Astral Codex Ten

Reagan

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Reagan

Article

Reagan is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 10 times across 10 issues between May 04, 2021 and October 23, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “The US got Reagan”; “The US got Reagan”; “member of Reagan’s ‘kitchen cabinet’“. It most often appears alongside Trump, United States, Congress.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 10
  • Issue count: 10
  • First seen: May 04, 2021
  • Last seen: October 23, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Book Review: A Brief History Of Neoliberalism
May 04, 2021 · Original source
But we know how this ended. The US got Reagan. Britain got Thatcher. A tide of free-market sentiment, later termed "neoliberalism", swept over the world. Governments confronted public sector unions and left them shells of their former selves; a series of regulatory changes let companies do the same with their own workforces. Top tax rates went down; newly money-hungry executives launched an orgy of mergers and buyouts. Entrepreneurs founded new companies and forced the old dinosaurs to compete on an equal footing; the dinosaurs responded by downsizing and offshoring their employees. Employment went from a lifetime guarantee to a bullet point you put on your resume when applying to the next place. By 1990-2000, most of this had settled down, and for better or worse we had a stable new system.
How directly influential this appeal to engage in class war was, is hard to tell. But we do know that the American Chamber of Commerce subsequently expanded its base from around 60,000 firms in 1972 to over a quarter of a million ten years later. Jointly with the National Association of Manufacturers (which moved to Washington in 1972) it amassed an immense campaign chest to lobby Congress and engage in research. The Business Roundtable, an organization of CEOs ‘committed to the aggressive pursuit of political power for the corporation’, was founded in 1972 and thereafter became the centrepiece of collective pro-business action. The corporations involved accounted for ‘about one half of the GNP of the United States’ during the 1970s, and they spent close to $900 million annually (a huge amount at that time) on political matters. Think-tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institute, the Center for the Study of American Business, and the American Enterprise Institute, were formed with corporate backing both to polemicize and, when necessary, as in the case of the National Bureau of Economic Research, to construct serious technical and empirical studies and political-philosophical arguments broadly in support of neoliberal policies. Nearly half the financing for the highly respected NBER came from the leading companies in the Fortune 500 list. Closely integrated with the academic community, the NBER was to have a very significant impact on thinking in the economics departments and business schools of the major research universities. With abundant finance furnished by wealthy individuals (such as the brewer Joseph Coors, who later became a member of Reagan’s ‘kitchen cabinet’) and their foundations (for example Olin, Scaife, Smith Richardson, Pew Charitable Trust), a flood of tracts and books, with Nozick’s Anarchy State and Utopia perhaps the most widely read and appreciated, emerged espousing neoliberal values. A TV version of Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose was funded with a grant from Scaife in 1977. ‘Business was’, Blyth concludes, ‘learning to spend as a class.’
The imbalances seem not to trouble the Bush administration, judging by cavalier statements to the effect that the current account deficit, if it is a problem, can easily be dealt with by people buying US-made goods (as if such goods are readily available and cheap enough and as if nominally US-made goods do not have a high foreign-input component). If this really happened then Wal-Mart would be put out of business. The budget deficit, Bush says, can easily be dealt with without raising taxes by curbing domestic programmes (as if there are any large discretionary programmes left to dismantle). Vice-President Cheney’s remark that ‘Reagan taught us that budget deficits do not matter’ is alarming, because what Reagan also taught is that running up deficits is a way to force retrenchment in public expenditures and that attacking the standard of living of the mass of the population while feathering the nests of the rich can best be accomplished in the midst of financial turmoil and crisis. If, furthermore, we ask the general question, ‘Who has actually benefited from the numerous financial crises that have cascaded from one country to another in wave after wave of catastrophic deflations, inflations, capital flights and structural adjustments since the late 1970s?’, the weak commitment of the current US administration to fending off a fiscal crisis in spite of all the warning signs becomes more readily understandable. In the wake of a financial crash, the ruling elite may hope to emerge even more empowered than before.
Highlights From The Comments On Kids And Climate Change
October 13, 2021 · Original source
Second, often elections aren’t close. As a commenter brings up in that thread, the Democrats controlled the House of Representatives nonstop for 38 years from 1955 - 1993. Reagan won the 1984 election by 525 to 13 (and AFAICT MVT should be aiming at the median electoral vote in an electoral system). I think some of this has to do with irrational emotions - ie the South hated Republicans so much after Lincoln and the Civil War that Democrats could do whatever they wanted and still win there. But there sure are a lot of irrational emotions in politics today and I wouldn’t want to count this factor out.
California Gubernatorial Candidates From Z to Z
May 24, 2022 · Original source
In case you’re still not convinced he’s really Republican, he lives on a ranch and has three children named Chase, Reagan, and Rosslyn.
Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy
June 24, 2022 · Original source
It is a universal feature of the American government that substantial federal agencies do not shrink — even Ronald Reagan, the president most opposed to an expansive federal government since Coolidge, failed to see any reduction in spending.
Grenada Intervention (1983): Reagan ordered an invasion, not out of self-defence nor with UNSC approval (in fact voted against by UN general assembly 108 to 9), of the small island off the coast of Venezuela where its communist military junta came into power
Your Book Review: The Outlier
July 08, 2022 · Original source
Like most people under 70, I was more aware of Carter’s post-presidency role as America’s kindly old grandfather, pottering around holding his wife’s hand and building Houses for Humanity. I mostly knew that he liked to wear sweaters, that he owned a peanut farm, and that he lost to Ronald Reagan.
He also has the misfortune to be running against Ronald Reagan, who, in addition to being a once-in-a-generation political talent, is willing to fight dirty. Afraid that a last-minute hostage release deal (the possibility from which the term “October surprise” originates) will secure Carter’s reelection, Reagan’s campaign manager William Casey cuts an illegal backroom deal with Iran to ensure the hostages stay put until after the election. Or at least, it sure seems like he does—there’s no definitive proof, and many sources say otherwise, but a lot of highly suspicious circumstantial evidence has emerged in recent years. And not just from Reagan’s enemies—even James Baker, Reagan’s Chief of Staff, says that Casey probably did it [5].
To make matters even worse, Ted Kennedy comes back from the (political) grave to fuck with Carter one last time. One of his former operatives somehow manages to steal Carter’s debate prep book and passes it to the Reagan campaign. As a result, Reagan is prepared for every one of Carter’s attacks, and crushes him in the debate [6]. Though to be fair, Reagan probably would have crushed him anyway, as Carter is a terrible debater and Reagan is notoriously charming. “A recession is when your neighbor loses his job,” he likes to say. “A depression is when you lose yours. And a recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his!”
Sorry, I Still Think I Am Right About The Media Very Rarely Lying
December 29, 2022 · Original source
The US branch of St. Hubertus was founded at Bohemian Grove, a secret society of elites (past members include Nixon, Reagan, Kissinger, and Hearst) who meet in a private redwood forest near San Francisco and do undisclosed things there.
Your Book Review: Public Citizens
June 23, 2023 · Original source
The answer starts with Nader’s uncompromising moral worldview. There never has been, and probably never will be, a president who lived up to his extreme standards. Take Jimmy Carter: even though Carter granted Nader unprecedented personal access, and even though many Naderites had high-level positions in Carter’s administration, Nader did nothing but criticize him, and in fact actively undermined his re-election15. “Reagan will help [our movement]” by galvanizing the opposition, Nader predicted, comically inaccurately. Decades later he finally admitted that Carter had in fact been the most pro-consumer president of his lifetime.
Inline links: 15, finally admitted
So of course when the nineties came around Nader viewed the Clintons with equal disdain, oblivious to the fact that the anti-government liberalism he pioneered was part of what brought about “Third Way” Democrats like Clinton and Gore. Like that Rage Against the Machine video, he saw Bush and Gore as one and the same—“tweedledee and tweedledum,” he called them. Having learned nothing from the Reagan years, he once again inaccurately predicted that a Bush victory would actually be better for the country, because it would fire up the progressive movement.
Inline links: that Rage Against the Machine video
Book Review: The Origins Of Woke
May 01, 2024 · Original source
Therefore, every business owner needs to monitor their employees for jokes, political comments, flirtatiousness, and take action against any offenses. Hanania has several complaints here. First and most legibly, it (say it with me) gets taken too far. Volokh lists a large number of [examples of things that have been found to be] evidence of a hostile work environment: signs with the phrase “men working”; “draftsman” and “foreman” as job titles, pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini and a burning American flag in a cubicle; an ad campaign using samurai, kabuki, and sumo wrestling to refer to Japanese competition; jokes of a sexual nature not targeted at any particular person; misogynistic rap music […] even terms like “great view” and “walk-up” have been cited as potentially trying to exclude blind people and those in wheelchairs. And In a 2015 and 2016, a black father and son named Owen Diaz and Demetric Di-az2 [sic] worked at a Tesla plant. They sued the company for racial discrimination, with the father’s claims alone making it to trial….racial slurs were used in the presence of Diaz, and he saw racist graffiti on a bathroom wall. It appears that the workers allegedly responsible were mostly or all minorities themselves, and each time an allegation could be verified, the employee was punished. Tesla claimed that they had taken enough steps to address the concerns of Diaz […] a jury disagreed, and awarded the plaintiff $137 million, an amount that the judge reduced to $15 million. In response to the verdict, Tesla released a statement pointing out that witnesses confirmed that the slurs were used in a friendly manner, usually by African-American employees, and without hostile intent. (fact check: this article says the racism also included demands to “go back to Africa” people leaving drawings of caricatured black cavemen at the employee’s desk, threats, and claims that black employees were "given the most menial and physically demanding work" - and that these claims were backed up by testimony from two dozen former workers and a cellphone video showing people telling a black employee that they are going to “cut you up, n—-r”. This seems like a sufficiently different story that I’d like to know whether Hanania still stands by his version) Other parts of harassment law lead to more unfair double-binds. For example, you can’t be seen to “retaliate” against someone who accuses another worker of harassment. So suppose that a minority employee is bullying a white employee, the white employee resists, and the minority accuses them as “harassment”. Maybe there’s even a full trial, everyone agrees this is what happened, and the white employee is found totally innocent. Still, you can’t fire the bully, because that would be retaliation for a harassment complaint. And since you probably don’t want the bully and their victim in the same department, you need to move one of them. And you can’t move the bully, because that would be viewed as “retaliation” for the harassment complaint and they could sue you for millions of dollars. So you have to punish the victim. But Hanania doesn’t just say this kind of thing goes too far. He has some broader point that I have trouble interpreting - basically that corporations used to be cozy, chummy places full of banter and flirtation that everyone enjoyed, and now this has been universally replaced with the bland soul-draining bureaucratic corporate aesthetic satirized in works like Office Space. Is this true? People talk about Mad Men (I’ve never seen it) as reflecting some kind of corporate golden age where at least high-ranking men enjoyed their jobs. If so, did it change because of harassment law? Or because neoliberalism replaced the work-for-thirty-years-and-get-a-golden-watch corporation with the work-for-three-years-and-then-seek-a-better-job-elsewhere corporation? Still, Hanania really hammers in this point that we should apparently all be angry about the loss of corporate flirtation - he calls the current regime, “a sexless, androgynous, and sanitized workplace” which is “contrary to human nature [and] miserable”. Without civil rights law, we could have “organizations that combined the aspects of a church, a social club, a matchmaking service, and a traditional business.” In such a world: Some corporations start encouraging dating and forming close personal bonds among their employees. This can take many forms, from Christian matchmaking to promoting a party-like atmosphere. These pro-relationship corporations will come in conservative or liberal forms. Other firms explicitly market themselves as providing a more “professional” or “classic” work experience . . . we will see a period of wild experimentation, with some forms of corporate organization drawing a great deal of media coverage. People will criticize many of these experiments, and they will become the subject of public outrage. After civil rights law has been defanged, however, government no longer has the ability to easily shut such efforts down. Eventually, public anger subsides, and the idea of the media attacking a firm because it dislikes its internal culture will seem as intolerant as attacking a religious community for its doctrines, or homosexuals for what they do together as consenting adults. I appreciate my anti-civil-rights books doubling as interesting settings for pornographic stories, but I’m otherwise unable to fathom the level of Hanania’s enthusiasm here. …And More Richard Hanania hates all this stuff. Partly he hates it because he thinks it’s unfair and anti-business and anti-merit. But also, Vaclav Havel talks about the indignity of life under communism. You weren’t allowed to just do your job and pay your taxes and follow the laws of the communist state. You had to be actively complicit. You had to act enthusiastic about the communism, force it upon others, inform on your colleagues and punish deviation - at least if anybody was going to check later. This kind of communism didn’t just hurt your pocketbook. It damaged your soul. It molded you into a worse and uglier type of person who would eventually abandon their better impulses in order to justify their actions to themselves. This is how Hanania thinks of civil rights law. Business owners can’t just give blacks ten extra points on the screening test and call it a day. They have to favor blacks while insisting to everyone that they don’t do this and it’s perfectly fair and they love civil rights law. They have to twist their employment criteria into some kind of illegible monstrosity so nobody can notice all the favoritism they’re doing, then tell everybody that they believe the monstrosity is “fairer”. They have to hire a bunch of diversity coordinators - not because they’re required to hire diversity coordinators, it’s not a requirement - but because they love equality so so much (and if they don’t do this, they’ll get sued for seemingly unrelated reasons). Everyone faces a constant threat of lawsuits which can only be warded against by seeming maximally woke and maximally enthusiastic and maximally happy about all the idiotic fake laws you are being forced to comply with. Like in communism, you have to become your own mini-police state. You have to make employees snitch on each other if they tell the wrong joke. You have to turn your company into a tyranny of HR ladies. If you do any of this even a little less than other companies, you’ll get sued for seemingly unrelated reasons, with penalties running potentially into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Because there’s no legible law except “be the same as everyone else so you don’t stand out as sue-able”, every corporation homogenizes into the same bland HR-ocracy. Everyone agrees on the same hiring process, which is to prioritize college degree, resume, and interview, and definitely not any test or measure of ability. This leads inevitably to our current society, where everyone has to waste their childhood doing meaningless extracurriculars so they can get into the best college so they can take the best internships so they get the best jobs. (unless they do something stupid like let themselves get the dreaded “resume gap”). But also: During the early 1800s, government positions were given out by the “spoils system”, basically “does the party in power like you personally?” In the 1880s, after President Garfield was assassinated by a guy who didn’t get a good enough position, they switched to a formal civil service, based on test performance and merit. The US civil service became the envy of the world, attracted some of the smartest people in the country, and obviously worked better than the old system wherever it was possible to compare. Still, this gradually (and somewhat deniably) ended in the 1970s, because the merit-based hiring system seemed like disparate impact. Hanania calls the current era “the racial spoils system”, where positions in the bureaucracy are based on the same kind of illegible morass as everything else (eg the FAA’s “biographical questionnaire”). He says every branch of government has become less effective as a result. Hanania doesn’t mention this, but I’ve heard an additional argument elsewhere. It’s legally dangerous for companies to hire based on anything like merit. Still, if you have great lawyers and are willing to pay a lot to settle lawsuits, you can get away with legally dangerous things. This is only worth it if you really really want high-merit employees, ie if the best employee is much more financially valuable to you than the second-best. This is mostly true in Wall Street (where you want your trader to outsmart the other guy’s trader by half a millisecond or whatever) and Silicon Valley (where ten employees can write a program used by millions of people). So the government, the civil service, the schools, etc, all abandoned merit-based hiring, while Wall Street and Silicon Valley lawyered up. But that means that if you’re a smart non-minority college graduate, you know that joining the civil service will be a mess - you’ll have a tough time even getting in, and you’ll always be passed over for promotions for less-qualified minorities. Meantime, Wall Street and Silicon Valley would love to have you. So all the smart people got concentrated in a few industries that might not have been their most economically productive use, and the old American tradition where elite families would send some of their kids into public service died out. What To Do? Hanania stresses that most Americans hate affirmative action (and probably by extension most other civil rights law, though they’ve probably never heard of disparate impact). Affirmative action has been on the ballot nine times, and failed eight of those. Most recently, it failed in California, a deep-blue, 66% minority state where the pro-AA side outspent opponents 17-to-1. Also, Republicans have controlled all the branches of government many times in the past fifty years, and now they control the Supreme Court. Most civil rights law is based on executive orders and judicial decisions, so you wouldn’t even need a Congressional vote to overturn it. Just an executive order, from any president who felt like it. Reagan could have overturned half of this with the stroke of a pen, if he’d wanted. So how has it survived this long? His answer: because until about 2010, Republicans were too scared of getting called racist. Reagan wanted to overturn affirmative action, but other Republicans (like Bob Dole) begged him not to, because racism, and eventually he caved. But since 2010, everyone has already been calling Republicans racist all the time, to the point where probably this threat has lost its power. And the sort of moderate Republicans who reined in Reagan are gone. So why haven’t Republicans (eg Trump) acted? Hanania thinks everyone is so obsessed with “woke” culture war stuff that the low-hanging fruit of actual woke laws that presidents can change has slipped under the radar. And so, this book. I would have summarized the case as “Hey, Republicans! Do you hate wokeness? Well, too bad, it’s a vast cultural movement with bastions in a bunch of places where we have no power. But some of this civil rights law stuff seems pretty related to wokeness, and we do potentially have power there. So instead of fighting the unwinnable cultural battle, how about we fight the very winnable policy one?” But maybe this didn’t seem optimistic enough for Hanania, so he framed it as “the legal wokeness is the source of the cultural wokeness” instead. More on this later. The Origins Of . . . Inequality A progressive, reading this book, might counter: “Sure, civil rights law - like all law - is poorly written and kludgy in parts. Like all law, it sometimes gets abused or taken too far. Those are the costs. But the benefits are that it fights discrimination and inequality. That’s very important! Don’t you think those benefits are worth the cost?” Unless I missed it, Hanania doesn’t touch this obvious counterargument. He briefly says that in a free market, companies couldn’t consistently maintain discrimination, because that would be leaving money on the ground. “Cool theoretical result,” objects the hypothetical opponent. “But white households earn an average of $80K and black households an average of $50K, and so on with other minority groups. So it sure seems like something inequality-related is going on.” My tongue-in-cheek reframing of Hanania’s summary of civil rights law went: We notice your workforce is less black than the applicant pool.
Inline links: 2, this article
Your Book Review: The Pale King
September 06, 2024 · Original source
The IRS really did shift its focus from compliance to maximizing profit during the Reagan era,*** a significant ideological reordering that The Pale King explains as politically necessary: Reagan ran on a platform both of reducing taxes and increasing defense spending. The only way this was possible was if the IRS got more efficient at collecting. Reagan could even capitalize politically on the IRS’s new methods: “‘The Service’s more aggressive treatment of TPs, especially if it’s high-profile, would seem to keep in the electorate’s mind a fresh and eminently disposable image of Big Government that the Rebel Outsider President could continue to define himself against and decry as just the sort of government intrusion into the private lives and wallets of hardworking Americans he ran for office to fight against.’”****
Secrets Of The Median Voter Theorem
October 23, 2024 · Original source
In 1964, LBJ beat Goldwater 61-39. In 1972, Nixon beat McGovern 61-37. Even as recently as 1984, Reagan beat Mondale 59-41. But we already know that partisanship was weaker in those days. The Median Voter Theorem only works if you can reduce everything to a single straight line. If voters don’t care about the right-left spectrum, they might judge based on criteria like “Reagan is more charismatic”, and then if everyone agrees that he’s charismatic you can get 59-41 or 90-10 or whatever numbers you want. In the old days, partisanship was too weak for the Median Voter Theorem to hold. Now it’s strong enough to matter, but there’s enough primary effect and “collusion” that parties don’t race towards the center, instead only trying to maintain equal distance from the center. But we may still find this surprising. The parties - especially the Republican Party - don’t feel like masterminds executing a complicated dance where they determine the exact amount of extremism the voters can tolerate. And what about non-partisan factors? Do they figure in? If some people dislike Trump because he committed 10,000 felonies and an attempted coup, do the Democrats enter that into their calculations and veer slightly further left? If Biden is demented, do the Republicans enter that into their calculations and veer slightly further right? If so, how come when Biden was replaced with the less-demented Kamala and the Democrats’ betting odds went way up, Trump didn’t change any of his positions AFAICT? The stats show that the past few elections, adjusted for electoral vote advantage, have all been around 49-51. But it doesn’t seem like the parties are working as hard as they would have to be to do it on purpose. Is it just a coincidence? Is there some deeper thermostat independent of the platforms and candidates of the moment? I’m not sure. But I do think we can say with confidence that the reason elections are almost never 80-20 or 99-1 is something like Median Voter Theorem. III. Okay, so the parties have to be in the middle. But which part of the parties? In the middle of what? Do parties target the median popular voter, or the median electoral voter? It must be the latter. We saw above that elections get closer, rather than further, from 50-50 after you adjust for the GOP electoral advantage. Also, this is obviously what you would do if you were at all sensible. You even see evidence of parties doing this; for example, lots of people talk about how the “tipping point state” for this election is Pennsylvania, so both candidates are investing lots of resources there. That’s classic Median Voter Theorem! Here’s a harder question. If you want to control the Presidency, you should target the median electoral voter. If you want to control the House of Representatives, then to a first approximation you should target the median popular voter, since House Districts mostly reflect population. If you want to control the Senate, you should target a different median voter entirely, since the Senate gives small states even more of an advantage than the Electoral College does. Parties want to control all three of these things, so who should they target? Ideally, Presidential candidates would target the median Presidential voter, Senate candidates the median Senate voter, etc. But it may not be this easy. Voters may work off a gestalt impression of where “the party” stands. In theory, the Republican candidate for Governor in California could appeal to the median Californian; in practice, Republicans almost never win in California because Californians hate the national Republican Party. So parties may have to target one of these goals to the exclusion of the others. There’s rarely a united House/Senate platform (Gingrich’s Contract With America possibly excepted). So probably both parties target the Presidency. If we assume small states tend conservative, then the median House voter should be further left, and the median Senate voter further right, than the median Presidential voter. If parties have to run a unified platform, and they optimize this platform to win the Presidency, we should expect to see Democrats win the House and Republicans win the Senate more often than chance. Is this right? Add on the two recent Congresses not shown, and since the Clinton era, Democrats have controlled 4/13 Houses and 6/13 Senates, the opposite of my prediction. I think there’s not enough data for this to mean anything, and continue to think there might be a slight inherent Median Voter Theorem fueled tendency for Democrats to win the House (possibly counterbalanced by other things like who has gerrymandered more successfully). IV. Suppose something happens to give one party an advantage. Maybe DC, Puerto Rico, and Guam all become states, giving the Democrats six extra guaranteed Senators and some extra electoral votes. Which of these do we expect: It’s very hard to have 54 Senate seats. Therefore, Democrats would control the Senate almost all the time, with a somewhat lesser but still probably decisive permanent Presidential advantage.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!nsjv!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3ee3413b-b877-452c-9728-eb10f611b4d6_8888x7887.png