reason we have
00:34:00.020
gender is because we were raised to believe we have gender, right? And so they see anyone who is
00:34:07.200
ossifying this idea of gender or saying, oh no, gender is real, as fighting for this completely
00:34:12.840
fictional and that it's not based on any sort of biological reality patriarchy, and that we should
00:34:17.440
move towards a completely genderless society. I think a lot of people don't actually know what the
00:34:22.340
gender critical movement is actually fighting for. And they believe this because that used to actually
00:34:25.880
be the scientific consensus. Before academics were like, oh no, there actually are like really
00:34:30.680
systemic differences between the way men and women think. And we now know this, and that you can't
00:34:35.100
just raise a guy as a girl or raise a girl as a guy. And most of the time have that turn out okay.
00:34:40.900
Actually, you can, there's been intergender studies on this. I'm not saying what's true.
00:34:44.940
I'm saying what is the political orthodoxy of the academic institution now?
00:34:49.400
So we can get on that later. But this has been a fantastic conversation, Simone.
00:34:52.940
Yeah, I love talking with you about these things. I especially love when we disagree
00:34:57.940
Yeah, me too. That's where we're going to come up with a new idea and we can,
00:35:00.040
we have a new thing to talk about for a few days.
00:35:02.040
Oh yeah, things are so much more interesting when one or both of us is wrong because then we
00:35:06.240
become slightly more enlightened at the end, but only slightly.