The Grateful vs. the Guilty

Taki's Magazine ^ | November 9, 2022 | Steve Sailer

[karpov]

Unlike you, who are reading this column on Wednesday, while writing it I didn’t have a clue what happened in Tuesday’s elections.

Then again, owing to how election-counting has slowed over the years due to the disinvention of the computer or whatever, you may not either. But you probably are more inclined to hear me opine on partisan politics today than you are on most Wednesdays.

So, I’m going to offer my highly stylized models of the appeal and inherent problems faced by the two parties, Republican and Democrat. Depending upon your turn of mind, you may find it disappointing or relieving that, unlike with my recent data-crazed columns, I’m going to go easy on presenting statistical evidence, in part because there will be all new data after Tuesday, and because it’s less work to just wave my hands around and paint word pictures rather than evaluate my theories with numbers.

“In general, big institutions such as academia, media, and tech have been increasingly closely aligned with Democrats, with a massive chilling effect on freedom of expression.”

To my mind, the Republican Party suffers from the contradictions of being traditionally the party of the executive class but also increasingly lately the party of the working class. I’m not sure if the inevitable economic conflicts between management and labor within the modern GOP can ever really be squared in the long term.

One fundamental problem is that most of the expertise at complex tasks like changing the tax code is of course found at the higher economic level. Moreover, working-class Republicans lack large institutions thinking hard about how to make subtle tweaks to benefit them, the way that, say, sixty years ago the AFL-CIO employed numerous smart lawyers, economists, and lobbyists to dream up reforms to benefit working-class Democrats